Civil Society and Empire: Ireland and Scotland in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World 0300139020, 9780300139020

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Civil Society and the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
CHAPTER ONE: Coffee, Association, and Cultural Hybridity in Seventeenth-Century England
CHAPTER TWO: Improvement and the Discourse of Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland
CHAPTER THREE: The Authority of the Defeated: Catholic Languages of the Moral Order in the Eighteenth Century
CHAPTER FOUR: The Experience of Empire: The Black Family, Britons, and the Emergence of Society
CHAPTER FIVE: A Habitat for Hopeful Monsters: David Hume and the Scottish Theorists of Civil Society
CHAPTER SIX: Civil Society and Empire in Revolution: Ireland and Britain in the 1790s
Conclusion
Notes
Index
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Citation preview

CIVIL SOCIETY AND EMPIRE

T H E L EW I S WA L P O L E S E R I E S I N E I G H T E E N T H C E N T U R Y C U LT U R E A N D H I STO R Y

The Lewis Walpole Series, published by Yale University Press with the aid of the Annie Burr Lewis Fund, is dedicated to the culture and history of the long eighteenth century (from the Glorious Revolution to the accession of Queen Victoria). It welcomes work in a variety of fields, including literature and history, the visual arts, political philosophy, music, legal history, and the history of science. In addition to original scholarly work, the series publishes new editions and translations of writing from the period, as well as reprints of major books that are currently unavailable. Though the majority of books in the series will probably concentrate on Great Britain and the Continent, the range of our geographical interests is as wide as Horace Walpole’s.

CIVIL SOCIETY AND EMPIRE IRELAND AND SCOTLAND IN THE E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U RY AT L A N T I C WO R L D

James Livesey

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund. Copyright © 2009 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Baskerville type by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc., Grand Rapids, Michigan. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Livesey, James. Civil society and empire : Ireland and Scotland in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world / James Livesey. p. cm. — (Lewis Walpole series in eighteenth-century studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-13902-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Civil society—Great Britain— History—18th century. 2. Civil society—Ireland—History—18th century. 3. Great Britain—Politics and government—18th century. 4. Ireland—Politics and government—1760–1820. I. Title. JN210.L48 2009 941.07—dc22 2009001940 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). It contains 30 percent postconsumer waste (PCW) and is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In Memoriam Thomas Anthony Livesey 1930‒2007 Christian, Gentleman, Patriot

With whom shall Athena born from Zeus’s brow mate? All her relatives are members of another species. What is the chance, of producing Athena in the first place, rather than a deformed monster? —Stephen Jay Gould, “Return of the Hopeful Monster,” Natural History, 1980

CON TEN TS

Acknowledgments, ix Introduction: Civil Society and the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, 1 chapter on e Coffee, Association, and Cultural Hybridity in Seventeenth-Century England, 24 chapter t wo Improvement and the Discourse of Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 54 chapter t hr ee The Authority of the Defeated: Catholic Languages of the Moral Order in the Eighteenth Century, 90

CONTENTS

chapter f ou r The Experience of Empire: The Black Family, Britons, and the Emergence of Society, 128 chapter f iv e A Habitat for Hopeful Monsters: David Hume and the Scottish Theorists of Civil Society, 154 chapter s ix Civil Society and Empire in Revolution: Ireland and Britain in the 1790s, 177 Conclusion, 214 Notes, 221 Index, 277

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ACK NOW LEDG MEN TS

This project has been gestating for a long time, and I have been very fortunate to have had such generous friends and colleagues willing to debate and discuss problems of history, politics, and theory into the long watches of the night. My first debt is to the friends of my youth with whom I have been thinking about the place of the Irish experience in wider contexts for many years: Johnny Kelleher, Jerry Murphy, Jo Bermingham, Brian McCarthy, Orla Smyth, Louise Favier, Emer McNamara, Pat O’Mahony, Gerard Delanty, Gino Lee, Sophia Carey, Eddie Lahiff, Andy Bielenberg, the citizens of the Woodview experiment, and my siblings Mary, Rick, and Finbarr. My mother, Rénee Livesey, has always been a model of civic engagement. Kate Forsyth revealed the virtues of Scotland to me. It is difficult adequately to acknowledge the generosity of intellect and spirit of Patrice Higonnet, Steve Pincus, and Frank Trentmann. My colleagues and students at Trinity College Dublin, especially David Dickson, Marianna Clyde, Louis Cullen, John Horne, Michael Brown, Christopher Finlay, and Colm O’Connell, and the many participants in my course on the Enlightenment helped enormously in the conceptualisation of this book. I would also like to acknowledge the Centre for Irish-Scottish Studies at Trinity, which was the project’s

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

first institutional home. Sussex has been a very happy place to think about and work on the interactions of intellectual and imperial histories and more generally to consider the nature of history as a pursuit. Richard Whatmore and Ruth Woodfield introduced me to Sussex, and that is only one of their many gifts. My work has benefited enormously from discussions with Senia Paseta, Tom Bartlett, Toby Barnard, John Shovlin, Roy Foster, Ian McBride, Kevin Whelan, Andrew Hadfield, Ultan Gillen, Richard Bourke, Norman Vance, Knud Haakonssen, and David Armitage. Particular thanks are due to John Shovlin, Joanna Stephens, and Richard Whatmore, who read the manuscript. The work has benefited from the attention and responses from seminar and conference participants at the universities of Sussex, Dublin, Oxford, Chicago, Queen Mary London, Princeton, and Tours, for which I am grateful. I am also mindful of financial support from the Huntington Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Irish Research Council on the Humanities and Social Sciences. This work would have been impossible without the expertise of the librarians and archivists at the British Library, the library of Trinity College Dublin, Widener and Houghton libraries at Harvard University, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Dublin Society, the Huntington Library, the University of Sussex Library, and the National Library of Ireland. The book was finished in Mather House at Harvard, and I am especially thankful to have been part of the community nurtured by the masters Sandra Naddaff and Leigh Hafrey. Sections of chapter two have previously appeared in the Historical Journal, and my thanks go to Cambridge University Press for permission to use this material. Joanna is another world on which Beatrix, Francesca, and I are the fortunate inhabitants. Long may our planet prosper.

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INTRODUCTION Civil Society and the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

A handful of terms have left the lexicon of political theory to become slogans; civil society has done so twice. Civil society was a central category for liberal thinkers in the eighteenth century and then an ideal for their nineteenth-century interpreters but became eclipsed in the more brutal political world of the middle twentieth century. Despite this occlusion it surprisingly provided the rallying call for the loose association of reformers that provoked the 1989 revolutions in Europe.1 Having been implied in this epochal moment, civil society became ubiquitous and in the aftermath of the twin shocks of 1989 and 2001 has gone on to become one of the most important terms in political theory and practice. Critics of globalisation cite the destruction of civil society as one of their reasons for mobilising and postulate a global “civil society from below” as the appropriate response to neo-liberal globalisation from above.2 Western governments appeal to the values of civil society in their projections of power, such as those into Bosnia and Iraq.3 The idea is now the focus of intense debate. Invoking civil society no longer refers to a single political position; differing interpretations of the meaning of civil society instead have come to define divergent ideological tendencies. The neo-conservative who wishes to roll back the state in favour 1

INTRODUCTION

of the market and the environmentalist Green who argues for greater agency for the new social movements both appeal to their understanding of civil society as the basis for their views. We are living through the second springtime of civil society as both idea and slogan, and that springtime is stormy. This book analyses why civil society emerged as a powerful idea in the late eighteenth century and indicates why that eighteenth-century debate remains relevant to our contemporary concerns. To investigate the history of civil society, we need a clear idea of what exactly it is we are addressing, but this is not a demand that is easily met. Civil society is an idea, association is a social practice, but the two are often confounded. Association can and does flourish outside civil society; Pierre Rosanvallon points out that France has had a robust associational life despite a political culture that has long been hostile to the claims of civil society.4 The relationship between association and civil society is contingent, constructed, and contested. The dominant understanding of the relationship still respects the neo-Tocquevillean line of argument that civil society comprises the set of local associations that mobilise and engage public commitment while limiting the scope of state power, or in other words the cluster of institutions and networks that fill in the social landscape between the family and the state. Unfortunately this clear and concise definition of civil society is too capacious and makes it impossible to distinguish civil society from any other idea about associations. Is a business part of civil society? A gentlemen’s club? A church? Association is the fundamental building block of all forms of civic life, but not all forms of civic life are forms of civil society. Moreover, there are a variety of ideals of civil society rooted in the many intuitions about the possibilities of modern life harvested from particular experiences of association. Social scientists and historians have long abandoned the search for some particular set of associations that can claim to be the “true” referent for civil society: John Keane, one of the most important interpreters of civil society, remarks that “the history of modern theorisations of civil society is the history of the quiet destruction of the philosophically naive view that the category of civil society represents some determinate reality ‘out there.’”5 The goal of this book is not to depict a particular world of association and argue that it created civil society. Rather the goal is to identify the innovations that renamed association as civil society. 2

INTRODUCTION

When we reconstruct the eighteenth-century Atlantic world from which the novel, even revolutionary, idea of civil society emerged it becomes clear that civil society was not just a term used to describe dense networks of civil association. Civil society idealised a totally new habitat for civil life and a new understanding of its scope and meaning. The ethics of civil society, particularly when they were fully explicated by David Hume, were monstrous; that is to say, they confounded long-held assumptions about moral excellence, political agency, and individual identity, and so the late eighteenth-century generation that embraced and embodied those ethics were hopeful monsters. They incarnated a new variety of selfhood, unsure if it could replicate itself. The public men and women in Scotland, Ireland, and other parts of the British world who developed the idea were hopeful that they could redescribe the life of a modern commercial empire in a way that would save their local traditions of civility. In order to accommodate themselves to commercial empire they were driven to reconsider notions of moral excellence and identity, even of fundamental theology, that had provided the common languages of moral experience for hundreds of years. Their seemingly modest claims for the “common life” or the everyday made them unfit for their old moral and political habitats and drove them to seek to adapt their environment to fit their new expectations. The consequences of that effort, its successes and its failures, still structure our ideas of civil society. Despite the difficulty of defining exactly what civil society is, strong claims for its importance are easy to find. Ernest Gellner has advanced the most impressive assertions and argues that civil society, and not democracy, is the appropriate moral norm or ideal for a modern polity.6 Gellner argues that civil society recognises the institutional prerequisites, plural values, and historical contexts necessary for liberty. Democracy, he argues, is inherently majoritarian and threatens the fabric of lives freely lived, unless it is strongly hedged in by the values of civil society. Gellner’s position coheres with one held by John Gray, who has explicitly argued for a liberal rather than democratic transition for post-communist countries.7 Gray has made even more radical claims for the sufficiency of civil society as a value orientation for modern conditions: “Civil societies are not the only legitimate societies, I conclude nevertheless that a liberal civil social society is the best one for cultures, such as all or virtually all contemporary cultures, which harbour 3

INTRODUCTION

a diversity of incommensurable conceptions of the good.”8 His most acute definition of a civil society is as one where there is the least possible recourse to collective decision making, that is, to politics. At the limit of this way of approaching civil society lies a suspicion of all politics as a form of technology, the antithesis of human interaction. This claim of priority for the specific but flexible relationships of civil life over the brittle and formal claims of politics has been most eloquently articulated by Vaclav Havel explaining his ideal of anti-politics: “I favour anti-politics: that is politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the useful, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favour politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans.”9 Havel finds the values of the lifeworld, of experience, emotion, and solidarity, only in civil society. It is impossible to overstate the contemporary intellectual and moral investment in the idea of civil society, and as the idea has become modish it has been over-extended. John Ehrenberg, commenting on work mapping the possibilities for civil society in America, wryly remarks that “in one of the most thoroughly commercialised social orders in human history, civil society is supposed to limit the intrusive state, attenuate the ravages of the market, reinvigorate a moribund public sphere, rescue beleaguered families and revitalize community life.”10 However, the ambiguous meaning of civil society is not just a function of its overuse. The idea itself, which seems so clear, of that cluster of institutions and associations between the state and the family which are entered and left freely, loses its specificity once it is closely examined. The politics of civil society are more easily invoked than actually found. Despite the claims made for civil society as the context for a new kind of politics that evades the pathologies of the old, it is very difficult to find a genuine example of the politics of civil society. In Poland the state was not challenged by civil society; rather “what was puzzling about Poland in the late 1970s was that with the significant exception of the Catholic Church, an independent and powerful body for the past twenty five years, ‘political society’ emerged without any corporate, institutional underpinning.”11 In a similar vein recent work has claimed that political reform movements in Korea created the opening for the creation of a civil society rather than the other way around.12 James Gibson argues for a particularly 4

INTRODUCTION

odd hybrid of political and civil themes, politicised friendship networks, as the agent for the Russian democratic transition, and some Russian scholars concur that classic political agency is necessary to create a civil society rather than the reverse.13 In every case political events and political actors created the space for the emergence of civil society. This ceases to be surprising once we pay attention to the political context in which the claims of civil society were asserted. As Tomaz Mastnak explains, in the late 1970s when the term was revived “civil society” was the rallying cry that ordered a heterogeneous political opposition across the landscape of Eastern European countries, and its function was to create an alternative ideological framework within which a new left could challenge revisionist Marxism, not to describe a social fact.14 Civil society is a key ideological battleground, and associations are central to modern life, but the kinds of associations that we link with the Tocquevillean idea of civil society are very hard to find. Civil society in contemporary thought is best understood as a kind of utopia, but a very appealing one that has attracted powerful intellects as well as the hopes and aspirations of social and political movements. The title of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Leon de Winter’s article “Civil Society and Hybrid Cars Will Defeat Islamists” expresses one set of aspirations that get invested in civil society.15 Beyond its more obvious ideological deployments, civil society promises to reinvigorate the central political value of freedom while avoiding the pathologies that bedevilled historical social and political movements. The most substantial, even heroic, effort at capturing civil society to revive social democracy is Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato’s attempt to integrate the civil society point of view into discourse ethics.16 In their vision even business associations become amenable to normative transformation through dialogue. In the hands of theorists such as Fareed Zakaria the idea of civil society serves in an almost directly contradictory way as the basis for a new liberal cosmopolitanism that guarantees the liberty of the individual against the populist temptations that are seen haunting all forms of democracy.17 Both these kinds of utopianism have been criticized by Michael Walzer. Walzer is sensitive to the attractions of civil society, “the realm of fragmentation and struggle but also of concrete and authentic solidarities,” but argues that the enthusiasts for civil society fail to recognise that the state is not just another kind of association nor politics just another 5

INTRODUCTION

kind of associative activity, with no more claim on the attention of the individual than any other.18 Rather the state is the institution that sets the terms and conditions for every other. Its inherently coercive possibilities demand a particular disposition for persons acting as citizens, a recognition of the nature of political freedom as unlike any other freedom. The state’s coercive powers force participants to consider the public good beyond their own conceptions of the good life. Walzer is not the only political theorist to worry about the scope and scale of the claims made for civil society. Charles Taylor argues that the very ambition invested in the idea of civil society is dangerous. The civil society point of view claims to be able to reconcile competing political and social ideals by distributing them into various realms, by reference to some more fundamental feature of social life such as trust or social capital.19 As Taylor sees it the two models of civil society create two kinds of political hope: the radical democratic idea of self-determination and the utilitarian or libertarian aspiration to marginalize the political.20 He argues that the incoherence at the heart of civil society, generated by the incompatible commitments to pluralism and autonomy, has tragic effect. The self-determining citizen and the autonomous individual are actually driven apart, theoretically, by invoking civil society. The notions of self-possession through collective action and of self-assertion through the total limitation of all interference threaten the texture of modern social life by promising a fictive resolution. Neither ideal can really comprise the other, and both threaten liberty: “radical self-determination swallows up the state in society, in a supposed common will; while the goal of marginalization tries to approach as close as possible to anarchy.”21 Taylor’s analysis underlines the importance of interrogating claims about civil society and of overcoming the barrier to analysis posed by the high value placed on pluralism in this debate. Pluralism and incoherence are not the same thing. Michael Foley and Bob Edwards underline the same point: the enthusiasts for civil society cannot assume the social peace they claim it fosters.22 Civil society captures a central intuition about the value of modern social life, its irreducibly plural values and norms, but the incoherence around civil society obscures, and so threatens, what it should illuminate and preserve. This book seeks to explain how this fragmentary, complicated, and possibly even incoherent idea managed to emerge as an important category of 6

INTRODUCTION

political and social thought. The idea was fashioned in the British world of the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century and its contemporary usage continues to reflect its historical origins. The argument of this book is that the strengths and weaknesses of the idea of civil society reflect those of its conditions of emergence: the British Empire in a moment of revolution.23 The book takes up the perspective of Frank Trentmann, who argues that the term has to be understood in the context of European state building but extends it to comprehend how civil society owed more to the imperial than the national context.24 Civil society was first invented as an idea of renewed community for newly provincial elites in the provinces of the British Empire. The success of empire depends on the creation or co-optation of these local or colonial elites. Civil society was a project of recuperation by the subjects of Atlantic empire.25 It was projected as an ideal of nationhood by those who had been excluded from political power by the loss of national independence. From its first coinage the idea of civil society has obscured the problems of politics and of political authority because it was designed to negate such authority and replace it. The idea of civil society, of a set of self-governing plural social networks that hedge in sovereign power and set the terms for its exercise, was the hope of Scottish and Irish elites faced with the power of the British Empire and retains meanings inherited from that context.

Empires, Guilds, and Natural Law The context within which Europeans considered questions of identity, politics, and morality in the eighteenth century was the nation.26 John Locke, for instance, assumes that political societies grow out of nations and that natural law effects itself through the nation.27 The seventeenth-century crisis that had ravaged Europe found a resolution in the emergence of the nation as the fundamental unit for the creation of order. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia defined the state through the principle of territorial integrity and set the scene for a sustained debate on what constituted those political units. There were many languages through which Europeans could represent to themselves the problems of conflict and consensus, identity and difference, but all of them took for granted that a fundamental fact about anyone was their membership in a historic community.28 This kind of national 7

INTRODUCTION

identity was very different from that of the modern nation-state, however: the political unit, be it monarchy or republic, was not necessarily, or even ordinarily, coterminous in extent with the nation.29 States, such as Habsburg Spain or Stuart Britain, often comprised a multiplicity of nations in a composite form.30 Nations were bound to states through dense networks of evolving customary legal relationships, the very complexity of which created constant problems of coordination and occasioned a rich literature of political philosophy.31 Two themes were paramount in this discussion and marked it out from Renaissance and classical discussions of politics. Every writer, from the mid-seventeenth-century English republican James Harrington to the Scottish practitioner of the “science of man,” David Hume, was convinced that trade, rather than military organisation, was the defining characteristic of modern nations. It would be a mistake to think that this was universally celebrated: rather writers and thinkers acknowledged that while trade had, as they put it, encouraged polished manners and civility, it posed a threat to virtue, the capacity of the citizenry to prefer the public good to their private interest.32 If a nation’s spirit was too commercial, political theorists feared, fundamental aspects of its identity, even the tastes that differentiated men from women, might be undermined.33 However, they all agreed that a viable nation had to have a foothold in the international trading economy.34 The international trading economy fundamentally meant the colonial trade, and so, for instance, the Estates of Scotland had ratified a scheme for the creation of a trading company in 1695. As David Armitage puts it, the Scots pursued this project of empire, the Darien scheme, as an alternative to dependency on England in Britain or the even more worrying prospect of the emergence of universal monarchy under France in Europe.35 There was an acute awareness that the profits of colonial trade generally, and South American silver in Spanish hands in particular, had created the possibility of an end to all nations. Inflation in the European economy, colonial wealth financing standing armies, the increasing irrelevance of older trading republics: these were all symptoms of the inability of the European polity to expand into the new and retain its old political shape. The antidote to the degenerative effect of commerce was felt to be commitment to the nation and to the continuation of the national community; thus the importance, for those communities, of national history. This was true even of nations, such as Ireland, whose status was am8

INTRODUCTION

biguous: Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éireann of 1634 was the useful past for the Old English, the descendents of the English mediaeval colonists, in Ireland, as George Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia of 1582 was for the Scottish baronage.36 Apart from their place in international trade the other characteristic of modern nations was their existence in an international states’ system. The eighteenth-century Scottish historian and intellectual luminary William Robertson was merely repeating a cliché of political pamphleteers in arguing that the existence of so many nations in Europe was the best guarantee of liberty.37 The greatest evil that could occur, in this view, would be the rise of a universal monarch, on the model of the Habsburg Charles V, who genuinely ruled over a world-bestriding empire in the sixteenth century, or Louis XIV of France, who threatened to create a total empire by absorbing or destroying all his military and commercial rivals.38 Such a monarchy would destroy liberty in both senses, taking away the basis of virtue in individual states and reducing the citizenry to commercial actors without any political role in a nation. Empire destroyed the independence of nations and took away the possibility of civic action from the citizenry. The work of Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) on natural law and sociability provided the philosophical basis for the argument that the threat to a system of states was an alternative incorporating union in which most elements would become provinces.39 The traditional English antipathy to France, which English people viewed as the most likely contender for universal monarchy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was derived from this fear.40 The discourse of the international states’ system and that of commerce balanced one another: the struggle to maintain the freedom of the seas was both profitable and virtuous. It was out of this background of national political thinking that the notion of civil society would emerge, but as an alternative to the historic nation rather than a redescription of it.

Scotland and Ireland in the Atlantic World While the institutions of civil society have roots deep in antiquity the modern idea was born in the middle of the eighteenth century in the anglophone societies of the Atlantic littoral, within the emerging British Empire.41 It might seem somewhat parochial to focus on one element of the 9

INTRODUCTION

Atlantic littoral to the exclusion of other areas, such as France, North America, and the Netherlands. The Atlantic basin in this period generated enormous social, cultural, and political innovation, to the extent that contemporary observers were aware they were witnesses to the creation of a new commercial order, a new basis for a civilisation. The idea of civil society was in many ways a very limited and local response to the creativity of that world. As Bernard Bailyn emphasises, the eighteenth-century Atlantic world was not made up of an aggregation of national communities and imperial political units but was animated by a community that existed in networks outside these organising structures.42 The emergence of civil society was only one part of this complex development, and one that was limited to elements of the British Atlantic. Subaltern elements performed experiments in culture and associational life that went beyond anything that could have been imagined among elites.43 Africans, in particular, cut off more completely from their past than Europeans, made the newest of New Worlds in the Haitian revolution, founding the second republic in the Western hemisphere after the only successful slave rebellion in modern history.44 Civil society was only one of the new cultural and intellectual features of this dynamic world, and not even the most innovative. However, it became one of the master categories of the British Atlantic. Contemporary observers such as Voltaire and Montesquieu were persuaded that British developments in the direction of a commercial society were qualitatively different to anything seen elsewhere.45 Britain was the test case of the viability of a new order of things, as far as contemporaries were concerned, and it was from that order, rather than from resistance to it, that civil society would emerge. Attention to the specific case of Britain also rescues the analysis of civil society from a lazy Whiggism. We associate liberal values so automatically with the Enlightenment that we need the acute thinking of Ernest Gellner to remind us just how extraordinary it was to have the emergence of “an effective central state which, while acquiring such great power, nevertheless did not pulverize the rest of society.”46 Gellner goes on to say that the creation of a new set of institutions and an environment that was protected by law yet simultaneously operated outside its prescriptive reach remains a “mystery.” This book will show that this mystery can be unravelled if we pay close attention to the local and specific contexts in which the ideal of civil society was worked out. 10

INTRODUCTION

There are several features of the British world of the North Atlantic that contributed to the shape of the concept of civil society. The most important contextual fact was that that world was not a nation-state, or even a federation, but an empire. The union between England and Scotland in 1707 had been conceived of as a buttress against empire, a French empire, but its very success and the subsequent expansion of British power made an empire of the British union.47 The effect was almost instantaneous: by 1708 John Oldmixon was publishing his history of the North American colonies under the title of The British Empire in America.48 Britain was unique because state formation and imperial formation became completely implicated with one another. Linda Colley has argued that British identity was constructed around the icons and images of the imperial military adventure, but it is clear that the nature of the new empire was highly contested. Various models of British identity were at stake, especially in the first half of the eighteenth century.49 This complex interaction, where the state was developing around an identity that it was itself constructing, created a variety of problems concerning the integration of older national identities, from English outward, into the new arrangement.50 J. G. A. Pocock has even argued that the British family of nations was bedevilled by an “English problem,” a refusal by the dominant nation to recognise the complexity of the new polity.51 There have been attempts to model the relationship between state and identity in this emerging British Empire. Bernard Bailyn and John Clive have suggested a model of cultural mimicry to account for the spread of new social habits, notions of civility, and forms of social organisation from London to what they term its “cultural provinces.”52 While the idea remains attractive to some scholars, such as Nicholas Phillipson, it has generally been rejected because much of what was invented, written, done, and said in Edinburgh, Dublin, or Boston, among other Atlantic cities, was innovative and original, not copied from any metropolitan source.53 Marshall even argues that by mid-century much of the dynamism behind British expansion was derived from the empire’s periphery.54 We need a more elaborated idea of the kinds of interactions around this Atlantic world rather than a simple model of diffusion and reception of new social habits. The “New British” or “New Atlantic” history has recently begun to engage with the variety of problems and opportunities that opened up in the construction of this first commercial empire.55 This literature provides a 11

INTRODUCTION

point of departure for the investigation of the creation of civil society; however, it is by no means a mature field, and this perspective raises as many questions as it answers.56 Atlantic history has been most successful in reinterpreting the period from the accession of Henry VIII to the Glorious Revolution. Historians have been able to apply a comparison of composite monarchies, first used to analyse continental states, in order to reassert the interactions between England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland and so escape a dualistic model of English centre and “Celtic” periphery.57 The paradigm of the composite monarchy has been particularly successful in explaining events in areas of the islands, such as the Western Isles or Ireland, whose constitutional status was uncertain.58 However, by the time of the Act of Union of 1707, at the very latest, Britain ceased to be a composite monarchy and became an empire that understood itself to be Protestant, maritime, commercial and free.59 David Armitage has recently underlined just how unstable and problematic empire and its ideology were. The first imperial construction lasted just one generation: “In due course the aggressiveness of that [British] nationalism, the unredeemed promises made to the colonists in the form of the rights of Englishmen, and the fissile consequences of the export of British political theory together ensured that the British Atlantic Empire would sunder and then be refashioned in the decades after the Seven Years War.”60 Civil society emerged in an imperial context, but one that was in flux and under pressure. The language and institutions of civil society were a set of responses to the tensions and difficulties created for provincial elites in this British empire. Far from being a feature of cultural mimicry, the new idea was a creative response on the part of the periphery to the confusion created at the imperial centre. Moreover, civil society retained its imperial content and remained a valuable resource for populations seeking to negotiate their place in the complexities of the British Empire well into the nineteenth century.61 Armitage identifies British political theory as one of the most important elements in the reactive mass that made up, and then pulled apart, the eighteenth-century British Empire. The complexity of the composite monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ongoing religious disputes, and eventual civil conflict had promoted the creation of a particularly rich literature of political theory in Britain as well as an extraordinary openness to the political literature of the Netherlands and France.62 No one mode of 12

INTRODUCTION

political thought dominated and organised the many threads of British political theory; however, the emerging tradition of “modern” natural law had potentially the most revolutionary consequences for the practices of civil association.63 The “modern” theory of natural law demanded that politics be conceived of in terms of the contracts between individuals guaranteed by a sovereign or sovereign body. The most important figure in the creation of this language was Hugo Grotius (1583 –1645), the Dutch political thinker who defined a political society or state as a group of individuals with a community of rights and sovereignty.64 The Grotian revolution lay in the abandonment of teleology as a strategy of explanation in ethical and political theory. Grotius discarded Aristotle’s contention that a just man was someone who sought to act justly, who had a just will, in favour of the idea that a just man was someone who exhibited the habit of respecting other people’s rights.65 By replacing justice with rights as the focus of the language of politics, natural right theory made it very difficult to conceive of the authority of any set of institutions between state and individual. Grotius’s ideas were introduced to Britain and Ireland, principally by John Selden and Thomas Hobbes, and became important instruments for understanding parliamentary sovereignty and the authority of the common law. Otto von Gierke, the late nineteenth-century German historian of medieval corporatism, explained the consequences of this intellectual development with clarity: “Local communities and corporate bodies, as distinct from the family, were regarded as only arising after the constitution of a system of political order, and within the limits of that system. They were useful, but not indispensable divisions of the body politic; they had no place in the general natural law scheme of civil society; they were only the particular institutions of a particular state, based on its positive law.”66 By redescribing political relationships in terms of natural law one created a new problem of explaining the role and function of every association that was not the family or the state. This difficulty was particularly important in a social world comprising provinces, colleges, guilds, corps, estates, corporations, universities, and other bodies all vested with some sort of legal authority over their members. The problem of understanding associations from a natural law point of view had been faced from the very first formulations of natural law. Jean Bodin, the late sixteenth-century French jurist and legal theorist who be13

INTRODUCTION

queathed his doctrine of sovereignty to the tradition, had attempted to integrate corporations into his new idea of a state by arraying them in a hierarchy of groups from the most particular, the college, to the most universal, the republic.67 Huguenot theorists attempted to work out a theory of a federal state in order to temper the absolute nature of sovereignty. The most developed effort to reconcile the language of natural law with a doctrine of authoritative organic corporations, that is, corporations with a right to make local laws for a membership that did not have a right of exit, was made by the German Calvinist Johannes Althusius (1557–1638).68 Althusius sought to square the circle by defining the “individuals” who constituted political society as colleges.69 This was an intellectually brilliant move, but it illustrated the intractable nature of the problem of integrating organic communities into a natural law conception based on individuals. If the only solution was to define away the existence of the individuals, then the problem was truly radical. German theorists who studied this problem in the nineteenth century became convinced that the tension between the organic and individualist conceptions of participation in organisations was irresolvable because it was constitutive of modern life. Ferdinand Tönnies (1855 –1936), another German commentator on the natural law tradition, eventually provided us with the vocabulary of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, community and society, through which this polarity could be expressed.70 That polarity has in turn provided modern historians and social scientists with a key analytic distinction that differentiates the modern world, a world of individuals, from that which came before. The concept of civil society was articulated within the language of the “modern” theory of natural law. The concepts of rights and of the distinction of sovereign state from local communities created the space within which a new notion of association could emerge. However, the polarity of community and society derived from the discussion of natural law is extremely unhelpful to any attempt to reconstruct the historical origins of civil society. The idea of civil society was created by individuals and groups who were attempting to reconstruct the psychology of organic community with the tools of individualist society. Adam Ferguson was quite explicit about this, Adam Smith argued in the same direction, and the less visible and famous town clerks, local elites, and clubmen all participated in the effort to square this circle. Civil society was, and remains, a hybrid idea, and if not 14

INTRODUCTION

quite a chimera, it did make a monstrous mixture of private and public qualities. The new world of sovereigns, centralised authority, pacified societies, and an international states’ system had no place for older political identities based on the diffusion of sovereignty among elites and local institutions. Anything that genuinely threatened the authority of the state would not be tolerated. The experience of association as political comradeship was radically diluted, and a new arena had to be constructed within which association could find a new content and meaning. That arena was civil society. An empire of natural law set the conditions and provided much of the vocabulary for the creation of a new idea of community in the eighteenth century. The empire itself was not understood to be that community, though. The proximate and local contexts within which new ideas of community were lived through were towns and cities. The eighteenth century was a great era of urbanisation across the British Isles. By 1800 one third of the population of England lived in towns; two thirds of all European urban growth in the eighteenth century was contributed by England.71 No other country had as mature a system of towns and cities as England, but nevertheless the Scottish urban fabric expanded impressively in the same period. By 1801 Scotland had seven cities with more than 10,000 people and a chain of towns of different sizes fulfilling differing functions across the central belt.72 In Ireland the picture was more complicated, as the growth of towns and cities was masked by overall population growth. All the port cities and market towns expanded significantly, and at least in Ulster the network of smaller urban centres expanded.73 The Irish pattern was if anything closer to that of North America than that of Britain. There also, significant urban growth was swamped by even more spectacular growth in the rural population.74 All of these urban areas benefited from the explosion in consumption that transformed economic, social, and cultural life around the Atlantic.75 The effects were most radically felt in Scotland, where the reorientation of trade transformed the entire urban geography. Up to the middle of the seventeenth century, urban Scotland was eastern Scotland; the four great burghs, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, and Perth, reflected trading links with Scandinavia, the Baltic, and France. The explosive growth of Glasgow, driven by the tobacco trade, and other centres such as Paisley and Greenock reoriented urban Scotland to the west.76 The effects were 15

INTRODUCTION

not as radical in Ireland, but particular centres, such as Cork, acquired new roles through participation in the Atlantic world.77 After the difficulties they had faced in the early seventeenth century, towns and cities were the major beneficiaries of the changed conditions. The price to be paid for the improved economic and political context for town life was the reduction of the towns’ legal and institutional autonomy. States with a new clarity about the nature of their sovereignty undermined civic community and its structures. One must be careful not to overstate this dynamic. The erosion of civic autonomy did not fully reduce towns to the condition of clients of either the state or rural aristocrats. Urban elites and indeed town dwellers generally adapted to the new conditions.78 The changes were profound, though. In Ireland the 1672 New Rules emasculated every urban corporation and gave the Lord Lieutenant sweeping powers. In Scotland in the same year, the monopoly on foreign trade exercised by the Royal Burghs was given up, and by 1700 the ancient monopolies held by merchant and craft guilds had disappeared.79 After 1689 the only continuing monopoly in foreign trade was that of the East India Company. A series of acts, including the 1662 Corporation Act in England and Wales, also gave the state power to remove members of corporations from office for religious or political dissent.80 During the Exclusion crisis, the struggle between Charles II and Parliament between 1678 and 1681 over the right of Charles’s Catholic brother James to accede to the throne, Charles’s wholesale purges of Whig-dominated corporations underlined the extent to which urban politics had been harnessed to national politics. Towns could not expect to act as independent agents, nor could they reasonably act in the name of their general good once the polarisation of national politics began to be reflected in party mobilisation within towns as well. While the powers and independence of the corporate structures that made up town life, from councils to guilds, were undermined or wholly removed, there was no corresponding effort on the part of Parliament or Castle to reform or remake those structures.81 Not until the Scottish Burgh Reform Act of 1833, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, and the Irish Municipal Reform Act of 1840 would wholesale reformation of the structures of urban governance occur. The slow pace of even this late reform can be gauged by the fact that it was not until 1898 that grand juries were finally abolished in Ireland, although most of their functions had been 16

INTRODUCTION

taken over by elected poor law guardians from 1835. While the state’s authority was reinforced its responsibilities declined. Growing parliamentary supremacy did not provoke important initiatives to acquire new areas of responsibility. The towns, and other structures of local government, were left to regulate local life with reduced powers and confused roles. Managing change required considerable innovation. The major innovation was the massive growth in clubs and societies. As Peter Clark reports, during the eighteenth century only churches and drinking houses drew more members than clubs and societies.82 Associations performed many of the functions that had been filled by privileged corporations before the eighteenth century. In England especially, associations were able to replace almost entirely the functions of older corporate structures. Their new activity was not restricted to providing contexts for urban sociability and the construction of a renewed urban identity; associations also acquired political roles. Ad hoc committees to create charitable hospitals, build roads, or reform morals confidently petitioned Parliament for regulatory and other powers.83 A new kind of urban elite was created that exerted itself in an alliance with Parliament, an alliance cemented by the membership of MPs in the plethora of new associations.84 The results of this kind of urban institution were impressive. Liverpool had its first voluntary hospital, the Westminster, by 1748 as the consequence of a local committee’s efforts. By the 1770s another novel form of association, the chamber of commerce, was engaged in the interests of local commerce without making claims for trading privileges, in a manner that had proved impossible for the old privileged guilds. The happy embrace of Parliament and urban associations allowed English towns and cities to negotiate a period of intense social and economic change without having to generate a range of new values and new ideas. As Clark again notes, England produced no extended philosophical justification for the importance and freedom of voluntary associations in society.85 Even as urban communities transformed themselves representations of the community could remain stable. The British Empire, speaking a political language of natural law, articulated the social life of its towns and cities through associations. Associative life was a common feature of the British realms but promoted more cultural change and posed a greater intellectual challenge in the countries and provinces outside England. In England radical social and political innova17

INTRODUCTION

tion did not fundamentally challenge the social and cultural order; in Ireland and Scotland fewer institutions generated radical new representations of the community. In North America the institutions of civil life were to provide the ground for revolution by creating the foundation for an American society out of the differentiated colonies.86 The idea of civil society was the middle ground trod by Irish and Scottish urban elites, between the continuity in English urban ideology and the radical break in America.87 The task of this book is to explain where and how this middle ground was constructed. The absolute reversal of imperial ideas that are then turned on their inventors is a fairly common historical phenomenon.88 What is less common is a hybrid invention of a new interpretation of the imperial ideal. In Scottish and Irish towns and cities a new interpretation of the meaning and function of the British Empire was fashioned in the eighteenth century and then offered to that empire as an alternative way of understanding itself. The vocabulary of national and personal identity and moral excellence, including virtue, independence, national history, constitution, and liberty, was made problematic for the Irish and the Scots by the emergence of a new kind of integrated British Empire. The Act of Union in 1707, uniting Scotland and England, and the Declaratory Act of 1720, asserting British parliamentary supervision over Irish affairs, underlined the transformation of a multiple monarchy into a unitary empire.89 1707 was the moment of fracture in the national narrative in Scotland, particularly, canonically represented in Buchanan as the progress of an elect, Protestant nation whose liberties had been defended against the English by the courage of its inhabitants and the will of God.90 It was also the moment of institutional fracture: the founding document of the imagined community of the Scottish nation, the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, cited and reiterated in the Claim of Right of 1689, made clear that the basis of Scottish liberty, and thus of identity, was the existence of Scottish institutions separate from those of England. The striking element of this Scottish story is the collapse of the economy of relations between identity (the awareness, for instance, that Scots and English shared a Protestant heritage) and difference (the distinctive Scottish Whig constitutional doctrine) into an assertion of absolute identity. The space of union was, paradoxically, one that denied a possible assertion of communal identity, even as it claimed to supply a vocabulary 18

INTRODUCTION

of neutral concept-metaphors for local and personal identity formation. Daniel Defoe, a leading propagandist for union, couched his argument not as the creation of a new nation but as a better form of provincialism for Scotland: under the terms of the Union of Crowns of 1601, Scotland “would rather seem a Province than a Kingdom, and yet remain without the proper advantages of a Province of England also; as being treated like Aliens in everything detrimental to England, and as subjects, in every thing advantageous to England, tho’ prejudicial to Scotland.”91 The existence of Scottish institutions was ignored, and the need to replace the identities they had sustained with new forms of identity was not entertained. The distinction between state and nation that could have been maintained in a federal union between England and Scotland was dispelled in the incorporating union that took place. The end of the Scottish Parliament meant, in a very real way, an end to the nation. While the union eliminated the institutions of national political life, it did not obliterate Scottish society. Scottish elites continued to represent themselves in Edinburgh after 1707. There was something of a turnover of institutions created by the social elites of Scotland between 1707 and the Peace of Paris in 1763. In 1720 the Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture was founded; it met its demise in the 1740s and was replaced between 1754 and 1763 by the Select Society.92 Particularly in the 1750s and 1760s there was a proliferation of societies such as the Poker Club; the Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, and Manufactures; and the Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland, all in Edinburgh, as well as the Literary Society in Glasgow and the Philosophical Club in Aberdeen.93 The resource on which all these societies drew was the continuing vitality of Scottish institutions such as the legal profession, the church, and the universities. The universities were particularly strong and reformed their structures and curricula throughout the period, making them the most vibrant and progressive in Europe.94 However, this institutional vitality could not in itself compensate for the lack of credible representations of self and of the community.95 The ministers, gentry, and lawyers who populated the learned and political societies of eighteenth-century Scotland were driven to redefine the very natures of self and community because existing definitions were not serviceable in the Scottish context. The generation born in the 1710s and 1720s, in 19

INTRODUCTION

particular, elaborated a series of themes first worked out in Ireland and married them to Lockean psychology, political economy, Shaftesbury’s aesthetics, the new jurisprudence, and Newtonian science. In doing so they attempted to rewrite the dominant accounts of the nature of humanity and the nature of community.96 So successful was this manoeuvre that the vocabulary it created, enshrining ideals of civil society and the happiness of the individual, has provided the organising principles of nearly all Western European societies. However, the eventual success of the Scottish exploration of alternative models of community should not distract our attention from the situation of crisis in which it was generated. This Scottish history is the immediate context from which the language of civil society emerged. Contemporary debates within the language of civil society re-enact the political and cultural contradictions inscribed into the idea at its very origin. The history of civil society will not simplify the concept but rather underline that it has been a complex if not incoherent idea from its first conceptualisation. Before we can begin to understand civil society, we must first differentiate it from other kinds of civic association and identify when it became distinct. As Adam Seligman points out, civil society emerged out of, and differentiated itself from, the discussion of civic virtue during the Enlightenment.97 The long tradition of thinking of a civil society as a politically organised commonwealth, beginning with the Greeks and revised in the early modern period as Machiavellian republicanism, provided much of the vocabulary for the new elaboration of civil society and key images of authentic solidarity.98 Yet despite the undoubted legacy of the antique cities for the elaboration of new thinking, the most important fact about individuals in civil society was that they were not citizens.99 If anything, the idea of civil society sought to find a context for the moral education of its members that was not equivalent to the agora or forum. One of the most important tasks of an historical approach to civil society is to date and locate precisely the break with the antique ideal. The idea of civil society was generated by urban intellectual elites in trading and manufacturing towns in eighteenth-century Ireland and Scotland. The challenge faced by the civic communities of these Atlantic home towns in the eighteenth century is best understood by contrasting them with their German cognates. As Mack Walker explains, after the Peace of Westphalia the structures of guild, city corporation, and estate were reinforced 20

INTRODUCTION

to ensure economic and political order.100 In the republics of Switzerland, similarly, the estate structures tightened, as did economic regulation, in the early part of the century. In both cases the identity of the town dweller, or more properly the citizen of the town, and its identification with the corporate structures of the civic constitution were reinforced. Not until the wars of the French Revolution would these structures, and the identities that depended on them, be compromised. Until then urban communities managed change within historic town constitutions. In contrast, by 1800 Atlantic communities had innovated with new social and institutional forms for nearly a century and a half. As an exercise in the history of ideas this argument departs from the dominant tradition of explanation in the field, associated with figures such as J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and John Dunn.101 While there are significant differences between the approaches of all of these scholars they all respond to Wittgenstein’s idea of language games and in particular to his insight that games generate criteria, rules, which determine meaningful speech and action. This insight has inspired a complex historiography into the elaboration of the “languages of politics” in early modern Europe, the vocabularies through which writers and speakers could be recognised as communicating meaningfully and making claims for the values and institutions that should govern the public realm. This book is indebted to an alternative reading of Wittgenstein by Stanley Cavell that argues that meaningful behaviour is constituted not by the criteria it generates, but by the space or stage on which the participants meet.102 The model of context used in this book to make comprehensible the political claims of the past, which are often very strange, is far more material and contingent than the various ideas of tradition, paradigm, conversation, or language that have been deployed by intellectual history.103 The practical consequence of this approach is that I do not attempt to construct a conceptual genealogy for a language of civil society since I argue that it does not have one. Civil society was an improvisation, an idea constructed from a variety of heterogeneous sources. Its coherence depended not on the integrity of the intellectual context from which it emerged but from its capacity to manage and master the difficult world of the emergent British Empire and, by extension, cognate modern polities. Townsmen in an emerging empire, one characterised by its use of the 21

INTRODUCTION

rhetoric of natural law, created the idea of civil society to provide a way of understanding political and social life in a period of bewildering change. Inhabitants of towns far from the centres of political power embraced the possibilities of new associations with particular enthusiasm. Civil society did not just read off the structures of town life in the Atlantic world. The idea took on new life and opened up new possibilities when it began to circulate as an interpretation of the possibilities of empire. Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics had enormous local differences, but both shared a common problem of articulating their relationship to an imperial centre. To explain their common problem they had to invent new vocabularies of political identity. Understandably, although these new ideas had different origins, the groups’ similar situations drove them to converge on a similar ground of civil society as the concept most appropriate to explaining their circumstances. Particularly after the Peace of Paris, imperial Britain threatened to become a new kind of universal empire, though in a commercial key. This threat was particularly repugnant to Scots who had committed themselves to British identity. They developed the Irish ideas and universalised them to elaborate a new understanding of the essential feature of a moral order as a civil society. This offered a way of explaining how the polity could escape the fate of universal empire, a new form of barbarism, either through reform or through wholesale renovation. Between 1763 and 1789 the civil society point of view was developed beyond its original use to rationalise the relationship of province to metropole in the British Empire. It now aspired to interpret and explain the developmental path of all commercial societies. The revolutionary decade of the 1790s marked the high point of the use of this idiom of civil life. The civil society point of view was shared by conservative and reformer alike, and different understandings of the idea actually drove violence rather than mediated it. The inconsistencies and confusions in our contemporary understanding of civil society date from this moment when the term was tested to near destruction. This book is the history of an idea. Associations are ubiquitous in human history and particularly important to modern life. The problem this book seeks to respond to is why eighteenth-century subjects of the British Empire found them so politically and culturally important that they were driven to change the referent for civil society, leaving behind its given meaning for the previous two thousand years as a politically organised commonwealth. 22

INTRODUCTION

While the literature of political theory was mined for responses to the colonial and provincial circumstance, the idea of civil society did not derive in any rigorous way from that disciplinary debate. The contexts for this intellectual innovation were social, economic, and political as well as textual. This contextual history of the idea of civil society has to account for two features, which might be called the Gellner problem and the Taylor problem. The Gellner problem is his justified surprise that so powerful an entity as the British fiscal-military state did not ideologically overpower and dominate its population; in other words, that it allowed an idea of civil society to emerge at all. The Taylor problem is the tension that arose almost instantly within that idea of civil society between the values of autonomy and plurality. The account has to be able to explain why the idea of civil society was so complex, even contradictory. The thesis of this book is that both these features were generated by the emergence of the idea in the provinces of empire. Civil society compensated local elites for their loss of citizenship, and the complexity of the idea reflected the near impossibility of retaining historic languages of moral excellence after citizenship or, as Alasdair MacIntyre put it, “after virtue.”

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CHA PTER ONE C O F F E E , A S S O C I AT I O N , A N D C U LT U R A L H Y B R I D I T Y I N SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

In the past twenty years historians interested in explaining change in early modern Europe have placed a powerful new factor alongside such classic components as the rise of the bourgeoisie or the military revolution: conversation.1 Civil conversation, polite or even impolite debate, gossip: all of this talk created networks that could be turned to many diverse purposes. We have come to understand the Enlightenment, in particular, as a sociability that encouraged reasoned debate in local circles and between dispersed people, rather than a particular doctrine or set of ideas.2 The idea of sociable, or civil, conversation has extended our idea of Enlightenment to include a membership much wider than the circle of a French-inspired “party of humanity,” to include the kinds of associations that are at the roots of classic civil society. Among the many institutions from schools and theatres to courts and galleries that fostered this new sensibility, two were particularly innovative: the salon and the coffee house. The salon, largely associated with France, inducted scholars and thinkers into polite society, thus civilising the republic of letters while broadening it.3 Yet the widest dissemination of a new enlightened sociability was based not in the relatively

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exclusive salon, but in the more popular coffee house, and the home of the coffee house was England.4 In 1650 a Jewish immigrant, only lately allowed to enter England and recorded only as “Jacob,” opened the first coffee house in Western Europe in rooms in the Angel Inn on the High Street in Oxford.5 Anthony Wood, who was to disapprove of these institutions as the reason for the “decay of study, and consequently of learning,” observed that the coffee house became a Mecca “for those who delighted in noveltie” and who wished to “spend most of the day in hearing and speaking of news, in speaking vily of their superiors.”6 “Nothing but news and the affairs of Christendome is discoursed of,” he complained, regretting that “one that discourseth in company scholarlike, . . . is accounted pedanticall and pedagogicall.”7 Jacob’s success in the Angel inspired imitators, including one Cirques Jobson, who brought his coffee-making techniques to the Queens Lane corner from the Lebanon, and Arthur Tillyard, who created a specifically royalist coffee house next to All Souls. A new institution had been created, one that quickly replicated itself and its characteristic intellectual sociability, its rejection of academic discourse in favour of conversation, and its hunger for news. These Oxford coffee houses were the first institutions of the Enlightenment, indeed the models for all the clubs, societies, reading circles, and scientific networks from which emerged the culture and ideal of reason. England was fertile ground for germinating the seed of a new idea of civilisation. The ground had been broken and tilled over by the Civil War; old habits and assumptions had been shaken. The collapse of controls on printing and publication in the 1640s allowed a new kind of contestatory print politics to emerge, particularly in the form of the “mercuries,” regularly published newspapers.8 Political change produced novelty. An obscure country gentleman like James Harrington could find himself in arguments with a king over the possible constitutional future of the country, when he was appointed to Charles I’s court in parliamentary custody in 1647.9 Harrington’s subsequent political evolution, from courtier to author of the classic of republican political thought, Oceana, and inspiration for the political debating club, the Rota, founded in Miles’s coffee house in Westminster in 1659, illustrated the new possibilities for political discussion and debate. The ideal of civil conversation as an experience shared among known friends

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under the eye of a patron, such as the Great Tew circle presided over by Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland in the 1630s, was transcended, or at least supplemented, by a new politics articulated in public around the principle of publicity.10 Coffee house culture blossomed as Englishmen and the other inhabitants of the British Isles used it to conduct a sixty-year political debate on their political future. As one would expect, the capital, the centre of political life, quickly acquired the new institutions. Pasqua Rosée arrived in London from Smyrna in the household of the Puritan merchant Daniel Edwards in 1651. Edwards and his friend Hodge financially backed Rosée to open the first London coffee house in St. Michael’s Lane off Cornhill in 1652.11 By 1700 there were two thousand coffee houses in London. Steven Pincus has portrayed the vital role the coffee houses played as centres for dissemination of political material and as a ground, or even the only ground, on which Englishmen could develop independent political opinions.12 In a coffee house, for the price of a penny, one could have access to the newspapers and pamphlets strewn about on the centre table and participate in political discussion. The conjunction of the political moment and the new institution created a new repertoire of political behaviour. In the coffee house new rules of discourse were hammered out. The most important rule was the primacy of reason over precedent or station. Having abandoned social pre-eminence as the template for civility, the habitués of the coffee houses were driven to develop new rules for polite discussion as well. Coffee houses became the model for a self-regulating social institution. These norms did not remain implicit but were systematised in, among other places, The Rules and Orders of a Coffee House: Enter here freely, but first if you please Peruse our civil orders, which are these. First, Gentry, Tradesmen all are welcome hither And may without affront sit down together: Pre-eminence of place, none here shall mind, But find the next fit seat that he can find: Nor need any, if finer persons come, Rise up to assign to them his room: To limit men’s experience we think not fair, But let him forfeit twelve-pence that shall swear:

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He that shall any quarrel here begin, Shall give each man a dish t’atone the sin.13 Critics as well as partisans of the coffee house drew attention to the new drink and the new behaviour: “As you have here a hodge-podge of drinks, so too is your company; for each man seems a leveller and ranks and files himself as he lists, without regard to degrees or order.” The coffee houses were “the rendezvous of pamphlets, and persons more idly employed to read them; a high court of justice where every little fellow in a camlet cloke takes upon him to transpose affairs both in church and state, to shew reasons against acts of Parliament, and condemn the decrees of general councils.”14 Defenders of the coffee house were well aware of the political importance of their very existence. Coffee houses were proof of the sociable nature of humans and of the impossibility of the absolutism theorised by “the apostle of Malmesbury,” Thomas Hobbes, whose writings, in particular his Leviathan, argued for a highly authoritarian vision of a new England.15 The Rota Club is the best example of the potential of coffee house politics. Set up in 1659, it stated its purpose as offering a model for a republic. The innovation introduced by Henry Nevill was that the debates, “the most ingenious, and smart, that ever I heard” according to the memorialist John Aubrey, were concluded with a secret ballot, a neutral method to bring decisions out of discourse.16 This could have odd effects, as when Samuel Pepys reports that the club voted in successive ballots that the Roman form of government was inherently stable and that it lacked a social base, but even he admired the standard of argument to be found among the members.17 The Rota Club was extraordinary for the high standard of political debate, but its effect, the politicisation and socialisation of a conversing public, was generally shared. As Pincus observes, the most telling testament to the values incubated in the coffee houses was the effort of the restored government of Charles II to close them down in 1675. That it failed to do so is hardly surprising since even its own Secretary for the Navy found them indispensable sources of news.18 The rules of coffee houses’ politics, their publicity, and their discursive rationality set the terms for the political sociability of the nation. The invention of the coffee house transformed urban sociability in unforeseen ways beyond politics. The new space in which negotiation and in-

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teraction were encouraged was turned to uses as various as those of talk. Literary clubs predated the coffee houses, Walter Raleigh and Ben Jonson having gathered friends at the Mermaid and the Devil’s Tavern, but the model of the literary society was established in Will’s coffee house in the 1660s with the poet and dramatist John Dryden as its resident sage.19 Stephen B. Dobranski argues that even John Milton was drawn into this literary sociability, despite his puritan rigour.20 Will’s provided a space for the arbiters of literary taste and was one of the sites from which Richard Steele and Joseph Addison were to address a widened coffee house audience in the pages of the Spectator and the Tatler. These journals promised to make their readers virtual habitués of the café society of London: “All accounts of gallantry, pleasure and entertainment, shall be under the article of White’s Chocolate house: Poetry, under that of Will’s coffee house; learning under the title of the Grecian; Foreign and Domestic news, you will have from St. James’s coffee-house.”21 This kind of café society was to have a long life; Peele’s on Fleet Street was still a literary coffee house in the time of Dickens. Literary life also had its Grub Street, of course, and the coffee house offered new possibilities to it as well. The Athenian Society, which met in the back room of Smith’s coffee house in the Poultry Market, filled the pages of its Athenian Mercury with coffee house answers to such learned questions as whether or not Adam and Eve had navels.22 The values of public debate and interaction were not necessarily the same as those of serious debate and judgement. The new social norms fostered by the coffee house were quickly disseminated across the English-speaking Atlantic world. By 1698 the editor of the Athenian Mercury, John Dunton, expected to find exactly the same network of coffee houses, pamphleteers, and printers in Dublin as he would in Exchange Alley. Dublin had a newspaper, the Dublin Newsletter, from 1685, through which Dunton could advertise his wares. He could conduct his book sale at Dick’s in Skinner’s Row, circulate the catalogue to coffee houses in provincial cities like Kilkenny and Cork to find buyers, and even conduct a pamphlet dispute with the bookseller Patrick Campbell from the new vantage point of Patt’s coffee house on the High Street.23 By 1726 James Arbuckle could complain in the Dublin Journal of “that formal set of humdrums who saunter from morning to night in a coffee-house, and have no other materials for thinking but what arises from a gazette.”24 Coffee house 28

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manners, disseminated in pamphlet and journal, formed the template for new sets of social norms. The first, abortive, Boston newspaper, Benjamin Harris’s Publick Occurances of 1694, gave the London Coffee House as its editorial address, and in 1721 Benjamin Franklin’s brother James would found the New England Courant in imitation of the Spectator.25 The communications innovations developed around the coffee house even had effects on the physical layout of towns. Trading towns mimicked the organisation of Cheapside and the Exchange: Charles Smith reported that by the mideighteenth century the booming port of Cork had an assembly room and two coffee houses near the exchange, “where they have the Dublin and London newspapers.”26 The English provinces adapted in similar ways: there were coffee houses in Shrewsbury in the 1660s, and it had a cluster of coffee houses around its market hall by the 1720s.27 Economic life was as affected by coffee house sociability as literary and social life. The transparency brought to communicative relations by the discursive norms of coffee house culture promoted a whole new scale of commercial enterprise. The densest network of coffee houses in London came to be around Exchange Alley. The coffee house brought the competing imperatives of risk and the need for security in speculation into a viable balance, the proprietor of the coffee house offering reliable information and the customers establishing credentials of character for people engaged in essentially hazardous businesses. Pleasant as it was to pass time in the coffee house, it was also a vital business occupation for a London merchant. Robert Herries, the junior associate of the merchant Richard Oswald, attended the Jamaica Coffeehouse in St. Michael’s Alley every afternoon to gather the news of the West Indian trade, to see the newspapers as they were published, and to establish his own presence in the networks of news and business.28 New economic institutions founded on this precarious balance of interest and reputation grew out of the coffee houses. The cluster of coffee houses on Exchange Alley between Cornhill and Lombard Street, including Jonathan’s, Garraway’s, Sam’s, Powell’s, and the Rainbow, became the haunt of dealers in securities and stocks.29 The customers of Jonathan’s set up their own institution in Sweetings Alley in 1773, and the Stock Exchange coffee house was born. It was to have been called New Jonathan’s in continuity with its coffee house origins.30 Other exchanges grew out of coffee houses. The customers of the Jerusalem and the Virginia coffee houses 29

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formed the Baltic exchange. The most famous evolution was that of the coffee house set up by Edward Lloyd in 1688 into a market for marine insurance. The informal system of underwriters taking “lines” as a proportion of a total insured was open to abuse, and Steele reports that there was a wellfounded suspicion that premiums were inflated and settlements capricious.31 However, the market’s flexibility and potential were so powerful that the effort to end the abuse of marine insurance by establishing monopolies through the Bubble Act of 1720 was totally subverted and the new companies were captured by the underwriters. Domestic insurance brokers set themselves up in Tom’s and Causey’s coffee houses, which evolved into the Hand in Hand Fire Office and the Sun Fire Office.32 All of these institutions capitalised on the possibilities for more rational economic decision making based on equal access to information and the possibilities for open negotiations. Addison perfectly expressed the interaction of communication and trade: “There is no place in town which I so much love to frequent as the Royal Exchange . . . I must confess I look upon High-Change to be a great council, in which all considerable nations have their representatives. Factors in the trading world are what ambassadors are in the pollitick world; they negotiate affairs, conclude treaties, and maintain a good correspondence between those wealthy societies of men that are divided from one another by seas and oceans, or live on the different extremities of a continent.”33 The coffee houses were the perfect institutions through which the new merchant elite of London, committed to the open trade of the Atlantic rather than the older system of monopoly companies, could organise itself.34 Of course the system was not foolproof, and the relationship of information to risk could become unstable if the profits promised to be spectacular or the information less than perfect. Garraway’s coffee house witnessed the greatest of these dysfunctions, the South Sea Bubble. Jonathan Swift satirised those who waited in the coffee house to profit from others’ misfortunes: Meanwhile secure on Garway’s cliffs A savage race, by shipwrecks fed, Lie waiting for the founder’d skiffs, And strip the bodies of the dead.35

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The coffee shop created circumstances which allowed the creation of new kinds of markets but could not stabilise markets entirely nor replace market behaviour; as Mandeville observed of the emerging commercial society, All trades and places knew some cheat No calling was without deceit.36 The coffee house was the model for a new idea of politics and the ground on which new patterns of social interaction and economic behaviour were set. It was also the place where new cognitive norms, particularly those of the experimental sciences, were worked out. The first meeting place of the men who would create the Royal Society, whose “first purpose was no more than only the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet, without being engag’d in the passions and madness of that dismal age,” was Tillyard’s coffee house in Oxford.37 The first effort of Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, John Wallis, and Nathaniel Crew to institute systematic research in the natural sciences was to sponsor a course of lectures in chemistry by the Strasbourg scholar Peter Sthael. These lectures were given at a room in the coffee house.38 Even after the move to London the members of the society were more often seen in the Grecian coffee house in Devereux Court or Child’s in St. Paul’s churchyard than in Gresham College.39 The basic features of the coffee houses, their openness to persons of every station in life and their commitment to the order of conversation, made them particularly well suited to the kinds of negotiations around the practices of the new science. The activities of Robert Hooke, the secretary to the Royal Society and the man responsible for ensuring that the scientific instruments vital to its work were built and actually functioned, reveal the way in which coffee house culture made possible experimental life. Rob Illife’s reading of Hooke’s diaries shows that he was in Garraway’s, Man’s, and Child’s every day, discussing the ways to construct the complicated instruments necessary for scientific experiment with skilled artisans like Thomas Tompion.40 The coffee houses were vital because they admitted a far wider social spectrum than the more socially exclusive Royal Society, where only the fifty members had right of access. Hobbes rejected the Royal Society’s claim to represent a public reason on precisely the grounds that it was a closed corporation.41 The link between coffee houses and a wide scientific sociability was general enough to be the object of satire: “Any 31

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fanatick artist, chemical operator, or whimsical projector, that tied but a crochet in their heads or but dreamed themselves into some strange fanciful discovery, might be kindly admitted as welcome brethren into this teeming society, . . . till, with drinking and rattling, they were ready to let fall a nauseous perpendicular from their mouths to the chamber pot.”42 The coffee house conversations of technicians and scientists more closely approximated the kind of public interrogation of experimental practice to which the Royal Society was explicitly committed than did the Society itself. Thomas Sprat, not himself a natural philosopher but a friend of Christopher Wren and the Royal Society’s first historian, explained that though the Society welcomed all professions and degrees “that by this equal balance of all professions, there will be no one particular of them outweigh the other, . . . yet the far greater number are gentlemen.”43 The staging of the interrogations of matters of fact through experiment by the socially qualified in Arundel House, the first home of the society, was managed by the interrogations of the technically competent in Garraway’s. Clearly coffee houses were not the only sites of cultural creativity or even of sociability in late seventeenth-century England. Aemelia Lanyer’s 1611 “Description of Cookham” and Ben Jonson’s 1616 “To Penshurst” began a strong tradition that idealised an alternative model of sociability around the English country house. And though thy walls be of the country stone, They’re rear’d with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan; There’s none, that dwell about them, wish them down; But all come in, the farmer and the clown; And no one empty-handed, to salute Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit. Penshurst Place was the Kent home of the Sidney family, whose members included Philip Sidney, author of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and hero of Protestant liberty, as well as being the home of Algernon Sidney, the republican politician, writer, and martyr. This image of the country house as a cradle of patriot gentry and a place of social integration exerted a strong hold on the English imagination, established a powerful image of an Arcadian substitute for urban sociability, and exemplified alternatives to Whiggish accounts of commercial politeness as the basis of civility.44 However, 32

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notwithstanding the existence of multiple bases for civil life, it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the coffee house to English culture in the middle to late seventeenth century. The coffee houses allowed new communicative relationships to emerge that in turn promoted entirely novel institutions and practices. Problems of trust, risk, information, and coordination were endemic to early modern states and societies.45 Intellectual resources existed that allowed states to understand and inflect this problem, particularly the emerging work in political economy, but actual control and coordination were beyond the resources of any early modern state. Even Louis XIV’s reconfiguration of state power and reorganisation of the nobility required the collaboration of provincial nobles.46 The increasing complexity of economic relations across early modern Europe generated analogous problems of coordination and provoked similar innovations across different states. By 1540 the disadvantages of keeping commodity prices secret had become so obvious to the traders in the Antwerp market, the busiest in northern Europe, that they printed and published the information freely.47 The advantages of holding privileged information had been outweighed by the disadvantages caused by suspicion and doubt. Antwerp’s lead was followed by Amsterdam and eventually London, and a business press became a necessary element of a functioning market. Coffee house culture made use of this kind of information in a new way because it allowed individuals to coordinate themselves. The institution sponsored the iterative interactions, negotiations, and judgements that allowed groups of individuals to deploy information and generate good judgement about one another. These problems of coordination were particularly acute in England, racked by a generation of political conflict. The English state was in the forefront of experiments with political economy, but the increasing sophistication of the state was not enough to create new conditions of social life.48 An influential argument by Douglass North and Barry Weingast even asserts that the Glorious Revolution, by fixing the nature of property rights and establishing a form of representative government, laid down the pattern for modern patterns of continuous economic growth.49 This idea captures how important the new institutions created out of political and social conflict were, but it understates the extent of institutional innovation. The argument has been criticised for its poverty; by concentrating on state insti33

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tutions, it occludes the cultural and social institutions necessary for individuals to act within a new legal framework.50 The cognitive and cultural norms generated through association in the coffee houses were just as important as legal frameworks in explaining the dynamism of English society. Even more important, the kind of economic growth that interests North and Weingast was not endogenously generated within England and captured within English political and legal institutions. International trade demanded coordination outside and beyond the nation-state.51 Secure property rights and a state open to elite negotiation and influence may have been a necessary condition for a dynamic polity, but it was not sufficient to coordinate trans-oceanic exchange, or even to motivate it. The cultures of association generated in the coffee house proved themselves to be far more flexible than the institutions of law and politics. They formed a template that encouraged global exchange and cosmopolitan values.

