A distinguished group of international scholars from the disciplines of history, philosophy, literature and art history offer a reconsideration of the ideas and the impact of the abbé Henri Grégoire, one of the most important figures of the French Revolution and a contributor to the campaigns for Jewish emancipation, rights for blacks, the reform of the Catholic Church and many other causes

In this age of globalization, the eighteenth-century priest and abolitionist Henri Grégoire has often been called a man ahead of his time. An icon of antiracism, a hero to people from Ho Chi Minh to French Jews, Grégoire has been particularly celebrated since 1989, when the French government placed him in the Pantheon as a model of ideals of universalism and human rights. In this beautifully written biography, based on newly discovered and previously overlooked material, we gain access for the first time to the full complexity of Grégoire's intellectual and political universe as well as the compelling nature of his persona. His life offers an extraordinary vantage from which to view large issues in European and world history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and provides provocative insights into many of the prevailing tensions, ideals, and paradoxes of the twenty-first century. Focusing on Grégoire's idea of "regeneration," that people could literally be made anew, Sepinwall argues that revolutionary universalism was more complicated than it appeared. Tracing the Revolution's long-term legacy, she suggests that while it spread concepts of equality and liberation throughout the world, its ideals also helped to justify colonialism and conquest.

Millennialists through the ages have looked forward to the apocalyptic moment that will radically transform society into heaven on Earth. Here, Landes offers a lucid and ground-breaking analysis of this widely misunderstood phenomenon.

Gregoire was an early nineteenth century French Roman Catholic bishop who turned his attention to the place of African Americans in Catholic and Euro-American thought. His work is, among other things, a devastating critique of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, in which the third president muses about black inferiority. Gregoire's views made an American edition difficult, as Jefferson opposed the book's appearance. An Enquiry is one of the few of Gregoire's thirty-plus books to be translated into English, and its publication in Brooklyn in 1810 was an event for African Americans. In this new edition, Graham Hodges presents a pristine reproduction of the original text in modern font, and offers a critical introduction to Gregoire, Franco-American abolitionism, and the influence of this important work on the development of the African American intellectual tradition.

A richly illustrated book exploring the origins of the modern fascination for heritage, comparing preservation in France, Germany and England.

To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth shows the vital role played by legal imagination in the formation of the international order during 1300–1870. It discusses how European statehood arose during early modernity as a locally specific combination of ideas about sovereign power and property rights, and how those ideas expanded to structure the formation of European empires and consolidate modern international relations. By connecting the development of legal thinking with the history of political thought and by showing the gradual rise of economic analysis into predominance, the author argues that legal ideas from different European legal systems - Spanish, French, English and German - have played a prominent role in the history of global power. This history has emerged in imaginative ways to combine public and private power, sovereignty and property. The book will appeal to readers crossing conventional limits between international law, international relations, history of political thought, jurisprudence and legal history.