Nabobs: Empire and identity in eighteenth-century Britain (review)

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Nabobs Revisited: A Cultural History of British Imperialism and the Indian Question in Late‐Eighteenth‐Century Britain

Reviewed by: The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain Patricia Meyer Spacks (bio) Betty A. Schellenberg. The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. x+250pp. US$80. ISBN 0–521–65060–6. This enlightening study further undermines the already tottering doctrine of "separate spheres" in eighteenth-century Britain. By examining careers rather than only individual works of female writers, Schellenberg makes a powerful case for eighteenth-century women's participation in public life. She exposes the inadequacy of literary criticism or historiography that assumes female subordination as the fact of paramount importance, and she raises far-reaching critical and historical questions. Schellenberg does not argue that female literary careers duplicated male ones. On the contrary, a conspicuous virtue of her book is its careful distinctions. Thus Sarah Fielding, a "woman of letters," can preserve an identity and imagine a career not fully professionalized, in contrast to the comparably prolific Charlotte Lennox, who saw herself and was widely seen as a professional writer. Sarah Scott deliberately obscured the extent of her literary production, in effect denying connection between her private and public life, through anonymity, pseudonymity, and disjunctive publication by various booksellers. [End Page 521] She burned her own letters and virtually disappeared from literary view: Clara Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1785) mentions Millenium Hall and The History of Sir George Ellison, but neither links them nor names their author. Frances Sheridan positioned herself to comment on public issues; Frances Brooke consciously supported a specific political agenda. The young Frances Burney fashioned an artful persona as "author," purposefully separating herself from more amateurish female writers. Possibilities for female career-shaping, Schellenberg amply demonstrates, were multifarious. Surveying women's careers, Schellenberg reminds us of the varied literary production that characterized them. Fielding not only wrote novels and that remarkable experimental fiction, The Cry; her contemporaries considered her especially distinguished for her translation of Xenophon. Lennox published a periodical, poetry, plays, and several translations, including a version of Shakespeare's sources, complete with critical commentary. Scott wrote history, as did Brooke, who also experimented with poetry, plays, and a periodical. Like their male counterparts, then, these women, writing for money, responded to market realities. Reaction to their work in reviews, Schellenberg shows, often ignored their gender. Contrary to much recent critical assumption, women writers were not universally patronized or ignored. Reviewers sought in their work, as in men's, human insight, moral sensitivity, wit, and imaginative development. When a reviewer found such qualities, he praised them. Schellenberg does not, however, claim that women's literary careers proved easy. Female authors shared men's difficulties, and they might find them—well, more difficult. Lennox, with two children and an irresponsible husband, faced urgent economic problems, which she confronted on occasion by soliciting subscriptions without producing a volume to justify them. Sarah Fielding, an unmarried gentlewoman, also financially needy, relied on the kindness of friends. Burney used The Witlings to express her annoyance about the pressures of female amateurism. Schellenberg not only describes women's literary careers, but also delineates and speculates about their cultural context. Her investigations include inquiry about the literary standards applied by eighteenth-century reviewers and about what she calls (borrowing the term from Clifford Siskin) "the Great Forgetting": the process by which female writers disappeared from the canon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The standards of the eighteenth century, she argues, might provide useful suggestions for our own evaluations of early women writers, and "the Great Forgetting" offers a cautionary tale. Previous accounts of how women became "forgotten" literary figures have stressed male efforts to regularize the canon. Schellenberg emphasizes the contributions women themselves made to the elimination of their predecessors. The famous Bluestocking correspondence of Catherine Talbot and Elizabeth Carter (published in 1809) systematically denigrates Lennox, on moral grounds, and elevates Sarah Fielding. Burney claims male but not female precursors. Frances Brooke, purportedly complaining about the devaluation of women novelists, names not a single one. Even Reeve, who mentions [End Page 522] numerous women in her genealogy of the novel, illustrates principles by which women might be "forgotten." Such instances do not add up to...