Cairo on Thames Coffee house culture was a central contributor to the culture of civility and association that characterised England from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.52 Civility, and an ideal of privacy, long preceded the middle of the seventeenth century, but it was in the coffee house that those private persons generated a collective culture of mutual respect.53 Just how and why they did so has not been fully explored or properly understood. The coffee house did not invent English individualism, but it provided a forum through which those individuals could organise themselves to shape and structure a new and dynamic world. The culture of association was the basis for the construction of a series of institutions, particularly economic institutions such as the Bank of England, that would allow England, eventually, to become the global hegemon.54 The link between the institutions of civility and efficient politics and economics is well understood; what is not understood is how this particular institution could inflect a culture in this particularly happy way. The very novelty of coffee allowed Englishmen to conduct social experiments with it. Coffee was exotic in the proper sense of the term: it lay off the map of the known. Coffee could not be organised under the existing categories of food and drink. It did not nourish, nor did it intoxicate. It was a 34

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new object of consumption, like tobacco or chocolate, which demanded new kinds of symbolic relationships. Accounts of coffee had trouble determining if it was a pleasure or a medicine. One account, after pointing out that it was “the universal drink” in countries where alcohol was not consumed, went on to argue for its use in lessening sexual urges, regulating periods, and clearing constipation.55 It is hard to resist the suspicion that coffee was thought to be a specific for the circulation and flows of the body by analogy with its own circulation in trade. The normal rules of interaction were relaxed around the magic (that is, unlike anything natural and knowable) substance that was coffee. The very process of brewing coffee was reminiscent of the work of the alchemist at his furnace, and coffee acted, in the popular imagination, to reconcile opposites in the manner of the quintessence.56 Its confusion of categories allowed supporters and opponents of the drink to project all manner of degustatory fantasy on it. The author of The Character of a Coffee House was sure that coffee was simultaneously a concoction made by witches and a beverage of gunpowder originally brewed by Guy Fawkes.57 Witches and Catholics were of course two of the most reliable objects of anxiety in the culture, and the pamphleteer concluded his attack on coffee house culture by an analogy of the coffee house with Catholic chapels: “The wax candles burning, and low devout whispers strike a kind of religious awe; while the modish gallant swears so often by Jesu, an ignorant catholic would take it for a chapel.”58 Supporters, on the other hand, could drink in antiquity and antique virtue through their coffee dishes. Henry Blount, an important enthusiast for coffee, identified the coffee he drank in Cairo as “the old black broth used so much by the Lacedemonians,” and the association of coffee with Spartan manners became a staple defence for its consumption.59 Coffee was not categorically secure and promoted hybrids and monsters. This association of an idea of coffee with an affront to natural categories was used by an inn-keeper to warn solid Englishmen against being transformed into exotic beings if they drank it: For men and X’tians to turn Turks, and think T’excuse the crime because ’tis in their drink Is more than Magick . . . Pure English Apes! Ye may, for all I know Would it be but mode learn to eat spiders too.60

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Coffee was a liquid philosopher’s stone, transforming tastes and natures, communicating across natural boundaries. It is hardly surprising that new solutions to political problems and entirely new social and economic relations were conjured up in coffee houses. Although coffee was a philosopher’s stone it was a rather limited one. Englishmen were turned into Turks, Persians, and in some cases Arabs in the coffee house, but nothing else. Coffee was a magic carpet, apt to carry the drinker to Cairo or Baghdad, Istanbul or Ispahan. It was a very specifically cultured object of consumption, and that culture was Middle Eastern.61 In part this was simply a reflection of its production and exchange. Up to 1715 Europeans were minor players in the market for coffee in Yemen, which dominated the trade, taking as little as 12 percent of the production.62 This balance was to change across the eighteenth century, and by 1772 English colonies in the West Indies were supplying twenty times more coffee to European markets than all of Asia.63 John Dalling, governor of Jamaica in 1774, celebrated the explosion of coffee growing “from seven grains of coffee brought into this island between 40 and 50 years ago, upwards of £100,000 worth of that article is now annually exported.”64 However, in the early period, to drink coffee was to participate in a materially Middle Eastern practice. The material matter of fact was reinforced and elaborated by the cultural elaboration of the meaning of coffee. A commitment to coffee really was understood to be the first step toward embracing an alternative political and social order, to quite literally turn Turk. The anonymous author of Coffee-Houses Vindicated argued that the use of coffee by Turks, Persians, and Arabs should recommend it in itself, but that if further argument was needed it was that coffee was a “drying agent” and so would make the “phlegmatic Englishman” more like the Easterner by drying him out.65 Here again the alchemy of coffee was in operation: by consuming the characteristic beverage one could acquire the characteristic. The potential for coffee to promote change depended on its proper setting, the coffee house. The qualities associated with the coffee house: were all tropes derived from the description of coffee houses in Middle Eastern travel literature: mixing of ranks, sobriety, and reasoned debate, even on political topics. Coffee houses were organised as one big room around a central space, within which anyone might take any place that was open, just as described by Sir John Chardin.66 In that space the men of the cities 36

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“converse, for there is the place of news and where the politicians criticise the government with all the freedom in the world.”67 Jean de Thévenot’s account stressed that coffee house debates occurred between men of all ranks and none: “In these places every kind of person mixes, without regard to religion or station.”68 Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier were both particularly impressed that the coffee houses were places where men spoke wittily of serious moral subjects, to the point that teachers in Ispahan would go there in the evenings to instruct the faithful.69 Later in the eighteenth century Carston Niebhur reported that in Aleppo, “a man of some wealth and learning took it on himself to go around to coffee houses delivering harangues for the spiritual improvement of the customers.”70 Other incidental features of coffee house culture, such as the obligation to offer a cup of coffee to anyone joining your circle and the popularity of draughts and chess, were also based on the eastern originals.71 The various kinds of coffee house were shared between east and west. The grand café with sumptuous divans and water features was popular in Damascus, Baghdad, and Paris, while the stall set in a working district was more characteristic of Cairo and London.72 The political fortunes of the coffee houses also reflected those of their Middle Eastern exemplars. In 1633 Sultan Murat IV had the coffee houses of Istanbul closed for fear of political sedition, just as Charles II would close the coffee houses of London in 1675.73 Even the exoticism of the coffee house had an eastern root. The inhabitants of the Middle East marked what western observers took for a characteristically “eastern” practice as Yemeni.74 The coffee houses that George Sandys thought were historic features of Istanbul in 1610 were relatively recent imports from Damascus.75 Far from being developed out of “puritan” sociability and political seriousness, coffee drinking and the coffee house were exotic hybrids, an institution with its attendant culture imported from another region and turned to new uses.76 It was by “turning Turk” that Englishmen created a new sociability. The most famous such changeling was Sir Henry Blount, and his engagement with coffee reveals the extent to which not just coffee but the entire institution of the coffee house was a form of cultural mimicry. Blount was an enthusiast for the Turks, whom he called “the only modern people great in action,” that is, who retained the vigour of the ancients.77 This transposition of the ancient and the modern was highly characteristic of 37

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the man; Aubrey organised his life of Blount around his confusion of boundaries and wrote him up as a living paradox. For instance, Blount was very critical of sending young men to the universities “because they learned there to be debauched; and that the learning that they learned there they were to unlearn again.”78 In other words what was generally accounted as learning Blount held to be its opposite. Blount was also a great critic of drunkenness, “but he allowed wenching,” and he sent his servants to watch executions rather than to church on a Sunday as a more effective form of moral education. Blount was a sort of human coffee, a transgressor of boundaries, a confusor of categories. It would be a mistake to underestimate Blount and to write him off as some sort of eccentric. His travels in the East were not unplanned wanderings but were directly inspired by the ambition to perform a comparative political science. As he explains, his goal was “firstly, to observe the religion, manners and policy of the Turks, not perfectly, (which were a task for an inhabitant rather than a passenger) but so far forth as might satisfy this scruple (to wit) whether to an impartial conceit, the Turkish may appear absolutely barbarous, as we are given to understand, or rather another kind of civility, different from ours.”79 Blount intended to visit Cairo, which he understood to be the largest city in the world, and where he thought he would experience the epitome of Turkish civilisation. What he thought most characteristic of that civilisation was the coffee house. Describing the coffee house he begins by underlining coffee’s odd nature, “a drink, not good at meat,” that is, a food that one does not consume as part of a meal.80 He goes on to say that the drink is consumed morning and evening in “coffee houses, which in all Turkey abound more than inns and alehouses with us.” What was most important about coffee houses in Turkey was their characteristic sociability. They provided a “harmless entertainment of good fellowship, for there, upon scaffolds half a yard high, and covered with mats, they sit cross legg’d after the Turkish manner, many times two or three hundred together, talking.” Blount went to find a new civility and unearthed it in the coffee house. Twenty years later he encouraged the Turkish merchants in London to open analogous institutions, to begin to turn London into a new Cairo.81 Blount’s promotion of Turkey as a source of an alternative civility that might solve the problems that beset England echoed ideas of the cultural 38

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superiority of the East to the West. Thomas Sprat, in his account of the foundation of the Royal Society, flatly stated that “it is evident, from the universal testament of history, that all learning and civility were deriv’d down to us from the Eastern parts of the world” and gave the Arabs pride of place in his genealogy of true reason: “They might even be compared to Rome and Athens themselves.”82 At this crucial moment in the construction of new social and political institutions, the East was not dismissed as the home of “oriental despotism” but praised as the model for a sociability and civility appropriate to the issues faced by England. The notion that Ottoman culture might hold the keys to creating a commercial, urban civility was reinforced by the importation of the techniques of inoculation for smallpox from Turkey.83 The dissemination of the technique in the Philosophical Transactions allowed inoculation to be picked up in Cambridge and Boston and so to protect a particularly vulnerable colonial city.84 The manner in which inoculation entered Boston was itself an illustration of the spontaneous communicative networks of the British North Atlantic and the ease with which they adopted ideas and practices from beyond that zone: “A certain clergy-man (by way of Europe) received advice of the practice among the Mussel-men [sic] and faithful people of the prophet Mahomet; also more immediately and viva voce from some of the scattered members of the good people in Guinea, who communicated it to the physicians in your town; one of whom (without the consent of his brethren) introduced the practice here in the midst of a populous town.”85 This example perfectly illustrated the combination of inter-cultural communication and culture of information that characterised the emerging commercial civility of the British North Atlantic. The cultural model of the Middle Eastern coffee house blended competing models of politics and identity in a sociable space and so created the possibility of civic peace and the further prospect of national flourishing. Coffee operated as a transition object, allowing and promoting the process of hybridisation between two cultures and so generating a new culture. John Fryer made clear the analogy between the civilisation of the East and the novel wonders of commercial London. His account of the coffee houses of Tehran cited the standard trope of coffee and conversation (“Here repair all that are covetous of News”) but also observed that the civic culture of Tehran had an odd effect. The bazaars and coffee houses were their most 39

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impressive buildings “as much as the halls of the citizens of London exceed Noblemen’s houses about the city, being the work and business of joint stocks.”86 London emulated Cairo and Tehran in its most commercial aspects. Between 1640 and 1689 the English civic order came into question and under stress. The very longevity of the crisis promoted exploration of alternatives and experiments with new ideas. These considerations generated an anxiety about the nature of order deep enough to raise questions about such core notions as sexual identity, for example, and eventually to sponsor a wholesale reformulation of the basis of patriarchy.87 We almost take for granted the novelty of the Levellers or the Quakers and the vibrancy of English civic life, but they are key indices of a population reaching beyond its cultural inheritance to generate new patterns and opportunities. Pincus has even argued that the entire political culture can be characterised by such experimentation. He argues that the classic traditions of political thought were hybridised in England under the Commonwealth to generate a political language that was “neither possessive individualism nor Machiavellian moment.”88 The elements that went into the English political culture in the late seventeenth century cannot be understood in terms of England alone. England’s relations with the outside world complicated solving the problem of order in England. Sharing a monarch with Scotland and Ireland created the possibility that outside agents might determine England’s future. In the 1640s there was considerable apprehension that the King might use Irish troops to defeat English parliamentarians. English engagement in a global network of commerce and exchange also put pressure on the society. Failure to compete with the Dutch, for example, undermined the credibility of Charles II’s supporters so that between 1667 and 1670 the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and the King himself all set up commissions to inquire into Dutch success in trade with the New World.89 England’s complicated place in an international system amplified the problems of internal politics. Trade with the outside world brought more than political problems and gold to England; trade brought novelty. The very fluidity of norms and insecurity about order that characterized the society allowed it to integrate that novelty into its social life. The trade in spices, silks, and sugar promoted 40

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a commercial revolution and laid the basis for a commercial empire. These trades also created the conditions for an information revolution, a transformation in the institutions through which merchants, scholars, or politicians negotiated, debated, or disagreed. Turning Turk, imitating the culture of the Middle East, created alternative ways of interacting and sheltered participants from political rhetorics and ideas, such as anti-Popery, that made cooperation impossible and disintegrated society.90 English associational civic culture would prove enormously adaptive and successful. In the middle of the eighteenth century it promoted the explosion in provincial science that was one of the roots of the industrial revolution.91 The culture of associations and committees, of negotiation and consensus-seeking, would also form the basis for the coordination of a world-spanning empire. The subjects of that empire would invent the idea of civil society as they in turn sought to understand this complex, hybrid creation. Just as the English turned Turk, so the colonists would “turn English” to manage the challenges of the novel world they found themselves within. The colonists would hybridise English civic culture as profoundly as the metropolitan English had adapted and transformed the culture of coffee.

From Mimicry to Commercial Empire Necessity being the mother of invention, England had needed to innovate; the need to settle the terms for social and political peace was a powerful stimulus to entertain novel ideas.92 The social, cultural, and economic innovations of the late seventeenth century could not of themselves stabilise the English polity; this would require political action. The Glorious Revolution and the Revolution Settlement resolved the ongoing political crisis and established the fundamental institutions of the English, and later the British, state. In February 1689 William and Mary accepted a declaration of right drawn up by the Convention Parliament that guaranteed the centrality of Parliament to the governance of the country and the inviolability of the judiciary, provisions which were reinforced by the Triennial Act that mandated re-election of Parliament every three years. The Mutiny Act of 1694 established ultimate parliamentary control of the army. The Toleration Act of May of that year established freedom of worship for Protestants but did not give political rights to Dissenters nor extend tolera41

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tion to Catholics. The Act of Settlement in 1701 permanently excluded any Catholic from the throne and guaranteed the Protestant Succession by granting the Crown to the descendants of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, granddaughter of James I. None of these measures reflected any kind of consensus; they were hammered out of political conflict, and every element of the settlement occasioned future debate. In 1710 the trial of Henry Sacheverell, a priest who had given a series of sermons asserting that the Anglican Church was in danger from Whig neglect, was an attempt by Whigs to impose their interpretation of toleration, an attempt that failed when a jury refused to condemn Sacheverell. Politics and not cultural or religious consensus sustained the new order. The institutions became stabilised, as John Locke explained in an unpublished pamphlet, not because of concord and harmony but because the very act of deposing James had committed the English to William. Every one, and that with reason, begins our delivery from popery and slavery from the arrival of the prince of Orange and the compleating of it is, by all that wish well to him and it, dated from King William’s settlement in the throne. This is the fence set up against popery and France, for King James’s name, however made use of, can be but a stale to these two. If ever he returne, under what pretences soever, Jesuits must governe and France be our master. He is too much wedded to the one and relyes too much on the other ever to part with either. He that has ventured and lost three crowns for his blinde obedience to those guides of his conscience and for his following the counsels and pattern of the French King cannot be hoped, after the provocations he has had to heighten his naturall aversion, should ever returne with calme thoughts and good intentions to Englishmen, their libertys, and religion.93

By turning latent conflict into actual crisis, the Glorious Revolution drove English elites to commit themselves to political reform. The inflection given to English social and political development by the events of 1688 –89 was clear to contemporaries. “Tis the late Revolution that has given birth to this new piece of work; a new face of things required a new state of England,” Guy Miege opened his statistical account of England under the new dispensation.94 Opponents of the changes also recognised their epochal nature. In 1714 Francis Atterbury rallied Tories to continue their struggle to overturn the revolution: “The country gentlemen who have stood the heat 42

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of the day for five or six and twenty years, are now almost quite worn out and harassed by taxes and elections. Each election hath been a kind of campaign, where men were to fight pro aris et focis.”95 Hearth and home were no longer what they had been; the bases for social and political power had been transformed. The commercial empire attained by Britain, recognised in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, was animated by ideological debate about its nature and consequence for the metropole. Yet, though the challenges of adaptation to a commercial state were great in England, they were still greater in the other British realms of the North Atlantic. The combination of the politics of empire and a society based on commerce, in its widest sense, made England a powerful force. Adapting to that force would require considerable ingenuity. The political moment, the settlement hammered out from 1688 onward, and the longer-term social and cultural processes worked out through the coffee houses mutually reinforced one another. Whig ideas most easily appropriated the new possibilities, though it would be incorrect to identify the new processes entirely with the Whigs. The most effective weapon in William of Orange’s arsenal may have been printed propaganda, distributed through the mails and the coffee houses, but as early as November 6, 1688, James II had his own propagandists contesting the Dutch view in pamphlets such as The Dutch design anatomized.96 The effect of the Revolution was to allow the informal techniques of control and coordination developed in society to be formalised as techniques of governance as well as motors of political competition. This result did not necessarily make the polity more tranquil. The Glorious Revolution was the moment when England’s basic financial institutions were consolidated, laying the basis for modern capitalism, but political organisation, as well as institutions, remained more important than economic life. The economic institutions were not insulated from political contestation; periodic Jacobite resurgences destabilised the market for public debt.97 Politics extended beyond the Jacobite threat; ideological combat within the regime was more present than the counter-revolutionary threat and constituted more of public life. The creation of the Bank of England anchored the finances of the new regime, but it also created new possibilities for public debt and, even more disturbingly, a basis for social and political power outside of land and yet another locus for political struggle.98 The Bank’s charter was sealed in Powis House in Lincoln’s Inn 43

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Fields on July 27, 1694.99 The ceremony was a symbol for the new order of things. Powis House had passed from Lord Powis, one of the closest supporters of James II, to Lord Somers after being forfeited to the Crown, and it looked out on the site of the execution of Lord John Russell in 1683. The triumph of the city merchants, and the new alliance of William III and the City, could not have had a more fitting site. However, by 1712 the Whig Bank had a Tory competitor in the market for state debt, the South Sea Company, and the Tory and Whig financial institutions were locked in a struggle for the East India Company.100 Bruce Carruthers argues that it was the capacity of the children of the coffee houses, the joint stock companies, to organise politically motivated investors and channel their competition into the market that stabilised English capital markets, not the inherent rationality of the legal norms enunciated in the Revolution. The Revolution Settlement intensified the pace of political and social change in England. The engagement of England in international conflict, and in particular the commitment of English resources to resisting Louis XIV’s attempt at universal monarchy, was another important element of the Revolution Settlement. John Locke was prescient, arguing even in 1690, when it was not clear that the Revolution would ultimately be successful, that the security of England depended on the success of her European allies: “They then who would not have the alliance for the security of Christendom broken, must support our present government in which it centres and on which it depends. They who would not betray England and expose it to popish rage and revenge, who have any regard to their country, their religion, their consciences, and their estates, must maintain the bulwarke we have set up against it, and which alone preserves us against a more violent inundation of all sorts of misery than that we were soe lately delivered from.”101 William III harnessed English resources to a European vision and irrevocably committed English interests to mainland Europe. In consequence old debates about standing armies became outdated and were replaced by the newer concern with the politics of public debt.102 Within the formal political system the antagonistic relationship between monarch and Parliament was finally resolved. The innovation of party created the basis for a new stability based on organised conflict over coherent political visions, even if this was not apparent to those who saw only faction.103 These institutional and political changes were mirrored by developments 44

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in political culture. The lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, following the Toleration Act of 1689, opened the door to that new version of civil liberty and toleration that was to be admired by commentators such as Voltaire. Print politics were not invented in 1695, and England had a robust print culture since the middle of the century, but the end of censorship institutionalised print politics and, more concretely, allowed for an explosive newspaper press.104 Mark Knights argues that the freedom allowed to public writing undermined patriarchalism and occasioned a vibrant discussion of gender.105 1688 marked the end of a particular configuration of political identities, especially in England. The paradoxical outcome of the triumph of the Whigs was that republicanism ceased to offer a real institutional alternative to monarchy, and so its associated language of civic humanism began its transformation from a critique of laws to one of manners.106 By 1716 John Toland could write that since Britain was a perfect Aristotelian “mixed government” there were no more consistent republicans, no more commonwealth men: “Our monarchy is the best form of a commonwealth.”107 The Glorious Revolution reorientated the axis of political opposition from debates over the nature of the polity to debates over the nature and consequences of empire. Tories and Whigs, even radicals such as Toland, no longer expressed themselves in a variety of political lexicons but through a shared language of the common good, equally informed by Ciceronian virtue and commercial interest.108 The new problems that generated political contention were about the kinds of commercial polity that one might construct, not the principle of a commercial polity. The exchanges, banks, boards, societies, and associations that grew out of the coffee houses solved problems of information and fostered coordinated efforts.109 They organised English economic and social life in a way that the state could not. Similar strategies of governance were even applied to the development of the Poor Law. Allowing local authorities to coordinate a plethora of reliefs, argues Peter Solar, created a system that could move resources to sustain individuals, maintain a stable social context, and support economic change.110 The techniques of coordination and association were used to palliate the effects of the economic transformation that were, in part, created by that very culture of association. Paradoxically, the very success with which English society adapted to international exchange and inter-cultural communication removed the incentive to continue to do 45

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so. As England came to dominate trade it no longer needed to adapt itself to outside pressures; rather, others now needed to adapt to the norms of trade articulated in London. Empire mobilised the techniques of coordination but turned them to new purposes. David Hancock has described the social landscape of the Empire as conditioned but not controlled by the overarching structure of the Navigation Acts. It created structures that were “bounded and free, decentralized and opportunistic.”111 The challenge for non-metropolitan members of the British realms in the early eighteenth century was to accommodate themselves to the boundaries of control while exploiting the areas of freedom. This structural relationship between organising centre and colonial agents remained remarkably stable until the 1760s, when in the aftermath of victory in the Seven Years’ War commercial empire threatened to transform itself into classic territorial domination. The change in the nature of the imperial polity had effects far beyond the directly political; in the late eighteenth century Joseph Banks would enjoy a prominence in natural history out of all proportion to his intellectual achievement due to his central role in the distribution of specimens from the Cook voyages.112 New techniques of communication were instrumentalised as new techniques for control. The foundation of the Board of Trade in 1696 crowned the union of new cultural attributes and old social and state structures.113 The Board was an institution designed to capture colonial policy from royal servants such as William Blathwayt, who had served as secretary for war and the colonies under both James and William and was an enthusiast for executive control of the colonies.114 The Board did eventually succeed in asserting control over the colonies, but had less success in redirecting colonial policy. Jacob Price points out that through its interpretation of the Navigation Acts the Board created the fabric of empire.115 The Acts, which had evolved sporadically from the 1650s, restricted all trade in the Empire to English and colonial vessels and further demanded that certain enumerated products (principally tobacco, sugar, and cotton) could only be exported to England and, after 1707, Britain. Continental goods were also to be sourced through Britain. Sociable methods were used to tighten these controls on exchange. The Cabinet convoked a discussion group that included such public intellectuals as John Locke, Charles Davenant, Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, and Josiah Child to discuss the form such a Board should take.116 46

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These figures in turn profited from and participated in the contemporary pamphlet controversy on colonial policy.117 There was nothing inevitable about the creation of a Board of Trade tied to the strategic interests of the state; Davenant, indeed, was simultaneously sponsoring an alternative Board of Trade to be governed by merchants rather than Crown servants while sitting on this discussion group. The outcome, however, was a Board of Trade that sought to fashion trade to reflect the strategic interests of the state, one empowered by the prerogative of the Crown rather than any model of the representation of opinion. It is perhaps significant that the major architect of the Board, John Locke, while a participant in coffee house culture, had never been an enthusiast for it. Wood reports that when Locke was following Sthael’s course in chemistry in Tillyard’s coffee house he was “of a turbulent spirit, clamourous and never contented, . . . he would be prating and troublesome.”118 Locke did not conform to the civility and lack of precedence of the coffee house but rather reflected the model of influence that characterised his long association with the household of the Earl of Shaftesbury.119 The model of empire that emerged would reflect this double heritage. Locke’s endorsement of trade rather than territorial expansion as the model for empire reflected the ideals of free communication and association, while the commitment to the state’s strategic goals was of a piece with Locke’s endorsement of colonial slavery and his justification for appropriation of unutilised land.120 The strength and adaptability of the emerging empire was based on its culture of communication and association, but it was capped with an older model of control. The foundation of the Board of Trade exploited the resources of the culture of communication and association generated in the coffee house, but it did so in service of “a Whig experiment in Empire, and . . . the golden age of aristocratic parlementarism.”121 Conversely, the crystallisation of a new elite for empire generated new institutions outside the sphere of the state. Coffee houses did not vanish, nor was their role entirely usurped. As late as the 1750s the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, which would eventually become the Royal Society of Arts, organised itself in Rowthmell’s coffee house near Covent Garden.122 However, a new variety of private institution, the club, began to replace their political functions. Brooke’s, the Whig centre, and White’s, which performed 47

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the same function for the Tories, both grew out of coffee houses but became subtly different institutions. Private clubs worked to coordinate and organise elite opinion, not public opinion. Their functions were reflected in their architecture. An entrance hall insulated the function rooms from the street, and rather than having one common room the club separated its various functions. Newspapers and magazines were found in the morning room while the coffee room became a separate area, “on a large scale, and fitted up in a style of superior splendour to what is usually observed in our more fashionable taverns.”123 Various other spaces, such as smoking rooms, libraries, and eventually billiard rooms allowed the membership to disassociate and recombine in varied groups. The club allowed a select society to organise itself in a variety of semi-public and private spaces.124 It was a social institution perfectly adapted to the needs of the governing elite of the new British Empire. The very success of these innovative institutions occluded their hybrid origins. While there would be no lack of critics of commercial society, the improvisations that underpinned its characteristic institutions became invisible. The integration of old and new, of parliament and exchange, of gentry and commerce, made the novel look natural. This was not true in the further reaches of the Empire. In the West Indies, along the slave coast of Africa, or even in New England and Ireland, the problems of trust, of coordination, and of the management of time and space all continued to demand institutional responses. The work of accommodation to commercial society and commercial empire had to be performed in specific local contexts, while merchants trading across the world needed to find social and intellectual contexts within which they could rationally deploy their resources.125 Patrick O’Brien underlines the ingenuity of merchants who coordinated activity between the metropole and “the ports, towns, naval bases, forts, settlements, mines, plantations, farms, and fisheries of a farflung Empire.”126 The problems of coordination and trust were amplified by time and distance. A ship leaving for Jamaica with instructions from London would take anything from nine to eleven weeks to make the passage, and transporting a reply would take from twelve to fourteen.127 London was a vital centre for information and capital but was not well located to send ships easily into the Atlantic, and contrary winds could leave ships waiting in the Downs off the south coast of England for weeks. The effects 48

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of distance were eventually mediated by frequency of communication. By the middle of the eighteenth century any American or Caribbean Atlantic port would expect at least one ship a month from England. By 1740 posts, newspapers, and the mail packet would make the communications network around the Atlantic particularly dense and colonial agents far more confident of their actions on behalf of metropolitan principals.128 Yet none of these technological advances took away the necessity for persons deployed around the Atlantic to coordinate with one another on the basis of reasonable assumptions about needs and preferences. One solution to the problem of coordination was the East India Company, a sovereign chartered company transposing legal and administrative norms across the planet. The India trade posed very different problems to the Atlantic trade, though. At best thirty ships sailed to Asia in a year, and the round trip took one year.129 More capital was tied up in any one voyage, and the profits of particular voyages were greater. In contrast, communication across the Atlantic was constant, and one ship could do the cycle of trade three times in twelve months, but profits were lower and investment more long term. Paradoxically, the frequency of communication across the Atlantic meant that the length of time for investments to mature in the plantation economy was too long and the risks too great for the merchant elite of London, who were accustomed to the controlled and predictable returns of the Levant and East India companies.130 After the collapse of the Virginia Company in 1624, no other monopoly company seriously proposed itself to control American trade. David Hancock has argued that because “no-one organised American agricultural-commercial dependencies” under a monopoly company, the institutions binding the islands of the Caribbean into the trading empire were largely developed by the planters themselves.131 The East India Company offered an entirely different model of empire to the self-organising commerce of the Atlantic. The Court of Directors sought to control the trade through a secret committee, created in 1683 and inspired by Josiah Child, which sought to direct the strategic interest of the Company and its agents.132 This hierarchical model of control never worked, and agents on the ground in India subverted the goals of the London Directors to their own ends, until eventually the Company evolved from a trading monopoly to a territorial government. The agents captured the Company so successfully that they nearly destroyed it.133 In the long 49

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run the territorial power of the East India Company became so threatening that contemporaries feared it would subvert the entire structure of British rule.134 The corporation seemed to be the enemy of the coffee house. The Atlantic economy threw up more flexible and diverse institutions of coordination. The commission agent solved the problem of coordinating activity between English markets and Caribbean sugar producers. The commission agent, who normally held land in the colony, had spent significant amounts of time there and retained networks of friends and clients. The agent operated under a social sanction sufficiently strong that proprietors could trust him to act in their best interests rather than his. Institutions like these remained fragile; William Freeman, Hancock’s case study, lost his role as agent for the Irish-born William Stapleton when another Irishman based on Monserrat raised doubts about Freeman’s probity.135 Distance was a strong solvent of trust. The problems of information were even more acute in the slave trade. The risks involved in the trade meant that agents charged four times the commission levied on European transactions, 10 percent instead of 2.5 percent.136 Anglo-American transfers could be organised on the basis of a guarantee payment system for post-dated bills of exchange, but no such system was viable for the extension of capital toward Africa.137 The key problem was the extension of credit to African merchants in the form of trade goods. This was dealt with in different ways in different places. Contact between Bahia in Brazil and the Gold Coast was so intense that a single “Atlantic community” with convergent norms emerged.138 A Creole society based on neither coast and regulating itself became particularly important after the abolition of slavery in Brazil when many freedmen returned to Africa, thus establishing a two-way traffic.139 The British Empire had a more defining centre than did the Portuguese, and so the process of hybridisation was more limited in that sphere. On the Old Calabar coast in the Bight of Biafra, in contemporary Nigeria, the British slave trade adapted the local institution of debt bondsmen, or pawnship, to lower the risk of default on the part of merchants who had contracted to supply slaves.140 In a manner that directly mirrors the metropolitan co-optation of the coffee house, metropolitan merchants and ship captains accepted the local institution for debt enforcement as part of the circulation of goods and people. Again this institution was not perfect; the ubiquitous violence of the slave trade made total security impossible. The 50

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slaver captains in particular were not subject to effective sanctions, and on occasion, fearing the outbreak of disease or from impatience, they would take the hostages in lieu of the promised slaves. In 1763 the Old Town, or Obutong, merchants from further up the river Calabar were massacred and enslaved by a cabal of captains seeking to gain advantage in the terms of trade.141 Despite this significant flaw, by the 1770s pawnship was ubiquitous in the slave trade, an economic institution improvised by agents where the rules and institutions of the state and the law could not regulate behaviour. The English commercial empire was a creature of global commerce. English society learned to build associations from contact with other cultures. The culture of association developed in the coffee houses was a powerful and flexible tool with which to build institutions to coordinate and control behaviour in an increasingly complex and varied world. This capacity for institution building through association became the characteristic feature of English commercial and political development in the eighteenth century. Associations also became the great tool of governance. A major governing innovation had become so naturalised as to no longer require comment. Sovereignty and governance, parliamentary power, and local associations all cohered in England. Just how useful it was to separate sovereignty and governance in this way was revealed when the markets for public debt crashed in both France and England in 1719–20. The French public understood it as a test “of the limits of the King’s credibility,” while the English public saw it as a failure of a particular institution.142 In England the division of fiscal labour reflected an embedded cultural pattern. The manner in which English people acted politically, and with it their relationship to the state, remained stable, even as the fashion in which they conducted themselves economically, socially, and culturally was transformed.143 Other regions and provinces of the English, and after 1707 British, Empire enjoyed the repertoire of associative techniques, but were subject to sovereign power in different ways. As Jack Greene explains, while the colonists’ and traders’ efforts to incorporate English economic, social, cultural, and religious practices were encouraged, their efforts to enjoy English law and liberties were resisted by the metropolitan centre.144 This dissonance created particular local practical and cultural problems. The main practical problem was the effort by elements of the Empire to capture the sovereign authority to further their own interests. The Molasses Act controversy of 51

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1730– 33 arose when West Indian sugar planters, who had previously been critics of the Navigation Acts, now sought to use the state to force American and Irish merchants to source sugar from them rather than from French producers.145 Their strategy was to present their interests as the imperial interest, and in doing so they threatened to break up the division of labour between sovereignty and governance respected in the metropole. Even more striking, outside England it was difficult to retain English languages of politics to describe the new associative forms. Scots meeting in philosophical and political clubs like the Poker Club, American town meetings, or Irish associations of agricultural reformers found it impossible to describe themselves under English languages of politics. This inability to balance local activity with faraway sovereign power would eventually tear the first British Empire apart, but until the outbreak of the American Revolution the tension would prove immensely productive of new ideas. Christopher Bayly remarks that by the end of the eighteenth century in northern Europe and in the American colonies a characteristic sociability had evolved that informed the organisation of print culture, capital formation, and even warfare, and that this culture had given these regions a structural advantage over other regions of the world.146 This insight into the importance of communication is vital, but we must also understand that the landscape of this world of communication was not even. Communication was asymmetrical, particularly in the commercial empire most committed to a language of liberty. Between 1689 and 1782 its members sought to stabilise the odd structure of the British Empire. The problem faced by regional and provincial elites was to manage their relationship to an imperial centre mobilised by large claims to sovereignty, which were represented in the terms of the Act of Union in 1707 but also in the Declaratory Acts asserting parliamentary supremacy over Ireland, in 1720, and the American colonies, in 1766.147 To understand and manage that relationship these local elites were driven to use the ideas and languages of association to understand their political relationship to the imperial centre. The repertoire of association that was so powerful a tool in English life became the template for new ideas of rule, citizenship, obligation, and community in the Empire. Local elites, particularly in Scotland and Ireland, turned the idea of association back on the imperial structures. In so doing they sought, in the man-

52

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ner of David Hume, to understand their position in the world in a manner that was more accurate and more honest. They also sought, in the manner of Adam Smith, to renegotiate the terms of inclusion in the empire. From this rich melange of theoretical and practical activity they hammered out the modern concept of civil society.

53

CHA PTER TWO IMPROVEMENT AND THE DISCOURSE OF SOCIETY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND

The manner in which Ireland negotiated the emergence of the new British Empire at the turn of the eighteenth century is not well understood.1 Ireland and Britain had very different experiences of the Glorious Revolution. The necessary fictions of abdication and an empty throne were incredible in Ireland, especially when James came to Dublin to reassert his claim, and so the issues of loyalty and obedience could not be avoided.2 The Revolution was far from bloodless, and between 1689 and 1691 Ireland became one theatre of the European war between Louis XIV and William III. Major land battles were fought at the Boyne, where 36,000 Williamites confronted 25,000 Jacobites, and at Aughrim, where the 7,000 Jacobite and 9,000 Williamite dead made it the most fatal battle in Irish history.3 Violence was not restricted to the battlefield; rather the whole country was militarised and civil life disturbed. Henry Boyle described the situation in Munster even before James landed in Ireland in April 1689: “All the towns and villages are filled with soldiers—horse, foot and dragoons. The whole county of Kerry and all westward of Bandon that belonged to the English all destroyed. All the ash trees in the country cut down for half pikes, my nephew’s wood at Fort destroyed; the best merchants of Youghal their doors 54

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broke open and themselves beaten by the soldiers.”4 The violence that ushered in the new order was not the only feature of the transition that differed from the British experience. The results of the war penetrated to the most basic level of social power in Ireland: land. The 1689 Jacobite Parliament’s Repeal and Attainder Acts had threatened to dispossess everyone who had acquired land in Ireland since 1641, creating the prospect of a total overthrow of the entire Cromwellian plantation.5 The Jacobite defeat dashed those hopes but did not remove confiscation and appropriation from the repertoire of Irish politics. The Treaty of Limerick, which ended the war in 1691, was not punitive and left many Jacobites in possession. Catholic landowners owned one fifth of the fertile land of the country in 1688, and the limited scale of Williamite confiscations left 14 percent still in Catholic hands in 1714.6 However, that settlement was not stable, and the efforts of an increasingly assertive Irish Parliament, in which Catholics could not participate, steadily undermined Catholic land ownership. The Treaty was not recognised by the Irish Parliament until 1697, and the much amended Articles of Limerick did not respect the limited toleration that had been granted. The effects of the penal code, which drove landed elites to conformity, reduced Catholic ownership of Irish land to 5 percent by 1776.7 Property, a cornerstone of the Revolution Settlement, became ideologically contested in the Irish circumstance. The political inflection of property rights was only one feature of the penal code that conditioned the social, political, and cultural life of the bulk of the population. By law Catholics could not hold long leases, employ more than two apprentices, vote in municipal or parliamentary elections, join guilds, or establish schools and colleges.8 Much of this legislation was only spottily applied, but its existence put a substantial proportion of the population in a state of illegality and so undermined the status of law itself.9 The creative compromise of the Revolution Settlement in England, fringing the established church with toleration, allowing speech to be effectively uncontrolled, and refocusing the idea of liberty from confessional identity to national identity, had perverse effects in Ireland. Protestant liberty and the established church did not go in tandem with toleration, and even Dissenters were excluded from any political participation by the provisions of the Test Act of 1704. Property, law, and toleration, all core elements of the new regime, had very different meanings in the Irish context. As Toby Barnard has 55

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pointed out, even basic categories of the social order in England, such as the peerage, fit uneasily to Irish realities.10 Managing the new Ireland of what would come to be called Protestant Ascendancy posed a challenge; managing the relationship between Ireland and the rest of the British realms posed another. The Glorious Revolution provoked reflection on the relationship between the two islands and raised expectations in Ireland, most famously in Molyneux’s Case of Ireland Stated, that the local political community would either become effectively self-governing or achieve union with England.11 The new situation generated a lot of activity. Junior clerics incensed by the erosion of the established church’s position in England managed to have Convocation re-established in Ireland in 1703.12 The Dublin Parliament awoke from its seventeenth-century torpor and began to challenge the administration, its newfound confidence best represented in Edward Lovett Pearse’s new Parliament Building, built on College Green between 1729 and 1731.13 The parliament attempted to widen its sphere of activity and assert its centrality to Irish affairs in parallel with the increased centrality of the English Parliament. Again, assertiveness could have perverse results, and from 1692 to 1695 the parliament was effectively stalled by an impasse over its claim to control the raising of revenue, resolved only by Lord Justice Henry Capell’s clever compromise that allowed local control without offending constitutional principle.14 By October 1698 William was pointing out, but not overturning, the efforts of the Irish House of Commons to claim the sole right to initiate money bills, and the control of local finance gave the parliament tremendous scope for local initiatives.15 Increased political activity mirrored increasing economic complexity. The task that faced Irish elites was managing the relationship between a poor, and therefore cheap, Ireland and a rich England in the emerging Atlantic economy. The challenges were various and posed by success as much as failure. The port of Cork became central to the supply of shipping going across the Atlantic and the supply of the Caribbean possessions. David Dickson reports that in the eighteenth century Cork exported more beef than any other port in the world, and so Cork merchants had to organise markets for supplying this beef, pork, and butter from the hinterland.16 Conversely, cooperage demanded that Cork adjust to becoming a net importer of wood from having been an exporter. The demands were not sim56

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ply those of managing integration into bigger markets; there were also problems of political economy. Despite the best efforts of the Irish Parliament, including imposition of duties on exports, in 1699 woollen manufacturers in England succeeded in persuading Parliament to exclude Irish woollens from English markets. Cattle exports were also controlled in a series of cattle acts, and from 1696 until 1731 even unenumerated colonial goods, such as rum, could not be directly imported into Ireland but had to be sourced through Britain. Problems of commercial integration were complicated by political imperatives. Irish political and economic elites needed to organise themselves to understand and respond to these challenges. The campaign for improvement was the response to that challenge.17 The Dublin Society, founded in 1731, was one of the most important institutions through which the Irish political nation adapted itself to the new environment.18 The Dublin Society was only one of the many sociable institutions in eighteenth-century Ireland that were committed to the process of improvement, which in the Irish context became a very capacious project. The Irish House of Commons strongly supported improvement through a wide variety of grants, premiums, and statutory boards. Eoin Magennis identifies the £2,500 granted to the work of the Linen Board in 1713 as the first such use of parliamentary money; by 1753 the parliament was disbursing £38,100, and in 1765 the amount had reached £108,496.19 Lords Lieutenant supported these efforts. Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, underlined how important commitment to improvement was in his speech closing the Irish Parliament of 1746: “Let me, therefore, most seriously recommend to you, in your private as well as in your public capacities, the utmost attention to those important objects, which at once enrich, strengthen, and adorn, a nation.”20 Parliament was not the only relevant political body, and assize grand juries organised local efforts at improvement for the thirty-one counties and seven towns outside Dublin. They were particularly important in the provision of roads.21 Improvement proved a far more ambiguous and difficult idea in the capital. Jacqueline Hill argues that the corporate bodies of Dublin, particularly the guilds, fought a long retreat in defence of their privileges, fighting for, but losing, the right to continue to levy dues, called quarterage payments, on Catholic practitioners of the trades, who could not be guild members, into the 1760s.22 The city’s chronic indebtedness also meant that the initiative in development, 57

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even within the city, passed to the parliament, which created the Wide Streets Commission in 1757, or individuals such as Luke Gardiner, the most salient improver of the Gardiner estate in the northeast of the city, and James Fitzgerald, First Duke of Leinster, who led the development of the then unfashionable south bank of the Liffey by commissioning Richard Cassels to build Leinster House on Kildare Street in 1745.23 Yet despite the Dublin corporate bodies’ essentially conservative nature, and their motivation primarily to resist the erosion of their particular advantages, they organised a wide swathe of the male population and fostered a rich associational life.24 The uneven landscape of associational life in Dublin was mirrored in the other towns and cities of the country. These towns, often incorporated only in the seventeenth century, vulnerable to local aristocrats, and lacking deep civic cultures, did not offer a network through which the project of improvement could be articulated.25 However, their institutional fragility should not obscure their economic and social vitality. As Toby Barnard notes, the most popular form of association for male members of the Protestant elite became the militia, and soldiering often went alongside freemasonry.26 Irish Protestants enjoyed a broad collective life which was explored in a variety of organisations and associations. The Dublin Society emerged from this rich mix, sharing members and principles with many of these other kinds of associations, in a moment of economic stress and political debate.27 The Dublin Society did not monopolise direct attention to improvement. The Physico-Historical Society sponsored an unfinished effort at a statistical account of Ireland from 1744 to 1752, and the work of the Dublin Society itself had been prefigured by the “Hartlib circle” and the Dublin Philosophical Society in the late seventeenth century.28 Richard Lawrence, the one-time Cromwellian firebrand, wrote in 1682 that the Philosophical Society was the answer to the problems created by the self-interested corporations, praising the young James Butler, Earl of Ossory, for being “the chief member of that honourable society, proposed for curing all our mercantile maladies in the chapter of corporation-trade.”29 The Philosophical Society shared much of its personnel with the Irish Council of Trade, created by James Butler, first Duke of Ormond, in 1664, as yet another body pursuing the economic development of the country. The Philosophical Society wound up in 1707, and the Dublin Society was in many ways its reincarnation. The Dublin Society was by no 58

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means the most popular or even most visible of these sociable institutions, but it inherited a genealogy of local efforts to participate in the Great Instauration, the project of transforming the common life through applied research, and so became the site for the major debate on the nature of the post-revolutionary polity.30 The Dublin Society became the template through which dependency and the notion of British liberty would be, ideally, reconciled, and a new socially grounded vision of the nation as a civil society was articulated. The core interest of the Dublin Society lay in improving agriculture. To that end it ran experimental farms and a testing ground for agricultural implements on Poolbeg Street and latterly financed a factory for implements in Celbridge.31 It sponsored the collection of statistical data very much in the manner of the states of Germany. It was also central to the provision of education. By the late eighteenth century it ran a school of minerology and geology, one that employed Richard Kirwan, the most important Irish chemist of the eighteenth century. All these activities were in addition to the construction of its library, which eventually provided the seed for the Irish National Library, the direction of its art school, and the development of a botanical garden. Even when the state enhanced its interest in these areas in the nineteenth century, it still tended to recruit its agents from the ranks of the Dublin Society. Robert Kane, the first president of Queen’s College, Cork, developed his ideas on Irish industrial development within the society, and Richard Griffith, of Griffith’s Valuations fame, was also a member. The Dublin Society was an instrument of governance in Ireland for at least two centuries.32 The activities of the society that mimicked those of a state would eventually become a direct inspiration for states seeking to improve their governance. In 1761 Henri Léonard Jean Baptiste Bertin, the head of the Maison du Roi, tried to inspire a network of societies in the French provinces based on the Dublin Society.33 In Britain the Board of Agriculture and the Royal Agricultural Society admitted their inspiration from the Dublin exemplar. The model of improving society sponsored by the Dublin Society would prove a valuable tool for responding to the challenges of various commercial worlds. Yet this perceived originality of the Dublin Society is difficult to explain or to account for. Ireland did not invent associations. Britain, and England especially, experienced the first flowering of civic association at the 59

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same time that the Dublin Society was founded. The Dublin Society was explicitly indebted to these associations, and particularly the Royal Society, for its structures and aspirations.34 What, then, marked out the Dublin Society from any other British provincial gathering of improving gentlemen enjoying enlightened sociability while developing their town or region?35 We can begin to answer this question if we address ourselves to the writings of the founders of the society, particularly those of Arthur Dobbs, Thomas Prior, and Samuel Madden.36 These three writers envisaged the society as a response to the curious position of Ireland within the emerging British Empire. The provincial (that is, Scottish, Irish, Caribbean, or North American) members of this fundamentally new polity all faced a similar problem of explaining how local elites contributed to and participated in the imperial enterprise. John Robertson argues that this problem of “kingdoms governed as provinces” was a common feature of a Europe where multiple monarchies were being transformed into unified states.37 In a sequence of articles, Nicholas Phillipson has delineated the Scottish Enlightenment as a critical and creative response to the importation of English political languages inaugurated by the Act of Union of 1707.38 The Scottish tradition utilised what lay closest to hand: “These . . . languages were of value, not because they were English, but because they were usable, if highly imperfect, resources for understanding the political problems of a pluralistic, extended monarchy like that of Britain.”39 A similar process of adaptation was necessary in Ireland. Importing English languages without participating in English political institutions generated particular paradoxes and called for creative responses. For Dobbs, Prior, and other politically aware Irishmen, the writings of Charles Davenant articulated those problems in an unusually provocative way.40 He was a powerful enough thinker that even his ideological enemies were impressed by his writing; William III’s agent William Blathwayt wrote to his colleague George Stepney after the publication of Davenant’s essay On the Balance of Trade in 1701, “I wish you had Dr Davenant’s book upon the subject. The Doctor seems in some things to close with the court and would not refuse a good place.”41 Davenant was not the most original political theorist in seventeenth-century England, but as a commissioner of the excise, an agent of the East India Company, and a disappointed supporter of James II, he was particularly attentive to the nature of 60

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commercial empire and paid specific attention to Ireland. Dobbs concluded his Essay on the trade and improvement of Ireland with a peroration against Davenant, accusing him of misunderstanding the political and economic interest of both Britain and Ireland.42 Prior developed the same argument, adding that in Britain’s strategic contest with France Ireland should be seen as Britain’s most reliable trading partner as well as its military ally.43 The same perspective was developed by Sir John Browne, who criticised Davenant for misapprehending how Ireland contributed to the commerce of England.44 The very acuity and insight of Davenant’s definition of the Irish predicament absorbed Irish writers. Henry Maxwell, for instance, deplored Davenant’s identification of Irish dependency but was completely captured by his ideal of a high-wage commercial empire and sought to redefine Ireland’s place in it.45 Davenant’s ideas entrapped Dobbs, Prior, and Madden in the same way. His articulation of the consequences of Irish dependency within commercial empire became their own, even as they combated it. Their inability to define the place of Ireland in terms other than Davenant’s drove them to seek to transform Ireland. Their instrument for national salvation became the Dublin Society. The debate with Davenant was lost. Irish authors failed to arrive at a compelling refutation of his argument for Ireland’s place in the empire. The failure was creative, however, and they found the resources to understand and act in their situation through conducting it. Davenant’s idea of a citizenry enjoying a plenitude of rights in a non-sovereign state was the template from which they developed a workable idea of the community. In debate with Davenant Irish political economists were driven to transvalue their own values, in order to recognise the real norms that animated their society. The Dublin Society became the model for a nation organised neither around virtue, the core notion of citizenship for the civic humanists; nor justice, the equivalent for the natural jurisprudential tradition. Instead the society incarnated an ideal of a community self-consciously organised around utility, or happiness. Happiness had a long history as a feature of Aristotelian moral theory, as the end of a rational life, as the effect of selffulfilment through commitment to virtue.46 Happiness in the Irish debate was transformed to mean pursuit of rational self-interest through maintenance of one’s rights. Happiness became a social rather than a political ethic. The novelty of this idea was matched by the heterogeneity of its 61

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sources. The new idea was worked out in political practice rather than in political theory and drew on the cultural and social resources of the ruling elite. The efforts of Irish political thinkers were to be rewarded not with a robust reassertion of Irish autonomy but with the scattered seeds of a new language of politics and a flourishing novel institution.

Debating Davenant Davenant redescribed English political culture in two vital areas. His “Essay upon universal monarchy” of 1701 was the culmination of the efforts over the previous half century to understand English national interests outside an ideological commitment to Protestantism.47 England’s national goal, he argued, was to deny any power the “universal monarchy,” that is, preponderant power on land and sea. To do this the nation should strive to maintain a multi-centred world of small states, or in other words a balance of power.48 He also offered a new analysis of how England could do so. The world had been divided into trading republics, such as the United Provinces or ancient Athens, and military empires, such as Spain or Persia.49 This balance was inherently unstable, since the preponderant military force of the empires continually threatened successful commercial republics. Even if republics successfully defended themselves, as Athens had against Persia, the price paid was transformation into another empire and loss of its trading role. In either case the wealth gathered by the republic was dissipated in war, either by the costs of defence or by being pillaged. England could escape this dynamic because it was neither republic nor territorial empire, but a new style of commercial monarchy, one that could avoid the cycle of despotism and corruption. William Temple, in the 1660s, had already argued that the cycle of rise and fall of centres of wealth would be broken by commercial monarchies.50 However, Temple saw a commercial monarchy as fundamentally a monopolistic enterprise, which would unite the virtues of both republic and empire in order to engross trade and so develop its military. For Temple it was obvious that Irish economic life should be organised to benefit English interests: “Regard must be had of those points wherein the trade of Ireland comes to interfere with any main branches of the trade of England, in which cases the encouragement of such trade ought to be either declined or 62

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moderated and so give way to the interest of trade in England.”51 Davenant had a far wider vision. A commercial monarchy would not be a trading port with a larger hinterland and therefore a bigger army dominating a territorial empire; it would be an essentially novel kind of polity, one that could refashion the nature of trade itself. The strength of such a polity would lie not in its monopoly of trade, but in the industry, creativity, and work of its population: “A nation may be supposed, by some accident, quite without the species of money, and yet, if the people are numerous, industrious, versed in traffic, skilled in sea affairs, and if they have good ports, and a soil fertile in a number of commodities, such a people will have trade and garner wealth, and they shall quickly get among them a plenty of gold and silver; so that the real and effective riches of a country is its native product.”52 This “native product” was what differentiated the necessarily small trading republic from a commercial monarchy. Davenant argued that wealth was not based on dominance of the carrying trade, but that the carrying trade depended on a local staple commodity that could sustain a numerous population. England’s staple was wool, which underpinned English military and commercial strength: “The woollen manufacture is a wealth in a manner peculiar to us. We have besides the product of other countries subject to dominion, the West Indies. The East Indies are an inexhaustible mine of vanities of other countries, which a rich nation will always covet. We have ports and situation, and everything that contributes to make us the foremost people of the whole commercial world.”53 While England might reasonably aim for pre-eminence in the new “whole commercial world,” it was not a potential monopolist. Instead England was the first of a new species of industrious, commercial states whose common interest lay in halting the expansion of the new contender for universal monarchy, France, and in defending commercial liberty.54 From this ground Davenant could denounce war as a waste of the national wealth while supporting the particular war against France: as the contender for universal empire, France was the instigator and cause of war.55 To defeat France was to defeat war. In principle, in a future Europe, properly balanced, even France would find its place in the system of comparative advantage. Davenant defined England as a commercial monarchy in a world of commercial states. In such an order England’s comparative advantages should give it pre-eminence. This idea of England’s role in the world gener63

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ated a transformation in the notion of English liberty. Freedom was now understood as commercial liberty, the liberty that underpinned the prosperity of the country: “For it has been ever seen that men abound most where there is most freedom, . . . it must follow that people will in time desert those countries whose best flower is their liberties, if those liberties are thought precarious or in danger.”56 As Shelley Burtt points out, this articulation of liberty with prosperity allowed Davenant to argue for a new series of civic virtues to replace the martial virtue of civic humanism.57 The key virtue was work; poverty and especially begging were not simply unfortunate accidents but signs of decadence. For Davenant those who did not contribute to the productivity of the country were bad citizens: “It may be more truly affirmed that he who does not some way serve the commonwealth, either by being employed or by employing others, is not only a useless, but a hurtful member to it.”58 Politics were to be understood with reference to this ideal of national flourishing. Prosperity depended on good governance, and poverty revealed a bad government: “Where a nation is impoverished by bad government, by an ill-managed trade, or by any other circumstance, the interest of money will be dear, and the purchase of lands cheap; the price of labour and provisions will be low; rents will everywhere fall, lands will lie untilled, and farm houses will go to ruin; the yearly marriages and births will lessen, and the burials increase.”59 Commercial liberty, civic virtue, and good governance were a virtuous triad that made England not only happy but free. Ireland was the great exception to Davenant’s vision of a free commercial empire.60 Ireland’s comparative advantage made it a competitor in the one sector where England could not allow competition, the woollen trade.61 Ireland had exactly the same climatic conditions and so could raise wool equivalent to England’s; its ports were as good as England’s, and labour was cheaper.62 Competition drove publicists for west-country interests to a sustained campaign for restriction of Ireland’s trade.63 The strategic imperative to retain the staple industry led Davenant from initial opposition to the Navigation Acts to a reluctant acceptance that the Irish freedom to trade would have to be restricted.64 Yet restricting Ireland posed a considerable intellectual problem for Davenant. Ireland was not a possession, like the plantations in the West Indies, it was a separate kingdom, one with undoubted rights to a parliament and to self-taxation.65 Davenant tus64

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sled with the problem that Ireland, like any other country, should develop itself: “They should increase in people, that their land should be drained, that they should have trade, and grow wealthy by it.”66 Moreover, he calculated that a prosperous Ireland would be a loyal Ireland, “for if there are now and then instances of countries that rebel wantonly, yet most commonly great defections proceed from great oppression.”67 Given all this, on what basis should the Parliament of England restrict Ireland’s trade with foreign countries? Why should Ireland be an exception to the vision of a Europe of trading states, especially when it shared a monarch with England? Davenant solved his problem by adhering to the argument that Ireland was different because Ireland was dependent.68 This description of the peculiar situation of the Kingdom of Ireland had been in circulation since 1608, when Sir Edward Coke, the pre-eminent common-law jurist, had used it to differentiate between the legal rights of Scots and Irish in Calvin’s Case, which had established the rights of the subjects of James I’s other kingdoms when in England.69 Ireland was dependent, in the light of this precedent, not because the monarch was also King of England and of Scotland, but because it was a Christian nation acquired by right of conquest and so was subject to legislation in the Parliament of England: “That albeit Ireland was a distinct, dominion, yet the title thereof being by conquest, the same by judgment of law might by express words be bound by Act of the Parliament of England.”70 Despite the authority of Coke this interpretation was far from settled legal doctrine throughout the seventeenth century, and it took the defeat of the Irish Jacobites to make political fact of the legal ideal.71 Davenant made the point by comparing Ireland to Scotland: “Scotland to England (as Aragon to Spain) is a distinct state, governing itself by different laws, though under the same Prince, and is truly but a state confederated with the realm of England, though subject to our King.”72 Scotland’s was an imperial crown, and while Ireland’s had been, the community to whom such a crown had been given by Henry II had lost it through their 52 rebellions: “They might have continued an independent kingdom, and the old Irish might have preserved both their land, and the immunities thereon depending, if they had not themselves altered their own constitution.”73 The defeat of the Irish rebels had brought an end to the Irish constitution. Davenant directly denied that the colonists inherited the ancient constitution of Ireland: “But the old inhabitants having lost the greatest 65

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part of their property, have lost so much of their share in the constitution which is now devolved upon those colonists which England has from time to time sent to conquer and possess the land, who are now properly the body politic of the kingdom.”74 The rights enjoyed by Irish Protestants, the body politic, were not conferred by the Irish constitution but were carried with them by the colonists into Ireland. They were the rights of free-born Englishmen, enjoyed not in England but in a dependent kingdom. While Scots were the political brothers of the English, “they are not our descendants, and they are but politically our brethren.” Irish Protestants were their political children and so in their care, “whereas the English-Irish, who are the chief lords of that soil, are naturally our offspring.”75 This language of patriarchy was dangerous and in the hands of a committed imperialist, such as William Atwood, could escalate into a claim for English supremacy even over Scotland.76 Davenant therefore did not rely on this genetic metaphor, which had unfortunate associations with theories of absolute rule, to describe the political condition of Ireland. He was far more specific, arguing that the Irish rebellions had destroyed the Irish constitution, not offended against a primordial paternal right of monarchs: “We would not be thought here to insinuate, that a people may lose their natural rights by an insurrection, but certain privileges not fundamental they may forfeit by non-use or misuse.”77 The consequence of Irish dependence was that the population enjoyed a set of rights but was not sovereign; it had civil rather than political rights. “To be a state not subordinate to any legislative authority on earth, is a privilege that may be forfeited by a subject country, and yet leave to the people their natural rights unhurt.”78 Davenant solved his intellectual problem by defining the Irish body politic in a genuinely novel way, as a political community that did not participate in sovereignty. The Irish were neither slaves nor citizens; in effect they enjoyed a kind of political life for which there was as yet no name. Davenant’s definition of Irish dependency, and its institutional reflection in the Declaratory Act of 1720, posed difficult problems for the Irish body politic.79 Dependency would be contested by the Patriot Party, inspired by William Molyneux, after it emerged in Charles Lucas’s campaigns in the 1740s.80 Yet it would be a mistake to take the Patriot position as representative of majority political opinion. In fact, of Davenant’s three arguments, the contention that Ireland was a dependent kingdom found the most sup66

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port. Pamphleteers regularly announced that reasoning: “The Protestant interest of Ireland has thus grown under the wings of England, and does now and must ever exist by her protection, consequently Ireland is a dependent kingdom.”81 Dependency could even generate a consensual ground for debate. Henry Maxwell acknowledged that “the circumstances of Ireland, by reason of her dependency, are such that she cannot always obtain those advantages she aims at when she would” and so argued for a central bank as an institution which would give the country more control over its economic future.82 His uncle, Hercules Rowley, drew the opposite conclusion from the same premise: “As Ireland is a dependent kingdom and can neither make laws, nor repeal them, when it pleases, without the consent of other people not so much interested in the welfare of this country as I could wish, we ought (in my humble opinion) to be very cautious, how we pin any thing upon ourselves, the consequences whereof are at least very doubtful.”83 Jonathan Swift, in the person of the Drapier, satirised the notion of dependency: “I confess I have often heard it mentioned, but was never able to understand what it meant.”84 Yet even the acute mind of Swift became entangled in the complexities of the relationship, and the Drapier’s declaration that he would resist the Pretender in Ireland if he attained the throne in England necessitated an apology: “I should freely confess that I went too far, that the expression was very indiscreet.”85 While Patriot opinion might contest the justice of Ireland’s dependency, the fact of it could not be denied. Davenant’s twinned ideas that Irish interests were essentially opposed to those of England and that the members of the Irish body politic still enjoyed their natural rights, even if the body politic itself was subject to a foreign legislature, were much more controversial.86 These were the arguments that Dobbs, Prior, and Madden were most anxious to refute. Dobbs’s counter-argument was that Davenant drew false economic conclusions from misconceived political premises, “and here we may see the falsity of Dr Davenant’s argument.”87 Dobbs entirely accepted Davenant’s novel definition of the nation as a productive, trading community. To exercise civic virtue in Ireland, as in England, was to contribute to the well-being of the community, but industry needed an outlet: “It is every man’s duty more immediately to promote the happiness of the nation where he lives, and by such means as are honest and lawful to encrease its power and wealth . . . 67

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This cannot be done without industry, and the produce of such industry will be poor and mean, and its usefulness of limited extent if it is not improved by the well ordered assistance of many heads and hands in contriving and executing; and if these fruits of human labour and industry be not dispersed over the world by means of traffic and commerce.”88 As a commercial monarchy similar to England, Ireland needed the same trading conditions if the distinctive virtues of the citizenry were to flourish. Of course Davenant accepted this, and in consequence argued that cattle exports should not be impeded and that the linen trade should be positively encouraged, but he feared that a low-wage Ireland would undermine England in the vital textile trade. Dobbs argued that, on the contrary, a low-wage, freely trading Ireland was a necessary element of the British Empire.89 The Wool Acts, which were supposed to defend English interests, and in particular English dominance of the textile market in Germany, were self-defeating. They could not make English exports cheaper and so had achieved nothing other than removing a competitor to France, which was the source of cheap labour in Europe.90 By restricting Irish trade England surrendered resources to its main international competitor. Davenant made this elementary economic mistake, in the view of Madden, Dobbs, and Prior, because he did not recognise the converging political interests of Ireland and England. Thomas Prior reinforced the point that Davenant misunderstood the returns to England on a vigorous, independent Irish trade: “The plantations enrich [England] by their commodities, which are re-exported to other countries, and Ireland by its continual remittances in money.”91 An Ireland free to determine its own interests would naturally form part of a virtuous British commercial empire: “We will by our industry and labours provide them with many necessaries to carry on their trade, and for their home consumption, which they must now necessarily have from foreigners: by this means we would have returns to give them.”92 Dobbs saw the possibility of an internally free-trading commercial empire, rather than an English commercial monarchy surrounded by more or less dependent satellites.93 On the other hand, an Ireland which was denied the means to develop itself would be a genuine threat to the peace and safety of the “British dominions” since its poverty would produce rebelliousness. Dobbs conceived of Ireland as an equal partner in a commercial empire understood as a federation. The same ideal inspired Henry Maxwell, whom 68

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Jim Smyth identifies as a federative unionist.94 This way of conceiving of the emerging British Empire was attractive not only to the Irish and was also supported by theorists such as Defoe. Defoe argued that England had no interest in a low-wage economy and would necessarily lose its position in those sectors that demanded low wages in any case. Rather than regret this outcome he celebrated it, because a high-wage economy was a high-value economy, one in which the work of the poor was worth more to themselves and to the nation: “The English poor earn more money than the same class of men or women can do for the same kind of work, in any other nation . . . Nor will it be deny’d, but that they do more work also: so then, if they do more work, and have better wages too, they must needs live better.”95 Defoe had a particularly sharp appreciation of the social effects of what he called “the revolution of trade” within England, which had allowed the poor “to work, not for cottages and liveries, but for money and to live, as we say, at their own hands,” that is, independently.96 His transformation of the idea of virtue into a commercial key was even more absolute than that of Davenant. Defoe had a model of commercial empire to match this ideal of a highly productive, innovative England. England’s interest lay not in dependent provinces but in creating a whole new order of states as partners: “There are new countries, and new nations, who may be so planted, so improved, and the people so managed as to create a new commerce and millions of people shall call for our manufacture, who never called for it before.”97 Defoe’s ideas exactly matched those of Irish Protestants who wished to be partners rather than subjects in a new kind of imperial endeavour. The obvious way to organise a federative empire was through some sort of union of Ireland with England, an institutional arrangement that would fix the place of both islands. William Petty had canvassed a union as the solution to all the problems of Ireland: “There would be no danger such a Parliament should do any thing to the prejudice of the English interest in Ireland; nor could the Irish ever complain of partiality when they shall be freely and proportionally represented in all legislatures.”98 Dobbs agreed but thought that a union would only be granted once Ireland had become prosperous: “They would then find it their interest to enlarge their foundation, as they have already done with Scotland, and to incorporate us with themselves by an equitable union.”99 There was no assumption that geog69

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raphy or history made an Anglo-Scottish union more obvious than an Anglo-Irish union. The notion that Scots Presbyterians were somehow closer in identity to the English than were Irish Anglicans was strongly contested by Swift in his first pamphlet, the unpublished The story of an injured lady, being a true picture of Scotch perfidy, Irish poverty, and English partiality.100 Swift’s irritation that impious Presbyterian Scots were now rewarded with union, and its concomitant easy terms of trade, was based on the argument that Ireland had subsumed the English constitutional tradition and so was effectively English, while Scots were foreigners, an argument that had been common in the 1680s and 1690s.101 During the union debate in Scotland, Defoe had even suggested that there was less popular resistance to union with Ireland than with Scotland among the English.102 In Dublin it seemed unimaginable that the English Irish could be refused the same terms of political life as Scots, since not only did they share the same religion and origin but “his majesty’s British subjects in Ireland are separated from his British subjects in Britain, by a little gutt of water of six hours sail.”103 In 1703 the Irish House of Commons proposed either a union or annual parliaments, in effect legislative independence, as an appropriate remedy for Irish grievances.104 In either case they would enjoy their rights. Dobbs proposed setting up a yeomanry and giving tenant farmers greater rights. With Ireland reproducing English conditions, the English “would find it in their interest to enlarge their foundation, as they have already done with Scotland, and to incorporate us with themselves by an equitable union.”105 Yet the problem faced by articulate Irish thinkers, as opposed to articulate Scots, was that these arguments had not been accepted, and so they lacked a union as the institutional basis through which to negotiate their relationship to the empire.106 However intellectually attractive, the idea of the British Empire as a federation organised under a loose notion of sovereignty was dispelled by the terms of the Scottish Act of Union of 1707 and the Declaratory Act of 1720. The idea of federation was rejected in favour of an incorporating union that claimed supremacy for the now British parliament in the British Empire. The circumstances of the Scottish union, which was accompanied by levels of bribery and influence peddling beyond even the flexible norms of eighteenth-century politics, evacuated any real effort to create a principled argument for the new arrangement.107 Ireland was not even offered the op70

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tion of incorporating union but had to be understood as the object of the policy of the new state, effectively a province. In neo-Roman or Machiavellian terms, Ireland was “Panopea, the soft mother of a slothful and pusillanimous people, . . . anciently subjugated by the arms of Oceana,” to be ordered as the interests of Oceana demanded.108 Panopeans and Marpesians, the Scots, were not partners but provincials. John Toland, protesting at the Declaratory Act, indicted precisely the neo-Roman ideology that motivated the act: “I know certain folks have it very much in their mouths, that the out-provinces of a government, can never be held under too severe a rein; when the very contrary of this is true. History cannot afford one example, where any out-province, or remote colony, ever rebelled against the mother country, or chief seat of government, but through unsupportable rigor and oppression.”109 A letter from Margaret Campbell to her husband Hugh, third Earl of Loudon and a strong supporter of the Hanoverian succession, exemplifies the frustration such provincial elites faced. Writing from a London preparing to celebrate the king’s birthday to her spouse gone to fight the Jacobites during the ’15, she wrote: “There is nothing worth writing from this abominable place, for wherever one goes, there is nothing talked of, but news from Scotland, or Berth-day cloathes; they are very different subjects, the one concerns no less than the lives and fortunes of half a nation, and the other a meer trifle, and yet I believe the last takes up more peoples’ heads, than the other.”110 Even a wholehearted commitment to the new British state could not disguise the limitations of the newly formed British institutions. Political realities severely constrained the possible responses to Davenant’s conception of the Irish situation. The various institutional remedies for its dependent status, including incorporating union and federation, were politically impossible. Another constraint was the cultural construction of Irishness in England. Irish Protestants had no difficulty in negotiating complex identities. Their social position as landowners integrated them into local societies governed by norms of deference, influence, and privilege. At the same time they unproblematically asserted their Englishness: “The Protestants of Ireland are a worthy part of the king of Great Britain’s subjects, and that in no respect should be thought a people different from the English, . . . I think they should ever be considered as the same people.”111 The events of 1641, when the English settlement in Ireland was 71

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threatened by a united rebellion of the Catholic elites, both Old Irish and Old English, as interpreted through Sir John Temple’s Irish Rebellion, provided a founding narrative of danger and redemption for the Irish Protestants, one which was re-enacted every October 23rd, the particular festival of their community.112 The numerical inferiority of the Protestant inhabitants of Ireland, which was once held to present a particular challenge to Protestant identity, was if anything an element of it.113 The biblical image of the justified remnant, set apart amidst danger and providentially delivered, was a powerful representation of the community. It was even capacious enough to be extended to Dissenters when the later events of the Williamite wars demanded interpretation.114 After the siege of Derry, Dissenters could, if necessary, be included within the central mythic narrative of identity, while continuing to be excluded from political representation by the Test Acts.115 In Ireland, argued John Toland, even Dissenters are Hanoverian.116 What Toland did not emphasise was that they had no other real political choice, as support for the “country party” in Ireland was highly dangerous politically: “Surely no true Protestant, under so mild and just an administration, which secures him in the possession of his rights religious and civil, can have any intention of bringing in tyranny and Romish superstition, why then should we unthinkingly at any time, even appear to set up a party as might appear to oppose the court because it is a court?”117 This notion of the retention of rights “religious and civil” was the touchstone that managed dissent among Dissenters. The core narrative was supplemented by other elements. Figures like James Ussher, one of the founding scholars of Trinity College, Dublin, and later Archbishop of Armagh, had been sufficiently confident of this Irish Protestant identity to look to embed it in the Gaelic past, seeking a Protestant Patrick.118 The identity was even rich enough to encompass very different ideologies and attitudes to the Catholic population, from the conciliatory ideas of a Vincent Gookin to the more aggressive attitudes of Richard Lawrence.119 Writing in the aftermath of the 1641 rebellion from Munster, where the seeming peace between settler and native had made the violence even more traumatic, Gookin refused to demonise the Catholic Irish, arguing that their violence was not some essential feature of their nature but a product of cultural and even political circumstance. Many of the Irish did not plan to attack their neighbours but were driven to it by “the 72

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English who at the beginning reckoned an Irish man and a rebell tantamount, and on that score forced many into war who desired peace.”120 Lawrence was not as conciliatory and fulfilled many of the stereotypes of the officer of the Cromwellian army. He originally thought that the violence of 1641, “that inhumane massacre upon a company of poor, unarmed, peaceable, harmless people living quietly amongst them,” had made it impossible for Irish Catholics and settlers ever to have confidence in a shared civility. But even Lawrence was prepared to be flexible when it worked to his advantage, asking Patrick Darcey, “who being of the proprietor’s religion and countryman I thought might do more with her than another,” to negotiate with the claimant to his property at Porterstown in the aftermath of the restoration of Charles II.121 Petty thought that most of the discussion of Irish national character was nonsense: “I see nothing in them inferior to any other people, nor any enormous predominacy of any humour . . . Their laziness seems to me rather to proceed from want of employment and encouragement to work, than from the natural abundance of Flegm in their bowels and blood.”122 Petty’s observation of Irish work habits was that, far from being lazy, the natives simply preferred intellectual to physical pursuits: “The Irish although extremely backward to all kind of corporall labour yet have been held generally very laborious in the way of letters.”123 The flexibility of Irish Protestants’ ideas about themselves was well suited to the complexity of the polity.124 The Irish understanding of the political options open to the Protestant community in Ireland was not shared in England. The local capacity to integrate Irish and English identity in one culture was not understood, and instead Irish Protestants were taken to be primarily Irish. John Hovell explained how absurd the English representation of Ireland would seem to a “stranger, arriving in England, [who] should hear many persons there, of seeming good parts and repute, rail against Ireland, sometimes wishing it under water, sometimes wasted, deserted and what not, [and] would think the people of this island deadly enemies,” when in fact “we have neither laws nor governors but of their sending us.”125 One of those governors, Henry Hyde, second Earl of Clarendon, devoted much of his speech on relinquishing his post to Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, to a defence of the Irish Protestants, but even he began with the observation that the “English of this country have been asserted with the character of being gener73

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ally phanaticks which is a great misery to them.”126 The agency of Irish Protestants was frustrated not because of any doubts they might have had themselves about their role, but because that role was constrained within the cultural model of Irishness developed in England.127 This culturally embedded constraint was fully apparent to Irish Protestants: “Unfortunately for this kingdom, it still keeps the name of Ireland, and the Protestant inhabitants the denomination of Irish, with old ideas annexed to them of opposition to the interest of England, and altho’ these ideas are so strongly associated, like sprights and darkness, that many generous Britons find it difficult on the plainest conviction to separate them, yet in reality, the scene is quite changed from what it was.”128 William Petty thought it “absurd that Englishmen born, sent over into Ireland by the commission of their King, and there sacrificing their lives for the King’s interest, and succeeding in his service, should therefore be accounted aliens, foreigners, and also enemies.”129 John Hovell asked if crossing to Ireland “transgressed a law of nature” and so divested English people of their rights.130 To the contrary, James Harrington determined identity from geography: “But, (through what virtue of the soil, or vice of the air soever it be) they come still to degenerate.”131 Irishness was a degenerative disease; this argument had already been developed by Edmund Spenser in the preceding century.132 James Arbuckle found noteworthy someone “who said, that he had the honour to be born in Ireland” when to be Irish “is usually looked upon as a misfortune.”133 The manner in which Irish cultural representations and modes of action developed at home was irrelevant to their reception in Britain. While it might be in the interests of England to incorporate Ireland within the polity, the representation of Ireland’s incivility was too foundational to English national discourse for arguments of interest to be determinative. Sir John Browne even supposed that the common sense of English political life was that Ireland be annihilated: “I am sensible that the proposition which I here advance is a very bold one, as it is so opposite to the universally received opinion, that it were better for England if Ireland were no more.”134 Dobbs again was clear, pointing out that “we can’t expect an enlargement of Trade (however rational it may appear here when nothing but public spirit prevails) unless we can make it appear that what we desire is not only beneficial to that whole of which we are a part, but also not detrimental to those who have a power to obstruct it.”135 The political room for manoeuvre 74

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by Irish interests in England was constrained by the interaction of a representation of Irish danger and sectional interests such as west-country woollen merchants and beef farmers.136 Irish dependency was inscribed into the terms of the emerging empire. The local tradition of political thought was already sensitive to the problems of dependency, prosperity, and political independence. Robert Molesworth was particularly alert to the relationship between liberty and prosperity. His study of Denmark was designed to illustrate the difference between the states of Europe that had maintained their “Gothic” constitutions (England, Poland, and Ireland) and those that had fallen under tyranny.137 Denmark served this purpose because it had only lost its liberty in the previous generation, and the effects of absolutism were therefore new and obvious. The observed effect of tyranny was to destroy confidence in the rule of law and so in the enjoyment of property: “The difficulty of procuring a comfortable subsistence and the little security of enjoying what shall be acquired through industry, is a great cause of prodigality.”138 In particular, Molesworth was impressed by the difficulties faced by the peasantry, who might have anything they created expropriated by unrestricted landlords: “If any one of these wretches prove to be of a diligent and improving temper, who endeavours to live a little better than his fellows, . . . it is forty to one but he is transplanted from thence to a naked and uncomfortable habitation, to the end that his griping landlord may get more rent.”139 Molesworth observed exactly the same lack of incentive to productive labour in Ireland.140 Molesworth had recommended political liberty and extensive trade to the Danes as the means of creating prosperity. These simple remedies could not be applied to Ireland, which being a special case, neither free nor bound but dependent, needed special solutions. Dependency threatened to distort and undermine the particular virtues of commercial empire. In Davenant’s account modern liberty was based on industry; work made the English free. However, labour had exactly the opposite effect on the Irish. In his efforts to explain the utility of Irish labour to the British comity of nations, Prior unwittingly defined Ireland as a slave society. Prior, like Dobbs, derived his explanatory categories from Davenant but sought to use those tools to undermine the conclusions Davenant had reached. Prior and Davenant agreed that the plantations were one basis of English strength because “the labour of the Negroes, about 20,000 in num75

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ber, costs little, and the profit thereof is great, and centres at last in England.”141 The plantations, as possessions worked by slaves, were supposed to be a special case without general political significance. However, Prior could not sustain the difference between this kind of work of slaves, which nobody pretended was to the benefit of the slave, and the work of free men that was ideally to be the basis of their freedom. Concerning Irish work, “much the same with the plantations, the produce and profit of all our labour issues constantly to the people of England, and therefore ’tis in its interest to give the people of Ireland full employment.”142 George Berkeley, the bishop of Cloyne, philosopher, and colonial projector in Bermuda, even reported that “the Negros in our plantations have a saying ‘if Negro was not Negro, Irishman would be Negro.’”143 The dependent nature of Ireland even turned trade and labour into slavery. A kingdom dependent on another could pervert the incentives to work offered to its population. Prior acknowledged this and concluded that if the Kingdom of Ireland was not allowed to trade freely, then the people should not work. In either case they would remain poor, and “’tis better to enjoy poverty with ease.”144 Irish claims to contribute and participate in commercial empire as a nation ended in paradox and immobility. The commercial polity that escaped the paradoxes of European history, England, perversely condemned one nation to poverty or slavery. Only Ireland, among European nations, could not benefit from commerce: “Trade, in the body politick, makes the several parts of it contribute to the well-being of the whole, and also to the more comfortable and agreeable living of every member of the community. Every nation, every climate from the Equinox almost to the very poles, may partake of the produce of all the rest, by means of a friendly intercourse and mutual exchange of what each has to spare.”145 Irish citizens did not enjoy these beneficial effects because trade was restricted and the nation dependent. The challenge was to find a mechanism other than unrestricted trade whereby a national community could create conditions where “the several parts of it contribute to the well-being of the whole.” Political constraints governed the extent to which Ireland could participate in this commercial world, just as they constrained the African trade.146 However, the Irish political community did enjoy a residual freedom that African slaves did not. While they might not have much chance of persuading England to redescribe itself in such a way that Irish Protestants could be acknowledged 76

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as full partners in the polity, they could, potentially, find a manner of redescribing themselves that eliminated or reduced the baleful effects of dependency. Some other way of imagining and describing the community would have to be found if it was to be able to act. Irish nationhood might be a curse, given its historical associations, but if a reformed Irishness could be created, then the curse could be dispelled. In effect, despite all their efforts to resist it, Irish Protestant thinkers and writers were driven back to Davenant’s formulation of their situation. They had to find a way of explaining how one might enjoy all one’s rights without sharing in sovereignty, a way of describing a community in which identity was not political. Irish thinkers were being invited to discover and describe civil society.

