Eighteenth-century Society Research Articles

Chinese Domestic Interiors and “Consumer Constraint” in Qing China: Evidence from Yangzhou

AbstractIn works that have profoundly influenced contemporary views of China’s economic growth relative to the Europe’s in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, Jan De Vries has concluded that “the East Asian industrious revolution is very much a supply-side phenomenon”, while Kenneth Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong among others have concluded that consumer restraint was a characteristic of eighteenth century society. These views are not supported by economic behaviour in Qing Yangzhou, where middle-brow writings show a marked attention to household décor and a high level of interest in material goods, including imports.

From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections ed. by Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor, and Michael Hunter (review)

Reviewed by: From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections ed. by Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor, and Michael Hunter Toby Burrows Walker, Alison, Arthur MacGregor, and Michael Hunter, eds, From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections, London, British Library Publishing, 2012; cloth; pp. x, 310; 72 colour illustrations; R.R.P. AU$89.95; ISBN 9780712358804. Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) was ‘arguably the greatest collector of the eighteenth century’ (p. 9), itself a great age of collecting in Western Europe. His huge collections of objects, plants, books, manuscripts, and art works – estimated to amount to nearly 80,000 items – formed much of the basis for the British Museum and its subsequent offshoots, the Natural History Museum and the British Library. They are also represented in numerous other institutions, from the Wellcome Library to the Victoria and Albert Museum to the National Portrait Gallery. They focus especially on natural history, medicine, and science – as befitting a man who succeeded Isaac Newton as the President of the Royal Society. According to one contemporary obituary, this was ‘perhaps the most magnificent … collection upon earth’ (p. 39). This volume brings together nineteen papers from a conference held at the British Library in 2010. The contributions reflect the extraordinary breadth of Sloane’s interests and activities, ranging across botany, medicine, and geology, the Netherlands, East Indies, and Jamaica, books, manuscripts, and pictures. They also cover Sloane’s long life and career as a very successful physician, scientist, benefactor, and entrepreneur. Also included is the first publication of the earliest surviving life of Sloane, written by Thomas Birch. Several themes stand out amid the richness of this almost overwhelming variety. A number of essays look at the ways in which Sloane’s networks of contacts, and his extensive correspondence with them, enabled him to assemble such a massive ‘collection of collections’. His ability to use ‘the power of curious specimens as levers of ascent’ (p. 21) in eighteenth-century society is reflected in the accounts of his life and career. Another prominent theme is how the global reach of eighteenth-century Britain is reflected in Sloane’s collecting activities, not least in his own travels in Jamaica. Several of the contributors work to analyse and exploit the numerous catalogues which [End Page 275] Sloane himself compiled and commissioned. And several work to reconstruct how the collection was organised and displayed in Sloane’s house in Chelsea, and to reconstruct now-dispersed elements of the collection, in an effort to see the collection as it was in Sloane’s lifetime. Sloane’s motivations for collecting on such a gigantic scale remain enigmatic; he was reticent about his aims, and the man behind the collection remains elusive. But these essays combine to form the best account to date of his remarkable life and work, as well as identifying a number of important lines for future inquiry – not just into Sloane himself but also into other collectors on a similarly massive scale. [End Page 276] Toby Burrows The University of Western Australia Copyright © 2014 Toby Burrows

