Over the course of the long 18th century, many of England's grandest country houses became known for displaying noteworthy architecture and design, large collections of sculptures and paintings, and expansive landscape gardens and parks. Although these houses continued to function as residences and spaces of elite retreat, they had powerful public identities: increasingly accessible to tourists and extensively described by travel writers, they began to be celebrated as sites of great importance to national culture. This book examines how these identities emerged, repositioning the importance of country houses in 18th-century Britain and exploring what it took to turn them into tourist attractions. Drawing on travel books, guidebooks, and dozens of tourists' diaries and letters, it explores what it meant to tour country houses such as Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth, Wilton, Kedleston and Burghley in the tumultuous 1700s. It also questions the legacies of these early tourists: both as a critical cultural practice in the 18th century and an extraordinary and controversial influence in British culture today, country-house tourism is a phenomenon that demands investigation.

Between 1750 and 1840, the home took on unprecedented social and emotional significance. Focusing on the design, decoration, and reception of a range of elite and middling class homes from this period, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 demonstrates that the material culture of domestic life was central to how this function of the home was experienced, expressed, and understood at this time. Examining craft production and collection, gift exchange and written description, inheritance and loss, it carefully unpacks the material processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries' social and emotional lives. The first book on its subject, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects. Utilising extensive archival research; visual, material, and textual analysis; and histories of emotion, sociability, and materiality, it sheds light on the decoration and reception of a broad array of domestic spaces. In so doing, it writes a new history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century domestic space, establishing the materiality of the home as a crucial site for identity formation, social interaction, and emotional expression.

A richly illustrated exploration of how late Georgian gardens associated with medical practitioners advanced science, education, and agricultural experimentation As Britain grew into an ever-expanding empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new and exotic botanical specimens began to arrive within the nation's public and private spaces. Gardens became sites not just of leisure, sport, and aesthetic enjoyment, but also of scientific inquiry and knowledge dissemination. Medical practitioners used their botanical training to capitalize on the growing fashion for botanical collecting and agricultural experimentation in institutional, semipublic, and private gardens across Britain. This book highlights the role of these medical practitioners in the changing use of gardens in the late Georgian period, marked by a fluidity among the ideas of farm, laboratory, museum, and garden. Placing these activities within a wider framework of fashionable, scientific, and economic interests of the time, historian Clare Hickman argues that gardens shifted from predominately static places of enjoyment to key gathering places for improvement, knowledge sharing, and scientific exploration.

A Cultural History of Shopping was a Library Journal Best in Reference selection for 2022. The 'consumer revolution' of the 18th century has been the subject of much debate among historians but it seems clear there was also a 'retail revolution': a period of unprecedented growth in material goods was accompanied by a proliferation of retail spaces and techniques which brought new fashions and imported commodities to the homes of consumers. Governments responded to a growing culture of polite and civilized behavior across society by stimulating urban renewal for leisure and shopping: new pavements, street lighting, green promenades, theatres, coffee houses, and adjacent shopping streets were laid-out everywhere in Europe. As the 18th century drew to its close, 'shopping' had become a publicly accepted and celebrated leisure pursuit, gaining its proper meaning in multiple languages. A Cultural History of Shopping in the Age of Enlightenment presents an overview of the period with themes addressing practices and processes; spaces and places; shoppers and identities; luxury and everyday; home and family; visual and literary representations; reputation, trust and credit; and governance, regulation and the state.

The eighteenth-century home, in terms of its structure, design, function, and furnishing, was a site of transformation – of spaces, identities, and practices. Home has myriad meanings, and although the eighteenth century in the common imagination is often associated with taking tea on polished mahogany tables, a far wider world of experience remains to be introduced. At Home in the Eighteenth Century brings together factual and fictive texts and spaces to explore aspects of the typical Georgian home that we think we know from Jane Austen novels and extant country houses while also engaging with uncharacteristic and underappreciated aspects of the home. At the core of the volume is the claim that exploring eighteenth-century domesticity from a range of disciplinary vantage points can yield original and interesting questions, as well as reveal new answers. Contributions from the fields of literature, history, archaeology, art history, heritage studies, and material culture brings the home more sharply into focus. In this way At Home in the Eighteenth Century reveals a more nuanced and fluid concept of the eighteenth-century home and becomes a steppingstone to greater understanding of domestic space for undergraduate level and beyond.

