In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery. Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.

Though blacks were not often seen on the streets of seventeenth-century London, they were already capturing the British imagination. For two hundred years, as Britain shipped over three million Africans to the New World, popular images of blacks as slaves and servants proliferated in London art, both highbrow and low. Catherine Molineux assembles a surprising array of sources in her exploration of this emerging black presence, from shop signs, tea trays, trading cards, board games, playing cards, and song ballads to more familiar objects such as William Hogarth's graphic satires. By idealizing black servitude and obscuring the brutalities of slavery, these images of black people became symbols of empire to a general populace that had little contact with the realities of slave life in the distant Americas and Caribbean. The earliest images advertised the opulence of the British Empire by depicting black slaves and servants as minor, exotic characters who gazed adoringly at their masters. Later images showed Britons and Africans in friendly gatherings, smoking tobacco together, for example. By 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade and thousands of people of African descent were living in London as free men and women, depictions of black laborers in local coffee houses, taverns, or kitchens took center stage. Molineux's well-crafted account provides rich evidence for the role that human traffic played in the popular consciousness and culture of Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and deepens our understanding of how Britons imagined their burgeoning empire.

A new, updated edition of this illuminating study on William Hogarth, one of the eighteenth century’s most famous artists and satirists. William Hogarth (1697–1764) was one of the great eighteenth-century painters, a marvelous colorist, and an innovator at all levels of artistic expression. In this updated volume, art historian and Hogarth scholar David Bindman surveys the works of this artist whose wry humor and sharp wit was reflected in his prolific paintings and prints, including The Rake’s Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode. Hogarth was also a master of pictorial satire, highlighting the moral and political issues of the day with delightful detail and comedy—themes that resonate deeply with our times. This new edition has been specially updated to include a discussion of Hogarth’s representation of Black people in eighteenth-century Britain, a subject that has long been overlooked in his many works. Now revised with additional material and illustrated in color throughout, this is a vivid and incisive study of the artist.

This book analyses the animal images used in William Hogarth's art, demonstrating how animals were variously depicted as hybrids, edibles, companions, emblems of satire and objects of cruelty. Beirne offers an important assessment of how Hogarth's various audiences reacted to his gruesome images and ultimately what was meant by 'cruelty'.

The reputation of William Hogarth (1697-1764) rests largely on his pictorial stories, a series of engravings that he called "modern Moral Subjects," the most famous being the Harlot's and the Rake's Progress. In this catalog, David Bindman works backward from Hogarth's reputation today--where he is seen by some as a conservative populist and by others as a political radical--and examines his impact on various artists over the past three centuries. Bindman also sets Hogarth's prints firmly in their historical context, discussing the artist's public and the different influences on his work, from Roman satire to the politics of the day. The result is an engaging and insightful portrayal not only of William Hogarth, but also of the middle years of the eighteenth century. Art lovers will enjoy this book, but so too will anyone with an interest in the literature and history of the mid-eighteenth century. The reputation of William Hogarth (1697-1764) rests largely on his pictorial stories, a series of engravings that he called "modern Moral Subjects," the most famous being the Harlot's and the Rake's Progress. In this catalog, David Bindman works backward from Hogarth's reputation today--where he is seen by some as a conservative populist and by others as a political radical--and examines his impact on various artists over the past three centuries. Bindman also sets Hogarth's prints firmly in their historical context, discussing the artist's public and the different influences on his work, from Roman satire to the politics of the day. The result is an engaging and insightful portrayal not only of William Hogarth, but also of the middle years of the eighteenth century. Art lovers will enjoy this book, but so too will anyone with an interest in the literature and history of the mid-eighteenth century.

Much attention has focused on the imperial gaze at colonised peoples, cultures, and lands. But, during and after the British Empire, what have writers from those cultures made of England, the English, and issues of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and desire when they have travelled, expatriated, or emigrated to England? This question is addressed through studies of the domestic novel and the Bildungsroman , and through essays on Mansfield, Rhys, Stead, Emecheta, Lessing, Naipaul, Emecheta, Rushdie and Dabydeen.