Improvement and Civil Society The practical challenges posed by participation in the economy of the North Atlantic world were not peculiar to Ireland. Martin Martin argued that the poverty of the Western Isles of Scotland existed because “by reason of their distance from trading towns, and because of their language which is Irish, the inhabitants have never had any opportunity to trade at home or abroad.”147 Access and the accompanying stimulus to trade were the core issues for development. Martin saw clubs and associations as the mechanism for fostering such development for Scotland just as Dobbs and Madden did for Ireland. Martin’s scheme was quite constrained; if the government of Scotland would “give encouragement for it to publick spirited persons or societies,” then trade would increase.148 Madden had a more capacious understanding of an improving society, arguing it should operate in Ireland much as the Board of Trade did in England or even as the government did in Holland, that body being “little more than a great council of merchants.”149 Though ambitious, Madden’s ideas reflected the consensus that “improving . . . must be carried on by private industry and experiments of ingenious men, more than by publick laws.”150 Dobbs revealed just how much turned on the idea of the improving society in Ireland in his vision of a national organisation coordinated by a general board in Dublin, drawing in every trade and economic function.151 The Irish versions carried a heavier burden of expectation not because their economic task was harder but because their political problem was more acute. Martin thought a royal 77

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burgh on Skye to govern a shrievalty of the Western Isles the obvious sponsor for improvement.152 Irish local government could not play this role. Dependency was also reflected in the New Rules of 1672 that had taken power away from Irish urban corporations. In Ireland the role of the improving society would have to be invented out of new sources rather than developed from older traditions. Dobbs, Prior, Madden, and the other founding members of the Dublin Society would develop its characteristic intellectual sociability from a variety of heterogeneous sources. The interest generated by “patriot” discourse, and particularly by the dominating figure of William Molyneux, has obscured most of these less well-known traditions. Indeed the influence of Molyneux, and of Lockianism generally, has probably been exaggerated. Locke’s radical rights theory was useless in Ireland since he explicitly stated that rights were not secure without political freedom.153 Trying to organise their ideas within this tradition makes strange bedfellows of figures like the High Tory Jonathan Swift and the republican Robert Molesworth; both were opposed to Walpolian Establishment Whig models of empire, but for very different reasons.154 The Protestant community in Ireland was too committed to a theory of passive obedience to embrace Locke.155 William King’s account of the disposition of members of the Church of Ireland to the Glorious Revolution argued that Ireland’s dependency was such that it owed allegiance to the Crown irrespective of who wore it and without question as to the legitimacy of their claim.156 This obedience was a perfectly passive kind, one in which even political judgement was dependent on the actions of the English political community; the principle of loyalty could never generate any political risk. To entertain discussion of Lockean ideas of rights threatened the status of dependency, which was politically impossible.157 Even when political life became reanimated by the Money Bill dispute in the 1750s, a rationalisation of the nature of the nation in terms of natural right remained a dangerous option.158 The radicalism of Charles Lucas and the other patriots in Dublin municipal politics remained carefully couched within the language of the constitution and respectful of dependency.159 Outside the natural jurisprudential tradition, three local intellectual resources existed in the Protestant community out of which a new model of community might be constructed in Ireland. The majority Catholic com78

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munity would have to work out its place in the Irish scheme of things and in the imperial context as well, but this need posed a different set of issues. Of the three local discourses the tradition of political economy, which spoke directly to the condition of dependency, was the most immediately useful and comprehended explicitly novel categories for the description of civic life. Within the Anglican community the moral reform movement, inspired by figures such as bishops Wetenhall and Browne, sought to bring the population to a new understanding of itself and created new representations of the moral community. The established church did not monopolize intellectual life in the country; Presbyterian social and political thinkers were a particularly important source of new ideas. Disenfranchised by the 1704 Test Act, their situation within Ireland mirrored that of the political community as a whole within the British polity. New Light Presbyterianism would derive a particular interpretation of the nature of Irish community that contributed to the emerging representation of the country. None of these traditions had the resources to perform a revolution in the conception of the polity in and of themselves, but in their interaction they created substantial new categories for self-understanding. It would be difficult to over-estimate the importance and novelty of the local tradition of political economy in the evolution of a new model of community.160 Michel Foucault has identified Petty as one of the key figures in the emergence of a new principle in the seventeenth century: governmentality.161 Foucault argues that governance, the promotion of the several ends and goods of the elements of the polity, generated an alternative horizon of political judgement to sovereignty in the late seventeenth century. Governance developed from the model of the community as family, with the governor in the place of the father, to a new and more abstract model of a population understood and guided by the science of political economy. The techniques and strategies of governance became more complex than the practices of paternal power. Governance proposed ends outside the functioning of the institutions of the state, the state and its existence being the horizon within which the notion of sovereignty worked. Petty illustrates the contrast of the values of sovereignty to governance well. His Political Anatomy of Ireland operates through a double vision. On the one hand he analyses Ireland in terms of the political struggles for sovereignty between opposed political groups. His particular contribution here was to turn a 79

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rather jaundiced eye on the opposing claims to legitimacy, commenting of the victors in the wars of the seventeenth century: “Upon the playing of this match upon so great odds, the English won and have (among and beside other pretences) a gamester’s right at least to their estates.”162 Petty’s realist vision understood sovereignty as power, primarily political power; however, he also argued that the acquisition of sovereignty could not pacify Ireland: “Declining all military means of settling and securing Ireland in peace and plenty, what we offer shall tend to the transmuting [of ] one people into the other, and a thorough union of interests upon natural or lasting principles.”163 The thrust of Political Anatomy was to analyse Ireland not as a political community or series of communities, shaped by a particular historical experience, but as a series of human and natural resources to be exploited. He systematically separated the political significance of particular institutions and events from their social and economic significance. He argued, for example, that short leases and the fear of discovery among Catholic landowners were not useful political safeguards but impediments to economic development.164 The most important feature of Petty’s work was his use of mathematical descriptions of Irish resources. This technique allowed him to collapse all differences of culture and community by describing their elements as part of a common productive system. Petty conceived of political analysis as the calculation of probabilistic dynamics, rather than as the perception of essential qualities.165 As Mary Poovey points out, the fact that many of Petty’s numbers were at best conjectural is beside the point: “By using numbers to expunge the affiliations that most of his contemporaries considered signs of partiality—religion and politics—Petty tried to argue that numbers were impartial.”166 Petty’s analysis, literally a decomposition of economic life into its constituent elements, was the first step in an eventual reconstitution of the polity in new terms. There was an ironic circularity in the centrality of Davenant to later Irish efforts to understand their position: Petty was identified by Davenant as the originator of the political arithmetic that laid the basis for his own economics.167 The redescription of social relations in terms of the mathematical quantities of economics was supported by changes in the economy itself. Much of the country became commercialised, that is to say that an integrated market emerged for a series of commodities, between 1660 and 1710.168 80

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Commercialisation was particularly rapid and profound in those regions and around those commodities that formed part of the new Atlantic trade network. David Dickson shows in his account of the evolution of the butter market in Cork that by 1700 brokers had emerged who set markets and worked as intermediaries between primary producers and exporters.169 These brokers operated as active agents of market principles and intruded them into the lives of the primary producers, arranging future contracts and setting prices for the whole region. Louis Cullen has illustrated how profound the effects of this penetration of new values into society could be. As commercialisation developed, money became necessary for most social transactions, and the Irish poor were driven to abandon the dairy products that had acquired a market value in favour of the potato as their staple food.170 The socially transformative effects of the imposition of market norms could have disturbing effects. Airt Uí Laoghaire, the subject of a classic poem mourning his death, was murdered at least in part because the profits he derived from the cattle and butter trade threatened the social position of some of his Protestant neighbours.171 Land, like butter, was a true commodity, unencumbered by legally enforceable customary rights or a more diffuse set of customary relations that might restrain the profit seeking of landowners. The individualistic precepts of political economy and the realities of Irish economic life matched one another, making the quantitative language of political arithmetic attractive to Irish commentators. Ireland could be thought of and analysed as a space to be governed according to the interests of its inhabitants rather than as a sovereign community expressing itself in a set of political institutions. It was one thing to decompose the warring tribes of Ireland in terms of the interests of the individuals making up their traditions; it was another to recompose those individuals within a novel language of community. There was something inherently paradoxical in even trying to imagine a community of individuals. One important source of new ideas of community in this direction came from the moral reform movements within the Anglican communion.172 The inspiration for the reform societies was not indigenous; they were modelled on the English societies for the reformation of manners. However, they were particularly important to the established church in Ireland because of the numerical inferiority of the Anglican population.173 The reformation of manners extended the mission of the Angli81

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can clergy outside their immediate flock to the disciplining of the society as a whole. The campaign also fostered a self-critical attitude toward its own ideas in the Anglican community itself, particularly in Bishop Peter Browne of Cork’s campaign against the cult of William of Orange and in Narcissus Marsh’s efforts as Archbishop of Dublin to raise the standard of clerical behaviour.174 As David Hayton points out, the campaign targeted all the institutions of social life, particularly those of the poor: churches, hospitals, schools, libraries, and workhouses. It sought also to regulate a variety of behaviours, from swearing to the profanation of the sabbath.175 The campaign for the reformation of manners fostered institutions in which an individualistic, disciplined, productive community could be created.176 These institutions formed one model for a community of individuals, if a particularly highly structured model based firmly on Protestant ideals of asceticism.177 The campaign was a failure, and to all intents and purposes it had lost its momentum as early as 1717 because the necessary institutions of discipline did not exist and there was considerable social resistance to the practices of informing that would have undermined popular pastimes, such as playing hurling on Sundays.178 However, the campaign was intellectually and culturally important because it reinforced the model of the community as a productive unit and it gave clergymen a new role. They were not just to have the care of souls, they were also to be the agents of something called improvement. Early versions of this new activity were highly marked by evangelising ambitions and were articulated not in the context of specifically Irish conditions but in millenarian style.179 Latterly moral improvement and economic improvement could become indistinguishable; Robert Howard, bishop of Elphin, practised his ministry largely through the improvement of his estates, while Francis Hutchinson, bishop of Down and Connor, was an enthusiast for the literal emulation of Peter the fisherman.180 Much of the zeal that had been committed to moral reform in the first decade of the eighteenth century was directed toward agriculture and commerce in the middle decades. The rhetoric around the charter schools changed subtly from the promise of wholesale evangelisation of the Catholic population to the promotion of industrious manners in the name of charity: “Christianity breathes charity in every part, so that a Christian without this principle in, is as defective a creature in his religion, as is in na82

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ture, a man without a rational mind.”181 A diffuse sense of religious duty as commercial charity could have some odd results, to the point of turning subscription to the Bank of Ireland into a religious duty: “If the universal consent of all civilized nations in all ages has placed charity at the head of the moral virtues; If Christ himself has given it the preference of all Christian as well as moral virtues; let us then try whether erecting a bank here, that will take no higher interest than five per cent, will not be the most charitable undertaking that private men can set about, or the legislature enact into a law.”182 The model of the nation as a body of men and women disciplined by the established church was not attractive to the Presbyterian scholar and teacher Francis Hutcheson, nor to his friend James Arbuckle; Hutcheson wrote that “all the open attacks which have been made upon religion and virtue by their declared enemies, have not been capable to do near the harm which has been done either thro’ the indiscreet and intemperate zeal, or the wrong and intemperate notions of some men.”183 This veiled critique of the enthusiasm of the members of the established church for attacking wrongdoing was supplemented with Hutcheson’s clear sense that the project of improvement might be more efficiently prosecuted if the population were conceived of in some way other than as a body of sinners. Hutcheson proposed a new idea of the population understood not as a group of atomised individuals, nor as a body of downfallen hurlers, but as a society, an assembly of moral equals governed not by discipline but by the search for happiness. “For that cannot be called society, where there is not a participation in rational delight, and an interchange of sentiments and passions; and without society no being can be happy, that is sensible of either wants or defects. Beings of different or opposite natures one to the other are no more capable of holding society together, than a train of discords in music is of producing that wonderful combination of sounds, which we call by the name of harmony. And for this reason it is necessary to our happiness, that we should have communication with our equals.”184 Hutcheson retained the productive individualism of the Anglican reformers, their ideal of the nation as a fundamentally moral community, and the emphasis on the institutions that constituted that community. He abandoned their obsession with discipline, however, and argued that society was fundamentally selfordering and structured by free communication, not hierarchical control. 83

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Through Hutcheson, New Light Presbyterianism bequeathed a tolerant and rational model of society to the Irish discussion of the possibilities of community.185 Hutcheson also forged the vital link between Irish and Scottish contexts for the discussion of the possibilities of commercial empire. The clarity of Hutcheson’s formulation of the utilitarian principle, that the good of society was defined by the happiness of the greatest number, was to be crucial for moderate divines and men of letters seeking to challenge the authority of traditional Calvinism.186 The tensions that were latent in these accommodations to the Irish situation were also apparent in Hutcheson’s writings. Discussing the nature of limited governments, such as dependent kingdoms, he argued that they were perfectly legitimate forms of government and that prudence, the central political virtue, might well demand such an organisation.187 However, he saw a particular danger in such arrangements if the dominant power sought to revise the constitution of the whole without reference to the dependent parties: “The only remedy indeed in that case, is an universal insurrection against such perfidious trustees.”188 The writer clearest about the ethics of society was already anxious about their limits and the point at which politics might reassert themselves in the most dramatic way. Dissenters, Protestants, and Catholics all developed new languages for describing the community in the early eighteenth century. All of these new languages converged on the idea of the community, or nation, as a productive unit created out of the labour of its members. The various models of the community—morally reforming institution, communicative society, and Christian commonwealth—all served to create a context for the rational individual idealised by political economy. Improvement was to perform in Ireland the same function that trade performed elsewhere. Social mechanisms of emulation and discipline would inculcate the distinctive virtues of commercial liberty in a population that was not allowed fully to participate in the system of trade. The institution that would direct this organisation of the life of the nation was to be the Dublin Society.

After Citizenship The writings of the founders reflected these various sources for the notion of an improving society. Hutcheson’s idea of society, for example, is 84

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cited, though inflected, in Dobbs’s writing. Where Hutcheson had developed his notion of society from the disinterested discourse of literati, Dobbs saw society as discourse toward the furtherance of self-interest. In Dobbs’s proposed network, the collective interaction created individual utility: “The general board ought to have corresponding members in each county by way of clubs, to consider their wants, and what improvements are proper for the several counties. And these county clubs may again be subdivided and have monthly meetings among themselves, to put every farmer they can influence upon the most advantageous improvements his land is capable of.”189 The individualism of this organisational idea was reflected in the terms of the meeting held on June 26, 1731, that laid the basis of the society as a free association of members committing themselves to work for “improving husbandry, manufactures and other useful arts.”190 The society very quickly turned the speculation on improvement into a programme and a practice. In the society’s first decade, the direction of technical innovation was support for anything that would redirect Irish agriculture away from pasturage and toward tillage. The society encouraged a pirate edition of Tull’s The New Horse Houghing Husbandry, imported model ploughs, and sent members on fact-finding missions abroad. The means used to achieve this goal mobilised the communicative techniques of the North Atlantic world. The society was a nexus through which informal networks of friends were brought into the light of public life. Christian Ussher’s friends Robert Taylor of Limerick and Thomas Coote of Coote Hill in Cavan had been investigating the best species of flax seed for some years, and the society gave them a forum to communicate their findings.191 It also set up formal communications with foreign agricultural societies, such as the “society erected in North Britain for the encouragement of tillage,” and domestic improving groups, such as the Gorey Friendly Society.192 The society’s publishing was not restricted to piracy. It sponsored research into a model agronomical library and eventually publicised its own proceedings in the Dublin Newsletter and Pue’s Occurences.193 Improvement and association became ubiquitous features of Irish elite life, and the model of civil improvement was inspired by the Dublin Society.194 Samuel Madden understood more clearly than anyone else the significance of the society they were creating. Improvement was an ideal embraced across the Atlantic world, but Madden saw that the model toward 85

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which they were working in Ireland, that of the individual benefit of all the constituent members, implied a new set of values. Where the ancients might seek to create virtue, or a modern nation respect justice or liberty, the members of Irish society instead furthered utility. There was a note of nostalgia in Madden’s praise for this new orientation: “Next to being eminently good and virtuous, to be truly and generally useful to others, is the great and honest glory of the man and the citizen.”195 Virtue was preferable, but virtue was not applicable to the situation. Madden and his critics even agreed that Ireland was remarkable for its lack of civic virtue. Madden stated that “there is hardly a spot of earth on the globe where it seems to have less influence than here in Ireland,” while his anonymous critic asserted that “he who sets himself to recommend the giving up of a private advantage to the publick good, must expect to be laughed at or look’d upon as a hypocrite.”196 The novelty of happiness as the acme of the virtues was easily satirised. Daniel MacLauchlan prefigured Diderot in proposing that since happiness meant pleasure, including sexual pleasure, prohibitions on sexual pleasure were irrational if not immoral.197 MacLauchlan also neatly aped the articulation of an industrious ethic with utilitarian ethics in Madden and others. Promiscuous women added to the wealth and strength of the nation by producing children: “I say, if the blessed fornication of such pretty rogues as these, was under proper regulations, so as they should not be put to the blush for propagating their kind in this expeditious way, the whole nation would soon find their account in it.”198 The evolution of social ethics was difficult to manage. Madden’s originality was to perceive that an unvirtuous, self-interested society could still have a set of distinctive moral qualities. By “our growing better oeconomists, . . . though we cannot be a great, we shall be what is infinitely more desirable, a contented and happy people.”199 He argued that the political nation could be replaced by a new kind of collectivity, a society: “Though we cannot at will make Acts of Parliament for the Nation, we can certainly prescribe laws for ourselves and our own conduct, and if we can but be true to our real interest and welfare, we may so order our private management at home, as to make up for our publick extravagances and follies abroad. Nations are composed of separate families, and if every gentleman in his own house will once determine, in his little sphere, to keep his country in his eye in all his expenses and management, we may yet be re86

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triv’d from ruin; and if once the tide of custom sets this way, we, who I have ever seen more scrupulous in observing the worst fashions, rather than the best laws, may see the scene shift, all men unite in the service of Ireland.”200 The important transpositions in Madden’s writing were custom and fashion for law, private for public, and the orientation of debate toward interest and welfare. Madden consistently replaced political categories and ideas with the discourse of society. The Irish political nation was absurd; what might be saved was Irish society. Madden’s register of public debate was acquired by his interlocutors. A writer supporting his plan for scholarships for needy youths argued that “no society on earth can hope to subsist long in any tolerable degree of happiness or greatness without industriously applying all possible expedients to the training of its youth in such a manner as may render them the most useful to their country.”201 Luxury was traditionally understood as the antithesis of the virtuous disposition “where the generality of people (collective or representative) are ready upon all occasions that offer, to give up, in each particular instance, every man, his own gain, or private advantage or the advantage of any particular set of men, to the good of the whole community.”202 In the particular situation of Ireland luxury was redefined away from this traditional understanding in favour of a definition in terms of particular consumption patterns: “a greater consumption of foreign commodities than is consistent with the situation and circumstances of the country.”203 Luxury was that which distorted the economic system, not that which confused the moral duty of the citizenry. The vocabulary of happiness, society, utility, and industry had replaced the older idiom of virtue. Happiness, which Louis de Saint-Just would later declare the great discovery of the eighteenth century, was the antidote to the Irish condition. Madden was acutely aware that too strong an insistence on virtue might threaten happiness. If the nation was to be reconciled to being a commercial society, it could not hark back to antique virtue. He was therefore one of the very first to combat Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critique of commercial society. In replying to Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” he perceived that in criticising the sciences Rousseau was undermining the validity of the ideal of happiness. He defined a science as “the knowledge of such things as constitute or contribute to the happiness and comfort, or the misery and discomfort of our nature”; in short, anything that made a com87

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munity into a society.204 Madden did not simply rehearse the comforts of modern life or the texture of English liberty as a response to Rousseau’s advocacy of the more rigorous demands of antique liberty. More interestingly he argued that Rousseau had made a mistake in his analysis of modern commercial polities. Madden accepted that corruption was a feature of human history but argued that it was not luxury but empire that created corruption: “The Romans indeed conquer’d most of the known world; but did they set virtue on the thrones of the conquered nations? No: like all other conquerors, after robbing, plundering and destroying, they set up deputies over the provinces, that ev’ry year fleeced them of the little they had left. And that has been the case of all the conquerors of the East, whether Assyrian, Grecian or Roman, down to Charles the fifth of Spain.”205 Even the most able defender of the values of society, of the depoliticised interaction of private persons, could not entirely occlude the structures that created the ideological and intellectual necessity for that society. Empire threatened society on two axes. The exercise of imperial power would corrupt the conquering nation, and the experience of domination could do the same to the conquered, or the dependent. Civil society arose as a model of community in Ireland at the turn of the eighteenth century. It comprised a new ethic, one that was generated from the interactions of self-interested private persons pursuing utility or happiness. The new social ethics did not develop in a vacuum but around the practical problem of organising Irish society to participate in the emerging British Empire. The instrument used to organise Ireland was the Dublin Society. Its founders consciously sought to find a manner of explaining Ireland’s role in the empire in dialogue, or indeed dispute, with one of its most acute theorists. They failed to defeat their interlocutor, but through the very attempt they identified a set of values that could animate Irish civil society. The idea of utility and the improving society were genuine innovations in Irish life that offered alternatives to national and sectarian languages of politics. However, the formula that encapsulated the nature of civil society, rights without citizenship, was not a stable representation of Irish social life. Dependency and empire made civil society vulnerable, and the explicitly political ideals, such as liberty and virtue, were potential grounds for a critique of the ideal. Finally the language of rights, utility, and society sat un-

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easily on a society where power was so narrowly concentrated. The investigation of the origins of civil society makes its development even more mysterious. How did the discourse of civil society migrate from being the compensatory self-understanding of a colonial elite to being a dominant representation of modern social life?

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Eighteenth-century Ireland may have been a Protestant kingdom, but it was a Catholic country. Eventually an account of how that majority might be incorporated in the kingdom, and on what terms, would have to be given. The simplest resolution was to define the Catholic population as subjects of the Protestant kingdom, but this solution, while legally coherent, left unspecified the manner in which Catholics, and particularly elite Catholics, were in practice to participate in economic and social life.1 The project of improvement was one route through which this problem could be approached. Dobbs recognised the possibility that Catholics might be productive members of society, even if they were excluded from citizenship. He thought, for instance, that the penal laws should not be applied to Jansenists and Gallicans: “I would freely give my vote for a toleration of them and their religion, and distinguish the laity, who adher’d to this less erroneous part of the Church of Rome, by giving them tenures, and an interest in their country, sufficient to promote their being industrious and assisting to increase the wealth of the country.”2 Bishop Berkeley could even find a positive virtue in Catholic religious discipline. Since their “flocks are of all others most disposed to follow directions,” Catholic priests could drive rather 90

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than persuade their parishes to improvement.3 In this context the productive, or welfarist, values of society were more relevant than the confessional identities of politics. However, the central fact of Irish life remained the exclusion of Catholics from positions of public influence. The ambition to include the Catholic majority in the productive life of the nation was in tension with the political need to maintain the structures of the confessional state.4 By the century’s end Theobald Wolfe Tone would articulate the solution that liberal Irish Protestants would find to their problem of inclusion. If Catholicism ceased to be an historical threat, if Catholics became, for political purposes, Protestants, the problem of popery would simply dissolve. Tone’s Argument on behalf of the Catholics of 1791 asserted that Catholics might be emancipated because they had ceased to be meaningfully Catholic: “The emancipated and liberal Irishman, like the emancipated and liberated Frenchman, may go to mass, may tell his beads, or sprinkle his mistress with holy water; but neither the one or the other will attend to the rusty and extinguished thunderbolts of the Vatican, or indeed the idle anathemas, which indeed his Holiness is now-a-days too prudent and cautious to use.”5 Recent research has followed Tone’s line of thought. Ian McBride has observed that when new Catholic representative institutions emerged after 1750, their spokesmen expressed themselves through the rhetoric of Whiggery. It would seem that effectively they conformed to the political language of Protestant Ireland. McBride also notes that the process through which the community acquired that language remains “a mystery.”6 This mystery cries out to be investigated. The first historian of revived Catholic political life, Thomas Wyse, used a similar language of occult developments to describe the evolution of Catholic life to the point in 1756 when Charles O’Conor and John Curry were willing to sponsor a Catholic Association: “Constitutions are the children of quiet and almost imperceptible moral revolutions. The great epochs which mark them to the readers of history, are only the final and definitive expression of opinions and feeling which have been growing up under the surface of the state for many years before.”7 This idea of a hidden moral revolution is an interesting hypothesis that allows us to restore agency to the Catholic subjects of the kingdom. It opens up an even more interesting possibility that elite Irish Catholics in the eighteenth century might have generated an independent language of 91

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rights, one that enabled them to participate in the British world of the North Atlantic without accepting the premises of Whiggery. Tone may have been the victim of some creative misinterpretation. The problems faced by elite Irish Catholics, and those concerned with their place in the polity in the early eighteenth century, were not altogether sui generis. The emerging fiscal military states of France, Spain, and Britain fashioned new political identities for their subjects and demanded intensified identification from their populations, principally in the form of increased taxation and participation in war.8 In consequence an array of politically defeated communities—Jansenists, Jacobites, Catalans, many varieties of Irish people, Huguenots, Cameronians, and Scots civic humanists, to name some of the more obvious—had to explain to themselves their participation in politically uncongenial worlds.9 Their predicament was a result of the paradox that increased demands for political identification had created problems of differentiation. As multiple monarchies ceded ground to integrated states, old identities that had been at one time unproblematic became heterodox. The challenge for the newly heterodox became to retain a distinctive sense of themselves without making themselves vulnerable to the stereotypes of their political opponents. French Huguenots and Jansenists, for example, faced the common problem of refusing to adhere to orthodox Catholicism while defending themselves from the charge of disloyalty to the monarch. They solved that problem in similar ways. Huguenot theorists in the refuge, particularly Pierre Jurieu, and Jansenists faced with Unigenitus, such as Nicolas Le Gros, converged on figurism as an intellectual strategy to allow for a variety of forms of religious experience without political danger.10 Figurism counselled obedience to the commands of the prince in expectation of the eventual triumph of, in their particular cases, either a renewed Catholicism or the reformed religion. The Babylonian captivity was a trial, and if God’s people sustained their covenant with him they would be rewarded with eventual glory. Political expectations were not abandoned in this vision, merely postponed, and not always for long. John Everard addressed James II as the redeemer of the Catholic Church in England in 1687 in this register: “Sure all signalize you as pre-ordain’d by the Almighty for a great work of Ages, viz. To rescue the Virgin Spouse of Christ the Roman Catholick Church from

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the Jaws of the Dragon.”11 However, the long-term importance of this rhetoric was not the political hope, usually unfulfilled, that it held out to particular communities. The division of interior belief from external conformity was based on the faith in the difference between the apparent history of states and a real history revealed in the Bible in which the values of the “saving remnant” would eventually redeem the whole. This idea was the ground for pluralism, for a distinction between languages of politics and languages of religious experience. This distinction would have important consequences. For instance, it was central to the division of conscience and reason that would structure Jean Barbeyrac’s influential theory of natural law.12 Figurism created the possibility of different registers of languages of public order, political and civil. Figurism was one response to the experience of finding oneself in a religious minority or in an uncongenial political situation; pietism was another. The most extreme pietist response to political defeat was the conformist pietism of Pierre Poiret. Poiret, originally from Metz but writing from the Palatinate, argued that French Protestants should conform to the Catholic Church in France in accordance with the wishes of the king because confessional hostility offended the will of God.13 A similar ideal of submission of the will informed Pierre Nicole’s Jansenist response to Louis XIV’s absolutism. Nicole’s political psychology was particularly appropriate to the situation of the Irish Catholic elite who entertained serious doubts about the legitimacy of the monarchy and its servants. As Nicole explained, “Everything that comes from self-regard is worthy only of disdain and hatred. One should recognise in the great only that which God has instituted through them and despise what jealousy and concupiscence sees in them. Only religion can tell one from the other, and reveal to us that which the great receive from God and that which they owe to the errors and illusions of men.”14 Nicole’s vision demanded a radical separation of divine and earthly values but reconciled them through a cunning of psychology: “Even though nothing differs from the charity which sees everything through God as much as the self-regard which sees everything through the self, nothing in turn so resembles the work of charity as the effects of self-regard.”15 The distinction between the realms allowed for an abnegation of the will toward instituted power, without a corruption of the intellect. Irish Catholic readers of

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Nicole could acknowledge William, Anne, or the Georges as legitimate rulers without having to accept the public rationalisation of their power or abandoning an expectation of their eventual demise. As Nannerl Keohane points out, the abnegation of political agency in favour of the will of God also opened up reflection on social life to another kind of pluralism, in this case recognition of the several and various ends of desirous human beings.16 The “errors and illusions” of individuals, their desires and secret purposes, were dangerous if allowed political scope, but they were part of God’s plan in the private sphere. The very diversity and plurality of the civil world could be understood as a positive good in its own right. Nicole used the venerable idea of pilgrimage to explain the value of the plurality of cultures and of commerce between them: “In every situation in which we are connected with others and in which we have some business, where we act, and where others act on us, and where the different outcomes can alter the state of our mind and spirit, those are the habitations where we pass the time of our pilgrimage, because there our soul exerts itself and finds repose. Therefore the whole world is our habitation, because as we inhabit the earth so we are connected to all men, and from them we receive both benefit and injury. The Dutch trade with the Japanese, we trade with the Dutch. We are therefore connected with the peoples at the ends of the earth, since through this trade the Dutch gain the means to help or harm us.”17 The Dutch, who disturbed the world by their resistance to their king, their embrace of unorthodox religious attitudes, and their economic innovations, were turned into yet another example of general providence. These figurist and pietist strategies would be used by Catholic and Jacobite thinkers and writers to address the problems of the Irish Catholic community and to offer it means of acting within the constraints of the Hanoverian state. Figurism and pietism both separated different spheres within which plural, and sometimes even contradictory, values were appropriate. Such differentiation mapped the cultural complexity of the situation of Irish Catholics. These intellectual resources would be used by such Catholics in a manner very similar to the use of Pufendorf ’s notions of sociability by their Protestant fellow countrymen.18 These ideas would be exploited within two intellectual traditions, Jacobite political economy and the Irish reception of French mystical Catholicism, to understand the his94

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torical situation and to point the way to acting within it. The economic and social circumstances allowed a surprising reassertion of Catholic Ireland by mid-century, and Jacobite Irish Catholics would speak a language of commerce and liberty by the 1750s. The Catholic elite did not learn to adapt themselves to a new order of things from Locke and Hutcheson. Instead they accommodated themselves to the order of the world as they found it, in expectation that the true order would be soon re-established. Both the Catholic and Protestant Irish would come to reflect on society as the most interesting ground of civil experience and would discuss it in similar ways as a sphere of harmonious interaction outside the more dangerous world of political identity. This convergence would mask very different intuitions of the ultimate demands of justice.

Underground Catholics in a Protestant Kingdom What was experienced as an intellectual and institutional problem by Protestant Ireland posed an existential crisis for the Catholic community and for individual elite Catholics, who suffered a crippling series of impediments to participation in society, particularly political society.19 Under William, the Irish Parliament passed a series of acts that harassed Catholics by removing the trappings of citizenship, such as bearing arms; deporting the Catholic hierarchy; and excluding Catholics from practising law.20 The pressure mounted in the succeeding reign, and the 1704 acts passed under Anne outlawing Catholic priests from entering the kingdom, dividing Catholic estates, and disallowing land purchase by Catholics amounted to direct attacks on the ability of the community to reproduce itself.21 By 1770, as a result of these legal changes, Catholic land ownership, the key index of political power, had fallen to 5 percent of the fertile land area. The 1697 banishment act outlawed all Catholic clergy claiming ecclesiastical jurisdiction and so threatened complete disorganisation of the church. This danger was avoided, as the act was not consistently applied but rather used to harass bishops in particularly sensitive situations: two of the three bishops who served in the diocese of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross between 1692 and 1746, John Sleyne and Donough McCarthy, became long-term prisoners in Cork city jail.22 Legal attacks on Catholic social power were not restricted to the most obviously political categories of church, land, and law; even manufac95

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ture was affected. An amending act to the 1703 provision disallowed any Catholic from training more than two apprentices simultaneously, restricting the possible growth of Catholic manufacture.23 The laws were highly resented by elite Catholics both for their concrete effects and for their animating ideals. Even after the laws had ceased to have consistent effect after the 1730s, they were still the touchstone with which elite Catholics interpreted their situation.24 Iconic events, such as the judicial murders of James Cotter and Nicholas Sheehy and the killing of Airt Uí Laoghaire, structured the memory of the Munster Catholic community, for example, in its continuing efforts to assert itself against its Protestant neighbours.25 These local struggles could have long-term consequences outside their immediate ground. It has been argued that Edmund Burke’s views on Protestant Ascendancy were highly coloured by his father’s experience as Cotter’s lawyer.26 As late as the 1790s the son of Charles O’Conor of Belangare, who had been one of the most articulate proponents of the reentry of the Catholic elite into the official life of the country, described the Catholic experience as an ongoing humiliation: “Their conquerors treated them as beings of a species not quite as low as the brute, but inferior to the human. They said that they were a mean, ignorant, superstitious horde of savages, that Ireland was another Boeotia, and that the intellects of the natives were stupefied by the potato.”27 Even repeal of the laws would not satisfy the need to be protected from that set of attitudes. Given the historical antipathies at play here, it is unlikely that Catholics embraced the ideals of the very community they identified as their oppressor. Catholic elites found many of the intellectual and social resources necessary to manage their difficult political situation and the emerging world of commerce in the Catholic community itself. Recent research has emphasised how successful the Catholic community was at compensating for its lack of access to land by entering trade and commerce. As Louis Cullen has argued, the dispossession of landed Catholic families drove them into novel activities and forced them to participate in trade, the church, medicine, and market-orientated farming.28 The most obvious aspect of this transformation lay in the conditions of landholding. The “underground gentry” who operated as middlemen, brokering leases on large estates, had to be conscious of market conditions if they were to survive and maintain their social position.29 Their rational exploitation of the opportunities for profit did 96

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create tensions with their traditional identity as generous patrons and lords. Their sub-tenants, the farmers, were even more defiantly commercial, inscribing a rational, accumulative individualism into strategies of family promotion across generations.30 The commercialisation of Catholic life had a clear trajectory from the accumulation of a surplus in the countryside to establishing family members in the towns. While it took some time for a significant Catholic trading community to arise (outside of Galway, where Catholic capital still had a foothold even in the 1690s), Catholic social life in the towns was commercialised very early in the century.31 It is unsurprising, therefore, that the issue that provoked the creation of the Catholic Committee in 1756 was quarterage payments, the levy by the guilds on nonmembers who followed the trades in Irish towns.32 Catholic participation in trade in Ireland was so extensive that Hercules Rowley thought they might dominate a bank if it was established: “You say the Bank cannot be at the same time in the hands of traders and of papists; this I cannot allow (altho’ I no where suppose it) for a great many of our traders are papists, and ’tis probable there may be more.”33 Moral problems associated with modern commercial life were confronted from within Catholic theology. A manuscript from the 1680s neatly distinguished between usury and productive investment, identifying a series of activities that were profitable and moral: “First by Traffick; by buying and selling, if you are a merchant yourself and understand how to turn your penny: or else by joining your money in society, with the labour and industrie of him that does. In this case of society, your share in the fund and in the hazzard, must be proportionable to the share you expect in the profit, must equal the pains and industrie of the partner that manages the traffick. Secondly by purchasing land, or rent charges.”34 Catholics were also involved in the institutions that regulated the rapidly expanding cities. Catholic women created a series of philanthropic foundations aimed at the medical and educational needs of poor women and children.35 Honora Nagle founded a charity school in Cork in 1754 and a teaching order of nuns in the same city in 1775. Catholics also participated in philanthropic efforts that had reach beyond that community; in August 1718 a committee of six Catholic and Protestant surgeons, all trained in French medical schools, created the first voluntary hospital in Ireland, at Cook Street in Dublin.36 This evolved into the Charitable Infirmary, which was to be the most important provider of medical services 97

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to the city through the eighteenth century. In Cork, similarly, the Charitable and Musical Society dedicated the surplus from its productions to the support of an infirmary; and the first regular newspaper in the city, the biweekly Corke Journal, came from the press of the Catholic printer Eugene Swiney.37 The nature of Catholic social and economic life drove the community to engage with the new commercial world of the Atlantic. But this engagement and participation in civic life posed as many problems as they solved. Did commercial life demand complete imitation of “those mastertraders the Hollanders,” or could some rationalisation of participation in it be found that allowed retaining a separate identity? Catholics successfully participated in the new order, but could the Catholic community generate a positive account of their own transformation? Catholicism is too often associated with the “world we have lost” for its contribution to the “world we have gained” to be appreciated. There is a dearth of work on the cultural and intellectual life of Catholics in eighteenth-century Ireland that would allow us to overturn this view completely, but we can already see that Catholic political consciousness cannot be restricted to a defeated, though defiant, Jacobitism and some notions borrowed from the Protestant tradition. C. D. A. Leighton has pointed out many of the Catholic contributions to the modernisation of Irish political discourse, especially the promotion of the secularisation of debate.38 He has also identified Gallicanism as the tradition within Catholicism that allowed Catholics to argue for a place within the structure of the Irish state.39 Gallicanism refers to a broad variety of movements within Catholicism, in fact to any phenomenon that questioned ultramontane, or papal, orthodoxy in the name of the local or national body of the faithful. Leighton’s understanding that the Catholic community was intellectually active in negotiating its relationship to the political environment is cogent, and his nomination of Gallicanism as the position that was most useful to local Catholics is central to understanding the experience. However, even Leighton under-estimates the vitality of the tradition, its newfound unity in the political circumstances of the early eighteenth century, and the density of the cultural resources it could bring to bear on those circumstances. The most surprising feature of Catholic polemical writing in the period is its confidence. The most prominent early eighteenth-century Catholic controversialist was Cornelius Nary, parish priest of Saint Michan’s in 98

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Dublin.40 From his appointment in 1698 to his death in 1738 Nary carried on an escalating series of public religious disputes, beginning in debates with his neighbouring Church of Ireland minister John Clayton and eventually attracting the father and son, both named Edward Synge, the elder one Archbishop of Tuam and the younger latterly Bishop of Elphin, as his adversaries. Nary’s confidence was such that he was not content just to defend his co-religionists, notably in his The Case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, but even attacked his own allies in the Church of Ireland.41 His engagement with the younger Synge grew out of Nary’s criticism of an important sermon Synge had given to the Irish House of Commons in 1725 condemning the penal laws. Nary saw traces of Deism in Synge’s address, which he criticised, but Nary’s controversy with Synge is particularly interesting because Synge was advocating a measure of toleration for Catholics on the Lockean principle of freedom of conscience: “By a toleration, I mean a liberty to worship God according to their consciences, without any encouragement from the Civil Government on the one hand, or fear of infliction of punishment on the other.”42 Synge was taken to task from his own side of the sectarian divide for suggesting that toleration be extended to “Popery, upon the very anniversary of the Irish Rebellion; the very remembrance of which, if there were no other reasons, is sufficient to posses all the Protestant inhabitants of this kingdom, with insuperable prejudices against that religion.”43 Nary, however, did not rally to the principle of toleration because he would not embrace the moral individualism that underpinned it. Synge argued that every individual had a duty to reconstruct their faith rationally: “If you refuse or neglect to enquire into the ground and reason of the religion which you have embraced, and the several parts and branches of it, do not think that it will excuse you before God at the last day, that your parents or friends brought you up in this religion.”44 Nary, while endorsing the plea for toleration, would not accept its theoretical justification. Against Synge’s methodological individualism Nary argued that the tradition was a reason in itself for belief, that the Church as witness preceded the scriptures.45 He laid out the most robust statement of the sufficiency of tradition as a reason for adherence: “The ignorant R. Catholick are, indeed, capable of giving this reason of ‘the Hope that is in them,’ viz., that their pastors and forefathers from father to son from the time that Christianity was planted amongst them, by the preaching and 99

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miracles of the first missioners that came sent from Rome hither, taught them the same faith, which they now profess.”46 Nary’s rhetoric displayed none of the hesitancy that one might expect of a subdued tradition. Nary’s confidence had two roots. The notion of historical Irish Catholicism he invoked, as an unbroken tradition from an original Papal mission, was a recent invention but a powerful idea that organised the Catholic community in adversity. Geoffrey Keating’s Foras feasa ar Éireann, completed by 1634, was the key text that reconceptualised the narrative of Irish history in this manner.47 Keating’s account of that history was highly tendentious and original and represented a fusion of his Anglo-Norman heritage with the Gaelic Irish interests he encountered during his education on the continent and in his pastoral work in Munster. His reading of the sources at best glosses over the distinctive monastic organisation of the medieval Irish church to assert a continuous attachment to Rome.48 He is also very belligerent, advertising in his preface that he will distance himself from other humanists who have written on Ireland for there is no historian of all those who have written on Ireland from that epoch that has not continuously sought to cast reproach and blame both on the old foreign settlers and on the native Irish. Whereof the testimony given by Cambrensis, Spenser, Stanihurst, Hanmer, Camden, Barckly, Moryson, Davies, Campion, and every other new foreigner who has written on Ireland from that time, may bear witness; inasmuch as it is almost according to the fashion of the beetle they act, when writing concerning the Irish. For it is the fashion of the beetle, when it lifts its head in the summertime, to go about fluttering, and not to stoop towards any delicate flower that may be in the field, or any blossom in the garden, though they be all roses or lilies, but it keeps bustling about until it meets with dung of horse or cow, and proceeds to roll itself therein.49

The particular target of Keating’s ire was Richard Stanihurst, the sixteenth-century Dublin jurist and political theorist, and he refers to him more than any other author. Stanihurst’s De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis argued that the Old English, the Anglo-Norman medieval colonists of Ireland, had failed in their historic mission to civilise Ireland by failing to eliminate Gaelic culture.50 Stanihurst’s analysis and his humanist prescriptions for the reform of Ireland were continuous with, though not identical to, Spenser’s more thoroughgoing attacks on the population of Ireland through the 100

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disciplinary role Stanihurst granted to the Crown, and in particular its power of the sword.51 Stanihurst’s position, and the Leinster Old English stance generally, seen from Keating’s Munster Catholic point of view, gave too much ground to critiques of Gaelic culture and opened the door to attacks on the entire Catholic community in the name of civility.52 The tenor of Stanihurst’s criticisms promoted the most violent and brutal attacks on the inhabitants of Ireland: “I believe that his hatred of the Irish was the first food that he sucked, when first he went into England to study, and was with child therewith, until he vomited that load (when he came to Ireland) in his writing, and it is an apparent sign that he hated the Irish, when he finds fault with the Cullins of Fingall for not banishing the Irish language out of Fingall, when they did banish those that inhabited the place before them, and saith as good as the Irish language is whoever talkes thereof will talk of the incivility of the people whose language it is, what can be understood by this, but that Stanihurst bore such vehement hatred unto the Irish, that he was sorry that the English conquest was Christianlike to the Irish and not paganlike.”53 Keating’s strategy was to label Stanihurst, and by extension his Irish humanist colleagues, as Machiavellian, unrestrained by the moral imperative to respect justice and nostalgic for an antique, pre-Christian world of absolute warfare. Keating, however, did not simply replay the conflict between the Old English and Old Irish with this new inflection, but opened the way to a synthesis by assimilating Gaelic Catholicism into CounterReformation Catholicism. He insisted that his work was not an alternative claim by the Old English to cultural leadership, but a true history. “It is not for love, or hatred, nor at the request of any, nor for lucre, or gain, I intend to write the history of Ireland, but that I conceive so noble a country as Ireland, and soe worthy a people as inhabited it, ought not to be left dead without speaking of them, . . . and meself being of the Old English extraction, though every new historian commends the country, they discommend the people, which spured me to write the history of the land and people of Ireland pittying what injustice was done to them, I know not why they should not be compared with any people in Europe in three things, viz. in valour, learning and constancy in the catholick religion.”54 Read in conjunction with his earlier penitential work, Trí bior-gaoithe an bháis (Three Shafts of Death), Keating’s history of Ireland could be understood not as an assertion of its rectitude by the Catholic community and its Gaelic tradition, but as 101

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an analysis of its sins and a call to repentance.55 Keating turned the local scholarly tradition away from justification toward an understanding of its difficulties; he prepared Irish Catholics for moral victory through political defeat. Keating’s strategy found its moment in the aftermath of the Confederation’s failure to negotiate a secure place for Catholics in the polity during the English Civil War and the contrasting success of the new Protestant interest, represented in the Convention of 1660, in establishing itself as the dominant political force in Ireland. 56 In this context the distinctive Old English historic mission of extending civility to Ireland ceased to have a political focus since Catholicism and incivility were now, in light of the massacres of 1641, understood to be synonymous. The civilising mission transformed itself from a negotiating stance directed at the Crown into an attachment to the Tridentine model of church discipline, an ideal for the Catholic community rather than for the kingdom.57 This realignment was encouraged by a parallel development in Old Irish, largely Franciscan, religious thinking, which moved away from a narrow focus on Gaelic reassertion and toward participation in the wider world of Catholic reform.58 The paradoxical result of political defeat was the creation of a new, united, Tridentine religious identity for elite Catholics, one that transcended previous cultural differences. Nary was a beneficiary of a complex path to a unified Catholic identity in Ireland.59 Nary was as sure of his political theology as he was of his ecclesiology. His quietist position rehearsed the evolution of one thread of Catholic thinking over the previous fifty years. The period from the Restoration of 1660 to the Glorious Revolution in 1688 was particularly important for changes in attitudes held by the Catholic subjects of the Stuarts. In both England and Ireland the prospect of significant Catholic political reassertion was generally abandoned, though a pro-French faction still held out hope of a total restoration.60 This change in stance was reflected in the manner of church organisation. England was declared a mission territory, and bishops ceased to be appointed to English sees. Vicars apostolic began to be appointed in their stead, beginning with John Leyburn in 1685.61 In Ireland the episcopal and diocesan organisation of the church was never abandoned, but it became impossible to sustain the organisation of the secular clergy on the island, and when the first new appointments to sees began in 102

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1669, the men were recruited from the continental colleges.62 In both countries the new clerical authorities were therefore men whose thinking had been framed by the relationship of the church to the monarchies of France and Spain rather than England and Ireland. The writings and person of François de Sales were particularly important to this cohort, including men as widely separated as Luke Wadding, the bishop of Wexford who had eighteen copies of de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life of 1608 in his library, and Richard Challoner, the mid-eighteenth-century vicar apostolic to London and prolific writer who was inspired by de Sales.63 Challoner’s 1740 Garden of the Soul, which was to be the standard handbook of Catholic spirituality for a hundred years, was essentially a re-reading of de Sales. Challoner was widely read in Ireland; the 1765 Dublin edition of his The Morality of the Bible had 780 subscribers, more than twice the number of any other work of Catholic piety published in Ireland for the entire eighteenth century.64 De Sales’s strain of French mystical Catholicism formed the core of the devotion of the Irish College in Paris, where Nary had studied. In 1652 the students of the college were encouraged by Vincent de Paul to declare their distance from the doctrines of the “Bishop of Ypres,” Cornelius Jansen, for whom Jansenism is named, and their adherence to those of de Sales.65 As Patrick Corish has noted, de Sales’s demonstration of the demands of the religious life were the vital seeds of a renewed sense of identity for the Catholic community.66 Three features of de Sales’s life made him particularly attractive to Irish and English Catholics. His exemplary spirituality and pacifism, maintained in his direct contact with Calvinists as the Bishop of Geneva, made him an apposite model for clerical behaviour. Converts from Protestantism cited him as an inspiration in precisely these terms.67 His this-worldly asceticism was even more important to clerics and believers adapting to a commercial world. De Sales explicitly argued for a form of Christian devotion committed to the active life: “As a firefly flies in the flames without burning its wings: so a vigorous and constant soul may live in the World without participating of any worldly humour; may find out springs of sweet piety amidst the brackish waters of secular affairs; and fly amongst the flames of earthly concupiscenses, without burning the wings of the sacred desires of the devout life.”68 He distanced himself from a monastic ideal of contemplation in favour of active charity, which he understood as the imitation of the love 103

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of God.69 Work and active attention to the things of the world were, according to de Sales, a form of prayer: “Take much more care to make your temporal goods profitable and fruitful, than worldly men do . . . God has given them to us to manage, and his will is that we render them profitable and fruitful, and therefore we do him good service to take care of them.”70 De Sales sustained his thinking on the probable effects of disciplined active engagement in the commerce and traffic of the world by recommending wealth while distinguishing it from avarice: “To be rich in effect and poor in affectation is the greatest happiness of a Christian.”71 These ideals spoke directly to a clerical community that had lost control of its benefices and a body of the faithful that was being driven into trade and commerce.72 The reception of this body of mystical Gallicanism allowed the Catholic subjects of the Stuarts to develop an ethic of public engagement and service that did not depend on direct political reassertion. The Salesian ideal of a church organised around charity, understood as active love in the common life, provided the religious backbone for the antiabsolutist strain of politics for Irish and English Catholics. This religious sentiment animated the resistance among insular Catholics to the politics of Louis XIV. The court of Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, was the institutional setting within which much of this politics was elaborated, at Saint James from 1662 until 1671 and at Somerset House from then to 1692, when Catherine finally left England.73 Her Portuguese background predisposed her to anti-imperial politics. Portugal had re-emerged from Spanish domination, and Spanish claims to imperial monarchy, only in 1640. The Portuguese claim to independence was inherently anti-caesaroimperial, and Catherine arrived in England well armed with gallican advisors, in the sense of men committed to the authority of local, national churches and a separation of political from religious claims. Her chapel almoners included Richard Russell and an Irish priest, Patrick Maginn. Both of them had been through the colleges at Douai, Paris, and, crucially, Lisbon.74 The Lisbon College of St. Patrick moved in the intellectual orbit of the universities of Salamanca and Coimbra, where the Catholic rejection of the claims to universal monarchy, associated with Botero and Campanella, had been developed by neo-Thomist theologians and civil lawyers.75 Maginn would continue to be central to the institutions of Irish Catholic intellectual life when he oversaw the acquisition of the property of 104

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the Lombard College for the Irish college in Paris.76 The gallican tendency of Catherine’s clerical following at the chapel at St. James was reinforced by the appointment of Philip Howard as almoner in 1665; his long-term goal as leader of English Catholicism was an accommodation between the Protestant state and its Catholic subjects.77 Catherine’s circle was aware that anti-absolutist politics committed them to more than just opposition to Louis XIV; it also drove them toward resistance against a violent imposition of Catholic orthodoxy in the Stuart realms. In 1685, as the thrust of James II’s religious policies became clear, Howard expressed his fear that “violent courses” worked more to the benefit of French foreign policy than the Catholic interest.78 Catherine’s household was the crucible in which a religious sensibility generated an innovative politics. Court and clerical politics coincided in the anti-French efforts of Catherine’s entourage. King Charles II’s successive mistresses, the Countess of Castlemaine and the Duchess of Portsmouth, were enthusiasts for ultramontane ideas, the French alliance, and French court culture and its claims to absolute authority on the part of the monarch.79 Catherine promoted a competing anti-French politics and a Catholic, Italian cultural programme, particularly through her chapel music.80 The chapel service was simultaneously a marker of Catherine’s independence from Charles’s French policy and an advertisement of the splendours of Catholic culture. Pepys, though initially resistant to the Italian music, was won over by the Easter service in 1668: it “did appear most admirable to me, beyond anything of ours—I was never so well satisfied in my life with it.”81 Just how seductive baroque Catholic culture could be is well illustrated in Evelyn’s rather breathless response to the intensified spectacle after the reintroduction of the Jesuits to the chapel royal in 1685: “I went to hear the music of the Italians in the new chapel, now first opened publicly at Whitehall for the Popish Service . . . Here we saw the Bishop in his mitre and rich copes, with six or seven Jesuits and others in rich copes, sumptuously habited, often taking off and putting on the Bishop’s mitre, who sat in a chair with arms pontifically, was adored and censed by three Jesuits in their copes; then he went to the altar and made divers cringes, then censing the images and glorious tabernacle placed on the altar, and now and then changing place: the crosier, which was of silver, was put into his hand with a world of mysterious ceremony, the music playing, with singing. I could not have believed I should ever have 105

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seen such things in the King of England’s palace.82 Catherine’s occupation of Somerset House and promotion of Salesian devout humanism was also continuous with cultural politics of Henrietta Maria, the widow of Charles I, which had mobilised the same mixture of Salesian spirituality and baroque ritual.83 The court of Catherine of Braganza crystallised a form of orthodox Catholicism that expressed its anticipation of the eventual triumph of its religious principles through a cultural programme, reconciled itself to the Protestant monarchy as an acceptable alternative to universal monarchy, and embraced the new economic order. Somerset House was as important to Irish Catholics as it was to English Catholics. The Irish Catholic elite maintained a strong presence in London. Thomas Nugent, second son of the Catholic Earl of Westmeath, kept a careful diary of public events while he was a student at the Middle Temple from 1669 to 1674 in which he noted the activities of his fellow countrymen, such as the four Irish naval captains who took part in the attempted capture of the Dutch Smyrna fleet in 1671, “which gained much credit to themselves and their nation for fighting so gallantly in this engagement.”84 Writing from Somerset House, members of the extensive, and important, Plunkett family of North Leinster framed the reaction of elite Catholics to the difficulties of the late seventeenth century. The Plunketts were at the heart of the political leadership of Irish Catholicism: Nicholas Plunkett (1602– 1680), brother of Lucas Plunkett, First Earl of Fingall, was one of the moving forces behind the Catholic Confederacy and survived to operate as principal negotiator on behalf of dispossessed Catholics with Charles II from 1660 to 1662.85 His sister-in-law, the dowager Lady Fingall, was lady-inwaiting to Catherine of Braganza and accompanied her to Portugal, with her two daughters, in 1692.86 Her husband Luke, Third Earl of Fingall, who only reacquired his lands at Killeen in North Dublin in 1672, had deposited his substantial library at Somerset House. This collection provided the material for Nicholas Plunkett of Dunsoghly, his uncle, to write “An account of the war and rebellion in Ireland since 1641” while in residence there. It was also the basis for the most incisive account of the Williamite wars, “A light to the blind whereby they may see the dethronement of James the Second King of England,” which Patrick Kelly suggests was written by another Nicholas Plunkett, the Jacobite colonel and brother of Luke.87 Colonel Plunkett also wrote “The Improvement of Ireland,” a tract in po106

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litical economy defining the place of the Catholic nobility in the development of the realm.88 This Plunkett circle generated a complete account and analysis of the situation of the Catholic elite and continued to provide much of its leadership: Oliver Plunkett, the Archbishop of Armagh caught up in the hysteria of the Popish Plot and executed at Tyburn in 1681, was a second cousin of Luke Plunkett, Second Earl. The language of moral providence used by Cornelius Nary—as opposed to a mere political providence that seduces those it favours, only to confound them—was coined by this Somerset/Fingall circle. In “A light to the blind” Colonel Nicholas Plunkett uses this language to account for the otherwise inexplicable refusal of Charles II to overturn the Cromwellian land settlement in Ireland and return property to the Irish Catholics who had supported him in exile: “On the other side, if there be a God to punish vice, and a hell for the place of torture, and an immortality of the soul, then what shall become of these atheistical oppressors of a nation? Woe, woe, woe unto them. But this woe is as lasting as eternity. A hundred thousand millions of years will pass while they are in torments, and yet the torments of the damned shall not end; no, nor after millions of millions more of years. It must therefore be a miserable bargain, to feast and sport here for a few days of life, and afterwards to pay for it in everlasting pangs.”89 Two orders of judgement had to be used simultaneously to understand anything that happened in the world. Nary’s sense of a secure place in divine history rested on a rich, elaborated language of the revelation of purpose in the workings of secular history. His confident voice resonated with a hundred years of debate and thought on the nature and purpose of the Catholic Church as a mission. He expressed one way in which the Catholic community reconciled itself to its difficult situation in both Ireland and England: by imagining itself as a moral community, regulating itself according to the Tridentine disciplines, and committing to the expression of charity, active Christian love, as its highest civic good. Events conspired to render even this sophisticated and complex attitude inadequate to the challenges that faced the Catholic community. Political quietism and the postponement of political hope were made impossible by the historical accident of a Catholic king asserting his political and religious authority. James II had two claims to the loyalty of his Irish Catholic subjects: he was their legitimate monarch and their co-religionist. His mobili107

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sation of support in Ireland in 1689 after his position had collapsed in England could not be refused, even though the Catholic leadership under the Earl of Tyrconnell, Richard Talbot, opened negotiations with William in November 1688.90 The long-run effect of their failed efforts and the subsequent war in Ireland was “the shipwreck,” the final undermining of the political position of the Catholics in the wake of James’s defeat. The cultural consequence of the disaster was that the Catholic community had to find a way to negotiate a difficult political identity, Jacobitism, as well as to sustain its religious commitment. This history of Jacobite thought should not overwhelm the separate, though shared, development of a theory of charity. By 1730 the Irish Catholic community had developed an autonomous language of the virtues of the social sphere. The classical ideal of friendship had been converted from an idealisation of the emotional bonds of male citizens into a vision of the domain where the virtues closest to the disinterested love of God could be exercised and experienced. The difference between this vision of the social sphere and the Irish Protestant concept is clear. For Catholics the social sphere incarnated a justice that was absent from politics; for Protestants the social sphere of the pursuit of happiness motivated a community that could not participate in the definition of justice in politics. Both Catholics and Protestants converged on civil society as the realm of public expression, but they did not share the same assumptions about its use or value.

