English Liberty Research Articles

Źródła i rola idei uprawnień naturalnych w „Pamflecie bostońskim”

For many centuries, the idea of natural rights has been one of the most important philosophical and legal concepts. Its importance results not only from the importance of the postulates but also, and perhaps above all, because it played a role in the course of changes taking place in modern times. The Boston Pamphlet is one of the first documents issued on the American continent in which revolutionary theses, in particular regarding relations with Great Britain, were formulated in the language of natural rights. The purpose of the article is to analyze the idea of the inalienable rights of the individual, which was expressed in this document. It was indicated that the revolutionary postulates of the authors of the document found as justification and intellectual foundation in a specific vision of inalienable individual rights (and more precisely in the vision proposed by John Locke). The analysis was preceded by a reference to the so-called English liberties, which allowed to place the Pamphlet and the idea of natural rights in a broader context. Attention was also drawn to the fact that although the concept of the inalienable rights of the individual was visible in earlier writings, it was brought to the fore only on the eve of the revolution. The analysis of the concept expressed in the document required the disclosure of those aspects of Locke’s doctrine that played a key role or were even transferred entirely to the content of the document.

The Weathersfield Affair

The Weathersfield Affair

Lucy Hutchinson and the Business of Memoirs

Abstract Until comparatively recently, Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs were read as a personal and private document, and, even though their significance as a primary historical source is now increasingly recognized, it is still generally assumed that they were conceived solely for circulation within her own family. Their true business, however, is with public affairs and posterity. Like the many other late seventeenth-century memoirs, they anticipate a posthumous readership, to whom they present an apologetic, justificatory, and highly partisan, account of the recent past, participating in a literary contest for the master narrative of seventeenth-century history. This argument is pursued through a comparative analysis of the Memoirs and other examples of its curious hybrid genre, part autobiography, part historiography, taking up their compositional and publishing history, their implied readership, and Hutchinson’s binary categorization of historical agents as ‘children of light and of darkness’. Unusually, Hutchinson does not identify these with the Civil War antagonists. The former, embodied in the idealized Christian gentleman John Hutchinson, fail in their ‘just defence of English liberties’ because of those on the Parliamentarian, Puritan, and republican side who betray the Good Old Cause as the Israelites betrayed Moses after their liberation. This is Hutchinson’s witness to posterity.

The History of the Search for the Author of the “Count Vorontzov Opinion” in the Context of the Perception of the British Constitutional Experience in Russia in the First Half of the 19th Century

The article is devoted to the analysis of case materials from the funds of the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GA RF) about the long-term, during 1827—1849, and persistent search by gendarmes on the orders of Nicholas I, the author of one of the drafts of the liberal “constitution”. Such actions could not be generated only by the adherence of the emperor to reactionary politics. It is possible that the principal course towards the eradication of the spirit of “English liberty” from the consciousness of the Russian nobility is explained by their desire to use another component of the British experience of state and constitutional building — the priority of evolutionary rather than revolutionary development. Nicholas I was not going to succumb to anyone's pressure, both inside the country and outside. He planned first to create a nation from among the representatives of those social groups that, from his point of view, were important for strengthening the foundations of power, then to grant the nation laws, possibly fundamental ones, and only then, on this basis, to build relationships with law-abiding subjects. The twenty-year search for the author of the criminal “constitution” is proof of this.

Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic by Brad A. Jones

Reviewed by: Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic by Brad A. Jones Liam Riordan Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic. By Brad A. Jones. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021. 330 pages. Cloth, ebook. Brad A. Jones’s Resisting Independence joins Maya Jasanoff ’s Liberty’s Exiles as the best of the recent wave of scholarship answering some of the most fundamental questions often overlooked in the vast scholarship about the American Revolution—who were the loyalists, why did they oppose the rebellion that created the United States, and why is understanding them significant? Jones focuses on popular loyalism as revealed in print culture and deploys an effective comparative analysis of four major port cities across the British Empire: New York City, Halifax, Glasgow, and Kingston. This unique selection provides a rich perspective on the British Atlantic, as Jones extends J. G. A. Pocock’s keen insights about how colonial spaces far from London made potent contributions to the meaning of “Britishness.”1 Jones achieves this by fruitfully expanding his subject to include loyalists beyond those who directly engaged rebels in the thirteen colonies that became the United States. Instead, loyalism here is a mode of conceiving and expressing Britishness in the period of significant transition from the 1760s to the 1780s, an ideological and social formation that has not been well understood due to an overemphasis on American patriots and the French Revolution. The book is well researched and skillfully written and makes several valuable revisionist arguments. Most importantly, Jones contends that popular loyalism was less authoritarian than the loyalism of British officialdom that other scholars have emphasized as a key element driving change in late eighteenth-century British imperialism, especially as part of the much-debated shift from the first to the second British Empire.2 For Jones, the historiographical emphasis on what the French Revolution meant for Britishness has overshadowed critical earlier developments, and he argues that the American Revolution spurred loyalists throughout the empire “to embrace a renewed commitment [End Page 154] to monarchy and empire and a more determined defense of their rights as British subjects” (13). A vigorous rights-based mobilization was thus not the sole province of patriots, and loyalists championed meaningful legislative reform to increase local representation and stressed the close ties between British liberty and Protestantism. The book’s revisionism is also displayed through its valuable corrective to the heavy emphasis often placed on loyalists as postwar refugees. In chapters 2 and 3, Jones argues that as early as the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, loyalism tested and changed what it meant to be British. His recasting of the Stamp Act’s repeal as “the final moments of a united British Atlantic” (43), rather than as the prologue to revolution, revealingly upends a foundational patriot teleology. He compellingly assesses imperial political culture in this period, carefully attending to how Britishness united people as well as to how local circumstances fueled differences; as he puts it, “the resurgence of British Loyalism . . . was both unifying and inherently fragile” (11). For example, Catholicism appears throughout Jones’s book as a persistent foil essential to the forging of Britishness, but the toleration established by the Quebec Act of 1774 strengthened the rebellion, as patriots effectively condemned imperial actions as pro-Catholic. The loyalist cause was also weakened in these early years by the characterization of rank-and-file rebels as fellow Britons who had been duped by a cabal of self-interested and self-proclaimed patriots. Because this interpretation imputed shallow roots to the rebellion, loyalists did not seem to need mass mobilization or severe retribution to prevail. The start of the war transformed this dynamic and shapes the key turning points and organization of the last half of the book—chapter 4 examines the outbreak of war, chapter 5 investigates its early years, and chapters 6 and 7 analyze events following the critical Franco-American alliance of 1778, whose impact “on popular conceptions of Britishness,” for Jones, is “impossible to overstate” (203). The conclusion examines local responses in the four port cities to the major British victory at the Battle of the Saintes in April...

On the Liberty of the English: Adam Smith’s Reply to Montesquieu and Hume

This essay has two purposes—first, to identify Adam Smith as intervening in the debate between Montesquieu and Hume regarding the nature, age, and robustness of English liberty. Whereas Montesquieu took English liberty to be old and fragile, Hume took it to be new and robust. Smith disagreed with both: it was older than Hume supposed, but not fragile in the way Montesquieu claimed. The reason for this was the importance of the common law in England’s legal history. Seeing this enables the essay’s second purpose: achieving a more thorough and nuanced understanding of Smith’s account of liberty. This requires us to go beyond repeating Smith’s famous claim that modern liberty was the result of the feudal barons trading away their wealth and power for inane status goods. As I demonstrate, this is only one part of a much wider story: of liberty requiring, and also being constituted by, the rise of the regular administration of justice, and ultimately the rule of law. Although Smith’s history of the English courts and common law has been almost entirely neglected by scholars, it is indispensable to understanding both his reply to Montesquieu and Hume and his wider political theory of modern freedom.

