Preparing for an Imperial Inheritance: Children, Play, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract In examining how children engaged with the British Empire, broadly defined, during the long eighteenth century, this article considers a range of materials, including museums, printed juvenile literature, and board games, that specifically attempted to attract children and their parents. Subjects that engaged with the wider world, and with it the British Empire, were typically not a significant part of formal education curricula, and so an informal marketplace of materials and experiences emerged both to satisfy and drive parental demand for supplementary education at home. Such engagements were no accident. Rather, they were a conscious effort to provide middling and elite children with what was considered useful information about the wider world and empire they would inherit, as well as opportunities to consider the moral implications and obligations of imperial rule, particularly with regard to African slavery.

What guns meant in eighteenth-century Britain

Palgrave Communications ◽

10.1057/s41599-019-0312-z ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Priya Satia

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

British Empire ◽

British Society ◽

Current Debate ◽

Second Amendment ◽

Long Eighteenth Century ◽

Ethical Systems ◽

The Way

Abstract This article briefly summarizes the place of guns in British society and culture in the long eighteenth century. My approach is that of a historical anthropologist, examining the meaning of guns from the way they were used and depicted. I examine the way guns were used and understood in civilian and military realms, especially their meaning and role in the expansion of the British Empire. Finally, the essay discusses whether and how this history should influence our understanding of the Second Amendment, which was written in the eighteenth century. It concludes that history substantiates both sides of the current debate about gun use in America and that we must therefore turn to other ethical systems of judgment to resolve that debate.

Church Building and Architecture

10.1093/oso/9780199644636.003.0018 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Louis P. Nelson

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

British Empire ◽

Church Of England ◽

Critical Role ◽

Church Building ◽

Long Eighteenth Century ◽

The Church

Contrary to popular perceptions, the long eighteenth century was a period of significant church building and the architecture of the Church of England in this era played a critical role in religious vitality and theological formation. While certainly not to the expansive scale of Victorian church construction, the period was an era of significant building, in London, but also across the whole of the British Empire. Anglican churches in this era were marked not so much by stylistic questions as by programmatic concerns. The era produced the auditory church, designed to accommodate better the hearing of the sermon and the increasing importance of music in worship. There were also changes to communion practice that implicated the design of architecture. Finally, some few Anglicans considered the theological implications of historical inspiration but many more considered the role of sensibility and emotion in worship and in architecture as one of worship’s agents.

The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198727835.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

The Novel ◽

Historical Criticism ◽

Street Level ◽

Self Image ◽

Part Time ◽

Eighteenth-century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century’s novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period’s philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the ‘long’ eighteenth century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to first decade of the seventeenth century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire seeks to reflect developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and to provide a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period’s texts can come together.

Introduction

Revolution Against Empire ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300214246.003.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Justin du Rivage

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

British Empire ◽

American Revolution ◽

North American ◽

The United States ◽

American Colonies ◽

Eighteenth Century Britain

This introductory chapter briefly considers why the British American colonists had broken away from an empire that they had long revered. Americans like to think of themselves as fundamentally different from Europeans—both more democratic and more libertarian. But during the eighteenth century, Britain and its North American colonies were actually becoming more alike. However, the United States followed a different path from the dramatic transformation that painted the globe French blue and British red. That path reflected the fact that the American Revolution was a revolution not for or against monarchy, but against the authoritarian transformation of the British Empire.

Conclusion

Children of Uncertain Fortune ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469634432.003.0009 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Daniel Livesay

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

British Empire ◽

Family Relationships ◽

Atlantic World ◽

Mixed Race ◽

The Core ◽

Racial Ideologies ◽

The conclusion reiterates the core argument of the book. It contends that mixed-race Jamaicans who left for Britain were critical to the debates around race and slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic world. In particular, their experiences show the ways family relationships influenced racial standing in the long eighteenth century. When definitions of family were loose, elites of color could successfully integrate in the British Empire. When definitions of family constricted, it became much more difficult to avoid being lumped into discriminated categories around Africanness. Overall, the conclusion reasserts that racial ideologies and prejudices were more complex than previously thought, both in the nakedly abusive society of Jamaica as well as the seemingly more tolerant location of Britain.