The Eighteenth Century in Indian History Robert Travers Seema Alavi , ed., The Eighteenth Century in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). Pp. 261. Rs 495. Indrani Chatterjee , ed., Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004). Pp. 302. $60.00. Rajat Datta , Society, Economy and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c. 1760-1800 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000). Pp. 376. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones , ed., A Man of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century India: The Letters of Claude Martin, 1766-1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). Pp. xi, 412. Rs 695. P. J. Marshall , ed., The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). Pp. vi, 456. Rs 650. Prasannan Parthasarathi , The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Pp. xii, 165, $70.00 (hardback). $56.00 (E-book). Norbert Peabody , Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Pp. xiii, 190, $60.00. Muzaffar Alam , The Languages of Political Islam in South Asia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). Pp. 200. $25.00 (paperback). In a famous review essay first published in 1940, the Dutch scholar J. C. van Leur challenged the relevance of the eighteenth century in Asian history. The eighteenth century, he wrote, was a "category for the periodization of time borrowed from western European and North American history," which evoked "the world of baroque and old fashioned classicism," on the one hand, and the "new bourgeois civilization," on the other. Reacting against a tendency by Dutch historians to portray eighteenth-century Indonesia through the records of the Dutch East India Company as a distant outpost of the European "age of enlightenment," van Leur urged that Asian history in the eighteenth century was still autonomous and vital. "That century did not know any superior Occident, nor any self-isolating Orient no longer progressing with it," he wrote. "It knew a mighty East, a rich [End Page 492] fabric of a strong, broad weave with a more fragile Western warp thread inserted into it at broad intervals" (van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society [Dortrect, 1983], 269, 289). J. C. van Leur may have been surprised by the resilience of the eighteenth century as a category in Indian (more often now styled South Asian) history. In truth, van Leur's strong aversion to the idea of an eighteenth century in Asia, which grew mainly out of his expertise in Indonesian history, always seemed odd from a South Asian perspective. The eighteenth century has long appeared as an obvious historical turning point in India, marked by the dramatic collapse of the Mughal empire at its start, and the equally dramatic expansion of the British empire at its end. Thus, van Leur's assertion that in eighteenth-century India "the establishment of local, even regional power by France and England did not disturb the power of the Mogol Empire more than fleetingly" was somewhat quixotic (van Leur, 273). Nonetheless, recent writing on eighteenth-century India has often gone with the grain of van Leur's determination to attend to the autonomous dynamics of Asian history, questioning the view that European expansion was necessarily the decisive motor of historical change. Even though the power of the Mughal emperors declined, new regional powers emerged, powers that could be fitted into van Leur's sense of the "rich fabric" of Asian history. If van Leur's notion of an "unbroken history in the state of Asian civilization" from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century now seems excessively monolithic and static, his conception of early modern Asian history as something more than the history of European expansion was ahead of its time. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, revisionist work about the eighteenth century formed one of the poles around which South Asian history revolved. This work was dominated by social and economic history, strongly inflected by Marxist and "Annaliste" perspectives, which sought to uncover the deep structural transformations of Indian society from the dead weight of the political history of empires. Writers on the eighteenth century tended to focus on processes of regional state...

Reviewed by: Power and the Professions in Britain, 1700–1850, and: The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England, and: Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 Geoffrey Clark Penelope J. Corfield. Power and the Professions in Britain, 1700–1850 (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Pp. 269. $85.00 cloth. Rosemary Sweet. The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Pp. 356. $90.00 cloth. Dror Wahrman. Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). $69.95 cloth. $22.95 paper. In the last twenty-five years, the eighteenth-century British middle class has attracted unprecedented scholarly attention. While it remained outside the scope of Namier’s aristocratic focus and played a faint second fiddle to the plebeian preoccupations of E. P. Thompson and his followers, the middling strata of British society have recently taken center-stage in the historiography of British society and culture in the long eighteenth century. As Dror Wahrman reminds us, however, this newly fashionable subject in fact belongs within a long intellectual tradition in which the middle class is seen as morally, socially, or politically pivotal. What distinguishes the three books under review here is their careful treatment of the “middle class” or the “middling sort” as less than coherent categories, and their acknowledgement that the social middle as a group existed primarily as a rhetorical construction with overt political purposes. This is not to say that the social history of the middling sort has in these cases simply been ablated away by the withering gusts of the linguistic turn. Quite the contrary. Penelope Corfield’s study of the rise of the professions (mainly following the senior branches of clerics, lawyers, and doctors, but also including cadet lines like teachers, engineers, and architects) provides a wealth of concrete data detailing the growth, geographical diffusion, and economic fortunes of groups which claimed genteel status and social power by virtue of their specialist knowledge. According to Corfield, lawyers and doctors were especially successful at raising their social prestige and in reinforcing their prerogatives, mainly by acquiring a substantial degree of self-regulation and consolidating themselves into professional bodies, albeit with internal hierarchies. In contrast, the sundry confessional divisions and theological rivalries of the clergy in a religiously pluralistic state prevented a similar move towards professional collaboration and self-organization. [End Page 308] The critical ability exhibited by certain professions to set formal admission and performance standards for their members was a key factor in their social elevation and that of the professions, and in their capacity to wield monopolistic power over a body of expert knowledge. For Corfield, then, the rise of the professions presents a valuable case study for testing the famous Foucauldian power/knowledge equation. Not surprisingly, Corfield’s nuanced appraisal of professional power leads her to accept Foucault’s weak claim that power expresses itself as knowlege but to reject his stronger claim that such power-generated knowlege held its subjects in thrall. True, doctors successfully pushed aside medical parsons, female practitioners, and quacks of various stripes, but they contended less successfully against an enduring tradition of self-medication and an expanding volume of satire of the profession. Yet even here, Corfield is quick to point out the power-bequeathing as well as power-diminishing effects of satire, which “was not only a tribute to their power but simultaneously a communal goad to ensure that they lived up to their pretensions” (42). Although from a sociological viewpoint the class position of the professions has always appeared ambiguous, contemporaries had little difficulty assigning them to that socially—and conceptually—amorphous grouping known as the middling sort, whose ranks were expanding in tandem with the eighteenth-century urban renaissance and the diversifying service economy upon which it was based. The number of towns in England with a population upwards of 20,000 went from three to twelve in the first three-quarters of the century and, according to Rosemary Sweet, it was the middling sort in these burgeoning urban centers that formed the social locus for both the...