Bruce Smith and Anglo-Australian Liberalism

AbstractBruce Smith (1851–1937) was the most prominent Australian exponent of classical or ‘old’ liberalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although his political career was not particularly successful, he was notable as the foremost defender of individualism as the authentic liberal creed, exemplified by his 1887 work Liberty and liberalism. He consistently attacked new liberalism, with its acceptance of extensive state interference, and socialism, as inimical to individual liberty and national prosperity. Although he is now recognized as an important figure in the Australian liberal pantheon, there has been relatively little attention to his thought outside Australia itself, despite his extensive connections to Britain. The general trajectory of Australian liberalism from ‘individualism’ to ‘collectivism’ was mirrored in Britain from the 1880s, especially during Prime Minister William Gladstone's second and third administrations, when the radicals within the Liberal party grew in influence and the aristocratic whig moderates waned. Smith maintained close links with the British Liberty and Property Defence League, which dedicated itself to fighting against collectivism, as well as with his personal hero, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, from whom his own politics derived much influence. This article considers Smith's thought through the prism of Anglo-Australian politics.

The Liberty and the London: Fishing for guns, 1650–1665

Little has been written about the history of English underwater salvage in the mid-seventeenth century. The navy of the 1650s and the 1660s needed divers and salvagers for their expanded operations, especially during wars against the Dutch. Ships sunk deep at sea were irretrievable, but vessels lost near shore in tidal waters could yield recoverable materials. This article offers new insights into wreck recovery during the period of the Interregnum and the Restoration. It investigates the archival evidence of efforts to recover ordnance from the English naval vessels Liberty (also named Charles) that sank in the North Sea in 1650, and the London that blew up in the Thames in 1665. Despite difficult tidal and weather conditions, Robert Willis and others were able to recover several tons of bronze guns for re-use.

Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage by Jean I. Marsden

Reviewed by: Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage by Jean I. Marsden Marcie Frank Jean I. Marsden, Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage ( New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 234. $99.00 cloth. In Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage, Jean I. Marsden firmly establishes the overriding significance of affect to theater in the second half of the eighteenth century. Indeed, she treats their relations as reciprocal, going so far as to propose that theater should be understood as affect. This is because, although it is not the only vehicle for affective transfer, theater is the period's most significant one and the model for its theorization. As Marsden argues, moreover, the transfer of emotion is crucial both as the basis of response to theatrical performance and as the measure of its success. By these means, she rehabilitates plays that have long gone unappreciated because of their sentimentality. Moreover, she forges a powerful argument for the way this drama functioned in the performance of a national imaginary. Not only did the eighteenth-century stage present transfers of feeling among actors and deliver them from actors to audiences; the theater also functioned as the reference point for those moral and aesthetic theories that posited the virtue of such transfers in the concept of sympathy. Theater provided theorists Adam Smith and David Hume with a repository of examples for describing moral and aesthetic response as well as with the location in which such responses occurred. Theater thereby served as both a model for and a medium of affective exchange. Furthermore, "because of the intense emotions it excited, and because of the public venue in which those emotions were experienced, [theatre] was hailed as a source of national moral authority," making it possible for the philosophical precepts to be extended to a broad public (2). A gracious organization of materials amplifies these connections. The first two chapters treat the role of theater in Scottish Enlightenment thought and audiences' responses to Sarah Siddons in Isabella, or The Fatal Marriage after her return to the London stage in 1782. In the subsequent three chapters, Marsden turns to specific plays in order to illuminate their contributions to the national imaginary: Arthur Murphy's The Grecian Daughter (1772), Richard Cumberland's The West Indian (1771) and George Colman's Inkle and Yarico (1787), and Cumberland's The Jew (1794). In closing her book with The Jew, which remained inordinately popular well into the nineteenth century but is more of a historical curiosity to-day, [End Page 484] Marsden follows the affective logic of sentimental nationalism that has been thoroughly explored in contexts other than the British stage, most prominently in Lauren Berlant's genealogy of American liberalism.1 Though the study of affect has sparked divergent, indeed theoretically incompatible, approaches to literary and cultural study, spurred on in part by Berlant, Marsden uses "feeling," "emotion," and "affect" interchangeably at no particular cost to her analysis, a practice I follow here for the sake of brevity.2 Marsden underplays the congruences of her work in theater studies with other branches of eighteenth-century studies and other areas of the profession. If she thereby accrues some advantages, including avoiding the weeds of terminological debate, she also sometimes misses the opportunity to make connections that would reinforce the significance of her conclusions. In compelling readings, Marsden attends to the positions occupied by women, enslaved people, and ethnic minorities as they performed the contradictions inherent in British ideals of duty, liberty, and toleration. Siddons's Euphrasia, the dutiful Grecian daughter who keeps her father alive by feeding him from her own breast, puts gender in the service of patriarchy by projecting a national ideal founded in filial, specifically daughterly, piety. As Marsden points out, this performance led to Siddons being painted as the Tragic Muse, first by Thomas Cook in 1783 and then by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1784 (97). The West Indian and Inkle and Yarico navigate differently the difficulties of celebrating a British liberty achieved through imperial expansion and supported by slavery. The Jew dramatizes the evils of antisemitism and encourages the tolerance of ethnic and...

