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1
G, Whitehead H., ed. Short-title catalogue of eighteenth-century Spanish books in the British Library. London: The British Library, 1994.
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2
British Library. Short-title catalogue of eighteenth-century Spanish books in the British Library. London: The British Library, 1994.
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3
Winearls, Joan. Art on the wing: British, American, and Canadian illustrated bird books from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Toronto: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, 1999.
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4
Beit-Arié, Malachi. Perek shirah: An eighteenth-century illuminated Hebrew book of praise : companion volume to the facsimile edition. London: Facsimile Editions Limited, 1996.
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5
Fuderer, Laura Sue. Eighteenth-century British women in print: Catalog of an exhibit. [Notre Dame, Ind.]: University of Notre Dame, 1995.
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6
Böhm-Schnitker, Nadine, and Marcus Hartner, eds. Comparative Practices. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.14361/9783839457993.
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Comparisons not only prove fundamental in the epistemological foundation of modernity (Foucault, Luhmann), but they fulfil a central function in social life and the production of art. Taking a cue from the Practice Turn in sociology, the contributors are investigating the role of comparative practices in the formation of eighteenth-century literature and culture. The book conceives of social practices of comparing as being entrenched in networks of circulation of bodies, artefacts, discourses, and ideas, and aims to investigate how such practices ordered and changed British literature and culture during the long eighteenth century.
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Barlow, Derek. On the transition from book labels to book plates amongst the circulating libraries & the booksellers in later eighteenth-century Newcastle-on-Tyne. Oldham [England]: Incline Press, 2002.
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8
Peter, Sabor, ed. 'Pamela' in the marketplace: Literary controversy and print culture in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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9
Fuderer, Laura Sue. Eighteenth-century British women in print: Catalog of an exhibit : February 15 to March 31, 1995, and June 12 to August 15, 1995, in the Department of Special Collections of the University Libraries of Notre Dame. [Notre Dame, Ind: Libraries], 1995.
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10
Lehmann, Reinhard G. British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Boyars Publishers, Ltd., Marion, 1993.
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11
Lehmann, Gilly. The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Prospect Books (UK), 1993.
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12
The British housewife: Cookery books, cooking and society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2003.
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13
Vitruvius Britannicus: The Classic of Eighteenth-Century British Architecture (Dover Books on Architecture). Dover Publications, 2006.
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14
Robbie, Enid Catherine. A British view of some French institutions in the mid-eighteenth-century: Fromt he papers and books of Sir William Mildmay. 1996.
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15
English fiction, poetry, and drama in eighteenth century Sweden, 1700-1764: A preliminary study. Stockholm: [Kungliga Biblioteket], 1985.
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16
Jackson, Gordon. The British Whaling Trade. Liverpool University Press, 2004. http://dx.doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9780973007398.001.0001.
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This book provides a comprehensive economic history of the British Whaling Trade, divided into two eras of significant technological difference. The first part concerns the traditional whaling trades that structured the industry for three centuries, from 1604-1914. The second part concerns the modern whaling trade between the years 1904-1963, characterised by technological advance and tremendous international competition. Gordon Jackson approaches the enormous subject of British Whaling from the perspectives of both the national economy of Britain, and the international whaling industry as a whole. The book consults official statistical material to determine the size and performance of various whaling fleets; eye-witness accounts and state papers for the early history of the trade; log books, and trade and customs records for the eighteenth century; and the documents of the Southern Whaling Company, Salvesen, and Unilever for insights into the modern whaling period. The book concludes with appendices containing statistical data concerning whale oil, whale stocks, and the price of goods, two bibliographies of further reading, and a conclusion that free competition and market demand simply exhausted whale stocks beyond any possibility of restoration.
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British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/book.101563.
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Stock, Paul. Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807117.001.0001.