Prisons today are often condemned as institutions of brutal deterrence, but they were viewed as products of benevolence and producers of goodness across the globe during most of the nineteenth and twentieth century. 1 A cathedral of modernity, the prison was embraced by local notables, county magistrates, government officials, legal experts, and political elites around the world from Paris to Rio de Janeiro and Auburn to Tokyo. Changing sensibilities towards pain, new representations of bodily integrity, humanitarian values heralded by Enlightenment thinkers, utilitarian ideas about punishment as a corrective measure, growing dissatisfaction with existing legal penalties, and revulsion at the conditions of existing jails combined towards the end of the eighteenth century in England and France to create a new conception of the prison as a total institution in which the wicked criminal could be reformed into a good citizen. While commitment to social improvement and faith in the malleable nature of humankind pervaded these early debates, the most important factor in the emergence of the prison was the political revolutions of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. During the French revolution, the fall of the Bastille symbolized the defeat of an entire ancient regime of punishment perceived to be cruel and arbitrary. A post-revolutionary mode of governance, in which legitimacy was vested in the nation rather than in a king, based its authority to punish on a code of law. Moreover, as the social hierarchies specific to traditional regimes were theoretically swept away by a new ideology of equality and fraternity, the state proclaimed a duty of care over its subjects: criminals should be punished in a humane way before being restituted to the social body. The idea of the reformative prison--producer of obedient citizens for a moral community based on the rule of law--paralleled the rise of [End Page 140] the modern state and the extension of political rights. Russia, for instance, opted for rehabilitation over corporal punishment during the era of Great Reforms, undertaking to redeem the nation's criminals in a new prison system, 2 while prison reform was embraced by the Meiji reformers in Japan after 1868. These global developments were dynamically interrelated: portraying their mission as a fight against "barbarism" and "inhumanity," prison reformers around the world operated within a comparative framework in which prison reform was seen as an indicator of a nation's "progress." The dungeon stood as an embarrassing reminder of backwardness, while the prison epitomized civilisation. Corporal punishment, arbitrary justice, and corrupt gaols were remnants of an old world, while reformed judicial systems, legal codes, and modern prisons were indicative of a new political order.

Reviews: The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective, on the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and its Aftermath, Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past, Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom?, Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama, Early Modern Civil Discourses, ‘A moving Rhetoricke’: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England,

