Discussion of Voltaire’s Précis du siècle de Louis XV Tickets, Mon 8 Mar 2021 at 17:00

Voltaire Foundation Enlightenment Workshop

About this Event

The Enlightenment Workshop, Oxford’s interdisciplinary research seminar in Enlightenment studies, is dedicated this term to discussions of new publications in the field. The final session highlights the significance of Voltaire’s account of his own time, Précis du siècle de Louis XV, recently published by the Voltaire Foundation. The editors, Janet Godden (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford) and James Hanrahan (Associate Professor of French, Trinity College Dublin) will provide an overview of Voltaire’s Précis. The new edition will be discussed by Colin Jones, Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London, and Síofra Pierse, Associate Professor of French at University College Dublin. More on the edition:

https://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/about-voltaire/pr%C3%A9cis-du-si%C3%A8cle-de-louis-xv

You will be contacted within 48 hours of the event via Eventbrite with the Zoom link.

Date and Time

Mon, 8 March 2021

12:00 – 14:00 EST

Chair: Nicholas Cronk

Siofra Pierce

Colin Jones

Janet Godden

James Hanrahan

The age of Louis XIV. To which is added, an abstract of the age of Louis XV. Translated from the last Geneva edition of M. de Voltaire, with notes, … by R. Griffith, … Volume 1 of 3

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.
This collection reveals the history of English common law and Empire law in a vastly changing world of British expansion. Dominating the legal field is the Commentaries of the Law of England by Sir William Blackstone, which first appeared in 1765. Reference works such as almanacs and catalogues continue to educate us by revealing the day-to-day workings of society.

The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification:

<sourceLibrary>British Library

<ESTCID>T137661

<Notes>Vol.3 is entitled ‘Sequel of The age of Louis XIV.’. The three volumes are dated 1779, 1780 and 1781 respectively. Intended to accompany ‘The works of M. de Voltaire’, 5 vols., London, 1779-80 and ‘The works of the late M. de Voltaire’, 5 vols., London,

<imprintFull>London : printed for Fielding and Walker, 1779-81. <collation>3v.,plates : ports.,map ; 8°

• Publisher : Gale ECCO, Print Editions (May 27, 2010)
• Language : English
• Paperback : 450 pages
• ISBN-10 : 1140651668
• ISBN-13 : 978-1140651666
• Item Weight : 1.76 pounds
• Dimensions : 7.44 x 0.91 x 9.69 inches

The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (New Penguin History of France): Colin Jones, Colin

There can be few more mesmerizing historical narratives than the story of how the confident monarchy left by Louis XIV in 1715 became the discredited failure toppled by revolution in 1789. This brilliant new book is the first in forty years to describe the whole period, from the last days of the “Sun King” to the wars of Napoleon. In a groundbreaking work of scholarship, Colin Jones argues that, contrary to popular belief, the house of Bourbon’s downfall was hardly a foregone conclusion. Producing an illuminating account of a society torn apart from within, he recounts the saga of how a dynamic French society—the heart of the Enlightenment—fell prey to the debt and humiliation of its wars against Britain.

Review

“The fullest and most reliable history we have of eighteenth-century France.” —William Doyle, Independent

“This is a work that merits the French designation magistral: masterly and authoritative.” —Robin Buss, Financial Times

About the Author

Colin Jones is professor of history at the University of Warwick, England.

• Publisher : Penguin Books; 1st edition (December 30, 2003)
• Language : English
• Paperback : 688 pages
• ISBN-10 : 0140130934
• ISBN-13 : 978-0140130935
• Item Weight : 1.03 pounds
• Dimensions : 5.1 x 1.2 x 7.8 inches

False Promises: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) – Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

An international study published by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Biba, Bread for the World, FIAN Germany, Forum on Environment and Development, INKOTA-netzwerk, IRPAD, PELUM Zambia, Tabio, and TOAM documents the dramatic negative impacts of the Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA) on small-scale food producers in the 13 African countries the initiative focuses on.

AGRA was founded in 2006 to give new impetus to the fight against hunger in Africa with a corporate-driven “Green Revolution” approach. It promised to double the agricultural yields and incomes of 30 million small-scale food producer households by 2020, thus halving both hunger and poverty in the focus countries. To achieve these goals, AGRA received over one billion US dollars –mainly from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but also from governments like the US, UK and Germany. The study issues AGRA a decidedly negative report card: yield increases for key staple crops in the years before AGRA were just as low as during AGRA. Instead of halving hunger, the situation in the 13 focus countries has worsened since AGRA was launched. The number of people going hungry has increased by 30 percent during the AGRA years.

