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The introduction provides an overview of the themes of the book. It describes the visit of the Roman Catholic bishop John Carroll to Boston in 1791 in order to indicate an 18th-century perspective on religious toleration, comparing this to issues surrounding political and ethnic diversity today. It explains how the controversial emergence of religious inclusion, equality, and cooperation is the history of America’s first great attempt to accommodate diversity and its first experiment with pluralism. It makes some caveats as to the nature of its study and suggets how the rest of the book is an introduction to the kinds of problems that arise when a culture premised upon uniformity gives way to a culture premised upon diversity.

This chapter discusses the eighteenth-century Church of England. It examines the changes in how people thought about the place of religion in eighteenth-century Britain by first looking at the histories of the eighteenth-century Church of England. The chapter studies the changing views of the Enlightenment's relationship to religious thought and practice in Britain. It ends with a discussion of the newer fields of study that have emerged, most especially during the latter part of the twentieth century.

This chapter discusses the complex linguistic situation of Italy in the eighteenth century, taking into account its broader implications as well as, specifically, women's relationship with spoken and written language. Throughout the century, Italian continued to be above all a written tool and still had to withstand competition from the dialects and from Latin, both in terms of writing and in the context of schooling. A new front of rivalry opened up with French, which, especially in the highest classes, occupied a privileged role at the expense of Italian, with women in particular often being attacked for indulging in its use. The debates on the education of women that enlivened the Settecento did not overlook the question of language: the Enlightenment re-evaluation of women's role in society, as educators and as citizens, explains the frequent pleas by educationalists and men of letters that the female sex should learn Italian. If, on the one hand, female periodicals and novels allowed women access to written Italian to an unprecedented degree, on the other a large number of female writers, journalists, and translators were able to offer their own direct contribution to language and the literary world.

The introduction describes the tension between two ways eighteenth‐century writing described the temporal dimensions of the taste for beauty. First, there is taste as such, an immediate, momentary sensory response of the mind. Second, there are tastes, slowly evolved predilections and outcomes of historical processes (e.g. modern taste, British taste, Gothic or Chinese taste). The first of three sections, ‘Times Upon the Mind’, shows both how the two temporal modes may be pleasingly harmonized in individual subjects and how in some they may produce cognitive dissonance. The second, ‘The Two Presents’, shows how taste joins the historical present—British modernity—with the intensely present experience of individual minds; even as taste’s temporal divide makes a critique of modernity possible. The final section, ‘The Composite Fantasy’, demonstrates how taste’s two temporalities combine to create aesthetic ideology in embryonic form, while also suggesting how that ideology may be dismantled.

Jeremy Black focuses on British policy and strategy in the so‐called ‘long’ eighteenth century, beginning with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and ending with the battle of Waterloo in 1815. Chapter 7 provides a contextual debate on the relationship between policy and strategy, discussing the dynamics between strategy and dynasticism, the complexity of strategic culture, the character of British imperialism, and the concept of power, with the associated challenges of reach and overreach. These factors collectively explain what the author refers to as the limitations to strategic planning. Black next describes the dynamics between strategy and policy in three case studies—the Seven Years War (1756–63), the American War of Independence (1775–83), and the French Revolution (1789–99)—and briefly analyses the Napoleonic Wars. Each conflict exhibited important geopolitical and strategic continuities as well as important political differences, and was shaped by Britain's domestic conditions and priorities.

This chapter complicates the received notion of the Magna Graecia's modern discovery during the 'Hellenic turn’ of eighteenth-century Europe. The historical geography of Leandro Alberti and others shows earlier Renaissance antiquarianism's perceptions of Greek South Italy as a place of picturesque natural beauty and lost antiquity, seemingly irreconcilable with the wider Italian classical past. The eighteenth-century rediscovery of Paestum is examined within its Neapolitan intellectual context, which includes the figures of Giambattista Vico, Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi and even J.J. Winckelmann, and in relation to the emergence of vase studies analysis that reveals the differential investment of Italian and foreign scholars in Magna Graecia, with latter bent on a search for an ideal conception of classical Greece that would effectively relegate Magna Graecia to the margins of classical study.