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Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760–1830 seeks to establish what literate British people understood by the word ‘Europe’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It achieves this objective through detailed analysis of nearly 350 geographical reference works, textbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias. Largely neglected by historians, these materials were widely read by contemporaries and can reveal the formative ideas about Europe circulating in Britain. The book therefore traces the history of ideas in non-elite contexts; it moves away from an approach to intellectual history concerned predominantly with prominent thinkers. The opening two chapters outline the characteristics and popularity of geography books and explain how they structure geographical knowledge. The remaining chapters explore eight themes which frame how Europe is understood in British culture. A chapter each is devoted to religion; the natural environment; race and other theories of human difference; the state; borders; the identification of the ‘centre’ and ‘edges’ of Europe; commerce and empire; and ideas about the past, progress, and historical change. Each chapter shows how geographical texts use these intricate concepts to communicate and construct widely understood ideas about the European continent. Is Europe unified by shared religious heritage? Where are the edges of Europe? Is Europe primarily a commercial network or are there common political practices too? Is Britain itself a European country? By showing how these and other questions were discussed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, the book provides a thorough and much-needed historical analysis of Britain’s enduringly complex intellectual relationship with Europe.
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Smith, Merril D. Women’s Roles in Eighteenth-Century America. ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9798216038047.
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This book offers a look at how the lives of women changed in the era when the United States emerged. Spanning the broad spectrum of Colonial-era life, Women's Roles in Eighteenth-Century America is a revealing exploration of how 18-century American women of various races, classes, and religions were affected by conditions of the times—war, slavery, religious awakenings, political change, perceptions about gender—as well as how they influenced the world around them. Women's Roles in Eighteenth-Century America covers the area of North America that became the United States and follows the transformation of the British colonies into a new nation. The book is organized thematically to examine marriage and the family, the law, work, travel, war, religion, and education and the arts. Each chapter combines current research and primary sources to offer authoritative portraits of real lives of the everyday women during this pivotal early era in our history.
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Moore, Sean D. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198836377.001.0001.
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Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans’ profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. It makes these claims on the basis of recent scholarship on how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, and evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford importing British cultural products. In doing so, this work merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labor of the African diaspora. This book, accordingly, is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, this book claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.
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Mc Inerney, Tim. Nobility and the Making of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350350496.
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Nobility and the Making of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain focuses on 18th-century Britain and Ireland at a time when race theory as we know it today was steadily emerging in the realm of natural philosophy to examine the structural relationship between nobility and race. This ground-breaking book examines texts from the fields of naturalism, political philosophy, medicine, and colonial venture, as well as interrogating works of drama and literature, in order to track how climate-based understandings of human variety at this time became increasingly imbued with noble traditions of genealogical purity and hierarchies of descent. This process, the book argues, allowed British naturalists and wider society to understand global populations according to an already familiar pattern of genealogical inequality, and offered the proponents of race theory a ready made model of natural supremacy. In this highly original and meticulously researched book, Tim McInerney explains why nobility and race developed in the way they did and how the premise of each promoted a certain idea of superiority. The result is a necessary in-depth understanding of how genealogical exclusivity works as a power strategy, vital to students and scholars alike.
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Lynan, Peter, and Julian Rushton, eds. British Music, Musicians and Institutions, c. 1630-1800. Boydell and Brewer Limited, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781800103511.
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Building upon the developing picture of the importance of British music, musicians and institutions during the eighteenth century, this book investigates the themes of composition, performance (amateur and professional) and music-printing, within the wider context of social, religious and secular institutions.
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Fisher, Samuel K. The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution. Oxford University PressNew York, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197555842.001.0001.
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Abstract The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution offers a new way of understanding the American Revolution and the relationship between diversity and revolution in the British empire. Drawing on little-used sources in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the book shows how people experiencing colonization in the eighteenth-century British empire—Irish-speaking Catholics, Scottish Highlanders, and Indigenous nations of North America—fought back by building relationships with the king and imperial officials. In the process, they created a more inclusive empire and triggered conflict between the imperial state and formerly privileged provincial Britons: Irish Protestants, Scottish Whigs, and American colonists. The American Revolution was only one aspect of this larger conflict between inclusive empire and the exclusionary patriots within the British empire. By putting typically excluded Gaelic and Indian voices at the center of the story and taking a comparative approach that includes Scotland and Ireland as well as North America, the book offers a new account of how empires functioned in the eighteenth century, how they fell apart, and how questions of diversity explain both. In the process it uncovers the British, imperial origins of Americans’ racial dilemmas, showing how these were not new or uniquely American but instead the awkward legacies of a more complex imperial history.