Reviewed by: The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Paula McDowell Jennifer L. Airey (bio) Paula McDowell. The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 353. $45. We are living in a moment of profound cultural change, as the movement from print to online culture has fundamentally shifted the ways in which we access and process information and monetize written content. Set in this context, Paula McDowell’s The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain is an especially timely work, one that draws parallels between the developing technologies of the eighteenth century—in this case, the movement from oral to print culture—and our own. It is only in retrospect, McDowell argues, that we can fully understand the implications of such a monstrous cultural shift, but similarities have already emerged between eighteenth-century reactions to technological change and our own: concerns over what is being lost, fears about the democratization of access to content, and uncertainty about how to monetize new modes of information transmission. According to McDowell, the concept of the “oral” came into being in the eighteenth century as an umbrella term for a series of often unrelated concepts. Encapsulating at once beliefs about religious tradition, appropriate gender roles, and social class divides, reactions to the concept of orality in the eighteenth century offer insight into a wide variety of social and cultural attitudes. In drawing connections between the development of [End Page 494] eighteenth-century print culture and the emergence of the digital, McDowell’s book is both important and timely. As a work of scholarship on the eighteenth century, it is a masterful and often enlightening work, offering new interpretations of well-known works by authors such as Defoe, Johnson, and Swift, and engaging with previously understudied voices such as those of the Billingsgate fishwives and John “Orator” Henley. McDowell begins in her first chapter with a nuanced analysis of the concept of oral tradition as it emerged in the eighteenth century. While the word “tradition” is now used in predominantly secular ways, it had important religious resonance in the early modern period. For Catholics, who placed emphasis on the importance of priestly intercession between the individual and God, “the tradition of the church is of equal authority with scripture” (28). For Protestants, by contrast, who privileged Biblical text and the individual’s relationship with God, the concept of tradition was much more fraught. Protestants positioned scripture—and by extension writing—as “the most reliable method of preserving and communicating knowledge” (29). Of particular interest in this chapter is McDowell’s reading of Dryden; prior to his conversion, she argues, Dryden linked orality with the vulgar rabble. As a Catholic, however, he became more supportive of oral tradition, arguing in The Hind and the Panther that the Catholic Church “by Tradition’s force upheld the Truth” (39). The battle between print and oral authority was central to other eighteenth-century debates. English common law, for instance, was composed of many unwritten laws, and thus “seventeenth-century proponents of the Ancient Constitution appealed to the authority of an ancient, unwritten tradition of laws and customs to further their own political goals” (45). Meanwhile antiquarians lamented the loss of oral culture (including lower-class slang, popular ballads, and the oral poetry of the Scottish Highlands) resulting from the growth of print. Not all forms of oral transmission were viewed positively, however; the concept of old wives’ tales, for instance, reflects the disrespect in which women’s speech was consistently held. McDowell turns in chapter 2 to Swift’s treatment of speech in A Tale of a Tub. As a clergyman himself, Swift understood well the importance of dynamic oratory in the pulpit, and he suggested that Dissenters were dangerous precisely because they knew how to perform for largely illiterate audiences. Swift associated the physicality and emotion of the spoken sermon “with popular unrest and gender subversion from below” (67). Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is the subject of McDowell’s third chapter. As...

268 Max Weber Studies than declarations, legislation, and constitutions. The latter have indeterminate pur chase, and might even constitute ruses to mislead external agencies form the more pedestrian and opaque realities of state power. Each of the case studies is of high quality and refreshingly theoretically engaged (as opposed to empirical and comparative in approach). I will finish with a few criti cal comments, none of which should be taken as a reason not to read the book, which is an important antidote to the swathes of privatization literature, especially that which has resulted from consultancies for development organizations. For all the complexity, subtle continuities, and historical context, it is clear that something novel has been taking place over the past twenty years. This novelty remains underspecified in the book, although there is clearly some assumption about the global consolidation of capitalism. After all, all of the case studies derive from 'transition economies', which have been powerfully hit by neoliberal agendas. And, in many ways, the kinds of processes described in the chapters are not historically alien of capitalist development understood generally or abstractly. Many aspects of the forging of capitalism in Europe—as Adam Smith observed and critiqued—relied on favour, force and criminality, themes that Max Weber was certainly also aware of. The book would have benefited from greater depth in terms of understanding the nature of moments of significant and unstable capitalist consolidation rather than making the less ambitious contradistinction with the highly ideological representa tions of the neoliberals. And, why not include some Western case studies? I would have thought that the United States or the UK post-1989 would have fitted rather nicely into any of the three sections. Graham Harrison University of Sheffield Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modem Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Cen tury England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. xvii + 414. ISBN 0-300-10251-8. £25.00 (hbk). John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. xxiv + 466. ISBN 0-521-83648-4. £55.00 (hbk). These two densely written, ambitiously presented, provocatively argued and deeply learned books present cutting edge cultural and intellectual histories of the modern self in both eighteenth-century England, and nineteenth-century Prussia and Berlin. Both are concerned with the way in which one can understand the rise of modern 'selfhood' as both idea and historical reality in the modern period, and both are equally concerned with the interrelationship between the idea of the self and history on the other. Put another way, understanding the development of the modern self historically, and the understanding of the self as a self in history are themes that unite these books that range, nevertheless, over different geographical and chronological time periods, but this unity is what justifies their interest to readers of such a journal as Max Weber Studies. Not only was Weber profoundly interested in the develop ment of the idea of the self as a category, and of the idea of the development of the self as a creature of personality. He was also profoundly influenced, of course, by© Max Weber Studies 2008. Book Reviews 269 developments in English and German history, and these two studies throw impor tant light on both chapters, and provide telling glimpses into those areas that were of such interest to Weber. Where Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (1990) focused on providing an histori cal philosophy of selfhood, Wahrman sees his project as an historical 'epistemology' of selfhood, and wishes to pursue the argument that in the final decades of the eigh teenth century, a revolution in the concept of selfhood occurred. Ranging widely over the sentimentalist novels and manuals of moral instruction, to comparison with animal psychology and racism, social anthropology, court cases and art historical illustration, alongside the prodigiously important ideas of language acquisition and its impact, Wahrman offers a complex and theoretically sophisticated social history of selfhood and its development in his period. He is keen to show too, as others have, the multiple languages of selfhood apparent in his study, illustrating that not all stadial theorists...