Freedom of expression and the palladium of British liberties, 1650–2000: A review essay

AbstractLondon has a reputation for being the “libel capital of the world.” Seemingly arcane defamation laws continue to constrain free speech. At the same time, Britain has long been celebrated as a pioneer of freedom, being one of the first to eliminate censorship and enshrine the liberty of the press. This article surveys the extensive literature on freedom of speech, newspapers, and censorship from the late‐17th century through the 20th. By drawing this scholarship together, the author emphasizes long‐standing continuities in debates over freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the place of defamation law in determining the limits of these dearly held liberties. It is in this context that the notorious libel laws begin to look less obscure and, indeed, more central to negotiations over civil liberty since the 18th century. When examined in this light, Britain looks far less exceptional; its struggles over the boundaries of free speech are at the core of public debates across the globe.

Catholic ‘conscience’, duty and disputes over English liberties in Jacobean Ireland

ABSTRACT The article examines Old English claims to catholic ‘liberty of conscience’ and the way in which this engendered a discussion of English liberties in Ireland. Old English representatives sought to ground their claims to ‘liberty of conscience’ in established practice, custom and law. Their claims to ‘liberty of conscience’ also brought into play the vocabulary of corporate and parliamentary liberty. In response, New English protestants turned to ideas of duty and citizenship, which were equally embedded in conceptions of English liberties. They argued that a catholic ‘conscience’ sat in opposition to ideas of duty to the king and the commonwealth. In doing so, the New English questioned both the basis and extent of the liberties possessed by the Old English. Such an exchange, this article argues, is illustrative of the way in which an English pairing of liberties, with ideas of duty and active citizenship, opened up an area of dispute involving a shared set of political concepts and vocabulary.

‘Families of mankind’: British liberty, League internationalism, and the traffic in women and children

ABSTRACT The League of Nations’ long term interest in the traffic in women and children mirrored, in key ways, what I call the ‘familial internationalism’ of some of its most influential British founders. Grounded in their understanding of the British Empire as an institution uniquely able to reconcile ‘liberty and self-government’ with the denial of liberty and self-government to the colonies, this vision of internationalism recast nations as cultural ‘families of mankind’ rather than political units with a right to sovereignty. This article thus explores first the influence of British imperial thought on League internationalism and then moves on to an analysis of the League’s Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children. In contrast to most historical investigations of the Committee, I read these archives as multivocal sites of political and cultural contestation about the status of women in relation to the national ‘family’. Ultimately, I argue, the work of the Committee resulted in an international convention that restricted women’s liberty by making it more difficult for them to travel internationally.

