The Age of the Elites
Nicholas Henshall examines the politics of aristocratic culture in Europe between 1650 and 1750.
‘The material condition of the masses is the only thing that matters.’ This announcement, made in 1980 by Maurice Larkin, a professor of history at Edinburgh University, encapsulates the neglect since the 1960s of aristocratic culture in early modern Europe. Though historians have subsequently investigated its decline in the enlightened decades preceding the French Revolution, its rise has been largely ignored.
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