History: The Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Architectural history has much to learn from the field of history, such as a more thoughtful self-consciousness about matters of evidence and periodization, narrative and causal ity, agency and structure. But these general methodological issues are not my concern here. Rather, I start from Nancy Stieber's questions: What can we learn from those study ing space and the built environment in other disciplines and, in turn, what can we teach them?1 Ultimately, it is Stieber's second question, What can we teach them?, that interests me most. Critical for our discipline is the further question, What can architectural history teach history, that history might not learn by other means? As example I take a spatiotemporal unit of history with which there is a rich architectural correspondence: the period in British history denominated the eighteenth defined to stretch roughly from the Glorious Rev olution of 1688, when William Ill's ascendance launched Protestantism's and Whiggery's dominance, to the Reform Act crisis of 1830-32, which marks the eclipse of Britain's ancien r?gime. Recent work by architectural historians Bar bara Arciszewska, Dana Arnold, and Elizabeth McKellar invokes by name the long eighteenth century, but without the aim of explicating the period's historiographical issues, its lessons for architectural history, or the lessons architec tural historians might conversely teach historians. To sketch out these matters will help architectural history learn from (and then teach to) the long eighteenth century. Historians today identify a series of themes central to Britain's long eighteenth century. First, the period has come to be identified with linked consumer and financial revolu tions in which an expanding domestic marketplace for goods, services, and credit was changing British society irreversibly.2 Historians focus both on the rise of con sumption among the general middling sort as well as on the roles of London's powerful financial elite, a cosmopolitan plutocracy that challenged traditional landed interests at the economic, political, and moral levels but whose iden tity and extra-commercial activities remain opaque despite a wealth of historiographical interest.3 Surprisingly, histo rians and architectural historians have largely left architec ture out of their discussion of the long eighteenth century's consumer and financial revolutions. This despite the built environment's obviously important role in accommodating institutions of change, from assembly halls to banks; in sym bolizing the rising classes' cultural identities at home, work, and play; and in ameliorating the shock of the new by over laying the virtues of familiar order onto the unnerving fren zies of modern capitalism, as in the classicized market spaces of the City of London. A second related theme involves what historian Kath