The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume II

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Degree Of Acceptance ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British State ◽  
The Relationship

This volume charts the development of protestant Dissent between the passing of the Toleration Act (1689) and the repealing of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828). The long eighteenth century was a period in which Dissenters slowly moved from a position of being a persecuted minority to achieving a degree of acceptance and, eventually, full political rights. The first part of the volume considers the history of various Dissenting traditions inside England. There are separate chapters devoted to Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers—the denominations that traced their history before this period—and also to Methodists, who emerged as one of the denominations of ‘New Dissent’ during the eighteenth century. The second part explores the ways in which these traditions developed outside England. It considers the complexities of being a Dissenter in Wales and Ireland, where the state church was Episcopalian, as well as in Scotland, where it was Presbyterian. It also looks at the development of Dissent across the Atlantic, where the relationship between Church and state was rather more loose. The third part is devoted to revivalist movements and their impact, with a particular emphasis on the importance of missionary societies for spreading protestant Christianity from the late eighteenth century onwards. The fourth part looks at Dissenters’ relationship to the British state and their involvement in campaigns to abolish the slave trade. The final part discusses how Dissenters lived: the theology they developed and their attitudes towards Scripture; the importance of both sermons and singing; their involvement in education and print culture; and the ways in which they expressed their faith materially through their buildings.

Postscript

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Carruthers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Major Turning Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
British State ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The interwar period marked a major turning point in the history of Scottish literature. The story of Scots before MacDiarmid’s recasting of it as synthetic Lallans was happily enmeshed in the experience of Britishness and of Britain’s imperial expansion overseas. As far back as the eighteenth century, Scots and English were viewed by Scots philologists as Saxon–British cognates. The emergence of an antithetical relationship of Scots and English was largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Indeed, MacDiarmid entirely reconceptualized the relationship of Scottish literature to the post-1707 British state. A partner nation of enthusiastic imperialists was reimagined as an oppressed colony. Scottish literature, both its practitioners and its critics, embarked on a process of forgetting Scotland’s complicity in Britishness and Empire.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

Supremacy and the Origins of American Slavery

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 754-758
Author(s):  
Michael Guasco
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
Connective Tissues ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

Katharine Gerbner has provided readers a much-needed treatment of the relationship between Protestant Christianity and the emergence of White Supremacist racial ideology in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Scholars have long perceived the general outlines of the story that unfolds in Gerbner's book, but no one has highlighted the connective tissues with as much care and detail. With her book, it is now much easier to see what we once could only imagine to be there: Christians (Protestants in this telling) played a singular role in the articulation of a racial ideology that would eventually become a widespread rationale for slavery throughout much of the Atlantic world. There are surprises in this tale, such as the seemingly paradoxical role played by historical actors who scholars often credit with being on the right side of history—the Quakers and Moravians, for example, who are typically cast as characters intent on destabilizing slavery. Not so, according to Gerbner. In this way, she does marvelously well to show how Protestant Christianity was never really above the fray and that those we might like to imagine were the progenitors of an eventual antislavery critique were also critical conduits in the development of modern-day racism.

From “Fiscal-Military” State to Laissez-faire State, 1760–1850

1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Harling ◽  
Peter Mandler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Government Growth ◽  
Regressive Tax ◽  
Central Apparatus ◽  
A Chain ◽  
British State ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The recent historiographical revolution in our understanding of the eighteenth-century state has broad implications, analytical as well as empirical, that are only beginning to be plumbed. Due largely to the work of Patrick O'Brien and John Brewer, the old picture—of a small, amateurish, corrupt central apparatus largely maintained (between sporadic wars) to dignify the crown and assist gentlemanly (i.e., parliamentary) plunder—has been pretty completely effaced. We now see that by the end of the French wars the British state was one of the largest and most efficient in Europe; certainly it engorged the largest proportion of national product by means of a ruthlessly regressive tax system. The French wars were the climax, not the sole begetters of this system, which had been spawned by a chain of wars mounting in scope and sophistication since the late seventeenth century and requiring commensurate improvements in fiscal policy: thus Brewer's memorable naming of the system as the “fiscal-military state.”For historians of the early nineteenth century, this revision raises a host of questions about the relationship of social change and social class to government growth. Particularly, it casts doubt on the customary association made between growth in the size or scope of government and the rise in the Industrial Revolution of new social and economic questions and a bourgeoisie to answer them; that is, it casts doubt on the implicit “modernization” model that hitches together economic growth, government growth, bureaucracy, professionalism, and embourgeoisement.