Le Bonheur au feminin: strategies narratives des romancieres des Lumieres

Defining happiness preoccupied eighteenth-century French intellectuals, including the women novelists whom Isabelle Tremblay discusses in her monograph, which offers ‘une étude thématique’ (p. 9) of how French women writers attempted to redefine personal happiness within the constraints imposed upon their lives. She includes a wide array of writers in her survey, from the better-known names of Lambert, Tencin, Épinay, Riccoboni, Le Prince de Beaumont, and Charrière, to the little-read works of Beccary, Robert, Villeneuve, and Kéralio. In the first half, Tremblay examines the traditions that defined the lives of the majority of women of the period: marriage, motherhood, and virtue. She argues that, while her chosen authors recounted stories of ‘une aliénation profonde’ (p. 27) within the restricted lives of women, they also championed self-respect and personal accomplishment as key components of women's true happiness. Riccoboni and Épinay used irony as a means of critiquing the ideologies responsible for women's misery within marriage, while others proposed strategies for surviving this oppressive institution, such as seclusion, flight, travel, or withdrawal from society. Motherhood, because it involved the care and education of children, was seen to compensate for a woman's lack of marital satisfaction. Virtue, as these novelists conceived it, led women to reflect independently on social norms and brought them peace of mind. In the second half, Tremblay focuses on how study, female friendship, and love helped women give meaning to their lives. Study was portrayed as offering women a sense of usefulness and increasing their self-esteem. Friendship not only enabled them to know themselves better, but provided comfort and support in their tribulations. And love, rather than passion, was depicted as steadfast, a sentiment on which women could rely during their struggles and which would impart a sense of ultimate value to their existence. In conclusion, Tremblay asserts that eighteenth-century women's fiction ‘participe à redéfinir l'archétype de l'héroïne féminine qu'incarne désormais la figure de la femme heureuse’ (p. 152). While Le Bonheur au féminin lacks a comprehensive presentation of the wider cultural debates surrounding happiness (and the author's concluding assertion is not fully substantiated), this is nonetheless a welcome reading of these under-studied women authors of the period and one that ties their contributions to an important debate within eighteenth-century society. Scholars will find much food for thought in Tremblay's study, which represents a significant step in the direction towards a better understanding of French women's fiction.

Rode the 12,000? Counting Coaches, People and Errors En Route to the Rehearsal of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks at Spring Gardens, Vauxhall in 1749

The Gentleman’s Magazine claimed that ‘above 12,000 persons’ attended the rehearsal of George Frideric Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks at Vauxhall Gardens in April 1749. Widely reproduced in biographies of Handel, in histories of London, and in studies of eighteenth-century British society and culture generally, in order to indicate not only Handel’s supposed popularity but also the spreading taste for art music, the commercialization of leisure, and the sophistication and egalitarianism of London’s population and venues, the figure is hugely inaccurate. This article offers a refutation of the claim and an exploration of the consequences for historians of relying too heavily and incautiously on the Gentleman’s Magazine as a source.

Slikar Filippo Naldi (II)

According to his own testimony, the painter Filippo Naldi was of Florentine origin. He lived and worked in Dalmatia in the mid-eighteenth century while serving in the Venetian army. He was mentioned in records as a port manager at Opuzen. In the wider Dalmatian area, Naldi painted a large number of religious works and several portraits. This paper attributes to him seven paintings in churches situated in the Dalmatian hinterland and the region of Poljica (at Zavojane near Vrgorac, Dobranje near Imotski, Kostanje at Poljica, Čaporice near Trilj and in the Franciscan monastery at Sinj). The author analyzes the characteristics of Naldi’s painting and his significance in eighteenth-century Dalmatian art and society.