This book shows how cultural production derived from, or in anticipation of, conflict can be used to create specific social identities, national histories, and contemporary concepts of memory in Britain and Australia. Studies on the politics of cultural production have usually focussed on one conflict, or on one particular cultural medium, at a time. This volume, however, presents a broader horizon to draw attention to more popular forms of cultural production from the Great War up to and including its Centenary. The chapters in this volume interrogate the contentious philosophical notion that culture thrives in times of war, and expires in peace, and asks whether ‘art’, as a form of social barometer, can anticipate conflict rather than merely respond to it. This is a fascinating read for students, researchers, and academics interested in British and Australian History and its relationship with Popular Culture. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary British History.

Consumers in eighteenth-century England were firmly embedded in an expanding world of goods, one that incorporated a range of novel foods (tobacco, chocolate, coffee, and tea) and new supplies of more established commodities, including sugar, spices, and dried fruits. Much has been written about the attraction of these goods, which went from being novelties or expensive luxuries in the mid-seventeenth century to central elements of the British diet a century or so later. They have been linked to the rise of Britain as a commercial and imperial power, whilst their consumption is seen as transforming many aspects of British society and culture, from mealtimes to gender identity. Despite this huge significance to ideas of consumer change, we know remarkably little about the everyday processes through which groceries were sold, bought, and consumed. In tracing the lines of supply that carried groceries from merchants to consumers, Sugar and Spice reveals how changes in retailing and shopping were central to the broader transformation of consumption and consumer practices, but also questions established ideas about the motivations underpinning consumer choices. It demonstrates the dynamic nature of eighteenth-century retailing; the importance of advertisements in promoting sales and shaping consumer perceptions, and the role of groceries in making shopping an everyday activity. At the same time, it shows how both retailers and their customers were influenced by the practicalities and pleasures of consumption. They were active agents in consumer change, shaping their own practices rather than caught up in a single socially-inclusive cultural project such as politeness or respectability.

With an Afterword by Theodore Koditschek A number of important developments and discoveries across the British Empire's imperial landscape during the nineteenth century invited new questions about human ancestry. The rise of secularism and scientific naturalism; new evidence, such as skeletal and archaeological remains; and European encounters with different people all over the world challenged the existing harmony between science and religion and threatened traditional biblical ideas about special creation and the timeline of human history. Advances in print culture and voyages of exploration also provided researchers with a wealth of material that contributed to their investigations into humanity’s past. Historicizing Humans takes a critical approach to nineteenth-century human history, as the contributors consider how these histories were shaped by the colonial world, and for various scientific, religious, and sociopolitical purposes. This volume highlights the underlying questions and shared assumptions that emerged as various human developmental theories competed for dominance throughout the British Empire.

The great age of European ceramic design began around 1500 and ended in the early 19th century with the introduction of large-scale production of ceramics. In this illustrated history, with nearly 300 color and black and white photos and reproductions, curator Howard Coutts considers the main stylistic trends�Renaissance, Mannerism, Oriental, Rococo, and Neoclassicism�as they were represented in such products as Italian Majolica, Dutch Delftware, Meissen and S�vres porcelain, Staffordshire, and Wedgwood pottery. He pays close attention to changes in eating habits over the period, particularly the layout of a formal dinner, and discusses the development of ceramics as room decoration, the transmission of images via prints, marketing of ceramics and other luxury goods, and the intellectual background to Neoclassicism.

In times in which global governance in its various forms, such as human rights, international trade law, and development projects, is increasingly promoted by transnational economic actors and international institutions that seem to be detached from democratic processes of legitimation, the question of the relationship between international law and empire is as topical as ever. By examining this relationship in historical contexts from early modernity to the present, this volume aims to deepen current understandings of the way international legal institutions, practices, and narratives have shaped specifically imperial ideas about and structures of world governance. As it explores fundamental ways in which international legal discourses have operated in colonial as well as European contexts, the book enters a heated debate on the involvement of the modern law of nations in imperial projects. Each of the chapters contributes to this emerging body of scholarship by drawing out the complexity and ambivalence of the relationship between international law and empire. They expand on the critique of western imperialism while acknowledging the nuances and ambiguities of international legal discourse and, in some cases, the possibility of counter-hegemonic claims being articulated through the language of international law. Importantly, as the book suggests that international legal argument may sometimes be used to counter imperial enterprises, it maintains that international law can barely escape the Eurocentric framework within which the progressive aspirations of internationalism were conceived