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Gallagher, Noelle. Itch, Clap, Pox. Yale University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300217056.001.0001.
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In eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay. This book explores the cultural significance of the “clap” (gonorrhea), the “pox” (syphilis), and the “itch” (genital scabies) for the development of eighteenth-century British literature and art. As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. The book highlights four key concepts associated with venereal disease, demonstrating how infection's symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and facial deformities. Casting light where the sun rarely shines, this study will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality.
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McCurdy, John. Quarters. Cornell University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501736605.001.0001.
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This book examines the quartering of British soldiers in North America in the eighteenth century, using ideas of place to understand the political and social history of quartering. In colonial America, quartering in houses was common, but this practice was challenged with the arrival of the British army during the French and Indian War. Eager to keep British regulars out of private homes, the colonists built barracks and planted military geography in the heart of their cities. The Quartering Act emerged after the war as an attempt to extend British rights and responsibilities to the colonies, but the size and diversity of British North America inhibited this effort and fractured the empire. As quartering in Canada and the backcountry diverged from that in the American colonies, friction emerged between the colonists and the British army. Following the Boston Massacre, quartering became a divisive issue that encouraged the Americans to contemplate forming their own nation.
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Taylor, David Francis. The Politics of Parody. Yale University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300223750.001.0001.
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This book explores how the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense of political issues, outrages, and personalities. The first in-depth exploration of the relationship between literature and visual satire in this period, the book explores how great texts, seen through the lens of visual parody, shape how we understand the political world. It offers a fascinating, novel approach to literary history.
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Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. Edited by John McWilliams. Oxford University Press, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/owc/9780199538195.001.0001.
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The second of Cooper’s five Leatherstocking Tales, this is the one which has consistently captured the imagination of generations since it was first published in 1826. Its success lies partly in the historical role Cooper gives to his Indian characters, against the grain of accumulated racial hostility, and partly in his evocation of the wild beautiful landscapes of North America which the French and the British fought to control throughout the eighteenth century. At the centre of the novel is the celebrated ‘Massacre’ of British troops and their families by Indian allies of the French at Fort William Henry in 1757. Around this historical event, Cooper built a romantic fiction of captivity, sexuality, and heroism, in which the destiny of the Mohicans Chingachgook and his son Uncas is inseparable from the lives of Alice and Cora Munro and of Hawkeye the frontier scout. The controlled, elaborate writing gives natural pace to the violence of the novel's action: like the nature whose plundering Copper laments, the books placid surfaces conceal inexplicable and deathly forces.
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Cohen, Ashley L. The Global Indies. Yale University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300239973.001.0001.
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This book is a study of British imperialism's imaginative geography, exploring the pairing of India and the Atlantic world from literature to colonial policy. The book weaves a complex portrait of the imaginative geography of British imperialism. Contrary to most current scholarship, eighteenth-century Britons saw the empire not as separate Atlantic and Indian spheres but as an interconnected whole: the Indies. Crisscrossing the hemispheres, the book traces global histories of race, slavery, and class, from Boston to Bengal. It also reveals the empire to be pervasively present at home, in metropolitan scenes of fashionable sociability. The book reveals how the pairing of the two Indies in discourse helped produce colonial policies that linked them in practice. Combining the methods of literary studies and new imperial history, the book demonstrates how the imaginative geography of the Indies shaped the culture of British imperialism, which in turn changed the shape of the world.
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Sehgal, Manu. Creating an Early Colonial Order. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190124502.001.0001.
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This book explains the origins of colonial rule and its dependence on large-scale military violence in eighteenth-century South Asia. By the final quarter of the long eighteenth century, war-making was not incidental to the elaboration of an infrastructure of extractive domination. The changing capacity of the early colonial regime to organize conquest with increasing efficiency was originative of a complex of laws, ideas, conception of sovereign authority, bureaucratic innovations enmeshed in a political economy of conquest that formed a distinctive early colonial order for South Asia. Colonialism—familiar to historians of the British Raj as coercive authoritarian domination—did not emerge fully formed in early nineteenth-century South Asia. Colonial conquest raised a series of important questions which are at the heart of this book: How was territory to be conquered? How was conquest to be explained and understood? How was the weight assigned to the military in colonial societies justified as an ideology of rule? In answering these questions this early colonial order cast a long shadow across the colonial and the postcolonial periods.
