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Marc H. Lerner, Richard Whatmore. Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain, and France in the Eighteenth Century., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1592–1593, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1592
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In his new book, Richard Whatmore makes a compelling case for the centrality of small state political experimentation in the long eighteenth century. Through private letters and published tracts, Whatmore examines the arguments of the Genevan représentants and emphasizes the significance of Genevan debates to the development of modern political thought, not just in Geneva, but internationally, to the European intellectual world. Whatmore connects the political and economic thought that originated in response to a series of constitutional crises in Geneva to a wider European discussion about sovereignty, liberty, empire, and the role of commerce in modern politics. Together with British and French reforming discourses, Whatmore shows how the représentant strains of thought played a crucial role in shaping European conceptions of cosmopolitan and commercial political entities. Moreover, Whatmore implicitly demonstrates through his examination of représentant thought that the modern international state system did not begin with the Congress of Vienna in the aftermath of the revolutionary wars. Indeed, he makes clear that there was a longer history of reformist attempts to build commercially active cosmopolitan states that cooperated for the benefit of a common good.
