Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-century Europe

by Derek Beales, H.M. Scott (Introduction)

The 18th century was a unique period of global and fundamental change. Britain conquered India and much of America, the American Revolution produced the USA, and Russia expanded vastly. In the field of ideas the Scientific Revolution was consolidated and followed by the Enlightenment. Nationalism flourished, populations surged, and the Commercial and Industrial Revolutions with Western technology eclipsed the East. Few centuries have inspired such a galaxy of historians, and their groundbreaking work has been drawn upon by Derek Beales in his collection of articles and special lectures. He covers the whole European kaleidoscope, but focuses especially on Joseph II and the Hapburg monarchy, asserting that Enlightened Despotism was the emodiment of the century's revolution in ideas, politics, government and administration.

Genres: Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published March 23, 2005

About the author

Derek Edward Dawson Beales, FBA, was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he gained a BA in 1953, an MA and a PhD in 1957. He was appointed a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1955 and a University Lecturer in History in 1965, which he held until 1980. He was then Professor of Modern History at Cambridge until 1997.

Beales was editor of The Historical Journal from 1971 until 1975. From 1984 until 1987 he was a member of the council of the Royal Historical Society. In 1989 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Kouache]

Very dry and academic. Most chapters start interestingly but then quickly manage to become an ugly labyrinth where at each corner you find statistics, boring extracts of letters and what older researchers thought on the subject. Don’t bother unless you have to write a 20 pages paper on the rule of Joseph II. And even then..

[Teobooks]

This is the type of book that makes me not want to be an academic. Many of the the subjects of these essays (1/2 interesting ones excepted) here are soooo specific that there are about 10-20 people in the whole world for whom this might be interesting, and those people are the other academics specializing in this area. Makes you really wonder what the point of all this work is. Because if the motivation is 'these sources/documents exist, therefore as researchers/historians we should write about them', that motivation doesn't make sense. What's the point of writing about obscure sources if you're just gonna write some obscure paper (which will with age become another 'source' for another researcher to do a paper on, which will also become a 'source' for another researcher even later to write a paper on, etc.) on it that only a slightly larger amount of people will read? I can't really see any other motivation: will this have any impact on interesting historiographical debates? No. Are these subjects intellectually stimulating? No.

I respect the hard work that Derek Beales has done to research this specific area (Joseph II's reign) so thoroughly, but in his essay on Mozart he says something along the lines of 'before Amadeus [the 80's movie about Mozart] came out nobody really knew who Joseph II was, but now they're more interested in what I have to say'. It seems here like Beales's academic work has alienated him from many people; he has dedicated so much of his life to a super-specific subject that he is deeply passionate about, but he can't even talk about it with most people. Is this not the lot of so many historians/academics, passionately working their whole lives only to receive the reputation of being a bore?