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Wright, Laura. Sunnyside. British Academy, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197266557.001.0001.
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This book traces developments in the history of British house-names from the tenth century, beginning with medieval house-naming practices referencing the householder’s name, the householder’s occupation, and the appearance of the house. In the early fourteenth century heraldic names appeared on commercial premises: tavern names such as la Worm on the Hope, and shop names such as the Golden Tea Kettle & Speaking Trumpet. From the eighteenth century five main categories are identified: the transferred place-name, the nostalgically rural, the commemorative, names associated with the nobility, and the latest fashion or fad. From the nineteenth century new developments are ‘pick & mix’ names consisting of uncoupled elements from British place-names joined together in new combinations, and jocular house-names. Historically, the house-name Sunnyside predominates in Scotland, and is traced through Middle English, Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman French Scottish Gaelic, and the influence of Old Norse, recording a prehistoric Nordic land-division practice known as solskifte. It was spread southwards in the eighteenth century by Nonconformists, and became a Quaker shibboleth. Quakers took the name to North America where it remains in use as a church name. A specific historic Sunnyside in the Scottish Borders influenced author Washington Irving to name his famous New York Sunnyside, which boosted the name’s popularity. London Sunnysides of the 1870s were grand suburban residences owned by rich industrialist Nonconformists with Scottish family ties, confirming the trend.
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Hernandez, Alex Eric. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846574.001.0001.
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This book assembles a body of print and performance concerned with the misfortunes of the middling sort, arguing that these works negotiated tragedy’s vexed relationship to ordinary life. This “bourgeois and domestic tragedy” imagined a particularly modern sort of affliction, an “ordinary suffering” divested of the sorts of meanings, rhetorics, and affective resonances once deployed to understand it. Whereas neoclassical aesthetics aligned tragedy with the heroic and the admirable, bourgeois tragedy treated the pain of common people with dignity and seriousness, meditating upon a suffering that was homely, familiar, realistic, and entangled in the nascent values of capitalism, yet no less haunted by God. Hence, where many have seen aesthetic stagnation, misfiring emotion, and the absence of an idealized tragicness in the genre, this book tracks instead a sustained engagement in the emotional processes and representational techniques through which the middle rank feels its way into modernity. Describing this shift as an episode in the histories of both tragedy and emotion, it revises the standard critical account of eighteenth-century tragedy and reads the genre’s emergence in the period as a vigorous cultural conversation over whose life—and whose way of life—is grievable, as well as how that mourning might be performed.
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Alborn, Timothy. All That Glittered. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190603519.001.0001.
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From the early eighteenth century into the 1830s, Great Britain was the only major country in the world to adopt gold as the sole basis of its currency, in the process absorbing much of the world’s supply of that metal into its pockets, cupboards, and coffers. During the same period, Britons forged a nation by distilling a heady brew of Protestantism, commerce, and military might, while preserving important features of its older social hierarchy. All That Glittered argues for a close connection between these occurrences, by linking justifications for gold’s role in British society—starting in the 1750s and running through the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes in California and Australia—to contemporary descriptions of that metal’s varied values at home and abroad. Most of these accounts attributed British commercial and military success to a credit economy pinned on gold, stigmatized southern European and subaltern peoples for their nonmonetary uses of gold, or tried to marginalize people at home for similar forms of alleged misconduct. This book tells a primarily cultural origin story about the gold standard’s emergence after 1850 as an international monetary system, while providing a new window on British exceptionalism during the previous century.
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The First John Murray and the Late Eighteenth-Century London Book Trade: With a Checklist of His Publications (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship ... Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs). British Academy, 1999.
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Muller, Hannah Weiss. Subjects and Sovereign. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190465810.001.0001.
