Project MUSE®: Eighteenth-Century Life - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/53
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Eighteenth-Century Life.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 20 (1996) through current issueLatest Articles: Eighteenth-Century LifeTWOProject MUSE®Eighteenth-Century Life1086-31920098-2601Latest articles in Eighteenth-Century Life. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Marine Materialities, Oceanic Humanities, and Eighteenth-Century Seas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981351
<p></p>
Late on the night of June 11th, 1770, Captain James Cook ran aground. HMS Endeavour was traveling north along the east coast of a continent Cook called New Holland when the ship “Struck and stuck fast” upon the “edge of a reef of Coral rocks.”1 The reef that damaged the Endeavour formed and still forms part of a vast system, known nowadays as the Great Barrier Reef, that ranges across some 133,000 square miles of the Coral Sea and is sometimes described as the world’s largest living organism. Its life, and the many layers of sediment and skeletal remains that constitute that life’s substructure, famously, but reversibly, altered the conditions of Cook’s expedition. In the words of the Goorie and Koori poet Evelyn
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981359">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/53/image/coversmallIntroduction: Marine Materialities, Oceanic Humanities, and Eighteenth-Century Seas2026-02-03text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Marine Materialities, Oceanic Humanities, and Eighteenth-Century Seas2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®658162026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Maritime Transport and Botanical Transplants: Bringing Sugarcane to Colonial New South Wales
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981352
<p></p>
British ships carrying plant species and seeds first arrived in Botany Bay on 19 January 1788. The history of this event has attracted less attention than the landing of the convict ships and Royal Navy vessels, but the cargo onboard these ships had a profound impact on the landscape and socio-cultural environment of the new colony of New South Wales. Alien plant species were brought to the Australian continent, equally as foreign as the people who carried them. Some were introduced so colonists could grow their own food and maintain the new outpost of empire, but others were part of an experiment to determine the possibility of exploiting the new territory as a site for growing tropical species for
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981359">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/53/image/coversmallMaritime Transport and Botanical Transplants: Bringing Sugarcane to Colonial New South Wales2026-02-03text/htmlen-USMaritime Transport and Botanical Transplants: Bringing Sugarcane to Colonial New South Wales2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®888062026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Transporting the Future: Erasmus Darwin and the Poetics of Climate Control
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981353
<p></p>
On 5 June 1789, the HMS Guardian was inspected by the president of the Royal Society, head of Kew Gardens, and unofficial adviser to the British government on matters scientific and Australian, Joseph Banks. Originally launched six months too late for enlistment into the War of American Independence, Banks needed the recommissioned supply ship for transporting supplies to the British settlement of New South Wales.1 Banks was anxious to provide the struggling colony with “food plants and trees . . . carefully selected from the stocks at Kew Gardens” and elsewhere. He had a plant cabin of his own design constructed on the Guardian’s quarter deck, one “large enough to house 100 or so large pots on shelves, . . . the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981359">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/53/image/coversmallTransporting the Future: Erasmus Darwin and the Poetics of Climate Control2026-02-03text/htmlen-USTransporting the Future: Erasmus Darwin and the Poetics of Climate Control2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®709502026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03One Day, Ships from Afar Arrive: A Lineage of Fujian Maritime-Trade Ceramics in the Ming and Qing Dynasties
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981354
<p></p>
Fujian (福建), a coastal province in southern China, had two regions famous for their pottery industries. The kilns in Zhangzhou Prefecture (漳州) started firing ceramics as early as the Song dynasty (960–1279), while Dehua County (德化) kilns date back to the Tang dynasty (618–907). During the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), both Zhangzhou Prefecture and Dehua County boasted highly skilled potters and sophisticated, privately owned ceramic kilns (Ch: minyao, 民窑) that served the needs of common people. Chinese ceramics, including those produced in these areas, are among the most well-known commodities that China traded across East and Southeast Asia and around the globe as the “first age of globalization” increased Fujian’s
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981359">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/53/image/coversmallOne Day, Ships from Afar Arrive: A Lineage of Fujian Maritime-Trade Ceramics in the Ming and Qing Dynasties2026-02-03text/htmlen-USOne Day, Ships from Afar Arrive: A Lineage of Fujian Maritime-Trade Ceramics in the Ming and Qing Dynasties2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®874082026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Incising the Future in Early Colonial Alaska
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981355
<p></p>