Killing Mrs. Siddons: The Actress and the Adulteress in Late Georgian Britain

THE SUBJECT OF ADULTERY AND DIVORCE IN LATE GEORGIAN BRITAIN poses a formidable challenge to orthodox disciplinary frameworks because it relates to many dimensions of late eighteenth-century life--marriage, the family, sexuality, gender, the law, morality, the regulation of the social order and the well-being of the nation, property, class, sociability, and social space--and also because it is locatable in a wide range of texts and media such as trial publications, newspapers and magazines, poems, plays and novels, as well as visual art. (1) Not only is it discursively permeable, late Georgian adultery is also epistemologically difficult: the slipperiness and intractability of its meanings confound explanations for human behavior based on distinctions between public and private selves, or between social and affective or psychological experience. (2) In the case of adultery, desires, emotions, and the sexual act itself have public, social, adulterated meanings: in some cases, moreover, these meanings are elusive and uncertain. As such, adultery goes against the grain of those trends in Enlightenment and Romantic culture that helped produce the very disciplinary frameworks in which it has been analyzed. This article attempts to negotiate some of these conceptual and methodological issues by proposing theatricality as one possible framework within which the amplitude of adultery's meanings in late eighteenth-century society might be gauged. In particular, I want to examine the link between the figure of the adulteress and the status of the actress Sarah Siddons, the consummate interpreter of the female outcast as tragic heroine in the Romantic period. My focus is the 1790s, when Siddons's appearance as an adulteress at Drury Lane coincided with the height of the panic generated by adultery, intersecting with legal and political discourses and threatening the iconic status of Siddons herself. As such, I hope to suggest not only a new way of configuring adultery in late eighteenth-century culture, but also a new perspective on Siddons and the Romantic theatre. I. The Theatre of Adultery The theatricality of late Georgian adultery is evident in the adultery itself, as represented in divorce trials and the print culture of the period. This story was often constructed dramatically around crucial incidents such as the discovery of the erring parties or confrontations and/or tearful partings between a wronged husband and wife. The role of servants in giving evidence of these incidents, either as spectators in the household or as active agents in detecting an affair, also highlights the status of adultery as a drama played out before interested spectators (in a way that reinforces Jurgen Habennas's observation that behavior, even in the intimate sphere of the conjugal family, was always audience-oriented). (3) The publication of adultery trials, many of which featured illustrations of curious or intriguing scenes in the affair, analogous to illustrations in contemporary dramatic texts or novels, also had the effect of theatricalizing adultery for the virtual audience of the reading public. (4) An additional element of the theatricality of adultery was constituted by the law. There were three main forums in which the adultery case could be tried in English law: the ecclesiastical courts, principally the Consistory Court and the Court of Arches at Doctors' Commons, which entailed the presentation by legal representatives of the parties of previously recorded depositions of witnesses before a judge who could record a sentence of separation from bed and board without the right of remarriage; the civil courts, in the form of a case for criminal conversation by which a husband could sue an adulterer for the loss of consortium in his wife; and finally, Parliament, where a husband could obtain a divorce by a private act which allowed for remarriage. Normally both an ecclesiastical divorce and a successful action for criminal conversation, or crim. …

Acts of Aesthetics: Publishing as Recursive Agency in the Long Eighteenth Century

Of primary concern to late eighteenth-century society was the sheer volume of printed work being produced in England. The response of authors troubled by this perceived crisis was an outpouring of works on taste, aesthetics, genre and literature, which attempted to describe and provide corrective solutions to the problem of over-publication. Yet this response itself, of course, only added to the number of works within Britain. How did the solution to a deluge of print become more printed materials? Did these authors envision print’s agency as a self-corrective process? And, if so, how can we recover and perhaps even model the connections between works that encompassed the responses to print? This essay outlines a potential solution to this problem by sampling a highly focused selection of digitized texts that raise the issue of over-publication. Through a quantitative analysis of these texts, it identifies the lexical patterns that may reveal the ways in which authors of the period envisioned the work of aesthetics. In particular, this article identifies an emerging consensus on how printed objects became agents within the socio-cultural world of the long eighteenth century: both as objects which could act on readers and as objects which could act on other printed texts. By comparing the language that these clusters of texts deploy to discuss the agency of print to their traditional generic, theoretical or historical groupings, we can begin to examine the process by which the potential power of print became the solution to the dangers it, itself, presented.

Who were the urban gentry? Social elites in an English provincial town, c. 1680–1760

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the identity and social worlds of the ‘urban gentry’ of Chester as they developed from the late seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century. In place of the political and cultural definitions which characterise analyses of this group, it takes the self-defined ‘occupational’ titles of probate records as a starting point for an investigation into the background and activities of those styling themselves ‘gentleman’. Central to their identity were networks of friendship and trust. These reveal the urban gentry to have been closely tied with both the urban middling sorts and the rural gentry: a position which at once reflected and underpinned their particular situation within eighteenth-century society.

