Sublime

By the eighteenth century, a new ideology was taking form, especially in Britain, that “greed is good” (to use a recent summary formulation), because greed spurs a society’s efforts and inventiveness. By giving vent to greed, the logic goes, societies can best harness the insatiable ambitions, great energies and ingenuity of their citizens. While g

By enlarging Old Europe into a new Euro-Atlantic ‘world’, the Occidentals had acquired hinterlands as varied and extensive as those of the Islamic realm or East Asia. There was much less evidence in the later early modern age that this great enlargement in territorial scale would also bring about the internal transformation to which Europe’s subseq

For half a century or more thereafter printers would follow a very conservative strategy, concentrating on publishing editions of the books most familiar from the medieval manuscript tradition.1 But in the sixteenth century they would also begin to open up new markets – and one of these was a market for news. News fitted ideally into the expanding

Sir Henry Garraway,

Although many of the pasquinades were bitingly topical, the confusion of the two forms was unfair. The avvisi could be cynical, but with rare exceptions were not openly offensive. Their value lay in their reliability as news; the writers could not exaggerate for effect, nor indulge in wishful thinking. In the clear distance between the avvisi and p

sources in any but the

By the sixteenth century it was clear enough that Europe’s comparative advantage over other Eurasian civilizations lay in its precocious development of marine activity. The simultaneous growth of long-distance trade with the Americas and India was one sign of this. Another was the rise of the huge cod fishery in the North Atlantic,

faster churning of companies in and out of the S&P 500, the death of news and the newspaper, the failure of established