Anti-war Thought Within and Beyond the Nation in the Eighteenth Century
from Part I - Popular Democracy, Representation, and the People
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2025
Popular support for war is widely understood to solidify Britain’s sense of itself in the eighteenth century. This chapter argues that objections to war shape Britain’s identity in the closing decades of the century, as the people are called upon to evaluate the justness of the nation’s acts in war. These acts are understood to be public acts, authored by each and every individual, including those who do not directly wage war. The attention to public responsibility coincides with renewed scrutiny of war’s harms, and the moral urgency of recognising and halting war’s killing animates philosophical essays, sermons, and poems, including works by Jeremy Bentham and Anna Letitia Barbauld. The period’s anti-war arguments foreground concepts of injury and responsibility that anticipate later developments in international law and ongoing discussions in moral philosophy.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.