The study also shows that AGRA in fact harms small-scale food producers, for example by subjecting them to high levels of debt. In Zambia and Tanzania, small-scale food producers were unable to repay the loans for fertilizer and hybrid seeds after the first harvest. AGRA projects also restrict the freedom of choice for small-scale food producers to decide for themselves what they want to grow. This has dramatic effects on crop diversity. AGRA’s focus is on the one-sided cultivation of maize. Traditional climate-resistant and nutrient-rich crops have thus declined. According to the study, millet production fell by 24 percent in the 13 AGRA focus countries from 2006 to 2018. Moreover, AGRA lobbies governments on behalf of agricultural corporations to pass legislation that will benefit fertilizer producers and seed companies instead of strengthening small-scale food production and alternative structures. Indeed, it is being courted by governments worldwide for precisely this service.

The publishers of the study conclude, among other things, that governments in the Global North and Global South must withdraw from AGRA and all other Green Revolution programmes. Instead, they should support more sustainable, holistic approaches such as agroecology. Agroecology focuses on the needs of small-scale food producers, their human right to food, and their food sovereignty.

The study False Promises: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)was published by: Biba (Kenya), Bread for the World (Germany), FIAN Germany, Forum on Environment and Development (Germany), INKOTA-netzwerk (Germany), IRPAD (Mali), PELUM Zambia, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Germany), Tabio (Tanzania) and TOAM (Tanzania).

Africa’s Green Revolution: Few gains, no accountability

This opinion article was published in the Nairobi Star in Kenya, home to the headquarters of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). It is based on my analysis of internal AGRA documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know through Freedom of Information Act requests.

When are African governments, donors, and African farmers going to demand some accountability from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)?

Fourteen years into this billion-dollar donor initiative to revolutionize African farming, and now past the 2020 endpoint for its goals of doubling yields and incomes for 30 million smallholder farmers, AGRA finally published internal country monitoring and evaluation reports from early last year.

I reviewed all 1,365 pages of those documents, unearthed in Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. Agency for International Development after AGRA refused to provide them. They show no progress toward AGRA’s top-line goals.

The absence of impact data in AGRA’s 11 recent country Outcome Monitoring reports, with no reference to results from its first ten years of Green Revolution promotion, suggests either that those results are so poor the organization does not want to reveal them or that it has never bothered to track progress toward its main goals. It is hard to know which is worse.

If AGRA is concealing evidence that its well-funded interventions, backed by massive African government subsidies for farmers to purchase commercial seeds and fertilizers, are failing to produce the intended results, it is defrauding donors, participating governments, and most of all farmers.

AGRA refused to provide data on its beneficiaries for our 2020 report, False Promises.

…(read more).

Ekasa Performance in Benin – Song, Dance, Prayer – Coronation 2016 | Jean Borgatti

Boston University African Studies Center
Dec 18, 2020

Walter Rodney Seminar hosted by the Boston University African Studies Center, October 26, 2020

St. Helena – a remote island in the Atlantic | (Travel Documentary) DW Documentary

DW Documentary – Oct 28, 2017

Every third week, a British Royal Mail ship begins its journey from Cape Town to Saint Helena, the remote island in the Atlantic where Napoleon was once in exile. It’s like the end of the world in the middle of the Atlantic. Five days, with a northwesterly course, and only then do the sheer black cliffs appear in front of RMS St. Helena. The island’s 4500 residents are often waiting impatiently for the ship’s arrival and panic if the schedule changes. Director Thomas Denzel and his team went on the journey to Saint Helena and met the people living on the island. Many of the residents are descendants of people who were sent into exile there by the British crown – the most famous among them, the French Emperor Napoleon. This is a report about life at the end of the world, loneliness, unique vegetation, and a very special journey.

