Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-30T07:02:25.315Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Linda Colley
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Britain's “long” eighteenth century, which began with one aristocratic revolution in 1688 and ended with another in 1832, was a pageant of success. The nation's art and architecture reached their elegant and original best. Its capital became the center of print culture, finance, fashion, and commercial creativity, the largest and most vibrant city in the Western world. The British constitution became a topic for eulogy, as much by the unenlightened and illiterate at home as by the Enlightenment literati abroad. The armed forces, fiscal system, and bureaucracy of the British state grew in efficacy and range, bringing victory in all but one of a succession of major wars. Legitimized by achievement and buttressed by massive economic and political power, Britain's landed elite kept at bay every domestic revolution except the industrial one, which only enriched it more. The American Revolution, of course, was not averted; but while this crisis embarrassed the British Empire, it did not destroy it. Even before 1776, the conquest of Canada had reduced the thirteen colonies' strategic significance, just as their profitability to the mother country had been outstripped by its Indian possessions; their final loss was made up, and more than made up, with relentless and almost contemptuous speed. Between 1780 and 1820 some 150 million men and women in India, Africa, the West Indies, Java, and the China coast succumbed to British naval power and trading imperatives.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 4: Re-Viewing the Eighteenth Century , October 1986 , pp. 359 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 These estimates are based on Philpin, C. E. and Creaton, H. J., eds., Writings on British History, 1960–61 (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Creaton, H. J., ed., Writings on British History, 1962–64 (London, 1979)Google Scholar, Writings on British History, 1965–66 (London, 1981)Google Scholar, Writings on British History, 1967–68 (London, 1982)Google Scholar, Writings on British History, 1969–70 (London, 1984)Google Scholar, and Writings on British History, 1971–72 (London, 1985)Google Scholar; and Elton, G. R.et al., eds., Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History (London, 1975–1984)Google Scholar.

2 Elton, G. R., Modern Historians on British History, 1485–1945: A Critical Bibliography (London, 1970), p. 77Google Scholar.

3 As one example of this trend, the International Directory of Eighteenth-Century Studies (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar lists 231 current projects on women's history as against only ten on war and society in this period. Unfortunately, little of this work on eighteenth-century women has focused on Britain and still less on the social, political, and economic life of the mass of British women as distinct from writers and feminists. Yet provincial directories, e.g., provide a unique source on women's work and urban status in this period (see Prior, Mary, ed., Women in English Society, 1500–1800 [London, 1985], pp. 93–117)Google Scholar.

4 A marvelous example of how this kind of history should be written is Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975)Google Scholar.

5 Stone, Lawrence, “The New Eighteenth Century,” New York Review of Books (March 29, 1984), pp. 42–48Google Scholar.

6 Balderston, Marion and Syrett, David, eds., The Lost War: Letters from British Officers during the American Revolution (New York, 1975), p. viiGoogle Scholar; Commager is quoted in ibid.; Middlekauff, Robert, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York, 1982), p. 14Google Scholar.

7 See Porter, Roy, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1982)Google Scholar.

8 Hill, Christopher, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (Edinburgh, 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), p. 87Google Scholar, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, no. 50 (1971), pp. 76–136Google Scholar, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture?” Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 382–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” Social History 3 (1978): 133–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 See Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931)Google Scholar, which has often been interpreted merely as an indictment of bias: read carefully, it in fact admits its inevitability.

10 Namier, Lewis, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1929)Google Scholar, and England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930)Google Scholar; Brooke, John, “Namier and Namierism,” History and Theory 3 (1964): 333–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Namier, Lewis, Personalities and Powers (reprint, Westport, Conn., 1974), p. 20Google Scholar.

12 See Namier, Julia, Lewis Namier: A Biography (London, 1971)Google Scholar; and Rose, Norman, Lewis Namier and Zionism (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar.

13 Examples would include Christie, Ian R., The End of North's Ministry, 1780–1782 (London, 1958)Google Scholar; Owen, John, The Rise of the Pelhams (London, 1957)Google Scholar; and Robson, R. J., The Oxfordshire Election of 1754 (Oxford, 1949)Google Scholar.

