| These nine papers, by leading British, Irish and German scholars, show how and why, in a crucial period of history, these countries preferred change that was gradual and consensual to radical and violent revolution. In the study of late eighteenth-century Europe the concept of ‘reform’, both in theory and in practice, has been neglected compared to the attention lavished on its more glamorous relation ‘revolution’. Yet it was reform not revolution which characterised the experience of both Great Britain and Germany from 1750 to 1850. This volume takes a comparative approach to shed all manner of new light on old problems. The British ship of state sailed untroubled through the turbulence created by the French Revolution without having to do much more than take in the occasional sail and flog the odd mutineer. Germany was certainly revolutionised after 1789, not least by the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire, but it was change imposed from outside, not generated from within by domestic subversion. Indeed, the various forms of exploitation suffered at the hands of the French Revolutionaries and their heir, Napoleon, only served to strengthen a long-established German preference for gradual change through reform. Though violent and rapid change may be more dramatic than gradual adaptation, this volume reveals that the study of the latter stimulates just as much intellectual excitement. Readership: Scholars and students of modern European history.
The volume is edited by Timothy Blanning, Professor of Modern European History, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy, and Peter Wende, Professor of Modern History, Johannes Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, and Director of the German Historical Institute, London.
The papers arise from a joint conference of the British Academy and the German Historical Institute held at the Academy in September 1997. | CONTENTS - Notes on Contributors
- T C W Blanning & Peter Wende, Introduction
- Eckhart Hellmuth, Why does Corruption Matter? Reforms and Reform Movements in Britain and Germany in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century
- L G Mitchell, The Whigs, the People, and Reform
- Diethelm Klippel, Legal Reforms: Changing the Law in Germany in the Ancien Régime and in the Vormärz
- Hagen Schulze, The Prussian Reformers and their Impact on German History
- Brendan Simms, Reform in Britain and Prussia, 1797?1815: (Confessional) Fiscal-Military State and Military-Agrarian Complex
- Paul Langford, The English as Reformers: Foreign Visitors? Impressions, 1750?1850
- K Theodore Hoppen, Riding a Tiger: Daniel O?Connell, Reform, and Popular Politics in Ireland, 1800?1847
- Peter Wende, 1848: Reform or Revolution in Germany and Great Britain
- Derek Beales, The Idea of Reform in British Politics, 1829?1850
- Index
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