Search Results

In the age of Malthus and the workhouse when the threat of famine and absolute biological want had supposedly been lifted from the peoples of England, hunger remained a potent political force – and problem. Yet hunger has been marginalized as an object of study by scholars of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, studies either framed through famine or left to historians of early modern England. The politics of hunger represents the first systematic attempt to think through the ways in which hunger persisted as something both feared and felt, as vital to public policy innovations, and as central to the emergence of new techniques of governing and disciplining populations. Beyond analysing the languages of hunger that informed food riots, other popular protests and popular politics, the study goes on to consider how hunger was made and measured in Speenhamland-style ‘hunger’ payments and workhouse dietaries, and used in the making and disciplining of the poor as racial subjects. Conceptually rich yet empirically grounded, the study draws together work on popular protest, popular politics, the old and new poor laws, Malthus and theories of population, race, biopolitics and the colonial making of famine, as well as reframing debates in social and economic history, historical geography and famine studies more generally. Complex and yet written in an accessible style, The politics of hunger will be of interest to anyone with an interest in the histories of protest, poverty and policy: specialists, students and general readers alike.

Today, the portrait of the Pacific Islander, Mai, painted by Joshua Reynolds is world-renowned as a symbol of empire and of the eighteenth century. But Reynolds painted other visitors from the New World, now forgotten. One especially haunting portrait was of a Cherokee warrior called Ostenaco, who visited Britain a dozen years before Mai. This book is less about Reynolds’s portraits than the full, complicated, and richly illuminating lives behind them. It tells the whole life story of Mai, the refugee from Ra‘iatea who voyaged with James Cook to London in the 1770s and returned home again to seek vengeance on his neighboring Islanders. It traces, for the first time, the entire biography of Ostenaco, who grew up in the southern Appalachians, engaged with colonists throughout his adulthood, and became entangled with imperial politics in complex ways during the American Revolution. And it reveals the experiences of the painter who encountered both Indigenous visitors, Reynolds himself—an artist often celebrated as a founder of modern British art but rarely seen as a figure of empire. This book interweaves all three parallel and otherwise unconnected lives together, explaining their links but also exposing some of the extraordinary diversity of the eighteenth-century world. It shows that Indigenous people pushed back and shaped European expansion far more than is acknowledged. It also reveals how much more conflicted Britons were about their empire in this era than is assumed, even while they witnessed its reach into every corner of the globe.

In this book, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela examines property ownership and its connections to citizenship, race and slavery, and piracy as seen through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. Balachandran Orihuela defines piracy expansively, from the familiar concept of nautical pirates and robbery in international waters to postrevolutionary counterfeiting, transnational slave escape, and the illegal trade of cotton across the Americas during the Civil War. Weaving together close readings of American, Chicano, and African American literature with political theory, the author shows that piracy, when represented through literature, has imagined more inclusive and democratic communities than were then possible in reality. The author shows that these subjects are not taking part in unlawful acts only for economic gain. Rather, Balachandran Orihuela argues that piracy might, surprisingly, have served as a public good, representing a form of transnational belonging that transcends membership in any one nation-state while also functioning as a surrogate to citizenship through the ownership of property. These transnational and transactional forms of social and economic life allow for a better understanding of the foundational importance of property ownership and its role in the creation of citizenship.

Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century examines the importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The years between the naval blockade of 1775, which began the American War, and the start of the First World War in 1914 witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast on both sides of the Atlantic. Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, coasts were often thought of as unhealthy, dangerous places. Developments in both medicine and aesthetics changed this. Increasingly, the coast could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation – a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production. Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. Spanning the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and including interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geography, these essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies speak across traditional period and disciplinary boundaries.