Generic Networks Michael Falk PARKER, KATE, and COURTNEY WEISS-SMITH, eds. Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014. 280 pp. $80.00. COOK, DANIEL, and NICHOLAS SEAGER, eds. The Afterlives of Eighteenth Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 314 pp. £65.00. These days, everything’s a “network.” It is the most useful, and therefore, perhaps the most hackneyed metaphor of our time. But it is the only image that captures how these two new books approach literary history. At first glance, they might seem rather distinct enterprises: Parker and Weiss-Smith’s collection shows how the history of poetry and the novel were intertwined in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland; Cook and Seager’s shows how eighteenth-century novels adapted earlier texts, and how they went on to be adapted in various ways from their own time to ours. What unites these two exemplary collections is a shared approach to genre. Classic histories of eighteenth-century fiction (Ian Watt, Michael McKeon and Nancy Armstrong come to mind) sometimes give the impression that the novel is autonomous. It emerged after seventeenth-century romance. It drew on but broke away from conduct literature, journalism, and travel writing. It established its own distinct standards of literary value. But these two collections approach the eighteenth-century novel as only one genre in a complex network of genres: epic, lyric, romance, chapbook abridgements, newspaper serializations, opera, drama, film, prose anthologies, parodic history, political cartoons, and the novels of other places and times. These genres jostle and interact through history, transforming one another in unexpected ways. Both sets of editors question the “rise of the novel.” In their introduction, Parker and Weiss-Smith argue that the new novel-centered literary history “can ‘squeeze’ poetry such that it can seem out of place, conservatively backwards-looking or presciently ‘pre-Romantic’” (xv). They seek to restore some “simple realities of eighteenth-century bookstalls: poetry and novels co-existed and commingled, and the poetry predominated” (xxi). Cook and Seager do not set themselves against the “rise of the novel” so firmly, but do argue that their approach can help us to see it in [End Page 126] a new way: “The ascendency of the novel may be gauged by its saturation of other genres” (13). The novel rose less because of its intrinsic properties—interiority, realism, length, etc.—than because of its position in networks of adaptation: by the end of the eighteenth century, the novel became the primary source for many other genres, as Walter Scott swept through the opera houses of Europe; Laurence Sterne’s “beauties,” neatly anthologized, burdened the shelves; and Jane Austen flickered in packed cinema-halls or elicited sobs in tissue-strewn living rooms. Though both books adopt a networked approach to genre, the kinds of networks they envisage are rather different. In graph theory, a network comprises two elements: nodes (or vertices), the objects in the network; and edges, the links between them. In Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered, there are only two kinds of nodes—most of the essays in the collection discuss, more or less exclusively, poems and novels. But there are many kinds of edges—the essays establish many different kinds of connection between these two genres. Parker, in her contribution to the volume, shows how Eliza Haywood drew upon the mock-heroic conventions of John Dryden and Alexander Pope to stage the attempted rapes in Betsy Thoughtless. Shelley King reveals the various and subtle ways Amelia Opie integrated verse into her novels and tales, to reveal both private and public shades of her characters’ thoughts. Joshua Swidzinski compares Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Edward Young’s Night-Thoughts, arguing that both authors relied on similar techniques of polyvocal and homiletic language to represent “what Clarissa calls the ‘inwardest mind’” (163). In these three essays alone, we can see how eighteenth-century poetry could influence the novel (Parker), how poetry and the novel could be integrated (King), and how they could simply be similar in form and meaning (Swidzinski). Taken together, the ten essays of the volume reveal a remarkable range of interactions between...

