Search results for ""Author Rafe Blaufarb""

Rafe Blaufarb examines the interwoven problems of taxation and social privilege in this treatment of the contention over fiscal privilege between the seigneurial nobility and the taxpayers of Provence. From the 1530s until the French Revolution and beyond, a series of deceptively simple questions divided privileged from non-privileged elite's in the province: what made land noble and, hence, tax exempt; how could land acquire or lose noble status? Aired in tribunals ranging from local village courts to the royal council in Versailles, these questions fuelled a long-running dispute that shaped the political life of early modern Provence, planted the seeds of revolutionary social conflict, and influenced provincial politics into the nineteenth century. This book sheds new light on two major fields of scholarly enquiry— early modern state-formation and revolutionary origins—and suggests a new explanation for the rise and fall of French absolutism. By fostering conflict between different kinds of local elite's, taxation not only undermined provincial cohesion and invited the intervention of royal authority but also helped to generate the salient social antagonisms of 1789. Although the book treats only a single province, its long-term chronology and broad source base ranging from village archives to the records of the central state provide a more holistic view of early modern French history than shorter-term, Paris-centred studies.

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The dramatic story of the slave ship Neirsee springs vividly to life in Rafe Blaufarb's graphic mircohistory, Inhuman Traffic. The story, set in the early nineteenth century, moves from the slave port of Old Calabar to the Caribbean and to the courts of Britain and France where the history of the illegal slave trade, slavery in the Caribbean, and diplomatic history all come into focus as Blaufarb follows the ship, its crew, and its captives. Students will be taken in by the vivid drawings and the rich narrative, but they will also find themselves immersed in an unusual learning experience. Blaufarb not only presents the history of the ship and captives, he takes the reader inside the project itself. He explains how he came upon the story, how he and his editor envisioned the project, and how he worked with the illustrator Liz Clarke to craft the 350 "cells" that compose the book. He and Clarke even take the reader inside archives in Britain and France which are themselves illustrated and their histories explained. Like all the best examples of the genre, Inhuman Traffic tells a compelling story through a complex interplay of image and text -- it will keep students reading, and learning, to the very end.

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