14 Brewer, John, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)Google Scholar; Kramnick, Isaac, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)Google Scholar; Robbins, Caroline, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Kenyon, J. P., Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holmes, Geoffrey and Speck, W. A., The Divided Society: Parties and Politics in England, 1694–1716 (London, 1967)Google Scholar; Plumb, J. H., The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Holmes, Geoffrey, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1967)Google Scholar.

16 Plumb, J. H., “The Growth of the Electorate in England from 1600 to 1715,” Past and Present, no. 45 (1969), pp. 90–116Google Scholar; Speck, W. A., Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies, 1701–1715 (London, 1970)Google Scholar.

17 Holmes, Geoffrey, The Electorate and the National Will in the First Age of Party (Kendal, 1976)Google Scholar; Cannon, John, Parliamentary Reform, 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 40–42Google Scholar.

18 For post-1789 plebeian dissidence in Scotland and Wales, see Williams, G. A., The Merthyr Rising (London, 1978)Google Scholar, and In Search of Beulah Land (London, 1980)Google Scholar; Jones, D. J. V., Before Rebecca: Popular Protest in Wales, 1793–1835 (London, 1973)Google Scholar; Logue, Kenneth, Popular Disturbances in Scotland, 1780–1815 (Edinburgh, 1979)Google Scholar; Murray, N., The Scottish Hand Loom Weavers, 1790–1850 (Edinburgh, 1978)Google Scholar.

19 Thus Malcolmson's, R. W. otherwise valuable Life and Labour in England, 1700–1780 (London, 1981)Google Scholar adopts a cavalier attitude to popular religion, excluding Methodism altogether. John Walsh's expert research on Methodism and plebeian culture will confirm that this was an error.

20 See Hay, Douglas, Linebaugh, P., and Thompson, E. P., eds., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; Malcolmson, Robert, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850 (Cambridge, 1973)Google Scholar; Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (London, 1975)Google Scholar, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (n. 8 above), “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture?” (n. 8 above), and “Eighteenth-Century English Society” (n. 8 above).

21 Plumb, , The Growth of Political Stability in England, pp. xvi–xviiGoogle Scholar.

22 Kenyon, J. P., “The Revolution of 1688,” in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society, ed. McKendrick, Neil (London, 1974), pp. 43–69Google Scholar; Wills, Garry, Inventing America (New York, 1979)Google Scholar. For a reassertion of Locke's significance, see Kramnick, Isaac, “Republican Revisionism Revisited,” American Historical Review 87 (1982): 629–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Russell, Conrad, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elton, G. R., Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 3 vols. (London, 1974–1983)Google Scholar; Morrill, J. S., Cheshire, 1630–1660 (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar, and Reactions to the Civil War, 1642–1649 (London, 1982)Google Scholar. These titles are selected from a vast literature.

24 See, however, Schwoerer, Lois G., “Th e Bill of Rights: Epitome of the Revolution of 1688–89,” in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. Pocock, J. G. A. (Princeton, N.J., 1980), pp. 224–43Google Scholar; and Goldie, Mark, “The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688–94,” History of Political Thought 1 (1980): 195–236Google Scholar.

25 Plumb, , The Growth of Political Stability in England, p. 1Google Scholar; cf. Colley, Linda, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 3–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 O'Brien, Patrick and Keyder, Caglar, Economic Growth in Britain and France, 1780–1914: Two Paths to the 20th Century (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Clark, J. C. D., English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985) (the quotation is from a publicity handout)Google Scholar; Cannadine, David, “The Past and Present in the English Industrial Revolution,” Past and Present, no. 103 (1984), pp. 131–72Google Scholar.

27 Colley, Linda, “Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 31 (1981): 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and In Defiance of Oligarchy: De Krey, Gary Stuart, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar; J. G. A. Pocock, “Radical Criticisms of the Whig Order in the Age between Revolutions,” and Rogers, Nicholas, “The Urban Opposition to Whig Oligarchy, 1720–60,” in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Jacob, Margaret and Jacob, James (London, 1984), pp. 33–57, 132–48Google Scholar.

28 Cruikshanks, Eveline, Political Untouchables: The Tories and the '45 (London, 1979)Google Scholar; Cruikshanks, Eveline, ed., Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759 (Edinburgh, 1982)Google Scholar.