Old Age in England Pat Thane The History of Old Age in England, 1600–1800, general editors: Lynn Botelho and Susannah R. Ottaway, volume editors: Anne Kugler and Ingrid Tague (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008, 2009). Part 1: vols. 1–4, pp. 1232; part 2: vols. 5–8, pp. 1584. $625.00. The history of the latter stage of life, old age, has been relatively neglected compared with that of childhood, youth, and maturity because of an assumption that survival to “old age” was rare in “the past.” Works such as Tim G. Parkin’s Old Age in the Roman World: A Cultural and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) and Shulamith Shahar’s Growing Old in the Middle Ages: “Winter Clothes Us in Shadow and Pain” (London: Routledge, 1997) have shown, however, that older people were commonplace even in the distant past and that their history holds interest. The excellent and earlier work of the editors, Lynn Botelho, Old Age and the English Poor Law, 1500–1700 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004) and Susannah R. Ottaway, The Decline of Life: Old Age in [End Page 511] Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), reinforced the message for early modern England, the period on which the volumes under review focus, when, as they put it in their general introduction to volume 1: “There were enough old people to allow for mockery and satire as well as respect and care” (xi). According to E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), with the best estimates we have and as reliable as we are likely to get, the proportion of the population aged over sixty was as high as 10 percent at the turn of the seventeenth into the eighteenth centuries, remaining above 9 percent from 1656 to 1726, then falling to 7–8 percent by the end of the eighteenth century as the birthrate rose. These are by no means negligible numbers. Another explanation for historians’ neglect of old age is the belief that, insofar as it had a history, it was a static, unchanging story well enough understood: older people were particularly valued and respected in past societies as repositories of wise counsel to the young, who, in return, cared for and protected them. This static approach has, rightly, come to be treated with skepticism. Cultural and social history offer contrary tales: for example, those of persecuted older women in the histories of witchcraft, or the dependence of older people on public relief in histories of the poor laws. Another plausible reason for the neglect, put forward by Botelho and Ottaway, is the inaccessibility of direct sources concerning old age in the past. Publications and manuscripts specifically about old age in earlier eras are relatively rare. To explore the experience of, or attitudes to, old age, it is often necessary to use sources that deal primarily with other groups or that do not obviously address germane issues. Sermons, diaries, letters, poor relief records, wills, court records, ballads, proverbs, novels, folk songs, medical texts, legal documents, etc., may unexpectedly yield evidence of the activities or others’ perceptions of ageing people. Ageing and old people lived in town and country, in all social classes, and could lead complex and diverse lives; they could figure in many different sources. A related difficulty on which the editors reflect in volume 1 is that people who would now be defined as “old” because they have reached a certain age were not necessarily so defined in early modern England. Then, stage of life was more often defined by capacity, fitness, and appearance rather than simply by passing an age-milestone—above all by the capacity to perform the normal tasks of adult life, especially work. “Old age” acquired a more rigidly chronological definition with the growth of state bureaucracies, becoming evident in the eighteenth century, as Ottaway describes, when, for example, the first civil servants received pensions at age sixty and older people “began to be considered as a social constituency in their own right” (II, x). The chronological definition of old age became more firmly fixed and largely unquestioned in...

The freshman composition course is a peculiarly American institution not shared by modern British or European universities. This study grew out of an attempt to understand why rhetoric fell from favor in the British universities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and why composition, as an course, failed to develop. It is the purpose of this study to examine writing instruction in the British universities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to understand such developments.2 Writing instruction within any society is subject to social and political influences, and nowhere is this more true than in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Britain, that territory that encompassed England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In addition, strong religious movements and a special linguistic situation during this period shaped where and how writing was taught. The eighteenth century in Britain was a period of transition as the agricultural population migrated to the cities in large numbers. Industrialization was rapid. Between 1700 and 1800, England saw the rise of the industrial centers of Manchester and Liverpool, while Scotland changed from a poor agricultural society to a relatively industrialized one with an increase in population from 84,000 to 500,000 during the nineteenth century. Preparatory schools and universities were not available or adequate. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, England had two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Although Scotland had four well-established universities, Ireland had one, and Wales none. The eighteenth century was also a period of upward mobility, and good English became a rung on the ladder. With economic stability established, the large and powerful merchant class and those aspiring to better themselves saw education in general, and language in particular, as one of the ways to move up. In response, the school teachers and grammarians, with a strong belief in rationality and rules, set out to standardize the language, firm in the beliefs that change was a sign of deterioration and that Latin was the standard by which all languages should be measured. During the period there was also a rise in nationalism, which resulted in a new reverence for language and literature. Although men and

Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions Deidre Lynch Sentimental novels are cluttered with things. The emotional attachments that people form with possessions in these mid-eighteenth-century fictions can seem as freighted with consequence as the emotional attachments that people form with each other. Indeed, modem readers of Henry Brooke's The Fool ofQuality or Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey might be pardoned for finding it hard to distinguish one sort of relationship from the other—even if normal notions of the folly of fetishism predispose us to believe that the difference between, say, ownership and friendship is a difference worth preserving. The keepsakes that clutter sentimental fiction (the lockets that protagonists wear next to their hearts; the sleeve buttons or snuffboxes that pairs of characters exchange to memorialize their first meeting or last, teary-eyed parting) work instead to collapse that difference. While they instructed their readers in emotional responsiveness, sentimentalists were more than ready to make objects of this variety—objects particularly valued because they are the surrogates for particular persons—their props. This practice marks the novelists' fashion-consciousness. On the testimony of the OED, which dates the word keepsake to 1790, it was only in the eighteenth century that keepsakes came to be identified as a distinct kind of material good. The fact that by 1790 members ofthe propertied classes had learned to want to give and to receive keepsakes from one another bespeaks the reciprocal influence EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 346 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION between eighteenth-century people's love affair with feelings, and their fascination with the new opportunities for acquisitiveness that they discovered in shops. And that new readiness to countenance superfluous expenditure that historians of this century's "consumer revolution" have recognized— people's new willingness to disregard the traditional association between luxury and vice and instead value the luxury good as a vehicle for the finer feelings—also lies behind the marketability throughout the era of a literature designed to procure for its readers the "luxury of tears."1 Writers such as Henry Brooke, Laurence Steme, Henry Mackenzie, and Sarah Scott vindicated the psychology of refinement suitable to the new consumer culture not only by finding increasingly nuanced ways of discriminating human emotions, but also by exemplifying the diversity of the portable properties that humans might feel emotional with or about. Hence the clutter. Sensibility is both the capacity to feel as others do and, as one eighteenth-century definition maintains, that "peculiar ... habitude of mind, which disposes a man to be easily moved, and powerfully affected by surrounding objects."2 The (only semi-) satiric imitator of Sterne who takes a "Sentimental Journey from Islington to Waterloo Bridge" knows he should let nothing (no thing) "escape" him: "The traveller ... should extract reflections out of a cabbage stump." Satirists were quick to note that sentimentalism invited people to be (in the standard phrase) "tremblingly alive" to dead matter.3 Such satires of sentimental animism had a point. A carriage for hire that sits alone and "unpitied" in an inn yard in Calais is able to arouse in Sterne's Parson Yorick the sense ofobligation he had been unable to muster in his earlier encounter with the Franciscan friar. "Much indeed was not to be said for it—but something might—and when a few words will rescue misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be a churl of them."4 It seems apt that Yorick's piteous words acknowledge his obligation to a désobligeant—that they personify a carriage that seats one person only. It is as if the communicative and emotive powers that sentimentalism 1 On sensibility and consumer culture see G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture ofSensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 2 "Question: Ought Sensibility to be Cherished or Repressed?" Monthly Magazine 2 (October 1796), quoted in Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 5. 3 Thomas Hood, "A Sentimental Journey from Islington to Waterloo Bridge," first published in the London Magazine, 1821; reprinted in Sterne...

Anti-Catholicism in eighteenth-century England was little studied before the 1980s. During the 1960s and 70s, political and economic- social historians displayed markedly less interest in the eighteenth century than in the seventeenth, with the ‘English Revolution’ at the latter’s core. Or they preferred to study the nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution and its spectacular modernizing transformations. Jacobitism, one notable preservative of anti-Popery, was scarcely examined by academics, who thought, as Herbert Butterfield had pronounced in 1931, that the Jacobites’ ‘adventures’ were among –the most useless things in the world’.1 Specialist ecclesiastical historians found the churches’ supposedly widespread ‘torpor’ in the eighteenth century less engaging than the religious struggles of the preceding hundred years or the deep, luminous religiosity of the Victorians. Anti-Catholicism appeared an anomaly in an England where religion seemed either cool or somnolent, and Enlightenment thinking scorned the religious fanaticism of ‘the former age’. Even the Gordon Riots no longer seemed an unequivocal recrudescence of atavistic ‘No Popery!’ fanaticism: for had not George Rude, that consummate Marxist magician, discerned in them ‘a deeper social purpose’, and produced Class Struggle from the hat?2

