Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 200-205
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Economic Statecraft ◽  
Hugh Blair ◽  
Catharine Macaulay

Writers on historical affairs in the eighteenth century increasingly came to conceive of commerce as a sphere of activity which was more dependent on the manners and desires of a nation's people than it was on the specific actions of its monarchs. The book's conclusion discusses this development with reference to a range of writers (including Hugh Blair, Adam Anderson and Catharine Macaulay) and considers its consequences. Chief among these, it is argued, was a shift in attitudes towards economic statecraft, and a series of new approaches to the histories of finances and commerce.

scholarly journals Revolution and human rights thought in the political philosophy of Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
The Political ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Public Reasoning ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
Core Issues

The Age of Reason is first and foremost an age of public reasoning. Equipped with a fresh and indeed unprecedented consciousness of feasibility and responsibility, educated citizens start to participate actively – and in many cases by taking personal risks – in discourses on political, religious and philosophical issues. In this article, I will highlight two core issues of the late eighteenth century – the dispute about the legitimacy of the French Revolution as well as its underlying philosophical conceptions and the rising human rights idea – and thereby revisit the interventions of three women who, though rediscovered in various fields of research, still have to gain their due recognition as pre-eminent political philosophers of their time.

Catharine Macaulay's Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Hicks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
Prescriptive Literature ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
War Memoirs ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
William Robertson

The eighteenth century marked a watershed in the relationship between women and historical writing in Britain. Previous to this period, D. R. Woolf has demonstrated, women had certainly purchased, read, and discussed works of history, contributing to “the ‘social circulation’ of historical knowledge.” A few, perhaps most notably Lucy Hutchinson, had composed Civil War memoirs. Some women had written genealogical, antiquarian, and biographical works, as well as local and family history, a “feminine past,” according to Woolf, that men often judged unworthy of real history. Only in the eighteenth century, however, did women and men significantly modify a neoclassical paradigm that conceived of history as a strictly male enterprise, the record of political and military deeds written by men and for men. In this century prescriptive literature increasingly urged history upon women as reading matter intellectually and morally superior to novels and romances. The great triumvirate of British historians, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and William Robertson, wrote expressly for female readers. Their “philosophical” history, with its shift of emphasis from political to social and cultural subjects, appealed to women, as did their experiments with the narrative techniques of sentimental fiction. The century also witnessed the appearance of the first female historian in Britain to write in the grand manner, Catharine Macaulay (1731–91). Mrs. Macaulay's success in the traditional genre of history won her the respect of male peers as well as the applause of a wide readership.

An English Audience for American Revolutionary Pamphlets

1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 355-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. C. Bonwick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
The World ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
And Function ◽  
Good Number ◽  
The Revolution

The eighteenth century was a great age of pamphleteering. Subjects were legion and authors innumerable. Every question of substance – and many of none – attracted writers to such a degree that in the world of politics one is tempted to establish the scale of pamphleteering as one of the yardsticks against which the importance of an issue should be measured. The American revolution fully conforms to this criterion, for during a twenty-year period beginning in 1763 it stimulated the publication of well over a thousand pamphlets in England alone. A good number of those pamphlets originated in America and their subsequent reappearance in England was a matter of considerable significance; some were written by Americans resident in London. This paper will examine the mechanics by which American revolutionary tracts were published and distributed in England, and their circulation among the radicals who proved themselves to be the patriots' best English friends during the difficult years of the revolution. They included among others Thomas Hollis, John Wilkes, Major John Cartwright and Granville Sharp; the Dissenting ministers Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, and one of the most brilliant women of her generation, Catharine Macaulay. Such an examination is not only an integral component in the analysis of the English side of the revolution; it also serves as a useful case-study in the mechanics and function of political propaganda.

The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Radical Republicanism

This edition of all of Catharine Macaulay’s known correspondence includes an introduction to the life, works, and influence of this celebrated, eighteenth-century, republican historian. Through her letters and those of her correspondents it offers a unique glimpse of the connections between radical republicanism and dissent in London, and throws light on the origins of parliamentary reform in Great Britain. Macaulay’s correspondents include many individuals who were active in the lead-up to the American and French Revolutions, others who became involved in the antislavery movement, and yet others who were central to the development of feminism. These letters demonstrate how Macaulay’s history of the seventeenth-century republican period in Great Britain, which she published between 1763 and 1783, encouraged her readers to represent themselves as the heirs of those earlier struggles and to lavish praise on the author as an important defender of their liberties and of the universal rights of mankind. It shows Macaulay and her friends to have been inspired by positive notions of liberty and by ideals of democratic republicanism, thought of as systems of equal government committed to universal benevolence, in which the common good would become the common care.

Economic statecraft and economic progress: William Guthrie’s General History

2018 ◽  
pp. 155-168
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
Economic Statecraft ◽  
History Of

The middle years of the eighteenth century saw a shift in the historiography of commerce as Enlightenment-era historians became increasingly preoccupied with tracing processes of long-term economic change. As a result, individual incidents in England’s economic past came to be conceived not just as evidence of monarchical prudence or virtue, but rather as sections in a narrative of national commercial development. Chapter eight addresses the contribution to this approach made by William Guthrie in his General History of England (1744–51). The first part of the discussion explores the Tacitean and Harringtonian approaches to history that Guthrie employed when working as a political journalist in the 1740s. Part two looks at how these ideas shaped his historical writing.

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