29 Erskine-Hill, Howard, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope (New Haven, Conn., 1975)Google Scholar, and “Literature and the Jacobite Cause: Was There a Rhetoric of Jacobitism,” in Cruikshanks, ed., pp. 49–69; Monod, Paul K., “For the King to Enjoy His Own Again: Jacobite Political Culture in England, 1688–1788” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1985)Google Scholar.

30 Sedgwick, Romney, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715–54, 2 vols. (London, 1970)Google Scholar; SirNamier, Lewis and Brooke, John, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1754–90, 3 vols. (London, 1964)Google Scholar; the volumes for the 1689–1714 and 1791–1819 periods will be published in the near future.

31 For example, Dickson's, P. G. M. classic The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967)Google Scholar; or Raybould, T. J., The Economic Emergence of the Black Country: A Study of the Dudley Estates (Newton Abbot, 1973)Google Scholar.

32 Cannon, John, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984), p. ixCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 But see Borsay, Peter, “The English Urban Renaissance: The Development of Provincial Urban Culture, c.1680–c.1760,” Social History 2 (1977): 581–604CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holmes, Geoffrey, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680–1730 (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Money, John, Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760–1800 (Manchester, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wilson, Kathleen, “The Rejection of Deference: Urban Political Culture in England, 1715–1785” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1985)Google Scholar.

34 Clay, Christopher, “Marriage, Inheritance and the Rise of Large Estates in England, 1660–1815,” Economic History Review 21 (1968): 503–18Google Scholar; Jenkins, Philip, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry, 1640–1790 (Cambridge, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stone, Lawrence and Stone, Jeanne C. Fawtier, An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar.

35 McCahill, Michael, “Peerage Creations and the Changing Character of the British Nobility, 1750–1830,” English Historical Review 96 (1981): 259–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rubinstein, W. D., “The End of ‘Old Corruption’ in Britain, 1780–1860,” Past and Present, no. 101 (1983), pp. 55–86Google Scholar; Colley, Linda, “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760–1820,” Past and Present, no. 102 (1984), pp. 94–129Google Scholar.

36 See Hobsbawm, Eric, “From Social History to the History of Society,” Daedalus 100 (Winter 1971): 20–45Google Scholar.

37 Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)Google Scholar, is a gold mine for historians.

38 Jan Albers of Yale University is charting both the Church of England's popular resilience in Lancashire before the 1770s and its weakening hold over the next two decades. Colley, Linda, “Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750–1830,” Past and PresentGoogle Scholar (in press).

39 But see Hill, B. W., “Executive Monarchy and the Challenge of Parties, 1689–1832: Two Concepts of Government and Two Historiographical Interpretations,” Historical Journal 13 (1970): 379–401CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McCahill, Michael, Order and Equipoise: The Peerage and the House of Lords, 1783–1806 (London, 1978)Google Scholar.

40 Namier and Brooke (n. 30 above), 1:184.

41 Anderson, Perry, “Origins of the Present Crisis,” New Left Review 23 (1964): 47Google Scholar. Marxist historians have supplied many of the most wide-ranging, if inevitably controversial, analyses of power relations in this society. See Thompson, E. P., “The Peculiarities of the English,” in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), pp. 35–91Google Scholar; and Eley, Geoff, “Re-thinking the Political: Social History and Political Culture in 18th and 19th Century Britain,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 21 (1981): 427–57Google Scholar.

42 Brewer, John, “English Radicalism in the Age of George III,” in Pocock, , ed. (n. 24 above), esp. pp. 337–41Google Scholar. See also McKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John, and Plumb, J. H., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982), pp. 197–262Google Scholar. Houlding, J. A., Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715–1795 (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar.

43 But see Munsche, P. B., Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws, 1671–1831 (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar.

44 Christie, Ian R., Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar.

45 Stone (n. 5 above), p. 47.

46 See Rubinstein (n. 35 above); Hurstfield, J., “Political Corruption in Modern England, “ History 52 (1967): 16–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Macmillan, G., The Sale of Honours (London, 1954)Google Scholar; Hanham, H. J., “The Sale of Honours in Late Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 3 (1960): 277–89Google Scholar; Walker, John, The Queen Has Been Pleased (London, 1985)Google Scholar. Stephen Taylor of Jesus College, Cambridge University, is currently at work on a study of eighteenth-century British corruption.