Dressing Angelo Soliman

Angelo Soliman, a black African, conveyed his heritage and his full participation in eighteenth-century Habsburg society through a mixture of eastern and western dress. As a freemason, Soliman's costume evoked popular conceptions of 'blackness' while asserting his equality within his lodge. Yet the costumes Soliman wore in the service of Prince von Liechtenstein or in the imperial natural history collection, where his stuffed body was placed after death, displayed political power by symbolically subjugating the African. Soliman's daily, Freemasonic, state ceremonial, and post-mortem dress reveal the complex layers of African identity in eighteenth-century Europe.

Confrontation, Negotiation and Accommodation: Garrisoning the Burghs in Post-Union Scotland

AbstractThis article challenges the assumption that garrisons in post-union Scotland were confronted with an “uninflammable” and easily controlled urban population. The emphasis is instead placed on the distinctive aspects of eighteenth-century Scottish society, characterized as it was by a combination of dispersed settlement and the fastest growing urban sector within the British-Irish Isles. These factors severely complicated and challenged the army’s ability to consistently and effectively control Scotland’s villages, towns and cities. Yet confrontation was not the only mode of interaction between local garrisons and the civic world of the burghs. The article argues that excessive concentration upon large scale urban tumults, such as the Malt Tax or Porteous Riots, has detracted from the subtle and sophisticated social and cultural practices which not only regulated relations between both groups but that increasingly eroded the boundaries and definitions of what constituted a “soldier” and a “civilian” in eighteenth-century Scotland.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography as an Eighteenth-Century Omnivore’s Dilemma

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography as an Eighteenth-Century Omnivore’s Dilemma Dana Medoro (bio) Custom makes killing, handling, and feeding upon flesh and blood, without distinction, so easy and familiar unto mankind. And the same is to be understood of men killing and oppressing those of their own kind. […] If men have but Power and Custom on their side, they think all is well. Thomas Tryon (1634–1703) My refusing to eat Flesh occasioned an Inconveniency, and I was frequently chid for my Singularity. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) Although Benjamin Franklin tried his hand at virtually every intellectual pursuit the eighteenth century had to offer—from scientific invention and music to politics and philosophy—he always referred to himself as the “printer of Philadelphia.” And although he died a rich and internationally renowned man, he paints a vivid picture of himself in the early pages of The Autobiography as a half-starved runaway stuffing bread into his mouth as he wanders through Philadelphia looking for somewhere to sleep. Having just escaped his violent brother, to whom he had been indentured as a printer’s apprentice, Franklin sets into motion what he came to stand for in and beyond the revolutionary era: the promise of a self-made man, free from tyranny and caste. Keeping a sense of this promise or potential [End Page 91] at the surface of his recollections, he skilfully crafts his autobiography according to a philosophy of character as something made, broken down, and reassembled, like a composed form of moveable type in a printing press. Unfinished and open to revision—he repeatedly describes his mistakes and infidelities, for instance, as errata, a printer’s idiom—Franklin also comes to us in a famously incomplete manuscript, broken off at key points in the narrative and posthumously published. All of these ruptures notwithstanding, a progression of overdetermined analogies connecting meat and violence moves across Franklin’s self-presentation. In addition, the powerfully articulated, influential vegetarian philosophies of the eighteenth century align these analogies with the main currents of Enlightenment thought: not only its theories of rational self-creation and governance (versus aristocratic inheritance) but also its repudiation of tyranny over other beings, human and animal. From Locke, Rousseau, and Buffon to Adam Smith and Voltaire, the foremost thinkers of Franklin’s time grappled with or at least addressed the use of animals for food in one way or another, raising questions about human cruelty, economic efficiency, and social hierarchy.1 In Tristram Stuart’s words: Vegetarianism circled the full gamut of eighteenth-century society.[...] People connected their food with morality and they had mechanisms for dealing with the theological context of sympathy and the health impacts of meat. In the era before the French Revolution, the landscape was already dotted with wild men seeking for a union with nature, which the Romantics would take to new extremes. From the anatomical observations of the scientists to the social anthropology of the Rousseauists, man’s nature herbivore or carnivore had become a central preoccupation of European culture. (255) These intellectual movements also contributed to the period’s revival of interest in Pythagoras, the mythical Greek founder of ascetic vegetarianism and exponent of the doctrine of animal souls.2 It is Pythagoreanism, as I will ultimately argue, that underlies the rituals of self-improvement and [End Page 92] abstinence from meat that are mapped out in The Autobiography, and it is Enlightenment philosophy, with its anti-aristocratic foundations, that in turn links those rituals to Franklin’s representation of the American War of Independence. Franklin conceptually pairs the British domination of colonial America with the hierarchical authority of humans over other animals, powerfully leveling both at one point when he reckons with the idea that meat is the murder of a fellow being. Like the Enlightenment thinkers who contemplated Pythagorean principles—and took them seriously enough to either borrow or reject them3—Franklin incorporates them into political and personal re-compositions of his character and country. In other words, he takes the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis into a secular way of understanding or rationalizing the kind of metamorphoses needed to reinvent himself as an American and a...

