eighteenth century Archives

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 14

This volume, which supplements the main chronological series of The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, contains 252 letters written to and from Jeremy Bentham, 19 letters written to and from individuals other than Bentham but containing material of biographical interest, and the will made by Bentham on 17 August 1785. The letters have either never before been published or been only partially published in previous volumes of The Correspondence. A large number of the letters were written by Bentham’s brother Samuel on his journey to Russia and during his sojourn in Russia, covering the years 1779 to 1791. This meticulously researched and richly annotated volume contains much new information of biographical interest and deepens our knowledge of Bentham’s relationship with his family, with the panopticon penitentiary scheme, and with such ‘disciples’ as Étienne Dumont, Henry Bickersteth, and Leicester Stanhope. Of particular interest will be correspondence with Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, Sir Samuel Romilly, Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, and John Quincy Adams.

Classics and Race

Classics and Race: A historical reader provides scholars and students with an exploratory intellectual history of the complex relationships between Classics and racist/anti-racist thought-systems. It collects together a series of readings of historical primary sources from the late medieval period until the mid-twentieth century, bringing to light how the classical tradition and post-ancient constructions of race have informed each other. Each reading is accompanied by an essay, written by a leading specialist who offers a discussion of the primary source.

The volume is arranged chronologically, from the late medieval period to the Renaissance, crucial for understanding classical humanism, and on to the eighteenth century with texts foundational to the modern emergence of classical studies as a discipline and its relationship to the transatlantic slave trade. The essays show how the classical tradition has continuously been structured by debates about race, racism and anti-racism. Including voices from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe and North and South America, the essays demonstrate why the primary text is important for understanding this intellectual and cultural history, and the global reach of the classical tradition.

No Country for Travellers?

No Country for Travellers? explores the rise and nature of British travel to Spain and Portugal between 1760 and 1820, across a region that is conventionally overlooked in studies of British travel to Europe. Drawing on extensive archival and printed sources left by travellers in the period, Rosemary Sweet and Richard Ansell reveal the unheralded significance of the two countries to eighteenth-century British culture, and their attraction as destinations long before the Peninsular War and nineteenth-century romanticism. Along the way, the book’s compelling narrative reveals the realities of Iberian travel, the different itineraries that travellers followed, the place of Spanish and Portuguese cities in the British imagination, and the importance of mediators in cultural exchange, on the Iberian side as well as the British. The travellers’ memoirs reflect changing perceptions of Spain and Portugal as modernisation raised new hopes that vied with pessimism and ancient prejudice, and also the persistence of cultural stereotypes, while the counterintuitive relationship between civilian travel and armed conflict emerges through a case study of the Peninsular War. Finally, focusing on contemporary fascination with the Alhambra in Granada, the authors examine the rise of British interest in Iberia’s Islamic history, with its significance for contemporary understandings of ‘Europe’.

Global Goods and the Country House

Global goods were central to the material culture of eighteenth-century country houses. Across Europe, mahogany furniture, Chinese wallpapers and Indian textiles formed the backdrop to genteel practices of drinking sweetened coffee, tea and chocolate from Chinese porcelain. They tied these houses and their wealthy owners into global systems of supply and the processes of colonialism and empire.

Global Goods and the Country House builds on these narratives, and then challenges them by decentring our perspective. It offers a comparative framework that explores the definition, ownership and meaning of global goods outside the usual context of European imperial powers. What were global goods and what did they mean for wealthy landowners in places at the ‘periphery’ of Europe (Sweden and Wallachia), in the British colonies of North America and the Caribbean, or in the extra-colonial context (Japan or Rajasthan)? By addressing these questions, this volume offers fresh insights into the multi-directional flow of goods and cultures that enmeshed the eighteenth-century world. And by placing these goods in their specific material context – from the English country house to the princely palaces of Rajasthan – we gain a better understanding of their use and meaning, and of their role in linking the global and the local.

Fonthill Recovered

Fonthill, in Wiltshire, is traditionally associated with the writer and collector William Beckford who built his Gothic fantasy house called Fonthill Abbey at the end of the eighteenth century. The collapse of the Abbey’s tower in 1825 transformed the name Fonthill into a symbol for overarching ambition and folly, a sublime ruin. Fonthill is, however, much more than the story of one man’s excesses. Beckford’s Abbey is only one of several important houses to be built on the estate since the early sixteenth century, all of them eventually consumed by fire or deliberately demolished, and all of them oddly forgotten by historians. Little now remains: a tower, a stable block, a kitchen range, some dressed stone, an indentation in a field.

Fonthill Recovered draws on histories of art and architecture, politics and economics to explore the rich cultural history of this famous Wiltshire estate. The first half of the book traces the occupation of Fonthill from the Bronze Age to the twenty-first century. Some of the owners surpassed Beckford in terms of their wealth, their collections, their political power and even, in one case, their sexual misdemeanours. They include Charles I’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the richest commoner in the nineteenth century. The second half of the book consists of essays on specific topics, filling out such crucial areas as the complex history of the designed landscape, the sources of the Beckfords’ wealth and their collections, and one essay that features the most recent appearance of the Abbey in a video game.

Between Design and Making

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a high point in the intersection between design and workmanship. Skilled artisans, creative and technically competent agents within their own field, worked across a wide spectrum of practice that encompassed design, supervision and execution, and architects relied heavily on the experience they brought to the building site. Despite this, the bridge between design and tacit artisanal knowledge has been an underarticulated factor in the architectural achievement of the early modern era.

Building on the shift towards a collaborative and qualitative analysis of architectural production, Between Design and Making re-evaluates the social and professional fabric that binds design to making, and reflects on the asymmetry that has emerged between architecture and craft. Combining analysis of buildings, archival material and eighteenth-century writings, the authors draw out the professional, pedagogical and social links between architectural practice and workmanship. They argue for a process-oriented understanding of architectural production, exploring the obscure centre ground of the creative process: the scribbled, sketched, hatched and annotated beginnings of design on the page; the discussions, arguments and revisions in the forging of details; and the grappling with stone, wood and plaster on the building site that pushed projects from conception to completion.