Roxann Wheeler. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. (New Cultural Studies.) Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2000. Pp. ix, 371. $26.50. ISBN 0-8122-1722-5.

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-474
Author(s):  
Anthony J. Barker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
British Culture

Inventing the English Massacre

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
British Culture

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

Vagrant Figures

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sal Nicolazzo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Police Legitimacy ◽  
Police Power ◽  
Racial Capitalism

This book, demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. The book argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. The author's research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. The first book in several generations to address policing and vagrancy in the eighteenth-century, and the first in the field to center race and empire in its account of literary vagrancy, this work is a significant contribution to the field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.

Memorialising Anson, the fighting explorer: a case study in eighteenth-century naval commemoration and material culture

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-150
Author(s):  
Katherine Parker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
British Culture

An informative example of the conscious act of naval hero-making are the commemorative medals struck in 1768 by the brother of George Anson. Anson had died in 1762, so these medals were not only a memorial to his life, but also a deliberate attempt to control his legacy. What the medals include, and omit, offers a fascinating opportunity to examine what some thought worthy of commemoration in eighteenth-century British culture. This chapter uses the medals as a prism through which to examine the interconnections between naval careers, material culture, and the process of commemoration. In addition, the paper offers a revaluation of the historiographical role of exploration in the eighteenth century and re-positions exploration as an explicitly naval activity in the British context.

Hunting the Methodist Vixen

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Andrew O. Winckles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Evangelical Women ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Women’S Writing

Chapter One lays out the broad conceptual stakes of the book’s argument, reviews the existing literature on Methodism, Romanticism, and women’s writing, and points to some of the modes of analysis that are pursued in the rest of the book. Furthermore, it lays out the rationale for examining women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Felicia Hemans, who would not have identified as evangelicals, in the context of evangelical women. The goal is not to trace influence, necessarily, but instead to examine how evangelical discourse came to permeate many different aspects of British culture. More broadly speaking this chapter explores of the stakes of the volume and lays out a conceptual framework for understanding how specific changes to the protocols of mediation that Methodists in general, and Methodist women in particular, pioneered can be mapped onto women’s writing more broadly during the long eighteenth-century.

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