The growth of the pottery industry in England, 1660–1815

This paper summarizes the author's attempts to quantify the growth of the pottery industry in England before 1815. It begins by considering the nature and limitations of the large body of miscellaneous data about trade, including the exports of glass and earthware and the imports of china-ware. It continues by presenting some new calculations of the growth of the industry based on a count, at five-yearly intervals, of the numbers of potteries at work and their sizes. The results of these estimates are presented in nine tables in the appendix. The third part of the article uses this new evidence to analyse the patterns of growth from 1660–1815 and concludes that this provides a framework for further, and more detailed, studies.     

Balance of Power vs. Perpetual Peace: Paradigms of European Order from Utrecht to Vienna, 1713–1815

Over the course of the eighteenth century, two major models of European international order emerged as alternatives to universal monarchy: one was based on the balance of power; the other centred on the idea of perpetual peace. This article traces each back to its origins in debates around the moment of the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. In particular, it examines the evolution of the doctrine of balance of power in early eighteenth-century English political thought and then as a legal principle incorporated into the Treaty of Utrecht, before proceeding to the counter-proposal in the form of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre's Plan of Perpetual Peace and the objections it raised. It then shows how Saint-Pierre's paradigm of a league of European states found (albeit in altered form) its way into the Treaty of the Holy Alliance (1815) proposed by Tsar Alexander I after the defeat of Napoleon. It concludes by highlighting the fundamental soundness of the idea of European league, as well as the flaws inherent in the early model of Saint-Pierre.     

Edward Lhwyd (c.1660–1709): Folklorist

Edward Lhwyd's ambitious Archaeologia Britannica project, for which he undertook an extensive tour of the Celtic-speaking regions of Britain and Brittany from 1697 to 1701, was to include “A Comparison of the Customes and Traditions of the Britains with those of other Nations.” Though this part of the Archaeologia was not written, some of the data that were collected survive. Lhwyd's comments on the material reveal that as an antiquary his primary interests were historical and lay in customs and rites as survivals, rather than in narrative; as an experimental scientist he was consistently sceptical of traditional or popular explanations of phenomena. Edward Lhwyd was the first systematically to record Welsh folklore, and the geographical breadth of his collecting, his structured approach, and his critical responses make him the foremost pioneer in the field.