What happened to the growth spurt of nineteenth-century adolescents? An essay on the history of a scientific omission

1990 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 767-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Vandereycken ◽  
Ron Van Deth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Growth Spurt ◽  
Pubertal Growth Spurt ◽  
Pubertal Growth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

SynopsisIt is common knowledge that puberty is characterized, among other phenomena, by a striking growth spurt. An exploration of the medical literature from previous centuries shows, however, that this feature of adolescence has attracted surprisingly little attention. Although the pubertal growth spurt was known to eighteenth-century physicians, it was neglected for about a century. The influential Belgian scientist Quetelet demonstrated a remarkable scotoma towards the phenomenon. It was only after his death in 1874 that the relationship between puberty and growth spurt became a scientifically established and recognized fact.

Introduction: Newspaper reporting of crime and justice

2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH FOYSTER
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Read Aloud ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Urban Policing ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
British State

One of the most intriguing and challenging problems facing historians of crime and the law is determining what were popular perceptions of criminal behaviour and criminal justice. Each of the articles in this special issue tackles this question by examining the content of British and colonial newspapers that were printed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The choice of this period is significant both for the history of the press, and for that of criminal justice. It was during the eighteenth century that the newspaper became the dominant form of print culture, with readers enjoying an increasing choice of papers that were printed both in London and in the provinces. As literacy rates improved, and because newspaper stories could be read aloud, the audience for newspapers continued to expand. At the same time, the British state attempted new ways of administering criminal justice. The multiplication of the number of offences that carried the death penalty meant that the criminal code gained notoriety as the ‘Bloody Code’, while the Transportation Act of 1718, covering England and Wales, authorized the deportation of English and Welsh criminals to the American colonies. By the end of the eighteenth century London magistrates were experimenting with new methods of urban policing, as fears mounted about how the growing population could be both controlled and protected from crime. Newspapers reported, reflected upon and sometimes debated each of these developments, yet remarkably, it is not until now that historians of crime have analysed in any detail what the content of these newspapers can reveal about contemporary attitudes towards crime and justice.

Guilt by Association: The Atheist Cabal and the Rise of the Public Sphere in Augustan England

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger D. Lund
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Voluntary Associations ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Voluntary Association ◽  
Fraternal Organizations ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Private Associations

It is a cliché of literary history that the natives of the long eighteenth century were uniquely “clubbable” men and women. As Peter Clark points out, by the mid-eighteenth century voluntary associations of all sorts had become “an essential part of the social and cultural language of urban life.” Clark chronicles the rise of coffee houses, benefit societies, lodges, fraternal organizations, and clubs of every kind. As he points out, however, while the “image and concept of the voluntary society increasingly penetrated every nook and cranny of British social and cultural life” in the eighteenth century, there was no “extended philosophical justification for the importance and freedom of voluntary associations in society.” The absence of such justifications may be traced, at least in part, to a relatively wide-spread suspicion of voluntary association as manifested in “atheist” clubs and heterodox conventicles, forms of association that figured prominently in the imagination of Augustan pamphleteers, but whose history, as Justin Champion remarks, “is obscure and little studied.” As I argue in this essay, a brief study of atheist clubs that presumably flourished in the early decades of the eighteenth century reveals a resistance on the part of High-Church Anglican pamphleteers to the growth of clubs and private associations because they presumably posed a threat to the establishment both in Church and State.

Taste-Based Medicine

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
India Mandelkern
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
New Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Marketplace ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Based Medicine

This essay examines the significance of gustation in the history of therapeutics as a shared anthropological inheritance that mediates human relationships with the natural world. Bringing together ancient Indian, Chinese, and Western medical cosmologies, I argue that our faith in the curative properties of certain tastes—or “taste-based medicine”—has been remarkably enduring. Focusing on elite English medical practitioners over the long eighteenth century, I demonstrate that “taste-based medicine” not only survived transformations within the English medical marketplace and the rise of the “new science,” but actively mobilized debates about the constitution of expertise and who should have access to it.

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