Reprint of the original, first published in 1845.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1845.

In 1701, Frederick I crowned himself the first King in Prussia. This title required a process of royal status construction in conjunction with other European rulers, and Frederick found his most willing partners in the English monarchy. This volume examines their ceremonial and military cooperation. Diplomatic ceremonial was the medium through which the English state and its representatives recognised the new royal rank of the Hohenzollern dynasty. In exchange, Frederick engaged in extensive military cooperation with the English in the War of the Spanish Succession. Yet English statesmen and diplomats also instrumentalised Anglo-Prussian relations for their own status production, furthering their careers and elevating their rank via the symbolic construction of Prussian royal dignity. This book investigates this reciprocal construction of status and rank, exploring the aims and actions of actors involved, and assessing the extent to which they succeeded. Consequently, this book represents an actor-centred work of ‘new diplomatic history’ that simultaneously reinterprets the reign of Frederick I and assesses a crucial yet understudied chapter in the rise of Prussia. This book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern diplomatic history, as well as general readers interested in the history of England and Prussia.

Scholars of British America generally conclude that the early eighteenth-century Anglo-American empire was commercial in economics, liberal in politics, and parochial in policy, somnambulant in an era of “salutary neglect,” but Stephen Saunders Webb here demonstrates that the American provinces, under the spur of war, became capitalist, coercive, and aggressive, owing to the vigorous leadership of career army officers, trained and nominated to American government by the captain general of the allied armies, the first duke of Marlborough, and that his influence, and that of his legates, prevailed through the entire century in America. Webb’s work follows the duke, whom an eloquent enemy described as “the greatest statesman and the greatest general that this country or any other country has produced,” his staff and soldiers, through the ten campaigns, which, by defanging France, made the union with Scotland possible and made “Great Britain” preeminent in the Atlantic world. Then Webb demonstrates that the duke’s legates transformed American colonies into provinces of empire. Marlborough’s America, fifty years in the making, is the fourth volume of The Governors-General.