Re-Viewing the Eighteenth Century || The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British History

The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British HistoryAuthor(s): Linda ColleySource: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 25, No. 4, Re-Viewing the Eighteenth Century (Oct.,1986), pp. 359-379Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on BritishStudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/175562 .

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The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British History

Linda Colley

I. Introduction

Britain's "long" eighteenth century, which began with one aristocratic revolution in 1688 and ended with another in 1832, was a pageant of success. The nation's art and architecture reached their elegant and original best. Its capital became the center of print culture, finance, fashion, and commercial creativity, the largest and most vi- brant city in the Western world. The British constitution became a topic for eulogy, as much by the unenlightened and illiterate at home as by the Enlightenment literati abroad. The armed forces, fiscal system, and bureaucracy of the British state grew in efficacy and range, bring- ing victory in all but one of a succession of major wars. Legitimized by achievement and buttressed by massive economic and political power, Britain's landed elite kept at bay every domestic revolution except the industrial one, which only enriched it more. The American Revolution, of course, was not averted; but while this crisis embarrassed the Brit- ish Empire, it did not destroy it. Even before 1776, the conquest of Canada had reduced the thirteen colonies' strategic significance, just as their profitability to the mother country had been outstripped by its Indian possessions; their final loss was made up, and more than made up, with relentless and almost contemptuous speed. Between 1780 and 1820 some 150 million men and women in India, Africa, the West Indies, Java, and the China coast succumbed to British naval power and trading imperatives.

Thus did eighteenth-century Britain, at the command of greed rather than of heaven, succeed in ruling the waves and much of the world. Why, then, has this period of its history so often failed to

LINDA COLLEY is associate professor of history at Yale University.

Journal of British Studies 25 (October 1986): 359-379 ? 1986 by The North American Conference on British Studies. All rights reserved. 0021-9371/86/2504-0004$01.00

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capture the enthusiasm of students and the avid attention of historians? Why, for instance, has it benefited so little from the massive surge in scholarly productivity during the past twenty-five years? In the 1960s, some 290 books and articles on eighteenth-century Britain were being published every year. Between 1973 and 1984, what might crudely be styled annual productivity in this area was no more than that and may have been less. Throughout all these years, pure political and constitutional history regularly made up just over a tenth of the total output. And, again, one may contrast this low proportion with the continuing resilience of political history in other periods of British history- notably, the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries.1

This article is an attempt to investigate the disparity between the excitement, achievement, and wide-ranging significance of eighteenth- century Britain and the torpor that so often characterizes its historiography. It examines, first, why the eighteenth century is so often regarded as less compelling and less accessible than many other periods of British history. Second, it explores how interpretations of this society have shifted dramatically in recent years. Finally, it discusses four aspects of eighteenth-century British politics (broadly defined as the manifold expressions of power in society) that seem important and contentious now and in need of serious research in the future.

II. Difficulties Some years ago, Geoffrey Elton rebuked historians of eighteenth-

century Britain for their "mildly desperate search for controversies," the implication being that they contended over very little.2 In fact, the reverse is true. The period is problematic precisely because it contains so much that was important and paradoxical at the time and that is still emotive and profoundly controversial now. And since many of these controversies relate to questions of power, authority, and dominance, they often repel rather than magnetize current scholarly curiosity.

What one writer recently described as an ambivalence toward political power has led-particularly in France and the United States-

These estimates are based on C. E. Philpin and H. J. Creaton, eds., Writings on British History, 1960-61 (London, 1978); H. J. Creaton, ed., Writings on British History, 1962-64 (London, 1979), Writings on British History, 1965-66 (London, 1981), Writings on British History, 1967-68 (London, 1982), Writings on British History, 1969-70 (Lon- don, 1984), and Writings on British History, 1971-72 (London, 1985); and G. R. Elton et al., eds., Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History (London, 1975-84).

2 G. R. Elton, Modern Historians on British History, 1485-1945: A Critical Bibliog- raphy (London, 1970), p. 77.

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POLITICS OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY

to centrifugal history, to an obsession with the deserving, the disadvantaged, the excluded, and the forward-looking, be they women, or slaves, or radicals, or peasants, or factory workers, or freedom fighters.3 It is incontrovertible that such people merit serious study; but although they cannot be properly understood if the context of authority is ignored, too many scholars have in fact chosen to reconstruct their activities without adequate reference to the power systems within which they fought, lived, and worked.4 When this partial and escapist vision is adopted, it becomes almost inevitable that societies such as eighteenth-century Britain will be seen as alien, unfashionable, and (as one eminent American historian put it to me) "inherently uninterest- ing." The unspoken argument behind this last denunciation is partly a moral one. How can concerned and contemporary scholars even want to study a nation that-at the height of the Enlightenment-conserved its monarchy and aristocracy, led the opposition to the American and French Revolutions, and was so ruthlessly obsessed with colonial expansion and commercial gain? If Britain were still a world power, these past sins might be forgiven (or at least be regarded as inherently inter- esting). As it is, its present insignificance compounds its past iniquities.

There is another sense in which the richness and diversity of eighteenth-century British society have compromised its historiography. Because it contains so many and such Janus-faced developments, the period lacks an easily perceived discrete identity. How, after all, should we define eighteenth-century Britain? Should we merely em- ploy the strict (but historically unimportant) boundaries 1700-1800? Or should we mark the Hanoverian Succession and the Battle of Waterloo by opting for 1714-1815? The definition adopted here, 1688-1832, reflects the duration of the Revolution Settlement; but Lawrence Stone's alternative "long" eighteenth century begins with the Restora- tion in 1660 and ends in 1800.5 To quibble about these dates is not pedantry; rather it emphasizes that the historiography of eighteenth- century Britain suffers from the same fate as eighteenth-century Po-

3 As one example of this trend, the International Directory of Eighteenth-Century Studies (Oxford, 1983) lists 231 current projects on women's history as against only ten on war and society in this period. Unfortunately, little of this work on eighteenth-century women has focused on Britain and still less on the social, political, and economic life of the mass of British women as distinct from writers and feminists. Yet provincial direc- tories, e.g., provide a unique source on women's work and urban status in this period (see Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society, 1500-1800 [London, 1985], pp. 93-117).