Jacobite Moral Theory in a Commercial World The political and existential difficulties elite Irish Catholics faced in finding a place for themselves in the British world after the Glorious Revolution were intensified by their commitment to Jacobitism.91 Not all Catholics were Jacobites, and not all Jacobites Catholic. William III had substantial Catholic backing, most importantly from the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, and Leopold had Irish connections, principally Francis Taaffe, Lord Carlingford, who was a confidant and military commander in the service of Charles V, Duke of Lorraine. In 1697 William intervened through his agent William Blathwayt to protect Taaffe’s estates in Ireland from confiscation. Blathwayt wrote to the Duke of Shrewsbury, “The king is so favorably inclined to my Lord Carlingford in relation to all his concerns in 108

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Ireland that I have acquainted the Lords Justices with his pleasure as I do now your grace that there is to be an exception to any Bill that is to pass in Ireland for confirming the outlawries in the kingdom in favor of my Lord Carlingford.”92 The distinction between Catholic and Jacobite was difficult to sustain, though, while James II and his son claimed control over all episcopal appointments in Ireland. From 1719 onward the Jacobite court in exile was in Rome, and it efficiently insisted on commitment to its restoration as a condition of appointment to the episcopacy in Ireland.93 Papal support for the Jacobite claim to the throne of Britain, lasting until the death of the Young Pretender, was particularly unhelpful to Catholics who sought to integrate themselves into the new British polity, since it raised the spectre of systematic Catholic “disloyalty.”94 The nature of Jacobitism also made it an awkward ground from which to address new realities. It would seem to have precluded acquisition of novel political ideas because it represented those whose interests were not served by the Glorious Revolution.95 This perception is reflected, for instance, in Linda Colley’s chapter headings for the first two sections of her analysis of the new order. “Protestants” and “Profits” describe the inheritors of the Glorious Revolution, and in contrast she argues that Jacobite Britain was the antithesis of Protestant, profit-seeking Britain: “The more one studies the map of resistance to Charles Edward Stuart, the more it is clear that commercial and manufacturing centres played a substantial part in his defeat.”96 Jacobitism, on this reading, was an impediment to revival. This sense of Jacobitism as a defensive and ultimately doomed posture is picked up in some other scholarship. Murray Pittock argues that in Britain it encapsulated a political and ideological challenge to the emerging Whig polity.97 Jacobite culture, he argues, synthesised the images of sacred monarch and the commitment to virtue in civic humanism to generate the icon of the patriot king, who would restore virtue and the social order.98 The image of the young pretender as a highwayman, celebrated in Jacobite song, crystallised the notion of the Jacobite as a rebel against the new social order. The ’45 was both denounced and idealised as a grand episode of social banditry.99 In Scotland particularly, clans facing financial ruin, persons incensed by the Act of Union of 1707, and dissidents from the post-revolutionary religious settlement, particularly Scottish Episcopalians, adhered to Charles Edward Stuart as a dynamic outsider who offered a possibility of 109

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exit from impossible situations.100 In Ireland also there was a strong current of Jacobitism that functioned as a style of protest against the transformation of the society and the collapse of notions of reciprocal propriety. There was a particularly vigorous poetic literature in Irish that condemned the Protestant elite as usurpers and heretics and looked to the return of the Stuarts for the restoration of a native, Gaelic elite and primordial social relations.101 In 1761, when the Whiteboy peasant secret societies emerged in Tipperary they sported white cockades, sang Jacobite tunes, and intermittently expressed their adherence to the Stuarts.102 The initial goals of the Whiteboys, resistance to enclosure and the increase in tithe payments, would seem to put them in the mainstream of peasant resistance movements to commercialisation in the eighteenth century.103 Similarly, the Defenders, a peasant movement in the north of the country, resisted enclosure and tithe, used the iconography of Jacobitism, and expressed themselves in bluntly sectarian language.104 However, it would be a mistake to identify the Williamite or Whig order entirely with the evolution of commercial society and Jacobitism with resistance to it. The Whiteboy movement arose not from immiseration but out of resistance to efforts by tithe holders to reassert their right to the increased profits of tillage. It was a struggle for control of the expanding resources of a commercial society, which developed in the agricultural hinterland of Cork, a region heavily integrated into the Atlantic economy; it was not a refusal of that society. As the movement developed it became more politically astute and acquired the characteristics of a political network, making demands on the polity rather than attacks on it.105 The Rightboy movement in Cork in the 1780s was even more disciplined and pursued clear goals. It united tenants with the political opposition to the conservative Earl of Shannon and regulated clerical dues to Catholic priests as well as tithes.106 Defenderism, argues Kevin Whelan, was only successful in areas of the Ulster borderlands where a commercially successful Catholic elite gave it a political backbone.107 Jacobitism was no impediment to particular individuals seeking to profit from the emerging commerce of empire, either. Augustus Boyd’s Donegal Catholic family supported both James II and the Young Pretender; his cousin the fourth Earl of Kilmarnock was executed after the ’45. This did not stand in the way of Boyd investing the money he had made

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in the Caribbean island of St. Christopher in a commission merchandising firm established off Broad Street in the City in 1745.108 Alexander Grant followed a similar trajectory through Jamaica from Inverness, and he had a similar origin in Jacobitism.109 From the other side there was scepticism about the claims to historical singularity on the part of Protestant free-born Englishmen. Steven Pincus has made a compelling argument that political economy provided new categories that replaced Protestant eschatology as the horizon of judgement of the national interest between the 1650s and the 1680s.110 Daniel Defoe, for example, endorsed the notion that England had become a commercial society but was sceptical about its religious inflection. Beginning in the reign of Elizabeth he asserted that “the revolution of trade brought a revolution in the very nature of things; the poor began to work, not for cottages and liveries, but for money, and to live, as we say, at their own hands.”111 He also appreciated that the “revolution of trade” had generated a consumption revolution and fostered something like mass consumption: “Even the wine, the spice, the coffee and the tea, after the gentry have taken the nice and fine species off, are beholding to the mean, middling and trading people to carry off the coarser part, and the bulk of the quantity goes that way too; so that these are the people that are the life of trade.”112 He expressed his scepticism about the identification of commercial society with the Revolution Settlement in his satirical recounting of English history “The True-Born Englishman.”113 Defoe refocused national identity on the practice of English liberties and satirised all claims to distinction through blood or nature. In passing, he undermines the claims of the Glorious Revolution to represent a categorical resumption of legitimate lawful rule by making it analogous to the Norman invasion; the Norman yoke prefigured the Dutch: The great invading Norman left us know What conquerors in after times might do To ev’ry Musquteer he brought to town He gave the lands which never were his own When first the English crown he did obtain He did not send his Dutchmen home again No reassumptions in his reign were known D’avenant might there ha’ let his book alone.114

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Not that Defoe had any Jacobite sympathies himself. Later in the poem Defoe satirises a kind of English ethnic nationalism, which he associates particularly with English Jacobitism, in order to claim a community of new commercial virtues that are shared by the Dutch. This kind of cosmopolitanism, seen also in a figure like Toland, opened the door to the Enlightenment and was one possible route that exploited the emerging gap between the political community and the history of civilisation. Other possible routes had less predictable consequences. Jacobitism is best understood not just as a resource for individuals and communities systematically opposed to the emergence of a commercial society and the fiscal-military state, but also as a source of alternative visions for that society and state. The possibility of pluralism, or relativising the values of the polity by reference to another set of norms, was most important to the politically defeated. My claim is not that Jacobitism itself was the most important source of pluralism within the British political tradition; rather, the core of my argument is structural: that defeated Jacobites were driven to create arguments of accommodation and compromise, arguments that laid the ground for plural visions of social inclusion and alternative ideas of community. Jacobitism in the British realms played a similar function to Jansenism in the French: it was a reservoir of alternative ideas and eventually became an alliance of the disaffected.115 In France the crisis of the absolute monarchy after its failure in the Seven Years’ War repoliticised Jansenism; the success of the British polity had the opposite effect on Jacobitism. As the prospect of regime change ebbed, Jacobites were driven to redirect their thinking away from a competing model of the British realms toward the description of a sphere of civil life within which they could sustain their particular values. Jacobites developed a vision of the political economy of the British realms in dialogue with the languages of political economy deployed by their Whig opponents. Jacobite political economy eventually provided political categories through which Irish Catholic Jacobites came to analyse their world and their place in it. Just as there were many reasons for adhering to the claim of the senior branch of the Stuarts, so there were many visions of a Jacobite political economy. Its roots lay in the possibility of reordering the commerce of Europe around an Anglo-French axis. All of James’s supporters understood that if he regained the throne the consequence would be some reorganisa112

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tion of the local and global economies. An inevitable element of that would be French domination of international trade. The context for the Glorious Revolution lay in the collapse of the Franco-Dutch political understanding in 1687 and the withdrawal of the trade privileges of the Treaty of Nijmegen.116 English supporters of William argued that one of their goals was resistance to the potential French commercial predominance that had been connived at by Charles II and James II. John Philips, John Milton’s nephew, argued that the later Stuarts purposely supported naval and maritime expansion by France: “It is well known in general, how much the extraordinary kindness of Charles the Second to Lewes the fourteenth, has contributed to that vast increase of shipping and experience in the art of navigation to which they are now arrived.”117 Philips sustained this perspective, and his poem on the Peace of Ryswick celebrated the double victory of arms and commerce on the part of William over Louis XIV: No longer France must bear the Name of Great, That first from War deriv’d affected Growth, But ne’er by Peace procur’d: He’s only fit To wear that Name, who keeps the Keys of both.118 On the other hand, Jacobites clearly understood that the restoration of James II would imply an inflection of the revolution of commerce and most particularly the destruction of the credit of Britain and the Netherlands in favour of France. As Nathaniel Hooke argued in his paper urging French support for a Jacobite landing in 1707, “It will destroy the credit of the exchequer bills, and of the commerce of the city of London, upon which all the sums employed against his majesty are advanced: and as the principal strength of the enemy consists in the credit of the city of London, when England shall be attacked at home, it will be out of her power to support her allies abroad.”119 Irish Jacobites had to imagine what the consequences would be for Cork, Waterford, or Dublin if London were to lose its commercial predominance. Jacobite political economy promised to restore justice and the natural order violated by the Williamites and their Dutch allies, but just what justice demanded was not obvious. The best indication of what James’s supporters in Ireland thought the consequences would be is revealed in the acts of the Irish Parliament called by James in May 1689. The parliament continued 113

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an independent line of Catholic politics as well as adhered to James’s cause; while acceding to James’s request for military mobilisation, it also used the opportunity to address long-standing goals, particularly on the land settlement and the terms under which Ireland engaged in trade. Calling a parliament with strong Catholic representation to achieve these ends had been a goal of the Lord Deputy, Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, since 1686.120 Tyrconnell had even considered surrendering Ireland to William if that would further the political goals of the Catholic elite.121 The parliament negotiated with James from a very strong position, and while it retained Poynings’ Law, it pushed through repeal of the Act of Settlement (1662) and the Act of Explanation (1665) against James’s wishes. These measures, if implemented, would have returned all land confiscated since 1641. Kelly notes, however, that one quarter of the parliament’s public acts were not concerned with these classic problems of land, constitution, and religion and dealt instead with economic issues, particularly of trade and industry. The parliament passed a series of laws protecting the infant Irish coal mining industry, allowing Irish merchants to participate in the colonial trade, and creating premiums for shipbuilding, among other projects.122 It also set aside funds for five schools of navigation in ports around the coast. Other educational initiatives included plans for a new Royal College of Saint Canice in Kilkenny and the appointment of Dr. Michael Moore, latterly rector of the University of Paris, as provost of Trinity College.123 Various initiatives to transfer trade privileges from England to France, primarily by giving France a monopoly in the import of Irish wool, were blocked by James. The economic policy of the parliament was consistent in looking to relocate Ireland as an independent actor in a French-dominated political economy. The political rationale for the independent development of the Irish economy was elucidated by the author of “A Light to the Blind.” Since Ireland was the only Stuart realm that had remained loyal to its king in the past three rebellions, “the king of England, for his own security, will make hereafter his Ireland a powerful nation, in order to be a check upon the people of England.”124 To that end Irish trade would have to be freed; its parliament would have to be given control of legislation; and coinage and a series of public works, “to make the great rivers of the kingdom navigable, as far as ’tis possible; to render the chief ports more deep,” would have to be un114

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dertaken.125 Jacobite political economy did not judge the utility of particular ideas and projects purely in terms of dynastic interest. “The Improvement of Ireland” berates the parliaments before 1689 for having neglected improvement “which they were oblig’d to doe, both thro’ love to their country; and thro’ their proper interest.”126 Jacobite political economy could reconcile loyalty to the monarch with the traditional claim to political independence of the Irish political nation. It could even admit that its notion of improvement was generated “in imitation of those master-Traders the Hollanders.”127 On this ground an entirely transformed nation could be imagined: ornamented with two trading companies, one for manufactured goods to the Mediterranean and another for meat and wool to continental Europe; its agriculture transformed; its towns booming; and its trade extensive. In that happy condition Ireland might even reverse its relationship to England and “overtop them in wealth by a general and free trade, as being a land more commodious for that purpose; if the same encouragement were given her, as there is to England.”128 The notion of loyalty to the king anchored this vision in a conservative model of the society.129 Improvement in an imagined Jacobite Ireland would reinforce hierarchy: “All honest industry should be encouraged: and may they wear the effects of it; since they have won it. Yett lett them not turn the same to the abuse or undervalue of such persons, to whom there is a respect due for gentility-sake, tho’ they not prove so wealthy, as those new men. Wealth is noe lasting companion to nobility.”130 Wealth and virtue were to be aligned very much in the manner imagined by Fletcher of Saltoun in Scotland, by simultaneously encouraging the emergence of a commercial elite but subordinating it to the authority of the traditional barons.131 Defeat changed this kind of speculation from an interesting exploration of the possibilities for a different polity in the British Isles into a pipe dream. The different aspects of the vision—a French political economy that would allow Britain to unravel and a renewed composite monarchy to develop out of England, Scotland, and Ireland, along with a form of economic development compatible with traditional social structures—had different fates. Reflection on the kind of commerce compatible with the mores and manners of an absolute monarchy and a hierarchical social system would be in the mainstream of French political thought through the eighteenth century.132 France enjoyed a rich Jacobite legacy in political economy. John 115

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Law was not a committed Jacobite, and his main Scottish patrons were the devotedly Whig Dukes of Argyll, but the concept of a Land Bank, which underlay the Mississippi Scheme, was derived from Jacobite ideas of value.133 More direct was the contribution of James Steuart, exiled from Britain after his participation in the 1745 rebellion, whose 1767 Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy defended the principle that political and social institutions should continue to shape modern economic life.134 The project of remaking the British realms as a confederation, however, became unattainable. The treaty of Limerick in 1692 brought hostilities to an end in Ireland, and even if, as Eamonn Ó Ciardha comments, nobody foresaw how stable that settlement would be, the defeat ended the possibility that the Irish Parliament would be the crucible within which an alternative political economy would be synthesised.135 After the disappointments of 1708, the installation of the new dynasty in 1714, and the fiasco of 1715, it was clear that a restoration, and attendant reorganisation, would only occur through some extraordinary event.136 The mid-eighteenth-century Scottish discussion of the British Empire would revisit the debate on the nature of the British polity, particularly in the militia debate, though rarely in a Jacobite framework. It would be the American colonists who would most vitally interrogate the terms of political integration in the British realms. What could be sustained out of the Jacobite vision was the commitment to virtue, to the moral order as a position from which to interpret social and economic reality. Hugh Reily, a Jacobite official, reinterpreted the failure of James’s cause from this perspective in his Ireland’s case briefly stated of 1695, which went on to be much republished, under many titles, as the classic statement of the Irish Jacobite view. Reily’s ideal of kingship, derived from Cicero, was to exemplify justice: “Nothing is more impoltick in a Prince than to commit any publick injustice because nothing can render him more odious to his People.”137 The treatment of the Catholic Irish by Charles II, who did not restore them to their lands, doomed the Stuart dynasty: “An act so little becoming a great or generous Prince, so contrary to common justice and with all so impolitick, as entailing perpetual factions and rebellions upon his successors by the hopes it gives to desperate needy people to make their fortunes the same way, and by the moral damp it strikes up on loyalty.”138 Reily argued that the Catholics were not dispossessed despite their loyalty, but because of it: “For the true reason why the Irish were so un116

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equally dealt with was that they were all Catholicks, never tainted with any republican principles.”139 His work has a consoling edge, since the analysis points to the redeeming potential of what he sees as the adherence to the true moral and religious order. Reily uses the Ciceronian notion of justice to give analytic bite to his interpretation. The English nation’s adherence to Protestantism, for instance, is criticised by Reily, not as the embrace of heresy, but as lazy venality: “In England she since got her Parliaments to pass what laws she pleased to that purpose, and to turn Protestants too for company, as being the easier way to heaven; for ‘till then the silly Papists thought themselves very happy, if they could reach thither at any rate, not only like pilgrims a foot, but with a continual exercise of tedious fastings, large alms deeds, frequent confessions, austere penance, and over and above all this, a full and free restitution to the utmost of their power, whensoever they had injured their neighbours: But upon a new Protestant discovery of the North-East passage to paradise, they found they might go to heaven in coaches.”140 In Reily’s hands Jacobitism was transformed from an adherence to the senior branch of the Stuart line to an attachment to the genuine moral order.141 His line of thought opened the way for Irish and Scottish Jacobites to consider their distinctive place in the emerging order as a saving remnant illuminating the immanent moral law. By discerning a real, moral realm under the surface of the vagaries of politics, Jacobites could use a figurist logic to sustain their identity, and their hopes of eventual justification. The work of developing this stance into a useful position for a community in the aftermath of defeat was carried on by the same network that had developed Irish Tridentine Catholic identity in the middle years of the seventeenth century. The clerical and scholarly networks that had underpinned the Fingall circle were supplemented by elements that circulated around the Jacobite court in exile, as well as the Scottish intellectual group led by the Innes brothers at the Scots College in Paris.142 The distinctive contribution of the Scots would be the consistent application of critical historical method to render “ancient constitutionalism” useless for political purposes and drive scholars to new bases for political thought.143 However, intellectual Jacobitism was not a purely Scottish phenomenon: Leinster families such as the Hookes and the Nugents of Westmeath also contributed to the elaboration of the Jacobite mind. 117

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Nathaniel Hooke, despite his Catholicism, would at first sight seem to have had a perfectly respectable Augustan background and to have been an unlikely candidate to be a Jacobite. He was a school friend of Pope’s and in later years was recommended by Lord Chesterfield to Sarah, dowager duchess of Marlborough, as an amanuensis for her memoirs.144 Hooke’s uncle, also named Nathaniel, revealed another aspect of the family, though. He had been born at Corballis in Meath and had been involved in the Monmouth rebellion. In 1688 he committed himself to James, converted to Catholicism, and latterly was the negotiator for the abortive Jacobite rising in Scotland in 1708. Nathaniel Hooke the younger acted as secretary to the elder in the 1720s in Paris when the older man was acting as a French diplomatic agent. The Hooke family came from the same Leinster Old English milieu organised around the Earl of Fingall, one that continued to produce intellectually ambitious Catholic and Scottish Episcopalian thinkers into the middle of the century. Its late flower was Luke Joseph Hooke (son of the second Nathaniel), who was to attain a chair of theology at the University of Paris. His ambition was to syncretise Newtonian science with Catholic theology, though this kind of aspiration left him vulnerable to more conservative interests. He was one of the examiners who passed the thesis of the Abbé de Prades, which would later be condemned for Spinozism and which was the occasion of the break in the publication of the Encyclopèdie.145 Luke Joseph Hooke would survive to witness the French Revolution from his position as librarian in the Mazarine, later the Institut de France.146 The vast Nugent family was another source of ideas on commercial society that formed part of the Fingall connection. The families intermarried; Robert Nugent of Carlanstown married Emilia Plunkett, daughter of Peter Plunkett, Fourth Earl of Fingall, in 1730. Nugents maintained strong links to Europe: Francis Taaffe, the Earl of Carlingford and companion of the Duke of Lorraine, stood as godfather to the son of Thomas Nugent, who had been made Chief Justice of Ireland under James II.147 The family had strong military affiliations, and one of the Jacobite cavalry regiments in the service of France was commanded by Christopher Nugent during the War of Spanish Succession.148 Members of the Nugent clan were also deeply involved in the new world of the metropolitan Enlightenment. Thomas Nugent was a translator of Montesquieu and Burlamaqui, and he made use of Montesquieu’s new social science in his travel writings.149 Thomas Nu118

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gent’s brother was Christopher Nugent, the physician and friend of Samuel Johnson whose daughter Jane married Edmund Burke in 1757.150 This group of Nugents allowed Jacobite intellectuals to capture the emerging vocabulary of social analysis particularly associated with Montesquieu and to integrate it into their writings. The Nugents were not the only conduit between Irish thinkers and Montesquieu, and the intellectual traffic was not all in one direction. Montesquieu had extensive links with the Irish merchant colony in Bordeaux, and John Black was his conduit for pamphlets on Irish topics.151 When a new wave of polemical writing on behalf of the Catholic Irish emerged in the 1750s, it would speak the language of commerce and liberty, and it would have a strong intellectual spine. The figure most central to the network of Jacobite intellectuals was not Irish but Scots. Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686 –1743), usually known as le chevalier Ramsay, was the major interpreter of the thought of François Fénelon for anglophones. Ramsay was introduced into the world of intellectual Jacobitism through the religious community at Rosehearty founded by Alexander Forbes of Pitsligo (1678 –1762). Ramsay’s biography of Fénelon (written in French and translated into English by Nathaniel Hooke), along with the eight hundred editions and translations of the Aventures de Télémaque, created the image of Fénelon as a particularly enlightened practitioner of a purified Catholic faith. Ramsay in turn was highly integrated into the circles of émigré Irish; Hooke admired Ramsay both as a religious thinker and as a critical historian and cited him as the inspiration for his use of sources in his history of Rome.152 Fénelon offered a useful model of Catholicism to Irish readers. He emphasised the internal, mystical element of religious life, the element least likely to lead to conflict with the authorities. His politics were anti-absolutist, against universal monarchy and in favour of what Lionel Rothkrug has called “Christian agrarianism.”153 His repeated insistence that the good life included economic well-being promoted by the widest participation in productive labour, especially in agriculture, was compatible with the demands of political economy. Fénelon was another example of frustrated political hope, of defeat. As tutor to the Duc de Bourgogne, heir presumptive to Louis XIV, he had hoped to redirect the French monarchy toward a pacific, agrarian future, but the death of his charge and the outbreak of the War of Spanish Succession dashed his hopes.154 Fénelon’s ideas circulated primarily in his Telemachus of 1699. 119

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Published against his wishes, this educational tract portrayed the virtues of the perfect prince and of the superior polity, motivated by disinterested “pure love.”155 As the publishing success of the century, this work had profound general importance, and it travelled everywhere. The hundred-volume library of John Wickham, parish priest of Templeshannon and Edermine in Wexford, inventoried on his death in 1777, was well stocked with polite literature in English but included only two volumes of French belles lettres, Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV and the Télémaque.156 Fénelon was ubiquitous, but the specifically Jacobite interpretation of his ideas was generated by Ramsay. In Ramsay’s 1723 Life of the archbishop (to which was appended his interpretation of Fénelon’s theology, the Philosophical Discourse of the Love of God ), his Essay upon civil government of 1722 (an interpretation of Fénelon’s politics), and his Travels of Cyrus (a continuation and imitation of the Télémaque), he laid out an ethic designed to reconcile Catholic Jacobites to a Protestant Whig order.157 The Jacobite Fénelon would provide the basis for a distinctive ethic for a commercial order. Ramsay came to Jacobitism through Catholicism. Son of an Ayrshire Calvinist, he “ran through the greatest part of the religions there professed in the search of truth.”158 The bridge from his natal Calvinism to Catholicism was laid down by the mysticism of Madame Guyon, who inspired Scottish Episcopalians and was protected by Fénelon.159 That search led him through Edinburgh and Rosehearty to Cambrai and conversion by Fénelon: “It was thus that Monsieur de Cambrai made me see, that a sober thinking deist must of necessity become Christian, and that a Christian cannot reason philosophically without becoming Catholic.”160 The most important element in Fénelon’s thought for Ramsay was the connection he drew between pure love and the motivation for moral action. Pure love was a religious notion; it explained the Christian’s highest love of God as motivated by a pure and total admiration for God’s perfection. Fénelon saw the hope of salvation as a less perfect, more self-interested motivation for religious faith. As Patrick Riley points out, this notion of disinterested love was rooted in the Aristotelian/Ciceronian account of friendship.161 Fénelon, following St. Paul (1 Corinthians 13:13), differentiated between three levels of love, each with a different and more perfect object. The highest good and the most perfect expression of charity was the selfless love of God. The love of fellow citizens was virtue, the political value; and 120

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the love of neighbours, “the discovery of oneself in the other and the delight in the discovery,” was friendship. Natural law prescribed that the community reflect and respect this hierarchy of values; sociability was an inherent characteristic of humans capable of, and enjoined to, love for one another. Ramsay completely adhered to this explicit and implicit critique of derivations of moral behaviour from self-interest. “I don’t understand here, by being sociable, to live together, . . . By society, I understand a mutual commerce or friendship.”162 That friendship was the basis of society: “It is this principle of disinterestedness with regard to ourselves, and of compassion for others, which is the true bond of society.”163 The idea of friendship was exemplified in Fénelon’s performance of his own social duties, according to Ramsay: “Politeness, which is often times but an empty show, by which we seek to make ourselves the idols of other men, and to make them serviceable to our interests, was in him the effect of self-forgetfulness, and of a desire to give himself wholly to others, that he might make them good. It was a sacrifice of his own will to prevent, pacify and moderate their passions, a kind of worship he paid to the images of God. And thus have I seen him transform the most common virtues of humanity into divine virtues.”164 In Ramsay’s account of Fénelon the love of God and the love of the neighbour dissolved the love of the polis, of the country; friendship and charity narrowed the space of virtue to a prudential respect for the laws. Virtue reduced to prudence allowed one to live within the law, even the laws of a usurper, without compromising any principles. “It is necessary that the Taxes which an Usurper imposes should be paid; that the Civil Laws which he makes should be obeyed; and that People should submit in general to all his Ordinances, which are necessary for preserving the Order and Peace of Society; but this Obedience must never go so far, as to approve the Injustice of his Usurpation.”165 Friendship, the active love of the other and the fulfilment of all duties toward him or her, more clearly revealed the natural law which any reasonable person might follow than did the laws, which were conventional solutions to local problems of order. The order of the virtues was transposed: the political virtues were relegated in favour of the “common virtues of humanity,” of commerce and society. Ramsay read Fénelon as promoting the oikos over the polis by using the same figurist logic that characterised other essays in rescuing lost political 121

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projects. Ramsay argued that the common duties revealed the fragments of “the law of nature, . . . which every intelligent being ought freely to follow.”166 The duties of the common life were the figures of the lost ancient law. Ramsay’s idea of natural law was significantly influenced by Jesuit scholars of China, and by Jean-François Fouquet in particular (whom he met on his visit to Rome in 1724).167 His Voyage of Cyrus most obviously engaged with the project of comparing Eastern and Western polities, and he appended his Discourse on the Theology and the Mythology of the Pagans to the 1727 edition. This made clear why he rejected “the modern theory of natural law.” Natural law could not be generated through the willing alienation of natural right by individuals; natural law was inherent in social life and revealed in the historical record. The variation of positive laws between different nations was evidence not of natural right but of the fact that positive law was merely conventional: “In every Country and State, that which one thinks just, another thinks unjust. But is this reasoning, to speak thus? All men are not reasonable; therefore reason is only a Chimera: all Men do not perceive, through want of Attention and Knowledge, the Resemblances and Properties of Lines; therefore, there must be not Geometrical Demonstrations. Man indeed, is not always attentive to this Law of Nature; he does not follow it when he discovers it, does not destroy the Force and Justice of this Law.”168 A figurist reading of the natural law tradition invested the idea of friendship in universal history. Through performance of the common duties of humanity, through attention to social role rather than citizenship, the Catholic Irish Jacobite could respect his values while engaging in the polity. Ramsay’s reading of Fenélon was highly idiosyncratic. Narrowing the space of virtue in this way, and widening the sphere of friendship to have it be approximate to charity, to the pure love of God, instrumentalised the thought of the French mystic to the point of misrepresentation. By releasing the civic sphere of friendship from its mooring in the positive law of the state, and by arguing that the fragments of lost natural law were more apparent in the spontaneous order of the common life than in the precepts of law, Ramsay pointed toward some of the most central themes of freemasonry.169 In the Irish context, this discussion took a different trajectory and created a vocabulary through which Catholic Jacobites could construct a coherent account of their engagement with the polity. A new object, rela122

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tionships of civility and culture, was offered through which the experience of the community could be understood. Natural law was disassociated from the constitution and the state, which in turn could now be understood as a provisional set of institutions. Jacobite political thought created the language for the analysis of Irish Catholics as members of a civil society that sustained suppressed political values.

Civility and the Nation The distinction between a private realm of friendly intercourse that demanded the highest moral values and a political realm that represented merely prudential legal arrangements was central to the thinking and writing of Catholic authors in the 1750s. John Curry and Charles O’Conor, founding members of the Catholic Committee (with Thomas Wyse) in 1756, took the rich discussions of the preceding fifty years and turned them to a new account of Irish history and a new claim for toleration.170 Both Curry and O’Conor advanced an audacious claim: that the Irish constitution had been so defective, from ancient times, that the nation had never been constituted in the political realm: “Its constitution, however excellent in other respects, gave, or was necessitated to give too great a price for the popular arts, and administered inadequate means to the noblest ends.”171 The great opportunity for reform, the invasion of Henry II, had been wasted, because rather than effecting “the great revolution, having from domestic divisions, many concurrent causes to forward,” Henry was “content barely with giving our government and constitution the last stroke, they cruelly gave us no other in its place.”172 Henry’s invasion was a disaster because it impeded the local dynamic toward the creation of monarchical power. The great defect of Irish political organisation was faction: political authority was too widely distributed. The country was so riven by political division that it was impossible for individuals to attain virtue. The ubiquity of faction meant that liberty, wholehearted attachment to the law, could not be distinguished from interest. The abortive monarchical revolution of the twelfth century allowed faction to continue. The Tudor revolution in government again missed its mark in Ireland. Elizabeth’s task “to plant civil order in the place of the misrule which had disgraced the three preceding reigns” should have taken hold, since the “ruinous effects of a Brehon gov123

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ernment were long felt.”173 The ends were undermined by the means, however, and tyranny and coercion drove the Irish into opposition. Worse again, from the Reformation onward, blame for the defects of the constitution was assigned to religious opinion: “The perverseness so long imputed to the Irish, as a people, was no longer charged to their nature, but on their religion. Almost every moral and civil duty, was then confined with the pale of an ecclesiastical party; every species of treachery was placed beyond it. Real crimes were disowned by one faction, imaginary crimes were imputed to another.”174 Popery, the great impediment to political accommodation, was analysed as a local pathology logically emerging from a defective, and unreformed, constitution. Curry and O’Conor argued that the long agony of the creation of a political constitution had ended in 1691. O’Conor wrote in his memoirs that Ireland was only properly conquered by William III; until that date the Crown had merely contended with various families and had not established itself as a categorically distinct holder of sovereign power.175 The paradoxical effect of the Williamite settlement, argued Curry, was to make the characteristic virtues of the Catholic population more apparent and to undermine the claim that they were inherently seditious: “The Catholics of the present age, have one great interest in common with their fellow subjects, and it consists in the peace of the country, under a monarch, who makes the happiness of all his people the principal object of his government . . . Since their submission at Limerick in 1691, they have been faithful to the government, which God has set over them; and we take great pleasure, in finding that the penal laws of the late Queen, which they did not provoke, have taken their best effects, in crowning those virtues, which, in fact, are the production of painful sufferings, not of power and wealth.”176 The penal laws, enacted for the most part under Anne, were effectively an historical mistake, since they proposed a remedy for a disease, popery, which was a feature not of the Williamite constitution but of the flawed constitution that had preceded it: “It would seem therefore that Queen Anne’s penal laws, had their source, not so much in the fear of a remote and possible danger, as in the resentments of former injuries.”177 Curry argued that the benefits of the settlement were obvious to Catholics, that it was Protestants who were not fully alive to the change of historical circumstance: “Papists have got a full sight of civil duty; and they profess and practice it. To them we need not 124

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apply. Our present suit is to Protestants who are still jealous, and who may perhaps be loth to part with mistakes, they have been long in the habit of indulging.”178 Anti-popery was a sort of disease. “It came on gradually, and was submitted to as a transient inconvenience” that afflicted the Protestant population, which would have to cure itself of it if the country were to flourish.179 Remove anti-popery from the political culture, and the impediments to Catholic investment and participation in the economic life of the country would disappear. Curry described the benefits of expanding the protections of the constitution to Catholics in exactly the same terms of civic engagement that were used by Protestant theorists of improvement: “Enough is said to shew, that an union on civil principles and practices, under the present establishment, is sufficient for all the purposes of civil security; and we need not go about to prove, that in our own Northern soil, and under our variable climate, the prosperity admitted by both, cannot be obtained, without the co-operation and mutual confidence of all our people.”180 Catholic polemicists and improvers converged on civil society as the site of integration of Ireland, the ground from which it could act effectively within the British comity of nations. Catholics and Protestants both identified civil society as the space for a regenerated public life and used a very similar vocabulary of rights and interests to describe it. Civil society was created by the Revolution Settlement; in civil society one enjoyed the protection of the law while pursuing one’s interests. However, this convergence masked very different understandings and expectations of civil society. Protestant improvers saw civil society as a compensatory ideal. In the absence of political independence or direct representation of the Anglo-Irish in London, the community could pursue its happiness even if it could not exemplify virtue. O’Conor and Curry, on the other hand, followed Ramsay in imagining civil society as the theatre within which individuals and collectivities pursued their most intimate and important ideals. The civic realm did not compensate for the inability to participate in the constitution as citizens: it was a superior realm to politics, and it incarnated virtue, in particular the religious virtue of charity. O’Conor and Curry developed this idea by applying Montesquieu’s categories of analysis to their interpretation of Irish history. Montesquieu’s distinction between the constitution and the “genius” of the people was central to this strategy.181 O’Conor argued that Ireland was an exception in 125

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European history; the virtue of the people was not developed in its constitution but in its arts. “A lettered nation, so long studied in arts peculiar to themselves, extremely retentive of them and paying but little deference to the learning of the continent introduced, comparatively, but lately among them.”182 Ireland’s was essentially a commercial and cultural civilisation; the normal pattern of European development modelled on the lands of the Roman Empire did not apply.183 Ireland had not received letters or commerce from the Romans, nor had it progressed from a Roman to a “Gothic” constitution. Instead it had independently developed the arts of peace from the Phoenicians and the Egyptians. “Without these advantages a people who should be the rudest as they were the remotest inhabitants of the old world could make no figure in knowledge, agriculture or commerce. They never, even in the infancy and most confused state of their government, sank into ignorance and barbarity, the great genius of this nation revived at several intervals . . . Ireland became the chief seat of the northern commerce.”184 O’Conor imagined Ireland as an experiment in history: the Carthaginian inheritance from Phoenicia and Egypt was transmitted to Ireland without passing through the sieve of Roman militarism. O’Conor even denied that the standard Irish orthography derived from the Latin alphabet. Inspired by Newton’s speculations on mythology, O’Conor argued that the particular genius of the native Irish was exemplified in their music and their poetry. Their scholarship and even the military arts “received the most lasting impressions from the power of words, and harmony of numbers, so a thorough knowledge of the arts of poetry and music was absolutely necessary and encouraged to a degree of extravagance.”185 The spirit of the native Irish was to be a “polite and commercial people,” and once they escaped the impediment of a defective political constitution, that spirit would reassert itself. O’Conor drew a direct parallel between the antique commerce in which Ireland had excelled and the modern commercial world: “Modern Ireland by the improvements in navigation, has numberless means of greatness and wealth, that the old had not. This antient country, by its remote situation, was, in a manner, precluded from any intercourse with the commercial world; whereas the present land, by the discovery of North America, might become a centre of traffic between the old and the new world.”186 Civil society was the launchpad for national reassertion in the Atlantic world. 126

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It is doubtful that the version of rights language and political economy deployed by Catholics in revival of Catholic political life in the 1750s was derived from Whiggery. Rather one can discern independent sources of an alternative language of civil society, rights, and commerce. A natural law tradition organised around the Ciceronian notion of friendship and interpreted through French mystical Catholicism offered an alternative to the Mandevillian genealogy of political economy. The characteristic concerns of Catholic moral theology and of Jacobite political thought were exported into the civil sphere. Catholic Irish merchants could emulate the trading Dutch without acceding to their political and moral values. Irish Catholics and Protestants constructed ideals for a civic space using very different genealogies. The Protestant natural law tradition provided the backbone for the ideas of improvers; without Grotius’s notions of rights or Pufendorf ’s model of sociability they would not have had a vocabulary through which they could express their idea of a civic sphere.187 Catholic thinkers were ultimately in the debt of French interpreters of the interior experience of the presence of God, and they trusted that real justice would be made apparent through the will of God acting in history. These were very different points of departure, but in the context of the emerging British Empire the separate ideals were directed toward contiguous points of arrival. The political structure of empire drove varied provincial elites toward similar languages of accommodation; however, these structural pressures could not generate communities of interpretation. Though Protestant and Catholic elites occupied a similar ground of legally protected participation in a sociability organised around the arts and commerce, they defined the meaning of that activity very differently, respectively as the exercise of rights and the expectation of justice. It remained to be seen if the territory of civil society was broad enough to contain this diversity, or the structures of empire strong enough to contain it.

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CHA PTER FOUR THE EXPERIENCE OF EMPIRE The Black Family, Britons, and the Emergence of Society

The successes of British arms and commerce in the middle of the eighteenth century had paradoxical outcomes for many British people. The strengthened empire threatened the individual’s ability to act as an independent citizen, to exercise liberty, even as it offered a stable legal context for civil life and trade.1 British power depended on trade, and protecting that trade required a strong state; but how was commercial liberty to reconcile “the strong presiding power, that is useful towards the conservation of a vast, disconnected, infinitely diversified empire with that liberty and safety of the provinces which they must enjoy?”2 As Peter Marshall explains, after 1763 the problem was intensified because there was a perception that the “empire of the seas,” based on trade, was now threatened by the temptation to create an “empire of conquest.”3 Contingent factors reinforced the changing nature of the British realms. In the middle 1760s trade to America, Europe, Ireland, and India actually declined from wartime levels.4 This downturn was dangerous since so much of the 600 percent increase in debt from the Seven Years’ War against France was serviced by excise taxes. In response, manufacturers in Britain demanded a more intensive exploitation of the empire, a demand that found a ready ear in London. The way this 128

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objective could be achieved was to impose some of the controls on the Atlantic world that were already common in Britain’s Asian sphere.5 The pressures and stress of victory were driving the British polity toward a more robust and thorough imposition of control from the centre. The obvious threat was that such an intensified imperial project could provoke a provincial and colonial reaction. This paradox of empire was not just encountered by provincial political elites, confronting the limitations to their agency, or by theorists, trying to understand the remit of their ideas. British individuals and families, particularly trading families, also faced the stronger state animated by the strategic imperatives of empire. The British identity of the population had to be dynamic and evolve rapidly as the nature of Britain changed, and the key term of British identity, the notion of liberty, became particularly fluid. After the 1763 victory in the Seven Years’ War, Hume argued that the state was now so strong that it threatened the liberty of the community. In 1778 Hume made this observation by drawing a paradoxical contrast between the arbitrariness of Elizabethan England and the threatened legal despotism of contemporary Britain: “England though it approached nearer, was in reality more remote from a despotic or eastern monarchy, than the present government of that kingdome, where the people, though guarded by multiplied laws, are totally naked, defenceless and disarmed, and besides, are not secured by any middle power, or independent powerful nobility, interposed between them and the monarch.”6 The Quebec Act of 1774, which retained French law and effectively established the Catholic Church in that province, and, more important, asserted direct Crown control over the internal organisation of a North American colony, was a particularly vivid illustration of the changing dynamics within the empire and provoked widespread resentment.7 As Richard Bourke explains, the debate on the Quebec Act was the occasion for Edmund Burke to reconceptualise the entire history of the progress of civilisation not as the expansion of liberty but as the moderation of the principles of conquest and subjection.8 Burke’s insight was that the constitutional condition of the conquered provinces was now being extended to cover all elements of the empire. American colonists were not the only British subjects affected, nor was their eventual rebellion the only response to a more rigorous imperial project. The intensified claim by the state to regulate behaviour by law drove British merchants away from 129

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a political sense of themselves as citizens toward the ground of civil society, to an accommodation with and withdrawal from the realm of politics and to a novel kind of identity and understanding of their role and function in the polity. The form of civil life idealised by Irish and Scottish theorists became generally relevant in the late eighteenth century. This chapter will illustrate the experience of empire through the history and writings of the family of John Black across the eighteenth century. The Blacks were a family of Aberdeen extraction which had both Presbyterian and conforming members.9 In politics they were initially pro-Stuart, and they had moved to Ireland as part of the opposition to Cromwell, but they supported the Williamites in the 1690s. They were traders who entered trade as part of the emerging merchant community in late seventeenth-century Belfast, and the Blacks eventually had branches all over the Atlantic, particularly on the Spanish, Portuguese, and French coasts. The family shares most of the characteristics of Robert Brenner’s “new men” who successfully reorganised the Atlantic colonial trade after the collapse of the Virginia Company and then set the direction of English economic and foreign policy after 1650.10 The Blacks were not a locally prominent family, but they were integrated into the dominant elite of Belfast society through connections of marriage and apprenticeship with the Eccles and Pottingers, and into the Dublin merchant world through the Eccles. The most famous of the sons and daughters of John Black (the central organising figure in the family in the eighteenth century) and Margaret Gordon was Joseph, the chemist and professor at Edinburgh University, but he was only one of thirteen children.11 John described his origins and his early apprenticeship in a note written in 1761: “John Black native of this town of Belfast born in or about the year 1681 or 1682 . . . was in or about the year 1696 or 1697 accompanied by his father taken up to Dublin and bound apprentice to learn trade with his uncle Alderman John Eccles afterwards Sir John Eccles who with his father Mr John Black of Belfast sent John Black jnr. to go and reside at Bordeaux in France where he arrived in the year 1699 . . . Young John Black from low circumstances and small beginnings acquired friends, acquaintances and a little good reputation and credit so as to commence there being a factor for captains of ships supercargoes and merchants in Great Britain and Ireland . . . married Margaret Gordon daughter of Robert Gordon a factor there from Aberdeen in 1716.”12 Joseph, the 130

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chemist, was unusual within the family because he escaped both a life of trade and the authority of his father.13 The rest of the family formed a classic family or kin network.14 Around the British Atlantic, business networks were generally animated not by individuals but by loose aggregations of household families.15 These households comprised complex and varied patterns of blood relations alongside other more elective affinities. They conformed neither to the model of the nuclear nor the extended family, and they were further complicated by the penumbra of friends that clustered around the family group.16 The Blacks were similar to many family networks used by New England merchants to direct and organise economic and social life.17 Bernard Bailyn argues that merchant networks imposed order on what was otherwise an almost chaotic and unpredictable world “that shifted in such unpredictable ways, depending on the vagaries of local gluts and dearths, that success required marketing skills of extreme reliability and skill, capable of clever extemporization and shrewd risk-taking.”18 Jacob Price’s work on the Perrys shows another example of a family network that was crucial to the organisation of yet another network, in this case the one pursuing the tobacco trade operating out of the Chesapeake.19 Where corporate organisations were absent, the family network became a central institution organising trade, credit, reputation, and information. The Black family was an example of one of the most successful and dynamic elements of the emerging British empire of trade. The most important node in the Blacks’ network was Bordeaux. John Black formed part of the community of merchants trading, mostly to Ireland, from the Chartrons quarter of Bordeaux. This trade to Ireland through the southern ports was part of the explosion of trade in wine and brandy, and the return trade in butter and salted meat, fostered by another network, one of émigré Catholic Irish producers and merchants.20 Installed from 1690, John Black rose on the tide of the Gironde as Bordeaux replaced Saint-Malo and La Rochelle as the main Irish trading partner after 1730.21 The Irish trade was the most important British Isles trade in Bordeaux. As late as 1789 half of all trade with the British Isles from Bordeaux was with Ireland, and at various points in the eighteenth century that proportion had been as high as three quarters of all insular trade.22 In 1751 John Black reported that there were eighteen ships in harbour for the new vintage from Dublin alone.23 Ireland was a privileged trade partner be131

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cause Irish tariffs did not target French wine and spirits in the manner of Britain, and Irish agricultural produce was in demand for re-export into the French colonial trade. Ireland provided as much material as the Netherlands and the Hanse for provisioning Bordeaux’s trade with the colonies.24 John Black’s business followed the pattern of the more numerous Catholic trading families in maintaining a correspondent in Cork, John’s uncle David, to gain entry to the victualling, and spreading from there to France, Portugal, and Spain.25 The network the Blacks built was very similar to that of such prominent Cork families as the Galweys, the most important links being to the south, in Cadiz and Lisbon. In the 1750s they were found in London, Boulogne, Bordeaux, Cadiz, Lisbon, Cork, Dublin, Douglas, Belfast, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen, and brother John junior would spend twenty-five years working in various islands across the Caribbean.26 The firm of John Lawton was the only other Protestant Cork family to participate in this thriving trade, and the ability of the Blacks, with their Belfast connections, to break into a world dominated by Munster Catholic families speaks to their dynamism and flexibility. The world they inhabited, viewed in a broader perspective to that of Cork, is best understood in the context of Ian Steele’s “second Atlantic,” linking the Mediterranean through Seville to the Caribbean and the American mainland.27 This southern and Mediterranean network was a vital outlet for British goods, alongside the betterknown Northern Atlantic circuit, at a moment when the tightly regulated markets of northern Europe did not allow expansion and the British trade in Asia was still in deficit.28 The Irish web on which the Blacks moved was paralleled by a similar web of Bristol-based merchants who exploited the inability of Spanish and Portuguese manufacturers to meet the demand of their American markets.29 Stanley and Barbara Stein even argue that the Spanish monopoly was effectively a facade behind which northern European trading houses, using factors in Cadiz and Seville, created a manufacturing base in their home countries.30 John Black’s success as just one person involved in this dynamic world eventually allowed him to build a house at Blamont outside Bordeaux, a name he kept for the second house he built in Armagh in the 1750s.31 Louis Cullen remarks that even among entrepreneurial merchant families the Blacks were particularly dynamic and dispersed.32 They managed this dispersion, and sustained the emotional bonds necessary for a success132

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ful family network, by writing. They maintained an intensive and self-conscious correspondence that allowed them to coordinate their responses to the changing political and economic world of the Atlantic and also to manage their relationships to one another. Letter writing, as David Fitzpatrick explains in a different context, was the central method through which relationships of mutual obligation were sustained when the sanctions of the household and the neighbourhood were no longer effective because of distance.33 Martha Taylor, writing to friends in London in the 1730s, remarked on that same capacity for correspondence to maintain bonds of intimacy: “I think this kind of intercourse one of the best arts in nature, for it contributes to society in spite of all those accidents that separate friends. While I am writing my imagination forms a pleasure so like that of a vocal conversation, that I oft forget that it is not such.”34 Esther Black, writing from Dublin to her brother Alexander in Cadiz, remarked on the peculiarity and particularity of a family that rarely met in the same place: “I have long wished for an opportunity of beginning a correspondence with you, as I see very little likelyhood of our meeting to converse face to face, and as I long much to be better acquainted with you I take this method to beg that now and then when you are tired with casting up large sums and settling accounts you would sit down and scribble over a piece of paper which would be a most agreeable present to me. I make people stare sometimes when I tell them I have brothers and a sister that I really don’t know, otherwise than as we converse by letter which is really true too true.”35 The hint at illegitimacy that drew stares from people illustrates how the Blacks had to work to sustain a family and household in a situation that stretched the boundaries of the general experience. Members of the family admonished one another if they neglected their correspondence, as John senior wrote to his son Alexander: “If you knew how exceedingly desirable it is to me to hear often of yours as well as of all the too dispersed branches of my family’s health and welfare I flatter myself you would not so long have kept silent.”36 Healed rifts in the network were celebrated with sentimental rhetoric, such as John’s epistolary embrace of his brother Robert: “I have with a singular pleasure and a thankfulness to God seen the return of that brotherly intimacy and affection with ought always to subsist and be maintained between so near relations.”37 Joseph, who was a regular writer within his scientific correspondence networks, was teased for being “our dumb Doctor Joseph” 133

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or “our silent Doctor Jo.”38 While the central news circuit flowed through John senior in Bordeaux and was conducted in standard English, other elements of the family maintained local correspondence, and often in nonstandard dialects, though they stepped into the wider stream to assert their affective rights. Isabella wrote to invite Alexander to visit her in Aberdeen when he was on his travels: “I hope I shall next to that have a long letter from bothe of you which wil mek me verez hapey with all your news how you hev ben this long 3 or faer and 20 years that you and I parted.”39 The family even played with their own epistolary styles in their communications and internally referred to their own epistolary characters. Thomas, writing to Alexander to ask him to have a seal made in London, dramatised the imagined moment that the envelope was opened as his opening line, “Hy— what’s this—a letter from Tom—what can this mean—some troublesome commission I suppose for I never hear from him but upon such occasions— why there now—I knew it, and just as I said here follows his orders.”40 The Black family members were adept at the communication at a distance that was the basis for coordination of the British realms around the Atlantic.41 They are a fascinating example of the way a family, in the sense of those families comprising large networks of mutual aid, identified by Naomi Tadmor and David Cressy, could sustain and participate in the dynamic and evolving world of the Atlantic.42 The way affection and function worked together was evoked by John Black on a visit to Dublin: “I am here these severall months enjoying the pleasures of the harmonies of my Isaac’s family and the warm lodging of the fireside on the Bachelor’s Walk where at every meal and repast we do most call to mind our hearty wishes for the health and prosperity of ours in Spain as well as Calais and Dover and all the world over, hoping that it will please God in his own due time that by a settled peace all or most of my scattered branches may in joy and gladness of heart be reassembled in person as they are united in union, love and friendship for each other.”43 The prosperity of the family was an element of its union, love, and friendship, and the fortunes of the family mapped those of nations and empires. Their ultimate happiness was not envisioned through the domestic joys of turning over the generations, but in the political vision of a general peace. Love, commerce, and politics were all part of the universe of the family. Even the young children mixed domesticity with politics. Jane, aged fifteen, on a trip to London, wrote to her mother that there 134

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were rumours of a war with France, “which I am sorey for as it will occasion my papa a great deall of trouble.”44 The domesticity of the Black family was a specific form of citizenship; not a refuge from the world but a means of acting in it. The loquacity and self-consciousness of the Blacks allow one to investigate their correspondence to evaluate how their family identity articulated with their social and political identities. The Blacks were very explicit about their motivations and the contexts they saw themselves working in. They are particularly interesting for what they reveal about the nature of British identity as it began to be deployed in the aftermath of the 1707 Act of Union. The Blacks clearly identified themselves as British. John Black’s brother Robert, the family’s longtime agent in Cadiz, remarked on the British population in Rotterdam when travelling through the city in 1727 in terms that drew a clear distinction between “English,” in this context Anglican, and “British” forms of worship, which he then extended to wider social identity: “Being Sunday went to several churches, there’s one English and two Presbyterian churches, very good buildings, that of the English was rebuilt at the charge of the Duke of Marlborough. There’s more British settled in this city than the rest of the province together. To a stranger that passes through whole streets together without hearing anything but English spoke it looks more like a British colony than a Dutch city.”45 Just what Robert Black could have meant by invoking Britishness is not very clear, and the idea was still in evolution. The meaning of “British” is also very much at stake in current scholarship.46 Scholarship in this regard reflects the historical record, where fundamental problems, such as allegiance, were only being slowly worked out. Mark Thompson has argued that before the union, allegiance was the political category that rationalised the extension of English law into foreign parts.47 After the Glorious Revolution and the union, allegiance to the Crown ceased to be a simple idea. In the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745, Scots, most notably Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, were unproblematically tried for treason under the provisions of the 1352 and 1696 English treason acts.48 Lovat was the last person ever beheaded on Tower Hill, and his fate illustrated the seeming consensus that if jurisdiction was unclear, British subjects were to be treated under English law. Yet while Jacobitism by either Scots or English was a crime against allegiance to the British monarchy, when Americans took up arms the same standard was 135

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not applied. When in 1777 Lord George Germaine introduced a bill in Parliament to suspend habeas corpus for rebel Americans captured at sea, in order to allow them to be detained without trial under presumption of treason, the provision was denounced as an instrument designed to give arbitrary power to the king’s ministers.49 Treason trials were never successfully prosecuted against Americans, and summary executions by the military of “rebels taken in arms” were denounced as barbaric and inhuman. Even in England there was considerable support for the view that the Americans were defending British liberties through rebellion and so not vulnerable to accusations of treason. Americans themselves exploited the flexibility of British identity, using its terms against the state. Ethan Allen denounced the military executions of General Odel and Captain Fellows on Long Island in August 1776 and described the executions of the common soldiers as irrational: “Some were hanged up by the neck ’till they were dead; 5 on the limb of a white oak tree, and without any reason assigned (except that they were fighting in defence of the only blessing worth preserving).”50 When captured himself he evaded Lord Lovat’s fate, only later to face treason charges on the part of the United States for his negotiations envisaging an independent Vermont Republic. Ambiguity had the opposite effect for John and Henry Sheares, accused of high treason in Ireland during the 1798 rebellion. Though the common law demanded two witnesses to sustain a treason charge, the judge at their trial argued that the precedent derived from an English statute, “which does not prevail to the same extent here.”51 The Sheareses were executed on July 14, 1798, in Dublin. The consequences of being British were not clear even on as clear-cut an issue as the difference between treason and loyalty. The core commitment in British identity was to “the only blessing worth preserving”: liberty “under an English system of law and government.” Beyond that it is difficult to specify.52 Linda Colley’s Britons argues that Britishness was an emerging unitary national identity constructed through participation in the imperial project and by distinction from the imperial enemy, France.53 National identity, in this account, set the context and pattern for a stable individual or family identity. This model of negative integration, which echoes Ulrich Wehler’s notion of German identity at the end of the nineteenth century, contrasts with the complex and multifaceted vision of

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the development of British history laid out by J. G. A. Pocock, most recently in his The Discovery of Islands, but developed over thirty years of reflection.54 He argues that the core of British history is the interaction of the British people (that is, of the many peoples who identify as British) with the institutions organised around the category of Britain, primarily the monarchy. Where Colley sees identification with the imperial state as the unifying thread, Pocock instead sees a dialectic: opposition to and critique of the imperial state is a form of participation in British life. This complicated relationship at the heart of British history between the British peoples and the state representing Britain, in the strong sense of being sovereign, allows for identity and difference and accounts for the unity of the subject, but accommodates the tensions within it. Pocock’s second claim is that British history is a world history, not restricted to the islands off Europe. He unites these two elements through bravura historical writing and imagination. His central image of British history, inspired by the poetry of the New Zealand poet Alan Curnow, is as an escape from the “narrow seas” around Europe in search of new deep-ocean islands.55 Empire is therefore central to Pocock’s British history and identity, but he asserts that empire did not create a unifying identity for the British by contrast with a dangerous “other” who had to be resisted and eventually dominated. Instead Pocock analyses empire as an evolving idea that challenged and provoked the peoples of the islands of Britain and Ireland. This idea moved through three phases. The problem of empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that of the imperial Crown; how was sovereign government to be created in the islands? British history, in many hands, has made its most telling contributions to date in addressing that problem. Pocock argues that Britain, in the sense of a national community knowing itself as a political subject, emerges from the dynamics of that history. His innovative suggestion is to see the eighteenth century, the second phase of his history, through the problems created by the extension of empire, in this sense, across the Atlantic. The “English problem,” how to order the relations between the dominant element in the British mosaic with its other members, is the conundrum that cannot be solved and eventually provokes the first secession in British history, the American Revolution. The third phase of empire is the most conventional one, the exercise of

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governance over non-European peoples. This is the moment that Pocock concerns himself with least, since Britishness was not offered to the subject populations of Africa and Asia and so they are not his concern. It is impossible not to admire the breadth and imagination of Pocock’s vision for the subject. Without dealing in detail with social and economic history, he opens the door for the integration of world-transforming economic history with the history of empire and points to how this British history could comprise the themes of industrialism, socialism, and imperialism. What limits this vision of Britishness is its polemical stance. It has always been articulated within a plea for a “new subject” as an alternative to the integration of British history within European history.56 Pocock’s imperial history is distorted by the desire to sustain a political subject with a coherent identity different from the new citizen that emerges from the revolutions against the European ancien régimes. The strategy of secession, used by Pocock to explain the tensions within the subject while retaining an essential core, therefore allows for plurality but obscures the elements of rupture, fragmentation, and incoherence that were the key features of the imperial experience.57 For Pocock, British identity and the imperial project have a complicated and often difficult relationship, but they are always mutually constitutive. Pocock’s ideas reach their limits at the moments when the identification of nation with state is made impossible by empire.58 The Blacks illuminate this different experience. In their case empire came to threaten the possibility of British liberty, but unlike the Americans, they did not have secession as a viable political option for them A new model of British identity had to be constructed.59 For the Blacks the relationship between British citizenship and empire eventually became not constitutive but antithetical. It would not be difficult to argue that the Black family was British in a relatively uncomplicated way, that it identified its own ambitions to act freely in the world with the union, its political culture, and its political fortunes. The language of Protestant liberty, the core language of imperial British identity, is not hard to find in the family’s writings. John Black, writing from Bordeaux to Cadiz, told his brother Robert that “we have these winter evenings been much diverted by the ingenious and shrewd reasonings of Gordon’s Independent Whig.”60 As the War of Jenkins’ Ear threatened to widen into the War of Austrian Succession, John reflected on his position 138

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as a British subject in France: “The old severitys are begun again by forcing Protestant children into convents; which it’s probable may soon make me resolve on sending Jenny and others of myne back again to Ireland as liberty is one of the choicest of blessings.”61 When visiting Cork in 1738 he rejoiced: “We are now in a country of real religion in publick.”62 He was also not above indulging in pride at the national reputation for probity, mingled with the historical memory of the historic struggle between liberty and French despotism as a method of political and economic analysis: I wrote lately to Messrs. Thomas that it seemed the virtue Boone Foy had abandoned the country ever since the Revocation de l’Edit de Nantes made in Henry IV time and annulled par l’homme immortel as his flatterers styled Louis XIV I asked lately at M Sigal an old West Indian commander here who complained that their islands were glutted with European goods; why they had not the like communication of trade with the American Spaniards as those of Jamaica he frankly responded c’est parce que les Espagnols ne trouvent pas le meme bonne foy avec les francois qu’avec les anglais ils se fient plus volontiers [because the Spanish do not find the same fair dealing among the French as among the English they are happier to work with the latter]. I told him that as duty and interest were always inseparable, the later was to the English the reward of their frankness and honesty.”63

Trust was not just an idealised national characteristic but also a central instrument in British merchant practices. Credit was regularly extended for up to two years to correspondents, and this made British trade very flexible. John Hope, from the Amsterdam house of Hope and Co., explained, “They are of all nations the least difficult to treat with, and the most averse, through motives of personal interest, from distressing their neighbours; and thence partly their unbounded trust to one another.”64 The Blacks’ insistence on trust put them in the mainstream of merchant British identity and practice. One can see a straightforward imperial nationalism in John’s sonin-law Issac Simon expressing his delight at British victories toward the end of the Seven Years’ War: “Great rejoicing here for the taking of Havana and if the report proves true that Prince Ferdinand has routed the French army will occasion more joy again.”65 From this kind of evidence the Black family network could be interpreted as a constitutive element of the expanding British military and trading empire, embracing war and trade as instruments for the expansion of the nation. 139

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However, this kind of identification would be a misinterpretation. The Blacks did not exhibit indiscriminate support for the wars of empire; rather they supported a particular version of the British national interest which was very different from that of the dominant Walpolian order. Reading Gordon’s Independent Whig was not a sign of wholehearted support for Robert Walpole’s Establishment Whigs, especially not when supplemented with “the pious and wise” Tillotson’s sermons.66 Even more telling was the family’s support for Admiral Vernon’s attack on Cartagena. Vernon was the symbol of mercantile and popular resistance to the Establishment Whigs and their template of empire.67 Vernon had fought Walpole in Parliament in the excise crisis in 1732 and would eventually be instrumental in his fall in 1742. John Black hoped that court intrigue would not impede Vernon’s hopes of following up his victory at Porto Bello: “Our Court seems to be very willing at present either to peace or to amuse their neighbours until the ambitious views of the Italian queen should be satisfied, but England will not trust such invidious fair pretensions and will, it’s believed, let Admiral Vernon try their muscle in America.”68 The family’s independent political line was sustained by their agent in London, John’s cousin Charles Black, whose inside intelligence allowed the family’s commercial policy to adapt to the twists and turns of state policy.69 Charles eventually became something of an ambiguous figure. His usefulness depended on his “friends,” who included William Stanhope, the first Earl of Harrington, and John Holles Pelham, the Duke of Newcastle, both prominent Walpolians; but those ministerial ties could undermine his primary familial loyalty.70 Charles’s choice to send his son to be educated at Oxford, where they “look back with a wishfull eye and would willingly reclaim the antient splendour of Mother Church’s pretentions to power dominion and state independency,” rather than Glasgow or Edinburgh, was also frowned on.71 Charles, by abandoning trade and setting himself up as a gentleman, incurred expenses he could not sustain, lost money by investing in government debt, and eventually became a burden to the family. When he wrote to his cousin that “it was not his fault he was poor,” John Black answered, “Nor was it my fault that his father had left house, plate, furniture etc all burdened and mortgaged . . . nor that he had not better measured his own expense at London nor that of his son at Oxford more adequately to his fortune and quality.”72 Charles had become part of the ruling oligarchy, with its tastes, which was not what the rest 140

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of the family associated itself with. The kinds of enemies the family attracted are also telling. In 1756 “secretary Fox,” Harold Munro Fox, an exTory Establishment Whig, was responsible for blocking the family’s access to import licenses.73 The Blacks were visibly oppositional; their sense of their British identity did not mean they embraced the state, Walpole, or (later) Pitt. War to overturn the Spanish claim to control access to the South American trade could be supported; war to extend dominion into North America and India was not so attractive. The most obvious distance between the Blacks and a simple idea of British identity is the fact that throughout the wars of imperial competition John Black fought to sustain his position in Bordeaux, in what was for long periods enemy territory. He judged that the roots of what would become the Seven Years’ War were such that he was not obliged to commit to the British war effort: “The limits betwixt the English and the French in North America not being settled, exposes both to daily bloody and base practices what are like not to be easily accommodated, each persisting in asserting their pretended rights.”74 The defence of liberty was not at stake on the banks of the Mississippi. The Blacks were one of only three Protestant trading houses allowed to stay in Bordeaux after 1756. John Black was able to mobilise a powerful coalition of “the magistrates and most eminent citizens,” including the minister Saint-Florentin, to attest to his commitment to France, and this recognition by the notability of the town “I esteemed as my lettres de noblesse.”75 This does not seem to have been a purely strategic loyalty. The Blacks repeatedly referred to France as their home. They joined in the general rejoicing after Louis XV’s recovery from near death in 1744: “We have had thanksgivings for the recovery of our good Prince whose mild and happy government makes his life most valuable to the least important of his subjects.”76 France remained in the thoughts of the Blacks even when they returned to Ireland. Kitty Turnly wrote that “I really think orchards in this country much more frucarious [fructuous] than even our vineyards in France and when there I thought nothing could exceed.”77 Elements of the family were forced by the French authorities to remove inland to the Angoumois for fear they might be fifth columnists for an English invasion in 1762. The prospect of peace led John to “flatter myself with hopes that our James and our John and all theirs are or will be soon restored to their native mansions sur les rives de la Garonne.”78 He also made sure that his children 141

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were naturalised French, and he put his property in their names to protect it from confiscation. John even reassured his son Alexander, in French, that despite appearances to the contrary he was not English: Tu ne dois pas t’inquiéter de la mésintelligence qu’il paroit y avoir entre l’Espagne et l’Angleterre. On peut t’avoir regardé comme anglais à Cadiz, ayant resté si longtemps dans une maison anglaise, mais tu ne l’es pas, non plus que nous ici. Je t’enverrai par le courrier prochain ton extrait baptistaire légalisé, et revêtu de toutes les formalités requises et authentiques. En attendant ne manque pas de te présenter à Monsieur le Consul de France, de réclamer, et le supplier de t’accorder sa protection, comme sujet du Roi. (Do not worry about the misunderstandings that seem to have arisen between Spain and England. You may have been viewed as English in Cadiz, since you worked for so long in an English house, but you are not, no more than we are. I will send on by the next mail your birth certificate, properly signed and sealed. While waiting for that do not neglect to present yourself to the French consul to ask him for his protection as a subject of the King [of France].)79

Just how flexible identity could be is illustrated by the fact that John advised Alexander to make exactly the opposite claim eleven years before: “At the breaking out of the last war your French birthright might have been of service butt its much better not to want or claime any other then British privilege there.”80 Was this flexibility in identity purely instrumental? It was obviously useful for merchants operating in international contexts to avoid the difficulties created by national rivalries. The family understood the relativity of cultural norms and identities. John Black indulged in some heavy-handed humour when his son Alexander equipped himself with a sword: “Perhaps the Cadiz Spaniards would be as much offended att yor having noe sword as the Constantinople dogs have a proffered aversion, gathering about barking and ready to bite the leggs of a Pera frank they meet with in their streets with that foreign accoutrement.”81 However, there is evidence to suggest this flexibility reflected a more complex and interesting reality. At times the French and British contexts could coincide. John Black described the end of the War of Austrian Succession as follows: “Never was poor country more to be pitied that this and some neighbouring provinces about a month ago. Threatened withal the dire consequences of a manifest famine our Magis142

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trates having determined to call to arms and repel in shutting the city gates, the desperate mob of the poor and the peasants who were on the point of a general revolt crying out loudly for bread for their perishing families, when it pleased God to send us a small supply of barks from Brittany arrived the 7th ulto. The town’s representative at court returns shouting ‘la paix, la paix avec du bled de l’Angleterre.’”82 Commerce and peace uniting France and Britain were neatly resolved in this anecdote. John Black’s local role in Bordeaux, as a citizen of the town, responsible for its social peace and economic flourishing, was not essentially in conflict with his British identity. Trade and liberty were not exclusive; the notions of doux commerce explained how trade inculcated a moral and political cosmopolitanism.83 Thus one could be French and loyal to rule of Louis XV, while being a free-born Briton. There are even more complexities to the Black family network’s ascriptions on identity. Their relationship to Ireland was particularly interesting. One of the most vivid pieces of writing in their archive is John Black’s recollection of being a refugee in flight from the Jacobites in 1690: “After the break of Dromore the Irish were coming sparing neither age nor sex putting all to the sword without mercy myself carried in the dark night aboard my father’s ship.”84 This memory, which was of a piece with the central myths of Irish Protestant thought on the barbarous nature of the Gaelic Irish, did not preclude interaction with the various Irish communities, including Irish Catholic Jacobites. John Black seems to have acted as banker for a Captain Dwyer serving in the French king’s forces, as he complains that the school fees and other charges he met were not reimbursed.85 On their travels the Blacks were entertained by Irish Catholic communities, including the Sextons in San Sebastien and Mr. Patrick Sarsfield in Ostend, “who had treated us with extraordinary civility and friendship and favoured us with recommendations to most of the places we were to pass through.”86 Sarsfield’s origins lay in Cork, and he had emigrated to escape the strictures on Catholics in that city: “I had no great inclinations to stay in the cursed city of Cork for several reasons chiefly the want of the liberty of conscience.”87 Ostend was a particularly sensitive spot, since the foundation of the Ostend Company in 1722 by the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburg Charles VI, was designed to circumvent the closure of the Scheldt by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and so to create a rival to both the Dutch and 143

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British East India Companies.88 The Blacks’ flirtations with Jacobites, Imperialists, and émigré Irish were well known enough for them to be denounced at court in England as “papist and Jacobite” by Henry Fox when they applied for licenses to import French wines to Ireland in 1756.89 John Black did know more of the counsels of émigré Jacobites than was strictly healthy. In a letter to his brother in 1740 he fulminated against the “English ministry’s late indolent management” of the war, which would not be unusual for a man with his politics. However, he went on to be ironic at the expense of the Duke of Ormond, who had been intermittently involved in abortive plans for Jacobite naval action in concert with the Spanish since 1718, remarking that “they might certainly have overpowered Admiral Buchanan instead of indulging their misery for want of bread, clothes, money and all necessaries in port.”90 Opposition to Walpole and contact with the Catholic émigré community made the family’s politics capacious. Ireland remained an affective affinity for the family as well. When Alexander Black returned to Ireland in 1762, his brother welcomed him from Belfast: “It was with infinite pleasure that we all here your affectionate brothers and sisters heard of your safe return to Hibernia after so long an absence, if I may not say banishment, among the Dons.” The correspondence is full of affectionate references to Ireland.91 The most telling instance of the family’s ability to negotiate relations with their Catholic compatriots is that two of the children, Margaret and Charles, who died in infancy, were buried in the churchyard of Saint Rémy, the parish church of the Chartrons Irish community.92 The only point at which John Black referred to himself as English, and then only by association, occurred in 1756, when he removed to Blamont to escape the war talk of the Irish community in Bordeaux: “Come hither from the Chartrons to enjoy a little rest from the malicious and inveterate reports in these so prejudiced times to all who bear the name of English.”93 Cultural identification with Ireland, commitment to the principles of British liberty, and service to the community in Bordeaux were all elements of the identity of the Blacks. The family at various points described itself, and acted, within a variety of national contexts: Irish, French, and British. It is tempting when confronted with these differing statements of political identity and attachment to contrast them with the settled idea and practice of family loyalty, in order to argue that the Blacks were really loyal to family and that these other na144

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tional ideas were of little importance to them. This temptation must be resisted: resolving the problem of identity by discounting all problematic evidence is unsatisfactory and reflects an anachronistic demand for an integrated and unitary subjectivity. The challenge is to understand how all these identity claims could be negotiated. One can get a little closer to achieving this goal if we pay attention to what the Blacks traded and how they did so. The Blacks moved between politics and trade, often engaging in moving contraband. The mechanics of this trade were well explained in information and instructions sent by John to Robert in 1740, when direct trade between Britain and Iberia was interrupted by the War of Jenkins’ Ear: “The sherry adventure is well arrived at Leith and with some difficulty received to an entry and profitable trade. Mr. Alexander desires to be informed without loss of time if a parcel of Seville oranges, lemons and raisins could not be brought to your place and with sham certificates of their being Portuguese growth, loaded off in Leith in a neuter ship.”94 The scope and range of their network allowed them to evade controls on trade by false consignment and redirection. As late as 1798, in another time of war, the French foreign minister, Talleyrand, would complain about the network of merchant houses, like the Blacks, that were evading the embargo on British trade from Spain: “Sur un autre côté nous voyons que le commerce de l’Angleterre avec l’Espagne, prohibé par une cédule, continue à se faire à l’aide des Bâtiments neutres et de ceux de Maroc, par l’intermédiaire des maisons irlandaises qui se trouvent établies dans les ports et par une foule d’agents répandus dans tout le Royaume.” (On the other hand we notice that the Anglo-Spanish commerce, prohibited by schedule, is carried on by neutral and Moroccan shipping, with the aid of the Irish merchant houses established in all the ports, and by a crowd of agents scattered across the kingdom.)95 The most important base for this aspect of the family’s trade was the Isle of Man. The Blacks established a presence on the island when John Black’s son Robert was established there “with a worthy friend with David Rosse at Douglass” in 1740.96 By 1743 his father reported that he was making a fortune.97 Douglas was an open port for smugglers in the eighteenth century. Until the revestment of the island to the crown in 1765, Man lay outside the jurisdiction of royal government and English courts of law.98 Tariffs were low, and goods imported into the island were safe from excise commissioners and from there easily smuggled into Ire145

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land, Scotland, and England. As the tobacco trade moved from Bristol to become dominated by Glasgow, the Isle of Man found itself at the centre of the tobacco smuggling trade. War made Man even more profitable, as merchant houses on the island could use neutral vessels to conduct trade between belligerents through the island. Contraband activity in the Isle of Man doubled between the mid-1740s and the mid-1750s and doubled again during the Seven Years’ War.99 John Black described the port of Douglas in its prosperity during a visit in 1760: “It contains about 2,500 inhabitants where refugees for debt from all quarters the natives a suspicious kind of islander, Jews, Gentiles, Infidels etc. . . . The bay and pier harbour often thronged with shipping, English colliers, Guinea Liverpudlians, Dutch and other neutrals about 50 to 60 sail.”100 Robert junior was set up in Douglas to re-export the family wine and East India Company tea into England while avoiding tax. Even more important was his role as intermediary in the brandy smuggling trade into Ireland, which from the 1730s onward was organised from Bordeaux, via the Isle of Man.101 The Blacks did not consider this kind of activity to be illegal, illicit, or even immoral, which is unsurprising given that even Walpole had indulged in trade with smugglers. Rather the Blacks were exercising commercial liberty, the freedom of the seas, which was the first postulate of British liberty. All the elements of the Blacks’ complicated and subtle identity were comprised in their Britishness, but this was not an identity organised around monarch or church. Their Britishness was cosmopolitan, not exclusive. They understood themselves to be citizens of a political community rather than a territory, a community that was, in David Armitage’s words, “Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free.”102 The construction of empire through collaboration between active agents, particularly merchants, and the state allowed tremendous scope for family networks such as the Blacks to assert themselves as citizens, as self-directing households.103 One consequence of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, where the legitimacy of British conquests and discoveries was acknowledged in international law but without an enunciated British doctrine of empire, was to open the Atlantic to people like the Blacks, and to align their “virtuous” or patriot politics with their imperial economic practice.104 The Blacks were like many other agents in the Atlantic zone who operated as independents rather than as “instrument[s] of a European nation-state strategy.”105 They are a par146