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In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, when a variety of conquered and ceded territories became part of an expanding British Empire, crucial struggles emerged about what it meant to be a “British subject.” In Grenada, Quebec, Minorca, Gibraltar, and Bengal, individuals debated the meanings and rights of subjecthood, with many capitalizing on legal ambiguities and local exigencies to secure access to political and economic benefits. In the hands of inhabitants and colonial administrators, subjecthood became a shared language, practice, and opportunity as individuals proclaimed their allegiance to the crown and laid claim to a corresponding set of protections. Approaching subjecthood as a protean and porous concept, rather than an immutable legal status, Subjects and Sovereigns demonstrates that it was precisely subjecthood’s fluidity and imprecision rendered it useful to a remarkably diverse group of individuals. This book revisits the traditional bond between subject and sovereign, arguing that this relationship endured as a powerful site for claims-making throughout the eighteenth century. Muller analyzes both legal understandings of subjecthood, as well as the popular tradition of declaring rights, to demonstrate why subjects believed they were entitled to make requests of their sovereign. She reconsiders narratives of upheaval and transformation during the Age of Revolution and insists on the relevance and utility of existing structures of state and sovereign. Emphasizing the stories of subjects who successfully leveraged their loyalty and negotiated their status, Subjects and Sovereign also explores how and why subjecthood remained an organizing and contested principle of the eighteenth-century British Empire.
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Sabor, Peter, and Thomas Keymer. 'Pamela' in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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36
Robinson, D. H. The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198862925.001.0001.
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This book advances a new interpretation of the origins of the American Revolution by looking at how conceptions of Europe and Europeanness shaped British-American political culture. It reconstructs colonial debates about the European states system and European civilization, and Britain’s position within both. From this basis, it shows how these concerns informed colonial attitudes towards American identity and America’s place inside—and, ultimately, outside—the emerging British Empire. The book explores the way in which colonists inherited and adapted Anglo-British traditions of thinking about international politics, how they navigated imperial politics during the European wars of 1740–63, and how the burgeoning patriot movement negotiated the dual crisis of Europe and Empire in the period between 1763 and 1775. In the process, it sheds new light on the development of public politics in colonial America, the anglicization/Americanization debate, the political economy of empire, the place of art and poetry in political culture, the interplay of history and prophecy with identity, eighteenth-century geopolitical thinking, and the relationship between international affairs and revolution. What emerges from this story is an imperial crisis and an American Revolution that seem both decidedly arcane and strikingly relevant to the political challenges of the twenty-first century.
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Conway, Stephen. Britannia's Auxiliaries. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198808701.001.0001.
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This book provides the first wide-ranging attempt to consider the continental European contribution to the eighteenth-century British Empire. The British benefited from many different European inputs—financial, material, and, perhaps most importantly, human. Continental Europeans appeared in different British imperial sites as soldiers, settlers, scientists, sailors, clergymen, merchants, and technical experts. They also sustained the empire from without—through their financial investments, their consumption of British imperial goods, their supply of European products, and by aiding British imperial communication. Continental Europeans even provided Britons with social support from their own imperial bases. Britannia’s Auxiliaries explores the means by which continental Europeans came to play a part in British imperial activity, at a time when, at least in theory, overseas empires were meant to be exclusionary structures, intended to serve national purposes. It looks at the ambitions of the continental Europeans themselves, and at the encouragement given to their participation both by private interests in the British Empire and by the British state. Despite the extensive involvement of continental Europeans, the empire remained essentially British. Indeed, the empire seems to have changed the Europeans who entered it more than they changed the empire. This study, then, qualifies recent scholarly emphasis on the transnational forces that undermined the efforts of imperial authorities to maintain control of their empires. In the British case, the state seems, for the most part, to have managed the process of continental involvement in ways that furthered British interests.
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de Miranda, Luis. Ensemblance. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454193.001.0001.