4 A marvelous example of how this kind of history should be written is David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975).

5 Lawrence Stone, "The New Eighteenth Century," New York Review of Books (March 29, 1984), pp. 42-48.

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land. Singularly lacking in accepted boundaries and divided by academic factions within, the history of this society is peculiarly prone to invasion and usurpation by outside lobbies with their own expansionist and explanatory ends to pursue.

One example of this is the way in which some Whig historians of the American Revolution seem compelled to corset eighteenth-century Britain into a predefined shape. For them, the saga of the emerging republic dictates that Britain be portrayed (though rarely precisely analyzed) as politically arbitrary, militarily inept, morally corrupt, and ideologically retrogressive, redeemed only by a minority of dissenting radicals who realized where the future lay. If this seems a caricature, consider a recent pronouncement by Marion Balderston and David Syrett on British army officers during the Revolution: they "did not fight for King or Country, they fought for promotion and more pay." Henry Steele Commager concurred: "It was not, after all, their [the British officers'] war .... They were as truly mercenaries of the King as were the Hessians and Brunswickers hired to fight in the American wilderness." Truly? Or there is the opening pen portrait in Robert Middlekauff's new and generally excellent survey of the winning of American independence: "How profoundly traditional, conventional and conservative English society was in the eighteenth century."6 Well, of course, much of it was. But these convenient and dismissive emphases scarcely accommodate the generally high level of success achieved abroad by Britain's army in this period, or the vivacity and range of the nation's Enlightenment, or the pioneering enterprise of its economic and urban organization, or the startling youth of its population.7

Our appreciation of how eighteenth-century Britain saw itself and its priorities is also constrained by the imperatives of British historians working on neighboring periods. For example, if, like Christopher Hill, one believes that the 1640s and 1650s offered the English an unprecedented opportunity for constitutional, religious, and social liberty and experimentation, then the eighteenth century has to become paradise lost. So Hill's influential study The Century of Revolution describes the early 1700s as dwindling into religious torpor, political stagnancy, easy elite hegemony, and plebeian defeat. Conversely, if, like E. P. Thomp- son, one adopts a pessimistic interpretation of the effect of urban and

6 Marion Balderston and David Syrett, eds., The Lost War: Letters from British Officers during the American Revolution (New York, 1975), p. vii; Commager is quoted in ibid.; Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (New York, 1982), p. 14.

7 See Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1982).

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industrial conformity on British society in the nineteenth century, then the pre-Reform Act period becomes the last heroic age. In his classic The Making of the English Working Class, as well as in several im-

portant articles, Thompson presents the eighteenth-century working man as a rural Adam, unpoliticized but clear on the "limits beyond which . . . [he] was not prepared to be 'pushed around', and the limits beyond which authority did not dare to go."8 These two particular historians are in fact linked by ideology and sympathy: yet how one

squares their disparate presentations of eighteenth-century England is far from clear.

III. Developments The presumptions of various practitioners of eighteenth-century

British history have been discussed for two reasons. Unacknowledged bias misleads the general reader; more important, some form of bias is inescapable in this as in every other field of history. Ranke's ideal of historical scholarship-"simply to show how it really was"-has never proved a feasible strategy in fact. Almost all historians, whether they admit it to themselves and their readers or not, have a secret agenda. All historians, whether they know it or not, are Whigs in the sense that they are "present minded"; and this is clearly apparent in the three main phases through which the historiography of eighteenth- century Britain has passed since the First World War.9

The first period-which lasted from the 1920s to the early 1960s- was dominated by the troubled if titanic figure of Lewis Namier and his two, very clever analyses The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and England in the Age of the American Revolution. "Namierism" is often used now as though it were a synonym for impatience with ideology and a narrow confinement to the high politics of the elite. Yet, as the late John Brooke argued, Namier's assertion that "the social history of England could be written in terms of the membership of the House of Commons" was in its time surprisingly

8 Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (Edinburgh, 1961); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), p. 87, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, no. 50 (1971), pp. 76-136, "Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture?" Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 382-405, and "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" Social History 3 (1978): 133-65.

9 See Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), which has often been interpreted merely as an indictment of bias: read carefully, it in fact admits its inevitability.

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democratic.10 Most British scholars had previously concentrated on the papers of monarchs, courtiers, cabinet ministers, and the aristocracy; Namier, by contrast, was one of the first to track down sources on the ordinary eighteenth-century M.P. and on his voters. Nor was Namier necessarily unsympathetic to patterns of political belief. He recognized that divisions in the localities were often based on the ten- sions between Anglicanism and Protestant Dissent, and he knew that after 1700 "it was impossible to eliminate party from parliament"; he just rejected the idea that eighteenth-century party was systematic or a matter of Whig versus Tory.11

But although Namier was far more subtle and wide-ranging than some of his detractors imply, his vision of the eighteenth century was to some degree narrowed and predetermined by his own personal and political circumstances. He was an emigre Jewish intellectual, disin- herited by his father in 1922, and was arguably kept out of a job in England's ancient universities because of anti-Semitism. Polish by birth, and a committed Zionist, he was profoundly anxious about the extreme ideologies, intense violence, and totalitarian governments of Eastern and Western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. So part of eighteenth-century England's compulsive fascination for Namier was almost certainly the refuge it seemed to offer from these contemporary agonies.12 He could view it as a rational and material society in which ideology was kept firmly in its place; he could present its politics, not as the product of a powerful state with a world role, but as a series of decorous machinations between country house owners; and he could and did avert his attention from the raucous politics of its streets and newspapers and concentrate instead on the tradition-bound rituals of the electoral process.