Seventy Years of the Society of Architectural Historians

During the summer of 1940, a group of architects, archaeologists, architectural historians, and graduate students (among them G. Holmes Perkins, Kenneth Conant, George M. A. Hanfman and Turpin C. Bannister) gathered regularly at the Harvard Faculty Club for dinners, lectures, and conversation and plan inspection trips New England architecture. On 31 July that year, twenty-five of them, after a particularly spirited meeting (the minutes note hecklers in the audience urging Professor Herbert Bloch, lecturing on Roman bricks, demonstrate his famous tasting method for dating bricks——which he declined) founded the Society of Architectural Historians. (The word American was dropped in 1947 when the Society was officially incorporated.) Their goal was to foster the understanding and appreciation of architectural history among both professional scholars and laymen and the publication of an unpretentious journal.1 Perhaps they imagined something like the eighteenth-century Society of Dilettanti——young British enthusiasts who shared their knowledge and passion about the art and architecture of antiquity over dinner and wine in each other's company and made occasional excursions. Little could anyone in this assembly imagine that what was founded in Cambridge on the eve of World War II would grow into a global society with 3,500 members, the publisher of the …

Refocusing the Gendered Gaze

Daniel Defoe makes use of subject-object patterns within his novel Moll Flanders in order to produce ruptures within eighteenth-century gender ideology and to reconstitute the subject-object relation between masculine and feminine within the novel. Even as Defoe affirms the dominance of gender ideology by positioning his readers as objects of the novel, Defoe uses his character of Moll Flanders to suggest the potential for transforming ideology through the performative act of gender. As Moll struggles to link fragments of her past, she explores the boundaries of gender identity and transgresses their limits in order to achieve movement within eighteenth century society. How Moll negotiates her conceptions and interpretations of her relation to her natural, cultural, and psychological landscapes suggests her success in tracing the presence of an identity that would inform and sustain the self by allowing her to assert a sense of economic individualism, which might release her from any moral obligation to the pervasive and dominant ideologies affecting gender in the eighteenth century.

Women, Enclosure and Estate Improvement in Eighteenth-Century Northamptonshire

AbstractThis paper examines the role of elite women in estate management, enclosure and landscape improvement in eighteenth-century England, a topic which has to date received little in the way of sustained academic consideration. The paper focuses on four women who took control of sizeable Northamptonshire estates in the 1760s and early 1770s, and demonstrates that these women were active as both managers and innovators. In examining the women's involvement in estate management, the paper explores a series of important questions about women's place in the history of parliamentary enclosure and landscape improvement, as well as women's role in eighteenth-century society more generally.