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ticularly vivid example of the British inflection of this common experience. They were patriot merchants, figures who formed the backbone of popular politics in England and exemplified the possibility of cosmopolitan “virtuous” empire. This community was also at the heart of the opposition to Walpole, particularly during the 1732 excise crisis. As imperial policy tightened, and as the commercial empire transformed into a territorial empire after 1763, independent merchants found their room for manoeuvre circumscribed. Figures such as William Pitt, or even Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, began to dream of an integrated world empire since after the elimination of French power; Hutchinson wrote, “There was nothing to obstruct a gradual progress from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.”106 Old opponents of Walpole, such as Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, who had been one of the leaders of the opposition to the Excise Bill, began to see a new threat to the political freedom of his two countries: “England is my native, and Ireland my adopted country and I love them both.”107 He worried about the increases to the regular forces and the raising of militias in both Britain and Ireland in 1769: “I call our standing army now 50000 men, and they are as well disciplined and as much enemies to the civil rights of their country as the regular army can possibly be, et c’est tout dire . . . But the military madness has infected every country in Europe and Ireland had not escaped it, may it escape the fate of most of the other nations of Europe whose chains have been forged and fixed by the military power.”108 Territorial empire was now a temptation for political elites as well as a possible solution to recurrent fiscal problems. As Gould explains, this imperial policy promised to resolve the problem of English disquiet over the burdens of international hegemony placed on the ordinary English people. Fiscal and political control of the North Atlantic would spread that burden.109 As the governance of the empire became transformed by this development, it demanded responses and accommodations from the provinces of empire, some of which, of course, would not accommodate and instead would revolt, but also from families who did not have the option of rebellion. The position on the Isle of Man was one of the elements of the British realms that changed most radically in the new order of things. The project of closing the Isle of Man to illicit trade had long been in the air. Ironically, one of the proponents of free trade for Ireland and an interlocutor of Dav147

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enant, Arthur Dobbs, had petitioned Walpole to buy out the Earls of Derby as part of Walpole’s excise scheme.110 That proposal was abandoned in the crisis of 1732–33, but in February of 1765 Robert Black was “pestering” his London brother, Alexander, with letters “to get intelligence if possible of what are or may hereafter be the orders given by the Lords of the Admiralty or Commissioners of the Customs to the cruisers about this island . . . pray try what you can do and endeavour to know how far India goods will be safe from seizure on the island, in case it is sold and annex’d to the crown.”111 Robert’s anxiety was that on the sale of the island even existing stock, imported before any change in its legal status, would be subject to seizure. Robert’s fears were realised when the fiscal privileges of the Isle of Man were bought from the Duke of Atholl as part of the general reorganisation of trade and excise inspired by George Grenville.112 The Revestment Act of 1765 bought out the duke for £70,000 and effectively ended the illicit Manx trade.113 The effect on the Blacks was almost instantaneous. By August Robert was writing to his Belfast correspondent William Mussendun that “the late revolution in this country has . . . effectively shut up every avenue to trade in this place,” and informing Mussendun that he proposed to relocate to Belfast.114 By summer of 1767, Robert had left Douglas and was set up in Castle Hill in County Down.115 The reorganisation threw the family network into crisis, and the Blacks sought to reshape their activities to a changed world. A clerk from the Bordeaux house was sent to Guernsey to see if the smuggling trade could be organised from there, but when Guernsey’s free port status was revoked by the parliament in 1767 he left the island.116 The Blacks had already contemplated profiting from the new British territories by setting up Alexander as an agent for the Ampère trading house in Quebec.117 Thomas Black had encouraged the two youngest brothers, James and Alexander, to set up a house in London, which he thought should have been done a long time before.118 This measure, while it seemed sensible, was in fact a counsel of despair, since the family had little chance of prospering where they had few connections if they faced difficulty where they had many. London was not a refuge for the family but the centre undermining the scope for independent merchants in the outports, and it was very difficult to turn the social capital that had sustained the old trading network into the actual capital that would be needed to break into the metropolis. 148

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The family’s circumstances worsened with the death of the patriarch John in 1767. Even before his death, their cosmopolitanism had become untenable and their ocean-bestriding network began to shrink. Robert had died in Cadiz in 1761, and when his nephew Alexander found his inherited capital amounted to only fifty pounds he abandoned the attempt to continue to carry on an independent trade from there.119 Alexander was similarly uninspired by the suggestion that he try his luck in Alicante. In 1760 John had relocated from Bordeaux to Armagh and had begun to direct his sons out of trade and toward manufacture, in particular the linen manufacture. He encouraged this new departure in new terms: “Long, long may the linen drapery thrive and prosper for the welfare of society and of our Ulster true blue patriots.”120 John Black’s formulation, twinning society with Ulster patriotism, was his response to the evacuation of the space that was previously occupied by his British cosmopolitanism. Political identity, Ulster patriotism, had split away from the kind of universalism that had previously allowed the family to balance their many differing contexts of action, which were now all collected under the term “society.” The idea of society would have been to hand for John Black as a new frame in which to locate his family because he was familiar with one of its inventors. A forty-year friendship with Montesquieu gave him privileged access to the emerging vocabulary of social description.121 What is particularly interesting is that he began to use the concept just as the context in which his family operated made older ideas unserviceable. The notion of society cropped up regularly in John Black’s correspondence after his removal from Bordeaux. Society was not just found in Britain; it also existed in France, where he hoped his family contingent would “be reckoned as useful members of society.”122 He notes that not only were the chemical discoveries of Joseph useful in the family linen manufacture, “his genius leads him to be in his philosophic, physic, chemist profession, an useful member of society.”123 Society supplements the narrowing space of citizenship and gives a new object to old cosmopolitan ideals. Society might allow an intellectual recalibration of the Black family’s vocation, but it could not of itself reorganise its business, which required more material aid. This fact was pointed out to John by his son Alexander, who pleaded for “some favourable resolution to establish me in a way of doing good to society” by giving him the capital to set up trade in London.124 His 149

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father could not help him, though he wanted to, “as is my duty to help and contribute to your present and future happinesse and welfare in the station of life you have now chosen but in these difficult times it requires some time to provide the means of doing the needful to obtain a supply.”125 The Black family, driven back to a much more geographically narrow sphere of operations, paradoxically found that family relations were now strained by contiguity. The vital problem was rescuing enough resources from the collapse of their trading affairs to set up the various fractions of the family in new contexts. Blamont was sold to realise its value, ending the family’s connections with France.126 John’s will was contentious because ambiguous, and the elder brother Robert had to remind everyone of the overriding necessity for family unity: “How much so ever we may differ in this point there is no doubt but we will soon and readily agree to a manner of accommodation; that the bond of union so remarkable in our family may continue infrangible as the bundles of rods in the fable.” The final reckoning of the will underlined that the family had never been really wealthy and that their way of life had depended on the extraordinary scope and range of the British Atlantic world and the social network that had allowed them to exploit it. Robert reluctantly told Alexander that his inheritance would not be adequate to establish him, “but if you were, you would only be in the same situation as Sam and I who never receive anything and who neither of us ever have received so much as you have done; and Sam was kept dependent and his father’s overseer at Blamont until 1758 and brother John is I think yet more hardly dealt with, nothing left him but £400 for 12 years profits of partnership and kept dependent until he was married.”127 Only Joseph made a successful transition into the new British world created in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, doing so by inserting himself in the English provincial manufacturing networks of his friends from Birmingham: “There is no person in the world I am more attached to than Mr Watt.”128 He at least avoided the fate of the younger John, who ended up working as an overseer in the West Indies for twenty-five years without ever managing to establish his independence.129 In 1807, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Peace of Amiens and as another war between France and Britain gathered intensity, Alexander Black analysed the history of Britain over the past thirty years as the gradual subversion of liberty. The British were in decline “from the difficulties 150

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and distress brought unto them by taxation and privations which unfortunately seem gradually to tend to the subversion of that liberty and the happy state with Great Britain could boast of before the year of 1762 (the year when I first visited England).”130 This pattern of a distinct change in the development of Britain and of the core political values of the polity in the early 1760s is remarked on by scholars and contemporaries. A British identity imagined around the cosmopolitan values of trade ceased to have purchase, and alternative ideas of political identity had to replace it. Chris Bayly argues that in this moment, “agrarian patriotism” turns British identity away from trade, with its attendant confusion of ranks, toward a hierarchical model of society where political power is derived from social domination and landownership is re-emphasised as the condition of political power.131 The effect of the American Revolution on British domestic political values was to further reinforce claims to authority and place an “emphasis on subordination and civil obedience.”132 The limit case of this new model of imperial Britishness was the plantation owner, who, in figures such as Thomas Thistlewood, created new and intensified kinds of domination as the mechanisms for creating identity.133 Thistlewood’s model of empire depended on exploitation of slaves, was based in violence, and relied on the coercive power of the state. John Dalling, the governor of Jamaica, explained in 1774 that the demographics of slave-based economies where the unfree outnumbered the free by 100 to 1 demanded standing armies: “This country must one day or other (God knows how soon) be involved in the most dreadful of human calamities, if not guarded against carefully . . . Hence the necessity for keeping up a constant and regular force, and supporting numerous barracks to protect the inhabitants from extirpation.”134 He was also aware that the more regulated British Empire was unwittingly destroying its trading base. He explained that “we formerly carried on a very considerable trade with the Spanish colonies in America,” but “a stop was put to this trade some time ago from severall of the vessels of that nation having been seized when trading at different parts of the island, and having been condemned as concerned in an illicit trade.” The Spanish were now sourcing their manufactured goods from the French in Saint Domingue. Dalling was absolutely conscious of the contradictions that were being built into the new model of territorial empire. He still could explain his part in the imperial role of Britain “to preserve the sacred flame of lib151

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erty” and was clever enough to understand that its colonies would eventually outstrip it, “and like an indulgent parent bestow a portion to her western sons to illuminate the new world.” The idea of an empire of liberty could not be sustained, though: “Strange idea for a resident in the West Indies, where slavery is established by law, and who denies to other, that which he himself so ardently desires.” The slave plantations of the West Indies were not the only sites of danger, nor the plantation owner the only new figure of imperial British identity: Edmund Burke campaigned endlessly against the danger posed to the British constitution by returned Indian imperialists such as Warren Hastings who, he argued, had been seduced by oriental despotism.135 Empire was producing kinds of identities that were inimical to an older understanding of British liberty. The worrying nature of the kind of empire emerging from the wars of the second half of the century could distort core principles of British identity, such as the freedom of the seas. The Anglo-Irish trade pact, proposed by the Prime Minister William Pitt in 1785, offered what had long been sought, free access to British markets for Irish merchants. Perversely it was resisted in the British parliament by longtime proponents of free trade, such as William Eden and Edmund Burke, and eventually rejected by the Irish Parliament.136 The threat of imperial integration was too great for the promise of commercial advantage to be embraced. Indeed, the private thoughts of the Lord Chancellor, Edward Thurlow, if known, would have justified those fears. In his notes to William Pitt commenting on the debate, he argued that if the Irish wanted free trade with Britain, then they were defining themselves as independent and no longer had any right to access to British colonies: “By invading the principle, they destroy their right to that trade, which opens to a more extensive clash of interests, and the argument upon it must turn on the wisdom and expediency of keeping any terms between the countries.”137 Even the far more liberally inclined William Eden continued to see a constitutionally ambiguous Ireland as a problem within the British commercial world. When arguing for a trade treaty between Britain and France, which he was to negotiate in 1786, he thought that in principle, “Ireland will at present expect, and is in policy right, specifically and clearly to be included in every British treaty”; but he recognised that “the two nations are at this hour on a different system in their respective trades with France,” and therefore much that was central to British policy 152

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“will not be so clearly acceptable to Ireland.”138 The logic of empire was conditioning the options open to all. As the polity was reimagined in terms of landed power, the patriotic cosmopolitanism that had formed the core of the British identity of individuals and groups such as the Blacks was displaced. One option was to retain attachment to the early model of British identity, which was to become an inherently revolutionary act, not really comprehensible as secession from a continuous tradition. Individuals and families that wished to sustain their attachment to cosmopolitan values without resorting to revolution in the manner of the American colonists had to find a ground other than the nation through which those values could articulate themselves. That ground was society. The idea of society provided a way of imagining how autonomy could be maintained, even as the structures of governance embraced other values. The Blacks started citing society as the object of their activities in the world precisely at the moment those activities began to be compromised. They were driven to a consolatory notion of a privileged extra-political space as a refuge for their identity, just as Jacobites and Irish of all persuasions were. Precisely the same confusion over autonomy and identity haunted their formulation as haunted others. Did society retain the values of liberty or replace them? An articulate network of self-aware persons ended up explaining its relationship to the public world in the same vocabulary as imperial provincial elites. The structural tendency to create this notion of society was so ubiquitous that it called out to be confronted and understood. That project, of reimagining history, and British history in particular, not as the rise and fall of political societies but as the progressive emergence of kinds of civil society, was taken on by the exponents of Scottish civil science, and most famously by its radical exemplar, David Hume.

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Eighteenth-century Irish thinkers adapted to the limitations on their political agency by investing in new ideas of improvement, friendship, and utility; provincial Scots went further in their adjustment to the emerging British Empire and looked for entirely new philosophical grounds on which the public virtues of a commercial order could be justified. This Scottish debate was so rich that it moved well beyond its original context and use to become a primordial reference for debate on the general nature of commercial modernity. In his seminal work on the creation of modern identity, Charles Taylor places the moral philosophers of eighteenth-century Scotland, principally Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, on the cusp of the emergence of a secularised vision of the self.1 Alasdair MacIntyre goes even further, blaming the Scottish moralists’ abandonment of the Aristotelian language of the virtues and their promotion of utilitarianism in its place for the poverty of contemporary moral languages.2 MacIntyre’s critique is of a piece with other accounts of the “Enlightenment project” as a whole as destructive of the possibilities of human flourishing. He takes on and puts in context Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s argument that the Enlightenment desire to enshrine reason as the means of rational self-mastery 154

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was self-defeating, as reason could not generate goals for human action.3 It is this conception of Enlightenment rationality as endlessly linear cognition that provokes the orthodox contemporary post-colonial or post-modern rejection of it.4 Yet this account of the Enlightenment is totally reified, and it accords a monolithic totality to the Enlightenment and to the modernity it is held to represent.5 Dipesh Chakrabarty’s beautifully ironic injunction to provincialise Europe is an effective historical demand to localise claims to universalism, to specify how and why such claims were made.6 The Scottish Enlightenment, in particular, was an effort at constructing a hybrid identity for a community whose experience had been fractured by the interruption of the continuity of its historical experience.7 The ideals of universality that writers derived in this effort, especially the idea of civil society, were far from being the deterministic and scientistic monoliths for which the Enlightenment is often condemned; rather they were a species of that “welltempered humanism” that Tsvetan Todorov has identified as one element in the French tradition.8 Rescuing the Enlightenment from negative dialectic does not establish the coherence and power of the Scottish vision of civil society. Replacing the Scots imagination of a modern commercial order into its political context explicates their claim to universalism, but it also illustrates how risky this manoeuvre was. The Scots social theorists inherited the problem of accounting for liberty in the provinces of the British Empire. David Hume confronted this inheritance and responded to it coherently, but the price that had to be paid, in his argument, for a new idea of liberty was too high for most of his compatriots. While Hume’s embrace of the civil life of commercial modernity was endorsed by his compatriots, the rigor of his moral theory and its thoroughgoing naturalism was not. There was no such entity as Scottish thought since there were wide areas of disagreement between different Scottish thinkers on the nature of identity and citizenship. No set of Scottish ideas were more original and unsettling than those of David Hume. Hume was recognisable as one of the many Scots interested in working out the demands of commercial life in Britain. He contributed to the justification and support of the morality of the “common life” and the denigration of “enthusiasm,” but MacIntyre and Taylor argue that his efforts to perform an “anatomy” of moral experience made him an uncomfortable colleague for moral realists like Hutcheson.9 The very language of flaying the moral subject used by Hume in de155

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fending his project is jarring: “Where you pull off the skin and display all the minute parts, there appears something trivial, even in the noblest attitudes and most vigorous actions: Nor can you ever render an object graceful or engaging but by cloathing the parts again with skin and flesh, and presenting only their bare outside. An Anatomist, however, can give very good advice to a painter or statuary: and in like manner, I am perswaded, that a metaphysician may be very helpful to a moralist.”10 Angus Calder even asserts that Hume alone brings a philosophical radicalism to the Scottish Enlightenment and indeed is so different to his interlocutors that he escapes the context of Scottish debate altogether.11 The obvious heterodoxy of his religious views does mark him out. The discomfort of Hume’s fellows with him came to a head twice, in 1744 and 1751, when he was frustrated in his ambitions to acquire the chairs of moral philosophy at Edinburgh and either logic or moral philosophy at Glasgow.12 Yet for all the uneasiness with Hume, he was never rejected or betrayed by his literati friends and colleagues, and if his intellectual concerns were external to Scottish problems this was not apparent to his fellow Scots. When he and his cousin Henry Home, Lord Kames, were threatened with excommunication by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, they were shielded by the moderates, the New Light or anti-Calvinist faction of Presbyterian clergymen.13 Hume was amused: “They did not propose to burn me, because they cannot. But they intend to give me over to Satan, which they think they have the power of doing. My friends, however, prevailed, and my damnation is postponed for a twelvemonth.”14 The loyalty of Hume’s Scottish friends was matched by Hume’s continued attention to the problems faced by Scotland and Britain. There were good reasons for Hume’s colleagues’ loyalty to him. Hume’s achievement was to unify the language of moral experience, to produce a way of understanding the subject of a commercial order from a consistent and coherent point of view.15 The earlier Irish and Jacobite essays in defining the specific moral experience of the extra-political space of civil society had one damning flaw: they introduced plural languages of moral order to public life, and such plurality was understood to be the basis of civil dissension. Hobbes was the most prominent figure who had developed this idea. His analysis of the nature of political power as sovereignty placed such a premium on unity that he embraced monism as a metaphysical posi156

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tion to deny any basis for claims to authority from spirit or revelation.16 Hobbes insisted that, to be just, the citizen had to follow the laws and had to believe in them, leaving no space for private equivocation: “If one does all the actions that the law commands (showing external obedience), but does not do them for the sake of the law but of the penalty attached or for glory, one is still unjust.”17 The common political discourse of anti-Popery turned on the same perception that competing kinds of authority, religious and secular, were corrosive of civil peace.18 The categorical distinction between politics and civil society, and between the political virtue of justice and the civic virtues of utility and friendship, opened up exactly the same kind of gap and threatened the same danger. Hume’s “science of man” offered to close that gap by providing a metalanguage or, as he put it himself, “an anatomy” by which the moral metaphysician could understand the common roots of the various moral and political experiences in the passions.19 This coherence was why Scottish natural law theorists and other social thinkers continued to endorse Hume, despite the voluntarist and individualist threat he posed to the Protestant natural law tradition.20 Hume provided the intellectual backbone to an analysis of commercial civilization from a civil society point of view that integrated politics instead of excluding it. Hume paid a heavy price for his intellectual achievement. He was driven, even tormented, by ambition and would not compromise himself in its pursuit. In the introduction to the Treatise of Human Nature he portrayed himself as a conqueror, disdaining “a castle or village on the frontier” and instead marching up “directly to the capital.”21 His border ancestors would have recognized the extension of strategic reach from the Northumberland periphery where they raided to the seat of literary as well as political power, and his northern countrymen would emulate his ambition when they marched as far as Derby in support of Charles Edward Stuart in 1745. Hume was not the only Scot to march on London. Hume felt the problem of assertion, the problem that was posed to communities by the creation of empire, particularly acutely as challenge for himself. Effectively he experienced the problem of the provinces of empire as a personal problem. He recalled that his youth was troubled by a desire for glory and ambition that could not be satisfied by the law or business, the two routes then open to a member of the Scottish gentry.22 Hume’s desire for glory, expressed as liter157

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ary ambition, and his marginal position, outside the structures of English national life, eventually drove him to think the unthinkable, to posit a world in which truth and the moral law were not guaranteed by a providential God. The intellectual position he adopted, which unified the provincial languages of commercial experience in the British Empire, required enormous courage. In rethinking the bases of experience, Hume refused every presupposition of order and intelligibility in an effort to define a new, and more coherent, foundation for “the common life.” That audacity was not easily achieved, even if he claimed that “a new scene of thought” opened up for him as early as his eighteenth year.23 Before he could proclaim “a complete system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security,” Hume experienced profound moral and intellectual crises.24 Hume’s intellectual development recapitulated the debates on the virtues of provincial members of a commercial empire. The threads of the debates we have already considered were gathered in his hands in the 1730s as he undertook his fundamental philosophical work. In no way did Hume simply reflect or reiterate the restatement of Aristotelian and Ciceronian ideas in a new register; Hume did not generate yet another imagined context for comradeship. However, every element of the Irish and Jacobite debates was important to him, even if only as rejected ideals that served to stimulate his own reflections. Hutcheson is a good case in point. He promoted New Light thinking in Glasgow with the support of his Irish students, to whom his idea that church and state were separate institutions, but similar in their basis in voluntary association, accorded with their local experience.25 Hume accepted Hutcheson’s concentration on society as the theatre of moral experience but rejected his sentimentalism. Hume argued that justice, the cardinal virtue of society, did not derive from the natural virtues such as kindness, friendship, or liberality, but was a conventional or artificial sentiment generated from utility or self-interest.26 In effect Hume accepted Hutcheson’s arguments in favour of society while endorsing Mandeville’s moral psychology.27 James Moore even argues that Hume was provoked by opposition to Hutcheson into an embrace of the Epicurean tradition, recently represented by Pierre Bayle, the tradition that John Robertson argues provided the backbone for the Enlightenment project of improve-

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ment. Hume’s moral philosophy cannot be understood as an extension of Hutcheson’s sentimentalism from aesthetics to the domains of morals and politics, but it was provoked by Hutcheson’s ideas. The agonistic relationship between Hume and Hutcheson is the best known of Hume’s interactions with thinkers, Irish and of other nationalities, on the position of Ireland. However, the record of his early reading, contained in the notes published by Ernest Campbell Mossner, reveals a consistent engagement with the problems of emergent empire and in particular an understanding of the literature of political economy centred on Ireland.28 Hume worked through and made notes on Arthur Dobbs’s Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland and put those ideas in the context of Child’s, Davenant’s, and Law’s ideas on trade.29 This volume was not the only subject of his reading in political economy, and he wrote extensive notes on the classic problems of Roman politics and on the more novel questions raised by the Dutch and French experiences; however, the issue of dependencies was aired in his writing on political economy in a manner that mimicked the Irish discussion of the theme. In his essay “That politics might be reduced to a science,” Hume was pessimistic about the possibilities for dependencies, arguing that “free governments have been commonly the most happy for those who partake of their freedom; yet they are the most ruinous and oppressive to their provinces.”30 Ireland was his test case, and it undermined any simplistic evaluation of the superiority of British mixed monarchy over French forms: “The provinces of absolute monarchies are always better treated than those of free states. Compare the païs conquis of France with Ireland, and you will be convinced of his truth; though this latter kingdom, being, in a good measure, peopled from England, possesses so many rights and privileges as should naturally make it challenge better treatment than that of a conquered province.”31 In his later writings Hume echoed the Irish critique of the Navigation Acts almost to the letter when he complained of restrictions on trade, “What have we gained by the bargain? We lost the French market for our woollen manufacture.”32 This literature formed a vital background to Hume’s eventual construction of a new, civic ideal of Britishness. Irish political economy and Hutchesonian moral philosophy were integral to Hume’s early thought, but the most proximate and important

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contribution to Hume’s intellectual development was made by Andrew Michael Ramsay. The evidence of Ramsay’s relationship to Hume is sketchy; one mention in a letter by Hume to a correspondent and friend, coincidentally also named Michael Ramsay, is a narrow foundation on which to build.33 The evidence is so slight that Mossner’s Life barely mentions Ramsay, and then only as an acquaintance helping Hume on his way to La Flèche, the school where Hume spent two years.34 However, this neglect of le chevalier Ramsay was one of the points on which Mossner was criticized by Richard Popkin, who argued that Ramsay was a central figure in the crise pyrrhonienne which was the stimulus for writing the Treatise of Human Nature.35 What Popkin drew attention to was that despite the very real differences between the apostle of pure love and the theorist of the science of man, they both shared a background in scepticism. Ramsay’s route out of the sceptical condition was to commit to a thoroughgoing transcendentalism and so to outflank these tangled issues of the compatibility of knowledge and faith: “It was thus that Monsieur de Cambrai made me see, that a sober thinking deist must of necessity become Christian, and that a Christian cannot reason philosophically without becoming Catholic.”36 This exit to Catholic orthodoxy was attractive to some intelligent young thinkers for whom the defence of a state church in the cause of moderation was not an adequate reason for religious belief or practice. Pocock, for instance, understands Edward Gibbon’s youthful flirtation with Catholicism in exactly this way.37 Obviously this route was not followed by Hume. Despite their different trajectories much light is thrown on Hume’s career by comparison with Ramsay’s. Both Ramsay and Hume were taken with scepticism and understood that scepticism represented a particular ethical stance rather than its absence; Hume wrote, “The worst speculative Sceptic ever I knew was a much better man than the best superstitious devotee and bigot.”38 Ramsay’s short, unpublished autobiography, dictated just before his death much in the manner of Hume’s “My Own Life,” recounts his Pyrrhonian education precisely as ethical commitment: “At Edinburgh he fell in with a highly moral advocate of complete tolerance, one of those men you might call a pyrhonnian sage who doubts more from suspicion of reason than in order to flatter the passions. This episcopalian doctor showed him the flaws in every variety of Protestant faith . . . This drove the young man into Socianism, then into radical toleration, and finally into a 160

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universal pyrhonnism.”39 Later in the manuscript Ramsay asserts that he never abandoned his philosophical Pyrrhonism even when he embraced the Catholic religion.40 What differentiated Hume from Ramsay was that Hume did not distinguish religion from philosophy. The problem of miracles made it impossible for Hume to sustain the division between the spiritual and the physical that would allow religious belief and philosophical scepticism to sit side by side. To acknowledge a miracle, “a violation of the law of nature,” demanded suspension of inferential logic, of the idea of probability which underpinned Hume’s epistemology.41 In a letter to George Campbell, Hume recounted where and how the Catholic temptation drove him to a thoroughgoing scepticism precisely through a consideration of the problem of miracles.42 He reports that, walking in the garden at La Flèche, he was debating with a Jesuit priest a miracle that was claimed for the house. Hume laid out his argument from probable witness, “but at last [the priest] observed to me, that it was impossible for that argument to have any solidity, because it operated equally against the Gospel as the Catholic miracles.”43 Hume’s tongue was firmly in his cheek here, since he explicitly held, against the consensus of the period, that prophecy, and so revelation, was as vulnerable to the argument of probable truth as miracles.44 Revelation was just another species of miracle to Hume’s mind and vulnerable to the same objection. Hume’s thoroughgoing naturalism was the mirror image of Ramsay’s fideism. Ramsay saw God as the condition of a probabilistic universe in which humans were morally free, and Hume saw a probabilistic universe comprising moral freedom as evidence against the existence of God. Both views were strategies to manage the sceptical disposition and justify its tolerant ethic. Hume was in conversation with writers such as Dobbs and Ramsay. He continued and transformed their discussion over the ethical life of a commercial polity and radicalized that discussion by making explicit the profound challenge posed by the transvaluation of the categories of politics into those of civil life. He was fully aware that his thinking and writing made strange the philosophical tradition and his own social and political environment. The trope that came up over and again in discussions of and by Hume was that of the monster, which was ironic since Hume was central to the eighteenth-century rejection of wonders, marvels, and monsters as useful instances that revealed the truth of nature.45 Hume used the trope of the 161

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monster in describing himself. In the conclusion of book one of the Treatise of Human Nature he used a particularly complicated set of tropes, derived from The Tempest, to express and define his monstrosity. The unacknowledged Shakespearian intertext is interesting in itself. Hume’s relationship to Shakespeare mirrored his ambiguous feelings about England and its culture, unavoidable but impossible to embrace, leading him to advise John Home “for God’s sake, read Shakespeare, but get Racine and Sophocles by heart.”46 The Tempest, a play deeply structured by the opposition of reason to fancy and by questions of legitimate possession of rule of an island, offered a wide array of reference for Hume to dramatise his relationship to his intellectual project and his political context. In the conclusion to the first book of the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume uses the image of the sea voyage in a “leaky, weather-beaten vessel” as a metaphor for his fears at attempting to reimagine humans.47 Hume first imagines himself as one of the passengers shipwrecked on “the barren rock,” but then he switches perspective and figures himself as Caliban: “I am at first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am placed in my philosophy, and fancy myself some uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human commerce, and left utterly abandoned and disconsolate. Fain would I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth; but cannot prevail with myself to mix with such deformity.”48 Hume berates himself for the “weakness” of his philosophy, just as Trinculo scoffs at Caliban: this is a very shallow monster I afeard of him—A very weak monster The Man i’ the Moon! A most credulous monster!49 Hume then goes on to lament his outcast state. Instead of being afflicted with the spirits that distress Prospero (“for every trifle are they set on me”), Hume has exposed himself “to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians and even theologians,” the spirits of a different isle.50 One of Hume’s responses later in the chapter to his awful condition, where he comments that “I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse” and so renders these philosophical speculations and the crises attendant on them ridiculous, is well known. However, this comment has been overvalued, since it is only the caesura around which Hume again turns the figures of 162

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The Tempest. In the latter part of the chapter, Hume, or the philosopher, becomes Prospero. He refuses “to throw all my books and papers into the fire” and asserts his commitment to seeking “the principles of moral good and evil, the nature and foundation of government” and other abstruse questions.51 He goes on to contrast the philosopher with “many honest gentlemen in England” whose “gross earthy mixture” Hume wishes would be added to the speculative spirit of the philosopher, recalling Prospero, who gives up his control of spirits to take up his rule by burying his staff in earth: But this rough magic I here abjure; and, when I have requir’d Some heavenly music,—which even now I do,— To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.52 The difference between Hume and Prospero was that while Hume might have abandoned the magic wand of metaphysics, he retained his book. Hume, or Caliban, is not simply transformed into a participant in the common life, the Englishman, by the alchemy of his thought. Instead he is transformed from one kind of monster into another, from Caliban into Prospero. Prospero gives up book and wand and returns from the island to his dukedom. Hume has no dukedom, nor any other office to return to, so the legitimacy and nature of rule on his island, like Caliban’s (“mine, by Sycorax my mother”), remained at stake. What was gained by giving up abstract ideas of justice derived from metaphysics? Prospero justifies his usurpation of the island by right of cultural superiority and denounces Caliban, whom Prospero had taught to speak, for refusing to accept the norms of civility. Hume had learned the language of English philosophy; would he say also that “my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse”?53 Curse he certainly did, for Hume was continually rude about England and the English; his letters are scattered with derogatory comments, such as one denouncing them as a “stupid, factious nation.”54 However, the historical experience of England was also the template from which he constructed a set of values appropriate to the new people who would live in 163

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society rather than the nation. The denunciation of England was always made in favour of Britain; in an island dominated by England Hume would always be Caliban, but in Britain he was Prospero. Both were monsters, but it was clearly preferable to be the latter. The idea of the monster united Hume’s philosophical and political projects, and the image was apparent to those who rejected his work. Hume’s self-accusation of monstrosity—of the perversion of reality, morality, and language—was echoed in the review of the Treatise in the History of the Works of the Learned of 1739. In its fortyfive-page review of Hume’s text, the History accused Hume, among other taunts, of assuming “the Air of the Sphinx, only not attended with the horrible cruelty of that monster.”55 This vision of Hume as a riddling monster, one outside human society, was remarked on even by his friends: Earl Marshal Keith informed Rousseau that Hume was generally seen “as a bit of a monster.”56 Hume’s monstrosity was that he lived, and indeed flourished, outside the accepted premises of debate on identity and value. Hume rejected a providential universe, which put him outside all religious contexts, and he also denied the rationality of the accounts of the derivation of moral and political values current in both history and philosophy. Hume was a hopeful monster, though. His account of the basis of moral and cognitive experience reflected the provincial condition, and it reflected a response to the English problem differing only in kind to that of Irish Catholics like O’Conor. Hume’s proverbial good humour and peace of mind were a standing affront to an English national myth asserting that no such happiness was possible for an unbeliever outside the Anglican communion.57 Hume fully understood that his status as a philosophical Caliban was to be contrasted with the settled, untroubled English identity: “I am sensible, that these two cases of the strength and weakness of the mind will not comprehend all mankind, and that there are in England, in particular, many honest gentlemen, who being always employ’d in their domestic affairs, or amusing themselves in common recreations, have carried their thoughts very little beyond those objects, which are every day expos’d to their senses. And indeed, of such as these I pretend not to make philosophers, nor do I expect them either to be associates in these researches or auditors of these discoveries.”58 However, where Hutcheson, Fénélon, or Ramsay had been content to identify spaces within the emerging commercial world where the values of the civic sphere could be sustained and pro164

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tected, Hume’s ambition was to universalize those values, to unify history around the figurist logic. As he wrote, he was not content with taking a border province but wished to assault the capital. Hume’s audacity was to imagine that the particular conditions that had made a monster of him were universal, that the world was full of unwitting monsters. His task, of bringing philosophy to the common discussion, was nothing less than overturning the illusions of identity. This significance did not pass unnoticed. Certain English writers, such as William Warburton and Richard Hurd, took up the task of naming the beast Hume; Warburton called him an “aetheistical Jacobite, a monster as rare with us as a hippogriff.”59 Hume’s relationship to Ramsay, with his Jacobite sympathies, makes this remark particularly insightful. His centrality to Scottish writing made him the target of satire. Hume’s ideas were identified with the Scottish threat to nationality and religion. In one pamphlet, the Scottish church was satirized as entirely Erastian, reduced to a branch of the state: “For this conformity, in church affairs, they have been long and thoroughly prepared by the philosophy of the illustrious David Hume. By the coerciveness of his arguments, not only all religious prejudices, but even the hypocrisy of religion is so far effaced from the clergy north of the Tweed, that it is in vain for their Presbyterian brethren, in England, to expect, from that motive, that they will be joined with them.”60 Hume’s status as monster made him liable to all sorts of tests throughout his life; seeing his grief on the death of his mother, for instance, his friend Alexander Carlyle could not restrain himself from accusing Hume of a secret belief in his mother’s resurrection.61 Hume’s entire life was configured as a test of how someone might live outside acknowledged collective narratives. His death became a theatre in which polite British society regarded whether or not such a being could pass away in peace, and it gave rise to a considerable correspondence. The terms of the debate on Hume’s death were defined by George Hornes when he complained that Hume was being enshrined as a paragon of humanity by his friends when, in truth, “would we know the baneful and pestilential influence of false philosophy on the human heart? We need only contemplate them in this most despicable influence of Mr hume.”62 The fact that questions of national identity were at stake as well as issues of religious faith was emphasised by Hornes’s declaimer that “I am a South Briton, and, consequently, not acquainted with what passes in the opposite quarter.”63 As late 165

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as 1792 William Agutter was to take as his theme the difference between the faith of Samuel Johnson and the irreligion of Hume in his sermon at Magdalen College, Oxford.64 Yet there were many North Britons willing to combat the view that Hume was a particularly Scottish monster. Adam Smith, in an open letter to William Strahan the printer, made his theme the cheerfulness with which Hume faced his death.65 Smith’s conclusion turned Hume from monster to model: “Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will allow.”66 William Cullen also gave an account of Hume’s last days as the passing away of an untroubled, peaceful spirit.67 Hume himself colluded with this hagiography: “My Own Life” was written as an apologia pro vita sua, and in his last conversation with Boswell he took pains to emphasise his calmness of spirit, even as he reiterated his agnosticism.68 The public eulogies for Hume from his Edinburgh moderate and literati friends were truly felt, but they masked the anxiety they felt about Hume’s heritage. Even as Smith was communicating to Strahan his affection for Hume, he was also informing him that he would prefer it if Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were not to appear and that if they were to be published, in no way would he allow himself to be connected to the book.69 In truth Hume not only was a Scottish monster but was seen as a monster in Scotland. Hume never escaped his marginal position and could never integrate himself fully into any society. His atheism opened him to attack from the Church of Scotland, and in 1757 he was threatened with excommunication.70 Hume was aware that only in his writing could he establish a home for himself and that the effect of his writing was to make unhomely his real home place. In 1759, writing to Adam Smith, he considered where best he should settle down to do the work on his History, asking Smith what he thought he should do: “Scotland suits my fortune best, and is the Seat of my principal Friendships; but it is too narrow a Place for me, and it mortifies me that I sometimes hurt my Friends. Pray write me your judgement soon. Are the Bigots much in Arms on account of this last Volume?”71 For all of Hume’s proverbial sociability—which even those shocked at his irreligion, such as Boswell or Johnson, were prepared to concede—Hume could not escape his marginalisation and decontextualisation.72 Hume’s

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friends, the moderates and literati, were constructing a myth, rather than representing the unvarnished truth, in their portrayal of Saint David.73 The logic behind this mythologisation is disclosed in the two figures Hume cared to attack in his last words, John Wilkes and Warburton.74 Wilkes the radical and Warburton the conservative are rarely yoked together, but Hume excoriated the violent rhetoric of both men as a species of the English enthusiasm that he condemned. Wilkes drew down Hume’s particular scorn for his attack on Britishness.75 Wilkes’s newspaper The North Briton conducted a skilful propaganda war against the ministry of Lord Bute, a Scot, and Bute’s paid press, The Briton, edited by Tobias Smollet, again a Scot, in the name of the rights of the trueborn Englishman. Wilkes exposed the sparse resources of the language of Britishness in his mocking assertion that Bute’s ministry was nothing less than a Scottish invasion of England.76 By the end of its life the North Briton was speaking a language of naked anti-Scottishness and insisting on English, not British, exceptionalism: “The restless and turbulent disposition of the Scottish nation before the union, with their constant attachment to France and declared enmity to England, their repeated perfidies and rebellions since that period, and their servile behavior in time of need, and overbearing insolence in power, have justly rendered the very name of Scot hateful to every true Englishman.”77 Hume was sarcastically invoked as the one Scot who the English might willingly see receive a government pension.78 The satire intended here is clear from Hume’s own statement on how he was viewed in England: “I do not believe that there is one Englishman in fifty, who, if he heard that I had broke my Neck to night, would not be rejoic’d with it.”79 Bute’s ministry, and the Scottish support for it, was denounced by Wilkes as unnatural, a monstrous inversion of reason, because the ambition to “extinguish party” ignored the real issues of principle at stake between Whig and Tory. The social science that animated Scottish writers in this project was rejected out of hand: “You may talk of the virtuousness of being vicious, the chastity of adultery, the christianness of atheism, and the naturalness of the most unnatural and beastly crimes.”80 Turning Turk, through drinking coffee, had been far more acceptable than turning British by reading Scots. Wilkes, and English nationalism generally, threatened everything the en-

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lightened Scottish elites were working for in both England and Scotland. Moreover, Wilkes was not some wild aberration from general opinion. David Hancock reports that there was general hostility to Scottish merchants in London: there were no mayors or aldermen of Scottish origin, and no Scot was elected to the Directorate of the Bank of England before 1790.81 Richard Bentley offered a satiric definition of a “North Briton (a bird of prey) not dazzled by any height,” which reflected the common criticism of Scots as place seekers, but the challenge was stronger than protection of local privilege.82 Wilkes’s reiteration of an Englishness that constructed itself in opposition to supposedly essential Scottish and French identities threatened to awaken a dormant Scottish civic consciousness and to destroy the Britain that was the ideal of the Scottish lumières. Hatred for Wilkes, a hatred which led to two attempts on his life by enraged Scots, could transform itself into a studied disregard for a degenerate England, inhabited by people who knew no virtue other than wealth.83 While English pamphleteers castigated Scotland as the country that had bred the despotic Stuarts, Scots in return replied that only a people as corrupt as the English, and a state as oppressive as that constructed by the Tudors, could have allowed the Stuarts to become despots.84 In the pamphleteering occasioned by the Bute ministry, some Scots came to the conclusion that the union was a mistake, that all the advantages of trade it created could have been enjoyed otherwise, and that in those conditions the Scots would not have had to share a country with a people as backward and barbarous as the English.85 Such a view rested on the premises of the Scottish civic humanist tradition, a tradition that threatened the worldview of the Scottish Enlightenment and undermined the project of a renewed British whiggism.86 However, what was really dangerous about this renewed Anglo-Scottish antagonism was that it tended to muddy the distinct Scottish Enlightenment critique of England. Hume agreed with the North Briton Extraordinary that the English were “the Barbarians who inhabit the Banks of the Thames,” though for a very different reason.87 Hume recognised that English society had created a new form of liberty, that of a commercial society, but he held that the Whig rationalisation of that liberty was nothing more than naked prejudice. The English were not capable of recognising, let alone embodying, modern commercial liberty: “Our Government has become a Chimera; and is too 168

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perfect in point of Liberty, for so vile a Beast as an Englishman, who is a Man, a bad Animal too, corrupted by above a Century of Licentiousness. The Misfortune is, that this Liberty can scarcely be retrench’d without Danger of being entirely lost; at least the fatal Effects of Licentiousness must first be made palpable, by some extreme Mischief, resulting from it.”88 In fact, after the revival of a specifically Whig Englishness in the aftermath of Britain’s victories in the Seven Years’ War, Hume considered that England had become the greatest threat to European liberty. England was now the contender for universal monarchy.89 Where Scottish civic humanists criticised England as the threat to Scotland, Scottish lumières criticised it as the threat to Britain and to the modern liberty Britain represented. Thus it was that Hume and Hugh Blair could agree with John Witherspoon, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence who had been one of the fiercest critics of the moderates in Scotland in supporting the American colonists in their revolt.90 Through the sanctification of Hume, the cadres of the Scottish Enlightenment were defending their major contribution to the politics of Britain: their creation of a new ideal of liberty and their development of a new language of civil society with which to describe that liberty.91 Hume’s legacy had to be defended against every faction, Whig, Tory, and Jacobite, in both countries. The Humean heritage that was being defended was his critique of preceding epistemological and moral traditions, undertaken in order to recompose them in a philosophy and way of life designed to relocate him and his like in a renewed ideal of community.92 Hume’s project of replacing natural jurisprudence and civic humanism with a “science of man” was the condition for the efflorescence of Scottish writing that redefined English, and therefore British, liberty as commercial liberty.93 Hume sought to show that liberty was perfectly compatible with a commercial society and that previous discussions that had contrasted interest with right had been badly posed.94 His procedure was to relativise the various positions and to assert that both were essentially rhetorics rather than coherent positions. His ironisation of the contending positions of Court and Country parties in British politics, and of the contrasting commitments of Whig and Tory, was particularly scathing in this respect.95 Commentators recognized just how strange Hume was rendering English history and questioned if his way of recounting the experience of the nation could be accepted as a history: “In169

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deed Mr. Hume the historian, instead of relating actions, matters of religion or politics, drawing characters, accounting for events, or representing the constitution, like all writers before him, strives to give the whole in a different way, and having a good deal of ingenuity, has so far succeeded as to give another turn to almost everything, insomuch that his history is neither the true story of this country, nor does any man of knowledge look upon it as such.”96 In criticising civic humanism, and in undermining Whig accounts of English liberty, Hume was creating the ground for a new notion of virtue and liberty, one that might be compatible with the Scottish situation. Hume was almost uniquely conscious that replacing the historic languages of politics that constituted public life created forbidding problems of continuity. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not rely on a stadial theory to account for the nature of some kind of naturally occurring commercial community. Instead he argued that the latent order of a commercial society had to be made evident; the new Israel would need its Moses. Hume was driven to imagine that the potential of community depended on the genius of politicians and scholars whose awareness of general causes could allow them to compose society and so make possible a common life they could not share.97 Hume’s essay on suicide reflects the burden that he placed on himself. In his view, existence could only be supported if it could be shown to be of benefit to someone: “But suppose that it is no longer in my power to promote the interest of the public; suppose that I am a burden to it; suppose my life hinders some person from being much more useful to the public: in such cases, my resignation of life must not only be innocent, but laudable.”98 The philosopher, the monstrous Scot, had no right to be supported as a member of the community, though his insight kept the community in being. Hume never fully succeeded in rewriting the community in a way that allowed him to reinscribe himself in what he called the common life. He remained forever torn between London and Edinburgh and was only really happy in exile in Paris. As he put it to Adam Smith, “Paris is the most agreeable Town in Europe, and suits me best; but it is a foreign country. London is the Capital of my own Country; but it never pleasd me much. Letters are there held in no honour: Scotsmen are hated: Superstition and Ignorance gain ground daily. Edinburgh has many Objections and many Allurements. My present Mind, this Forenoon the fifth of September is to return to 170

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France.”99 Hume’s publisher, Thomas Cadell, insightfully put together Hume’s naturalism, his ambition, and his politics in a letter he wrote to Isaac Hawkins Browne immediately after Hume’s death. Cadell’s problem concerned the pieces that Hume had left for posthumous publication, including the essays against the immortality of the soul and on suicide: “I most sincerely wish the editor may suppress the two last or I must decline being the publisher, for no consideration however lucrative, will induce me to be the dispenser of such destructive doctrines. What shall we say of the author! A man moral in his own conduct—gentle, humane and amiable in his manners—that this man should be desirous of distributing after his death, opinions so highly prejudicial to the morals and happiness of mankind. The love of fame, his darling passion, was the motive—singularity he supposed would procure him this, and convinced, I am well persuaded, in his own mind that annihilation was to be his fate, he was indifferent to the consequences that might result from the publication.”100 Few others could exhibit Hume’s heroism, or indifference, in the face of the lack of foundation for experience and community.101 Though Hume’s work was the foundation for the Scottish writing of the latter half of the century, the task of writing the community out of its predicament would really be taken on by figures whose institutional commitment to Scotland did not leave open for them the possibility of exile, of embracing the idea they were useful monsters rather than participants in the common life. Hume’s science of man was too destructive of existing vocabularies, such as that of natural law, and so his strategy of contextualizing English experience in a revived history of civilization was embraced, while the more uncomfortable elements of his thinking were ignored.102 Not that Hume’s critics were entirely unaware of the logic of his ideas. George Campbell, the principal of Marischal College in Aberdeen, who combated Hume directly on the subject of miracles, also picked up the problem of the nature of the subject in civil society.103 In one of his weekly sermons he directly attacked Hume’s naturalistic account of civil society, arguing that “there is no subject on which libertines show more inconsistency, than on what regards the advantages derived from religion to civil society.”104 Hume’s thoroughgoing rejection of realist accounts of moral experience would have to wait for Bentham to be exploited as a tool of political analysis. Instead his Scottish inheritors wrote as if the new civic context could 171

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simply include the Aristotelian virtues. Those writers, basing their work on that of Francis Hutcheson, were ready to argue that the root of human nature was not to be found in the political connections between persons, and in that they embraced Hume. But they relocated the civic realm and its characteristic relationships of sympathy into common life, the emotive bonds of fellow feeling found in civil society; and they developed civil society as a substitute for political life rather than a categorically novel arena.105 University teachers, lawyers, and Presbyterian ministers, figures such as Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and Adam Smith, reinvented a community for themselves, a new context. That community was still a nation, but one under a revised idea of nationhood. The nation was no longer the historic community reproducing itself through its governing institutions and knowing itself through its distinctive history. Rather the real nation was the civil society within which members of the community conducted emotive and commercial relations.106 The name of this new nation was Britain, and Britain could only be apprehended through the invention of a new vocabulary that transcended old polarities of “elect” and “damned,” “civil” and “barbarous,” and instead substituted a new language of civil relations that recognised the multiplicity and plasticity of legitimate social forms.107 British liberty, in the eyes of the Scottish literati, was the institutional context within which the moral sense could allow new social forms, characterised by politeness and sentiment, to develop.108 Thus these thinkers were able to acknowledge the exigencies of law and politics, expressed through the vocabularies of civic humanism and natural jurisprudence, while asserting that the distinctive qualities of the moderns were not evoked in those discourses.109 The plasticity of the idea of moral sentiment, and indeed the novelty of the idea of benevolence as the root of the capacity for community, allowed the thinkers and writers of the Scottish Enlightenment scope for a variety of accounts of legitimate human community. Writers such as Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, James Millar, and Lord Kames produced a series of versions of society, each one using differing interpretations of ideas of progress, justice, virtue, and civility. The stadial theory of history, which was first rehearsed in John Dalrymple’s Essay toward a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain in 1757, became the theoretical frame for a variety of versions of civic community.110 The immense possibilities and the very flexibility of 172

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this language are easily revealed through a comparison of some of the canonical texts of this tradition. Ferguson’s History of Civil Society and Smith’s Wealth of Nations, for instance, both attempted to derive normative criteria for the evaluation of modern societies.111 Both authors were concerned about the grounds and conditions of right action; thus the frame for their thinking was moral rather than legal, even though they acknowledged that legality was a fundamental principle of modern commercial societies.112 Their dissimilar backgrounds disposed them to approach this issue from very different angles. Smith was a Lowlander, the son of a customs official, and had spent his early career on a Snell studentship in Oxford. Ferguson was born in Logerait in Perthshire, right on the Highland line, and on leaving St. Andrews was appointed chaplain to the Black Watch due to his native tongue being Gaelic. Given these kinds of backgrounds it is understandable that Smith would argue that a commercial society, organised around the principle of justice rather than virtue, could create the conditions for civic commitment and moral autonomy with its own resources.113 His work on the market, though much misunderstood, was clearly an effort at explaining this possibility. However, as concerned as Smith was to delineate the immanent morality of a commercial society, he still stressed that commercial society was not the destiny of every human community.114 Ferguson, with his different cultural experience, was less sanguine about the possibilities of a commercial society creating a civilised life and argued that a commercial society would always have to borrow institutions and practices, most notably the citizen militia, from other social forms. Where Smith was implicitly relativist in his reading of the ways in which the natural sociability of mankind, articulated as moral sentiment, might express itself, Ferguson explicitly stated that a flourishing civilisation might be grounded on any set of principles: “The Chieftain of an Arab tribe, like the founder of Rome, may have already fixed the roots of a plant that is to flourish in some future period, or laid the foundations of a fabric, that will attain to its grandeur in some distant age.”115 What is particularly interesting, though, is the way that both writers were agreed that there was no possibility of a total theory of civic experience. Though Smith was more optimistic about the possible fortunes of commercial society, both asserted that the meanings of social life could not be imposed. Rather each society had to create its own form of civility.116 Although they contended that there were secular trends 173

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in the world system that tended to promote commercial societies, they did not argue for a linear model of progress that was incumbent on any society.117 Ferguson went so far as to claim that there was no universal frame for the ascription of civility to a people, although there were criteria through which the political health of a nation could be judged: “Sentiment and fancy, the use of the hand or the head, are not inventions of particular men; and the flourishing of arts that depend on them, are, in the case of any people, a proof rather of political felicity at home, than of any instruction received from abroad, or any natural superiority in point of industry or talents.”118 History, for Smith, Ferguson, and the other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, remained open. The Scottish writers’ separation of politics, law, and manners allowed them to rewrite the history of mankind and the history of Scotland. Hume’s critique of a Whig providentialism, best represented in his highly popular History of England, was the model from which they derived their project of relativising the English achievement—a commercial society— and describing their own place in the project of civilisation. One of the most striking examples of this project was Kames’s Sketches for the History of Man.119 Kames argued that the human species was constituted as separate nations, which were instituted by God and characterised not by differing laws but by differing manners.120 This strategy allowed him to acknowledge the superiority of the English constitutional framework while arguing for the superior manners of the Scots. The union had not extinguished Scottish national spirit but animated it: “The national spirit was roused to emulate and to excel: talents were exerted, hitherto latent: and Scotland, at present, makes a figure in Arts and Sciences, above what it ever made as an independent kingdom.”121 In a startling reversal, Kames characterised commercial civility in such a manner that Britain became a projection of an idealised Scottish community, defined by its civilised mores since antiquity. The poems of Ossian and the treatment of women in Scottish society were used as evidence for a primordial Scottish civilisation uniquely adapted to generate the values for a modern society.122 The Scots, in defining a new model of community for themselves, defined a new model of nationality for the polity. It is difficult to see in this body of writing anything approaching the monolithic project of reason for which the Enlightenment is often con174

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demned. Rather, this work united themes of universality and particularism in a complex blend that sought to capture the experience of alienation that went with the loss of familiar contexts, while expressing the particular possibilities that were opened by commercial civility. The plasticity of this work is evident in the uses to which it was put. The Treaty of Paris of 1763, marking definitive victory over France, made England the new contender for universal monarchy and so created a cultural crisis for the English. Success for England created exactly the same crisis that failure had generated in Scotland. Thus a body of writing that sustained a critique of English imperialism, seen most radically in the writings of the Scots during the Militia controversy of the late 1750s and the Ossian controversy of the 1760s, as well as in Hume and Smith’s acerbic correspondence, was reabsorbed as a legitimating doctrine for a modern civil society.123 This was not a seamless project either, and subaltern elements of English society used elements of the vision of the modern, commercial nation as a critique of the old order.124 It is impossible to comprehend the power and persuasiveness of the new category of civil society without an understanding of Hume’s contribution. The earlier Irish commentators had generated supplementary ideas of improvement and charity which could compensate for the occlusion of Irish political agency; Hume laid the foundations for a complete redescription of the British polity. However, nobody writing after Hume was willing to accept the radical consequences of his ideas. Hume’s version of civil society assumed an anti-realist moral stance, abandoning the derivation of ethics from natural law and describing a radical divorce between ethics and law. His was a philosophy and a social science for and of monsters. Hume followed his thinking on the nature of commercial empire to the point where he understood that it made citizenship irrelevant and impossible. Subsequent Scottish practitioners of the science of man were not prepared to become monstrous. They interpreted civil society as a space where the characteristic virtues of citizenship, such as comradeship, generosity, loyalty, and the love of common good, might be saved and exercised. Even before the flowering of the Scottish debate the discussion of civil society had been freighted with contradiction. Irish Catholics and Protestants found themselves praising the civil realm as, respectively, the province of utility and of charity, of the arena of rationally cooperating individuals or of the fragmentary shards of a lost world of justice. The flight of the Scots from 175

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the pitiless logic of Hume added another level of complexity to this discussion. The incoherent deployment of Hume’s categories meant that the characteristic Humean insight about the inability of moral restraint to condition political power was effectively lost. This misreading of Hume meant that the late eighteenth century inherited a frankly utopian idea of civil society. Hume’s acute sense that the ethics of civil society were an accommodation to a uniquely powerful imperial state, a terrible compromise that he thought had to be made to ensure civil peace, was ignored. Hume’s monstrosity was written off as a personal feature rather than a systematic insight. Civil society was instead idealised as a sufficient constraint on the imperial state and the condition for continuing moral traditions rather than revising them. Very few commentators, most notably Edmund Burke, would notice that Hume had identified a political and cultural crisis. Empire produced civil society, but empire did not acknowledge the ethics of civil society as its own. All were agreed that commercial liberty was exercised in civil society, but what would happen if the different understandings of commercial liberty were to come into direct conflict?

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Under questioning from a secret committee of the Irish House of Lords after the failed rebellion of 1798, Thomas Addis Emmet, a leader of the United Irishmen, made a very strange observation. Asked by the lord chancellor, John Fitzgibbon, if he thought that the government had been foolish to allow the United Irishmen to meet even after government agents had penetrated the organisation, Emmet replied, “I thought they were right in letting us proceed. I have often said, laughing among ourselves, that if they did right they would pay us for conducting the revolution, conceiving, as I then did, and still do, that a revolution is inevitable, unless speedily prevented by very large measures of conciliation.” He went on to paint a picture of the leadership of the United Irishmen as a body concerned to save the established order from its own folly. “It seemed to me an object with them that it should be conducted by moderate men, of good moral characters, liberal education, and some talents, rather than by intemperate men of bad characters, ignorant and foolish; and into the hands of one or another of these classes it undoubtedly will fall. I also imagined the members of Government might be sensible of the difference between the change of their situation being effected by a sudden and violent convulsion, or by the 177

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more gradual measures of a well conducted revolution.”1 A few days later he repeated the same idea to a committee of the Irish House of Commons: “Having no doubt that a revolution would and will take place, unless prevented by removing the national grievances; I saw in the organisation the only way of preventing its being such as would give the nation lasting causes of grief and shame. Whether there be organisation or not the revolution will take place.”2 Invited to anatomise the organisation of the United Irishmen, Emmet was instead conducting a seminar in social and political analysis. Emmet’s observation seems odd, since if revolution in Ireland was somehow inevitable, it was not making progress in the late summer of 1798. On May 23, 1798, the United Irish network had taken to arms. Their plan had been to capture Dublin through an urban insurrection and simultaneously surround it with risings in Meath, Kildare, and Wicklow.3 The alliance between the United Irishmen and the Catholic Defenders, an agrarian secret society, was to provide the manpower necessary for this general rising. Other revolts, conducted for the most part by Presbyterians, particularly in Antrim and Down, were to make it impossible for British forces to regroup and recover. This ambitious plan had not succeeded, largely because the leadership of the movement had been captured while meeting in Oliver Bond’s house in Dublin on March 12. Second-line figures such as John and Henry Sheares moved up to fill the roles of the captured members, but they never gained control of their own network and were compromised from the start. Francis Higgins, a government spy, was able to inform Dublin Castle that they were made majors-general in the organisation in early May.4 After the capture of Edward Fitzgerald, the military head of the United Irishmen, on May 18, these men could not direct events. The rebellion never took shape in Dublin, was quickly snuffed out in the north of the country, and only managed to hold its ground for a few weeks in Wexford, in need of aid from France that did not arrive in sufficient force or in time. In July and August, as Emmet negotiated with the Irish government, the rebellion had been reduced to a guerrilla operation in the Wicklow hills that would peter out by October.5 Ineffective French aid, in Mayo in August and Donegal in October, could not revive the rebellion, which was comprehensively defeated with the loss of at least 15,000 and possibly as many as 30,000 lives. Emmet’s confidence in Irish revolution could not have been derived 178

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from the military fortunes of the United Irishmen. In any case, throughout his involvement in the organisation he had been a critic of the plans for armed rebellion, even in alliance with the French. That strategy had been sponsored primarily by Theobald Wolfe Tone, Arthur O’Connor, and Edward Fitzgerald. Some light was thrown on just what alternative idea of revolution, other than violent insurrection, Emmet must have had in mind by his friend William James McNeven’s testimony to the committee of the Irish House of Commons. McNeven, himself a Catholic, explained that the central goal of the United Irishmen was parliamentary reform, not Catholic Emancipation, because parliamentary reform was the key to freeing the nation’s trade, eliminating tithes and corruption, and accomplishing all the other measures they had in mind, including ameliorating the situation of the Catholic population. When the chief secretary and one of the most important establishment politicians of the period in both Britain and Ireland, Henry Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, then teased McNeven, asking if “they would have been satisfied to effect a revolution through a reform,” McNeven replied, “If a change of system be one way or another inevitable, of which I have no doubt, and which you yourselves cannot but think highly probable, who can be so much interested in its occurring peaceably as you are? In any tranquil change you will retain your properties, and the immense influence which attaches to property; in such a situation you would necessarily have a considerable share in the management of affairs; and I cannot conceive how a revolution, effected in such a manner, would much confound the order of society, give any considerable shock to private happiness.”6 Even at this point McNeven and Emmet were trying to persuade their interlocutors that their own interest lay in a change in the nature of the state, and they assumed that society and the fortunes of individuals would be relatively unaffected. Arthur O’Connor made a similar point, asserting that organising an uprising was too easily achieved to be their real goal: “If our mere object had been to effect a revolution, the British ministry and the Irish government were effecting one more violently and rapidly than we wished for.” He went on to admonish the Irish government that, by creating a sectarian counter-force to the United Irishmen in the Yeomanry and Orange Order, they had guaranteed that the revolutionary transformation of Ireland would be bloody: “You will one day pay dearly for the aid you have derived from this temporary shift.”7 179

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The leadership of the United Irishmen displayed a curious confidence in the inevitability of revolution in Ireland, especially considering that the proximate reason they were talking to the Irish government was to save the life of their friends William Byrne and Oliver Bond. They had already witnessed the painfully botched executions of Henry and John Sheares outside Newgate Prison.8 While they spoke, the forces that they presumably thought would conduct the revolution were being disarmed and destroyed by the army. Theirs was not a strong position. This seeming paradox is resolved in considering that the political thinking of these United Irishmen was conditioned by their civil society point of view. Even as political events seemed to dash their hopes, they were sustained by their perception that the underlying dynamics of history were creating a new reality that could not be resisted. Arthur O’Connor articulated this perception more clearly than anyone else: “There has been a revolution in civil society throughout Europe, of which the French Revolution is but a part; which, when considered, will demonstrate that the monopolizing and exclusionary system is no longer feasible.”9 There was little need to reflect at length on a political system, such as the Irish constitution, that was inherently anachronistic. The governing assumption of United Irish politics was that once the impediments to the free expression of Irish society were removed the natural concord and self-evident common interest of all would assert themselves. Politics as classically understood, the difficult and often tragic debate around competing and compelling insights into the nature of the community, was not an important part of this vision, since the United Irishmen could not see where values alternative to their own might be anchored. The concluding sentences of Wolfe Tone’s Argument on behalf of the Catholics of 1791 exemplified this position: “Let them look to their government; let them look to their fellow slaves, who by coalition with them may rise to be their fellow citizens and form a new order in their society, a new era in their history. Let them once cry Reform and the Catholics, and Ireland is free, independent and happy.”10 The United Irishmen anticipated a cultural revolution whose participants would acknowledge how comprehensively social relations had been transformed by commercial civilisation—so much that politics would be rendered irrelevant. They were practitioners of a new “science of politics,” one based in the insights of civil society. The Dublin United Irishmen had addressed the practical problems of 180

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political organisation when they set up a committee to draw up a plan of parliamentary reform, under the tutelage of Emmet, in January 1793. They did not really consider fundamental problems of constitutional organisation; there was no equivalent here to the Federalist Papers. All the plans they considered, and their final report distributed in January 1794, considered only reform of the franchise and the constituencies.11 The franchise they proposed, universal male suffrage in constituencies with proportionate populations, was radical, and it would have revolutionised social relations by destroying the patterns of family “interests” that structured Irish politics, as they were fully aware. However, none of the plans had anything to say about the relationship of representation, legislation, and executive power, which was of the first importance since the Irish government was directly appointed by the Crown. The political lacuna is well illustrated by William Drennan’s proposals for how this parliamentary reform was to be accomplished: 1. Let provincial conventions prepare the way to a convention of the Irish nation on this, or a similar plan. 2. Let the national convention draw up 1st, a declaration of rights personal, political religious, national, and 2dly, present a petition of right from the people of Ireland to the king of Ireland. 3. The sovereign will then interpose to save the constitution, and to bless the people.12 Drennan was imagining a Declaration of the Rights of Man and a National Assembly, or even a Convention, without a fall of the Bastille, and assuming that George III would play the role of the father of the nation, which is even more surprising because the trial of Louis XVI was happening at exactly the moment that he was writing. This lack of specificity about the politics of the union was shared with similar reform movements in Britain. Whig reformers had long argued that a convention of British people elected on a broad franchise would compel Parliament to grant franchise reform through moral pressure alone.13 The success of the Irish Volunteers in gaining legislative independence for the Irish Parliament in 1782 was the example that best illustrated their hopes, and the achievement of the Catholic Convention in 1792, which inspired Pitt and Henry Dundas to create the Catholic Relief Act of 1793 and thus gained the right to vote for proper181

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tied Catholics in Ireland, confirmed the utility of the strategy. Wolfe Tone, reflecting on the lessons of Irish reform politics, called the 1793 relief act “the first fruit of the union of Irishmen.”14 Stephen Small even argues that the Irish experience in the 1780s drove subsequent British radical politics and that the Volunteers became the inspiration for English radicals.15 The United Irishmen thought they had already witnessed the political agency of civil society and were confident of its transformative powers. In the crisis of late 1792, Britain was at the point of declaring war against France, which had just declared a republic and was on the verge of executing Louis XVI. War would drive a wedge between domestic radical politics and French affairs and force radicals to navigate a difficult course of adherence to “French principle” without becoming French agents. In the crisis the Belfast United Irishmen, strongly opposed to war, threatened revolution but eventually proposed something much more familiar: “We would most respectfully suggest the propriety of county meetings and of Provincial Conventions, by delegations from parishes, cities and great towns:—a measure by which the united voice of all the men of Ireland would be drawn to a focus.”16 The United Irishmen consistently resorted to the ideals of civil society in response to political contingencies and even international crises. The power and insight of the analysis of Irish affairs by the United Irishmen owed a lot to the civil society point of view. It allowed them to escape the religious, ethnic, and constitutional categories that immobilised Irish political life and to make credible claims for a unified national interest. Emmet especially, but also men such as Drennan, Thomas Russell, McNeven, and O’Connor, interpreted their experience from the civil society point of view and acted on that understanding. The revolution they constantly appealed to was not primarily, or originally, a recourse to violent popular insurrection but an ideal of the transformation of Ireland into a modern (that is, commercial) society, which would in turn find its appropriate mode of representation. The circular distributed by the society in December 1791 described their goal as “to make an united society of the Irish nation,” and the constitution described this society as “a brotherhood of affection, an identity of interests, a communion of rights and an union of power.”17 The idea of society allowed them to avoid the more difficult problems of political and ethnic identity. The Irish radicals’ sophisticated social and economic understanding of 182

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their context contrasts with the poverty of their political thinking, which was exhausted by the appeal to the principle of representation. This unevenness was not a personal intellectual failure but reflected more general features of late eighteenth-century thought. Conflict in Ireland in the 1790s turned on ideas which were central to British and European politics. Interrogating the place and role of civil society in the revolutionary crisis of the 1790s in Ireland has relevance well beyond the specific history of Ireland or even Britain. As Richard Bourke has argued, Irish political violence reflects a problem in the constitution of stable modern polities in Europe; it illustrates systematic problems in the construction of modern liberal democracies.18 In Ireland the capacity of the categories of civil society to manage civil dissensus, to allow sustained disagreement on the basis of the good life without collapse into civil war, was tested and found wanting. Civil society was central to Irish politics, and the collapse of Ireland into terror illustrates the weakness of the concept. Ireland was not an independent political unit, and its political life was not autonomously conditioned by the array of internal forces. The ideas and ideals of Irish political actors negotiated much wider contexts than the purely local. Ireland was a particularly fragile element of the British polity, so the revolutionary crisis of the British realms, as well as the conceptualisation of British identity and political liberty that was its central characteristic, was most dramatically played out in Ireland.19 The categories that Irish radicals used were not restricted to Irish experience or even the wider British context, but also reflected the changed assumptions in Europe and in the Atlantic world after 1789. Reflective members of the United Irishmen, such as Thomas Russell and William Drennan, interpreted the consequences of the French Revolution for Ireland by analysing Irish experience as a particular version of the general history of civilisation. To this end they used the categories generated by Scottish and Irish thinkers. Political economy was central to that body of work. Russell, in an address given to a political circle in Dublin in 1791, framed the problem of Ireland as one of commerce rather than politics: “Ireland of all countrys of Europe seems the best qualify’d for trade and manufactures . . . yet with all these advantages we are so far from striking out that some of our former ones are decaying.”20 Drennan was familiar enough with Smith that he could make jokes about the division of labour in his letters to Martha McTier; when 183

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complaining about the number of workers a contractor brought to mend his chimney, he wrote, “Every man to his trade—and I recollected that Smith expiates much on the division of labour, and though he says it accelerates work I think it retards mine.”21 More seriously, Drennan argued that Catholic Emancipation was a necessity, or else “all this will put off the day of general freedom—the barbarians and Mr Burke, and this island will be the last redeemed in Europe.”22 The leaders were not the only members of the United Irishmen aware of their debt to Scottish social theory. In an address to the Scottish people, the Dublin United Irishmen congratulated them on their genius for the writing of history as they asked for their help now in making it, and the Belfast United Irishmen scolded the Scots for the gap between their cultural creativity and political passivity.23 The French Revolution provoked the United Irishmen to use Scottish civil thought to reconsider the possibilities of modern politics, just as it inspired Richard Price, Mary Wollstonecraft, or, negatively, Burke. The anglophone debate on the French Revolution, “which seemed calculated to make an epoch in the history of every nation, and which has peculiarly acted on the condition of Ireland,” provided the frame for their political thought.24 The French Revolution was not just an exogenous event that inflected political debate on Ireland and Britain, either by transforming the nature of Anglo-French rivalry or undermining traditional assumptions about the political culture of Catholics. The narrative of events in France, which was closely followed in the British Isles, continued to generate new challenges and to open new questions which were directly relevant to domestic politics. Ireland and Britain were less witnesses to than participants in the French Revolution. The most important radical paper in Ireland, the Northern Star, largely consisted of reports on the events in France. In their fascination with the French Revolution, Irish radicals were in harmony with their British comrades, and they were fully aware of this. A 1791 banquet of the Northern Whig club held in Belfast on July 14 included a toast to “James Mackintosh and the Vindiciae Galliae ” among more predictable toasts to the fall of the Bastille and “The Glorious Memory” (of William III).25 The potential conflicts built into the complex structure of the British Empire were made actual by the consequences of the French Revolution. The imperial state found it difficult to retain any coherence, especially as it sought to mobilise manpower and resources for war after 1793. In Ireland complexity could 184

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turn to absolute paradox: the 1793 Catholic Relief Act, for instance, was pushed through an Irish Parliament that thought of itself as Patriot by the enemies of revolution, Pitt and Dundas, seeking to mobilise the Catholic population for the war against France.26 Irish radicals saw themselves as part of the general revolutionary movement and were avid consumers of its literature, as David Dickson has shown in his study of the publishing history of Thomas Paine in Ireland.27 Nor did they restrict their concerns to the island: Iain McCalmain has established the presence of key radicals, like Thomas Evans, in both London and Ireland.28 However, historians who have looked at the ideas of the United Irishmen have stressed the continuity of their thought. It has been interpreted as an amalgam of civic humanism, moral sentiment, and eschatological religious ideas rather than any radical innovation.29 Once the British context of the United Irishmen’s politics is restored, their dependence on insights generated from the ideal of civil society becomes apparent. The events in Ireland in the 1790s have to be understood in these British and European contexts. Civil society was supposed to be the key that allowed Irish thinkers to understand the complexities of Irish life in a more insightful and powerful manner and so to master them. The surprise of violence in Ireland, particularly its scale, and the re-emergence of old ethnic and sectarian forms of political allegiance confounded all expectations and forced thinkers and practical politicians to reconsider the most fundamental categories they used to explain and guide their experience. The appeal to civil society, which was supposed to end conflict, instead was found to drive it. Eventually, all parties had to abandon the classic interpretation of civil society as an understanding of the polity and embrace new ideals.