Namier's influence was huge and in some ways pernicious. Well into the 1950s and early 1960s, his disciples and graduate students in Britain and America produced a wealth of scholarly studies on individual elections, constituencies, M.P.s, minor politicians, and short ad- ministrations.13 Many of these books and articles remain invaluable;

10 Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1929), and England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930); John Brooke, "Namier and Namierism," History and Theory 3 (1964): 333-35.

11 Lewis Namier, Personalities and Powers (reprint, Westport, Conn., 1974), p. 20. 12 See Julia Namier, Lewis Namier: A Biography (London, 1971); and Norman

Rose, Lewis Namier and Zionism (Oxford, 1980). 13 Examples would include Ian R. Christie, The End of North's Ministry, 1780-1782

(London, 1958); John Owen, The Rise of the Pelhams (London, 1957); and R. J. Robson, The Oxfordshire Election of 1754 (Oxford, 1949).

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but others were compiled by men and women who shared their mas- ter's love of detail without his power of mind. Seeing so much being written on so little by so many convinced generations of teachers and students that eighteenth-century British history was too intricate (not to say tedious) for general consumption. Moreover, just as Namier had been ferocious in his treatment of earlier Whig historians (he did not of course believe that he himself was one), so the reaction against him and his disciples after 1960 was excessive. A younger generation of historians felt obliged to correct Namier on petty points of detail or to express disgust at his real or purported indifference to ideology, to extraparliamentary activism, and to the role of crowds and women. As this writer knows, such denunciations of the dead are safe and pleasur- able to write, but in the end they only exaggerate Namier's current importance, obscure the real nature of his achievement, and confuse the general reader who has almost certainly never read any of Sir Lewis's books.

This second stage in the modem historiography of eighteenth- century Britain was shaped by the reaction against Namier; yet, just as he had been, it was also influenced by contemporary political and economic preoccupations. In the 1960s and 1970s, unprecedented pros- perity on both sides of the Atlantic fostered university expansion and a mood of liberal optimism, even radicalism, among academic historians. The same period witnessed Britain's longest-serving quasi-socialist government. In these buoyant circumstances it was to be expected that what was seen as Namierism would be reappraised and found wanting. Political ideas now seemed desirable rather than dangerous; and they were conscientiously reinserted into eighteenth-century British politics: notably in John Brewer's Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III, a title that deliberately echoed while subverting much of Namier's first great book. In America, J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and Isaac Kramnick followed Caroline Rob- bins in reconstructing the content and diffusion of eighteenth-century Whig ideologies and mythologies.14 In Britain, J. P. Kenyon, W. A. Speck, J. H. Plumb, and Geoffrey Holmes stressed the polarization of Whig and Tory attitudes to the constitution, to foreign policy, to reli-

14 John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976); J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York, 1971); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).

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COLLEY

gion, and to the social order as part of their reaffirmation of a two-party conflict in Britain between 1688 and 1720, though not beyond.15

As far as eighteenth-century electoral politics was concerned, interest shifted from the members of Parliament and their manipulative agents to the voters themselves. Plumb and Speck demonstrated that, between 1689 and 1715, England's electorate became less deferential, more avid for printed propaganda, more responsive to party platforms, and much bigger.16 Plumb argued for 250,000 voters by 1715 and Geof- frey Holmes for 340,000 by 1722, with the caveat that many more individuals probably possessed the franchise than were willing and able to use it. Even if this last hypothesis was bound to remain little more than that, the implication of these findings-as John Cannon pointed out-was that a higher proportion of the male population was enfran- chised in early Georgian than in early Victorian England.17

At the same time a more radical group of scholars, associated with E. P. Thompson, concentrated on the rural, largely unenfranchised and illiterate masses of England (the plebeian history of Wales and Scot- land before the French Revolution has still to be written).'8 In analyz- ing power and social relations, these historians tended to neglect the role of urban culture and bourgeois dissidence. Some of them also ignored, to their cost, electoral, constitutional, and religious rituals as an index to popular mentality.19 Instead they concentrated on the meaning of rural protest and the quality of certain types of crime, such as poaching, industrial embezzlement, and threatening letters. They stressed that patrician authority was buttressed and mediated, but also

15 J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689-1720 (Cam- bridge, 1977); Geoffrey Holmes and W. A. Speck, The Divided Society: Parties and Politics in England, 1694-1716 (London, 1967); J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (London, 1967); and Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1967).

16 J. H. Plumb, "The Growth of the Electorate in England from 1600 to 1715," Past and Present, no. 45 (1969), pp. 90-116; W. A. Speck, Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies, 1701-1715 (London, 1970).

17 Geoffrey Holmes, The Electorate and the National Will in the First Age of Party (Kendal, 1976); John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640-1832 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 40-42.

18 For post-1789 plebeian dissidence in Scotland and Wales, see G. A. Williams, The Merthyr Rising (London, 1978), and In Search ofBeulah Land (London, 1980); D. J. V. Jones, Before Rebecca: Popular Protest in Wales, 1793-1835 (London, 1973); Kenneth Logue, Popular Disturbances in Scotland, 1780-1815 (Edinburgh, 1979); N. Murray, The Scottish Hand Loom Weavers, 1790-1850 (Edinburgh, 1978).

19 Thus R. W. Malcolmson's otherwise valuable Life and Labour in England, 1700- 1780 (London, 1981) adopts a cavalier attitude to popular religion, excluding Methodism altogether. John Walsh's expert research on Methodism and plebeian culture will confirm that this was an error.

