The Fabrication of Louis XIV or The Rise of Financial Capitalism

The Fabrication of Louis XIV

Author: Peter Burk

Louis XIV was a man like any other, but the money and attention lavished on his public image by the French government transformed him into a godlike figure. In this engrossing book, an internationally respected historian gives an account of contemporary representations of Louis XIV and shows how the making of the royal image illuminates the relationship between art and power. Images of Louis XIV included hundreds of oil paintings and engravings, three hundred-odd medals struck to commemorate the major events of the reign, sculptures and bronzes, as well as plays, ballets (in which the king himself sometimes appeared on stage), operas, odes, sermons, official newspapers and histories, fireworks, fountains and tapestries. Drawing on an analysis of these representations as well as on surviving documentary sources, Peter Burke shows the conscious attempt to 'invent' the image of the king and reveals how the supervision of the royal image was entrusted to a committee, the so-called 'small academy'. This book is not only a fascinating chronological study of the mechanics of the image-making of a king over the course of a seventy-year reign but is also an investigation into the genre of cultural construction. Burke discusses the element of propaganda implicit in image-making, the manipulation of seventeenth-century media of communication, the channels of communication (oral, visual and textual) and their codes (literary and artistic), and the intended audience and its response. He concludes by comparing and contrasting Louis's public image with that of other rulers ranging from Augustus to contemporary American presidents.

Read also The Greatest Story Ever Sold or Ataturk

The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason

Author: Larry Neal

This work establishes the existence of a sophisticated and smoothly functioning system of financial markets in the mercantile states of northwestern Europe throughout the 1700s. Based on computer analysis of thousands of price quotes from the financial press of the eighteenth century, the results should force both historians and economists to reevaluate their understanding of the evolution of financial markets and their importance for the economic developments of that era.

Table of Contents:

1. Historical background for the rise of financial capitalism: commercial revolution, rise of nation states, and capital markets;
2. The development of an information network and the international capital markets of London and Amsterdam;
3. The early capital markets of London and Amsterdam;
4. The Banque Royale and the South Sea Company: how the bubbles began;
4. Appendix: were the Mississippi and south sea bubbles rational?
5. The Bank of England and the South Sea Company: how the bubbles ended;
6. The English and Dutch East India Companies: how the west was won;
7. The integration of the English and Dutch capital markets in peace and war;
8. The English and Dutch capital markets in panics;
9. The capital markets during revolutions, war and peace;
10. A tale of two revolutions: international capital flows 1792-1819;
11. The London and Amsterdam stock markets, 1800-1825.