THIS book has been much more than a study merely concerned with horse racing. It also offers some innovative and important insights for cultural and social historians of the period. Racing's relationship with eighteenth-century society was multifaceted and multilayered, and linked to broader political, economic, social and cultural trends. So this study speaks to the way these changes during the eighteenth century impacted on British society, on the rise of a key commercialized leisure industry, and the emergence of an increasingly professionalized sport. Through the lens of racing, it also picks up on monarchy, religion, the landed elite, gentry and the ‘middling sort’; political, financial, social, economic and cultural change, including gender where appropriate; and intellectual, social and cultural developments.

This study has offered the first major analysis of the place occupied by horse racing in British society in the long eighteenth century, drawing on voluminous research in the relevant primary and secondary literature. Today, organized sport is amongst the most important British cultural and leisure activities, and by 1815 horse racing already occupied a special place in British leisure life. This study thus sheds fresh light on the formative period of racing, when racing's structures, organizations and cultural practices were first shaped – a growth that is closely related to the importance to elite society of status, ownership, political allegiance and gambling, as well as the state's need for military preparedness.

By 1809 The Morning Chronicle recognized racing as the sport of Britain's people, its ‘ancient, authorized and national sport’. In 1810 the Irish-American journalist Stephen Cullen Carpenter listed horse racing as standing first amongst a growing number of sports increasing in popularity in England.