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contained, by the operation of the law; in the same way, the insubordi- nation of the crowd was both legitimized and circumscribed by folk memory and tradition.20

Most of this socialist and Marxist scholarship was innovative; much of it was vivid, subtle, and immensely challenging. Yet in the 1980s, the third and current phase of eighteenth-century British studies, many of its assumptions about social attitudes and the location of power have in turn come under attack from both right- and left-wing historians. Even in the midst of the affluent society and the expansive and popularist history it fostered, some percipient scholars-clas- sically, J. H. Plumb in his Ford lectures of 1965-had stressed that it was as important to study the strength and persistence of the ruling elite in eighteenth-century England as it was to analyze its opponents and subordinates. "The acceptance by society of its political institu- tions, and of those classes of men or officials who control them," Plumb argued, like the survival of traditional "patterns of belief, of work, of family life and social habits," has been unfairly neglected by historians obsessed with the phenomena of change and revolution.21 In the festschrift issued for Plumb in 1974, J. P. Kenyon struck an analogous warning note, insisting that the intellectual hegemony of contract theory and the obsolescence of Sir Robert Filmer and patriarchalism in eighteenth-century England had been overstated. John Locke might be widely read and influential on the periphery of the British Empire (though, indicatively, even this was soon to be questioned), but in his own country the prophet had little immediate honor and few readers apart from dissenting intellectuals.22

By the late 1970s, with political conservatism rampant on both sides of the Atlantic, these historiographical cautions were becoming entrenched as the new orthodoxy. In Britain, especially, historians have responded to a seemingly invulnerable Tory administration, a widening gap between rich and poor, a post-Falklands revival of jin-

20 See Douglas Hay, P. Linebaugh, and E. P. Thompson, eds., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1975); Robert Mal- colmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1973); E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (London, 1975), "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" (n. 8 above), "Patri- cian Society, Plebeian Culture?" (n. 8 above), and "Eighteenth-Century English Soci- ety" (n. 8 above).

21 Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, pp. xvi-xvii. 22 J. P. Kenyon, "The Revolution of 1688," in Historical Perspectives: Studies in

English Thought and Society, ed. Neil McKendrick (London, 1974), pp. 43-69; Garry Wills, Inventing America (New York, 1979). For a reassertion of Locke's significance, see Isaac Kramnick, "Republican Revisionism Revisited," American Historical Review 87 (1982): 629-44.

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goism, a record level of unemployment, and (not least) an assault on university funds and privileges by dwelling on the resilience of the ancien regime in their nation rather than on the dynamics of social, economic, cultural, and political change.

The shift in scholarly emphasis from change to continuity, from ideology to religion, from plebeian protest to patrician power, has been further encouraged by two other connected historiographical developments. The first is the influence of the revisionist school of seventeenth-century British history. Conrad Russell, Geoffrey Elton, John Morrill, and many others have minimized the Civil War's effect on constitutional developments and on the structure and control of local gentry elites, stressing instead the centrality of religious debates and the resilience of Anglicanism.23 Thus the notion that the events of 1642-60 represent a constitutional or a Puritan (never mind a bourgeois) revolution has become almost as unfashionable as paeans to the revolution against Stuart absolutism in 1688.24 Both crises have been emasculated. It therefore follows that many historians of eighteenth- century Britain now believe that they have fewer new developments to accommodate or account for when they begin to tell their story. For Plumb in the mid-1960s it was self-evident that "by 1688 conspiracy and rebellion, treason and plot, were a part of the history and experience of at least three generations of Englishmen" and therefore incum- bent on him to account for the advent of stability in eighteenth-century England; but in the 1980s it is the longevity of fundamental political, social, and religious stability in early modern England that most historians choose to dwell on, not its evolution or disruption.25

The second historiographical trend may be partly a function of Britain's current industrial recession and, even perhaps, of its admis- sion to the European Economic Community. Instead of seeking to explain how Britain diverged politically and socially from Continental Europe after 1688 and linking this divergence with Britain's pioneering industrial revolution, many historians now emphasize the similarities between Stuart and Georgian Britain and absolutist Europe. This argu-

23 Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629 (Oxford, 1979); G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 3 vols. (London, 1974-83); J. S. Morrill, Cheshire, 1630-1660 (Oxford, 1974), and Reactions to the Civil War, 1642-1649 (London, 1982). These titles are selected from a vast literature.

24 See, however, Lois G. Schwoerer, "The Bill of Rights: Epitome of the Revolution of 1688-89," in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Prince- ton, N.J., 1980), pp. 224-43; and Mark Goldie, "The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688- 94," History of Political Thought 1 (1980): 195-236.

25 Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, p. 1; cf. Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714-60 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 3-23.

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ment demands that the uniqueness and primacy of British industrialization be denied-as, for example, in Patrick O'Brien and Caglar Key- der's Economic Growth in Britain and France-and, at its most extreme, can lead to eighteenth-century Britain being interpreted as "an ancien regime state, dominated politically, culturally and ideologically by the three pillars of an early modern social order: monarchy, aristocracy, church."26

This last statement illustrates one of the dangers inherent in the dialectical progression of this period's historiography: overreaction against previous scholarly assumptions. But one can argue (and of course I have a vested interest in doing so) that some of the recent revisionism in eighteenth-century British history has been valuable. The Tory party, previously thought to have been socially and politically regressive and anyway defunct by 1720, has been energetically salvaged. My In Defiance of Oligarchy maintained that a distinct Tory party, organized both at parliamentary and constituency level, long survived the Hanoverian Succession of 1714. I also suggested that the party pioneered some of the popularist strategies and ideas later associated with John Wilkes, an argument that has subsequently been devel-

oped by Gary Stuart De Krey, J. G. A. Pocock, and Nicholas Rogers.27 Jacobitism, too, has benefited from the revived interest in historical causes previously dismissed as lost or reactionary. Eveline Cruick- shanks has argued that "up to 1745 the Tories were a predominantly Jacobite party, engaged in attempts to restore the Stuarts by a rising with foreign assistance," and, consequently, that the Hanoverian dy- nasty was not secure until after Culloden and, perhaps, not until 1759, when the last serious French attempt to sponsor a Stuart restoration failed.28 More impressive, however, is the work of Howard Erskine- Hill and Paul Monod, who treat eighteenth-century Jacobitism as a

26 Patrick O'Brien and Caglar Keyder, Economic Growth in Britain and France, 1780-1914: Two Paths to the 20th Century (London, 1978); J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832 (Cambridge, 1985) (the quotation is from a publicity handout); David Cannadine, "The Past and Present in the English Industrial Revolution," Past and Present, no. 103 (1984), pp. 131-72.