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This book provides the first ever transnational and longue-durée intellectual history of a highly influential but largely understudied modern phrase: esprit de corps. A strong attachment and dedication among the members of a community of practice or a body politic, esprit de corps can be perceived as beneficial (collective élan) or detrimental (groupthink). As a polemical argumentative signifier, esprit de corps has played a significant role in the cultural and political history of the last 300 years: the idea was influential and debated during the European secularisation of education in the eighteenth-century, during the French Revolution, during the United States process of Independence, and the French Empire. It was praised by British colonialists, French sociologists, and during the World Wars. It was instrumental during the rise of administrative nation-states and the triumph of corporate capitalism. ‘Esprit de corps’ is today a keyword in nationalist and managerial discourses. Born in eighteenth-century France in military as well as political discourse, the phrase and its implications were over the centuries an important matter of debate for major thinkers and politicians: d’Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau, Lord Chesterfield, Bentham, the Founding Fathers, Sieyès, Mirabeau, British MPs, Napoleon, Hegel, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Waldeck-Rousseau, de Gaulle, Orwell, Bourdieu, Deleuze & Guattari, etc. For some of them, esprit de corps is the very engine of History. In the end, this book a cautionary analysis of past and current ideologies of ultra-unified human ensembles, a recurrent historical and theoretical fabulation the author calls ensemblance.
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Canuel, Mark. The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192895301.001.0001.
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What did Romantic writers mean when they wrote about “progress” and “perfection”? This book shows how Romantic writers inventively responded to familiar ideas about political progress which they inherited from the eighteenth century. Whereas earlier writers such as Voltaire and John Millar likened improvements in political institutions to the progress of the sciences or refinement of manners, the novelists, poets, and political theorists examined in this book reimagined politically progressive political associations in multiple genres. While embracing a commitment to optimistic improvement—increasing freedom, equality, and protection from injury—they also cultivated increasingly visible and volatile energies of religious and political dissent. Earlier narratives of progress tended not only to edit and fictionalize history but also to agglomerate different modes of knowledge and practice in their quest to describe and prescribe uniform cultural improvement. But Romantic writers seize on internal division and take it less as an occasion for anxiety, exclusion, or erasure, and more as an impetus to rethink the groundwork of progress itself. Political entities, from Percy Shelley’s plans for political reform to Charlotte Smith’s motley associations of strangers in The Banished Man, are progressive because they advance some version of collective utility or common good. But they simultaneously stake a claim to progress only insofar as they paradoxically solicit contending vantage points on the criteria for the very public benefit which they passionately pursue. The “majestic edifices” of Wordsworth’s imagined university in The Prelude embrace members who are “republican or pious,” not to mention the recalcitrant “enthusiast” who is the poet himself.
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Smith, Craig. Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474413275.001.0001.
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Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.
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Ingleby, Matthew, and Matthew P. M. Kerr, eds. Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474435734.001.0001.
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Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century examines the importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The years between the naval blockade of 1775, which began the American War, and the start of the First World War in 1914 witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast on both sides of the Atlantic. Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, coasts were often thought of as unhealthy, dangerous places. Developments in both medicine and aesthetics changed this. Increasingly, the coast could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation – a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production. Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. Spanning the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and including interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geography, these essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies speak across traditional period and disciplinary boundaries.
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Wendorf, Richard. Printing History and Cultural Change. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192898135.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This study provides one of the most detailed and comprehensive examinations ever devoted to a critical transformation in the material substance of the printed page; it carries out this exploration in the history of the book, moreover, by embedding these typographical changes in the context of other cultural phenomena in eighteenth-century Britain. The gradual abandonment of pervasive capitalization, italics, and caps and small caps in books printed in London, Dublin, and the American colonies between 1740 and 1780 is mapped in five-year increments which reveal that the appearance of the modern page in English began to emerge around 1765. This descriptive and analytical account focuses on poetry, classical texts, Shakespeare, contemporary plays, the novel, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, sermons and religious writings, newspapers, magazines, anthologies, government publications, and private correspondence; and also examines the reading public, canon formation, editorial theory and practice, and the role of typography in textual interpretation. These changes in printing conventions are then compared to other aspects of cultural change: the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, the publication of Johnson’s Dictionary in 1755, the transformation of shop signs and the imposition of house numbers in London beginning in 1762, and the evolution of the English language and of English prose style. This study concludes that this fundamental shift in printing conventions was closely tied to a pervasive interest in refinement, regularity, and standardization in the second half of the century—and that it was therefore an important component in the self-conscious process of modernizing British culture.