Military Scotland in the Age of Proto-globalisation, c. 1690 to c. 1815

A Global Force ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474402736.003.0002 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Andrew Mackillop

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Middle Class ◽

British Empire ◽

Social Mobility ◽

Military Service ◽

East India Company ◽

Officer Corps ◽

Global Networks ◽

Class A ◽

This chapter considers the way in which military service acted as an agent of mobility and a means of extending global networks. In the long eighteenth century. The so-called military economy allowed Scots, who were over-represented in the British officer corps, to use existing regional and kinship connections to extend a form of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. Service in the armies of the East India Company provided Scots from the emerging middle class a means for social mobility. The creation of these networks allowed Scottish localities to connect directly to the remotest areas of the British empire.

The long eighteenth century

A Century of Theological and Religious Studies in Britain, 1902-2002 ◽

10.5871/bacad/9780197263051.003.0008 ◽

2004 ◽

Author(s):

Jane Shaw

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

Church Of England ◽

Religious Thought ◽

Fields Of Study ◽

This chapter discusses the eighteenth-century Church of England. It examines the changes in how people thought about the place of religion in eighteenth-century Britain by first looking at the histories of the eighteenth-century Church of England. The chapter studies the changing views of the Enlightenment's relationship to religious thought and practice in Britain. It ends with a discussion of the newer fields of study that have emerged, most especially during the latter part of the twentieth century.

Governance through Documents: The Board of Trade, Its Archive, and the Imperial Constitution of the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World

Journal of British Studies ◽

10.1017/jbr.2019.281 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 59 (2) ◽

pp. 264-290

Author(s):

Asheesh Kapur Siddique

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

British Empire ◽

American Revolution ◽

Atlantic World ◽

British Atlantic ◽

American Colonies ◽

British Atlantic World ◽

Long Eighteenth Century ◽

British State

AbstractThis article examines the role of documents, their circulation, and their archivization in the enactment of the imperial constitution of the British Empire in the Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century. It focuses on the Board of Trade's dispatch of “Instructions” and “Queries” to governors in the American colonies, arguing that it was through the circulation of these documents and the use of archives that the board sought to enforce constitutional norms of bureaucratic conduct and the authority of central institutions of imperial administration. In the absence of a singular, codified written constitution, the British state relied upon a variety of different kinds of documents to forge the imperial Atlantic into a governed space. The article concludes by pointing to the continuing centrality of documents and archives to the bureaucratic manifestation of the imperial constitution in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution.

Travelling in New Formes: Reissued and Reprinted Travel Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century

Mémoires du livre ◽

10.7202/1016741ar ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 4 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Matthew Day

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Travel Literature ◽

Careful Consideration ◽

Significant Part ◽

Main Body ◽

New Meanings ◽

The Creation ◽

Long Eighteenth Century ◽

Title Pages ◽

The Way

Despite increased recognition of the importance of the material nature of the book to our understanding of the creation of meanings, there has been relatively little focus on the travel literature of the eighteenth century. The market was enormous and a significant part of it comprised reissued and reprinted works. This article looks at the way books that returned to the market were given new contexts and created new meanings without changing the language of the main body of the text. By careful consideration of paratextual features such as title-pages, dedicatory epistles, marginalia and running titles and by considering such issues as the gathering of texts into collections, this article demonstrates the financial, political and ideological motives behind the reissue and reprinting of books. It shows how, through them, texts were 'reformed' in many different ways and suggests that reissues and reprints created, in effect, new books.

‘Neither Masters nor Slaves’: Small States and Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century

Lineages of Empire ◽

10.5871/bacad/9780197264393.003.0003 ◽

2009 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Richard Whatmore

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

British Empire ◽

Free State ◽

Survival Strategies ◽

Small States ◽

Self Perception ◽

In the nineteenth and twentieth century, the British Empire was viewed as a moral phenomenon. It was often described as supportive of self-government, benevolent, and respectful of the customs and laws of the dependent states of the empire. In the twentieth century, Britain became involved in world wars to defend the independence of its small states. This involvement was partially spurred by commercial interests but it was mainly because of the desire to maintain Britain’s reputation as a defender of liberty and because of its self-perception as an archetypal free state. This chapter determines the origins of the perception of Britain as defender of small states and of Europe’s small republics. It begins with an evaluation of the prevailing perspectives on the empire during the eighteenth century and the survival strategies employed by Europe’s small republics. The chapter also examines the bankruptcy of the traditional policies for maintaining national independence by the latter part of the eighteenth century. It concludes with the perception of Britain as a defender of small states by the time of the Vienna Settlement.