27 Linda Colley, "Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes," Transac- tions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 31 (1981): 1-19, and In Defiance of Oligarchy; Gary Stuart De Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party (Oxford, 1985); J. G. A. Pocock, "Radical Criticisms of the Whig Order in the Age between Revolutions," and Nicholas Rogers, "The Urban Opposition to Whig Oligarchy, 1720-60," in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Mar- garet Jacob and James Jacob (London, 1984), pp. 33-57, 132-48.

28 Eveline Cruikshanks, Political Untouchables: The Tories and the '45 (London, 1979); Eveline Cruikshanks, ed., Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689- 1759 (Edinburgh, 1982).

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durable and multifaceted culture rather than as a high political and militarily practicable commitment.29

Unlike the Jacobites, eighteenth-century British aristocrats were glutted with success; but until recently their social, political, and economic influence was taken for granted rather than explored. Sir Lewis Namier concentrated his own and the History of Parliament Trust's attention on the House of Commons rather than on the Lords.30 The next generation of political historians was no more ready to analyze the eighteenth-century British elite systematically or to assimilate the findings of many economic historians on the extent of aristocratic investment in the post-1688 stock market and in urban and industrial development.31 It is indicative that in the more conservative 1980s this neglect has been redressed, a shift that is nicely captured in the preface to John Cannon's Aristocratic Century: "Though there is much evi- dence that merchants and financiers, teachers and journalists, lawyers and architects, shopkeepers and industrialists prospered in Hanoverian England, the questions to be explained seem to me to be almost the opposite of Marxist historiography-not how did they come to control government, but why did they not challenge aristocratic domination until towards the end of the century?"32

Cannon's question will remain unanswered until scholars are prepared to address seriously the "middling sort" of eighteenth-century Britain: thus far their diversity, scant archives, and limited property and political weight have repelled most conservative as well as most radical historians.33 But recent scholarship has illuminated how far

29 Howard Erskine-Hill, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope (New Haven, Conn., 1975), and "Literature and the Jacobite Cause: Was There a Rhetoric of Jacobitism," in Cruikshanks, ed., pp. 49-69; Paul K. Monod, "For the King to Enjoy His Own Again: Jacobite Political Culture in England, 1688-1788" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1985).

30 Romney Sedgwick, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715-54, 2 vols. (London, 1970); Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1754-90, 3 vols. (London, 1964); the volumes for the 1689-1714 and 1791-1819 periods will be published in the near future.

31 For example, P. G. M. Dickson's classic The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756 (London, 1967); or T. J. Ray- bould, The Economic Emergence of the Black Country: A Study of the Dudley Estates (Newton Abbot, 1973).

32 John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984), p. ix.

33 But see Peter Borsay, "The English Urban Renaissance: The Development of Provincial Urban Culture, c.1680-c.1760," Social History 2 (1977): 581-604; Geoffrey Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680-1730 (London, 1982); John Money, Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760-1800 (Manchester, 1977); and Kathleen Wilson, "The Rejection of Deference: Urban Political Culture in England, 1715-1785" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1985).

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aristocratic self-consciousness, estate policy, and endogamy conspired to keep an aspiring Georgian bourgeoisie at bay. Christopher Clay, Philip Jenkins, and Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone have all addressed themselves to these problems, albeit reaching rather dif- ferent conclusions.34 Michael McCahill and W. D. Rubinstein have argued that after 1780, far from being put on the defensive by the French Revolution, the British aristocracy increased in size and in its control over rotten boroughs, government employment, church patronage, industrial and financial ventures, and imperial exploitation. More recently, it has been suggested that this same post-1780 period saw the emergence of a new and more calculated form of national monarchy in Britain.35

Superficially, then, the historiography of this period is confusingly cyclical. In the 1960s E. P. Thompson reacted against the convention- ally sedate presentation of eighteenth-century England and immor- talized the making of its working class; twenty years later, the historical emphasis has shifted once more to its leisured classes and how they remade and reasserted themselves in precisely the same time period. Yet this seeming volte-face is really no such thing. If sociopolit- ical antagonisms were becoming sharper in the late eighteenth century (as I believe they were), one would expect to see both an increase in plebeian consciousness and bitterness and a ruling group that was more avid for office, honors, wealth, and a discrete cultural identity. In this case, as in so many others, a profound understanding is made easier if we practice societal and not just social history, if we adopt a synoptic rather than a sectional vision, and if we remember that there was more than one eighteenth-century Britain.36

For there was bound to be more than one. In 1688 there were 4.9 million people in England; by 1832 there were over 13 million and over 16 million Britons: almost 60 percent of them were under twenty-five years of age. As yet, historians have scarcely considered what effect

34 Christopher Clay, "Marriage, Inheritance and the Rise of Large Estates in En- gland, 1660-1815," Economic History Review 21 (1968): 503-18; Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry, 1640-1790 (Cambridge, 1983); Law- rence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540-1880 (Oxford, 1984).

35 Michael McCahill, "Peerage Creations and the Changing Character of the British Nobility, 1750-1830," English Historical Review 96 (1981): 259-84; W. D. Rubinstein, "The End of 'Old Corruption' in Britain, 1780-1860," Past and Present, no. 101 (1983), pp. 55-86; Linda Colley, "The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760-1820," Past and Present, no. 102 (1984), pp. 94-129.

36 See Eric Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," Daedalus 100 (Winter 1971): 20-45.

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this demographic revolution had over time on social, cultural, and political attitudes.37 They do know that by the 1780s church attendance was far lower and the moral influence of ecclesiastical courts much less than in the 1680s; they also know that after 1750 developments in printing, transport, language, and the organization of work eroded lo- calism and deepened extraparliamentary awareness of war at home and revolution abroad.38 In these circumstances, the futility of seeking to cover the entirety of this period with a single umbrella-be it the Age of Aristocracy, the First Industrial Revolution, the Age of Elegance, or the Wickedest Age-is only confirmed by the ludicrous disparity among these titles.

