The terms “capitalism” and “socialism” continue to haunt our political and economic imaginations, but we rarely consider their interconnected early history. Even the eighteenth century had its “socialists,” but unlike those of the nineteenth, they paradoxically sought to make the world safe for “capitalists.” The word “socialists” was first used in Northern Italy as a term of contempt for the political economists and legal reformers Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria, author of the epochal On Crimes and Punishments. Yet the views and concerns of these first socialists, developed inside a pugnacious intellectual coterie dubbed the Academy of Fisticuffs, differ dramatically from those of the socialists that followed. Sophus Reinert turns to Milan in the late 1700s to recover the Academy’s ideas and the policies they informed. At the core of their preoccupations lay the often lethal tension among states, markets, and human welfare in an era when the three were becoming increasingly intertwined. What distinguished these thinkers was their articulation of a secular basis for social organization, rooted in commerce, and their insistence that political economy trumped theology as the underpinning for peace and prosperity within and among nations. Reinert argues that the Italian Enlightenment, no less than the Scottish, was central to the emergence of political economy and the project of creating market societies. By reconstructing ideas in their historical contexts, he addresses motivations and contingencies at the very foundations of modernity.

Robert Owen and the Owenites were associated with the rise of an early industrial society in Britain and with the development of an agricultural, frontier society in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. This book, originally published in 1969, was the first to use both British and American source material, and tells the story of Robert Owen and the movement associated with his name, from the standpoint of comparative social and intellectual history. The book directs new light on Owenism, and at the same time illuminates general problems of the history of social movements and social change in modern societies.

"When Darwin returned to Britain from the Beagle voyage in 1836, the most talked-about scientific books were the Bridgewater Treatises. This series of eight books was funded by a bequest of the last Earl of Bridgewater, and they were authored by leading men of science, appointed by the President of the Royal Society, and intended to explore "the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation." Securing public attention beyond all expectations, the series gave Darwin's generation a range of approaches to one of the great questions of the age: how to incorporate the newly emerging disciplinary sciences into Britain's overwhelmingly Christian culture. Drawing on a wealth of archival and published sources, including many unexplored by historians, Jonathan R. Topham examines how and to what extent the series contributed to a sense of congruence between Christianity and the sciences in the generation before the infamous Victorian "conflict between science and religion." He does so by drawing on the distinctive insights of book history, using close attention to the production, circulation, and use of the books to open up new perspectives not only on aspects of early Victorian science but also on the whole subject of science and religion. Its innovative focus on practices of authorship, publishing, and reading helps us to understand the everyday considerations and activities through which the religious culture of early Victorian science was fashioned. And in doing so, Reading the Book of Nature powerfully reimagines the world in which a young Charles Darwin learned how to think about the implications of his theory"--