This long-awaited second edition sees this classic text by a leading scholar given a new lease of life. It comes complete with a wealth of original material on a range of topics and takes into account the vital research that has been undertaken in the field in the last two decades. The book considers the development of the internal structure of Britain and explores the growing sense of British nationhood. It looks at the role of religion in matters of state and society, in addition to society's own move towards a class-based system. Commercial and imperial expansion, Britain's role in Europe and the early stages of liberalism are also examined. This new edition is fully updated to include: - Revised and thorough treatments of the themes of gender and religion and of the 1832 Reform Act - New sections on 'Commerce and Empire' and 'Britain and Europe' - Several new maps and charts - A revised introduction and a more extensive conclusion - Updated note sections and bibliographies The Long Eighteenth Century is the essential text for any student seeking to understand the nuances of this absorbing period of British history.

This book deals with changing conditions and conceptions of authorship in the long eighteenth century, a period said to have witnessed the birth of the modern author. Challenging claims about the public sphere and the professional writer, it engages with recent work on print culture and the history of the book and takes up such under-treated topics as the forms of literary careers and the persistence of the Renaissance “republic of letters” into the “age of authors.”

The essays collected in this volume engage in a conversation among lexicography, the culture of the book, and the canonization and commemoration of English literary figures and their works in the long eighteenth century. The source of inspiration for each piece is Allen Reddick’s scholarship on Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the great English lexicographer whose Dictionary (1755) included thousands upon thousands of illustrative quotations from the “best” authors, and, more recently, on Thomas Hollis (1720-1774), the much less well-known bibliophile who sent gifts of books by a pantheon of Whig authors to individuals and libraries in Britain, Protestant bastions in continental Europe, and America. Between the covers of Words, Books, Images readers will encounter canonical English authors of prose and poetry—Bacon, Milton, Defoe, Dryden, Pope, Richardson, Swift, Byron, Mary Shelley, and Edward Lear. But they will also become acquainted with the agents of their canonization and commemoration—the printers and publishers of Grub Street, the biographer John Aubrey, the lexicographer and biographer Johnson, the bibliophile Hollis, and the portrait painter Reynolds. No less crucially, they will meet fellow readers of then and now—women and men who peruse, poach, snip, and savour a book’s every word and image.

An analysis of the forces which shaped politics and culture in Germany, France and Great Britain in the eighteenth century.

The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century brings together international scholars to examine: the figure of the botanical explorer; links between imperial ambition and the impulse to survey, map, and collect specimens in "new" territories; and relationships among botanical knowledge, self-representation, and material culture.

The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare. In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people’s expectations of their health and their bodies.

This innovative collection explores how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe. The study of sociability in the long eighteenth century has long been dominated by the example of France. In this innovative collection, we see how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe. The contributors use a wide range of sources - from city plans to letter-writing manuals, from the writings of Edmund Burke to poems and essays about the social practices of the tea table, and a variety of methodological approaches to explore philosophical, political and social aspects of the emergence of British sociability in this period. They create a rounded picture of sociability as it happened in public, private and domestic settings - in Masonic lodges and radical clubs, in painting academies and private houses - and compare specific examples and settings with equivalents in France, bringing out for instance the distinctively homo-social and predominantly masculine form of British sociability, the role of sociabilitywithin a wider national identity still finding its way after the upheaval of civil war and revolution in the seventeenth century, and the almost unique capacity of the British model of sociability to benefit from its own apparent tensions and contradictions.