At the top of the hill, I could smell the Baltic sea. I was en route to “Maarjamäe loss,” the main building of the Estonian History Museum (Eesti Ajaloomuuseum), a historicist manor “castle” built in the 1870s during Tallinn’s heyday as a summertime sea resort town for elites of the Russian Empire. That I could smell, almost feel, Baltic salt in the air seemed providential for what I was seeking at the museum: marine materials from a different watery world, the North Pacific. Pacific worlds filled the shelves of this storage room at the shores of the Baltic: dehaired sealskin, spruce roots, walrus tusks, bentwood, cormorant feathers, marine mammal sinew and intestines, lyme grass, horned puffin beaks, baleen
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981359">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/53/image/coversmallIncising the Future in Early Colonial Alaska2026-02-03text/htmlen-USIncising the Future in Early Colonial Alaska2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®935862026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03From Manila to Bologna and Beyond: The Maritime Trajectory of an Eighteenth-Century Philippine Bamboo Container
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981356
<p></p>
I believe that there is no city in the world in which so many nationalities come together as here. . . . He who spends an afternoon on the tuley or bridge of Manila will see all these nationalities pass by him, behold their costumes, and hear their languages—something which cannot be done in any other city in the entire Spanish monarchy, and hardly in any other region in all the world.In 1745, the Jesuit missionary Pedro Murillo Velarde y Bravo (1696–1753) faced the greatest challenge of his professional life. For over twenty years, the Andalusian scholar traveled throughout the Philippines on behalf of the Society of Jesus evangelizing for the Catholic faith. This work brought him into contact with the diversity
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981359">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/53/image/coversmallFrom Manila to Bologna and Beyond: The Maritime Trajectory of an Eighteenth-Century Philippine Bamboo Container2026-02-03text/htmlen-USFrom Manila to Bologna and Beyond: The Maritime Trajectory of an Eighteenth-Century Philippine Bamboo Container2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®1350592026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03The Maritime World of Saint Blaise: Ragusan Identity in Dubrovnik and around the World
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981357
<p></p>
Dubrovnik, a medieval fortified city in Croatia, is today renowned for its well-preserved cultural heritage and archive, which contains valuable documents for studying the history of the Dubrovnik Republic (1385–1808) (figure 1). Notably, the Dubrovnik archive provided materials for historian Fernand Braudel’s extensive study of the Mediterranean. The city-state astutely leveraged its long-standing political independence, extensive trade, and powerful merchant marine to invest in its art and architecture. Because it was situated between two powerful states, Dubrovnik needed skillful diplomacy to succeed. The foundations of Dubrovnik’s wealth and cultural achievements also rested on a well-organized aristocratic
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981359">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/53/image/coversmallThe Maritime World of Saint Blaise: Ragusan Identity in Dubrovnik and around the World2026-02-03text/htmlen-USThe Maritime World of Saint Blaise: Ragusan Identity in Dubrovnik and around the World2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®916502026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Sentiment, Source Criticism, and Marine Life in the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981358
<p></p>
Searching antiquity for an epigraph to adorn the first volume of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), Edward Gibbon chose a familiar passage from Livy’s History of Rome:Iam provideo animo, velut qui, proximis litori vadis inducti, mare pedibus ingrediuntur, quicquid progredior, in vastiorem me altitudinem, ac velut profundum invehi; et crescere pene opus, quod prima quaeque perficiendo minui videbatur.[I see that I am like people who are tempted by the shallow water along the beach to wade out to sea; the further I progress, the greater the depth, as though it were a bottomless sea, into which I am carried. I imagined that as I completed one part after another the task before me would
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981359">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/53/image/coversmallSentiment, Source Criticism, and Marine Life in the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USSentiment, Source Criticism, and Marine Life in the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®1000442026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03The Hollow Sea: Soundings in Eighteenth-Century Marine Poetics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981359
<p></p>
How were oceanic sounds imagined and deployed in poetry of the long eighteenth century? As so often in the cultural history of the sea, the answers involve ambivalence, paradox, and extremes.1 Water can seem like a natural medium for sound and for poetry, associated as they are with sound waves, fluent speech, immersive listening, floods of eloquence, torrents of song. And yet human ears and voices are not typically at home in marine environments. This posed a particular difficulty for poetry, the literary form that persisted in its heightened concern for shaping, recording, and projecting sounds. Writings of the period could represent the undersea as silent, but also filled with mysterious and unfamiliar sounds.
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981359">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/53/image/coversmallThe Hollow Sea: Soundings in Eighteenth-Century Marine Poetics2026-02-03text/htmlen-USThe Hollow Sea: Soundings in Eighteenth-Century Marine Poetics2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®1049612026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03