IV. Directions So where should historians go from here? One hopes, in general,

toward an approach that is less particularist but more rigorous and more exciting. More specifically, there are at least four aspects of eighteenth-century Britain that stand in urgent need of imaginative and incisive research: first, the mechanisms of power employed by the central government; second, the real degree and significance of this society's putative corruption; third, the politics of war and empire and their effect on domestic history; and, finally, the extent to which there was a genuinely British experience in this period. Each of these questions will be addressed briefly in turn.

How powerful was the eighteenth-century British state, and how far did it govern by coercion rather than by consent? Answering this question is complicated by a lack of good institutional histories. There are, for instance, no recent, comprehensive analyses of the influence of the crown or the House of Lords during these years.39 More obfusca- tory, still, is the common assumption that the central government was insignificant in comparison with local landowners. John Brooke once wrote that "the work of the British government was virtually restricted to preserving the constitution (which meant doing nothing in home

37 E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541- 1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), is a gold mine for historians.

38 Jan Albers of Yale University is charting both the Church of England's popular resilience in Lancashire before the 1770s and its weakening hold over the next two decades. Linda Colley, "Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750-1830," Past and Present (in press).

39 But see B. W. Hill, "Executive Monarchy and the Challenge of Parties, 1689- 1832: Two Concepts of Government and Two Historiographical Interpretations," His- torical Journal 13 (1970): 379-401; and Michael McCahill, Order and Equipoise: The Peerage and the House of Lords, 1783-1806 (London, 1978).

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affairs) and conducting foreign policy."40 On the Left, the tendency to analyze eighteenth-century political antagonisms mainly in terms of social relations has led to an analogous denial of governmental intru- sion. Thus Perry Anderson argued that the large armies, police forces, and bureaucracies that typified absolutism were absent from Britain and that this was "a correlate of the local, molecular character of [its] agrarian power in the 17th and 18th centuries."41

But was it? There are at least three reasons for thinking not. First, it seems a priori unlikely that eighteenth-century Britain could have demonstrated such remarkable ability to maintain stability at home and to raise money and men to win wars and colonies abroad if its state machinery had been entirely puny. Second, as John Brewer has consis- tently argued, Parliament became increasingly active in this period in passing public as well as private statutes and in raising taxes. By the 1760s about 20 percent of the nation's output was being appropriated in taxation-almost twice the comparable French figure. Finally, J. A. Houlding's splendid Fit for Service suggests that far too much has been made of this society's lack of a police force.42 The army was consis- tently trained and dispersed with the maintenance of order at home rather than the winning of victory abroad in mind: hence some of its military failures, especially at the start of each of Britain's major wars.

Houlding's findings must call into question the notion that eighteenth-century Britain's ruling class endured primarily because it was benign or because it tolerated a large measure of popular ebullience. As yet, little work has been done on the volume and availability of arms in this society; but it seems clear that the Bill of Rights's allowance of arms to Protestant citizens often proved nugatory.43 If it turns out that the British state had already secured a monopoly on efficient violence, then its avoidance of revolution in this period may be less complex

40 Namier and Brooke (n. 30 above), 1:184. 41 Perry Anderson, "Origins of the Present Crisis," New Left Review 23 (1964): 47.

Marxist historians have supplied many of the most wide-ranging, if inevitably controversial, analyses of power relations in this society. See E. P. Thompson, "The Peculiarities of the English," in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), pp. 35-91; and Geoff Eley, "Re-thinking the Political: Social History and Political Culture in 18th and 19th Century Britain," Archiv fir Sozialgeschichte 21 (1981): 427-57.

42 John Brewer, "English Radicalism in the Age of George III," in Pocock, ed. (n. 24 above), esp. pp. 337-41. See also Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982), pp. 197-262. J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715-1795 (Oxford, 1981).

43 But see P. B. Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws, 1671-1831 (Cambridge, 1981).

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than Ian Christie has argued.44 And if it appears that, by the later eighteenth century, power in Britain was shifting from the localities to the center, then the landed elite's increased appetite for official employment at precisely this time becomes even more explicable.

If the British state is to be properly reassessed, its reputed corruption will need to be far more rigorously examined. As Bernard Bailyn and others have shown, Anglo-American opposition polemic in this period was saturated with indictments of corruption and its tentacular progress in Britain. This propaganda, with its peculiar and localized meaning, is sometimes interpreted as though it were accurate political description. Thus, in an excellent review of the historiography of eighteenth-century Britain, Lawrence Stone referred to "the pervasive stink of corruption at all levels of elite society and government."45 Yet it is very doubtful whether official corruption in Britain reached its acme in this period. If it did, it was probably more widespread in the latter half of George III's reign and under George IV than at the time of the American Revolution. And, in the case of such practices as the sale of honors, eighteenth-century Britain's record fades into probity in comparison with the Jacobean era or even the premiership of Lloyd George.46

So we need both to probe the real extent of corruption and to evolve a less anachronistic estimate of its contemporary meaning. In Georgian Britain borough patrons lent their electoral influence to the government in return for promotion and profit; in present-day Britain and America large corporations donate money to party funds in return for sympathetic legislation and (in some cases) individual ad- vancement. The former practice is now condemned and the latter widely tolerated, yet the substantive difference between them is far from clear. Again, scholars often cite the degree of electoral bribery in the eighteenth century as proof of the contemptuous dominance of the landed elite and the tractability of the electorate, yet no power group goes to the expense of money bribes if it is able easily to coerce. So the level of bribery in this society almost certainly demonstrates the limits

44 Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflec- tions on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford, 1984).

