A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783This book, the first volume to appear of the "New Oxford History of England", offers the most authoritative, comprehensive general history of England between the accession of George II and the loss of America. Though conventionally seen as static and politically stable, the eighteenth century was an age of extraordinary vitality and variety, of contrasts and change. Beneath the serene surface of aristocratic government, stately manners, and Georgian elegance, lay a less orderly world of treasonable plots, riotous mobs, and Hogarthian vulgarity. While rapid commercial growth and burgeoning bourgeois pretensions gave rise to the positive achievements of military success and imperial expansion, cultural confidence and polite manners, tensions and contradictions simmered and threatened. Evangelical enthusiasm jostled with scientific rationalism, oligarchical politics with popular insubordination, and entrepreneurial opulence with plebian poverty, and sentimentality with utilitarian reform. Using the most up-to-date research, Paul Langford reveals the true character of the age, and demonstrates that eighteenth-century society was both strengthened and stretched by the changes to which it was subjected. "The New Oxford History Of England" series (General Editor: J.M. Roberts), is the first volume of Sir George Clark's "Oxford History of England", published in 1934. Over the following fifty years that series established itself as a standard work of reference, and a repertoire of scholarship for hundreds of thousands of readers. "The New Oxford History of England", of which this is the first volume, is its successor. Each volume will set out an authoritative view of the present state of scholarship, presenting a distillation of the new knowledge built up by a half-century's research and publication of new sources, and incorporating the perspectives and judgements of a new generation of scholars. It is the intention of th |
Contents
ROBINS REIGN 17271742 | 9 |
THE PROGRESS OF POLITENESS | 59 |
INDUSTRY AND IDLENESS | 123 |
PATRIOTISM UNMASKED 17421757 | 183 |
SALVATION BY FAITH | 235 |
THE FORTUNATE ISLE | 289 |
PATRIOTISM RESTORED 17571770 | 331 |
NEW IMPROVEMENTS | 389 |
THE BIRTH OF SENSIBILITY | 461 |
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American aristocratic bill Bishop Britain British Bute Cambridge Church City clergy colonies commercial concern contemporary controversy corruption court criticism debate depended Dissenters Duke Earl early economic Edmund Burke effect election electoral England English Englishmen evangelical excise French friends George II's George III Hanoverian History Horace Walpole House of Commons Howell Harris important increasingly industry interest Jacobite James John Jonas Hanway King King's labour late eighteenth century legislation less London Magazine Lord Lord North manufacturing Memoirs middle-class ministers ministry moral Newcastle North offered opponents Oxford Parliament parliamentary party patriotic Pelham Pitt political poor popular proved reform reign respect Revolution Rockingham royal seemed sense sentimental Seven Years War Soame Jenyns social society success Thomas Tories trade traditional turnpike Vicesimus Knox vols Wales Walpole Walpole's Wesley Westminster Whig Whiggism Wilkes William women