"Take Care of Me When Dead": Jefferson Legacies

"Take Care of Me When Dead"Jefferson Legacies Annette Gordon-Reed (bio) Keywords Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, Hemings family, slavery, racism "Take care of me when dead," Thomas Jefferson wrote on February 17, 1826, to James Madison, his friend of over fifty years. Although he would live another five months, Jefferson likely understood that the end was near. The final two years of his life, with the exception of his old friend Lafayette's two visits to Monticello on his triumphant return to the United States in 1824, had been a parade of horribles. His physical condition, particularly in the final year before he wrote this letter to Madison, was rapidly deteriorating. He was in constant pain that required ever increasing doses of laudanum that, no doubt, affected his mood and his day-to-day functioning. His financial affairs were in ruins. The lingering effects of the Panic of 1819 and his own flawed economic decisions—including co-signing notes for a relative who defaulted on the obligations—left him reeling.1 James Morton Smith, who edited three volumes of the correspondence between Jefferson and Madison, has written that "Despite their talent for epistolary camaraderie, the correspondence between these two Virginia gentlemen, these closest of friends, is characterized by a grave [End Page 1] formality, a dignified reserve, a mannered elegance, with little display of affection except for a friendly salutary close." Morton also noted that Jefferson confided to one of his granddaughters that it is "easier to write ten letters of business than one of the intangible affections of the mind." Although this letter does not stray far from the parameters of emotion that Morton discerned, the letter's final paragraph, with Jefferson's request that Madison take care of him after he was gone, casts a different light on the substance of the paragraphs that go before it. In his gloomy circumstances, Jefferson's mind roamed over the public and the private, touching on things that meant a great deal to him that he understood would be imperiled once he was gone.2 First, there was talk of the University, interspersed with a perhaps too-optimistic prediction about the number of students who would enroll, and there was an acknowledgement of the Virginia legislature's decision not to give the effort any more money. That discussion veered into Jefferson's perennial obsessions—politics, and their relationship to the American Revolution, and the role that young people, young white men, of course, would play in the still New Republic: In selecting our Law-Professor, we must be rigorously attentive to his political principles. you will recollect that, before the revolution, Coke Littleton was the universal elementary book of Law Students; and a sounder whig never wrote, nor of profounder learning in the orthodox doctrines of the British constitution, or in what were called English liberties. you remember also that our lawyers were then all whigs. but when his black-letter text, and uncouth, but cunning learning got out of fashion, and the honied Mansfieldism of Blackstone became the Student's Horn-book from that moment that profession (the nursery of our Congress) began to slide into toryism, and nearly all the young brood of lawyers now are of that hue. they suppose themselves indeed to be whigs, because they no longer know what whiggism or republicanism means. it is in our Seminary that that Vestal flame is to be kept alive. it is thence to spread anew over our own and the sister states. The spirit of the Revolution and the beneficial nature of the American Experiment could be imparted through the right books and the right [End Page 2] course of study—as could wrong notions—"toryism," "honied Mansfieldism." His new "Seminary" appears as a last best hope to keep alive the flame—and the disciples, the students who would one day form half of the state legislature, would carry the torch to other states.3 And then it was on to more personal matters, Jefferson's "mortification" at the very public controversy over the lottery that he had proposed as a scheme to help save himself from financial ruin. After listing the catalogue of events that had...

“What Freedom?”

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

The No-Nose Club

English manners in the eighteenth century had undergone a revolution. With Puritanism defeated, the bawdy culture of the Restoration surfed in on a tidal wave of smut, scat, and scabies. For the next century, both coarseness and wit would be intertwined with a jaded cynicism and scepticism for all things radical. Markers of the new English liberty included the gin craze, the South Sea Bubble, and a spread of venereal disease rising to near-epidemic levels. Noelle Gallagher’s new book, Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination, is a surprising and gripping study of this dark century, both its humour and its discontents. Its focus, venereal disease, is a common enough subject among writers and satirists, but never has it been so perceptively interrogated as in Gallagher’s study. By focusing on the ‘imagination’ – meaning novels, drama, poetry, and satires both written and visual – Gallagher moves beyond the typical medical humanities approach that seeks to unearth the empirical truth of infection, and instead embraces the many raucous and contradictory social attitudes that underwrite the depiction of VD, and particularly syphilis, during the period.