Reviewed by: The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, vol. 1, The English Phallus, and: The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, vol. 2, Queer Articulations Cameron McFarlane The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, vol. 1, The English Phallus. By Thomas A. King. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Pp. 328. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, vol. 2, Queer Articulations. By Thomas A. King. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Pp. 536. $65.00 (cloth). Thomas A. King’s two-volume The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750 offers a wonderfully rich, wide-ranging, and densely argued reconsideration of the emergence of gender and sexuality in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Indeed, so wide-ranging and densely argued are King’s volumes (which, together, comprise over eight hundred pages of text and detailed notes) that this short review will necessarily do an injustice to them; however, both volumes are highly recommended to anyone interested in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century English culture and in the historical formation of gender and sexuality as putatively “natural” categories. King’s study begins with a seemingly straightforward observation: traditional patriarchal society never required an investment of power and entitlement in all men because they were men; indeed, as King reminds us via Randolph Trumbach, in traditional patriarchal society, not just women and children but most men were the property of other men. While that may seem a straightforward observation, no one, I think, has so thoroughly considered its implications. In a culture so fully structured by relationships of super- and subordination, one’s sense of place, of status, of self derived from one’s proximity to—that is, one’s subjection to and dependence upon—a [End Page 563] body of power, most notably, the monarch’s, a body of power that, in turn, conferred power. The achievement of (relative) power and status was thus a practice publicly enacted between bodies, not a quality privately originating in bodies. “Male entitlement,” King writes, “was therefore tenuous, limited to certain spaces and times, a privilege to be exercised and not a bond defining men as psychologically and ideologically equivalent. Men’s sense of selfhood, it follows, was not yet properly a gendered subjectivity, if by gender we mean the subjective experience and social enactment of oneself as a member of a natural group of sex” (1:5, emphasis in original). What King traces brilliantly are the ways in which the emergence of men as a “natural group of sex” was integral to the emergence of a privatized and universalized public sphere resistant to an older order of absolutist subjection; that is, the emergence of gender and sexual subjectivities was inseparable from the political transformations of the long eighteenth century. While King builds on the work of previous scholars in the field, what sets his study apart, what makes it so surprisingly innovative, is his (re)introduction of the term “pederasty” to the discussion of the formation of modern genders and sexualities. As a form of same-sex behavior that is by definition dependent on asymmetrical relations of power, “pederasty,” for King, names “the erotic enactment of early modern subjection and thus its difference from a modern economy of heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual subjectivities” (1:25). Pederasty, that is, was a form of same-sex behavior that functioned, not inevitably in opposition to order, but to reproduce and, thus, confirm a social and political order of super- and subordination; King is exceptionally persuasive, it seems to me, in demonstrating that we have misread what is actually evidence of pederasty in the historical record—accounts of James I’s favorites, libertine poetics, for example—as evidence of private, subjective desire between men. In reading scenes of pederasty as scenes of desire “between men,” we replicate the mystification performed by the emergence of gender (that is, the occlusion of relationships of subjection)—even when the emergence of gender is our object of study. In King’s account, the surprisingly prominent rejection of sodomy we find in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries should in fact be understood as a rejection of pederasty, which, in turn, should be understood as a rejection of absolutist subjection. What...

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, n.s., Vol.XXXIII, no.2, August 2010 The Silk Road Renewed? South Asian Entrepreneurs in Uzbekistan Karen Leonard University of California, Irvine The Problem After Uzbekistan gained its independence in 1991, South Asian capitalists (Indians, Pakistanis, and Afghans) flocked to it and other struggling Central Asian economies, bringing capital, information, and technology. 1 Given that earlier, certainly in Mughal times (the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries), 2 and indeed pretty much until British, Russian, and Chinese political rivalry led to the suspension of close relations between Central Asia and the nations to the south of it during the early twentieth century, very important economic and cultural connections had existed between the Indian subcontinent and Central (or Inner) Eurasia, the renewed flow of South Asian entrepreneurs to Central Asia poses interesting problems. Is the Silk Road being re-opened? What are the relationships between Central Asian and South Asian traders and businessmen, and how have these related to state borders and policies over time? What histories are important at the present time, and how and by whom are they being formulated? In the fall of 1999 I spent three months in Uzbekistan studying Pakistani, Indian, and Afghan traders and businessmen in Central Asia. 3 This project in Central Asia expanded my interest in South Asia to a new region though one historically linked to it. I began as a tourist, interacting with South Asians in Shafiqul Islam, ‘Capitalism on the Silk Route?’, in Michael Mandelbaum (ed.), Central Asia and the World (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1994), pp.147–76. Stephen Frederic Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Richard C. Foltz, Mughal India and Central Asia (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Scott C. Levi, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550–1900 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2002); and Scott Levi (ed.), India and Central Asia: Commerce and Culture, 1500–1800 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007). The research was funded by a grant from Global Peace and Conflict Studies, University of California, Irvine, and I thank GPACS for it. ISSN 0085-6401 print; 1479-0270 online/10/020276-14 O 2010 South Asian Studies Association of Australia DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2010.493282