47 But see Horne, Thomas, “Politics in a Corrupt Society: William Arnall's Defense of Robert Walpole,” Journal of the History of Ideas 41 (1980): 601–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The best recent analyses of electoral practices are Phillips, J. P., Electoral Behavior in Vnreformed England: Plumpers, Splitters and Straights (Princeton, N.J., 1982)Google Scholar; and O'Gorman, Frank, “Electoral Deference in ‘Unreformed’ England: 1760–1832,” Journal of Modern History 56 (1984): 391–429CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Though see, for its controversial revisionism, Tucker, Robert W. and Hendrickson, David C., The Fall of the First British Empire (London, 1982)Google Scholar.

49 Some recent specialized studies are Middleton, Richard, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years' War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peters, Marie, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years' War (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar; Niedhart, Gottfried, Handel und Krieg in der Britischen Weltpolitik, 1738–1763 (Munich, 1979)Google Scholar; Bonwick, Colin, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977)Google Scholar; Sainsbury, John, “The Pro-Americans of London, 1769 to 1782,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978): 423–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Langford, Paul, “Old Whigs, Old Tories and the American Revolution,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 8 (1980): 106–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Harlow, Vincent, The Foundation of the Second British Empire, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1963–1965)Google Scholar; Horn, D. B., Great Britain and Europe in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1967)Google Scholar; Langford, Paul, The Eighteenth Century, 1688–1815 (London, 1976)Google Scholar. New surveys of the Second British Empire and of Britain's Continental foreign policy are in preparation by C. A. Bayly and Jeremy Black, respectively.

51 Philip Lawson is currently examining investment in the East India Co. Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793–1815 (London, 1979)Google Scholar.

52 Ratcliffe, Barrie M. and Chaloner, W. H., eds., A French Sociologist Looks at Britain (Manchester, 1977), p. 65Google Scholar.

53 See Cranfield, G. A., The Development of the Provincial Newspaper, 1700–1760 (Oxford, 1962)Google Scholar; Haydon, Colin, “Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth Century England, c.1714–c.1780” (D.Phil, thesis, Oxford University, 1985)Google Scholar.

54 See, e.g., Cookson, J. E., The Friends of Peace: Anti-war Liberalism in England, 1793–1815 (Cambridge, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 This practice is linguistically justified, but it severely curtails accessibility. Recent surveys containing good bibliographies are Lenman, Bruce, Integration, Enlightenment, and Industrialization: Scotland, 1746–1832 (London, 1981)Google Scholar; and Morgan, Prys, A New History of Wales: The Eighteenth Century Renaissance (Llandybie, 1981)Google Scholar.

56 Murdoch, A. J., The People Above (Edinburgh, 1980)Google Scholar; Lenman, Bruce, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746 (London, 1980)Google Scholar; but see Shaw, J. A., The Management of Scottish Society, 1707–1764 (Edinburgh, 1983)Google Scholar.

57 Pocock, J. G. A., “1776: The Revolution against Parliament,” in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. Pocock, J. G. A. (Princeton, N.J., 1980), p. 266Google Scholar. See also Pocock, J. G. A., “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” New Zealand Historical Journal 8 (1974): 3–21Google Scholar (reprinted in Journal of Modern History 47 [1975]: 601–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject,” American Historical Review 87 (1982): 311–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 For one aspect of this, see Smith, Olivia, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar.

59 Hechter, Michael, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley, 1975)Google Scholar.

60 See, e.g., Jenkins (n. 34 above).

61 Morgan, Prys, “From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 15–42Google Scholar.

62 See E. Ingram, ed., Two Views of British India: The Private Correspondence of Mr. Dundas and Lord Wellesley, 1798–1801 (Bath, n.d.).

63 I have developed this argument in “Whose Nation?” (n. 38 above).

64 SirFirth, Charles, A Commentary on Macaulay's History of England (London, 1938), pp. 5–7Google Scholar.