The Golden Trade of the Moors: West African Kingdoms in the Fourteenth Century: Edward W. Bovill

“This book is the liveliest account of African history ever written, covering over [one] thousand years of trans-Saharan trade. “Finely written and researched. … This edition will no doubt whet the appetites of a fresh generation of scholars and students for greater knowledge of parts of Africa still surprisingly little-known to the outside world.” ― Journal of Islamic Studies “A unique source book.” – The New York Times “Utterly enthralling … splendidly romantic.” ― The New Yorker

“An utterly enthralling, scholarly study . . . very blunt about all the hot little towns, sharp traders and the brutal rulers who figure in this book-but Bovill’s truths turn out to be splendidly romantic. — The New Yorker

“Bovill is a gifted teller of tales . . . it is a delightfully written and well-organized account of a vast and neglected field of history . . . a unique source book on Saharan trade routes, caravan organization and Sudanese history. . . . Mr. Bovill not only reveals a firm grasp of history but of anthropology and economic geography.” — New York Times

“Bovill writes, as a historian, of the Sahara’s golden age, threading his way clearly and with learning through a maze of Berber and Sudanese dynasties. . . .” – — Spectator

About the Author

About Edward William Bovill: The late Edward William Bovill was a historian and author of numerous books.

Editor: Robert O. Collins, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Shadow in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan, 1919-1956 and The Waters of the Nile: Hydropolitics and the Jonglei Canal, 1900-1988, as well as 24 other books.

• Publisher : Markus Wiener Publishers; 2nd Revised ed. edition (July 18, 2009)
• Language : English
• Paperback : 332 pages
• ISBN-10 : 1558760911
• ISBN-13 : 978-1558760912
• Item Weight : 15.8 ounces
• Dimensions : 6 x 0.74 x 9 inches

African Studies – Authoritative Research Guide – Oxford Bibliographies

Editor in Chief: Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Vice Chancellor (President) and Professor of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the United States International University Africa, Nairobi

• Concise treatment of large topics such as “Slavery in Africa” or “Famine” to quickly get you up to speed on topics outside of your area of expertise
• Expert recommendation on the best works available in African Studies whether it be a chapter, a book, a journal article, a Website, blog, or data set – streamline the research process
• Each subject area has an Editor in Chief, an Editorial Board and peer reviewers, ensuring balanced perspective with scholarly accuracy, authority, and objectivity
• Each article is an authoritative guide to the current scholarship on a topic with original commentary and annotations by top scholars
• A robust update program keeps researchers informed of advances in their field
• Intuitive linking and discoverability tools help users quickly locate full text content to prevent dead ends

The birth of independent African nations, the rise of the Civil Rights movement and African-American Studies in the U.S., and the end of the Cold War all prompted the emergence of African Studies as an important area of inquiry in Africa, Europe, and North America. Founded as Africa was emerging from centuries of the slave trade and foreign domination, the field has sought to displace racist foreign notions to explore African perspectives on art, culture, economics, geography and the environment, ancient and modern history, literature, music, politics, religion, science and thought, and society.

Over more than half a century, the field has emerged as a diverse multidisciplinary effort that spans multiple epistemologies and methodologies, making it challenging for students and scholars to be informed about every applicable area. And given the diversity of African environments and peoples it is difficult to appreciate both its broad similarities and complex specificities. We have thus combined broad introductions to such subjects as African society, politics, or literature with specific studies of individual peoples, states, or literary traditions to enable the user to appreciate Africans’ distinctiveness as well as their diversity.

Since the literature on African Studies is diverse, fast moving, controversial, and scattered among unfamiliar sources, we have asked leading scholars to identify the most significant themes and areas of study in their fields, recommend the best sources for exploring them, and discuss these works conceptual and empirical significance to provide a series of guided studies through the diverse approaches to a wide array of complex subjects. A great deal of this work has moved online with the most recent scholarship, research, and statistics appearing in online databases. With advances in online searching and database technologies, researchers and practitioners can easily access library catalogs, bibliographic indexes, and other lists that show thousands of resources that might also be useful to them. In this situation what is most needed is expert guidance. Researchers and practitioners at all levels need tools that help them filter through the proliferation of information sources to material that is reliable and directly relevant to their inquiries. Oxford Bibliographies in African Studies offers a trustworthy pathway through the thicket of information overload.

….(read more).

See related:

• Oxford Research Encyclopedias: African History (short video introduction)
• Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Historiography: Methods and Sources: Thomas Spear

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History

About the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History

Substantive, peer-reviewed, and regularly updated, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History combines the speed and flexibility of digital with the rigorous standards of academic publishing. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History is currently available to institutions worldwide via subscription and perpetual access and to individuals via subscription.

The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History is part of the larger online Oxford Research Encyclopedia, a dynamic digital encyclopedia continuously updated by the world’s leading scholars and researchers. Learn more about the program here.

For details and access see:

• African Studies – Authoritative Research Guide – Oxford Bibliographies
• xford Research Encyclopedias: African History
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Historiography: Methods and Sources: Thomas Spear