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Games, Alison. Inventing the English Massacre. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197507735.001.0001.
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This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.
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Chico, Tita. The Experimental Imagination. Stanford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9781503605442.001.0001.
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This book is about experimental imagination in the British Enlightenment. It tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds. Early scientists used metaphor to define the phenomena they studied. They likewise used metaphor to imagine themselves into their roles as experimentalists. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British literature includes countless references to early science to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge, whose truths challenge the dominant account of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non epistemological innovation of the long eighteenth century. The Experimental Imagination considers traditional scientific writings alongside poems, plays, and prose works by canonical and non-canonical authors to argue that ideas about science facilitated new forms of evidence and authority. The noisy satiric rancor and quiet concern that science generated among science advocates, dramatists, essayists, and poets reveal a doubled epistemological trajectory: experimental observation utilizes imaginative speculation and imaginative fancy enables new forms of understanding. Early scientific practice requires yet often obscures that imaginative impulse, which literary knowledge embraces as a way of understanding the world at large. Reciprocally, the period’s theory of aesthetics arises from the observational protocols of science, ultimately laying claim to literature as epistemologically superior. Early science finds its intellectual and conceptual footing in the metaphoric thinking available through literary knowledge, and literary writers wield science as a trope for the importance and unique insights of literary knowledge.
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Jones, Brad A. Resisting Independence. Cornell University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501754012.001.0001.
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This book maps the loyal British Atlantic's reaction to the American Revolution. Through close study of four important British Atlantic port cities — New York City; Kingston, Jamaica; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Glasgow, Scotland — the book argues that the revolution helped trigger a new understanding of loyalty to the Crown and empire. The book reimagines loyalism as a shared transatlantic ideology, no less committed to ideas of liberty and freedom than the American cause and not limited to the inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies. The book reminds readers that the American Revolution was as much a story of loyalty as it was of rebellion. Loyal Britons faced a daunting task — to refute an American Patriot cause that sought to dismantle their nation's claim to a free and prosperous Protestant empire. For the inhabitants of these four cities, rejecting American independence thus required a rethinking of the beliefs and ideals that framed their loyalty to the Crown and previously drew together Britain's vast Atlantic empire. The book describes the formation and spread of this new transatlantic ideology of loyalism. Loyal subjects in North America and across the Atlantic viewed the American Revolution as a dangerous and violent social rebellion and emerged from twenty years of conflict more devoted to a balanced, representative British monarchy and, crucially, more determined to defend their rights as British subjects. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, as their former countrymen struggled to build a new nation, these loyal Britons remained convinced of the strength and resilience of their nation and empire and their place within it.
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Holland, Robert. The Warm South. Yale University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300235920.001.0001.
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Ever since the age of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century, the Mediterranean has had a significant pull for Britons — including many painters and poets — who sought from it the inspiration, beauty, and fulfilment that evaded them at home. Referred to as ‘Magick Land’ by one traveller, dreams about the Mediterranean, and responses to it, went on to shape the culture of a nation. This book charts how a new sensibility arose from British engagement with the Mediterranean, ancient and modern. Ranging from Byron's poetry to Damien Hirst's installations, the book shows that while idealized visions and aspirations often met with disillusionment and frustration, the Mediterranean also offered a notably insular society the chance to enrich itself through an imagined world of colour, carnival, and sensual self-discovery.
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Hart, Patrick, Valerie Kennedy, and Dora Petherbridge, eds. Henrietta Liston's Travels. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467353.001.0001.
