BOOK: Dan EDELSTEIN & Jennifer PITTS (eds.), The Cambridge History of Rights, vol. IV: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries [The Cambridge History of Rights, eds. Nehal BHUTA, Anthony PAGDEN & Mira L. SIEGELBERG] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025), ISBN 9781316519165, 120 GBP

 

(image source: Cambridge Core)

Abstract:

The age of Enlightenment and revolutions produced some of our best-known declarations of rights, but they did not create the idea of rights. Writers during this age did such a good job at declaring rights that many historians and politicians later believed that they invented them. The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of Rights shows that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are better understood as a time of transformation, extending rights-making to meet the needs of a modernizing world. Rights became a means of liberation for religious minorities, the economic downtrodden, women, slaves, and others. But rights also became a means of control, especially in European colonies around the world, as well as in liberal economic regimes that protected property rights. Through twenty-six essays from experts across the world, this volume serves as an authoritative reference for the development of rights across this period of history.

On the editors:

Dan Edelstein, Stanford University, California Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and (by courtesy) of Political Science and History at Stanford University. Jennifer Pitts, University of Chicago Jennifer Pitts is Professor of Political Science and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Table of contents:

Part I. A Revolution in Rights?:

1. Barbeyrac's intervention. Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke David Grewal

2. Rights, mercantile capitalism and the bourgeois revolution: the rise of political economy Martti Koskenniemi

3. Social rights Glauco Schettini and Charles Walton

4. Rights in Enlightenment theories of rights Céline Spector

5. Rights, property, and politics: Hume to Hegel Richard Bourke

6. Antislavery in the age of rights: or, the rights of slaves confront the right to slaves Christopher Leslie Brown

7. The Enlightenment Constitutionalism and the rights of man Vincenzo Ferrone

8. Fundamental rights at the American founding Jud Campbell

9. Declarations of rights Jeremy D. Popkin

10. The rights of women (or women's rights) Karen Offen

11. The image of rights in the French Revolution Adam Lebovitz

Part II. Post-Revolutionary Rights:

12. On the nadir of natural rights theory in nineteenth-century Britain Gregory Conti

13. The 1789 declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen: a civil creed of the French republic? Valentine Zuber

14. Rights in the thought of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel Frederick Neuhouser

15. Rights and socialism 1750–1880 Gareth Stedman Jones

16. Economic liberalism and rights in the nineteenth century David Todd

17. Human rights during the 1848 revolutions Mike Rapport

Part III. Rights and Empires:

18. Rights and empires: relations of authority Lauren Benton and Jane Burbank

19. Rights in Late Mughal and Early Colonial India Hasan Zahid Siddiqui

20. Rights in the Americas Joshua Simon

21. The free sea: an antislavery of human rights Amy Dru Stanley

22. Abolition and Imperialism in Africa Bronwen Everill

23. Rights in Pan-Asian, Pan-Islamic, and Pan-African thought Cemil Aydin

24. Indigenous rights in settler colonies Saliha Belmessous

25. Catholicism and rights: politics, economics and, sexuality Udi Greenberg

26. (Human) Rights Associations (1775–1898) Wolfgang Schmale.

Read more here: DOI  10.1017/9781009019521.