Presbyterianism has shaped Scotland and its impact on the world. Behind its beliefs lie some distinctive practices of governance which endure even when belief fades. These practices place a particular emphasis on the detailed recording of decisions and what we can term a ‘systemic’ form of accountability. This book examines the emergence and consolidation of such practices in the eighteenth century Church of Scotland. Using extensive archival research and detailed local case studies, it contrasts them to what is termed a ‘personal’ form of accountability in England in the same period. This supports the contrast that has been made by other authors between a focus on system in Scotland, character in England. The wider impact of this approach to governance and accountability, especially in the United States of America, is explored, as is the enduring impact of these practices in shaping Scottish identity. The detailed exploration of these practices, drawing on the rich archives of the Church of Scotland, can help inform ongoing debates about Scotland and its place in Britain.

‘This is a dark story…’ Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron (1778) Sinister Histories is the first book to offer a detailed exploration of the Gothic’s response to Enlightenment historiography. It uncovers hitherto neglected relationships between fiction and prominent works of eighteenth-century history, locating the Gothic novel in a range of new interdisciplinary contexts. Drawing on ideas from literary studies, history, politics, and philosophy, Sinister Histories demonstrates the extent to which historical works influenced and shaped the development of Gothic fiction from the 1760s to the early nineteenth century. In moving from canonical historians and novelists, such as David Hume, Edmund Burke and Ann Radcliffe, to less familiar figures, such as Paul M. Rapin de Thoyras, Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee, this innovative study shows that while Enlightenment historians emphasised the organic and the teleological, Gothic writers looked instead at events and characters which challenged such orderly methods. Through a series of detailed readings of texts from The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798), Sinister Histories offers an alternative account of the Gothic’s development and a sustained revaluation of the creative legacies of the French Revolution. This book is aimed at students and scholars with interests in the Gothic, the eighteenth century, historiography, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and gender studies.

Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cécile Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city’s development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans’s rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city’s streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana’s capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America’s most intriguing city.

Misfit Forms re-interprets a series of choices that shaped the development of the British novel. Histories of the novel often situate the early nineteenth century as a culminating moment in the novel's “rise.” However, a look at the complicated junctions negotiated by the novel during the eighteenth century reveals not only achievements but also exclusions—paths less travelled. Pairing readings of novels by Defoe, Sterne, Gaskell, Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë with less familiar texts, including printer's manuals and grammar treatises, each chapter brings out an occluded mode. As argued in chapters 1 and 2, practices of typographical emphasis, and the correlated understanding of sensibility as sense-based communication of affect, offer different paradigms for relationship, desire, and pleasure than do the psychological idealizations of “transparent” typography and sympathetic identification. Chapter 3 shows that process-based cumulative narrative structures, declared primitive in relation to teleological plots, facilitate readerly pleasure in the representation of process, rather than subordinating means to ends. Chapter 4 argues that while most nineteenth-century novels privilege active curiosity and treat particulars as clues or signifiers, an alternative mode privileges passive wonder and presents particulars as singularities. Deleuze's theories of sexuality, minor language, singularity, and dynamic repetition help render these historical alternatives legible; they, in turn, invite us to reconstruct the novel's value as an arena for experience, as opposed to an epistemological tool.

Pauper Policies examines how policies under both old and New Poor Laws were conceived, adopted, implemented, developed or abandoned. The author engages with recent literature on the experience and agency of poor relief recipients, and offers a fresh perspective on poor law administration. Through a ‘policy process’ approach, the author exposes several significant topics in poor law history which are currently unknown or poorly understood, each of which are explored in a series of thematic chapters. It contains important new research on the adoption and implementation of enabling acts at the end of the old poor laws, Gilbert’s Act of 1782 and Sturges Bourne’s Acts of 1818 and 1819; the exchange of knowledge about how best to provide poor relief in the final decades of the old poor law and formative decades of the New; and the impact of national scandals on policy-making in the new Victorian system. The volume points towards a new direction in the study of poor law administration, one which examines how people, both those in positions of power and the poor, could shape pauper policies. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in welfare, poverty and society in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England, as well as those who want to understand the early workings of the welfare system.