A micro-history of eighteenth-century systemic change that places ordinary French lives alongside global advances. This book explores the eighteenth-century modernization of the coastal province of Languedoc. Mining a wealth of archival sources, James Livesey unveils how provincial elites, peasant households, and local political institutions began to implement such changes as establishing a credit system and building networks of natural historians and agronomical innovators who introduced new plants and farm machinery to the region. These practices were gradually embedded in daily life and gave rise to connections between the province and the broader world.
Contents
1. Small Changes: Credit, Debt, and Money in the Languedoc -- 2. Local Ideas and Global Networks -- 3. The Natural Province of Reason: Agronomy, Botany, and Subaltern Science -- 4. The Swing Plow as an Eighteenth-Century Universal Machine -- 5. Sovereignty, Politics, and Reason in the Post-Revolution.