From 1700-1704 to 1795-1799 the average stature of Russian recruits decreased from 164.7 to 159.5 cm. It means that the eighteenth century is noted for the fall in the biological status of the Russian population. The decrease occurred against the background of a considerable economic growth and was caused not by economic depression but by the rise in taxes and obligations. Increase in payments to the state was linked with the wars Russia waged for outlets to the Baltic and Black seas, and for the status of a great power, and with reforms carried out by the supreme power catching up with the West European countries.

This chapter explores the differentiation and marginalization of Magna Graecia within an emerging Hellenism increasingly focused on classical, mainland Greece, by looking at late eighteenth-century travel narratives and historiographies. Disappointment at the paucity of classical monuments in Magna Graecia, as expressed by Winckelmann's German pupil Riedesel, is shown to give way to later French and British travelers’ interest in the region's exotic and antique quality. Magna Graecia's central role in the origins of modern narratives of ancient Greece is examined alongside the region's marginalization, in these same narratives, as a mere site of ancient Greek colonization, overlooking its place as a center of Greek culture. A distinctly different take is revealed in the historical works of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, which sought to harmonize Magna Graecia's past with the Italic past, a trend that signals a growing divide between Italian and non-Italian approaches to Magna Graecia.

This chapter looks at how descriptions of Spain in the eighteenth century are intriguing for their accounts of perceived indolence, or more generally of a people who failed to take advantage “of their Climate and Situation.” Taken at face value, these observations convinced contemporaries and historians that Spain was simply producing less than it could have. Alleged idleness was a well-rehearsed theme in Europe's Protestant north whenever the mores of southern European papists (or non-Europeans, for that matter) were described. Travel writer Henry Swinburne argued that Spaniards worked fewer hours and days than he thought they ought to, and intuitively provided one possible explanation for such behavior: Spaniards simply did not believe they could benefit from higher levels of “industry,” that is, effort.

The 18th-century Post Office is usually portrayed as mired in inefficiency. New private and public sources tell a different earlier story. Post office records and 34 letter collections show how people used the Royal Mail and how it affected their lives. In the 17th century, basic postal routines were established and the quantity of letters carried increased. In the 18th century, a national network served by coaches grew out of the old six roads. By 1800 the Royal Mail had become a commercial newsagent spreading papers throughout the nation. At the same time, it continued to open letters and censor mail. The newspaper, novel, and coffeehouse are often cited in regard to the rise of the public sphere, but the letter and the Post Office are rarely mentioned. Yet its arena of unrestricted discourse was as provocative to the state as any coffeehouse. By 1800, a service created to censor mail had become a private necessity and a public right.

This chapter examines the characteristics of genius as set forth during the eighteenth century, when the modern idea of genius first took root and when the secular values of the Enlightenment took hold of the notion in order to celebrate human achievement, advance intellectual and artistic innovation, and support the emergence of new disciplines and genres. The century is characterized above all by a huge appetite for knowledge, and it is in this context that genius began to take its modern form. It became the object of new enquiry, but was also regarded as its privileged source. The chapter takes a look at certain defining characteristics of genius in this century and expounds on them.

This chapter binds the various strands of this book together. Taken as a whole, the evidence for changes in barristers' numbers, education, work, remuneration, and career paths suggests that under their sway, the administration of English common law at Westminster became a relatively closed regime in the eighteenth century. These themes have been developed in the context of major economic, social, and cultural changes which affected England generally. It considers why Westminster Hall was so resilient, and how the culture of the bar contributed to the development of an elitist legal regime, in the face of appeals for broad access to justice, according to the common law tradition. It also discusses how Georgian barristers cultivated their own collective life and conceptualised their roles, in the context of continuing criticisms about the legal system. Lastly, the chapter reflects on the wider significance and ramifications of the bar's eighteenth-century story.