:A Mother's Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France.(The Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture.)

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the language of virtue in eighteenth-century France, and the central part that it played in political, cultural, and social life. Historians and literature specialists have begun to pay attention to women's particularly complex relationship with the rhetoric of virtue: it could empower women but also cause them to embrace suffering. Lesley H. Walker's study of mothers in Enlightenment literature and art is a timely contribution to this field. She has taken as her subject the role of eighteenth-century mothers in fashioning virtue, above all, the ways in which they instilled virtue in their daughters. Walker explores this intriguing theme through the fiction and literature of the period. She draws on psychoanalytical writings to inform her investigations into the power of maternal love and its relationship to virtue and self-sacrifice. A central theme of the book is the way in which mothers in Enlightenment literature offered powerful models of virtue; but it was a power that was often achieved through the self-sacrifice and/or death of the mother. Typically the daughter expressed her grief at the loss of her mother by deciding to emulate her and become, in her turn, a model of virtue. Walker looks at mother-daughter relationships in the works of a number of novelists and artists, including Madame de Lafayette, François Fénelon, Madame de Lambert, Madame de Genlis, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Madame Roland, Madame de Staël, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Marguerite Gérard, and Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont. In her analysis of artistic genres she charts the move away from rococo aristocratic styles to paintings that conveyed love and tenderness between mothers and their children—a genre at which women artists such as Vigée-Lebrun and Gérard were often more successful than their male counterparts such as Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who tended (perhaps unconsciously) to eroticize such paintings. Walker's readings are both sensitive and authoritative. She thus brings a fresh eye even to such well-worn topics as Rousseau's attitude to women in La Nouvelle Héloïse and enables us to see this work anew. She does not shy away from controversy and is particularly critical of Joan Landes and her interpretation of Rousseau's role in excluding women from the public sphere. Walker asserts that “the time has come to demystify Rousseau as the primary target of feminist critique and cause of women's disenfranchisement from the public sphere” (p. 71). Whereas other literary analysts have seen Julie's capitulation and agreement to marry Wolmar as a sign of the victory of paternal authority, Walker argues persuasively that it is the death of her mother, and Julie's desire to become a virtuous mother—literally by taking her mother's place—that leads to her willing self-sacrifice. Walker follows this up with a thoughtful account of how Madame Roland self-consciously echoed Julie's sacrifice in her own life when she dealt with her own mother's loss by embracing virtue. There were limits, however, to the degree to which inspirational mothers, with their love and dedication to the education of their daughters, could offer a liberating or empowering experience. Virtue could not play the same role for women as it did for men. Maternal virtue was fundamentally about the sacrifice of individual desires and ambitions. Moreover, eighteenth-century society remained very limited in the actual social opportunities granted to women. Walker concludes that “the daughter's enlightenment is not her liberation. She will remain enmeshed in a world of great social obligation and considerable constraints; her life will, however, be better than it might have been without such an education” (p. 27).

ORIGINS OF THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MODERN GREEK SCIENCE

The purpose of the paper is to examine how Greek historians account for the presence of modern scientific ideas in the intellectual environment of eighteenth-century Greek-speaking society. It will also discuss the function of the history of modern Greek science in the context of Greek national historiography. As will be shown, the history of modem Greek science spent most of its life under the shadow of the history of ideas. Despite its seemingly secondary role, however, it occupied a distinctive place within national historiography because it formed the ground upon which different perceptions of the country's European identity converged. In this respect, one of the main goals of this paper is to outline the particular ideological presumptions, which shaped the historiography of modern Greek science under different historical circumstances. At the end an attempt will be made to articulate a viewpoint more in tandem with the recent methodological developments in the history of science.

