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History, Nature and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Europe is a research project designed to illuminate the consequences of a development, in which civil society came to be understood in increasingly global and increasingly historical terms. The project asks how intersecting debates concerning ‘nature,’ ‘civility’ and ’empire’ related to the cosmopolitan-European perspective of ‘Enlightenment’ and its juxtaposition of history and modernity. As the contention between the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘civility’ grew simultaneously with suspicions that the world might not be manageable by human agency, the question of conflict gained real significance, especially in relation to the ideas and practicalities of empire. Our project tackles the intricacy of these debates by examining three key themes – ‘history,’ ‘nature’ and ’empire’ – with a scope that extends beyond an individual country, by way of combining the contextualising style of intellectual history with conceptual history, history of philosophy, and transfer studies.

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