Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks : Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain

Womersley, David (EDT); Montagu, Edward Wortley

ISBN 10: 0865978727 / ISBN 13: 9780865978720

Published by Liberty Fund, 2015

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 22212476-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks : Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain
• Publisher: Liberty Fund
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865978727
• ISBN 13: 9780865978720
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

In 1759, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, when Great Britain was suffering a series of military reversals, Montagu considered his country’s plight in an historical context formed by the study of five ancient republics: Sparta, Athens, Thebes, Carthage, and Rome. Montagu’s focus on the ancient republics gives his contribution a distinctive twist to the chorus of voices lamenting Britain’s decline, and his analysis exerted influence in three momentous eighteenth-century crises: the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution. This is the first modern edition of Montagu’s work.

Edward Wortley Montagu (1713 –1776) was the son of a wealthy British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He was a student of oriental languages at the University of Leiden, which apparently proved useful during the peace negotiations at Aix-la-Chapelle which concluded the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748.

David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on English literature from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. He is the editor of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (2012) for Cambridge University Press.

About the Author

David Womersley is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.