Paul Monod

Dangerous Merchandise: Smuggling, Jacobitism, and Commercial Culture in Southeast England, 1690–1760

For historians, as for revenue officers, the bold English smuggler of the eighteenth century has been an elusive figure. His motives, the structure of his business, and his relationship to broader social and economic trends, remain far from clear. This is partly because the sources for histories of smuggling are fragmentary and obscure, but it also reflects the inadequacies of proposed interpretations. The early chroniclers of the smuggling trade represented it as an assertion of popular rights, bravely, if at times violently, defended against the agents of an intrusive government. This somewhat romantic view has recently been reformulated by Cal Winslow, who has depicted southcoast tea smuggling in the 1740s as a “social crime,” sanctioned by the laboring classes but condemned by those in authority. Conversely, economic historians have written of smuggling as a “big business” that accounted for one-third of English trade with France and Holland and had an effect both on the level of prices and the distribution of goods. The tea smuggler, as Hoh-cheung Mui and Lorna Mui have noted, “was indeed an important complement to his legal counterpart and as such contributed to the commercial expansion of the kingdom.” He “became a virtual pioneer in developing trade facilities,” especially in remote areas, and helped to expand the market for luxury commodities like brandy and tea by undercutting the prices of the great merchants and established companies.

Born to rule : British political elites

Using historical parliamentary records and his own independent research, Ellis Wasson reconstructs the shape of Britains small and remarkably stable ruling elite from medieval times to the end of World War II.

The Politics of Handel's Early London Operas, 1711–1718

Athough aristocratic Whigs were the primary supporters of opera during the last years of Queen Annes reign, Whig publicists launched a series of attacks against Italian opera that revealed social and ideological tensions within the party. The Earl of Shaftesbury, an ardent Whig, gave intellectual weight to the Whig aristocratic taste for opera, but proponents of the popular theater remained unconvinced that this foreign art form could be reconciled with Whig principles. Handels operas reflected, as well as responded to, these debates.

Thomas Carte, the Druids and British National Identity

Was it possible for a convinced Jacobite to imagine an acceptable British national identity? Linda Colley raised this question in her book Britons, where she argued that Jacobitism was antithetical to the concept of a united Great Britain, as well as to the values for which it stood — namely, anti-Catholicism, anti-French sentiment and a global commercial destiny, shared by Scots and English alike.1 From a different perspective, Daniel Szechi has depicted Scottish Jacobitism as an ideology fundamentally opposed to the Union of 1707, and strongly imbued with an Anglophobic rhetoric.2 ‘Britishness’, in other words, was seen by Jacobites as a curse, an identity imposed by Whigs and their tools. Its rejection was part of the appeal of the Stuart cause. This antipathy may also have nourished the cause’s internal weaknesses. Jacobites were seriously divided by national and ethnic allegiances, as contemporary observers often noted. In 1726, the spy John Semple wrote of the exiled Jacobites in Paris that ‘[t]he Irish, Scotch and English of them seem to have quite different views and ways of thinking, and there are two parties of each Nation, so that I may justly say there are six parties.’3 None of them could be called a British party, in any sense of the term.

A Voyage out of Staffordshire; or, Samuel Johnson’s Jacobite Journey

What sort of Jacobite was Samuel Johnson? Surely, he did not resemble his own satirical depiction in The Idler of the ‘vehement and noisy’ Tom Tempest, who was ‘of opinion, that if the exiled family had continued to reign, there would have neither been worms in our ships nor caterpillars on our trees’.1Was he then more like the quiet scholar-poet Elijah Fenton, a fellow native of Staffordshire, whose life Johnson affectionately chronicled? He wrote of how Fenton, ‘with many other wise and virtuous men, who at that time of discord and debate consulted conscience, whether well or ill informed, more than interest … doubted the legality of the government’, and became a Nonjuror.2 Did the great lexicographer do likewise? Or should we accept Boswell’s critical assertion that, in later years at least, Johnson liked to give ‘an affectation of more Jacobitism than he really had’? Boswell noted that ‘at earlier periods he was wont often to exercise both his pleasantry and ingenuity in talking Jacobitism’.3 Were his loud declarations of Jacobite sympathy then no more than a conversational strategy?

A Disunited Brotherhood?: Secrecy, Publicity, and Controversy among British Freemasons of the Eighteenth Century

questions touching the writer’s legacies, thanks to a series of letters concerning her death that figure at the end of the volume (before an appendix of rediscovered letters). This edition of Graffigny’s correspondence, which certainly more than fulfils Anne-Catherine Helvétius’s desires, sets very high standards for scholarship and provides researchers from many different fields with first-rate materials for future theses, books, and articles.

Introduction: Loyalty and Identity

The study of Jacobitism is at a crossroads. From the 1970s, when Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill re-established it as a serious area of research, the main emphasis among those who work on Jacobitism has been on its disruption of the prevailing trends of the contemporary societies of the British Isles through risings, conspiracies, riots, seditious words and a language of dissidence that resonated in literature, song, art, glass and textiles. This new research disrupted a traditional historiography which in response has generally sought to ignore rather than counter it. The traditional view identified Jacobitism not as a real threat to the stability of the British kingdoms, but rather as a defiant pose that never translated into a coherent ideological alternative, a marginal politics outside the social, religious and political mainstream. To be a Jacobite was to be a backward-looking absolutist rather than a forward-looking Briton.

Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788.

List of plates List of maps, tables and graph Note for reader Acknowledgments List of abbreviations Introduction: defining Jacobitism Part I. Jacobite Rhetoric: 1. Laws of man and God: the moral foundations of Jacobite political argument 2. Jemmys the lad that is lordly: popular culture and Jacobite verse 3. Look, love and follow: images of the last Stuarts in Jacobite art Part II. Structures of Jacobitism: 4. Jacobite underworlds: the practice of treason 5. Religion and loyalty: Jacobitism and religious life Part III. Popular Jacobitism 6. The torrent: riots and demonstrations, 1688-1715 7. The day will be our own: the tradition of Jacobite protest, 1715-80 8. All for the lawful heir? the problem of Jacobite seditious words Part IV. Two Faces of Treason: 9. Lives of the gentry: Jacobitism and the landed elite 10. By a principle of duty: the Jacobite rebels Conclusion: Jacobitism in history Bibliography Index.

Charles Edward Stuart: A Tragedy in Many Acts.

Bonnie Prince Charlie is one of historys most romantic figures, but to what extent has myth obscured reality? Possessed of the cunning and seductive charm of Charles II and the bravery of James II, Charles Edward Stuart failed in his attempt to take the English throne and ended his days in exile in Rome. Drawing on extensive original research, Frank McLynns biography reveals a man of rare promise and quality whose ambitions were frustrated by the political complexities of his age and a personality fatally flawed during an unhappy childhood.