“Always Connect” seems more fundamental than “Always Historicize,” at least for the long eighteenth century (pace Jameson and Foucault). People characterized themselves and others through their multiple relations and positions relative to each other, as master-servant, master-slave, patron-client, parent-child, sister, brother, friend, daughter, feme sole or wife. Sense impressions presented themselves to consciousness singly and discontinuously –meaningless before being connected by diverse operations of the mind.

Eighteenth-century thinkers said of historical and legal evidence that “naked” facts, without the causes that produced them and the circumstances that accompany them are not sufficient to characterize actions. They also recognized that each fact had a different significance and characterized actions differently depending on which other facts and circumstances we connect them to and by what causes and mental operations. And the preferred exemplary or didactic forms of neo-classical and conjectural history posited a vital and still active connection between the present and the past: past actions and their outcomes provided lessons applicable to the present, while present knowledge of human nature illuminated the past.

“Always Connect” has also become fundamental to our current historicizing practices. We are researching connections among eighteenth-century writers in coteries or social networks, as well as writers’ “professional” and/or collaborative connections to patrons, printers or booksellers. We are exploring connections between texts and their different material forms in successive publications and kinds of publication (from book to abridgement to periodical, for instance). We are studying connections between practices of reading or writing and uses of texts — such as borrowing, sharing, inheriting and purchasing books, or annotating them, reading them aloud, and conversing about them –and researching various textual connections between works –genres, adaptations, appropriations, translations and intertexts.

We are working with the impact of social and cultural connections, such those established between ranks, genders and races, and of customs, by wealth, celebrity or fame. We are also exploring geographical connections, between regions and national cultures within the British Isles; and between different parts of Britain and the Americas, or the Ottoman Empire, or India or the Far East –together with connected genres and practices, such as travel literature, correspondence, empire, military expansion, commerce or the transnational book trade. We also increasingly study and theorize media connections — relations between print, manuscript and oral cultures, or between image and text, and performance and print.

Eighteenth-Century Connections is an exciting new series of short, digitally led volumes that invite you as writer and you as reader to “always connect.”