The Failure and Fracture of Civil Society Some of the most acute thinking that animated the United Irish network grew out of reflection on Scottish civil science and the British debate on civil society. Arthur O’Connor, editor of The Press, the foremost newspaper of opinion in Ireland, was a member of the radical wing of the Foxite Whigs and a friend of Francis Burdett, and he was criticised for reciting “a few pages out of Adam Smith in lieu of conversation.”30 His political experience drew directly on these plural contexts. Thomas Addis Emmet had 185

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more direct experience of Scottish learning when he attended medical school at Edinburgh University. While there he distinguished himself in his studies, acquired proficiency in Scottish moral philosophy from Dugald Stewart, and wrote a chemistry dissertation under Joseph Black. He was also an enthusiastic member of a series of intellectual clubs and societies, serving as president of five of them; particularly notable is his membership in the Speculative Society.31 The society is best described by one of its most distinguished alumni, James Mackintosh, as “upon the whole, . . . a combination of young men more distinguished than is usually found in one university at the same time.” Mackintosh goes on to comment on the members’ divergent fates and the way they exemplified the fortunes of Britain and Europe in the 1790s: “The subsequent fortunes of some of them, almost as singular as their talents, is a curious specimen of the revolutionary times in which I have lived. When I was in Scotland in 1801, [Benjamin] Constant was a tribune in France, [Charles] Hope [Lord Granton] the Lord Advocate; and Emmet, his former companion, a prisoner under his control.”32 In this world and, in particular, in the Speculative Society, they created their distinctive vision of the world and a lifelong network. It was one of the “centres of calculation” for all intellectual purposes in which its members created sustaining personal as well as intellectual networks. In his memoirs Mackintosh gives a series of pen-pictures of the most prominent members, including Emmet, and speculates on how their later careers reflected their characters and activities in the society. In later years Mackintosh would persuade Emmet, when Emmet stayed with him in London on his return from his grand tour in 1789, that he should abandon medicine and apply himself to the law.33 Mackintosh took care of Constant’s daughter Albertine in London in 1814.34 The cultural life of Edinburgh bound together disparate worlds and laid the basis for continuing relations. More important than the personal connections made at Edinburgh were the intellectual commitments. The first glimpses of some of Constant’s lifelong concerns can be seen in the papers he presented to the Speculative Society on the problem of universal toleration, one of the elements of his liberalism, and on the historical origins of religious belief, the subject of his last, unpublished, book.35 Mackintosh’s presidential address in 1786 was an attack on the slave trade, a cause he was to be associated with all his life. All of their work and their subsequent political careers were to be animated by 186

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the training they acquired here in Scottish civic science, and their writings continued to be expressed in its languages. Constant, Emmet, and Mackintosh were to support the French Revolution because they viewed it through this optic, but the effect of the revolution would be to overturn their intellectual assumptions and strain the bonds of their associational life, even their friendship. In 1798 the Speculative Society voted to expel Emmet from its membership and to erase his name from its list.36 The most famous statement of advanced Scottish opinion on the French Revolution was Mackintosh’s Vindiciae Galliae, written in response to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. A huge success, the book went through three London editions and a Dublin edition in 1791 alone.37 The book used the characteristic Smithean strategy of breaking down a polity into its constituent spheres, then analysing the norms and dynamics of each sphere through its local and independent laws. Adam Smith most famously exploited this approach to analyse the differing norms of economic and social life in commercial societies in his best-known works, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiment. What this strategy allowed for was a separation of the state, properly animated by natural law, and society, driven by opinion, custom, or culture. From this perspective one could escape the shackles of the “constitution” in analysing political events: the constitution did not create the political community but rather was the treaty of alliance between state and civil society. When that alliance ruptured, for whatever reason, it was a mistake to look to its text to understand why. As Mackintosh put it, “Great revolutions are too immense for technical formality. All the sanction that can be hoped for in such events is the voice of the people however informally or irregularly expressed.”38 Scottish analysis emphasised law and society and reduced the importance of politics as classically understood. It allowed for novel approaches to the most difficult phenomena of public life. Unlike Paine or Joseph Priestley, Mackintosh did not rehearse the radical case against Burke’s reading of the English constitution, nor did he deploy democratic political arguments in the manner of Wollstonecraft. Instead Mackintosh argued that Burke’s entire political science, the categories he used and the analytic strategies he followed, was archaic. Burke could not be taken seriously because he was mired in confusion, a confusion of words. Mackintosh drew a distinction between Burke’s rhetoric and his own method: “Analysis and method, like the discipline and armour of mod187

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ern nations, correct in some measure the inequalities of controversial dexterity and level up on the intellectual field the giant and the dwarf.”39 Mackintosh used the figure of the disciplined infantryman to invoke the science of the progress of civilisation, which structured his argument and of which he claimed Burke was ignorant. Like a knight on the modern battlefield, Burke was magnificent but archaic. Burke could not penetrate to the mechanisms that moved the revolution and instead was entrapped in the maze of events. Mackintosh sought what he called “general causes” for the French Revolution and found them in the particular development of French society. Two generations of Scottish thought had been devoted to determining the logic of society, as opposed to politics, and Mackintosh exploited this resource to understand and explain the seemingly random and chaotic. The revolt of the French army in 1789, for instance, was not a contingent but a predictable element of a developed state: “The remark of Mr Hume is here most applicable, that what depends on a few may be attributed to chance (secret circumstances) but that the actions of great bodies must ever be ascribed to general causes. It was the apprehension of Montesquieu, that the spirit of increasing armies would terminate in converting Europe into an immense camp, in changing our artisans and cultivators into military savages, and reviving the age of Attila and Genghis. Events are our preceptors, and France has taught us that this evil contains in itself its own remedy and limit. A domestic army cannot be increased without increasing the number of its ties with the people.”40 The events in France reflected the unfolding logic of its social state. Although it looked as if an unprecedented political revolution in favour of democracy was occurring, in truth France was readjusting to the civilised norm of a restrained monarchy: “The downfall of the feudal aristocracy happening in France before commerce had elevated any other class of citizens into importance, its power devolved on the crown.”41 Now that power was to be restrained by public opinion, the proper connection between society and the state. There was no need to search for conspiracies of Freemasons or the nefarious effects of utopian philosophers: “It might truly be said to have been a revolution without leaders. It was the effect of general causes operating on the people.”42 Constant was provoked to answer Burke as well, but the projected refutation was never finished, made irrelevant by Mackintosh and Paine.43 In188

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stead his first developed reflection on the revolution was a manuscript he prepared in 1790 on the revolutions in Belgium.44 Constant makes exactly the same claim to superior insight as Mackintosh and argues that though the politics of Brabant turns around the question of the Joyeuse Entrée—the constitution—the conflict fundamentally arises between groups generated from Belgian society, the parti aristo-théocratique and the democrats. What was at stake, he argued, was not the constitution but liberty.45 Here Constant was appropriating a term from the civic tradition and using it within the new science of politics. Liberty meant not participation in the constitution but the new ideal of independent self-realisation in society. This argument grounded the conclusion of his analysis that the democrats showed a more profound understanding of liberty in a commercial society. They recognised that the French alliance would guarantee Belgian liberty because the French, having attained commercial liberty, were no longer animated by raison d’état. Emmet did not join his colleagues in replying to Burke directly, but rather on his return to Dublin he applied their ideas practically by becoming involved in reforming circles. Emmet’s political activity was animated by the thinking he had been exposed to in Scotland, and it illustrated the consequences of Mackintosh’s ideas. In temperament he was no radical reformer with a burning need to fling himself into public life. His grandson, writing his biography, claimed that he actually restrained the resort to rebellion by the United Irishmen until his arrest.46 His personal circumstances would have made him, if anything, a conservative. Emmet was no marginal “gutter Rousseauian” alienated from the cultural life of the high Enlightenment, but a man who shared in the world of the European republic of letters.47 After graduating from Edinburgh he toured the medical schools of Europe, preparing to take up a practice in Dublin. Patronage and mutual favours were an accepted part of that elite world and knit it together across the continent. Pierre Marie Auguste Broussonet, a medical researcher and botanist from Montpellier, had been a colleague in Edinburgh and was instrumental in having Emmet’s father Robert and the Dublin chemist Richard Kirwan, who would later be another United Irishman, elected as corresponding members of the Montpellier Société royale des sciences in 1788.48 From 1790 to 1791 Emmet redirected himself from a medical to a legal career, and he was admitted to the Irish bar in 1790. He had a name to 189

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make if he was to leave the shadow of his more rhetorically talented, and recently deceased, elder brother Temple. He also got married, to Jane Patten, in 1791. Wolfe Tone names him as a member of the political club that preceded the formation of the United Irishmen, but Emmet seems never to have submitted any paper to the club, and in his Memoirs Wolfe Tone appends him to his recollections of it as an afterthought.49 Richard Madden agrees that Emmet seems not to have had a revolutionary character and that he certainly seems to have had a cautious side. In 1802, for instance, he wrote to McNeven asking him to delay the publication of his Pieces of Irish History for fear that by technically breaking the terms of the parole of the prisoners in Fort George it might provoke the French government to return them to the English. In the same letter he admitted to McNeven that his real interest now lay in immigrating to the United States and picking up the pieces of his private life.50 He seems to have been dragged into revolutionary politics by a curious combination of having more politically motivated friends, such as Russell and Wolfe Tone, and the changing circumstances. His connection with Wolfe Tone led him to be appointed legal advisor to the Catholic Committee in 1792. Emmet did not join the United Irishmen until 1796, and he was promoted to the Leinster Directory in 1797 only when Arthur O’Connor was arrested. However, this chain of contingency does not tell the full story of Emmet’s political career in Dublin. His education in Scottish civil science made him vulnerable to the gravitational pull of public life because Irish public discourse turned around precisely the distinctions of state and civil society that he had been trained to recognise as central to the science of politics. Irish political discourse had centred on civil society since the early part of the century, and it was through this optic that parties to debate interpreted the revolutionary politics of the 1790s. The United Irishmen did not distinguish themselves from other bodies of organised opinion in Ireland by using these ideas; the categories used by all parties in Irish affairs in the 1790s, including the conservatives battling the United Irishmen, were grounded in this language. In fact the language of civil society had become something of a boilerplate in Irish life. It was not restricted to politics but was adapted to the discussion of morals and manner. John Aikin, for instance, did a good impression of Polonius in his pedagogical writing and can be relied upon to reflect a consensus in informing his son that “if perfection be anywhere at190

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tainable, it would seem to be particularly in those institutions which are the creatures of man—in which he has a specific end or purpose in view, involving no wills or powers but his own—which are purely matters of convention between man and man, that may be made whenever he chooses to make them. Such are the regulations belonging to civil society. In these concerns, if the end be first precisely laid down, and experience be faithfully consulted as to the success of different means, it is scarcely possible that continual progress should not be met, as the world advance in reason and knowledge, toward a perfect coincidence of means and end.”51 The ideal of civil society was tolerance, an aspiration to accommodate all views within a capacious ideal of sociability. The aspiration to consensus and civil peace was illustrated by the antiquarian William Bennet, who was Bishop of Cork and Ross and from 1794 Bishop of Cloyne; he was the third in a line of scholarly and improving bishops to have graced the see, after George Berkeley and Richard Woodward. In 1793 he wrote to a young poet friend, “You and I, my young friend, look upon establishments both religious and civil through different mediums, and no wonder we form different conclusions. But I have known enough of the weakness and blindness of man in his present state, not to allow to you, and entreat for myself, entire liberty of opinion upon these delicate topics.”52 However, the real point of the discourse of civil society in Ireland was to not to illuminate meliorism or toleration but to buttress the ancient constitution.53 Convention and design did not extend to political institutions, only to society. Edward Bayly, the rector of Arklow, reminded the newly created militia that they were fighting for civil society against the illusions of political utopians. He argued that the violence of the revolution was the result of misunderstanding the relationship between civil society and political power and “will remain for all ages an awful, a memorable example of the fatal consequences which must ever ensue from agitating the public mind with visionary systems of an equality incompatible with civil society—with perfection unattainable in this uncertain life.”54 Civil society was invoked by William Eden, Baron Auckland, to criticise Paine’s vision of natural rights. Rights were not natural but generated by the historical experience of a particular society. Eden’s use of the idea in an Irish context is particularly interesting because he saw Ireland as one element in a wider imperial, even global whole. His Irish experience was extensive: as well as serving in the executive as chief secretary, he was 191

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the member for Dungannon in the Irish House of Commons from 1780 to 1782. This was only one strand of his efforts as penal reformer and theorist of commercial society. In 1786 he had negotiated the trade treaty with France, an instrument he saw very much through the optic of Adam Smith’s ideals: “That this kingdom in sound policy should wish for a liberal system of commerce with France I have never doubted, even before we had the advantage of Mr Smith’s labours to prove it . . . for it is true that nations which live in intimate habits of commerce with each other and with a connection of interests and reciprocal trusts of property are less likely to quarrel, than those which are attached to adverse plans of trade: it will follow that the present negotiation, if successful, may by its pacific tendency become the most solid blessing that this county ever received from its governors or from Providence.”55 Eden embraced the idea of civil society to the point of arguing that “with its consequent rights and benefits [it] is a state to which the human race has a natural inevitable tendency.” If history drove human societies toward civil society, which was the lesson of Scottish speculative history, then appeals to natural rights were, in this sense, appeals against nature: “Natural rights—and civil rights—are so distinct as to be in some instances contradictory; and that one very material civil right—is that individuals be secured in enjoying the advantages of an inequality which is not a natural right i.e. not a right whilst men continue in a state of nature.”56 The conservative deployment of the idea of civil society was clearly incompatible with Mackintosh’s development of it, yet even some United Irishmen expressed themselves through this rhetoric of political quietism. Tobias Molloy, of Mayo, affirmed that his reforming zeal could not and would not alter the constitution of the kingdom, and that all that could be asked for was to participate in its benefits.57 Civil society in conservative hands was designed to be the intellectual outwork of the ancient constitution. Transformations in civil life were irrelevant to sovereign power, which existed on an entirely separate plain. Just as the idea that political structures existed to protect the differing values generated by a complex society could be used to criticize the structures of the British Empire, so might the opposite argument, that the empire guaranteed the safety of civil society from faction and enthusiasm, be deployed by conservatives, most famously by Burke.58 The United Irish critique of the governance of Ireland turned precisely 192

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on the rejection of the argument that the political constitution guaranteed and protected civil society; instead, “in our opinion ignorance has been the demon of discord, which has so long deprived Irishmen, not only of the blessings of a well-regulated government, but even the common benefits of civil society.”59 Thomas Ledlie Birch, the Presbyterian minister at Saintfield in County Down, argued that progress occurred despite politics: “Whatever mischiefs may have resulted to human society from that kind of philosophic illumination by which modern times are distinguished, one certain good at least has been produced by it—men have become better acquainted —the bond of common nature has been strengthened—and each country begins to feel an interest in the concerns of every other. It is not to a more extensive personal intercourse, or to the creation of any new principles of political union, that this is to be attributed. It is owing solely to an increased communication of sentiment and feeling—to a knowledge which has diffused itself through the world that the human mind is everywhere made of the same materials, and that on the great questions which concern men’s interest in society, the men of every country are alike.”60 The politics of civil society were so complex that some members of the United Irishmen endorsed the constitutionalist position. In curious ways radicals, reformers, and conservatives in Ireland disagreed not on the nature of the nation taken as a unit, nor even, at base, on the relationship of religion to politics, but on the relationship between the forms of life generated in civil society and those of empire. Emmet’s odd radicalism can be understood from this common appeal of all parties to civil society. His friendships might well have dragged him into revolutionary politics, but it was the rigidity and, to the Scottish mind, inaccuracy of the conservative portrayal of the relationship between society and state that provoked Emmet beyond comment into action. The Irish discussion was impoverished by comparison to Scottish theory because it ignored opinion, the third category that connected the other two: state and society. Writing in The Press under the pseudonym of Montanus, Emmet analysed the pathologies of the Irish polity and its possible solutions. The idea of the nation as a civil society, often presented as an organic growth, animated all his thoughts. The problem of Irish political life was the suppression of the natural growth of civil society by the state, but this was a condition that could not be sustained: “The tree is warped from its natural 193

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growth, and heaven-ward tendency, and bowed to the earth by the application of immense force and irresistible pressure; remove the force and pressure, it will return, with a tremendous elasticity; it will resume the bias with God and nature connected with its first germ, and spread its branches to the sky.”61 Opinion had enlightened even the poorest Irish, promoting “the increase of information and improvement of intellect among the poor,” but the repression of opinion threatened disaster.62 The disaster could take one of two forms. The people of Ireland could be provoked to a violent rebellion that would destroy the fabric of civil society: “The extremity of oppression and misery alone could destroy the implicit veneration and terror with which they had been taught to view rank and property.”63 Alternatively, the instrument of oppression, the yeomanry, “to whom we may attribute the loss of Catholic Emancipation, of Parliamentary Reform and of temper and moderation in the government of the country,” could be the instrument of the overturn of civil government.64 “Taught to debate, to agitate, to give law, invested with the whole executive authority of the country,” the yeomanry were potential praetorians, capable of replacing civil government with military rule and so destroying commercial civility and civil society.65 The United Irishmen, for Emmet, did not constitute a revolutionary organisation but stood in for the repressed Irish civil society and gave it voice: “You ask me what I suppose to be the meaning and object of the people? I answer that they feel that they have been deprived of the blessings of the English constitution; that they have been made the slaves of a cruel and outrageous military despotism—and they demand atonement for the past and security for the future.”66 Emmet conceived of the conservative resistance to the United Irishmen as a species of irrational denial of an evident social reality. This manner of thinking underplayed both the political ideals animating the notion of the constitution and those implied by the radicals. Both forms of political adherence would put the capacious notion of civil society deployed by Emmet under stress as the 1790s developed.

Civil Society and Politics in the English Debate on the French Revolution The Irish debate on civil society formed part of the British response to the French Revolution, and both debates were conditioned by the work of 194

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Edmund Burke. Burke and his interlocutors established some of the fault lines in the civil society point of view. The analysis of the place of classic politics by participants in the Burke debate underlined the insufficiency of civil society as a conceptual position from which to understand and orientate oneself in a world in crisis. Civil society was central to the controversy provoked by Burke’s gloomy predictions for the French Revolution. The fracturing of “the little platoon we belong to in society . . . the first link in the series by which we proceed to a love of our country” was one of the major criticisms he addressed to the revolution, but civil society held a more central place in his ideas than simply illustrating his adherence to a society of orders.67 Burke described liberty as a condition achieved in civil society, and he doubted it was the goal of the French revolutionaries: “I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with civil and social manners.”68 Burke condemned the animating ideals of the French revolutionaries, and British radical reformers, as chimerical fantasies in contrast to the solid ground of liberty he described. Burke’s description of civil liberty in a commercial society was very close to that of his radical critics. He diverged from them when he argued that the liberty the subject enjoyed in civil life depended on the sublime nature of monarchical sovereignty as the condition for its maintenance. Social authority and political authority, argued Burke, were different in essence, and ideals proper to one could not be exported to the other. This distinction between politics and social life was the ground for his famous argument that there had never been a revolution in England; in 1688 “they left the crown what, in the eye and estimation of the law, it had ever been, perfectly irresponsible.”69 Burke’s interpretation of modern politics was idiosyncratic because it retained a specifically political form of experience and authority, which he identified absolutely with monarchy, while it also recognised the kinds of social authority generated in civil society, which in other hands were the ground for radical anticipations of political change. For Burke, political institutions and experiences were characteristically sublime and could not be analysed or even created according to the logic of mutual benefits that characterised relationships in civil society. “To 195

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give freedom is easy,” he argued; but “to temper together those opposite elements of liberty and restraint” was the secret to constructing a free government, and Burke thought that in the absence of an understanding of the necessarily asocial power of the sovereign, “before its final settlement it may be obliged to pass, as one of our poets says ‘through great varieties of untried being,’ and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and blood.”70 The charge that the ideals of the French revolutionaries, and by extension the English radicals, were fantasies, unreal imaginings, was turned back on Burke by his opponents. Tom Furniss has pointed out that the rhetorical strategies used in this debate mirrored one another; conservatives and radicals used visionary rhetoric and condemned the other for so doing.71 The basis for this odd symmetry was the common appeal to civil society as the ground of experience, and the incomprehension was generated because most commentators did not recognise that Burke saw the scope of society as more limited than they did. Of Burke’s interlocutors only Mary Wollstonecraft responded to his argument for the necessity of a political sublime. She accepted Burke’s insight that the political community did not grow organically out of relations in civil society and recognised the centrality of a self-transcending sublime to the institution of law, but she denied that this political experience was foreign to reason. Burke argued that the sublime truths of morality could only be socially sustained by an established church: “Such sublime principles ought to be infused into persons of exalted situations; and religious establishments provided, that they may continually revive and enforce them.”72 Wollstonecraft acknowledged that moral truths had to be sublime, but denied they needed establishment: “I reverence the rights of man, . . . I bend with awful reverence when I enquire on what my fear is built—I fear that sublime power, whose motive for creating me must have been wise and good; and I submit to the moral laws which my reason deduces from this view of my dependence on him—It is not his power that I fear—it is not to an arbitrary will, but to unerring reason I submit.”73 Wollstonecraft’s idea of reason articulated the political and the social. Reason was sublime, but it was also fundamentally democratic: “A few simple truths meet the first enquiry of reason, and appear as clear to an unwarped mind, as that air and bread are necessary to enable the body to fulfil its vital function.”74 Wollstonecraft proposed a demotic sublime in re196

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sponse to Burke’s monarchical and hierarchical staging of the experience and reversed Burke’s argument for hierarchy. Burke, she argued, was susceptible to a simulacrum of compassion for suffering: “Misery, to reach your heart, I perceive, must have its cap and bell.” If “a man of rank and fortune” did not share the common lot, “is it among the list of possibilities that [he] can have received a good education? How can he discover that he is a man, when all his wants are instantly supplied and invention is never sharpened by necessity?”75 Wollstonecraft deployed pain and suffering in a different way than Burke to establish the ground of the sublime. Where for Burke they were associated with the legitimate punishment that was one of the attributes of sovereignty, for Wollstonecraft they were elements of the hardship experienced by the common people in daily life. Her fundamentally Christian vision saw suffering humanity as capable of sublime compassion, and therefore capable of finding insight into the demands of justice. Belief in the equal access of all to the truths of reason, won by the experience of the sublime in compassion, drove Wollstonecraft to argue that the greatest offence to reason was grinding poverty. Such destitution made it impossible for individuals, driven by necessity at all times, to incorporate “the truly sublime character who acts from principle,” and Wollstonecraft ended her book by arguing that social relations should not be the basis for political participation but should be transformed to enable independence.76 Her corresponding proposals to divide estates and re-establish peasant agriculture as the basis of English political economy aligned her thought with the agrarian radicalism of Paine and Thomas Spence.77 Wollstonecraft’s response to Burke created a specifically political language for democratic politics. For both thinkers, civil society could not generate a set of political categories from itself. They illustrated how civil society was the terrain for political debate, not the final context of political judgement. Burke’s conservatism and Wollstonecraft’s radicalism were rooted in divergent perceptions of the nature and meaning of civil society. The appeal to social experience could not adjudicate between fundamentally different ideals of the good life, which very quickly became expressed as alternative political ideals, conservative and democratic, with conflicting claims on the organisation of basic resources, especially land. English politics could survive, and even thrive, on such an explicit reorganisation of the spectrum of political opinion from conservative to radical. The Scottish project of re197

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describing the nation as a social entity rather than a political community had been rejected, so the coherence of the nation did not depend on the shared moral horizon of civil society. Such an escalation in Ireland, from claims based on the shared experience of civil society to explicit appeals to political ideals, would lead to a breakdown in civil order, sectarian terror, government repression, and eventually revolution. In Ireland, recognition of politics as competition between competing ideals of sovereignty was impossible because Ireland was not sovereign. Ireland had been imagined not as a sovereign nation but as a social nation; political events put the languages of social harmony under extreme stress and revealed the often conflicting hopes and aspirations that were embedded in the notion of society. As these assumptions came into view, conflict became inevitable, but so did innovation.

The Fall of Civil Society The conditions of and limits to a politics of civil society became apparent in 1794. Radical aspirations became difficult to sustain in legal politics as both the British and Irish governments became less tolerant of opposition. Domestic politics were driven by international conditions. As French armies began to assert themselves on the continent and the prospect of easy victories in French overseas colonies began to recede, the pressures of war began to tell on Britain and its dependencies, and the strategic need to eliminate internal dissent was endorsed by the government.78 William Eden had foreseen what the results of prolonged warfare would be in Ireland and, indeed, for Europe: “I am willing to believe that if the continental war ends well, Ireland will be kept in that order and correction which are essential to her own happiness; and if it should not end well I fear that all civil governments and all mankind will be involved in one general darkness and misery.”79 John Horne Tooke, Thomas Hardy, and John Thelwall were arraigned on treason charges in London, and the police closed the Society of United Irishmen in Dublin after they had been fatally compromised by Wolfe Tone’s discussions of the possibility of support for a French invasion with the French agent William Jackson. Both events occurred in May of 1794. The efficacy of political power, and of the repressive potential of the state, could

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not have been more vividly illustrated than by the efficiency with which the opposition was immobilised. The defenders of the British, and particularly the Irish, constitutions did not accept that they were anachronistic, made irrelevant by the dynamics of history, and they threatened to engage in reform by pursuing a conservative rather than radical agenda. Pitt’s accommodation with the Portland Whigs in July 1794 regrouped British political forces for a long-term struggle with France, creating the kind of new imperial centre that Edmund Burke had long hoped for.80 The ideological colouring of that alliance was not at first apparent, but Ireland was to be the theatre in which the combination of reform and conservative retrenchment that characterised the alliance would be worked out. The appointment of William Wentworth Fitzwilliam, Second Earl Fitzwilliam, as lord lieutenant of Ireland in late 1794 was generally understood to mean that the most grievous abuses of the Irish political system would be addressed and some sort of Catholic Emancipation granted. His achievement of office was taken as a sign of the vigour of establishment, while also posing a threat to more comfortable interests. Fitzwilliam was a strong ally of Portland and a friend to Irish Whigs such as the extensive Ponsonby family and Henry Grattan. John Fitzgibbon, an archconservative and the incumbent lord chancellor of Ireland, wrote to John Beresford, who was temporarily to lose his position as commissioner of revenue under Fitzwilliam, that the only way he could see of defeating Fitzwilliam’s support for Grattan’s proposals “for the repeal of all laws in any manner affecting Papists” was to have them stopped “by authority from England.”81 Fitzgibbon even indulged a little sarcasm on the topic of the reforming energy of the government, contrasting the social and ameliorative vision of reformers with his own sense of the national interest: “We talk very much of increasing the military establishment, but ministers are so much engaged in doing good that they have not leisure to think of anything so trivial as the defence and security of the country.”82 Fitzgibbon, either from principle or for purely pragmatic reasons, campaigned for an ideologically tight commitment to the state, the constitution, and Protestant power in opposition to Fitzwilliam’s more reforming vision.83 Fitzgibbon was at least an element in the coalition of interests that persuaded George III that any further concessions to Catholics would corrupt his coronation oath. The subsequent fail-

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ure of Fitzwilliam’s viceroyalty, dismissed in March 1795 for having overstepped his brief by cashiering Beresford, eliminated the last illusion of a politics without polarisation. Far from being seen as a sign of government exhaustion, Fitzwilliam’s fall was interpreted as a sign of a deepened commitment to “the principles of the constitution.” In Ireland Fitzgibbon was at the centre of efforts to organise the state and its agents in the task of instituting this new understanding of their role. In a letter reinstituting James Stewart Moore, who had been suspended for allowing a demonstration demanding release of United Irish prisoners, as a magistrate in county Antrim, he admonished him that “it appeared to me that you, when upon more occasions than that, acted in such a manner as betrayed on your part, if not a wish to conciliate the banditti who now infest the county of Antrim, at least a disinclination to exert yourself as a magistrate to suppress them.”84 Moore was informed that in the future he should see his assignment as the vigorous pursuit of “rioters and traitors.” What Harry Thomas Dickinson has termed “a conservative ideology of considerable appeal, endurance and intellectual power” was turned in the hands of William Pitt and his allies into a powerful political movement.85 William Drennan, who began to withdraw from public life at this juncture, pointed out the consequence of a more aggressive stance on the part of a government which now saw Ireland as an element of a British polity under attack: “The unhappy circumstances of the times, have destroyed all gradations of opinion; the isthmus of neutrality has been worn away by the contending waves of the opposite sides; and the anarchy of interests has resolved into two distinct casts, that stand lowering at each other like two adverse armies.”86 The immediate consequence in Ireland was a militarization of society. Already in 1793 raising the militia had put significant numbers of young men under arms, and the escalation of conflict intensified the military dynamic. Thomas Bartlett calculates that as much as 20 percent of the male population saw active military service of some sort in the Crown forces between 1793 and 1815, and this mobilisation was mirrored by revolutionaries and irregulars, including Defenders and members of the Orange Order.87 The raising of the yeomanry in 1796 put eighty thousand Protestant men under arms—in contrast to the militia, which admitted members of all religions—and so intensified the fragmentation of society. The application of the Insurrection Act, which allowed counties to 200

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be proclaimed as insurrectionary and the military to be given wide scope to disarm the population, laid the basis for civil war and terror, including the brutal suppression of Ulster by General Lake’s forces from March 1797. The language of armed camps became not a metaphor but a description. The latent contradictions and animosities that had been occluded by the language of civil society now became apparent. The militarisation of Irish political life became one more element of the reanimation of Anglo-French rivalry as ideological struggle. The different commitments entailed by invoking civil society became the content of conflict, and thinkers such as Mackintosh who had previously used the concept as a master category that could relativise conflict in terms of deep social processes were now driven to assign a political, partisan meaning to the term. Civil society had emerged as a concept designed to make an empire of liberty comprehensible. It had asserted the possibility of civil liberty under a stable framework of law generated by an imperial state. In the face of a state that would not accept the moral authority of civil society, society faced two choices. It could accede to the sovereign claim and acknowledge that political power was independent of civil society, or it could absorb political power and so cease to be civil society, becoming instead the basis for a claim to some form of capacious, democratic citizenship. The trajectories of the adherents to civil society arguments after the mid-1790s divide according to which of these alternatives they were driven to. Ironically, the most complete intellectual exercise in the politics of civil society in Ireland appeared just as the conditions for a politics of civil society were becoming more difficult. Henry Joy, a newspaper editor, published his “Thoughts on the British Constitution,” which had run as an occasional series in his Belfast News Letter, as part of the Belfast Politics, with Henry Bruce, a Presbyterian minister and principal of the Belfast Academy, in 1794. Joy made the most powerful assertions for the primacy of opinion, arguing that public opinion, “which animates every breast and whispers that the rights of the people, pursued even in the ways of peace, cannot be withheld,” even as he asserted his political creed as “the Constitution, the whole Constitution and nothing but the Constitution.” 88 The very belief that there was an opinion that formed separately from politics was the core of the civil society point of view. In the introduction to the collection, Bruce and Joy confronted the fact that opinion and the constitution had not developed together as hoped and that instead they were facing 201

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ubiquitous political violence. They asserted that “if the people be unanimous they will succeed; if not it is vain for clubs and juntos to think of inspiring governments with any permanent alarm”; at the same time they criticised the United Irishmen for having indulged in “imitation of republican principles and language,” effectively conceding that ultimate authority lay with the government.89 Even this highly moderate intervention, designed to rescue a consensus from a rapidly polarising politics, was considered too radical by the authorities, and sales of the volume were halted after only eighty copies had been distributed.90 The tensions and even contradictions within the language of civil society were created by its inability to manage and order civil dissensus in the British realms. The disintegration of civil society was not just experienced as a crisis of political categories; commentators observed a polarisation and politicisation of social life. A series of letters to Burke from correspondents in Cork in May 1797 argued that “there is a very great and general change in the minds of the people here brought about within a short period. No more of that enthusiasm of loyalty and detestation of French principles which prevailed so much on the late alarms. It is now ‘the English ministers and government detest poor Ireland and would set us to cutting one another’s throats as they have done in the North . . . ‘ In short such is that language spoken by every man almost you meet and a great deal worse.”91 As expectations of relatively peaceful social change were confounded, the unthinkable became possible: “On the whole it appears to me that the minds of men are so heated, that nothing but the horrors of Revolution can cool them. Many wish for the experiment and fly to ills they know not of.”92 The new and sometimes contradictory elements introduced into a body of thought that was already very complex were not just Irish. Political events, which confounded all expectation, undermined deep-seated assumptions. The trajectory of the French Revolution, from its delirious beginning through Terror, revolutionary wars, and eventually Bonaparte’s dictatorship, was almost impossible to comprehend and understand under any circumstances but was particularly explosive in the tense Irish context. “The Annals of Ballitore” by Mary Leadbeater, born Mary Shackleton, captures the collapse of civility in Ireland like no other document. Begun in 1799, in the immediate aftermath of the violence of the rebellion, but only published, with many editorial emendations, in 1862, the account describes 202

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the effects of militarised political conflict.93 Ballitore was a small village in Kildare and the site of the school, run by the Quaker Shackleton family, at which Edmund Burke had been educated before attending Trinity College. The circle around the Shackletons exemplified the kind of polite and affective sociability that was the ideal of a civil society, and they sustained their emotional connections with widely scattered friends. Like the Blacks, the Shackletons and their friends poured their hearts out in their letters. In 1757 the Ballitore old boy William Dennis, now running his own school “in the more kindly soil of Munster,” sent word of the network to his old teacher: “I have been engaged in a doughty contest with [Thomas] Sheridan lately, but know not yet how it will end. Why do not ye learned and virtuous assist in destroying this pretender to science who would graft education on a playhouse and make mimick orators? I have lost my old ally Mr Brennan who went to London last January, thence never to return. You are the only friend I have now in this island whose head and heart I equally esteem. I assure you this reflection hath made me often melancholy of late. I have heard nothing from Ned [Edmund Burke] since October but have twice read and am now reading his book, which I sincerely think a masterly performance and in a manner entirely new.”94 As late as 1792 Burke’s son Richard acknowledged the emotional commitment to Ballitore: “I trust you will do me the justice to believe that when I came into this country I did not intend to leave it without the satisfaction of visiting Ballitore. It is with infinite respect I find I shall be obliged to return without gratifying my ardent desire to embrace you and to give you some account of my adventures here in my crusade in favour of the poor papishes, as well as of our friends in England.”95 Ballitore was an exemplar of modern civility. This idyll could not and did not survive the polarisation of Irish society. By 1797 Mary Leadbeater reported that because the Quaker community at Ballitore was not obviously committed to the establishment it was being accused of harbouring revolutionary sympathies: “Mutual jealousies and discontents found their way even here, though I believe a party spirit prevailed less in this place than in most others. It might be retorted that all here were croppies, a term I suppose originating in those who professed republicanism wearing their hair short. This was an unjust aspersion on the peaceable inhabitants of the vale. It is true that the poison had been administered, and was secretly pervading the mass of the people, but we who were of a profes203

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sion which denied the spirit of contention, were undeserving of such censure. We should deem it great inconsistency between principles and practice, if we joined the cry of either party against the other.”96 The village had the bad luck to fall into the hands of the United Irish insurgents on the 25th of May and to be recaptured by the military on the 27th, who burnt it to the ground, executing able-bodied men, such as the local doctor and carpenter, and even burning the house of the widow of a militiaman who had been killed in government service during the skirmish at Kilcullen.97 One incident more than any other captured Mary Leadbeater’s sense of a moral world that had been destroyed: “At the same time a fat tobacconist from Carlow lolled upon one of our chairs and talked boastingly of the exploits performed by the military whom he had accompanied, how they had shot several, adding, ‘we burned one in a barrel.’ I never in my life felt disgust strongly; it even overpowered the horror due to the deed, which had been actually committed.”98 Modern morals had proven not to be adequate to protect the population from the horrors of civil war. Expectations of peaceful political change were confounded in Ireland, and the ideas that had sustained those expectations became untenable across the British polity. By 1799 Mackintosh was writing to George Moore of Mayo, who had written in criticism of the French, “I greatly admire your honesty and magnanimity, in openly professing your conversion. I think I shall have the courage to imitate you. I have too long submitted to mean and evasive compromises. It is my intention, in this winter’s lectures, to profess publicly and unequivocally, that I abhor, abjure and forever renounce the French Revolution.”99 Abjuring the French Revolution produced a seismic shift in Mackintosh’s intellectual outlook. As he explained to Richard Sharp, renouncing the French Revolution meant overturning an entire mechanism for the interpretation and understanding of the political world, Scottish social science. It also unmoored his entire personality: “Those only who had irrevocably attached their early hopes, their little reputation, which they might be pardoned for exaggerating, and even as they conceived, their moral character, to the success or failure of the French revolution, can conceive the succession of feelings, most of them very painful, which agitated the mind during its progress.”100 Mackintosh’s recantation and reorientation of his ideas became a major public event. The course of lectures on natural law he gave at Lincoln’s Inns in 1799 made a sensation. Advertised 204

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in the Herald, the Times, and the Morning Chronicle, the lectures had to be postponed for a week to allow all the prospective subscribers to receive their tickets.101 The stress placed even on Scottish intellectual elites themselves over the revolution can be gauged through the writings of Dugald Stewart, who worked hard to distance his mentors from any radical ideas. The theme of his biographies of the great figures of the middle of the century was the chasm between Hume’s dangerous ideas and the prudent theorising of his friends.102 In places Stewart’s retelling of the history of the Scottish Enlightenment amounted to wholesale distortion, such as his promotion of the relatively minor Thomas Reid as a serious intellectual alternative to Hume.103 Constant’s novel Adolphe, begun in 1805, explores the psychology of a man who suffers the erosion of the integrity of his character by his abandonment of the values of honour and propriety in favour of the revolutionary ideal of self-expression. The famous deterioration of the relationship between Emmet and O’Connor in Fort George, after O’Connor accused Emmet of being in the pay of Dublin Castle, can plausibly be interpreted in terms of the strain of clever men trying to make sense of events that quite escaped their comprehension. They had all understood revolution to be an inevitable process, a process to be explained and mastered by the new science of politics. The failure of revolution was also the failure of the theory, of the way of understanding and talking about public life. In the aftermath of failure, and after four years of incarceration as a result, McNeven and Emmet offered a completely different understanding of Irish revolution to the social process they had anatomised in earlier years. Power, international relations, and political opportunity explained the outbreak: “French armies, French fleets and French treasure were solicited and obtained by America, and . . . in similar circumstances they solicited and were promised similar aid.”104 The consequences of normative social change have been replaced with the calculations of high politics. A retreat to a kind of realist or Machiavellian science of politics, or despair at the possibility of any rational approach to public life, was not the only exit taken from the politics of civil society; embracing the ideas of political democracy offered an alternative. Arthur O’Connor’s political thinking had been governed by the same idea of the progress of civil society as Emmet’s. His central argument had been that strictly political questions were secondary to “the phenomena which appear in civil society. If the ex205

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isting institutions are consonant to the self-interest of the bulk of mankind, in their present advanced state of knowledge, independence and industry, they will stand: But, if they are repugnant to their self-interest, no force, no device, can uphold them.”105 His initial commitment to revolutionary change in Ireland in the first half of the 1790s developed from this understanding of the consequences of the age of revolutions for Britain: “There has been a revolution in civil society throughout Europe, of which the French Revolution is but a part; which, when considered will demonstrate that the monopolizing and exclusionary system is no longer feasible.”106 Taking Hume and Montesquieu as his guides, O’Connor developed the position that political arrangements would and should reflect the organisation of civil society. His State of Ireland of 1798 still cited this idea. The revolutions in Geneva, the United Provinces, Brabant, and finally France were not political coups or the outcomes of international competition between great powers but the consequence of the progress of commercial civilisation: “For it is from the pernicious consequences which have followed from the continuation of those laws of primogeniture, entails and settlements that I mean to account for the revolution which has taken place in parts of Europe, and for that revolution which must go through every other commercial and civilised part where those laws are in force.”107 O’Connor’s analysis of Ireland as an element of the civil society of Europe and the Atlantic world exploded the polarities of Irish politics. He dismissed the worries of the theorists of Protestant liberty about Catholic emancipation as incomprehensible: “I shall ask of no better proof that they are entitled to liberty, than their having the spirit to claim it.”108 O’Connor’s anti-imperialism was rooted in the same set of concerns that animated Burke’s unionism. Both men were interested in the survival of civil society, but each understood the problem differently. Where Burke saw civil society as an assemblage of customs and habits, O’Connor saw it as the sphere of application of social knowledge. Burke could only see revolution as a disaster, but O’Connor understood it as a particular kind of challenge: “When the mind has arrived at that state of political knowledge, by which it is enabled to discover the certainty of the immense revolution which at this instant operates in civil society, it is apt to be puzzled to account how mankind who are now, even in the most enlightened countries, immersed in such

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gross prejudices, shall be able to acquire sufficient knowledge to establish and support the change.”109 The condition of Ireland in its revolutionary moment transformed what that knowledge might be and who might have it. This model, where he saw political change depending on social change, did not survive his revolutionary experience, but he did not abandon his interest in society. O’Connor’s novel idea was to reintroduce politics to social life, to integrate politics into the long-term processes he saw operating in European history. In his testimony to the Irish House of Lords, O’Connor took Adam Smith’s ideas on commercial society in a new direction and argued that political corruption created Irish poverty, that Irish politics created the conditions for Irish society rather than the other way around. Empire was taken not as a stable context within which the life of the nation evolved but as a political fact which was inherently pathological and amenable to change. O’Connor unpicked the governing assumptions that had conditioned Irish thinking on empire and created the context for civil society. The restrictions on Irish trade, especially on agricultural production, were not a necessary concession to over-arching imperial interest, but a pathology. They meant that capital could not be accumulated in the country; “hence the best machinery, and the most extensive division of labour, by both which, labour is so wonderfully abridged, the low profits which result from abundant capital, and the being able to give long credits, are all lost to a nation bereft of every means to acquire wealth.”110 O’Connor was led not only to popular sovereignty, but to the popular interest as the foundation of the polity. This conclusion had radical consequences and separated him from his colleagues. His view that happiness depended on popular citizenship—“Let the people have representatives they can call friends, men in whom they can place confidence, men they have really chosen”— contrasts with Emmet’s reply when asked what ideas of politics the people adhered to: “It has not been my fortune to communicate much with them on that subject.”111 Both O’Connor and Emmet used Scottish civil science to understand Ireland’s circumstance, but O’Connor diverged from Emmet in arguing that popular citizenship was the remedy to Ireland’s problems. The idea of civil society was not capacious enough for the claim to autonomy and self-definition O’Connor wanted to make, so he was driven onto the ground of democratic self-assertion. His democratic commitment drove

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him to the view of neo-Jacobins such as John Thelwall that the sovereignty of an unreformed parliament was not even an approximation of liberty but inherently threatened the rights of the people.112 O’Connor’s revolutionary experience drove him to reconfigure civil society as an element of a democratic polity rather than as a model for the polity in itself. The reduced scope for civil society in his thinking allowed him to reconsider both social and political relationships and to assess them in terms of the demands of citizenship. The most radical changes in his thinking can be seen in his treatment of the question of landholding. Nothing could have been more explosive in the Irish context. The conservative charge against the United Irishmen was that beneath their rhetoric of social continuity lay an ambition to threaten the Williamite land settlement and reassert Catholic land claims. The Sheares brothers were executed because a manuscript proclamation, never printed or published, was found in their effects promising a redistribution of land: “The brave patriot who survives the present glorious struggle and the family of him who has fallen or shall fall hereafter, shall receive from the hands of a grateful nation an ample recompense out of that property which the crimes of our enemies have forfeited into its hands.” In fact their promise extended beyond compensation for active United Irishmen to a wholesale agrarian law, recasting Irish political economy: “We will never sheathe the sword until every being in the country is restored to those equal rights, which the God of nature has given to all men.”113 This kind of transformative ideal was very far from the socially conservative language used earlier, and it was the obvious consequence of replacing civil society with popular citizenship as the animating ideal of the organisation. The populace in Ireland was the peasantry, and their expectations were an amalgam of economic aspirations and historic grievances. O’Connor reported a conversation he conducted with some farmers while on an organising trip with Edward Fitzgerald through Connaught in 1797 that illustrated these hopes: “Have you not heard within this year there was something doing for Ireland? Oh yes we have heard of it, it goes that we are all to be one, Protestant and Papist, and join against the Saxons, the story is rife that the old chiefs are stirring. And who are they? Why they talk of an O’Connor and a Fitzgerald and that the French will be with Ireland for see you we have an old prophecy that as Ireland was lost under an O’Connor it can never be gained but by the same.”114 O’Connor’s 208

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flirtation with this popular sentiment of historic injustice drilled through the languages of accommodation that had governed public life in the latter part of the century. In his negotiations with Generals Hoche and Clarke at Rennes and Angers in 1796, O’Connor abandoned the aspiration to bring Irish society unscathed through a political revolution. Instead he told them the best that the “aristocracy” could hope for was to avoid a massacre and to get help immigrating to England. The regulations and proclamations hammered out in those negotiations foresaw a total redistribution of Irish land and even offered a share to soldiers and sailors who joined the revolutionaries.115 The notion that Irish civil society resolved the varying interests of its members was abandoned. Irish society was now understood as fundamentally pathological and in need of political reformation. O’Connor extended this idea to a critique of the concept of civil society. The notion of the spontaneous resolution of interests was absurd: “In the whole history of mankind in all the experience of your life you will find that all mankind are born with the propensity to appropriate the produce of other men’s labour to satisfy their own wants and enjoyments, the upper class call this robbery when applied to the lower class, but in their own class they disguise it by a more polite expression, but the act in both is taking from another what in the origin was gained by his labour, without his consent.”116 The ideals of autonomy and self-assertion that had previously been grounded in the idea of civil society were now understood to be threatened by it. The frustrations created by the disappointments of politics and theory for those of a more conservative cast of mind can be gauged through the work of the recipient of Mackintosh’s renunciation of the French Revolution, George Moore of Moorehall. Moore was another individual whose world had been destroyed by the frustrations of reform politics. His son, John, was declared president of the Connaught republic in August 1798 when a small French force landed in Mayo, and after its failure and military defeat he died in custody. His father wrote in favour of the union in 1799, not from any faith in the British constitution but because he had lost all faith in Irish society and the possibility of civility or even the rule of law. If public opinion existed in Ireland it was not the expression of commercial civilisation, though it was organised through its forms: “A set of men, whose opinion is the only thing that can be called a public opinion in Ireland, have arrayed themselves in clubs and lodges to maintain this prejudice, to pre209

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serve all religious and civil animosities pure and unmitigated in the country.”117 Moore’s denunciation of the Orange Order was only an element of his denial that there was a civil society in Ireland, and he argued for the union as a means of liberating individual Irish men and women “from party government . . . the tyranny of passion . . . [and] the despotism of prejudice.”118 These were political categories foreign to Scottish social science. Surprising numbers of onetime United Irishmen were open to the attractions of union, precisely because it offered the possibility of reconstructing civility and escaping civil war. Civil society had proved to be too fragile to guarantee order, and some expedient was necessary. Union once more reiterated the connection between the Irish and British contexts of politics, something that was obvious to astute commentators. Thomas Jackson, keeping Sir William Hamilton in Naples abreast of the news of London, told him that “all of the attention of the public is at present occupied by the present union” and that the men of property in both kingdoms hoped it would pass, despite the popular opposition.119 Samuel Neilson, the onetime proprietor of the Northern Star, wrote to his wife from prison in Scotland in the same vein: “I see a union is determined on between Great Britain and Ireland. I am glad of it. In a commercial point of view it cannot be injurious and I can see no injury the country will sustain from it politically.”120 Emmet’s sister Mary Anne wrote anonymously explaining that union or some form of popular democracy was the only option open to Irish politics. The compromise through which civil society could assert itself to effect reform while leaving the forms of the constitution in place was no longer open, and since popular revolution had not brought about reform, another avenue had to be explored: “I tell the Parliament of Ireland, that they must depend either on the people or on the minister.”121 William Drennan was not in favour of the union but thought it inevitable, precisely because civil society had ceased to exist in Ireland. Drennan understood that the logic of military competition was driving the creation of ultimately similar unitary states in Britain and France that would be animated by fundamentally similar models of national politics: “In the uniform habit of cursing and mimicing the French Revolution, your inverted order ends where it began, by decreeing the unity and indivisibility of the empire.”122 Drennan went on to explain that the essence of the union was extinguishing 210

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all intermediary bodies. He argued, in a complex and dialectical style, that the union would eventually frustrate its own ends. William Pitt’s Act of Union would destroy union: “He will take the middle term out of the Irish constitution and will leave nothing but King and people, the monarch seen only through the medium of military rule, and the people having no other object to which they can ascribe their grievances, but the crown.”123 Twenty years later Crofton Croker remarked that the fabric of society in Cork had never recovered from the shock of the violence of the 1790s. The social institutions of the city were challenged: “Religious and party feeling was excited to the extreme, and ran so high as to create distinctions, the existence of which are not forgotten to the present hour, that have checked friendly intercourse and cordiality of sentiment, and destroyed the source of much innocent enjoyment.”124 With very different problems and perspectives in mind both writers pointed to the same reality: civil society had ceased to exist as the theatre of public affairs. The perception that the social fabric and the nature of the British polity had been fundamentally changed was not an observation limited to the inhabitants of the city of Cork. Susannah Taylor, a Unitarian and yet another disappointed French sympathiser, writing to Mackintosh in India from Norwich in 1810, agreed with him that the social institutions and experiences of civil society that had created their moral characters had now vanished: “The deficiency which you have so eloquently described of what is now called sentiment is a prevailing and a bad feature of the present time. In this respect I feel what it is to belong to the last generation. I remember such beings as romantic damsels and love stricken youths, such qualities as ardour and enthusiasm in politics and religion tempered by sound sense and genuine philosophy with that perennial spring of fancy and feeling which the native expression of the soul refined by education can produce.” She argued that imperial mobilisation for war had corrupted the national character and could not foresee where “the mistaken policy and the mercenary monopolizing spirit of commercial aggrandizement will lead both in Europe and in India. In Europe you know we are now professed smugglers and pirates. Driven from the continent we avowedly hold a few islands for the purposes of contraband trade and we fit out mighty expeditions for the sake of destroying what we cannot possess. It is alleged that we are forced to adopt these desperate measures. If this were granted the effect upon the na211

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tional character is not the less deplorable and must certainly tend to banish honest as well as sentimental feeling.”125 As the structure of empire that had created a space for civil society was abandoned, so the vocabulary of character that was proper to it ceased to have any purchase on political and social reality. Mackintosh himself pulled off the remarkable feat of repositioning himself around the idea of law rather than society as the guarantor of liberty, and in doing so avoiding the kind of despair experienced by Moore or Taylor, in the lectures on natural law he delivered at Lincoln’s Inn in 1799.126 However, even Mackintosh admitted in later years that while this manoeuvre was tactically sound, it was not intellectually convincing, and that he was reduced to finding “the middle way” in politics rather than working out how modern politics really worked in the light of the events of the French Revolution.127 Replying to Taylor he accepted that the kind of civility and sociability they had earlier taken for granted as a feature of a modern polity had proved to be very fragile: “The dreadful disappointment of the French Revolution, and the reaction of the general mind produced by it, have made many things unpopular besides liberty. Coarseness and barbarity seem to be eagerly sought, in order to be as far as possible from the refinement and humanity that were fashionable before the revolution.”128 A science of politics and a political stance grounded in the history of civil society had been overthrown by a decade of revolution. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, political thinkers sought some resource that would allow them to represent politics as they had actually experienced them, a sometimes transcendent and often terrifying search for accommodation with one’s fellows. Pierre Manent argues that one cultural resource they could find that was adequate to the task was religion.129 Religious languages of grace, providence, and the sublimity of cosmic history seemed fitting to the events; only the non-negotiable ideas of transcendental faith captured the nature of political identity in the revolutionary moment. Deeply reflective thinkers, like Constant and Hegel, were driven to ask how the political subject and the political community constituted themselves in this register.130 The discrediting of the language of civil society as the key to understanding public life reopened the question of the specificity of the political—of just what it was to be a citizen and what was the nature of the community of citizens—in a radical way. Both Mark Philp and Gregory Claeys argue that the effect on Britain of the French 212

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Revolution was effectively to transform radical popular politics.131 Paine’s Agrarian Justice and Thelwall’s Rights of Nature escaped the limitations of prerevolutionary radical politics to assert new kinds of rights, such as welfare rights, that effaced the distinction between civil society and politics.132 The norm of democracy they both invoked marked a radical shift in the way politics was conceptualised, away from what James Epstein has termed the “constitutional idiom.”133 Citizenship ceased to refer to a region of experience and was now understood as relevant in all areas, so that one might reasonably speak of the rights of children in families, for instance.134 Religion and politics reoccupied the horizon of value and became again the languages through which ultimate and universal claims could be made. Cosmopolitan values had animated the engagement with the world by the new British polity in the early years of the eighteenth century. John Locke’s capacious account of natural rights, in the hands of writers such as Daniel Defoe, inspired utopian aspirations and also provoked denunciations from figures such as Jonathan Swift who were committed to traditional values. The provinces of empire, which did not enjoy full agency in the space of the Atlantic, developed the idea of civil society to mediate the contrast between the notions of rights and liberty that animated the British realms and their own experience of limitation and dependency. Civil society, in the hands of Scottish theorists of a commercial order, then offered itself as the placeholder for cosmopolitan values when in the 1760s the British imperial state threatened to turn into another competitor for an empire of conquest. Civil society universalism was expressed not as the aspiration to liberty but instead as the aspiration to happiness. Its cosmopolitanism was philanthropic rather than political. The revolutionary crisis of the 1790s revealed that this kind of limited, social ideal of the polity was an insufficient means of guaranteeing social peace. Civil society, which had promised a context which transcended older concerns about independence and empire, was revealed to be at best an element of a modern polity. The old problems of political assertion could not be avoided.

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Gustave de Beaumont, the friend and collaborator of Tocqueville, came to Ireland in 1835 and 1837 to prepare his study of the country, which was published in 1839. He was introduced to every level of Irish life, from popular societies for the support of the orphan children of Dublin to the very selective company of the Vice-Regal Lodge.1 Despite his extensive exploration of the complexities of Irish associational life he was not introduced to anything like an Irish civil society. In fact, the Dublin barrister Henry Joy, a descendant of the Henry Joy who had written on Irish civil society in the Belfast Politics, denied that such an entity existed in Ireland. Joy drew a contrast between the level of social knowledge in Ireland and that in Scotland and warned Beaumont that in Ireland opinion was systematically suspect: “When you start on your tour you will find it necessary to be very cautious in regarding the loose statements on political and statistical matters you will hear from all parties in con accusation . . . In nothing are the Irish more contradistinguished from the Scotch than in the inaccuracy of their information on the moral and physical circumstances of their own country. Generally speaking an Irishman can tell you more of England, Scotland or France than he can of Ireland itself. You cannot therefore exercise too much 214

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caution in being influenced by the loose and thoughtless statements, which will be made to you in conversation by persons of all parties.”2 Civil society, which had been such an important idea in Ireland in the late eighteenth century, had vanished by the 1830s. This disappearance dramatises an important question: How did the idea of civil society survive and thrive when the context that had created it, the first British Empire, was transformed by the revolutionary era? Civil society had so obviously failed in its promise to maintain civil peace that it is hard to understand why it could re-emerge and reacquire a central place in political ideas. The limitations and contradictions within the idea of civil society had been revealed when it was mined for political rather than civil ideals. Civil society failed to sustain civil dissensus within the British polity in the 1790s. Irreconcilable commitments to divergent religious and moral ideals could be bracketed when the fundamental political problem of the terms of the constitution of the community was not at stake, when the imperial context was taken as a given. When the political constitution was directly addressed in Ireland and Britain in the middle of the 1790s, civil society was not able to produce a public culture that would generate a minimal consensus. In the subsequent political violence every set of actors thought it was defending the possibility of civil order against tyranny or anarchy. The effect was a collapse in faith in the possibility of any civil order, and indeed even in the existence of a coherent society. This breakdown contributed to the end of the local political representative institutions and the incorporation of Ireland in the United Kingdom on January 1, 1801. Why then the continuing relevance and even strength of civil society? A contingent, but very important, reason for the longevity of civil society, despite its failure, was that the inhabitant of civil society, Hume’s hopeful monster, found and adapted itself to a new habitat. Utilitarianism, with its roots in Etienne Dumont’s reworking of the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, was inspired by Hume’s ideas about experience and developed a complex moral and political vocabulary through which a new kind of world could be imagined and instituted.3 The idea of the subject as a totally naturalised agent was one of the central tenets of mid-nineteenth-century radicalism, and the context for that subject, civil society, was imported into radicalism also. John Stuart Mill’s master category of “opinion” functioned to open space for individuals and plurality and so restored the political virtues to utilitar215

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ian radicalism in exactly the manner in which Hume’s readers infused his thought with the old Aristotelian categories of citizenship.4 Civil society was disseminated as just one of the elements of the complex universe of British liberal political thought. However, this liberal descent would of itself account for the importance and longevity of the idea of civil society since very few polities attempted to emulate British politics directly. Civil society could not depend on British intellectual hegemony for its power. Civil society remains an important political category because empire remains an important political reality, indeed an increasingly important political option. As Charles Maier has pointed out, empire has to be understood not simply as the extension of formal sovereignty beyond national boundaries, but as a political form that apportions different structures of law and governance on different territories and, at the limit, on different kinds of person, however distinguished.5 One essential feature of empire, along with the presence of frontiers, is the centralisation of sovereignty. Empires coordinate, not homogenise, and the possibility of pluralism is one of the most attractive features of empire. Sovereigns make law, setting the boundaries or frontiers within which every other kind of association must function; so the imperial sovereign creates the condition for other kinds of activity, which can vary widely. The response to empire pioneered by the Irish and Scots of the eighteenth century—the resort to opinion as an alternative to law locally, and to society for the polity—has been rehearsed over and again since. It is absolutely no surprise that Eastern European intellectuals began to use the idea of civil society in the late 1970s to claim an area of relative autonomy from the over-arching Soviet empire. This pattern occurs in some unexpected places. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “multitude” rampaging over the “electronic commons” created by contemporary forms of empire is theorised as a radical solvent of imperial structures.6 In reality the members of this multitude are the natives of empire, exercising opinion but being contained within the bounds of law, and the commons look very familiar as well. These genealogical and structural reasons for the continuing currency of civil society turn out not to be very separate from one another. John Stuart Mill was a servant of the East India Company for many years, as was his father, and developed much of his thinking from his experience of imperial administration. As Lynn Zastoupil has pointed out, the central category of 216

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opinion had been highly current in debates on the nature of British power in India from 1800 onward.7 Four influential Scotsmen—Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras (1820–26); Mountstuart Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay (1819 –27); John Malcolm, Governor of Bombay (1827–30); and Charles Metcalfe, Resident at Delhi (1811–19) and Hyderabad (1820– 5), and Acting Governor-General (1835– 36)—sought to find some way to sustain local traditions of power and influence under as general and indirect a form of imperial control as possible. This group, termed the “empire of opinion” school, saw local habits and customs as the basis of a stable civil society and so of imperial cohesion. Munro explained clearly that an extensive civil society in which emulation allowed individuals to excel was preferable to direct control over broad areas of Indian life: “The natives of the British provinces may, without fear pursue their different occupations, as traders, meerassidars, or husbandmen, and enjoy the fruits of their labour in tranquillity; but none of them can aspire to anything beyond this mere animal state of thriving in peace—none of them can look forward to any hare in the legislation, or civil or military government of their country . . . The consequence, therefore, of the conquest of India by British arms would be, in place of raising, to debase the whole people.”8 India was imagined by this group as a complex civil society and opinion as a subtle social feature that fostered dynamic, integrated moral subjects. Successful empire depended on recognising the different capacities and competences of imperial and local authorities. This specific idea of opinion as a mediative reality, located between law and the individual, that was the condition of a consensus about plurality was absolutely central to Mill’s ideas on domestic politics. Neither civil society nor utilitarianism was camouflage or simply an instrument of imperial control, but both served to populate the moral imagination of empire as a mode of government.9 Thinking about empire as a recurrent political structure with characteristic strengths and weaknesses brings around again the set of questions central to the history of the idea of civil society that were raised in the introduction. Ernest Gellner’s problem of how the imperial British state allowed a network of independent institutions to emerge that potentially could pose a threat to its own power is one that has attracted attention to exactly the eighteenth-century debate discussed in this book. Charles Taylor’s problem is more abstract and less discussed but, if anything, more urgent. Taylor 217

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asked why the idea of civil society has sought to harmonise ideals that seem to be contradictory. Taylor considers how pluralism and citizenship, which are clearly moral goods in themselves, could ever have been understood as inherently compatible. It is not clear that the hope for independence of the will of others and the commitment to collective exploration of the nature of the good life can be resolved, even ideally. Taylor suggests that the expectation of consensus in civil society creates a political problem. Essentially contested categories such as “liberty,” “justice,” and “equality,” which animate politics, do not allow for consensus but rather a civilized dissensus.10 The answer to these two seemingly only tangentially related questions turns out to be the same. Civil society emerged as a concept designed to manage the relationships of elite provincials to the British Empire in the eighteenth century. Far from threatening the power of the empire, it articulated and amplified it. The bounded notion of citizenship offered within the concept allowed the reconciliation of autonomy and citizenship. Individual self-assertion was the best interpretation of commitment to the common good, because the contestation over and definition of the common good, the essence of politics, was conducted at the imperial centre. The ultimate legal and political frame for civil society was external, not internal, to provincial life. Private individuals and even groups could embrace widely divergent ethics, and even political hopes, without fear that disagreement could degenerate into conflict. Civil society is not in tension with empire, civil society is an element of empire. The most attractive feature of civil society is its ethic of toleration, which is also true of empire. Empires use hierarchy and difference to allow incompatible or antagonistic ideas, cultures, and even peoples to distribute themselves in such a way that peace can be maintained. The almost absurd contradiction that Charles Taylor identified at the heart of the idea of civil society, between an aspiration to an almost total autonomy simultaneous with an almost total moral integration, is a fantasy that can only be sustained if the political decisions that frame the life of the community are in some way given by an exogenous force. Contemporary ideas about the nature and possibilities of civil society are confused. Robert Putnam aspires to revive democracy by appealing to civil society, while Fareed Zakaria hopes to replace democracy with civil society.11 Such debates cannot be adjudicated by historians, since they are about much more than the interpretation of particular terms. What the his218

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torian can do is to point to the ground on which debate occurs, and the ground for this particular debate is very boggy. The shared assumption that civil society is a fairly neutral feature of any advanced capitalist society is difficult to sustain. Commercial societies by their very nature promote dense associational life, but association is not the same as civil society. Civil society has many specific features that are incompatible with the kind of revived democracy that Putnam favours. The capaciousness of civil society, its capacity to comprise complexity and plurality, is highly attractive. This richness comes at a price, and that price is the distinction of public moral debate from sovereign power. It is under conditions of empire that civil society most accurately describes the nature of associations and the public moral world that they create.

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NOT E S

Introduction 1. Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Cambridge, 2003), 50–78; John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York, 1999), 173 –98. The term was first used in this context by a Czech scholar, Jacques Rupnik: see his “Dissent in Poland: The End of Revisionism and the Rebirth of Civil Society,” in Opposition in Eastern Europe, ed. Rudolf L. Tokes (Oxford, 1979), 60 –112. 2. Mario Piantia, Globalizzazione dal Basso: Economia Mondiale e Movimenti Sociali (Rome, 2001); Michael Edwards, Civil Society (Cambridge, 2004). 3. Larry Diamond, “What Went Wrong in Iraq?” Foreign Affairs, 83 (September–October 2004), 34. 4. Pierre Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 2007). 5. John Keane, Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (Cambridge, 1998), 52. 6. Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Enemies (London, 1994), 184– 89. 7. John Gray, “Post-Totalitarianism, Civil Society and the Limits of the Western Model,” in Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (London, 1993), 214. 8. John Gray, “What Is Dead and What Is Living in Liberalism?” in Post-Liberalism, 284. 9. Vaclav Havel, “Anti-political Politics,” in Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, ed. John Keane (London, 1989), 396 –97. 10. Ehrenberg, Civil Society, 200. This tendency is not limited to the United States: see

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B. Knight and P. Stokes, The Deficit in Civil Society in the United Kingdom, Foundation for Civil Society Working Paper No. 1 (Birmingham, 1996). 11. Z. A. Peleznski, “Solidarity and the ‘Rebirth of Civil Society’ in Poland, 1976 – 81,” in Keane, Civil Society and the State, 368. 12. Shin Jong-Hwa, “The Limits of Civil Society: Observations on the Korean Debate,” European Journal of Social Theory, 3 (May 2000), 258; Charles Polidano, “Review Article: Don’t Discard State Autonomy: Revisiting the East Asian Experience of Development,” Political Studies, 49 (August 2001), 513–27. For a contrary view see S. J. Han, “Modernization and the Rise of Civil Society: The Role of the ‘Middling Grassroots’ for Democratization in Korea,” Human Studies, 24 (2001), 113– 32. 13. James L. Gibson, “Social Networks, Civil Society and the Prospects for Consolidating Russia’s Democratic Transition,” American Journal of Political Science, 45 ( January 2001), 65; I. K. Kalinin, “Concerning the Debate about Civil Society,” Sotsiologicheskie Issledovaniya, 4 (2001), 112 (in Russian). 14. Tomaz Mastnak, “The Reinvention of Civil Society: Through the Looking Glass of Democracy,” Archives of European Sociology, 46 (2005), 343. 15. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Leon de Winter, “Civil Society and Hybrid Cars Will Defeat Islamists,” New Perspectives Quarterly, 23 (Summer 2006), 31–33. 16. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Arato and Cohen, “Politics by Other Means?” Dissent, 45 (Summer 1998), 61–66. 17. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York, 2003). 18. Michael Walzer, “The Concept of Civil Society,” in Toward a Global Civil Society (Oxford, 1995), 16. 19. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York, 1995); Fukuyama, “Social Capital, Civil Society and Development,” Third World Quarterly, 7 (2001); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2000). 20. Charles Taylor, “Invoking Civil Society,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 200. 21. Ibid. 22. Michael W. Foley and Bob Edwards, “The Paradox of Civil Society,” Journal of Democracy, 7 (1996), 45. 23. However, Mary Kaldor warns that overattention to the history of the concept may undermine our capacity to recognise the novelty of the newer global version: see Global Civil Society, 3. 24. Frank Trentmann, “The Problem with Civil Society: Putting Modern European History Back into Contemporary Debate,” in Exploring Civil Society: Political and Cultural Contexts, ed. Marlies Glasius, David Leewis, and Hakan Seckinelgin (London, 2004), 26. 25. Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 7.

