Abstract
During the eighteenth century, trade, discovery, warfare and settlement took Britons to all parts of the world. From the very beginning of the expansionist process, those extending British maritime and commercial enterprise beyond European waters and into the wider world had directed their energies and resources towards the east as well as the west, and towards the south as well as the north. As a result, although the overseas footholds established by the British were often uncertain and sometimes short-lived, they gradually began to constitute an empire whose chief characteristics were its diversity and widely scattered distribution. For all the obvious importance of trade and settlement in the Atlantic world, activity in Africa, India and the Pacific region was increasingly recognized as defining the full extent of British overseas ambition. Britain proved to be rather more successful than France, Holland and Spain in maintaining at least a token presence in all of the main spheres of European overseas interest, and it gradually became evident to Britons that their empire was taking a form that was unlike any other, past or present. Always seeking out comparisons and contrasts with the empires of ancient Greece, Rome and Persia, commentators duly noted that Britain was the first to exert influence in all parts of the globe.
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Notes
For recent discussions of the increasingly central place of empire in eighteenth-century political consciousness, see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995)
and Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire. British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2000).
For the part played by the empire in the creation of a British identity, see the hotly debated study by Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992).
P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000 (London, second edition, 2001), esp. pp. 23–103.
David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community (Cambridge, 1995).
Holden Furber, John Company at Work: a Study of European Expansion in India in the Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1951), p. 159.
P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914 (London, 1993), pp. 467–8.
For a critical discussion of gentlemanly capitalism in an eighteenth-century metropolitan context, see H.V. Bowen, Elites, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire, 1688–1775 (Basingstoke, 1996), passim.
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), p. 8.
H.V. Bowen, ‘British Conceptions of Global Empire, 1756–1783’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26 (1998), pp. 1–27.
This emerges from a recent study of the late-eighteenth-century press, Jeremy R. Osborn, ‘India, Parliament and Press under George III: a study of English attitudes towards the East India Company and empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (University of Oxford D. Phil. thesis, 1999).
For a detailed study of this theme, see P.J. Marshall and Glyndwr William, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 1982).
See H.V. Bowen, ‘Perceptions from the Periphery: Colonial American views of Britain’s Asiatic empire, 1756–1783’ in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (eds), Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the New World, 1500–1820 (New York, 2001).
C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989), 100–32.
T.H. Breen, ‘An Empire of Goods. The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776’, Journal of British Studies, XXV (1986); Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740. An exploration of communication and community (New York, 1986).
There is a vast and growing literature on this subject, but for a detailed and influential elaboration on these themes, see Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness. The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988).
Cary Carson, ‘The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: why demand?’ in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (eds), Of Consuming Interests. The Style of Li fe in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 1994), p. 690.
Richard L. Bushman, ‘American High-style and Vernacular Cultures’, in Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole (eds), Colonial British America. Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984), p. 359. Bushman’s views are discussed further in his The Refinement of America, Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992).
Ian K. Steele, ‘The Empire and Provincial Elites. An Interpretation of Some Recent Writings on the English Atlantic, 1675–1740’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, VIII (1980), 18.
Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), pp. 118, 132;
Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves. The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986), pp. 276–7.
For discussions of this process in Britain, see Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class. Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London, 1989), pp. 5–9;
Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Oben Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 23–5.
See, for example, the cases cited in Robert ErBrown and B. Katherine Brown, Virginia, 1705–1786. Democracy or Aristocracy? (East Lansing, 1956), pp. 34–42.
This was most obviously reflected in some of the practices associated with debt, creditworthiness and business agreements. In some contexts, the form taken by such arrangements was entirely based upon a gentleman’s social standing and his word of honour. For a discussion of this with reference to the Chesapeake planter elite, see T.H. Breen, Tobacco Culture. The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton, 1986).
Edwin J. Perkins, ‘The Entrepreneurial Spirit in Colonial America: the foundations of modern business history’, Business History Review, LXIII (1989), 160–86.
See, in general, Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, pp. 11–138; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, pp. 92–100; Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, pp. 261–313; Paul G.E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore. From tobacco to grain (Ithaca, 1980), pp. 120–67.
For the relationships within families and the lifestyles of the Virginia and Maryland gentry, see Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House. Planter Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, 1980).
For details of the general improvement in living standards in the Chesapeake after the 1680s, see Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, ‘The Standard of Living in the Colonial Chesapeake’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, XLX (1988), 135–59 and idem, ‘Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior’.
Aubrey C. Land, ‘Economic Base and Social Structure. The Northern Chesapeake in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Economic History, XXV (1965), 639–54; idem, ‘Economic Behavior in a Planting Society. The Eighteenth-century Chesapeake’, Journal of Southern History, XXXIII (1967), 469–85; John Bezis Selfa, ‘Planter Industrialists and Iron Oligarchs. A comparative prosopography of early Anglo-America ironmasters’, Business and Economic History, XXIII, 66–7.
Clemens, Atlantic Economy, pp. 134–5. For the development of varying patterns of diversification evident among the elite of Maryland, see Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony. Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720 (Princeton, 1982), pp. 79–91.
See, for example, Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1955), pp. 101–2, 134–42, 192–7;
Virginia B. Harrington, The New York Merchant on the Eve of the Revolution (1935, reprinted Gloucester, MA, 1964), pp. 11–37, 126–63;
Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise. Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, 1986), pp. 11–164. For a recent discussion of the material world of these individuals and their influence on those around them, see Carson, ‘The Consumer Revolution’, pp. 607–10.
Sung Bok Kim, ‘A New Look at the Great Landlords of Eighteenth-century New York’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. series, XXVII (1970), 579–614 (esp. 595–600).
Alan Gallay, The Formation of a Planter Elite. Jonathan Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens, GA, 1989).
For the development of elite culture and the adaptation of the gentlemanly ideal to conditions in this region, see Richard Waterhouse, A New World Gentry. The Making of a Merchant and Planter Class in South Carolina, 1670–1770 (New York, 1989).
P.J. Marshall, ‘The White Town of Calcutta under the Rule of the East India Company’, Modern Asian Studies, 34, 2 (2000), 308–9.
For studies of British social life in India during this period see, for example, Percival Spear, The Nabobs. The Social Life of the English in Eighteenth-century India (Oxford, 1932; new impression, 1980)
and S.C. Ghosh, The Social Condition of the British Community in Bengal 1757–1800 (Leiden, 1970), republished as The British in Bengal. A study of the British society and life in the late eighteenth century (New Delhi, 1998).
For the long-term evolution of the Company state and comparisons with the British domestic state, see C.A. Bayly, ‘The British Military—Fiscal State and Indigenous Resistance. India 1750–1820’ in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War. Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994), 325–30.
Furber, John Company at Work; idem, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient 1600–1800 (Minneapolis, 1976). For the importance of private trade, see also P.J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: the British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Centwy (Oxford, 1976)
and I.B. Watson, Foundations for Empire: English Private Trade in India 1659–1760 (New Delhi, 1980).
Amales Tripathi, Trade and Finance in the Bengal Presidency 1793–1833 (2nd revised edition, Calcutta, 1979), pp. 79–80.
P.J. Marshall, ‘Private British Trade in the Indian Ocean before 1800’, in Ashin Das Gupta and M.N. Pearson (eds), India and the Indian Ocean 1500–1800 (paperback edition, New Delhi, 1999), 299.
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Bowen, H.V. (2002). Gentlemanly Capitalism and the Making of a Global British Empire: Some Connections and Contexts, 1688–1815. In: Gentlemanly Capitalism, Imperialism and Global History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919403_2
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