Academicians and academies in eighteenth-century Naples

The academies make it possible to trace the transformations that took place in eighteenth-century Neapolitan society, and their history illuminates the role played by Freemasonry throughout the Enlightenment. They promoted dialogue between professional corporations and the establishment, as the former experimented with new training and production methods. Natural history played a crucial role, investigating the territory in terms of both space and time and accumulating knowledge and resources which could benefit the nation. The area around Vesuvius became a laboratory where scientists, enquirers into natural phenomena and antiquaries worked side by side, while Naples established itself as the capital of research into archaeology and natural history.

KAREN HARVEY. Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture. (Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, number 3.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp. ix, 261. $75.00

In this important book Karen Harvey demonstrates how an understanding of erotic culture challenges a number of grand narratives that social and cultural historians have posited for the eighteenth century. Harvey distinguishes erotica from pornography by arguing that the former “depicted sex, bodies and desire through illusions of concealment and distance: bodies were represented through metaphor and suggestion, and depictions of sexual activity were characterized by deferral and silence,” whereas the latter was concerned with the “explicit depiction of sexual action” (pp. 20–21). Through her detailed analysis of a wide range of erotic material, Harvey questions assumptions that the eighteenth century was either a period of control and restraint, characterized by politeness, or a time of unprecedented sexual license and pleasure. She argues instead that erotic culture exemplifies how both could be achieved within eighteenth-century society: erotic literature was about sex and celebrated sexual pleasure, but it was enjoyed within all-male sociable environments such as the coffee-house and club, which had a reputation for refinement and civility. In contrast to pornography, and given that the reader of erotic literature had to decipher sexual meanings from a variety of classical and botanical metaphors, its enjoyment was more of an intellectual exercise than one that was intended to bring about immediate physical gratification.

Histories of Colonialism, Legality, and Aboriginality

It is hard to write a history about something that is still happening – like a biography of a person still alive or a history of a people still existing. The problem is not that the historian cannot know those parts of the story that have yet to take place. Rather, the problem is that the historian’s interpretation of the story so far may be influenced – consciously or unconsciously – by a sense of how the story might (or should) turn out and by an appreciation that the way in which the story is presented can become part of the story, influencing the way it does turn out.1 Moral evaluations of past actions are particularly problematic in this respect.2 Condemning a people of the ancient past as wicked will have only indirect practical implications today, but to condemn the past acts of a living nation as wicked is to identify possibilities of redemption, reparation, and reconciliation. The writer of a history about something that is still happening therefore has a special responsibility to appreciate that choices about how to portray the past may affect the ways in which moral discourse unfolds today.3 To write a history of the common law and its relationship to Aboriginal peoples in colonies and former colonies is to write a history of something that is still happening. Historians may see the Mohegan Indian land claim in colonial Connecticut (to take one example) as a legal artefact excavated from the records of an eighteenth-century society now dead and gone, but for lawyers this old case is part of the present legal

Mutinous Behavior on Voyages to the South Seas and Its Impact on Eighteenth-Century Civil Society

This paper pays special attention to incidents fi rst reported in the revolutionary decade of the 1790s, contrasting the mutiny experienced by the merchant captain John Meares, on his trading venture to Nootka, with that suff ered by William Bligh of the Royal Navy on the Bounty. These voyages reveal complementary aspects of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the Pacifi c. The reports of each mutiny, which reached London within months of each other, illustrate the diffi culty contemporaries experienced in openly writing about insurrection at sea, and also reveal how an exotic South Sea location could focus the public’s attention on the issue of “liberty.” Previous commentators have examined the Bounty mutiny chiefl y to discover its cause and, in the process, to analyze the complex personalities involved. 1 This article, however, considers the impact of the Bounty mutiny on civil society and the arts, draws on parallels in the Meares and Bligh accounts, and contextualizes the Bounty episode within the long recorded history of mutinous behavior during South Sea voyages. The frequency of mutiny on the South Seas was a source of anxiety to sponsors of exploratory voyages, and to fi nanciers intent on commercial exploitation. Commanders who avoided open mutiny in the 1760s were