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26. Anthony Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth, England, 1991), 85– 87; on the specific nature of early modern claims to nationhood see Harald Gustafson, “The Eighth Argument: Identity, Ethnicity and Political Culture in Sixteenth-Century Scandinavia,” Scandinavian Journal of History, 27 (2002), 91–113. 27. John Locke, “An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government,” ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1960), 381– 82, 473–76. 28. For the early eighteenth-century discussion of nations see Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971). I am contesting Venturi’s argument that the language of nationality in the eighteenth century was inherently oppositional. 29. See Leah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 86– 87; and Peter Fastido, “National Pride in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Vol. 1, History and Politics, ed. Raphael Samuels (London, 1989), 44– 56. Both authors argue that England did evolve a specifically modern form of nationalism in the period, which still leaves open the problem of British nationalism. 30. On composite states see Helmut Georg Koenigsberger, “Monarchies and Parliaments in Early Modern Europe: Dominium Regale or Dominium Politicum et Regale,” Theory and Society, 5 (1978), 191–217; Koenigsberger, “Composite States, Representative Institutions and the American Revolution,” Historical Research, 62 (1989); and John H. Elliot, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present, 137 (1992), 48–71. 31. The bibliography on this topic is enormous, but some vital works include Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993); John H. Elliot, The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain (1598 –1640) (Cambridge, 1963); and William F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton, N. J., 1972). 32. See the essays in John Greville Agard Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975). Peter Miller has argued convincingly that the language of virtue went beyond republican political language in England due to the common basis of all political discourses of the period in a Ciceronian heritage: see Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994), 21– 87. 33. Some thinkers, on the other hand, celebrated this possibility: see Montesquieu’s comments on fashion in The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 315 –16. 34. Istvan Hont, “Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy Reconsidered,” in The Economic Limits to Modern Politics, ed. John Dunn (Cambridge, 1990), 41. 35. David Armitage, “The Scottish Vision of Empire: Intellectual Origins of the Darien Venture,” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1995), 102. 36. On Keating see Brendan Bradshaw, “Geoffrey Keating: Apologist of Irish Ireland,” in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534 –1660, ed. Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (Cambridge, 1993), 166– 90; and Bernadette Cunning-

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ham, “Seventeenth-Century Interpretations of the Past: The Case of Geoffrey Keating,” Irish Historical Studies, 25 (1986), 116 –28. On Humanist history see William J. Bouwsma, “Three Types of Historiography in Post-Renaissance Italy,” in A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 295– 307. 37. William Robertson, The History of the Reign of Charles V (London, 1769). 38. Frances A. Yates, “Charles V and the Idea of the Empire,” in Astrea, The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975), 20 –27. 39. John Robertson, “Empire and Union: Two Concepts of the Early Modern Political Order,” in Union for Empire, 26. 40. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992), 24–25; Steven Pincus, “The English Debate over Universal Monarchy,” in Robertson, Union for Empire, 37– 62. 41. John Keane, “Despotism and Democracy: The Origins and Development of the Distinction between Civil Society and the State 1750 –1850,” in Civil Society and the State, 42–50. 42. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 59– 60. 43. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia, Pa., 1976); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000). 44. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). 45. For the commercialisation of English society in particular, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997). 46. Gellner, Conditions of Liberty, 86. 47. Robertson, “Empire and Union,” 26, 30 – 31. 48. John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement, Progress and Present State of all the British Colonies on the Continent and Islands of America, 2 vols. (London, 1708), cited in P. J. Marshall, “Introduction,” The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 5. 49. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1992), 177– 93. 50. On those identities see principally Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999), 75 –183. 51. J. G. A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge, 2005). 52. John Clive and Bernard Bailyn, “England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 11 (1954), 200 –213; Clive, “The Social Background to the Scottish Renaissance,” in Scotland in the Age of Improvement, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Rosalind Mitchison (Edinburgh, 1970), 225–45. 53. Nicholas Phillipson, “Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in The University in Society, 2 vols., ed. Lawrence Stone (London, 1975), 1:407– 48; Phillipson, “Politics, Politeness and the Anglicization of Early Eighteenth-Century Scottish Culture,” in Scotland and England, 1286–1815, ed. Roger Mason (Edinburgh, 1987), 226– 46. For a more complex reading of this kind of in-

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teraction, see John Darwin, “Civility and Empire,” in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (Oxford, 2000), 321– 36. 54. P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain India and America c. 1750 –1783 (Oxford, 2005), 15. 55. For an overview, see David Armitage, “Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” American Historical Review, 104 (April 1999), 427– 45. 56. For a sample of this developing field, see Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds., The British Problem: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago c. 1534 –1707 (Basingstoke, England, 1996); Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood, eds., A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles c. 1750–c. 1850 (Manchester, 1997); S. J. Connolly, ed., United Kingdoms? Ireland and Great Britain from 1500: Integration and Diversity (Dublin, 1998); Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, eds., Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850 (Cambridge, 1998). 57. On the application of the model in the local context see Jenny Wormald, “The Creation of the British Multiple Kingdoms or Core and Colonies?,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Series 6, Vol. 2 (1992), 175 –94. 58. See among others Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governers: The Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge, 1994); Nicholas Canny, “The Attempted Anglicization of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century: An Exemplar of ‘British History,’” in Three Nations: A Common History, ed. R. G. Asch (Bochum, 1993); Canny, The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, 1566 –1643 (Cambridge, 1982); and Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal McDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, 1609–1683 (Cambridge, 1992). 59. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 8. 60. Ibid., 171. 61. Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani, “Introduction,” in Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge, 2001), 4. 62. The secondary literature on this topic is enormous, but for two useful points of entry see Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner, eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993); and Robertson, Union for Empire. 63. See principally Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979); Tuck, “The ‘Modern’ Theory of Natural Law,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), 99–119; and Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993). 64. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 77. 65. J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, 1998), 79. 66. Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Ernest Barker (Cambridge, 1934), 1:63. 67. Ibid., 64. 68. Johannes Althusius, Politica Methodice Digesta, ed. Carl Friedrich (Cambridge, Mass., 1932).

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69. Anthony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (London, 1984), 138. 70. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. and trans. Jose Harris (Cambridge, 2000). See Jose Harris, “Tönnies on ‘Community’ and ‘Civil Society’: Clarifying Some Cross-Currents in Post-Marxian Political Thought,” in Markets in Historical Context: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World, ed. Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann (Cambridge, 2004), 129 –44, for a brief overview of the distinction. 71. Edward Anthony Wrigley, “Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent in the Early Modern Period,” in The Eighteenth-Century Town, 1688 –1820, ed. Peter Borsay (London, 1990), 73. 72. Ian Whyte, “Urbanisation in Early-Modern Scotland: A Preliminary Analysis,” Scottish Economic and Social History, 9 (1989), 21–35. 73. T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan, eds., A New History of Ireland, Vol. 4 (Oxford, 1986), 182. 74. S. K. Schultz, “The Growth of Urban America in War and Peace, 1740 –1810,” in The American Revolution: Changing Perspectives, ed. W. M. Fowler and W. Coyle (Boston, 1979), 133. 75. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and John Harold Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1983); Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993); Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997); Stana Nenadic, “Middle-Rank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1720–1840,” Past and Present, 145 (1994), 125 –54. 76. Thomas Martin Devine, “Scotland,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 2, 1540 –1840, ed. Peter Clark (Cambridge, 2000), 156, 161–62. 77. Mark McCarthy, “The Forging of an Atlantic Port City: Socio-Economic and Physical Transformations in Cork, 1660 –1700,” Urban History, 28 (2001), 25 –45. 78. A. I. Cowan, “Urban Elites in Early Modern Europe: An Endangered Species?” Historical Review, 64 (1991), 121–37. 79. Thomas Martin Devine, “The Merchant Class of the Larger Scottish Towns in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in Scottish Urban History, ed. George Gordon and Brian Dicks (Aberdeen, 1993), 92–111. 80. Ian A. Archer, “Politics and Government 1540 –1700,” in Cambridge Urban History, Vol. 2, 254. 81. Joanna Innes and Nicholas Rogers, “Politics and Government 1700–1840,” in Cambridge Urban History, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2000), 530. 82. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000), 430. 83. See Innes and Rogers, “Politics and Government,” 536, for a table of petitions to Parliament for improving acts. 84. Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 177. 85. Ibid., 178.

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86. Jack Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988); Timothy Hall Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford, 2004). 87. Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Civil Society in the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Kaviraj and Khilnani, Civil Society, 58. 88. For a Syrian example see Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York, 2000). 89. The most concise presentation of this position is that of Nicholas Phillipson, “The Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge, 1981), 22. The thesis that the Act of Union represented a fracture in Scottish history has suffered from its association with Hugh Trevor-Roper’s intemperate presentation of it: see “The Scottish Enlightenment,” Studies on Voltaire, 58 (1967), 1935 – 58; and “The Scottish Enlightenment,” Blackwood’s Magazine, 322 (1977), 371– 88. His thesis of a unique Scottish “backwardness” as the ground for the Union has no support. 90. Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an AngloBritish Identity, 1689–1830 (Cambridge, 1993), 19 – 39. James Henderson Burns argues that the notion of civic virtue was, if anything, even stronger in the Scottish tradition than in the English: “George Buchanan and the Anti-Monarchomachs,” in Phillipson and Skinner, Political Discourse, 3. 91. Daniel Defoe, An Essay at Removing National Prejudices against a Union with Scotland (Edinburgh, 1706), 5. 92. Nicholas Phillipson, “Lawyers, Landowners and the Civic Leadership of Post-Union Scotland: An Essay on the Social Role of the Faculty of Advocates 1661–1832 in EighteenthCentury Scottish Society,” Juridical Review, n.s., 21 (1976), 110–12. 93. See Roger L. Emerson, “The Social Composition of Enlightened Scotland: The Select Society of Edinburgh, 1754 –1764,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 114 (1973), 297– 98; and Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1985), 231. 94. Roger L. Emerson, “Scottish Universities in the Eighteenth Century, 1690–1800,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 167 (1977), 461–66. 95. For a developed discussion of the relationship between individual and national identities see William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations (Cambridge, 1990). 96. Sher, Church and University, 8; Emerson, “Select Society,” 292. Previous expressions of the distinctive approach of the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment have centred on their efforts to combat Bernard Mandeville. This seems too narrow a focus: see Mark M. Goldsmith, “Regulating Anew the Moral and Political Sentiments of Mankind: Bernard Mandeville and the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 49 (1988), 587– 606. 97. Adam B. Seligman, “Animadversions upon Civil Society and Civic Virtue in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century,” in Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, ed. John A. Hall (Cambridge, 1995), 201.

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NOTES TO PAGES 20‒25

98. For this background to civil society thinking see Ehrenberg, Civil Society, 3–28. The classic account of early modern republicanism remains in J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975). 99. For a contrasting view see Anthony Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 96–109. 100. Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State and the General Estate, 1648–1817 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998). 101. On this tradition see Quentin Skinner, “The Rise of, Challenge to and Prospects for a Collingwoodian Approach to the History of Political Thought,” Ideas in Context, 61 (2001), 175 – 88; Skinner et al., “Political Philosophy: The View from Cambridge,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 10 (2002), 1–19; and J. G. A. Pocock, “The Concept of a Language and the Métier D’Historien: Some Considerations on Practice,” in Pagden, Languages of Political Theory, 19 –38. 102. For Cavell’s insightful reading of Wittgenstein on games see Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford, 1979), 124. 103. For a discussion of this approach see James Livesey, “Intellectual History and the History of Science,” Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History, ed. Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (London, 2006), 130 – 46.

Chapter One. Coffee, Association, and Cultural Hybridity in Seventeenth-Century England 1. Examples include Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993); Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003); Arlette Farge, Dire et mal-mire: L’opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1992); Dagmar Friest, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London 1637–1645 (London, 1997); and Alex Preda, “In the Enchanted Grove: Financial Conversations and the Marketplace in England and France in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 14 (2001), 276– 307. 2. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). 3. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994). 4. Anthony Clayton, London’s Coffee Houses: A Stimulating Story (London, 2003); Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, Conn., 2005); Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London, 2004). 5. Edward Robinson, The Early English Coffee House, with an Account of the First Use of Coffee (London, 1893), 73; Aytoun Ellis, The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee Houses (London, 1956), 18. The Florian in Venice predates the Angel by two years but did not inspire the same new sociability. The site of the Angel is still in use as a coffee house at time of writing. 6. Anthony Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1891– 95), 1:168, 2:300.

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7. Ibid., 1:423. 8. For an overview of the literature on public print and popular politics, see Jason Peacey, “Print and Public Politics in Seventeenth-Century England,” History Compass, 5 (2007), 85 – 111. 9. John Aubrey, Brief Lives (Woodbridge, England, 1982), 127. 10. Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Great Tew Circle,” in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays (Chicago, Ill., 1987), 166 –230; Jack C. Hayward, “New Directions in the Study of the Falkland Circle,” Seventeenth Century, 2 (1987), 19– 48; Thomas H. Robinson, “Lord Clarendon’s Moral Thought,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 43 (1979), 37– 59; Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 270 –92. 11. Ellis, Coffee House, 29. 12. Steven Pincus, “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History, 67 (December 1995), 833. 13. The Rules and Orders of the Coffee House (London, 1674), cited in Robinson, Early English Coffee House, 40. 14. Anon., “The Character of a Coffee-House, with the Symptoms of a Town-Wit” (London, 1673), in Harleian Miscellany, or a collection of scarce, curious and entertaining pamphlets and tracts, as well in manuscript as in print, found in the late Earl of Oxford’s library, interspersed with historical, political and critical notes, 8 volss, (London, 1809 –10), 6:465, 467. 15. Anon., “Coffee-houses Vindicated. In Answer to the late published Character of a Coffee-House,” Harleian Miscellany, 6:472. 16. Aubrey, Brief Lives, 128. 17. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols., ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (London, 1970), 1:14, 17, 21–22. 18. Ibid., 5:30, 320. 19. Anon., The London Clubs, their Anecdotes and History, private Rules and Regulations (London, 1853), 3 –4; Ellis, Penny Universities, 58. 20. Stephen B. Dobranski, “‘Where Men of Differing Judgements Crowd’: Milton and the Culture of the Coffee Houses,” The Seventeenth Century, 9 (1994), 35 – 56. 21. The Tatler, no. 1 (April 12, 1709). 22. Gordon McEwan, The Oracle of the Coffee House: John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (San Marino, Calif., 1972); William Wright, “Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudoxia Epidemica and English Coffee House Journalism,” Journal of Popular Culture, 12 (1978), 37. 23. John Dunton, The Dublin Scuffle (London, 1699), 5, 7, 19. 24. Dublin Journal, July 9, 1726, in James Arbuckle, ed., A Collection of Letters on several Subjects lately Published in the Dublin Journal, 2 vols. (London, 1729), 2:100. 25. Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic 1675 –1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (Oxford, 1986), 156. 26. Charles Smith, The Ancient and Present State of the Country and City of Cork, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1750), 1:407.

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27. Angus McInnes, “The Emergence of a Leisure Town: Shrewsbury 1660 –1760,” Past and Present, 120 (August 1988), 66. 28. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735 –1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 88. 29. P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756 (London, 1967), 490. 30. Ibid., 506. 31. Steele, English Atlantic, 226. 32. P. G. M. Dickson, The Sun Insurance Office 1710 –1960: The History of 250 Years of British Insurance (Oxford, 1960). 33. The Spectator, no. 69 (May 19, 1711). 34. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550 –1653, 2nd ed. (London, 2003), 494 –96. 35. Jonathan Swift, “Ballad on the South Sea Scheme,” in Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (Leipzig, 1844), 247. 36. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, 1988), 2:20. 37. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, 4th ed. (London, 1734), 53. 38. Wood, Life and Times, 1:290; Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 292. 39. Ellis, Penny Universities, 89. 40. Rob Iliffe, “Material Doubts: Hooke, Artisan Culture and the Exchange of Information in 1670s London,” British Journal for the History of Science, 28 (1995), 311–15. 41. Shapin and Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 123. 42. Anon., The Secret History of Clubs: particularly the Kit-Cat, Beef-Steak, Vertuosos, Quacks, Knights of the Golden Fleece, Florists, Beaux, Etc., with their original and the characters of the most noted members thereof (London, 1709), 11. 43. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 66– 67. 44. Hugh Jenkins, Feigned Commonwealths: The Country-House Poem and Fashioning the Ideal Community (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1998); Kari Boyd McBride, Country House Discourse in Early Modern England: A Cultural Study of Landscape and Legitimacy (London, 2001). 45. Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (London, 2000); Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (Oxford, 2000); Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780 –1870 (Cambridge, 1996). 46. William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985). 47. John J. McCusker, “The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” American Historical Review, 110 (April 1995).

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48. Paul Slack, “Government and Information in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present, 184 (August 2004), 33– 68; Julian Hoppit, “Political Arithmetic in EighteenthCentury England,” Economic History Review, Series 2, 49 (1996), 518–19. 49. Douglass North and Barry Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic History, 49 (December 1984), 803– 32. 50. Patrick K. O’Brien, Fiscal Exceptionalism: Great Britain and Its European Rivals from Civil War to Triumph at Trafalgar and Waterloo, London School of Economics Working Paper 65/1 (2001); Avner Greif, “The Fundamental Problem of Exchange: A Research Agenda in Historical Institutional Analysis,” European Review of Economic History, 4 (2000), 251– 84. 51. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change and Economic Growth, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 9378 (December 2002). 52. See Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack, eds., Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000) for a compendium of views on the centrality of civility to English experience. 53. Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (Oxford, 1978). 54. North and Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment.” 55. Anon., The Natural History of Coffee, Thee, Chocolate, Tobacco in four several Sections, with a Tract of Elder and Juniper Berries showing how useful they may be in our Coffee-Houses: And also a Way of making Mum, with one Remark on that Liquor (London, 1682), 3, 4 –5. 56. Betty Jo Tweeter Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, or, “The Hunting of the Greene Lyon” (Cambridge, 1975), 29, 35. 57. Anon., “Character of a Coffee-House,” 466. 58. Ibid., 469. 59. Sir Henry Blount, “A Voyage to the Levant: A Brief Relation of a Journey Lately Performed by Master Henry Blount, Gentleman,” in A Collection of Voyages and Travels compiled for the Library of the Earl of Oxford (London, 1747), 7:546; Anon., “Coffee-houses Vindicated,” 472. 60. Ellis, Penny Universities, 50. 61. Ilay Ors, “Coffeehouses, Cosmopolitanism and Pluralizing Modernities in Istanbul,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 12 (2002), 119– 45. 62. John E. Wills, Jr., “European Consumption and Asian Production in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London, 1993), 143. 63. Jacob M. Price, “The Imperial Economy, 1700 –1776,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, Eighteenth Century Empire, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford, 1998), 86. 64. John Dalling, “Observations on the Present State of Jamaica” (1774), Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne Mss. c. 524. 65. Anon., “Coffee-houses Vindicated,” 471. 66. Sir John Chardin, Travels in Persia, 20 vols. (London, 1721), 2:239.

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67. Ibid. 68. Jean de Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage fait au Levant (Paris, 1664), 64. 69. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les six voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, écuyer baron d’Aubonne, en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes (Paris, 1679), 1:448. 70. Carston Niebhur, Travels through Arabia and other Countries of the East, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1792), 2:264 –65. 71. Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage, 66. Coffee was first drunk in France in Marseilles rather than Paris, where Thévenot introduced it to his friends in the 1650s. 72. The Procope, founded on its current site in 1686 complete with waiters costumed in an oriental fashion, was the prototypical Parisian grand café; see Jean Leclant, “Le café et les cafés à Paris (1644 –1693),” Annales Economie Societè Civilisation, 66 ( January–March 1951), 7. 73. Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffee-Houses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle, 1985), 102; Pincus, “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create,’” 822. 74. Hattox, Coffee and Coffee-Houses, 27. 75. Ellis, Coffee House, 12. 76. For the “puritan” origins see Robinson, Early English Coffee House, 140. 77. Blount, “Voyage to the Levant,” 7:513. 78. Aubrey, Brief Lives, 42. 79. Blount, “Voyage to the Levant,” 7:514. 80. Ibid., 7:546. 81. Aubrey, Brief Lives, 43, gives Blount’s connections to the first coffee houses. 82. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 5, 43. 83. Transactions of the Royal Society, 1714–15. 84. Zabdiel Boylston, Some Account of what is said of Inoculating or Transplanting the Small Pox by the learned Dr Samuel Timonius and Jacobus Pylarinus (Boston, 1721); Cotton Mather, An Account of the Method and further Success of Inoculation for the Small Pox in London (Boston, 1721). 85. A Letter from One in the Country, to his Friend in the City: in Relation to the Distresses Occasioned by the Doubtful and Prevailing Practice of the Inoculation of the Smallpox (Boston, 1721), 2– 3. 86. John Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia in Eight Letters Being Nine Years Travels begun 1672 and finished 1681 (London, 1698), 345. 87. Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660 –1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28 (1995), 295–322; Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680–1714 (Manchester, 1999). David Cressy, however, cautions us against over-extending this issue in concrete social situations in “Gender Trouble and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies, 35 (October 1996), 438 –65. 88. Steven Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth,” American Historical Review, 103 ( June 1998), 705 –36. 89. Barbara Amiel, “Trade, Plantations and Property: John Locke and the Economic Defense of Colonialism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (October 1994), 597.

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90. Dan Beaver, “Conscience and Context: The Popish Plot and the Politics of Ritual, 1678 –1682,” Historical Journal, 34 (1991), 297– 327. 91. Ian Inkster, “The Development of a Scientific Community in Sheffield, 1790–1850: A Network of People and Interests,” Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society, 10 (1973), 99– 131; Inkster, “Motivation and Achievement: Technological Change and Creative Response in Comparative Industrial History,” Journal of European Economic History, 26 (1997), 49–86. 92. For exactly the opposite conclusion from a roughly similar analysis, see J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 2000). 93. James Farr and Clayton Roberts, “John Locke on the Glorious Revolution: A Rediscovered Document,” Historical Journal, 28 (1985), 395. 94. Guy Miege, The New State of England under their Majesties King William and Queen Mary (London, 1691), 2. 95. Francis Atterbury, English Advice to the Freeholders of England (London, 1714), 4. 96. Jonathan Israel, “The Dutch Role in the Glorious Revolution,” in The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact, ed. Jonathan Israel (Cambridge, 1991), 105 –62; Lois Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore, 1981). Tony Claydon, “William III’s Declaration of Reasons and the Glorious Revolution,” Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 87–108. 97. John Wells and Douglas Wills, “Revolution, Restoration and Debt Repudiation: The Jacobite Threat to England’s Institutions and Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic History, 60 (2000), 418– 41. 98. Dickson, Financial Revolution in England. 99. Ibid., 55. 100. For the politics of public debt see Bruce G. Carruthers, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princeton, N. J., 1999). 101. Farr and Roberts, “John Locke on the Glorious Revolution,” 395. 102. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975), 425–27. 103. J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675 –1725 (London, 1967), 66 –97. 104. R. B. Walker, “The Newspaper Press in the Reign of William III,” Historical Journal, 17 (December 1974), 691–704; Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2005); Justin Raven, Naomi Tadmor, and Helen Small, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996); Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, eds., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke, England, 1994). 105. Mark Knights, “History and Literature in the Age of Defoe and Swift,” History Compass, 3 (2005), 8; Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England, 1860 –1714 (Manchester, 1999); P. McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford, 1998).

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106. Blair Worden, “The Revolution of 1688 – 89 and the English Republican Tradition,” in Israel, The Anglo-Dutch Moment, 241–77. 107. John Toland, The State Anatomy of Great Britain, 2nd ed. (London, n.d.), 9. 108. Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in EighteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge, 1994); Shelly Burtt, Virtue Transformed: Political Argument in England, 1688–1740 (Cambridge, 1992), 8 – 9. 109. On coordination and integration see Hancock, Citizens of the World. 110. Peter Solar, “Poor Relief and English Economic Development before the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review, 48 (1995), 1–22. For a local study that supports the case, see John Broad, “Parish Economies of Welfare,” Historical Journal, 42 (1999), 985–1006. For a critique of Solar’s ideas, see Steve King, “Poor Relief and English Economic Development Reappraised,” Economic History Review, 50 (1997), 360 – 68. 111. David Hancock, “‘A World of Business to Do’: William Freeman and the Foundations of England’s Commercial Empire,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 57 ( January 2000), 34. 112. David Philip Miller, “Joseph Banks, Empire, and ‘Centres of Calculation’ in Late Hanoverian London,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hans Reill (Cambridge, 1996), 29. 113. Ian K. Steele, The Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1790 (Oxford, 1968). 114. Stephen Saunders Webb, “William Blathwayt, Imperial Fixer: Muddling through to Empire, 1689 –1717,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 26 (1969), 399. 115. Jacob M. Price, “The Imperial Economy, 1700–1776,” in Marshall, Oxford History of the British Empire, 78. 116. Peter Laslett, “John Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Origins of the Board of Trade, 1695 –1698,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 14 ( July 1957), 384. 117. Barbara Armeil, “Trade, Plantations and Property: John Locke and the Economic Defence of Colonialism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (October 1994), 592. 118. Wood, Life and Times, 1:472. 119. Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, N. J., 1986). 120. David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory, 32 (2004), 602–27; James Farr, “‘So Vile and Miserable an Estate’: The Problem of Slavery in Locke’s Political Theory,” Political Theory, 14 (1986), 263– 89. 121. J. G. A. Pocock, The Limits and Divisions of British History, Studies in Public Policy No. 31, Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, 1979), 6. 122. Hancock, Citizens of the World, 35. For the Royal Society of Arts see Henry T. Wood, A History of the Royal Society of Arts (London, 1913), and Derek Hudson and Kenneth Luckhurst, The Royal Society of Arts 1754 –1954 (London, 1954). 123. Anon., The London Clubs, their Anecdotes and History, Private Rules and Regulations (London, 1853), 25.

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124. A parallel private consumption of coffee and conversation developed in German female coffee circles (kaffeekränzchen): see Paul Albrecht, “Coffee-Drinking as a Symbol of Social Change in Continental Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 18 (1988), 96. 125. For the distinction between the social problem of trust and the intellectual problem of prediction, see Thomas Broman, “The Habermasian Public Sphere and ‘Science’ in the Enlightenment,” History of Science, 36 ( June 1998), 129, 144. 126. Patrick K. O’Brien, “Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State and the Expansion of Empire, 1688–1815,” in Marshall, Oxford History of the British Empire, 60. 127. Steele, English Atlantic, 31. 128. Ibid., 113. 129. P. J. Marshall, “The British in Asia: Trade to Dominion,” in Marshall, Oxford History of the British Empire, 488. 130. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Trade, 1550 –1653, 2nd ed. (London, 2003), 93. 131. Hancock, “‘World of Business to Do,’” 5. 132. C. H. Philips, The East India Company 1784–1834, 2nd ed. (Manchester, 1961), 9. 133. L. S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, 1952), 49; Philips, East-India Company, 23. 134. H. V. Bowen, “British India, 1765 –1813,” in Marshall, Oxford History of the British Empire, 530. 135. Hancock, “‘World of Business to Do,’” 15. 136. Jacob Price, “What Did Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas Trade, 1660 –1790,” Journal of Economic History, 49 ( June 1989), 279. 137. Richard B. Sheridan, “The Commercial and Financial Organisation of the British Slave Trade,” Economic History Review, 11 (1958– 59), 249– 63. 138. Robin Law and Kirsten Moon, “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 56 (April 1999), 307– 34. 139. For a more general argument for the importance of this Atlantic community see Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 53 (1996), 251– 88. 140. Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade,” American Historical Review, 104 (April 1999), 333 –55. 141. Ibid., 346. 142. Thomas E. Kaiser, “Money, Despotism and Public Opinion in Early EighteenthCentury France: John Law and the Debate on Royal Credit,” Journal of Modern History, 63 (March 1991), 2; Philip Mirowski, “The Rise (and Retreat) of a Market: English Joint Stock Shares in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History, 41 (September 1981), 559 –77. 143. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989).

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144. Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in Marshall, Oxford History of the British Empire, 223. 145. Richard B. Sheridan, “The Molasses Act and the Market Strategy of the British Sugar Planters,” Journal of Economic History, 17 (1957), 62. 146. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780 –1914 (Oxford, 2004), 75. 147. On the state see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York, 1989).

Chapter Two. Improvement and the Discourse of Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland 1. David Armitage, “The Political Economy of Britain and Ireland after the Glorious Revolution,” in Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland, ed. Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge, 2000), 225. For compelling descriptions of that new society see Toby Barnard, A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649 –1770 (New Haven, 2003); and Sean J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992). 2. Sean J. Connolly, “The Glorious Revolution in Irish Protestant Political Thinking,” in Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, ed. Connolly (Dublin, 2000), 42. 3. Harman Murtagh, “The War in Ireland, 1689 –91,” in Kings in Conflict: The Revolutionary War in Ireland and Its Aftermath 1689–1750, ed. W. A. Maguire (Belfast, 1990), 89. 4. Captain Henry Boyle to the Dowager Countess of Orrery, February 14, 1689, in Calendar of the Orrery Papers, ed. Edward MacLysaght (Dublin, 1941), 369. 5. John Gerald Simms, The Williamite Confiscation in Ireland, 1690–1703 (Westport, Conn., 1976), 21. 6. W. A. Maguire, “The Land Settlement,” in Maguire, Kings in Conflict, 139– 56. 7. Arthur Young, A Tour in Ireland, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1922), 2:44. 8. Maureen Wall, The Penal Laws 1691–1760: Church and State from the Treaty of Limerick to the Accession of George III (Dundalk, 1961). 9. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, 279 – 94. 10. Barnard, New Anatomy of Ireland, 24. 11. Jacqueline Hill, “Ireland without Union: Molyneux and His legacy,” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1995), 271. 12. Patrick Kelly, “Recasting a Tradition: William Molyneux and the Sources of the Case of Ireland,” in Ohlmeyer, Political Thought, 85; Sean J. Connolly, “Reformers and Highflyers: the Post-Revolution Church,” in As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation, ed. Alan Ford, Jerry McGuire, and Kenneth Milne (Dublin, 1995), 155 –63. 13. Edward McParland, “Building the Parliament House in Dublin,” Parliamentary History, 21 (2002), 131– 40. 14. C. I. McGrath, “English Ministers, Irish Politicians and the Making of a Parliamentary Settlement in Ireland, 1692– 5,” English Historical Review, 119 (2004), 585 – 613.

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15. William Blathwayt to the Lords Justices, London, October 21/31, 1698, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne MSS 2 Box 1, f23. (The dates given were both Julian and Gregorian.) 16. Dickson, Old World Colony, 136. 17. The most capacious account of improvement in this context is John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005). 18. Royal Dublin Society Minute Book 1, Organisational meeting of June 25, 1731. The meeting was organised by Thomas Prior. For accounts of the foundation see Henry F. Berry, A History of the Royal Dublin Society (London, 1915), 3–14; and Terence de Vere White, The Story of the Royal Dublin Society (Tralee, 1955), 7–13. 19. Eoin Magennis, “Coal, Corn and Canals: Parliament and the Dispersal of Public Moneys 1695–1772,” Parliamentary History, 20 (2001), 74. 20. Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, “His Excellency the Earl of Chesterfield’s Speech to both Houses of Parliament at Dublin, on Friday, April 11, 1746,” in The Letters and Works of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, ed. Lord Mahon, 5 vols. (London, 1853), 5:57. 21. Neal Garnham, “Local Elite Creation in Early Hanoverian Ireland: The Case of the County Grand Jury,” Historical Journal, 42 (1999), 623– 42. 22. Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660 –1840 (Oxford, 1997), 130 – 31. 23. Jacqueline Hill, “The Shaping of Dublin Government in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 107 (2001), 149– 65; Edel Sheridan Quantz, “The MultiCentred Metropolis: The Social Topography of Eighteenth-Century Dublin,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 107 (2001), 268. 24. Toby Barnard, “‘Grand Metropolis’ or ‘The Anus of the World’? The Cultural Life of Eighteenth-Century Dublin,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 107 (2001), 185 –210; John Hogan and Gary Murphy, “From Guild to Union: The Evolution of the Dublin Bricklayers’ Society, 1670 –1888,” Saothar, 26 (2001), 17–24. 25. Rosemary Sweet, “Provincial Culture and Urban Histories in England and Ireland during the Long Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 108 (2002), 223–40. 26. Toby Barnard, Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 (New Haven, Conn., 2004), 367. 27. Kirsten Ewell Sundell, “‘The Dangerous Pamphleteers’: Dublin’s Economic Authors 1727–1732” (PhD thesis, University of Notre Dame, 2002), 43– 48. 28. Toby Barnard, “The Hartlib Circle and the Origins of the Dublin Philosophical Society,” Irish Historical Studies, 19 (1974), 56–71; Barnard, “The Hartlib Circle and the Cult and Culture of Improvement in Ireland,” in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge, 1994), 281–97; Eoin Magennis, “‘A Land of Milk and Honey’: The Physico-Historical Society and the Surveys of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Series C, 102 (2002), 199–217.

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29. Richard Lawrence, The Interest of Ireland in Its Trade and Wealth Stated (Dublin, 1682), xiii. 30. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626 –1660 (New York, 1976). But see Michael Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain (Woodbridge, 1995). 31. John Wynn Baker, A Short Description and List with the Prices of the Instruments of Husbandry made in the Factory at Laughlinstown, near Celbridge, in the County of Kildare (Dublin, 1762). 32. See Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann, “Markets in Context: Ideas, Practices and Governance,” in Markets in Context: Toward a Post-Marxist Critique of Markets, ed. Bevir and Trentmann (Cambridge, 2004), 5 –32. For the classic account of governance see Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (London, 1991), 87–104. 33. André Bourde, Agronomie et agronomes en France au XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols. (Paris, 1967), 2:1031, 1101. 34. Samuel Madden, A Letter to the Dublin Society on Improving their Fund and the Manufacture, Tillage Etc. in Ireland (Dublin, 1739), 20. Sir Thomas Molyneux, another of the founders, was a friend of Newton and Evelyn. 35. For the improvement of Dublin see Constantia Maxwell, Dublin under the Georges: 1714 – 1830 (London, 1936); Maurice Craig, Dublin, 1660–1860 (Dublin, 1952); Colm Lennon, “The Changing Face of Dublin, 1550–1750,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 107 (2001), 39 –52. 36. RDS Minute Book 1, September 16, 1731. Prior was born in 1682 in Rathdowney in King’s County (modern Laois), was educated at Kilkenny College, and was close to Berkeley. He was also one of the founders of the Rotunda lying-in hospital with Bartholomew Mosse. Dobbs was born in 1689 in Carrickfergus County. Antrim was an Irish M.P., a surveyor-general of Ireland, and eventually governor of North Carolina. Madden, born 1686 in Dublin, was a nephew of Molyneux. Dobbs and Prior were on the first committee of the society, organised before the society drew up its constitution in December 1731. Madden never formally joined the society but was an active collaborator and contributed funds. 37. John Robertson, The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005). 38. Nicholas Phillipson, “Towards a Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in City and Society in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Paul Fritz and David Williams (Toronto, 1973), 125–47; Phillipson, “Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in The University in Society, 2 vols., ed. Lawrence Stone (London, 1975) 1:407– 48; Phillipson, “The Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge, 1981), 19 –40; and Phillipson, “Politics, Politeness and the Anglicization of Early Eighteenth-Century Scottish Culture,” in Scotland and England 1286–1815, ed. Roger Mason (Edinburgh, 1987), 226–46. 39. Phillipson, “Definition of Scottish Enlightenment,” 125. 40. On Davenant see Shelly Burtt, Virtue Transformed: Political Argument in England, 1688 – 1740 (Cambridge, 1992), 4– 9; Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and

238

NOTES TO PAGES 60‒64

the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689 –1830 (Cambridge, 1993), 49– 50; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N. J., 1975), 436 – 46; and Istvan Hont, “Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy Reconsidered,” in The Economic Limits to Modern Politics, ed. John Dunn (Cambridge, 1990), 50– 89. For Davenant’s relevance beyond the “Anglo-Dutch moment,” see Richard Whatmore, “‘A Gigantic Manliness’: Paine’s Republicanism in the 1790s,” in Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750 –1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge, 2000), 140. 41. William Blathwayt to George Stepney, May 20, 1701, Blathwayt Papers OSB MSS 2, f 32, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 42. Arthur Dobbs, An Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland, Vol. 1 (Dublin, 1727), 66– 68. 43. Thomas Prior, A List of the Absentees of Ireland and the Yearly Value of their Estates and Incomes spent Abroad with Observations on the Present State and Condition of the Kingdom (Dublin, 1729), 62– 63. 44. Sir John Browne, Seasonable Remarks on Trade with some Reflections on the Advantages that might accrue to Great Britain, by a Proper Regulation of the Trade with Ireland (Dublin, 1728), 42. 45. Henry Maxwell, Reasons Offer’d for Erecting a Bank in Ireland; in a letter to Hercules Rowley (Dublin, 1721), 4, 40–43. 46. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (London, 1985), 148– 49. 47. Charles Davenant, “An Essay upon Universal Monarchy,” in The Political and Commercial Works of that Celebrated Writer Charles D’Avenant, 5 vols., ed. Charles Whitworth (London, 1771), 4: 1– 42; for the intellectual context of this intervention, Steven Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 1996). 48. Hont, “Free Trade,” 62. 49. Davenant, “That Foreign Trade is Beneficial to England,” in Political and Commercial Works, 1:349. 50. Hont, “Free Trade,” 42. 51. William Temple, An Essay upon the Advancement of Trade in Ireland (London, 1673), 10. 52. Davenant, “That Foreign Trade is Beneficial,” 1:354. 53. Davenant, “An Essay upon the Probable Methods of Making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade,” in Political and Commercial Works, 2:227–28. 54. John Robertson, “Universal Monarchy and the Liberties of Europe: David Hume’s Critique of an English Whig Doctrine,” in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), 358; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992), 24–25. 55. Davenant, “Discourse on the Public Revenues and on the Trade of England,” in Political and Commercial Works, 1: 134; Davenant, “That Foreign Trade is Beneficial,” 371. 56. Davenant, “An Essay upon the Probable Methods,” 187. 57. Burtt, Virtue Transformed, 8 – 9.

239

NOTES TO PAGES 64‒66

58. Davenant, “An Essay upon the Probable Methods,” 203. 59. Davenant, “That Foreign Trade is Beneficial,” 358. 60. Paul Kennedy argues this strategic vision emerged through England’s wars against the Dutch; see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, 1976), 65 –67. 61. See Hont, “Free Trade,” 78 –89, for a full discussion of the economic problems posed by Ireland. 62. For the debate on the acts see Patrick Kelly, “The Irish Woolen Export Prohibition Act of 1699: Kearney Revisited,” Irish Economic and Social History, 7 (1980), 22– 44. 63. John Cary, An Essay on the State of England in Relation to its Trade, its Poor and its Taxes (Bristol, 1695); Cary, A Vindication of the Parliament of England (London, 1698). See also William Atwood, The History and Reasons of the Dependency of Ireland upon the Imperial Crown of the Kingdom of England (London, 1698). 64. Davenant, “An Essay upon the Probable Methods,” 236–37. 65. Ibid., 246. 66. Ibid., 237. 67. Ibid. 68. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 148, stresses the political and institutional debate around this fact. See also J. H. Baker, “‘United and Knit to the Imperial Crown’: An English View of the Anglo-Hibernian Constitution in 1670,” in Mysteries and Solutions in Irish Legal History, ed. D. S. Greer and N. M. Dawson (Dublin, 2000), 73– 95. 69. Calvin’s Case 7 Coke Reports 1a, 77 ER 377. 70. Ibid., 398. 71. D. Alan Orr, “England, Ireland, Magna Carta and the Common Law: The Case of Connor Lord Maguire,” Journal of British Studies (2000), 389 –421. 72. Davenant, “An Essay upon the Probable Methods,” 248. 73. Ibid., 244. For the medieval discourse of the “community of the realm,” see James Lydon, “Ireland and the English Crown, 1171–1541,” Irish Historical Studies, 29 (May 1995), 281–94. For the Tudor reinvention of Irish political discourse see Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979); and Ciaran Brady, “England’s Defence and Ireland’s Reform: The Dilemma of the Irish Viceroys, 1541–1641,” in The British Problem c. 1534 –1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (London, 1996), 89–117. 74. Davenant, “An Essay upon the Probable Methods,” 245. 75. Ibid., 248. 76. William Atwood, The Superiority and Direct Dominion of the Imperial Crown of England over the Crown and Kingdom of Scotland, and the Divine Right of Succession of Both Crowns Inseparable from the Civil (London, 1704). 77. Davenant, “An Essay upon the Probable Methods of Making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade,” 243. 78. Ibid., 244.

240

NOTES TO PAGES 66‒70

79. Isolde Victory, “The Making of the 1720 Declaratory Act,” in Parliament, Politics and People: Essays in eighteenth-century Irish History, ed. Gerard O’Brien (Dublin, 1898), 9–29. 80. Patrick Kelly, “William Molyneux and the Spirit of Liberty in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Irís an dá Chultúr, 3 (1988), 133– 48. 81. Anon., An Inquiry into some of the Causes of the Ill Situation of the Affairs of Ireland (Dublin, 1731), 7. 82. Maxwell, Reasons Offer’d for Erecting a Bank, 4. 83. Hercules Rowley, An Answer to a Book Intitled: Reasons Offered for Erecting a Bank in Ireland. In a Letter to Henry Maxwell Esq. (Dublin, 1721), 5. 84. [ Jonathan Swift], Fraud Detected, or, the Hibernian Patriot, Containing all the Drapier’s Letters to the People of Ireland (Dublin, 1725), 140. 85. Ibid., 143. 86. See Patrick Kelly, “The Politics of Political Economy in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” in Connolly, Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 105–29, for an overview of this literature. 87. Dobbs, Trade and Improvement of Ireland, 1:68. 88. Ibid., 3. 89. Ibid., 4–7. 90. Ibid., 7. 91. Prior, List of the Absentees of Ireland, 64. 92. Dobbs, Trade and Improvement of Ireland, 1:66– 67. 93. This view was later to be taken up by Smith. See Adam Smith to Henry Dundas, November 1, 1779, in Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (Indianapolis, 1987), 240 – 42. 94. Henry Maxwell, An Essay upon the Union of Ireland with England (London, 1703). For an analysis of Maxwell, see Jim Smyth, “‘No Remedy more Proper’: Anglo-Irish Unionism before 1707,” in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, 1998), 301–20. 95. Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce (London, 1728), 37. 96. Ibid., 48. 97. Ibid., ix. 98. William Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland (London, 1691), 31. 99. Arthur Dobbs, An Essay on the Trade of Ireland, Vol. 2 (Dublin, 1731), 77. 100. See Jim Smyth, “The Communities of Ireland and the British State, 1660–1707,” in Bradshaw and Morrill, British Problem, 254. 101. See Richard Lawrence, The Interest of Ireland (Dublin, 1682); and John Hovell, A Discourse on the Woolen Manufacture of Ireland (Dublin, 1689). For a full treatment of these themes, see Jim Smyth, “‘Like Amphibious Animals,’ Irish Protestants, Ancient Britons 1691–1707,” Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 785 – 97. 102. Daniel Defoe, An Essay at Removing National Prejudices against a Union with Scotland (Edinburgh, 1706), 15.

241

NOTES TO PAGES 70‒73

103. Anon., Some of the Causes of the Ill Situation, 13. 104. Smyth, “‘No Remedy more Proper,’” 308. 105. Dobbs, Trade of Ireland, 2:77. 106. James Kelly, “Political and Public Opinion in Ireland and the Idea of an AngloIrish Union, 1650 –1800,” in Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ireland, ed. D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, and Vincent Geoghegan (Basingstoke, England, 2001), 110– 44. 107. William Ferguson, “The Making of the Treaty of Union 1707,” Scottish Historical Review, 43 (1964), 89 –110; Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, 50. 108. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (Cambridge, 1992), 6. 109. John Toland, Reasons why the Bill for the Better Securing the Dependency of Ireland upon the Crown of Great Britain should not Pass into Law (London, 1720), 12. 110. Margaret Campbell to Hugh Campbell, October 20, 1715, Loudon papers, LO 7384, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. 111. Anon., Some Remarks Occasion’d by the Revd Mr Madden’s Scheme and Objections Raised Against It, by one who is no Projector (Dublin, 1732), 10. 112. Toby C. Barnard, “Crises of Identity among Irish Protestants 1641–1685,” Past and Present, 127 (May 1990), 50; Barnard, “The Uses of the 23 October 1641 and Irish Protestant Celebrations,” English Historical Review, 105 (1991), 889– 920. 113. For an overview of changing views on this question and others in eighteenth-century historiography, see Sean J. Connolly, “Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” in The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, ed. D. G. Boyce and Alan O’Day (London, 1996), 15– 33. 114. Ian McBride, The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (Dublin, 1997), 12–13; Anthony Terence Quincey Stewart, The Narrow Ground: The Roots of Conflict in Ulster (London, 1989), 49– 52. 115. Patrick Griffin, “Defining the Limits of Britishness: The ‘New’ British History and the Meaning of the Revolution Settlement in Ireland for Ulster’s Presbyterians,” Journal of British Studies, 39 (2000), 263– 87. 116. Toland, Reasons, 5. 117. Anon., Some Thoughts Concerning Government in General and our Present Circumstances in Great Britain and Ireland (Dublin, 1731), 52. 118. Alan Ford, “James Ussher and the Creation of Irish Protestant Identity,” in Bradshaw and Roberts, British Consciousness and Identity, 185–212. 119. Barnard, “Crises of Identity,” 63 –80. 120. Vincent Gookin, The Great Case of Transplantation in Ireland Stated (London, 1655), 9. 121. Richard Lawrence, The Interest of England in the Irish Transplantation Stated (London, 1655), 12; Richard Lawrence to Walter Cooper, Dublin, April 25, 1668, in Calendar of the Orrery Papers, ed. Edward McLysaght (Dublin, 1941), 60. 122. Petty, Political Anatomy of Ireland, 98.

242

NOTES TO PAGES 73‒77

123. William Petty to Samuel Hartlib, Kilkenny, October 13, 1652, Osborne MSS f 16799, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 124. Jane Ohlmeyer, “Seventeenth-Century Ireland and the New British and Atlantic Histories,” American Historical Review, 104 (April 1999), 454. 125. John Hovell, A Discourse on the Woolen Manufactury of Ireland and the Consequences of Prohibiting Its Exportation (n.p., 1698), 10. 126. The Lord Clarendon’s Speech at the Resignment of the Sword, [February] 1687, Blathwayt Papers OSB 2 f 54, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 127. For an overview of English models of Irishness in the period see Joop Leersen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996), 32–76. 128. Anon., Some of the Causes of the Ill Situation, 11. 129. William Petty, “The Political Anatomy of Ireland,” in The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, 2 vols., ed. Charles Henry Hull (Cambridge, 1899), 1:159. 130. Hovell, Discourse on the Woolen Manufactury, 10. 131. Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana, 6. 132. Ciaran Brady, “Spenser’s Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s,” Past and Present, 111 (May 1986), 38. 133. Francis Hutcheson, A Collection of Letters and Essays, on Several Subjects, Lately Published in the Dublin Journal, 2 vols. (London, 1729), 1:259. 134. Browne, Seasonable Remarks on Trade, 38. 135. Dobbs, Trade and Improvement of Ireland, 1:13. 136. Browne, Seasonable Remarks on Trade, 46. 137. Robert Molesworth, An Account of Denmark as it was in the Year 1692 (London, 1694), 43. 138. Ibid., 83. 139. Ibid., 87. 140. Robert Molesworth, Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor (Dublin, 1723), 4. 141. Thomas Prior, List of the Absentees of Ireland, 65. 142. Ibid. 143. George Berkeley, A Word to the Wise, or, the Bishop of Cloyne’s Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland, 2nd ed. (Dublin, 1749), 4. 144. Prior, List of the Absentees of Ireland, 73. 145. Ibid., 1–2. 146. Tim Kiern, “Monopoly, Economic Thought, and the Royal African Company,” in Early-Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London, 1996), 427– 66. 147. Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (London, 1703), 336. 148. Ibid., 2. 149. Madden, Letter to the Dublin Society, 11.

243

NOTES TO PAGES 77‒81

150. Francis Hutchinson, A Letter to a Member of Parliament Concerning the Imploying and Providing for the Poor (Dublin, 1723), 3. 151. Dobbs, Trade and Improvement of Ireland, 1:98 – 99. 152. Martin, Western Isles of Scotland, 348. 153. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, 1988), 413. 154. For a reading that does attempt to organise these authors in this way see Sundell, “The Dangerous Pamphleteers.” 155. Connolly, “Glorious Revolution in Irish Protestant Political Thinking,” 37. 156. William King, The State of the Protestants of Ireland under the late King James’s Government; in which their Carriage toward him is Justified (Dublin, 1713), 89. 157. Patrick Kelly, “Perceptions of Locke in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 89c (1989). 158. Thomas Bartlett, “The Origin and Progress of the Catholic Question in Ireland, 1680–1800,” in Endurance and Emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Thomas P. Power and Kevin Whelan (Dublin, 1990), 6. 159. Hill, From Patriots to Unionists, 261. 160. However, it has been largely ignored. For overviews see Kelly, “Politics of Political Economy”; and Salim Rashid, “The Irish School of Economic Development: 1720 –1750,” The Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, 54 (1988), 345 – 69. 161. Foucault, “Governmentality.” Ian Hacking thinks Petty may have developed his ideas from John Graunt: see Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge, 1975), 105. 162. Petty, Political Anatomy of Ireland, 24. 163. Ibid., 29. 164. Ibid., 89. 165. Hacking, Emergence of Probability, 110. 166. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998), 135. 167. Davenant, “On the Use of political Arithmetic, in all Considerations about the Revenues and Trade,” in Political and Commercial Works, 128. 168. David Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland 1660–1800 (Dublin, 2000), 115. 169. David Dickson, “Butter Comes to Market: The Origins of Commercial Dairying in County Cork,” in Cork: History and Society; Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County, ed. Patrick O’Flanagan and Cornelius G. Buttimer (Dublin, 1992). 170. Louis Cullen, The Emergence of Modern Ireland 1600–1900 (London, 1981), 141– 49. 171. Louis Cullen, “The Contemporary and Later Politics of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Irís an dá Chultúr, 8 (1993), 7–38. 172. David Hayton, “Did Protestantism Fail in Early Eighteenth-Century Ireland? Charity Schools and the Enterprise of Religious and Social Reformation c. 1690 –1730,” and Toby C. Barnard, “Improving Clergymen, 1660 –1760,” both in Ford, McGuire, and Milne, As by Law Established, 136– 51, 166 –86.

244

NOTES TO PAGES 81‒86

173. Toby C. Barnard, “Reforming Irish Manners: The Religious Societies in Dublin during the 1690s,” Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 806. 174. Peter Browne, Of Drinking to the Memory of the Dead (Dublin, 1713); Barnard, “Reforming Irish Manners,” 811. 175. Hayton, “Did Protestantism Fail?” 167. 176. Barnard, “Improving Clergymen,” 136. 177. On Protestant asceticism, see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. R. H. Tawney (London, 1930), 95 –154. For a friendly critique of Weber see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 511–12. 178. On the problems facing all such disciplinary campaigns in the period, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), 113. 179. Gerard Boote, Ireland’s Naturall History (London, 1652). See also Barnard, “Hartlib Circle and the Cult and Culture of Improvement.” 180. Barnard, “Improving Clergymen,” 146 – 48; Francis Hutchinson, A Second Letter to a Member of Parliament Recommending the Improvement of the Irish Fishery (Dublin, 1729), 3– 6, 21. 181. Mordecai Cary, A Sermon Preached at Christ Church, Dublin, on the 18th day of March 1743 before the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland (Dublin, 1744), 16. 182. Maxwell, Reasons Offered for Erecting a Bank, 12. 183. Hutcheson, Letters and Essays, 1:160. 184. Ibid., 1:48. 185. Ian McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 51. 186. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, 2nd ed. (London, 1726), 87. 187. Francis Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, ed. Wolfgang Liedhold (Indianapolis, 2004), 192. 188. Ibid., 193. 189. Dobbs, Trade and Improvement of Ireland, 1:98. 190. RDS Minute Book 1, June 26, 1731. 191. Ibid., December 13, 1731, p. 26. 192. Ibid., June 21, 1733, p. 75; RDS Minute Book 2, December 6, 1733, p. 5. 193. RDS Minute Book 1, January 20, 1732, p. 35; RDS Minute Book 2, November 25, 1736, p. 42. 194. Mervyn Busteed, “Sir James Caldwell, c. 1720–84: An Anglo-Irish Landlord in the Age of Improvement,” Irish Studies Review, 9 (2001), 317–29; Magennis, “‘Land of Milk and Honey.’” 195. Madden, Letter to the Dublin Society, 6. 196. Samuel Madden, Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland as to their Conduct for the Service of Their Country (Dublin, 1738), 12–13. 197. Daniel MacLauchlan, An Essay upon Improving and Adding to the Strength of Great Britain and Ireland by Fornication, Justifying the same from Scripture and Reason (Dublin, 1735), 2.

245

NOTES TO PAGES 86‒92

198. Ibid., 18 –19. 199. Madden, Reflections and Resolutions, 19. 200. Ibid., 29. 201. Anon., Some Remarks Occasion’d by the Revd Mr Madden’s Scheme, 7. 202. Ibid., 8. 203. Anon., Some of the Causes of the Ill Situation, 19. 204. Samuel Madden, A Reply to the Discourse which Carried the Premium at the Academy of Dijon in 1750, on the Question proposed by the said Academy, hath the Re-Establishment of Arts and Sciences Contributed to Purge or Corrupt our Manners? (Dublin, 1751), 5. 205. Ibid., 29.

Chapter Three. The Authority of the Defeated 1. T. O. McLoughlin, Contesting Ireland: Irish Voices against England in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1999), 26. 2. Arthur Dobbs, An Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland, Vol. 1 (Dublin, 1727), 92. 3. George Berkeley, A Word to the Wise, or, the Bishop of Cloyne’s Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland, 2nd ed. (Dublin, 1749), 3. 4. Sean J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992). 5. Theobald Wolfe Tone, An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, in which the Present Political state of that Country, and the Necessity of a Parliamentary Reform are Considered (Dublin, 1791), 35. 6. Ian McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 25. 7. Thomas Wyse, Historical Sketch of the late Catholic Association of Ireland, 2 vols. (London, 1829) 1:61. 8. Istvan Hont, “The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: ‘Nation-State’ and ‘Nationalism’ in Historical Perspective,” in Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the NationState in Historical Perspective, ed. Hont (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 463 –73. 9. For the Cameronians in this context see Colin Kidd, “Conditional Britons: The Scots Covenanting Tradition and the Eighteenth-Century British State,” English Historical Review, 117 (2002), 1147–76. 10. On Jurieu and writings of the refuge see Guy Howard Dodge, The Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Diaspora with Special Reference to the Thought and Influence of Pierre Jurieu (New York, 1947); and W. J. Stankiewicz, Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century France: A Study of Political Ideas from the Monarchomachs to Bayle, as Reflected in the Toleration Controversy (Berkeley, Calif., 1960). On figurism, see Catherine-Laurence Maire, “L’église et la nation: Du dépot de la vérité au dépot des lois: La trajectoire janséniste au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales Economie Société Cvilisation, 46 (September–October 1991), 1177–1205 ; and Dale van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution 1560–1791 (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 89 –100.

246

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11. John Everard, A Winding-Sheet for the Schism of England Contriv’d for to Inform the Ignorant, Resolve the Wavering and Confirm the Well-Principled Roman Catholic (Dublin, 1687), 4. 12. Tim Hochstrasser, “Conscience and Reason: The Natural Law Theory of Jean Barbeyrac,” Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 289– 308. Barbeyrac was a second-generation Huguenot of the refuge. 13. W. R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Regime 1648–1789 (Cambridge, 1999), 15. 14. Pierre Nicole, De l’éducation d’un prince: divisée en trois parties, dont la dernière contient divers traittez utiles à tout le monde (Paris, 1670), 175. My translation. 15. Pierre Nicole, Essais de morale: contenus en divers traittez sur plusieurs devoirs importans, Vol. 3 (Paris, 1675), 146. My translation. 16. Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 300 – 302. 17. Pierre Nicole, Essais de morale: contenus en divers traittez sur plusieurs devoirs importans, Vol. 1 (Paris, 1701), 211–12. My translation. 18. Istvan Hont, “The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the ‘Four-Stages’ Theory,” in Jealousy of Trade, 159– 84. 19. The best overview of penal legislation remains Maureen Wall, “The Penal Laws 1691–1760,” in Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays of Maureen Wall, ed. Gerard O’Brien (Dublin, 1989), 1–60; but see also Louis M. Cullen, “Catholics under the Penal Laws,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Irís an dá Chultúr, 1 (1986), 23– 36. 20. 7 Will. 3, c. 5 (1695), An Act for better Securing the Government by Disarming Papists; 9 Will. 2, c. 1 (1697), An Act for Banishing any Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction and all Regulars of the Popish Clergy; 10 Will. 3, c. 13 (1698), An Act to prevent Papists being Solicitors. 21. 2 Ann, c. 3 (1703), An Act to Prevent Papist Priests from Coming into the Kingdom; 2 Ann, c. 6 (1703), An Act to prevent the further growth of Popery. 22. David Dickson, “Jacobitism in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: A Munster Perspective,” Éire: Ireland, 39 (Fall/Winter 2004), 53– 54. 23. 8 Ann, c. 3, sec. 37 (1709), An act for explaining . . . An Act to prevent the further growth of Popery. 24. Marianne Elliot, The Catholics of Ulster: A History (Harmondsworth, England, 2000), 164. 25. Louis M. Cullen, “The Contemporary and Later Politics of the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá Chultúr, 8 (1993), 7–38; Cullen, “The Blackwater Catholics and County Cork Society and Politics in the Eighteenth Century,” in Cork: History and Society, ed. Patrick O’Flanagan and C. G. Buttimer (Dublin, 1993); Neal Garnham, “The Trials of James Cotter and Henry, Baron Barry of Santry: Two Case Studies in the Administration of Criminal Justice in Early Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” Irish Historical Studies, 31 (1999), 328 – 42. 26. Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (London, 1992), 6 –10. 27. Charles O’Conor, ed., Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late Charles O’Conor of Balangare Esq. MRA (Dublin, 1796), 184.

247

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28. Louis M. Cullen, “Catholic Social Classes under the Penal Laws,” in Endurance and Emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Thomas P. Power and Kevin Whelan (Dublin, 1990), 73. 29. Kevin Whelan, “An Underground Gentry? Catholic Middlemen in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” in The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity 1760 –1830 (Cork, 1996), 27– 33. 30. Cullen, “Catholic Social Classes,” 62. 31. David Dickson, “Catholics and Trade in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: An Old Debate Revisited,” in Power and Whelan, Endurance and Emergence, 85 –110. 32. Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992), 50; C. D. A. Leighton, Catholicism in a Protestant Kingdom: A Study of the Irish Ancien Regime (London, 1994), 67–85. 33. Hercules Rowley, An Answer to Mr Maxwell’s Second Letter to Mr Rowley Concerning the Bank (Dublin, 1721), 16. 34. Anon., “The Case of Usurie Stated, and resolved according to Scriptures, Fathers and Councils” (England, c. 1680), Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne MSS 17920. 35. Rosemary Raughter, “A Discreet Benevolence: Female Philanthropy and the Catholic Resurgence in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” Women’s History Review, 6 (1997), 465 –84. 36. Patrick J. Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey (Dublin, 1985), 128; Maire Kennedy, “Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Publishing in Munster and South Leinster,” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 103 (1998), 89–104. 37. Laurence M. Geary, Medicine and Charity in Ireland 1718 –1851 (Dublin, 2004), 22–23. 38. Leighton, Catholicism in a Protestant Kingdom, 94. 39. Ibid., 145– 60. 40. Patrick Fagan, Dublin’s Turbulent Priest: Cornelius Nary (1658 –1738) (Dublin, 1991). 41. Cornelius Nary, The Case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland (Dublin, 1724). 42. Edward Synge, The Case of Toleration Consider’d with Respect both to Religion and Civil Government in a Sermon Preach’d in St Andrew’s Dublin, before the Honourable House of Commons (Dublin, 1725), 41. 43. Stephen Radcliffe, A Letter to the Reverend Mr. Edward Synge, Prebendary of St. Patrick’s, Occasion’d by a late Sermon Preach’d in St. Andrew’s, Dublin, before the Honourable House of Commons, October 23, 1725 (Dublin, 1725), 4. 44. Edward Synge, A Charitable Address to All who are of the Communion of the Church of Rome (Dublin, 1727), 4. 45. Cornelius Nary, A Rejoinder to the Reply to the Answer to the Charitable Address of his Grace Edward, Lord Arch-Bishop of Tuam, to all who are the Communion of the Church of Rome (Dublin, 1730), 12. 46. Cornelius Nary, A Letter to His Grace Edward, Lord Archbishop of Tuam, in Answer to His Charitable Address to all who are of the Communion of the Church of Rome (Dublin, 1728), 9. 47. Brendan Bradshaw, “Geoffrey Keating: Apologist of Irish Ireland,” in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict 1534 –1660, ed. Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield,

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and Willey Maley (Cambridge, 1993), 166 – 90; Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2004). 48. Nicholas Canny, “The Formation of the Irish Mind: Religion, Politics and Gaelic Irish Literature,” Past and Present, 95 (1982), 96. 49. Geoffrey Keating, trans. David Comyn and Patrick Dineen, The History of Ireland, Corpus of Electronic Texts, University College Cork, www.ucc.ie/celt (accessed June 6, 2006). 50. Richard Stanihurst, De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis (Antwerp, 1584), Renaissance Latin Texts of Ireland, University College Cork, http://www.ucc.ie:8080/cocoon/doi/rlti/rebus? subroot⫽TEI.2 (accessed June 6, 2006); Colm Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, the Dubliner 1547– 1618 (Dublin, 1981). 51. Ciaran Brady, “Spencer’s Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s,” Past and Present, 111 (May 1986), 39. 52. For the political and intellectual strategies of the Old English, see Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland 1625 –1642 (Ithaca, 1966); Ciaran Brady, “Conservative Subversives: The Community of the Pale and the Dublin Administration,” in Radicals, Rebels and Establishments, ed. Brady and Patrick J. Corish (Belfast, 1985); and Nicholas Canny, “Edmund Spencer and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity,” Yearbook of English Studies, 13 (1983), 1–19. 53. “A Defence of the True History of Ireland, Containing the Sums of the Transactions of Ireland, Gathered by much Pains out of the most ancient and authentick Records and Chronicles of Ireland, and many Forraign Allowed Authorities by Jefery Keating,” Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborn Shelves, fc 94, undated MS, v. 28. 54. Ibid., 56– 57. 55. Cunningham, World of Geoffrey Keating, 3. 56. Michéal Ó’Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, 1999); Tadhg Ó’hAnnracháin, “Conflicting Loyalties, Conflicted Rebels: Political and Religious Allegiance among the Confederate Catholics of Ireland,” English Historical Review, Vol. 119 (2004), 851–72; Aidan Clarke, Prelude to Restoration in Ireland: The End of the Commonwealth, 1659–1660 (New York, 1999). 57. Patrick J. Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin, 1981), 44. 58. Canny, “Formation of the Irish Mind,” 97. 59. Bartlett, Fall and Rise. 60. Steven Pincus, “The European Catholic Context of the Revolution of 1688 –89: Gallicanism, Innocent XI, and Catholic Opposition,” in Shaping the Stuart World 1603–1714: The Atlantic Connection, ed. Allan I. MacInnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden and Boston, 2006), 79 –114; John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973). 61. John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570 –1850 (London, 1975), 70. 62. Corish, Irish Catholic Experience, 116. 63. Thomas O’Connor, “Religious Change, 1550–1800,” in The Oxford History of the Irish

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Book, Vol. 3, The Irish Book in English 1550 –1800, ed. Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (Oxford, 2006), 183; Eamonn Duffy, ed., Challoner and His Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England (London, 1981). The reorganisation of the history of French religious thinking around de Sales is the theme of Henri Bremond, Histoire Littéraire du Sentiment religieux en France depuis la Fin des Guerres de Religion jusqu’a nous: L’Humanisme dévot (1580 –1660) (Paris, 1916). 64. Pádraig Ó’Súilleabháin, “Catholic Books Printed in Ireland 1740 –1820 Containing Lists of Subscribers,” Collectanea Hibernica, 6 and 7 (1963– 64), 232. 65. Patrick Boyle, The Irish College in Paris from 1598 to 1901: with a brief Account of the other Irish Colleges in France (Dublin, 1901), 16. 66. Corish, Catholic Community, 87. 67. Serenus Cressy, Exomologesis, or, A faithfull Narration of the Occasion and Motives of the Conversion unto Catholick unity of Hugh-Paulin de Cressy, lately Deane of Laghlin &c. in Ireland and Prebend of Windsore in England now a second Time printed with Additions and Explications by the same Author who now calls himself B. Serenus Cressy, religious Priest of the holy Order of S. Benedict in the Convent of S. Gregory in Doway (n.p., 1653), 463. 68. François de Sales, An Introduction to the Devout Life (London, 1686), xxi–xxii. 69. Helène Bordes, “Charité et Humilité dans l’Oeuvre de François de Sales,” Dix-septième siècle, 43 (1991), 15 –25. 70. De Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, 340. 71. De Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, 334. 72. Robert Sauzet, “Dieu et Mammon: Les Réformes et la Richesse,” History of European Ideas, 9 (1988), 443 – 50. 73. Clarissa Campbell Orr, “Introduction: Court Studies, Gender and Women’s History 1660–1837,” in Queenship in Britain 1660 –1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics, ed. Orr (Manchester, 2002), 17; Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, Vol. 5 (London, 1857), 492. 74. Strickland, Queens of England, 507. 75. Patricia O’Connell, The Irish College at Lisbon 1590–1834 (Dublin, 2001), 23; Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1995), 47. 76. Boyle, Irish College in Paris, 26. 77. Bossy, English Catholic Community, 69. 78. Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet’s History of his own Time, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1724 –37), 1:364. 79. Edward Corp, “Catherine of Braganza and Cultural Politics,” in Orr, Queenship in Britain, 56. 80. Peter Leech, “Musicians in the Catholic Chapel of Catherine of Braganza, 1662– 92,” Early Music, 29 (2001) 570 – 88. 81. Samuel Pepys, R. C. Latham, and W. Mathews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols., (London, 1971), 9:126 (March 22, 1668). 82. John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence, 4 vols. (London, 1886), 2:271.

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83. Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge, 1989); Frances E. Dolan, “Gender and the ‘Lost’ Spaces of Catholicism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (2002), 649 –50. 84. Thomas Nugent, “Observations on several transactions that happened in the year 1669, and since that time being the 21st yeare of the raigne of Charles II,” Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne MSS 11095. 85. Tadhg Ó’hAnnracháin, “Plunkett, Sir Nicholas (1602–1680),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/67056 (accessed July 24, 2006). 86. Strickland, Queens of England, 691. 87. Patrick Kelly, “‘A Light to the Blind’: The Voice of the Dispossessed Elite in the Generation after the Defeat at Limerick,” Irish Historical Studies, 24 (November 1985), 440– 41. Kelly gives the definitive account of the complicated history of these manuscript histories. 88. Patrick Kelly, ed., “The Improvement of Ireland,” Analecta Hibernica, 35 (1992), 49. 89. John T. Gilbert, ed., A Jacobite Narrative of the War in Ireland, 1688 –1691 (Shannon, 1971), 20. 90. J. G. Simms, Jacobite Ireland, 1685 –91 (Dublin, 2000), 51. 91. Work on this topic has been transformed by Breandan Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghear: na Stíobhartaigh agus an Taos Léinn 1603 –1788 (Dublin, 1996); and Eamonn Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685 –1766: A Fatal Attachment (Dublin, 2004). 92. William Blathwayt to the Duke of Shrewsbury, July 25, 1797, Blathwayt Papers, Osborne MSS 2 f 29, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 93. Patrick Fagan, ed., Ireland in the Stuart Papers, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1995) 1:3. 94. Tadhg Ó’hAnnracháin, “‘Though Hereticks and Politicians should Misinterpret their goode Zeal’: Political Ideology and Catholicism in Early-Modern Ireland,” in Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland, 155 –75. 95. On Jacobitism see Breandán Ó Buachalla, “Irish Jacobitism and Irish Nationalism: The Literary Evidence,” in Nations and Nationalism: France, Britain, Ireland and the Eighteenth-Century Context, ed. Michael O’Dea and Kevin Whelan (Oxford, 1995), 103–16. 96. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992), 83. 97. Murray G. H. Pittock, Jacobitism (London, 1998), 11. 98. Murray G. H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1994), 93. For Irish literary Jacobitism see Breandán Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghear: na Stíobhartaigh agus an t-aos léinn 1601–1788 (Dublin, 1996). 99. For connections between Jacobitism and social banditry, see John Broad, “Whigs and Deer-Stealers in Other Guises: A Return to the Origins of the Black Act,” Past and Present, 119 (May 1988), 56 –72. 100. T. M. Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester, 1994), 20. 101. Pádraig A. Breathnach, “Oral and Written Transmission of Poetry in the Eighteenth

251

NOTES TO PAGES 110‒13

Century,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Irís an dá Chultúr, 2 (1987), 57– 66; Diarmuid Ó Muirithe, “‘Tho’ not in the full Style compleat’: Jacobite Songs from Gaelic Manuscript Sources,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Irís an dá Chultúr, 6 (1991), 93 –104. 102. James S. Donnelly, “The Whiteboy Movement, 1761– 65,” Irish Historical Studies, 21 (1978), 20 – 54. 103. E. P. Thompson, “Custom, Law and Common Right,” in Customs in Common, ed. Thompson (Harmondsworth, England, 1991), 97–184. 104. Thomas Bartlett, “Defenders and Defenderism in 1795,” Irish Historical Studies, 24 (1985), 373– 94; Marianne Elliot, “The Defenders in Ulster,” in The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion, ed. David Dickson, Daragh Keogh, and Kevin Whelan (Dublin, 1993), 222–33. 105. James S. Donnelly, “Irish Agrarian Rebellion: The Whiteboys of 1769 –76,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Series c, 83 (1983), 293 – 331. 106. Maurice Bric, “Priests, Parsons and Politics: The Rightboy Protest in County Cork, 1785–1788,” Past and Present, 100 (1983), 100–123. 107. Kevin Whelan, “An Underground Gentry? Catholic Middlemen in EighteenthCentury Ireland,” in The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760 –1830 (Cork, 1996), 41. 108. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 48. 109. Ibid., 51. 110. Steven Pincus, “From Holy Cause to Economic Interest: The Study of Population and the Invention of the State,” in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. Pincus and Alan Houston (Cambridge, 2001). 111. Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce (London, 1728), 48. 112. Ibid., 103. 113. Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman (London, 1700). 114. Ibid., 14. 115. Dale van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 249 – 302. 116. Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000), 460. 117. John Philips, The Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II and K. James II (London, 1690), 72–73. 118. John Philips, Augustus Britannicus, a Poem upon the Conclusion of the Peace of Europe (London, 1697), 12. 119. Nathaniel Hooke, “A Memorial concerning the Advantages That will Result to France in Supporting a Rebellion in Scotland, Presented to the Court by Col. Hooke in 1707,” in The Secret History of Colonel Hooke’s Negotiations in Favour of the Pretender in 1707 (Dublin, 1760), 8.