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The book is the first print publication of Henrietta Liston’s Turkish Journals, a significant yet virtually unknown work of women’s travel writing. It is composed of the full text of the 1812-1814 journal and some further writings, such a significant 1813 letter from Liston to her nephew, Dick Ramage and extracts from other journals, and these are preceded by an extensive critical introduction. The journals reveal that as the wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Liston had privileged access to the Ottoman elite and to the diplomatic corps. They reflect on British-Ottoman relations, combining Orientalist perspectives with a human-centred version of the picturesque. Liston offers astute commentaries on people, places, and events – including a plague-ridden Constantinople, the harem of the Grand Vizier’s deputy, the presentation of ambassadors in the Seraglio and the departure of pilgrims on the hajj. The introduction includes sections on Liston’s life and the diplomatic context of her writings, and the Ottoman social and political context of the period. Liston’s writings are considered in relation to the discourses of travel writing, to British-Ottoman relations, to Orientalism and the picturesque, and to other eighteenth-and nineteenth-century women travellers and their works on the Ottoman Empire. There is also discussion of the manuscripts on which the book is based, and of issues such as their composition, revision, and transcription.
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Noggle, James. Unfelt. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501747120.001.0001.
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This book offers a new account of feeling during the British Enlightenment, finding that the passions and sentiments long considered as preoccupations of the era depend on a potent insensibility, the secret emergence of pronounced emotions that only become apparent with time. Surveying a range of affects, including primary sensation, love and self-love, greed, happiness, and patriotic ardor, the book explores literary evocations of imperceptibility and unfeeling that pervade and support the period's understanding of sensibility. Each of the four sections of the book—on philosophy, the novel, historiography, and political economy—charts the development of these idioms from early in the long eighteenth century to their culmination in the age of sensibility. From Locke to Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney, and from Dudley North to Hume and Adam Smith, the book's exploration of the insensible dramatically expands the scope of affect in the period's writing and thought. Drawing inspiration from contemporary affect theory, the book charts how feeling and unfeeling flow and feed back into each other, identifying emotional dynamics at their most elusive and powerful: the potential, the incipient, the emergent, and the virtual.
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Marshall, P. J. Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198841203.001.0001.
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In the later eighteenth century the West Indian sugar islands were a source of conspicuous wealth for some individuals and an important addition to the resources of Great Britain. They were generally reckoned to be the most valuable of Britain’s imperial possessions, a view which Burke fully endorsed. This book examines his long involvement with the West Indies, at a personal level through the ambitions of his brother and some of his closest friends, as a politician and what contemporaries called ‘a man of business’ in the management of a great national asset and in trying to win the support of powerful West Indian interests for his political connection. He became a participant in debates about the ethics of enslavement and the slave trade. Burke deplored both slavery and the trade, but he recognized that the plantation economy of the West Indies depended on them and that therefore they played a crucial role in Britain’s immensely valuable Atlantic commerce. The policies that he advocated for the further development of the West Indian and African trades inevitably involved more enslaved Africans in the British Empire and on occasions he was drawn into implicitly endorsing the slave trade. Except for a few years from 1788 to 1791, Burke was not prepared to countenance immediate abolition of the trade, but he did devise a comprehensive plan for reforming both it and the institution of slavery, that in the very long term would make both redundant.
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Bow, C. B., ed. Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198783909.001.0001.
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This book explores the philosophical and historical significance of common sense philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment. As one of eighteenth-century Scotland’s most original intellectual products, the Scottish ‘school’ of common sense philosophy developed as a viable alternative to modern philosophical scepticism known as the ‘Ideal Theory’ or ‘the way of ideas’. The philosophical writings of Thomas Reid and David Hume factor prominently in the volume as influential authors of competing ideas in the history and philosophy of common sense. In the chapters of this volume, which all embody original and innovative research, the contributors recover anticipations of Reid’s version of common sense in seventeenth-century Scottish scholasticism; re-evaluate Reid’s position in the realism versus sentimentalism dichotomy; shed new light on the nature of the ‘constitution’ in the anatomy of the mind; identify changes in the nature of sense perception throughout Reid’s published and unpublished works; examine Reid on the non-theist implications of Hume’s philosophy; show how ‘polite’ literature shaped James Beattie’s version of common sense; reveal Hume’s response to common sense philosophers; explore English criticisms and construction of the ‘Scotch school’; and illustrate how Dugald Stewart’s refashioning of common sense responded to a new age and the British reception of German Idealism. In recovering the ways in which Scottish common sense philosophy originally developed in response to the Ideal Theory in Britain during the long eighteenth century, this volume takes an important step toward a more complete understanding of ‘the Scottish philosophy’ in the age of Enlightenment.