The Excise Crisis Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole

When President George Washington ordered an army of 13,000 men to march west in 1794 to crush a tax rebellion among frontier farmers, he established a range of precedents that continues to define federal authority over localities today. The "Whiskey Rebellion" marked the first large-scale resistance to a law of the U.S. government under the Constitution. This classic confrontation between champions of liberty and defenders of order was long considered the most significant event in the first quarter-century of the new nation. Thomas P. Slaughter recaptures the historical drama and significance of this violent episode in which frontier West and cosmopolitan East battled over the meaning of the American Revolution. The book not only offers the broadest and most comprehensive account of the Whiskey Rebellion ever written, taking into account the political, social and intellectual contexts of the time, but also challenges conventional understandings of the Revolutionary era.

The essays in this volume do not claim that the Revolution of 1688-89 in itself constituted an epoch-making event in the history of progress and freedom. Instead, they argue that it marks an important conjunction of many trends, changes, and developments in the years before and after 1688.

A major interpretation of British history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Corruption, Party, and Government in Britain, 1702-1713 offers an innovative and original reinterpretation of state formation in eighteenth-century Britain, reconceptualising it as a political and fundamentally partisan process. Focussing on the supply of funds to the army during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), it demonstrates that public officials faced multiple incompatible demands, but that political partisanship helped to prioritise them, and to hammer out settlements that embodied a version of the national interest. These decisions were then transmitted to agents in overseas through a mixture of personal incentives and partisan loyalties which built trust and turned these informal networks into instruments of public policy. However, the process of building trust and supplying funds laid officials and agents open to accusations of embezzlement, fraud and financial misappropriation. In particular, although successive financial officials ran entrepreneurial private financial ventures that enabled the army overseas to avoid dangerous financial shortfalls, they found it necessary to cover the costs and risks by receiving illegal 'gratifications' from the regiments. Reconstructing these transactions in detail, this book demonstrates that these corrupt payments advanced the public service, and thus that 'corruption' was as much a dispute over ends as means. Ultimately, this volume demonstrates that state formation in eighteenth-century Britain was a contested process of interest aggregation, in which common partisan aims helped to negotiate compromises between various irreconcilable public priorities and private interests, within the frameworks provided by formal institutions, and then collaboratively imposed through overlapping and intersecting networks of formal and informal agents.

Riotous Assemblies examines eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England through the lens of popular disorder. Tackling both the more closely-studied forms of protest, such as food riots, industrial disorders, and political disturbances, and much less well understood occasions of popular disorder, such as tax riots, turnpike riots, riots against the establishment of the militia, and religious riot, Adrian Randall re-engages the study of riot within a wider interpretation of the forces - social, economic and political - which were transforming society. He pays particular attention to disturbances in the years between 1795 and 1812, critically examining how far they indicated the major discontinuities discerned by earlier histories of protest, or whether they retained much of the character of earlier upheaval. Based upon detailed case studies and drawing upon the most recent research, the book extends the focus of earlier studies of protest. It locates the origins of disorder within the concepts of constitutionalism and the free-born Englishman, and argues that older attitudes proved far more tenacious than many have allowed.

This sparkling account of the great age of Whiggery during the reigns of George I and II is distinguished by its attention to social history. The author deftly explains how the political transformation which brought an end to the âeoerage of partyâe under Queen Anne and ushered in the âeoestrife of factionâe under the Hanoverians was related to social and economic conditions. This major political change brought stability to England andâe"by important, though incremental shifts in mobility, religion, agriculture, industry, and literacyâe"slowly transformed English society. W. A. Speck argues that in 1714 England was ruled by rival elites called Tory and Whig and that by 1760 they had fused to form a ruling class. This union became possible as divisive issues faded and economic and political interests were shared. Whiggery itself, however, split apart for lesser reasons. âeoeCountryâe Whigs were restorationists on moral and religious grounds while âeoeCourtâe Whigsâe"neither Saints, nor Spartans, nor Reformersâe"created the mechanisms to realize the promise of the Glorious Revolution of 1689: mixed monarchy, property and liberty, and Protestantism. Stability and Strife is the most up-to-date book in English eighteenth-century history in its methodsâe"the use of social science data and literary sourcesâe"and in its sophisticated topical and narrative approaches to this fascinating era.