영국인의 자유, 식민자의 권리: 영국 헌정주의, 정착민 식민주의, 그리고 미국 독립혁명의 대의(大義)

English Liberties and Colonizers’ Rights: English Constitutionalism, Settler Colonialism, and the Search for the American Revolution’s Common Cause - English Constitutionalism;Settler Colonialism;The American Revolution;Landownership Rights;Self-Government Rights

News - Briefing. Political opposition growing to police technology in the UK

MPs and human-rights technology groups have called for UK police forces to cease all use of facial-recognition surveillance activities in public spaces. British civil liberties campaign think tank Big Brother Watch (BBW) supports the call.

The Devil and the Detail

An Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State was published in London, in two volumes, between 1682 and 1683. Its author John Nalson was a fervent believer in the twin pillars of the monarchy and the Anglican Church. In An Impartial Collection he holds up the internecine conflict of the 1640s as an example not to be followed during the 1680s, a period of further religious and political upheaval. Nalson’s text is anything but neutral, and its perspective is neatly summarised in the engraved frontispiece which prefaces the first volume. This article examines how this illustration, depicting a weeping Britannia accosted by a two-faced clergyman and a devil, adapts and revises an established visual vocabulary of ‘otherness’, implying disruption to English lives and liberties with origins both foreign and domestic. Such polemical imagery relies on shock value and provocation, but also contributes to a sophisticated conversation between a range of pictorial sources, reshaping old material to new concerns, and raising important questions regarding the visual literacy and acuity of its viewers.

What the Victorian Empire Learned: A Perspective on History, Reading and Print in Nineteenth-Century Textbooks

Abstract This essay draws upon trends in cultural historiography as well as the methodologies of book history to argue that Victorian school histories articulated and reinforced three persistent myths of modernity (all of which have been thoroughly discredited by scholarship but persist in popular historical understanding). These are the notion that literacy is necessary to progress, the idea that the advent of printing with moveable type was a harbinger of enlightenment, and the tenet of historians’ practice that written records are a necessary precondition for the discipline to function. Each of these ideologies is concerned with the practices of reading and writing, print culture, and documentation, which are intrinsic to the scholarship of book history. To identify the connections, we should read the texts of school books alongside the bibliographical and archival evidence of their materiality and mobility. The texts conveyed a lesson of European superiority indirectly by retelling the Whig narrative of English liberty. Colonial editions and other iterations were widely circulated. The article offers five examples of schoolbooks to demonstrate how they worked and how they travelled, then proposes a digital humanities solution to the historiographical and bibliographical challenges that arise. A complex relational database connecting three sets of data: about the attributes of books in their multiple versions, about the people associated with their authorship and publishing, and about the institutions that supported them.

Calculating Shylock: Commerce, Captivity, and the Free-Born Subject

This essay argues that George Granville's adaptation of The Merchant of Venice (1701) exploited the significance of imperiled liberty to Shakespeare's original play. The drama around Shylock acquired both a new shape and sharpened significance, the essay proposes, in relation to changing ideas about individual and collective freedom—questions that recent developments supplied with both acutely personal and more broadly politicized significance for early eighteenth-century theatergoers. Building upon precedents including John Dryden's Amboyna (1673) and Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko (1695), the adaptation of Shakespeare's play that held the stage for the opening decades of the eighteenth century appeared at a moment of expanding global commerce as well as the pervasive unfreedom, bondage, and violence that was the corollary of that trade. At a moment when appeals to English liberty were ever more trenchantly asserted, even as unfreedom became more pervasive and stringently enforced, the adapted play channeled the dynamics of Shakespeare's drama, this essay sets out to show, into an affirmative staging of the English subject, in which freedom appeared as an undisputed but precariously maintained birthright in ways that looked back to Magna Carta and ahead to the American Declaration of Independence.