45 Stone (n. 5 above), p. 47. 46 See Rubinstein (n. 35 above); J. Hurstfield, "Political Corruption in Modern

England," History 52 (1967): 16-34; G. Macmillan, The Sale of Honours (London, 1954); H. J. Hanham, "The Sale of Honours in Late Victorian England," Victorian Studies 3 (1960): 277-89; John Walker, The Queen Has Been Pleased (London, 1985). Stephen Taylor of Jesus College, Cambridge University, is currently at work on a study of eighteenth-century British corruption.

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of deference rather than just the extent of its leverage. This perception eluded pamphleteers at the time, who believed that corruption invari- ably disturbed "the political conditions necessary to human virtue and freedom": it should not elude us.47

Another concomitant of scholarly neglect of the eighteenth-century British state is unconcern about its foreign relations. Postimpe- rial guilt may have been responsible for directing more attention toward the empire's vexed Victorian apotheosis and twentieth-century dissolution than toward its aggressive and unapologetic accumulation in the eighteenth century. Thus the so-called First British Empire has attracted mainly American historians and is consequently interpreted very much with the American Revolution in mind.48 No recent study has concentrated on the domestic repercussions of the colonial con- quests of the Seven Years' War; no book is available that explores how all classes in Britain reacted to the American Revolution; and no de- tailed biography of the empire's great propagandist, William Pitt the elder, has been published since 1912.49 The major work on post-1783 imperial reconstruction is still Vincent Harlow's The Foundation of the Second British Empire. Eighteenth-century British policy in Europe has fared slightly better, but not much. D. B. Horn and Paul Langford have written able surveys; but specialized monographs in this area are usually arid and confined to diplomatic maneuvers, individual ambas- sadors, and descriptions of land and sea battles.50

Linguistic incapacity has contributed to keeping this field an un-

47 But see Thomas Home, "Politics in a Corrupt Society: William Arnall's Defense of Robert Walpole," Journal of the History of Ideas 41 (1980): 601-14. The best recent analyses of electoral practices are J. P. Phillips, Electoral Behavior in Unreformed England: Plumpers, Splitters and Straights (Princeton, N.J., 1982); and Frank O'Gor- man, "Electoral Deference in 'Unreformed' England: 1760-1832," Journal of Modern History 56 (1984): 391-429.

48 Though see, for its controversial revisionism, Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Fall of the First British Empire (London, 1982).

49 Some recent specialized studies are Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years' War, 1757-1762 (Cam- bridge, 1985); Marie Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opin- ion during the Seven Years' War (Oxford, 1980); Gottfried Niedhart, Handel und Krieg in der Britischen Weltpolitik, 1738-1763 (Munich, 1979); Colin Bonwick, English Radi- cals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977); John Sainsbury, "The Pro- Americans of London, 1769 to 1782," William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978): 423-54; and Paul Langford, "Old Whigs, Old Tories and the American Revolution," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 8 (1980): 106-30.

50 Vincent Harlow, The Foundation of the Second British Empire, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1963-65); D. B. Horn, Great Britain and Europe in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1967); Paul Langford, The Eighteenth Century, 1688-1815 (London, 1976). New surveys of the Second British Empire and of Britain's Continental foreign policy are in prepara- tion by C. A. Bayly and Jeremy Black, respectively.

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fashionable one, and so has the widespread belief that the direction and consequences of foreign policy in this period were exclusively an elite concern. Yet this is only partly correct. The effect of war on this society grew exponentially until, by the early 1800s, one in five adult males was engaged in some form of military service; war and coloniza- tion influenced employment and wage levels, credit availability, and the pace of industrialization; monetary investment in empire could even become a kind of peoples' capitalism: the East India Company, especially, sold stock across a wide social spectrum and to both sexes.51 Moreover, imperial expansion provided limited opportunities for Britain's disadvantaged, particularly for its Celtic disadvantaged. When the French Saint-Simonian Gustave D'Eichthal toured Britain in 1828, it seemed to him that there was "hardly a family ... which does not have someone overseas."52

Thus large sections of the British public were in a position to have some sense of external affairs and their consequences. This is one reason why narrow diplomatic history simply will not suffice. There was no secretary of state with discrete responsibility for war and colonies until 1794; and, even after that date, bureaucratic departments and the cabinet could rarely determine the formulation and execution of foreign policy in isolation from domestic politics, prejudices, and lobbies. One cannot understand the succession of Anglo-French wars without devoting some consideration to popular xenophobia and anti- Catholicism, particularly as trumpeted by the press.53 The outbreak of the war of Jenkin's Ear in 1739, the discussions surrounding the Peace of Paris in 1763, the government's presentation of its American policy before and after 1775, and the withdrawal of the Orders in Council before another American War in 1812 were all influenced by mercantile and commercial lobbies, both in London and in the provinces.54 So one insular rationale for paying more attention to Britain's world role in this period must be that it will enrich our understanding of power and social relations at home.

Throughout this article the words "England" and "Britain" have

51 Philip Lawson is currently examining investment in the East India Co. Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793-1815 (London, 1979).

52 Barrie M. Ratcliffe and W. H. Chaloner, eds., A French Sociologist Looks at Britain (Manchester, 1977), p. 65.

53 See G. A. Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper, 1700-1760 (Oxford, 1962); Colin Haydon, "Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth Century England, c.1714-c.1780" (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1985).

54 See, e.g., J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-war Liberalism in England, 1793-1815 (Cambridge, 1982).

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been used advisedly; but too often they are employed as though these nations were synonymous. Much of what passes as British history has been written only from the papers and perspectives of the English; and the resurgence of Celtic nationalism since the 1950s has tended to complement rather than reverse this parochialism. Many of the best historians at work in Wales and Scotland confine their research to their own nations' past, and a minority restrict their publications to the Welsh or Gaelic language.55 Some, but only some, of this historiographical separatism is justified by eighteenth-century events. Alex- ander Murdoch and Bruce Lenman have shown, for example, that London-based governmental and military authority had only limited influence over Scotland's political and social organization until the 1750s.56 Nonetheless, as the century advanced, English cultural, political, and economic influence did increasingly penetrate the Celtic fringe. So how one should approach and reconstruct the period's Brit- ish history becomes a valid, complex, and emotive question.

