Take two: ‘Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress (1715 to 1789),’ Isser Woloch and Gregory S. Brown

For full review, see my Patreon. 

If you want to snaffle this book from my palsied clutches, leave a comment with your email address and we’ll discuss the addition of a charge for postage. I think $10 is a fair price for the book itself. A scholarly but engrossing survey of more narrow histories, it covers a period of time that – going by the number of times woke IT drones use the word “Enlightenment” – continues to press upon the collective consciousness. Downsides: slavery, game laws, relatively high infant mortality. Upside: flourishing print culture and longer life expectancy. Begins and ends with war but there’s a lot more to it than conflict and the conflict that there is, is conveyed using sophisticated ideas about popular narratives that played into what people thought were their “rights”.