Commerce, Culture, and Civilization in Greek Enlightenment and Contemporary European Thought
In: Journal of Early Modern HistoryAbstract
This article describes the interaction between Greek readers, writers, and publishers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, giving particular attention to the challenges faced by the latter in obtaining financial support for their endeavors. These contingencies exerted a significant influence on the form and content of Greek discourse as expressed in one striking instance by the efforts made on the part of Greek intellectuals to publicly reimagine the role of commerce and its practitioners in the rise or rehabilitation of nations. In addition therefore to providing a revealing view of what one historian of the period has called “the linguistic construction of class,” the Greek literary preoccupation with commerce also serves as a valuable exhibit of “cultural transfer,” or the manner in which genres of thought originating in one setting may become naturalized within another to the point that they appear to have been generated from purely native sources and circumstances.
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15
J. Goldstein, “Of Marksmanship and Marx: Reflections on the Linguistic Construction of Class in Some Recent Historical Scholarship,” Modern Intellectual History 2, no. 1 (2005): 87-107.
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22
See for example G. Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. C. Calhoun (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 289-339, (330). See also Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture. The criticisms cited above refer of course to Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989).
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30
In the future, “when writing of a particular place or city,” the editors assured their readers, the paper “would first give the more general name, for instance of the kingdom in which each is found, the latter to be recorded in footnotes.” Efimeris, 30 December 1791, 491.
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57
A. Korais, “The Present State of Civilization in Greece,” in Nationalism in Asia and Africa, ed. E. Kedourie (London, 2006), 153-188 (161).
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61
See for example N. Charilaou, “Neofytos Doukas: i drasi tou sta chronia 1803-1814,” Nea Estia 141 (1997): 41-55.
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62
M. Patiniotis, “Scientific Travels of the Greek Scholars in the Eighteenth Century,” in Travels of Learning: A Geography of Science in Europe, ed. A. Simoes, A. Carneiro and M.P. Diogo (Dordrecht, 2003), 47-75 (68-69).
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67
Korais in Kedourie, Nationalism in Asia and Africa, 184-5. The resemblance of some of the lines cited above to those found in volume III of Hume’s History of England (1778) is striking, as in the latter’s reflections on the effect of the Reformation: “Men, roused from that lethargy, in which they had so long sleeped, began to call in question the most ancient and most received opinions.” Cited in K. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997), 145. Korais owned a copy of the Hume work. P.K. Enepekides, Documents Notariaux Inédits sur Adamantios Coray (Berlin, 1959), 39.
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81
J.M. Smith, “Social Categories, the Language of Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” 350. Note also in this vein the work of contemporary authors such as Chrétién le Roy and his Le Commerce vergé, ou réfutation du discours couronné par l’Academie de Marséille en 1777, sur cette question: Quelle a été l’influence du commerce sur l’espirit et les moeurs des Peuples (Brussels, 1779). See also Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment.
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93
G. Frangos, “The Philike Etairia: A Premature National Coalition,” in The Struggle for Greek Independence, ed. R. Clogg (London, 1973), 87-103. Frangos also compiled the most authoritative account of the Society’s membership. Of the 1,093 filikoi or “friends” identified in his study, 910 reported their occupations. 53.7 percent of these represented themselves as merchants. See G. Frangos, “The Philike Etairia 1814-21: A Social and Historical Analysis” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1971), 87.
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Commerce, Culture, and Civilization in Greek Enlightenment and Contemporary European Thought
In: Journal of Early Modern HistoryAbstract
This article describes the interaction between Greek readers, writers, and publishers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, giving particular attention to the challenges faced by the latter in obtaining financial support for their endeavors. These contingencies exerted a significant influence on the form and content of Greek discourse as expressed in one striking instance by the efforts made on the part of Greek intellectuals to publicly reimagine the role of commerce and its practitioners in the rise or rehabilitation of nations. In addition therefore to providing a revealing view of what one historian of the period has called “the linguistic construction of class,” the Greek literary preoccupation with commerce also serves as a valuable exhibit of “cultural transfer,” or the manner in which genres of thought originating in one setting may become naturalized within another to the point that they appear to have been generated from purely native sources and circumstances.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 139 | 31 | 2 |
| Full Text Views | 67 | 4 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 29 | 11 | 0 |