In a series of important articles, J. G. A. Pocock has urged that it should be written in terms of "an English domination of associated insular and Atlantic cultures" and consequently incorporate the Amer- ican and Irish colonial experience.57 As Pocock and others have proved, this is both a feasible and a very productive approach in the history of political thought. Many political pamphlets published in London were immediately copied in Dublin, Edinburgh, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia; and print also carried ideas from the periphery of the empire to its center, sometimes at an even greater pace. Celtic and colonial writers like William Molyneux, Lord Molesworth, Edmund Burke, Thomas Gordon, Richard Price, Benjamin Franklin, and Tom Paine were crucial to the ideological and linguistic evolution of English opposition argument.58

55 This practice is linguistically justified, but it severely curtails accessibility. Recent surveys containing good bibliographies are Bruce Lenman, Integration, Enlightenment, and Industrialization: Scotland, 1746-1832 (London, 1981); and Prys Morgan, A New History of Wales: The Eighteenth Century Renaissance (Llandybie, 1981).

56 A. J. Murdoch, The People Above (Edinburgh, 1980); Bruce Lenman, The Jaco- bite Risings in Britain, 1689-1746 (London, 1980); but see J. A. Shaw, The Management of Scottish Society, 1707-1764 (Edinburgh, 1983).

57 J. G. A. Pocock, "1776: The Revolution against Parliament," in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton, N.J., 1980), p. 266. See also J. G. A. Pocock, "British History: A Plea for a New Subject," New Zealand Historical Journal 8 (1974): 3-21 (reprinted in Journal of Modern History 47 [1975]: 601- 21), and "The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject," American Historical Review 87 (1982): 311-36.

58 For one aspect of this, see Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (Oxford, 1984).

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But when examining political and social organization, Pocock's ambitious definition of Britain may be less useful than the familiar trio of England, Scotland, and Wales-always remembering that, for many eighteenth-century developments, the trio became a quartet with Ire- land. The prime need here is to test and refine the thesis-most co- gently expressed in Michael Hechter's Internal Colonialism-that the Celtic nations have always been consciously remodeled by London in an English image and to suit English needs.59 To an extent this process indubitably did occur in the eighteenth century. By the early 1800s there was a United Kingdom landed elite, linked by intermarriage, common investment patterns, a London-based social life, and the House of Lords. Similarly, the urban development of Dublin, Cork, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Swansea, and Cardiff led to emulation of English commercial practices and values and metropolitan fashions and culture.60

But Celtic passivity should not be exaggerated. As Prys Morgan has shown for eighteenth-century Wales, invading English influence could actually hasten the assertion (and at times the invention) of an indigenous Celtic culture.61 Moreover, the exploitation between En- gland and her Celtic neighbors was not unilateral. Many Welsh and Scottish plebeians clamored for English instruction, not because they were repudiating their own languages or acquiescing in the hegemony of their anglicized landlords, but because they wanted access to a wider labor market. The bourgeoisie and minor gentry were equally concerned that their participation in a wider British patriotism should bring them profit. Scottish doctors used their superior medical training to oust Englishmen from lucrative practices in the south; Irish and Scottish army officers were disproportionately active in the making of the Indian empire and were rewarded with a disproportionate amount of its patronage.62 For these peripheral peoples, as for many English plebeians, the slow emergence of a genuinely British patriotism and nation-state may have represented opportunity, not official orthodoxy and oppression.63

59 Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley, 1975).

60 See, e.g., Jenkins (n. 34 above). 61 Prys Morgan, "From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the

Romantic Period," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 15-42.

62 See E. Ingram, ed., Two Views of British India: The Private Correspondence of Mr. Dundas and Lord Wellesley, 1798-1801 (Bath, n.d.).

63 I have developed this argument in "Whose Nation?" (n. 38 above).

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V. Conclusion

Lord Macaulay once wrote that "even to educated people" eighteenth-century England was "almost a terra incognita." Yet he also believed that the years between the constitutional revolutions of 1688 and 1832 could be presented to the public as a patriotic triumph, as a period of progress in civil rights, in religious toleration, in commercial and cultural enterprise, and, naturally, in imperial expansion.64 We may mock or we may envy Macaulay's Whiggish and chauvinistic certainties; yet, in one sense at least, his historiographical instinct was sound. He realized that the eighteenth century in Britain, unlike the seventeenth century, lacked a central, defining event. Therefore historians had to create and impose their own unifying themes so as to make the period accessible to a wider audience. If that audience has proved increasingly hard to find, it is primarily because Britons today no longer view their past in Macaulay's complacent terms. The eighteenth century has lost its only homogeneous interpretation and has yet to find a satisfactory alternative role.

What that role should be is still unclear. There is a danger that the period's multiform complexity will be violated by scholars eager to impose their own crude and facile schemas. But what is certain is that eighteenth-century British history needs to be examined with wide- ranging categories in mind. The significance throughout these years of the state, of war, of empire, of nationalism, of demography, of geogra- phy, and, indeed, of gender stands in need of rigorous yet confident analysis. Such research strategies would integrate Britain's rather insular historiography with European scholarship and might halt its recession in the world at large. For British history today is no longer auto- matically taught at Commonwealth schools and universities and is vanishing from many American campuses. If it is to survive and flour- ish in the future, then, like many other British exports, it will need to be redesigned for the open market. Such an approach to history will probably appall some purists; but one doubts if it would have shocked eighteenth-century Britain. That society practiced self-interested ex- pansionism so as to win a dominant place in the world. If its historians practice only "Little Englandism," they will have only themselves to blame-and few but themselves for an audience.

64 Sir Charles Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay's History of England (London, 1938), pp. 5-7.

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Re-Viewing the Eighteenth Century || The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British History