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NOTES TO PAGES 114‒17

120. John Miller, “The Earl of Tyrconnell and James II’s Irish Policy, 1685 –1688,” Historical Journal, 20 (1977), 814. 121. Simms, Jacobite Ireland, 50 –51. 122. Kelly, “Improvement of Ireland,” 47; Simms, Jacobite Ireland, 92. 123. Boyle, Irish College in Paris, 47. 124. Gilbert, Jacobite Narrative of the War, 39. 125. Ibid., 40. 126. Kelly, “Improvement of Ireland,” 54. 127. Ibid., 61. 128. Ibid., 54. 129. For another version of an imperial vision anchored in allegiance to the Crown, see Mark L. Thompson, “‘The Predicament of Ubi’: Locating Authority and National Identity in the Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore, 2005), 71– 92. 130. Ibid., 83– 84. 131. Andrew Fletcher, A Discourse Concerning Militias and standing Armies with Relation to the past and present Governments of Europe and of England in Particular (London, 1697). 132. Paul Cheney, “The History and Science of Commerce in the Century of Enlightenment: France, 1713–1789” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2002); John Shovlin, “Toward a Reinterpretation of Revolutionary Antinobilism: The Political Economy of Honor in the Old Regime,” Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000), 35 –66; Shovlin, “Emulation in Eighteenth-Century French Economic Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36 (2003), 224 – 30. 133. Antoin Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker (Oxford, 1997), 68– 69, 105–22. 134. Manuela Albertone, “The Difficult Reception of James Steuart at the End of the Eighteenth Century in France,” in The Economics of James Steuart, ed. Ramón Tortajada (London, 1999), 41–75. 135. Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 87. 136. Daniel Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (New Haven, Conn., 2006). 137. Hugh Reily, The Impartial History of Ireland (London, 1768), 72–73. 138. Ibid., 45. 139. Ibid., 48. 140. Ibid., 10. 141. For a Scottish example of this line of Jacobite thought, see Daniel Szechi, “Constructing a Jacobite: The Social and Intellectual Origins of George Lockhart of Carnwath,” Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 977–96. 142. James F. McMillan, “The Innes Brothers and the Scots College, Paris,” in The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks and Edward Corp (London, 1995), 91–101.

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NOTES TO PAGES 117‒21

143. Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an AngloBritish Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge, 1993), 101–7. 144. Thompson Cooper, rev. Adam I. P. Smith, “Hooke, Nathaniel (d. 1763),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13692 (accessed February 23, 2005). 145. Thomas O’Connor, An Irish Theologian in Enlightenment France: Luke-Joseph Hooke, 1714 – 96 (Dublin, 1995). 146. Luke Joseph Hooke, Á MM les députés de l’assemblée nationale (Paris, 1791). 147. Nugent, “Observations on Several Transactions.” 148. Harman Murtagh, “Irish Soldiers Abroad 1600–1800,” in A Military History of Ireland, ed. Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey (Cambridge, 1996), 298. Christopher Nugent lost his regiment after his involvement in the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion. 149. Thomas Nugent, A Grand Tour through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France, 4 vols. (London, 2004). 150. Seamus Deane, “Montesquieu and Burke,” in Ireland and the French Enlightenment, 1700 –1800, ed. Graham Gargett and Geraldine Sheridan (London, 1999), 47. 151. Public Record Office Northern Ireland Black Papers T/1073/7/9, John Black, Laus Deo in South Blamont, June 24, 1754. 152. Nathaniel Hooke, Discours Critiques sur l’Histoire et le Gouvernement de l’ancienne Rome (Paris, 1770), 5. 153. Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, N. J., 1965), 234. 154. Ibid., 272– 97. 155. François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, Les Aventures de Télémaque, Fils d’Ulysse (suite du quatrième Livre de l’Odysée) (Paris, 1699). 156. Pádraig Ó’Súilleabháin, “The Library of a Parish Priest of the Penal Days,” Collectanea Hibernica, 6 and 7 (1963 – 64), 235. 157. Andrew Michael Ramsay, Histoire de la Vie de Messr. François de Salignac de la MotteFénelon, Archevesque Duc de Cambray (Brussels, 1724); Ramsay, An Essay upon Civil Government wherein is set forth, the Necessity, Origins, Rights, Boundaries of different Forms of Sovereignty, with Observations on the ancient Government of Rome and England according to the Principles of the late Archbishop of Cambray (London, 1722); Ramsay, Les Voyages de Cyrus, avec un Discours sur la Mythologie, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1732). 158. Andrew Michael Ramsay, The Life of François de Salignac de la Motte Fénelon Archbishop and Duke of Cambray, trans. Nathaniel Hooke (Dublin, 1771), 85. 159. W. R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Régime, 1848 –1789 (Cambridge, 1999), 22. 160. Ibid., 110. 161. Patrick Riley, “Introduction,” in François de Fénelon, Telemachus Son of Ulysses (Cambridge, 1994), xxii. 162. Ramsay, Civil Government, 23. 163. Ramsay, Life of François de Salignac de la Motte Fénelon, 131.

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NOTES TO PAGES 121‒28

164. Ibid., 126. 165. Ramsay, Civil Government, 58. 166. Ibid., 11. 167. Arnold H. Rowbotham, “The Jesuit Figurists and Eighteenth-Century Religious Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 17 (October 1956), 481. 168. Ramsay, Civil Government, 21. 169. Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1991), 35. 170. Bartlett, Fall and Rise, 50; Jacqueline R. Hill, “Popery and Protestantism, Civil and Religious Liberty: The Disputed Lessons of Irish History,” Past and Present, 118 (1988), 96–129. 171. Charles O’Conor, Dissertations on the Antient History of Ireland, wherein an Account is given of the Origine, Government, Letters, Sciences, Religion, Manners and Customs of the antient Inhabitants (Dublin, 1753), vii. 172. John Curry, An Historical and Critical Review of the Civil Wars in Ireland from the Reign of Queen Elizabeth to the Settlement under King William (Dublin, 1775), iii; O’Conor, Dissertation on the Antient History of Ireland, 58 –59. 173. Curry, Historical and Critical Review, viii. 174. Ibid., vii. 175. O’Conor, Memoirs, xvii. 176. Curry, Historical and Critical Review, xviii. 177. John Curry, Observations on the Popery Laws (Dublin, 1777), 17. 178. Curry, Historical and Critical Review, xix. 179. Curry, Observations on the Popery Laws, 7. 180. Curry, Historical and Critical Review, xx. 181. O’Conor, Dissertations on the Antient History of Ireland, v; Curry, Observations on the Popery Laws, 5; Curry, Historical and Critical Review, v. 182. O’Conor, Dissertations on the Antient History of Ireland, vi. 183. Colin Kidd argues that a similar imagined history was not entertained for Scotland: see Colin Kidd, “Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity in Enlightenment Ireland and Scotland,” English Historical Review, 109 (November 1994), 1198. 184. O’Conor, Dissertations on the Antient History of Ireland, 35. 185. Ibid., 52. 186. Ibid., 141. 187. Knud Haakonssen, “Enlightened Dissent: An Introduction,” Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1996), 7.

Chapter Four. The Experience of Empire 1. Nancy F. Koehn, The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715 –1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 200 –201.

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2. Edmund Burke, “Letter to John Farr and John Harris Esqrs. (Sheriffs of the City of Bristol) on the affairs of America,” in Edmund Burke: Selected Works, ed. W. J. Bate (New York, 1960), 212. 3. P. J. Marshall, “Empire and Authority in Later Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 15 (1987), 110 –15. 4. Koehn, Power of Commerce, 53. 5. Philip Lawson, “The Missing Link: The Imperial Dimension in Understanding Hanoverian Britain,” Historical Journal, 29 (September 1986) 747– 51; Sudipta Sen, “Colonial Frontiers of the Georgian State: East India Company’s Rule in India,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 7 (December 1994), 368 – 92; Philip J. Stern, “British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections,” William and Mary Quarterly, 63 (October 2006), 693–712. 6. David Hume, The History of England, 6 vols. (London, 1778) 4:370; quoted in Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, N. J., 2007), 50. 7. Philip Lawson, “The ‘Irishman’s Prize’: Views of Canada from the British Press 1760–1774,” Historical Journal, 28 (1985), 575– 96; Paul Langton, “‘Tyrant and Oppressor!’ Colonial Press Reaction to the Quebec Act,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 34 (2006), 1–17. 8. Richard Bourke, “Edmund Burke and the Politics of Conquest,” Modern Intellectual History, 4 (2007), 403 – 32. 9. Jean Agnew, Belfast Merchant Families in the Seventeenth Century (Dublin, 1996), 54. 10. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders 1550–1653 (Princeton, N. J., 1993), 114–15. 11. List of children of John Black and Margaret Gordon, Public Record Office Northern Ireland D/1950/a. Henceforth PRONI. 12. John Black, “Letter of attorney and order to my sons Robert, George and Sam in consulting Mr Frank Turnly to farm and let out the lands and tenements of our Blamont to Protestant tenants,” July 1761, PRONI D/1401/4. 13. R. G. W. Anderson, “Joseph Black: An Outline Biography,” in Joseph Black 1728–1799: A Commemorative Symposium, ed. A. D. C. Simpson (Edinburgh, 1982), 7–11. 14. David Cressy, “Kinship and Kin Interaction in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, 113 (November 1986), 38 – 69. 15. Richard Grassby, Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family and Business in the English-Speaking World, 1580 –1740 (Cambridge, 2001), 269, 309. For an analysis of the household family, though one not focused on trade, see Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001). 16. Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England 1680 –1780 (London, 1996). 17. Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 87, 135 – 37. 18. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 47.

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19. Jacob Price, Perry of London: A Family and a Firm on the Seaborne Frontier, 1615 –1753 (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). 20. Louis M. Cullen, The Irish Brandy Houses in Eighteenth-Century France (Dublin, 2000). 21. Louis M. Cullen, “The Irish Merchant Communities of Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Cognac in the Eighteenth Century,” in Négoce et Industrie en France et en Irlande aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, ed. Louis M. Cullen and Paul Butel (Paris, 1980), 52. 22. Paul Butel, Les Négociants bordelaise, l’Europe et les Iles au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1974), 78 –79. 23. John Black, Bordeaux, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, April 19, 1751, PRONI Black Papers. 24. Paul Butel, Vivre à Bordeaux sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 1999), 168 – 69. 25. David Dickson, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster 1630–1830 (Cork, 2005), 152, 161. 26. John Black, Trinidad, to George Black, Belfast, March 1, 1799, PRONI D/1401/9. 27. Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic 1675 –1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (Oxford, 1986), 17. 28. Jacob Price, “What Did Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas Trade,” Journal of Economic History, 49 ( June 1989), 275. 29. Kenneth Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993); Kenneth Maxwell, “The Atlantic in the Eighteenth Century: A Southern Perspective on the Need to Return to the ‘Big Picture,’” Transactions of the Royal Society, 6th series, 3 (1993), 219–20. 30. Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early-Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2000). 31. This community slowly integrated into the Bordelais notability. See Robert Forster, “The Noble Wine Producers of the Bordelais in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History, 14 (1961), 18 – 33; Butel, Vivre à Bordeaux, 170 –71. 32. Cullen, “Irish Merchant Communities,” 58. 33. David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca, 1994), 503 –15. 34. Martha Taylor, “Taylor’s Book to Copy my Letters in given by the Rt Honourable John Lord Boyle Mar: 25th Anno 1730,” Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborn Shelves, autograph MS f12, c 236. 35. Esther Black, Dublin, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, October 14, 1759, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49131. 36. John Black, Bordeaux, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, August 1753, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49158. 37. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, January 5, 1743, PRONI D/719/10. 38. John Black, Bordeaux, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, August 15, 1750; John Black, Bordeaux, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, May 15, 1751, PRONI D/719/34. For Joseph Black’s scientific correspondence, see Eric Robinson and Douglas McKie, eds., Partners in Science: Letters of James Watt and Joseph Black (London, 1970).

257

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39. Isabela Burnett (née Black), Aberdeen, to Alexander Black, n.d. [1762], Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49215. 40. Thomas Black, Dublin, to Alexander Black, London, October 7, 1771, PRONI T/ 1073/23. 41. On this theme, see Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York, 1994); Richard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office and Pubic Information, 1760–1860s (New York, 1989); Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700 –1865 (New York, 1989); and David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735 –1785 (Cambridge, 1995). 42. Cressy, “Kinship and Kin Interaction.” 43. John Black, Dublin, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, February 14, 1760, PRONI D/719/ 52. 44. Jane Black, London, to Margaret Black, Bordeaux, July 9, 1734, PRONI D/1950/3. 45. Robert Black, “Robert Black’s travels from Cadiz in Spain to Holland thence thro’ Germany, Flanders, France and Italy, begun in the year 1727,” Vol. 1, June 12, 1727, PRONI T/1073/2. 46. For an overview of the state of the field in Anglophone literature, see David Baker and Willy Maley, “An Uncertain Union (A Dialogue),” in Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, 1550 –1800, ed. Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor (Aldershot, England, 2004), 8 –21. 47. Mark L. Thompson, “The Predicament of Ubi: Locating Authority and National Identity in the Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore, 2005), 72. 48. Lisa Steffen, Defining a British State: Treason and National Identity, 1609–1820 (New York, 2001), 81– 83. 49. Ibid., 96. 50. Ethan Allen, A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity (Philadelphia, 1779), 26–27. 51. Richard R. Madden, The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times, series 1, 2 vols. (London, 1842), 1:189. 52. Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford, 1998), 208. 53. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992). 54. J. G. A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge, 2005). 55. For Curnow and the context of New Zealand cultural politics, see Stuart Murray, Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Literary Nationalism and the 1930s (Wellington, 1998), 220– 46. 56. J. G. A. Pocock, “Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment: Revolution and Counter-Revolution; A Eurosceptical Enquiry,” History of Political Thought, 20 (1999), 125– 39. 57. For initiatives in this direction, see the essays in Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004).

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NOTES TO PAGES 138‒43

58. David Armitage, “Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” American Historical Review, 104 (April 1999), 428. 59. Paul Gilroy, After Empire? Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Oxford, 2004). 60. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, Cadiz, February 7, 1739, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49165. 61. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, Lisbon, August 5, 1741, PRONI D/719/8. 62. John Black, Cork, to Margaret Black, Bordeaux, July 11, 1738, PRONI D/1950/15. 63. John Black, Bordeaux, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, September 5, 1750, PRONI D/ 719/35. 64. John Hope, Letters on Credit, 2nd ed. (London, 1784), 9–10, quoted in Price, “What Did Merchants Do?” 273. 65. Isaac Simon, Dublin, to Alexander Black, October 9, 1762, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49214. 66. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, Cadiz, February 7, 1739, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49165. 67. Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon,” Past and Present, 121 (1988), 74–109. 68. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, Cadiz, April 8, 1741, PRONI D/719/7. 69. Agnew, Belfast Merchant Families, 212. 70. Charles Black, London, to John Black, Bordeaux, August 11, 1739, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49130. 71. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, London, February 12, 1746, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49167. 72. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, Cadiz, January 30, 1751, PRONI D/719/41. 73. Laus Deo, Bordeaux, October 1756, PRONI T/173/8/11. 74. John Black, Bordeaux, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, April 19, 1751, PRONI D/719/42. 75. Laus Deo, Bordeaux, May 1756, PRONI T/1073/8/8. 76. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, London, August 22, 1744, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49166. 77. Kitty Turnly, Dublin, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, September 30, 1759, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49225. 78. John Black, Blamont North, to Alexander Black, Belfast, October 4, 1762, PRONI D/79/61. 79. John Black, Bordeaux, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, December 30, 1761, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49175. 80. John Black, Bordeaux, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, March 14, 1750, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49152. 81. John Black, Bordeaux, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, March 14, 1750, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library. 82. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, London, June 1, 1748, PRONI D/719/18. 83. Paul Cheney, “A False Dawn or Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism? Franco-American

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Trade during the American War of Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly, 63 (2006), 463– 88. 84. Laus Deo, Ayr, August 18, 1752, PRONI T/1073/7/11. 85. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, Lisbon, April 8, 1741, PRONI D/719/7. 86. Laus Deo, Bordeaux, May 1755, PRONI T/1073/8/3; Robert Black, “Robert Black’s travels from Cadiz in Spain to Holland thence thro’ Germany, Flanders, France and Italy,” Vol. 2, T/1073/2/10. 87. Patrick Sarsfield, Ostend, to Dominick Sarsfield, May 28, 1716, National Library of Ireland, Accession No. 2930, in David Dickson, “The Cork Merchant Community in the Eighteenth Century: A Regional Perspective,” in Cullen and Butel, Négoce et Industrie, 46. 88. J. Holland Rose, A. P. Newton, and E. A. Benians, eds., The Cambridge History of the British Empire, Vol. 1, The Old Empire from the Beginnings to 1763 (Cambridge, 1929), 364. 89. Laus Deo, Bordeaux, October 1756, PRONI T/1073/8/11. 90. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, Cadiz, August 6, 1740, PRONI D/719/3. 91. George Black, Belfast, to Alexander Black, Dublin, September 1, 1761, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49132. 92. List of Children of John Black and Margaret Gordon, PRONI D/1950/a. 93. Laus Deo, Bordeaux, October 22, 1756, PRONI T/1073/8/11. 94. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, Faro, November 26, 1740, PRONI D/719/5. 95. Rapport au Directoire exécutif sur la situation de la République française considérée dans ses rapports extérieurs avec les autres puissances 14 Messidor an 6 [ July 2, 1798], Beinecke Library, Yale University, GEN MSS 549 Box 4, f 89. 96. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, Faro, November 26, 1740, PRONI D/719/5. 97. John Black, Bordeaux, to Robert Black, January 5, 1743, PRONI D/719/10. 98. J. R. Dickinson, The Lordship of Man under the Stanleys: Government and Economy in the Isle of Man, 1508 –1704 (Manchester, 1996), 19. 99. Louis M. Cullen, Smuggling and the Ayrshire Economic Boom of the 1760s and 1770s (Ayr, Scotland, 1994), 14. 100. Laus Deo, Douglas, Isle of Man, September 23, 1760, PRONI T/1073/12/7. 101. Louis M. Cullen, The Brandy Trade under the Ancien Régime: Regional Specialisation in the Charante (Cambridge, 1998), 35. 102. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 8. 103. Michael J. Braddick, “Civility and Authority,” in The British Atlantic World 1500 –1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael Braddick (Basingstoke, England, 2002), 93–94. 104. On the idea of an “empire of freedom,” see Peter Marshall, “A Free Though Conquering People”: Britain and Asia in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1981); and Wilson, Sense of the People, 137–205. 105. Carole Shammas, “Introduction,” in Mancke and Shammas, Creation of the British Atlantic World, 4. 106. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1749 to 1774 (London, 1828), 85.

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107. Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to Lord Southwell, Blackheath, August 21, 1769, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne MSS 19410. 108. Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to Lord Southwell, London, December 12, 1769, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne MSS 19409. 109. Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), 106 –47. 110. C. R. Fay, “Arthur Dobbs, Adam Smith and Walpole’s Excise Scheme,” Historical Journal, 4 (1961), 203 –7. 111. Robert Black, Douglas, Isle of Man, to Alexander Black, London, February 13, 1765, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49207. 112. Koehn, Power of Commerce, 22. 113. R. H. Kinvig, The Isle of Man: A Social, Cultural and Political History (Liverpool, 1975), 115. 114. Robert Black, Douglas, to William Mussendun, Belfast, August 9, 1765, Mussendun Papers, PRONI D/354/735. 115. John Black, Belfast, to Alexander Black and James Black, London, July 30, 1767, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49162. 116. Cullen, Smuggling and the Ayrshire Economic Boom, 43. 117. James Black, Bordeaux, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, February 21, 1761, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49140. 118. Thomas Black, Belfast, to Alexander Black, London, April 11, 1764, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49212. 119. Robert Black, Douglas, to Alexander Black, Cadiz, February 2, 1761, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49200. 120. John Black, Blamont North, to Alexander Black, Belfast, November 13, 1762, PRONI D/719/66. 121. Laus Deo, South Blamont, July 24, 1754, PRONI T/1073/7/19. 122. John Black, Blamont North, to Alexander Black, Dublin, September 9, 1762, PRONI D/719/60. 123. John Black, Blamont North, to Alexander Black, Belfast, November 13, 1762, PRONI D/719/66. 124. Alexander Black, London, to John Black, Belfast, November 1763, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49125. 125. John Black, Dublin, to Alexander Black, London, December 14, 1763, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49160. 126. John Black, Belfast, to Alexander Black, London, July 30, 1767, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49162. 127. Robert Black, Castle Hill, to Alexander Black, London, October 25, 1768, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49208. 128. Joseph Black, Edinburgh, to Alexander Black, London, March 11, 1786, Black Family Papers, Huntington Library, HM 49178.

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NOTES TO PAGES 150‒55

129. John Black, Trinidad, to George Black, Belfast, March 1, 1799, Marshall Papers, PRONI D/1401/9. 130. Alexander Black, London, to Matthew Black, Dublin, April 13, 1807, Black Papers, PRONI T/1073/48. 131. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780 –1830 (London, 1989), 78 –81. 132. Gould, Persistence of Empire, 182. 133. Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004). 134. John Dalling, “John Dalling Observations on the Present State of Jamaica, 1774,” Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne Shelves c 524. 135. Regina Janes, “‘In Florid Impotence he Spoke’: Edmund Burke and the Nawab of Arcot,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 16 (1986), 91–105; Peter J. Marshall, “The Making of an Imperial Icon: The Case of Warren Hastings,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 27 (1999), 1–16. 136. Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free-Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism, 1750 –1850 (Cambridge, 2004), 33–38. 137. Chancellor (Edward Thurlow, First Baron Thurlow), “Observations Respecting Ireland,” November 22, 1785, Beinecke Library, Yale University, General MSS 442 f 49. 138. William Eden (afterward Baron Auckland), to William Pitt, Beckenham, November 29th, 1785, Beinecke Library, Yale University, General MSS 442 f 20.

Chapter Five. A Habitat for Hopeful Monsters 1. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989), 266– 69, 343 –47. 2. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London, 1981); MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London, 1988). 3. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972), 85. 4. See Thomas Doherty, After Theory: Postmodernism/Postmarxism (London, 1990); Stephen Slemon and Alan Lawson, eds., After Europe: Critical Theory and Post-Colonial Writing (Mundelstrup, Denmark, 1989); Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, eds., De-scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality (London, 1994). 5. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catharine Porter (London, 1993), 39. For critiques of the “ideology of science” see Steven Schapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton, N. J., 1985); Schapin, “Social Uses of Science,” in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1980), 93 –139. 6. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N. J., 2008).

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7. John Robertson, The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005). 8. Tsvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 353 – 99. 9. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 48– 49; Taylor, Sources of the Self, 345; M. A. Stewart, “Two Species of Philosophy: The Historical Significance of the First Enquiry,” in Reading Hume on Human Understanding: Essays on the First Enquiry, ed. Peter Millican (Oxford, 2002), 72. 10. David Hume to Francis Hutcheson, September 17, 1739, in The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols., ed. J. Y. T. Grieg (Oxford, 1932), 1:33. Henceforth DHL. 11. Angus Calder, The Manufacture of Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1992), 36, 48– 49. 12. Roger L. Emerson, “The ‘Affair’ at Edinburgh and the ‘Project’ at Glasgow: The Politics of Hume’s Attempts to Become a Professor,” in Hume and Hume’s Connexions, ed. M. A. Stewart and J. L. P. Wright (Edinburgh, 1994), 1–22. 13. On the moderates see Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1985). 14. David Hume to Allan Ramsay, June 1755, DHL 1:224. 15. Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), 59. 16. See Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes and Spinoza,” in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), 27– 52, for an account of Hobbes’s commitments; Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston, 1960), 272–77, for religion; Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, for the consequences of Hobbes’s metaphysical monism. 17. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverstone (Cambridge, 1998), 64. 18. Peter Lake, “Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Conflict in Early-Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603 –1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London, 1989), 72–106. 19. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford, 1975), 10; Christopher Finlay, “Hume’s Theory of Civil Society,” European Journal of Political Theory, 3 (2004), 369 – 91. 20. Knud Haakonssen, “Protestant Natural Law Theory: A General Interpretation,” in New Essays on the History of Autonomy: A Collection Honoring J. B. Schneewind, ed. Natalie Brender and Larry Krasnoff (Cambridge, 2004), 105. 21. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1978), xvi. 22. David Hume, “My Own Life,” DHL 1:3. 23. David Hume to [Dr. George Cheyne], [March or April 1734], DHL 1:13. The letter is more likely to have been addressed to Dr. Arbuthnot: see Ernest Campbell Mossner, “Hume’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 1734: The Biographical Significance,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 8 (1944), 135 – 52. 24. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, xvi. 25. M. A. Stewart, “Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” in Enlightenment and

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NOTES TO PAGES 158‒62

Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 1996), 47, 61. 26. James Moore, “Hume and Hutcheson,” in Stewart and Wright, Hume and Hume’s Connexions, 23 – 57. 27. Robertson, The Case for Enlightenment, 258– 89. 28. Ernest Campbell Mossner, “Hume’s Early Memoranda, 1729–1740: The Complete Text,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 9 (October 1948), 492– 518. 29. Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (London, 1665); Charles Davenant, An Account of the Trade between Great Britain, France, Holland, Spain (London, 1715); John Law, Money and Trade Considered, with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money (Edinburgh, 1705). 30. David Hume, “That Politics may be Reduced to a Science,” in Essays, Moral Political and Literary (Indianapolis, 1985), 18 –19. 31. Ibid., 21. 32. David Hume, “Of the Balance of Trade,” in Essays, Moral Political and Literary, 315. 33. David Hume to Michael Ramsay, September 1734, DHL 1:13. 34. Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (London, 1954), 100. 35. Richard H. Popkin, “Book Review: The Life of David Hume,” Journal of Philosophy, 52 (December 1955), 805–6. 36. Andrew Michael Ramsay, The Life of François de Salignac de la Motte Fénelon Archbishop and Duke of Cambray (Dublin, 1771), 110. 37. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, The Enlightenment of Edward Gibbon 1737– 1764 (Cambridge, 1999), 23. 38. David Hume to Gilbert Elliot of Minto, March 10, 1751, DHL 1:154. 39. “Anecdotes de la vie de Messire André Michel Ramsay chevalier Baron ou plustost banneret de l’Écosse,” Bibliothèque Méjanes, Aix-en-Provence, MS 1188 (417), 5 – 6: “Il rencontra a Edimbourg un tollerant parfait, mais moraliste, un de ces hommes qu’on peut appeler un sage pyronnien qui doute par deffiance de la raison, plustost par envie de flatter les passions. Ce Docteur épiscopal lui montra le faux dans les religions et sectes Protestants . . . C’est ce qui jetta le jeune homme d’abord dans le Socianisme puis dans tolérantisme outré et ensuite dans un pyronnisme universel.” I owe this reference to Richard Whatmore. 40. “Anecdotes de la vie de Messire André Michel Ramsay,” 14. 41. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 114 –16. 42. Hume had developed the argument of his 1748 essay on miracles long before, but hesitated to publish it: David Hume to Henry Home, London, December 2, 1737, in New Letters of Hume, ed. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest Campbell Mossner (Oxford, 1954), 2. 43. David Hume to George Campbell, June 7, 1762, DHL 1:361. 44. Peter Harrison, “Prophecy, Early Modern Apologetics, and Hume’s Argument against Miracles,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (April 1999), 241–56. 45. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150 –1750 (New York, 2001), 326, 346– 47. 46. David Hume to John Home, December 1754, DHL 1:215.

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47. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 263. 48. Ibid., 264. 49. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act II, Scene ii. 50. Ibid., Act II, Scene ii. 51. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 270–71. 52. Shakespeare, Tempest, Act V, Scene i. 53. Ibid., Act I, Scene ii. 54. David Hume to William Strahan, January 30, 1773, DHL 2:269. 55. History of the Works of the Learned (1739), 353, in Mossner, Life, 122. 56. Earl Marshal Keith to Rousseau, Rousseau Correspondance, Vol. 10 (Paris, 1924), 102, quoted in Mossner, Life, 439. 57. Johnson, asked by Boswell how an unbeliever like Hume could die proclaiming his peace of mind, answered, “He lied.” James Boswell, diary entry for September 16, 1777, in Boswell in Extremes 1775–1778, ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (London, 1971), 155. 58. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 272. 59. Francis Kilbert, ed., A Selection from Unpublished Papers of the Right Reverend William Warburton (London, 1841), 257. 60. Anon., An Essay on the Means of producing Moral Effects from Physical Causes (London, 1773), 4. 61. Mossner, Life, 174. 62. [George Hornes], A Letter to Adam Smith LLD, on the Life, Death and Philosophy of His Friend David Hume Esq. (Oxford, 1777), 30. 63. Ibid., 28. 64. William Agutter to James Boswell, October 17, 1792, in The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson, ed. Marshall Waingrow (London, 1969), 494– 95. The sermon was published in 1800 under the title “On the Difference between the Deaths of the Righteous and the Wicked. Illustrated in the Instance of Dr. Samuel Johnson and David Hume Esq.” 65. Adam Smith to William Strahan, Kirkaldy, November 9, 1776, in The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. H. Mossner and I. S. Ross (Indianapolis, 1987), 218. Henceforth Smith Corr. 66. Adam Smith to William Strahan, Smith Corr., 221. 67. William Cullen to William Hunter, September 17, 1776, DHL 2:449. 68. David Hume, “My Own Life,” DHL 1:5; James Boswell, “An Account of my last Interview with David Hume Esq. [Partly recorded in my Journal, partly enlarged from my memory],” in Weis and Pottle, Boswell in Extremes, 11. 69. Adam Smith to William Strahan, September 5, 1776, Smith Corr., 211. 70. David Hume to Adam Smith, Edinburgh, March 1757, Smith Corr., 207. 71. David Hume to Adam Smith, London, July 28, 1759, Smith Corr., 44. 72. James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson LL.D (London, n.d.), 30– 31.

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73. The street abutting the corner of St. Andrew’s Square on which stood Hume’s house was jokingly named “St. David’s Street” by Nancy Ord, whom he considered marrying: Mossner, Life, 566. 74. Hume, “My Own Life,” 5; Boswell, “My last Interview with David Hume,” 12. Warburton is accused of “petulence, arrogance and scurrility,” while Hume held Wilkes proof enough of the impossibility of the immortality of the soul. 75. For a full account of Wilkes’s English nationalism see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992), 105 –17. 76. The North Briton, 1, June 12, 1762, 10. 77. The North Briton, 2, April 2, 1763, 215. 78. The North Briton, 1, August 12, 1762. 79. David Hume to Gilbert Elliot, September 22, 1764, DHL 1:470. 80. Anon., The Contrast: with Corrections and Refutations (London, 1765), 154. 81. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 45. 82. Richard Bentley, Patriotism, a Mock Heroic. In Six Cantos (London, 1765), 89. 83. Anon., A North Briton Extraordinary: Published at Edinburgh (London, 1765), 6 –9. 84. Anon., A North Briton Extraordinary, written by a young Scotsman, now a volunteer in the Corsican service (London, 1767), 24 – 37. 85. Anon., North Briton Extraordinary (1765), 7, 12–14. 86. Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an AngloBritish Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge, 1993), 207. 87. David Hume to Hugh Blair, April 1764, DHL 1:436. 88. David Hume to Gilbert Elliot, February 1770, DHL 2:216. 89. For an elaboration of this reading of Hume see John Robertson, “Universal Monarchy and the Liberties of Europe: David Hume’s Critique of an English Whig Doctrine,” in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), 349 –73. 90. Thomas P. Millar, “Witherspoon, Blair and the Rhetoric of Civic Humanism,” in Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment, ed. Richard Sher and Andrew Smitten (Edinburgh, 1990), 46 – 64; Donald W. Livingston, “Hume, English Barbarism and American Independence,” in Scotland and America, 133. 91. John Robertson, “The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition,” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Micheal Ignatieff (Cambridge, 1983), 137–78. 92. The key text on this project is Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975); in common with most commentators subsequent to Forbes, I am dubious about the Whig nature of Hume’s politics. See Nicholas Phillipson, “Propriety, Property and Prudence: David Hume and the Defense of the Restoration,” in Phillipson and Skinner, Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, 303. 93. See the essays in Peter Jones, The Science of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh,

266

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1989). The argument that Hume sought not to perfect natural jurisprudence but rather to overcome it is supported by Knud Haakonssen, “Natural Law and Moral Realism: The Scottish Synthesis,” in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford, 1990), 61– 62. 94. Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographical Revision (Cambridge, 1978), 30 – 43, 74. 95. David Hume, “That Politics may be reduced to a Science,” in Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford, 1993): 22–24. 96. Anon., Another Letter to Mr. Almon in Matter of Libels (London, 1770), 152–53. 97. David Hume, “Of Commerce,” in Selected Essays, 155. This stress on agency was the necessary conclusion of his rejection of any kind of foundationalism; see Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge, 1981), 4–44. 98. David Hume, “On Suicide,” in Selected Essays, 323. 99. David Hume to Adam Smith, Paris, September 5, 1765, Smith Corr., 107. 100. Thomas Cadell to Isaac Hawkins Browne, London, September 28, 1776, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne Files f 17615. 101. Istvan Hont, “The Rhapsody of Public Debt: David Hume and Voluntary State Bankruptcy,” in Phillipson and Skinner, Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, 321. 102. Haakonssen, “Natural Law and Moral Realism,” 61– 62. 103. George Campbell, A Dissertation on Miracles: Containing an Examination of the Principles advanced by David Hume esq. in an Essay on Miracles (Edinburgh, 1762). 104. George Campbell, The Happy Influence of Religion on Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1779), 1. 105. T. D. Campbell, “Francis Hutcheson: ‘Father’ of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (Edinburgh, 1982), 167– 85. See in particular Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises (London, 1725). 106. Again, this idea was originally Hutcheson’s: see Susan M. Purviance, “Intersubjectivity and Sociable Relations in the Philosophy of Francis Hutcheson,” in Sociability and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, ed. John Dwyer and Richard B. Sher (Edinburgh, 1993), 33. 107. J. G. A. Pocock, “Hume and the American Revolution: The Dying Thoughts of a North Briton,” in Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge, 1985), 128. 108. Colin Kidd, “North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-Century British Patriotisms,” Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 361– 82. 109. Shelley Burtt points to the Scottish transformation of political argument in Virtue Transformed: Political Argument in England, 1688–1740 (Cambridge, 1992), 13. John Dwyer makes more of the new Scottish ideal of community in “Enlightened Spectators and Classical Moralists: Sympathetic Relations in Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” in Dwyer and Cher, Sociability and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, 96 –118, and in Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1987). 110. Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976), 100.

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111. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767); Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis, 1981). 112. Ronald Meek does not acknowledge the difference between their moral and jurisprudential theories and so ascribes a rigid progressivism to this entire tradition: see his Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976), 66 –120. 113. Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics, 70 –74. 114. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1:377. 115. Ferguson, History of Civil Society, 168– 69. 116. For a development of the relativistic notion of civilisation in the Enlightenment, see Jean Starobinski, “Le Mot Civilisation,” in Le Remède dans le Mal: Critique et Légitimation de l’Artifice à l’Age des Lumières (Paris, 1989), 11– 59. 117. John Millar, Smith’s student before becoming professor of civil law in Glasgow, used the four stages theory of social development similarly to analyse how commercial societies evolved without arguing for the normativity of this evolution. See Paul Bowles, “John Millar, the Legislator and the Mode of Subsistence,” History of European Ideas, 7 (1986), 238. 118. Ferguson, History of Civil Society, 261. 119. Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man in Two Volumes (Edinburgh, 1788). 120. Ibid., 1:73. 121. Ibid., 1:190. 122. Ibid., 1:424–77. For an opposing argument that the Scottish Enlightenment could not integrate the culture of the Highlands into a renewed version of nationality, see Colin Kidd, “Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity in Enlightenment Ireland and Scotland,” English Historical Review, 109 (November 1994), 1197–1214. 123. John Robertson, The Enlightenment and the Militia Issue in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1989). See Colley’s Britons, 147–94, for an account of this crisis. 124. Gregory Claeys, “The Origins of the Rights of Labour: Republicanism, Commerce and the Construction of Modern Social Theory in Britain, 1796 –1805,” Journal of Modern History, 66 ( June 1994), 249–90.

Chapter 6. Civil Society and Empire in Revolution 1. “Substance of Thomas Addis Emmet’s Examination before the Secret Committee of the House of Lords, on Friday, August 10, 1798,” in Richard R. Madden, The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times, series 2, 2 vols. (London, 1843), 2:84. 2. “The Examination of Thomas Addis Emmet, before the Secret Committee of the House of Commons, August 14, 1798,” in Richard R. Madden, The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times, series 1, 2 vols. (London, 1842), 2:89. 3. Thomas Graham, “Dublin in 1798: The Key to the Planned Insurrection,” in The Mighty Wave: The 1798 Rebellion in Wexford, ed. Daire Keogh and Nicholas (Dublin, 1996), 65 – 78; Liam Chambers, “The 1798 Rebellion in North Leinster,” in 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, ed. Thomas Bartlett et al. (Dublin, 2003), 122– 35.

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NOTES TO PAGES 178‒84

4. Francis Higgins to Edward Cooke, May 1, 1798 in Revolutionary Dublin, 1795 –1801: The Letters of Francis Higgins to Dublin Castle, ed. Thomas Bartlett (Dublin, 2004), 234. 5. Ruan O’Donnell, The Rebellion in Wicklow 1798 (Dublin, 1998). 6. “The Examination of William James MacNeven before the Secret Committee of the House of Lords, August 7 and 8, 1798,” in Madden, United Irishmen, series 1, 2:255 – 56. 7. “The Examination of Arthur O’Connor, before the Secret Committee of the House of Lords, August 16th, 1798,” in Madden, United Irishmen, series 1, 2:317, 320. For the yeomanry, see Allan Blackstock, An Ascendancy Army: The Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin, 1998). 8. James Quinn, “The Kilmainham Treaty of 1798,” in Bartlett, 1798, 423 –36. 9. “A Stoic” [Arthur O’Connor], The Measures of a Ministry to Prevent a Revolution are the certain Means to Bring it about (London, 1794), 27. 10. Theobald Wolfe Tone, The Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone 1763– 98, 2 vols., ed. Thomas W. Moody, Robert Brendan McDowell, and C. J. Woods (Oxford, 1998), 1:128. 11. Robert Brendan McDowell, “Select Documents: United Irish Plans of Parliamentary Reforms,” Irish Historical Studies, 3 (1942– 43), 39– 59. 12. William Drennan, “Plan of Representation of the People of Ireland in Parliament,” January 10, 1793, in McDowell, “Select Documents,” 47. 13. Eugene Charlton Black, The Association: British Extra-Parliamentary Political Organization, 1769 –1793 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 31–130; Terry M. Parssinen, “Association, Convention and Anti-Parliament in British Radical Politics,” English Historical Review, 88 ( July 1973), 504– 33. 14. Wolfe Tone, Writings, 1:491. 15. Stephen Small, Political Thought in Ireland 1776 –1789: Republicanism, Patriotism and Rebellion (Oxford, 2002), 117–18. 16. William Bruce and Henry Joy, The Belfast Politics, or, a Collection of the Debates, Resolutions and Other Proceedings of that Town (Belfast, 1794), 106. 17. Proceedings of the United Irishmen of Dublin (Philadelphia, 1795), 10, 15. 18. Richard Bourke, Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas (London, 2003), 7. 19. John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793 –1796 (Oxford, 2000); Mark Philp, ed., The French Revolution and English Popular Politics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2004); Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789 –1832 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). 20. C. J. Woods, ed., Journals and Memoirs of Thomas Russell (Dublin and Belfast, 1991), 44. 21. William Drennan, Dublin, to Martha McTier, Belfast, January 21, 1799, in Jean Agnew, ed., The Drennan-McTier Letters, vol. 2, 1794 –1801 (Dublin, 1999), 453. 22. William Drennan, Dublin, to Sam McTier, Belfast, February 5, 1791, in Jean Agnew, ed., The Drennan-McTier Letters, vol. 1, 1776 –1793 (Dublin, 1999), 356. 23. “Address from the Society of United Irishmen in Dublin to the delegates for promoting a reform in Scotland,” in The Report of the Secret Committee of the House of Commons, with an appendix (Dublin, 1798), 97; Bruce and Joy, Belfast Politics, 100 –104. 24. Thomas Addis Emmet, “Part of an Essay towards the History of Ireland,” in William

269

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James McNeven, Piece of Irish History, Illustrative of the Condition of the Catholics of Ireland, of the Origin and Progress of the Political System of the United Irishmen and of Their Transactions with the AngloIrish Government (New York, 1807), 1. 25. Madden, United Irishmen, series 1, 1:78. 26. Thomas Bartlett, “An End to Moral Economy: The Irish Militia Disturbances of 1793,” Past and Present, 99 (1983), 41– 64. 27. David Dickson, “Paine and Ireland,” in The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion, ed. David Dickson, Daire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan (Dublin 1993), 135 –51. See also Whelan, “The Republic in the Village,” in The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity 1760–1830 (Cork, 1996), 62–74. 28. Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988), 11. 29. Ian McBride, “William Drennan and the Dissenting Tradition,” in United Irishmen, 49 – 62; McBride, “ ‘When Ulster Joined Ireland’: Anti-Popery, Presbyterian Radicalism and Irish Republicanism in the 1790s,” Past and Present, 157 (November 1997), 63–93; Jim Smyth, The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (London, 1992); Small, Political Thought in Ireland, 190–263. 30. Lady Wycombe to Lady Holland, March 6, 1798, British Library, Add MS 51682. 31. Richard R. Madden, The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times, series 3 3 vols. (London, 1860), 3:28. 32. Sir James Mackintosh, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, 2 vols., ed. Robert John Mackintosh (London, 1835) 1:27. 33. Madden, United Irishmen, series 1, 3:32. 34. Albertine de Staël to Benjamin Constant, January 10, 1814, in Madame de Staël, Charles de Villiers, and Benjamin Constant, Correspondence, ed. Cecil Patrick Courtney (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1993), 189. 35. Benjamin Constant, Oeuvres complètes: Écrits de jeunesse (1774 –1795), ed. Lucia Onacini and Jean-Daniel Landaux (Tubingen, Germany, 1795), 1:113. 36. Speculative Society of Edinburgh, History of the Speculative Society of Edinburgh from its Institution in MDCCLXVIV (Edinburgh, 1845), 155. 37. James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Galliae: Defence of the French Revolution and Its English Admirers against the Accusations of the right honourable Edmund Burke, including some strictures on the late production of M de Calonne, 2nd ed. (London, 1791). 38. Ibid., 61. 39. Ibid., iv. 40. Ibid., 21. 41. Ibid., 3. 42. Ibid., 127. 43. Constant, Oeuvres complètes, 1:239. 44. Constant, “De la révolution du Brabant en 1790,” in Oeuvres complètes, 1:223– 39. 45. Ibid., 232.

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46. Thomas Addis Emmet, Memoir of Thomas Addis and Robert Emmet, 2 vols. (New York, 1915), 1:233. 47. On this model of revolutionary commitment see the work of Robert Darnton, including “The Grub Street Style of Revolution: J. P. Brissot, Police Spy,” Journal of Modern History, 40 (1968), 301–27; and The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1996). 48. Registers of the Société Royale des Sciences, 1788, Archives départementales de l’Hérault, Montpellier, D 162. 49. Theobald Wolfe Tone, Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone: Memoirs, journals and political writings, compiled and arranged by William T. W. Tone, ed. Thomas Bartlett (Dublin, 1998), 37, 433. 50. Madden, United Irishmen, series 1, 1:119. 51. John Aikin, Letters from a Father to his Son, on various Topics, relative to Literature and the Conduct of Life. Written in the years 1792 and 1793 (Dublin, 1795), 28. 52. William Bennet to anonymous, Dublin Castle, July 27, 1793, Beinecke Library, Yale University, OSB f 1104. 53. James Kelly, “Conservative Protestant Political Thought in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” in Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, ed. S. J. Connolly (Dublin, 2000), 185 – 220. 54. Edward Bayly, Sermon preached at Arklow church, before a general meeting of the militia of the county of Wicklow, when first embodied, on the 18. of August 1793. By the Rev. Edward Bayly, . . . With notes, to confirm and illustrate several passages of the text (Dublin, 1793), 3. 55. William Eden (afterward Baron Auckland), Beckenham, to William Pitt, November 29, 1785, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Gen MSS 442 f 20. 56. William Eden, The Probable Consequences of a Union, impartially Considered (Dublin, 1799), 18. 57. Tobias Molloy, An Appeal from Man in a State of Civil Society to Man in a State of Nature, or, an Inquiry into the Origins and Organisation of those political Incorporations most Productive of human Happiness (Dublin, 1792), 257. 58. Laurence Parsons, Thoughts on Liberty and Equality (Dublin, 1793); William Smith, The Rights of Citizens (Dublin, 1790). 59. Proceedings of the United Irishmen of Dublin (Philadelphia, 1795), 6. 60. Thomas Ledlie Birch, The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland and Other Writings, ed. Brian Clifford (Belfast, 1991), 83 – 84. 61. The Press, 21, November 14, 1797. 62. The Press, 21, November 14, 1797. 63. The Press, 8, October 14, 1797. 64. The Press, 16, November 2, 1797. 65. The Press 24, November 21, 1797. For the ubiquity of this argument in the late eighteenth century see Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, N. J., 2006), 22– 94. 66. The Press, 61, February 17, 1797.

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67. Edmund Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 3, The French Revolution 1790 –1794, ed. Leslie George Mitchell (Oxford, 1989), 97. 68. Ibid., 58. 69. Ibid., 78. For the origins and political valence of Burke’s deployment of the sublime in politics, see Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge, 2003). 70. Burke, “Reflections,” 291, 293. 71. Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Oxford, 1993), 257. 72. Burke, “Reflections,” 143. 73. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Man (Orchard Park, N.Y., 1997), 67. 74. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Man, 49. 75. Ibid., 45, 76. 76. Ibid., 37. 77. Malcolm Chase, The People’s Farm: English Agrarian Radicalism 1775 –1840 (Oxford, 1988). 78. Michael Duffy, “War, Revolution and the Crisis of the British Empire,” in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge, 1991), 120. 79. William Eden, Lord Auckland, to John Beresford, Beckenham, September 2, 1793, in The Correspondence of the Rt. Hon. John Beresford, 2 vols., ed. William Beresford (London, 1854), 2:15 –16. 80. Jennifer Mori, William Pitt and the French Revolution, 1785 –1795 (Edinburgh, 1997). 81. Lord Fitzgibbon, Lord Chancellor, to John Beresford, Dublin, February 14, 1795, in Correspondence of the Rt. Hon. John Beresford, 2:72. 82. Lord Fitzgibbon, Lord Chancellor, to John Beresford, Dublin, March 2, 1795, in Correspondence of the Rt. Hon. John Beresford, 2: 77. 83. Anne C. Kavanaugh, John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare: Protestant Reaction and English Authority in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 1997). 84. John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, to James Stewart Moore, Dublin, December 8, 1796, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne MSS 18085. 85. Harry Thomas Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), 292; Thomas Philip Schofield, “Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution,” Historical Journal, 29 (September 1986), 601–22. 86. William Drennan, A Letter to His Excellency Earl Fitzwilliam, Lord Lieutenant etc of Ireland (Dublin, 1795), 5. 87. Thomas Bartlett, “Defence, Counter-Insurgency and Rebellion: Ireland, 1793– 1803,” in A Military History of Ireland, ed. Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey (Cambridge, 1996), 247. 88. Henry Joy, “Thoughts on the British Constitution,” in Bruce and Joy, Belfast Politics, 191, 197. 89. Bruce and Joy, Belfast Politics, ix, vii.

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90. Ian McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 177. 91. Laurence French, “Extracts from letters from Cork,” holograph copies of portions of two letters from unnamed correspondents, Cork, May 3, 1797, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne MSS 8750. 92. French, “Extracts from letters from Cork,” May 4, 1797. 93. Mary Leadbeater, “The Annals of Ballitore since the year 1766 being Mary Leadbetter’s history of her own times and of her native village,” The Leadbeater Papers: A Selection from the MSS and Correspondence of Mary Leadbeater, 2 vols. (London, 1862), Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborn Shelves c 252 1/2. 94. William Dennis to Richard Shackleton, August 3, 1752, Clonmel, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborn Files f4319; William Dennis to Richard Shackleton, March 1758, Clonmel, Osborn Files f 4325. 95. Richard Burke to Richard Shackleton, Dublin, April 5, 1792, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborn Files f 4319 . 96. Leadbeater, “Annals of Ballitore,” 2:168. 97. Leadbeater, Leadbeater Papers, 1:227, 231, 238– 44. 98. Ibid., 242. 99. James Mackintosh to George Moore, January 6, 1800, in Mackintosh, Memoirs, 124 –25. 100. James Mackintosh to Richard Sharp, December 9, 1804, in Mackintosh, Memoirs, 131. 101. James Mackintosh to Cadell and Davies, Lincoln’s Inn, February 12, 1799, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne MSS Files Folder 9527. 102. See, for instance, Dugald Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith LLD,” in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Indianapolis, Ind., 1982), 279– 80; or Dugald Stewart, An Account of the Life and Writings of William Robertson DD, FRSE (London, 1981), 31. 103. Dugald Stewart, An Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid DD FRS Edin., Late Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow (Edinburgh, 1802). See Michael Brown, “Creating a Canon: Dugald Stewart’s Construction of the Scottish Enlightenment,” History of Universities, 9 (2001), 135 –55. 104. William James McNeven, Pieces of Irish History illustrative of the Condition of the Catholics of Ireland, of the Origin and Progress of the Political System of the United Irishmen and of their transactions with the Anglo-Irish Government (New York, 1807), x. 105. Arthur O’Connor, The State of Ireland (London, 1798), 45. 106. O’Connor, Measures of a Ministry, 27. 107. Arthur O’Connor, The State of Ireland, ed. James Livesey (Dublin, 1998), 70. 108. “Arthur O’Connor’s speech on the Catholic Question, in the House of Commons, on the fourth of May, 1795,” The Beauties of the Press ([Dublin], 1800), 206. 109. O’Connor, Measures of a Ministry, ii–iii.

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110. “The examination of Arthur O’Connor,” 33. 111. “Thomas Addis Emmet’s Examination,” 85. 112. John Thelwall, Peaceful Discussion and not tumultary Violence the means of redressing national Grievance (London, 1975), 3. 113. Richard R. Madden, The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times, series 1, 2 vols. (London, 1842), 2:235. 114. Bignon Papers (private collection), O’Connor manuscript memoirs. 115. Bignon Papers, “Réglement provisoire pour l’Irlande.” 116. Bignon Papers, O’Connor manuscript memoirs. 117. George Moore, Observations on the Union, Orange Associations and the subjects of domestic policy with reflections on the late events on the continent, 2nd ed. (London, 1800), 33. 118. Ibid., 43. 119. Thomas Jackson to Sir William Hamilton, London, February 19, 1799, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne MSS 17992. 120. Samuel Neilson to Mrs. Neilson, Fort St. George, July 21, 1799, in Madden, United Irishmen, series 1, 1:246. 121. Anon. [Mary Anne Emmet], An Address to the People of Ireland Shewing them why they Ought to Submit to an Union (Dublin, 1799), 5. 122. William Drennan, Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt (Dublin, 1799), 4. 123. Ibid., 19. 124. T. Crofton Croker, Researches in the South of Ireland Illustrative of the Scenery, Architectural Remains and the manners and Superstitions of the Peasantry (London, 1824), 193– 94. 125. Susannah Taylor to Sir James Mackintosh, Norwich, January 13, 1810, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborne MSS 19143. 126. James Mackintosh, “A Discourse on the Law of Nature and Nations,” in The Miscellaneous Works of Sir James Mackintosh, 3 vols. (London, 1846) 1:341–78. 127. Mackintosh, Memoirs, 1:134. 128. Mackintosh, Memoirs, 1:439– 40. 129. Pierre Manent, Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme: dix leçons (Paris, 1987), 178. 130. For Hegel’s mobilisation of this religious tradition in a political key, see Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit 1790–1807 (Cambridge, 1987). 131. Gregory Claeys, The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall (University Park, Pa., 1995), xii–lvi; Mark Philp, “The Fragmented Ideology of Reform,” in Philp, French Revolution and British Popular Politics, 51– 53. 132. Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice opposed to Agrarian Law and to Agrarian Monopoly (London, 1797); John Thelwall, The Rights of Nature against the Usurpations of Establishments (London, 1796). 133. James Epstein, “The Constitutionalist Idiom,” in Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790 –1850 (Oxford, 1994), 9. 134. Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, 2004); Jennifer

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Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830 (Ithaca, 2005).

Conclusion 1. John Revans, Dublin, to Gustave de Beaumont, June 15, 1834, Beinecke Library, Yale University, MS Vault Tocqueville C.1.e; J. Drummond, Phoenix Park, to Gustave de Beaumont, July 26, 1837, Beinecke Library, Yale University, MS Vault Tocqueville C.1.e. 2. Henry J. Joy, Mountjoy Sqr., Dublin, to Gustave de Beaumont, Gresham’s Hotel, July 16, 1835, Beinecke Library, Yale University, MS Vault Tocqueville C.1.e. 3. John Roland Dinwiddy, “Bentham and the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Radicalism and Reform in Britain, 1780–1850 (London, 1992), 291–315. 4. David A. Haury, The Origins of the Liberal Party and Liberal Imperialism: The Career of Charles Buller, 1806 –1848 (New York, 1987), 72–73. 5. Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 6 –7. 6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Hardt and Negri, Multitude (New York, 2004). 7. Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, Calif., 1994), 51– 86. 8. Thomas Munro, letter to Governor-General Hastings, in George Robert Gleig, The Life of Major-General Sir Thomas Munro, 2 vols. (London, 1830), 1:465– 66, cited in Zaspoutil, John Stuart Mill and India, 61. 9. Jennifer Pitts, “Jeremy Bentham: Legislator of the World?” in Bart Schultz and Georgios Varouxakis, eds., Utilitarianism and Empire (Lanham, Md., 2005), 57– 91. 10. W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56 (1956), 167– 98. 11. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2000); Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York, 2003).

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I NDEX

Allen, Ethan, 136 Althusius, Johannes, 14 American colonies: and British empire, 52, 116, 129; and commercial trade, 49; Scottish support for, 169 American Revolution: and British Empire, 137; effect of, on British political values, 151; and flexibility of British identity, 135 – 36 Ampère trading house, Quebec, Canada, 148 Amsterdam, business press in, and commodity market, 33 Angel Inn coffee house, 25 Anglican community, in Ireland, 79, 81– 82, 83 Anglo-Irish trade pact, proposal of, 152 Anne, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, 95, 124 Antwerp market, and publishing of commodity prices, 33 Arato, Andrew, 5

Aberdeen, Scotland: and Black family, 130, 132; trading links of, 15–16 accommodation, and political structure of empire, 48, 127 Act of Explanation (1665), 114 Act of Settlement (1662), 114 Act of Settlement (1701), 42 Act of Union (1707), 12, 18, 52, 60, 70, 109, 135, 211 Addison, Joseph, 28, 30 Adorno, Theodor, 154 – 55 Africa: and British Empire, 48, 138; and slave trade, 50, 76 Africans, and Haitian revolution, 10 agrarianism, Christian, 119 agrarian radicalism, 197 agricultural improvement, and Dublin Society, 59, 85 agricultural production, and Irish trade, 132, 207 Agutter, William, 166 Aiken, John, 190 –91 277

INDEX

Bayly, Chris, 151 Beaumont, Gustave de, 214 Belfast, Ireland, merchant community of, 130 Belfast News Letter, 201 Belfast Politics, 201 Belgian revolution (1790), 189 Bennet, William, Bishop of Cloyne, 191 Bentham, Jeremy, 171, 215 Bentley, Richard, 168 Beresford, John, 199, 200 Berkeley, George, Bishop of Cloyne, 76, 90, 191 Bertin, Henri Léonard Jean Baptiste, 59 Birch, Thomas Ledlie, 193 Black, Alexander, 133, 134, 144 –51 passim Black, Charles, 140 –41 Black, David, 132 Black, Esther, 133 Black, Isabella, 134 Black, James, 148 Black, Jane, 134 –35 Black, John (1), 119, 130– 46 passim, 149– 50 Black, John (2), 132, 150 Black, Joseph, 130– 34 passim, 149, 150, 186 Black, Robert, 133, 135, 138, 145 – 50 passim Black, Thomas, 134, 148 Black family network: and British identity, 135 –45, 153; and commercial trade, 130–32, 140, 145–50; correspondence of, 131– 35; and Isle of Man, 145– 48 Blair, Hugh, 169 Blathwayt, William, 46, 60, 108 –9 Blount, Sir Henry, and Turkish civilisation, 35, 37– 38 Board of Trade, and colonial policy, 46, 47 Bodin, Jean, and natural law, 13–14

Arbuckle, James, 28, 74, 83 Aristotelian philosophy, and virtues, 13, 154, 172 Armagh, Ireland, 149 Armitage, David, 8, 12, 146 arts: and Catholic and Protestant elites, 127; as virtue of Irish people, 126 Asia, and British trade, 129, 132 association: and civil society, 2, 14 –15, 219; and commerce, 34, 45– 46, 219; and sovereign power, 51– 53 associations, 17, 22, 34; and coffee house culture, 34 – 41, 45; influence of, on governance of states, 59– 60; as mechanism for development, 77; and natural law, 13–14 Athenian Mercury, 28 Athenian Society, 28 Atlantic colonial trade, 30; communication and coordination in, 48 –50; and family networks, 130 – 32; and Ireland, 56 – 57, 80 –81, 98, 131– 32; Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 146 Atlantic world: and civil society, 3, 7, 9 – 22, 126; and dynamics of empire, 128 – 30; scope and range of Black family network, 150 Atterbury, Francis, 42– 43 Aubrey, John, 27, 38 Aughrim, Ireland, 54 autonomy, and identity, 153 Bailyn, Bernard, 10, 11, 131 Ballitore, Kildare (Ireland), 202–3 Baltic trade, 30 Bank of England, 34, 43 – 44 Bank of Ireland, 83 Banks, Joseph, 46 Barnard, Toby, 55 – 56, 58 Bartlett, Thomas, 200 Bayle, Pierre, 158– 59

278

INDEX

Bute, Lord, and English nationalism, 167, 168 Butler, James, Earl of Ossory, 58 Butler, James, first Duke of Ormond, 58 butter, and Irish trade, 81, 131 Byrne, William, 180

Bond, Oliver, 178, 180 Bordeaux, France, and Black family network, 131– 32, 141, 143, 146 Boston, Massachusetts, 29, 39 Boswell, James, 166 Bourke, Richard, 129, 183 Boyle, Henry, 54 –55 Boyle, Robert, 31 Boyne River, battle of, 54 brandy, and Irish trade, 131– 32, 146 Brazil, and slave trade, 50 Brenner, Robert, 130 British Empire: and American colonies, 52, 116, 129; changing dynamics of, 137–38; and civil society, 3, 7–22, 214– 19; and commerce, 40, 41– 53, 68 –69; and French Revolution, consequences of, 184– 85; Irish participation in, 88– 89; and Scottish philosophy, 116, 154; as sovereign power, 51– 52 British identity, 128– 30; and Black family network, 135 – 45, 153; evolution of, 135 – 37; and political liberty, 183; and political power, 151 The Briton, 167 Brooke’s (private club), 47–48 Broussonet, Pierre Marie Auguste, 189 Browne, Isaac Hawkins, 171 Browne, Peter, Anglican Bishop, 79, 82 Browne, Sir John, 61, 74 Bruce, Henry, 201–2 Bubble Act (1720), 30 Buchanan, George, Rerum Scoticarum Historia, 9, 18 Burdett, Francis, 185 Burke, Edmund, 119, 184, 187–88, 199, 203; and British liberty, 129, 152, 176; civil society, views of, 194 – 96, 202, 206; and Protestant Ascendancy, 96 Burke, Richard, 203 Burtt, Shelley, 64

Cadell, Thomas, 171 Cadiz, Spain, 132, 135 Calder, Angus, 156 Campbell, George, 161, 171 Campbell, Hugh, Earl of Loudon, 71 Campbell, Margaret, 71 Campbell, Patrick, 28 Caribbean trade, 49, 50, 110 –11 Carlyle, Alexander, 165 Carruthers, Bruce, 44 Cary, Lucius, Viscount Falkland, 26 Cassels, Richard, 58 Catherine of Braganza, queen of Charles II, 104– 6 Catholic Association, in Ireland, 91 Catholic Committee (Ireland), 97, 123, 190 Catholic Confederacy, 106 Catholic Convention (1793), 181–82 Catholic Defenders, 110, 178, 200 Catholic emancipation, 179, 184, 199, 206 Catholicism: and anti-absolutist politics, 104– 6; and community, 84, 108; and new religious identity, 102– 4; and political discourse, 98; and political rights, 41– 42, 92– 95, 127. See also Irish Catholics Catholic Relief Act (1793), 181– 82, 185 cattle exports, from Ireland, 57, 68, 81 Cavell, Stanley, 21 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 155 Challoner, Richard, vicar apostolic to London, 103 The Character of a Coffee House, 35

279

INDEX

1–7, 153; and improvement, 54 –62, 77– 84; in Ireland, 84–89, 123, 125 –27, 180, 182– 94, 204– 9; local and specific contexts of, 9 –23; and natural law, 9, 13 –15, 157; and politics, 4 –7, 157, 194 – 98, 201, 205–9, 215; response to French Revolution, 194 –98, 206; and Scottish Enlightenment, 153, 154 –76 Claeys, Gregory, 212–13 Clark, Peter, 17 Clayton, John, 99 Clive, John, 11 clubs: and elite opinion, 47– 48; as mechanism for development, 77. See also associations; societies coffee, as new object of consumption, 34– 36 coffee houses: and business press, 33; and civil society, 24 –31; culture of, 34–41; replacement of, by clubs and private institutions, 47– 48 Coffee-Houses Vindicated, 36 Cohen, Jean, 5 Coke, Sir Edward, 65 Colley, Linda, Britons, 11, 109, 136, 137 colonial trade: and English Board of Trade, 46, 47; as international commerce, 8 –9; and Ireland, 57. See also Atlantic colonial trade commerce: and identity, 142–43; and national community, 8 –9 commercial civilization, and political revolutions, 206 commercial empire: of Britain, 22, 128 – 30; and civil society, 3; communication within, 46– 48, 85; and Irish participation, 76 –77, 96–97; and monarchy, 62–64; utilitarian principles of, 84 commercial society: and association, 219; and the British Atlantic, 10; and civil liberty, 168 –70, 189, 195 –96; and con-

Chardin, Sir John, 36– 37 Charitable and Musical Society, 98 Charitable Infirmary, 97–98 charity: development of, in Irish Catholic community, 108; religious virtue of, 125; and work, as a form of prayer, 103– 4 Charles Edward Stuart (Young Pretender), 109–10, 157 Charles I, King of Great Britain and Ireland, 25, 106 Charles II, King of Great Britain and Ireland, 16, 104, 105, 106, 113; and coffee houses, 27, 37; and international trade, 40; and land settlement in Ireland, 107; restoration of, 73 Charles V, and Hapsburg empire, 9 Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor, 143– 44 Child, Josiah, 46– 47, 49, 159 Child’s coffee house, 31 chocolate, as new object of consumption, 34– 35 citizenship: and civil society, 175, 208; and democratic politics, 213; and happiness, 207; and pluralism, 218 civic humanism, David Hume’s critique of, 169 –70 civil conversation, and coffee houses, 25– 27 civility: and commercial society, 173 –74, 175; and national politics, 123 –27 civil science, development of, in Edinburgh, 186– 89 civil society: and association, 51–53; and British union, 210 –12; and coffee house culture, 37– 41; conditions and limits of, after 1794, 198 –213; and experience of empire, 22, 88 –89, 128– 30, 214–18; failure and fracture of, 185– 94; history and interpretations of,

280

INDEX

Croker, Crofton, 211 Cullen, Louis, 96, 132– 33 Cullen, William, 166 Curnow, Alan, 137 Curry, John, 91, 123–26

trol of resources, 110; and Ireland, 182–83; Scottish theorists’ views of, 172–74 commodity prices, publication of, 33 communication: and management of commercial empire, 46–48; and North Atlantic world, 85 community: alternative ideas of, and Jacobitism, 112; and conception of natural law, 14–15 Constant, Albertine, 186 Constant, Benjamin, 186, 187, 188 –89, 212; Adolphe, 205 constitution: as alliance between state and civil society, 187, 189; English, and Irish radicals, 194, 199; and public opinion, 201–2. See also Irish Constitution contraband trading, 145– 46, 148, 211 Convention of 1660, and Irish Protestants, 102 conversation, civil, 24–27 Coote, Thomas, 85 Corish, Patrick, 103 Cork, Ireland: and Atlantic economy, 16, 56 –57, 81, 110; and British polity, 211; and Burke correspondence, 202; coffee houses, 28, 29; family trading networks, 132; imprisonment of bishops, 95; philanthropic and cultural organizations of, 97–98 Corke Journal, 98 Corporation Act (1662), 16 cosmopolitan values, and trade, 151 Cotter, James, 96 Counter-Reformation Catholicism, 101–2 country houses, and social integration and civility, 32 credit, and flexibility of British merchants, 139 Crew, Nathaniel, 31

dairy products, and Irish trade, 81, 131 Dalling, John, governor of Jamaica, 36, 151 Dalrymple, John, Essay toward a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain, 172 Darcey, Patrick, 73 Darien scheme, and Scotland, 8 Davenant, Charles, 46– 47, 60– 68, 75, 80, 159; On the Balance of Trade, 60 debt bondsmen (pawnship), 50, 51 debt enforcement, and British slave trade, 50– 51 Declaratory Act (1720), 18, 66, 70, 71 Defenders. See Catholic Defenders Defoe, Daniel, 19, 69, 70, 111–12, 213 democracy: and civil society, 3, 208, 218; concept of, after French Revolution, 213 Denmark, loss of liberty in, 75 Dennis, William, 203 dependency, of Ireland, 66– 67, 75 –76, 78, 79; and British Empire, 88 –89, 159 Devil’s Tavern coffee house, 28 Dickinson, Harry Thomas, 200 Dickson, David, 56, 81, 185 Dissenters, in Ireland, 55, 72, 84 Dobbs, Arthur, 60, 67–68, 74, 75, 77, 90; and Dublin Society, 78, 85; Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland, 61, 159; and free trade for Ireland, 147– 48 Dobranski, Stephen B., 28 Douglas, Isle of Man, 145, 146 Drennan, William, 181, 182, 183– 84, 200, 210 –11

281

INDEX

181, 182, 189– 90; radicalism of, and civil society, 193 –94 empire: and civil society, 176, 193, 207, 212, 219; construction of, through collaboration, 146; and national identity, 7–9; phases of, and British history, 137–38; pluralism in, 216; political structure of, and accomodation, 127; territorial, and imperial policy, 147, 151–52 England: and coffee house culture, 37– 41; commercial empire of, 41– 53, 62, 68 – 69; and French Revolution, 194–98; Glorious Revolution and political change, 41– 53, 102; and Irish trade, 62–63, 68; liberty of, and commercial society, 168 –70; and monarchy, 62, 175; and Scottish Enlightenment, 167–68; social life in, and economic growth, 33– 34. See also British Empire English Parliament: centrality of, 41; and relationship with monarch, 44 Enlightenment. See Scottish Enlightenment Episcopalians, Scottish, 109 –10 Epstein, James, 213 Estates of Scotland, and international trade, 8 Europe, and English interests, after the Revolution, 44 Evelyn, John, 105– 6 Everard, John, 92– 93 Excise Bill, 147 excise crisis (1732), and Robert Walpole, 140, 148 excise taxes, and British trade, 128, 148 experimental sciences, and new cognitive norms, 31

Dryden, John, 28 Dublin, Ireland: and coffee houses, 28; improvement efforts in, and associations, 57– 58; and Irish Rebellion, 178 Dublin Journal, 28 Dublin Newsletter, 28, 85 Dublin Philosophical Society, 58 Dublin Society, 57– 60, 61, 78, 84 –87, 88 Dumont, Etienne, 215 Dundas, Henry, 181– 82, 185 Dundee, Scotland, trading links of, 15 Dunn, John, 21 Dunton, John, 28 Dutch commercial virtues, 112, 115 Dutch trade, 94, 127, 143– 44 East India Company, 44, 143–44, 146, 216; and Charles Davenant, 60; coordination of, 49– 50; and monopoly in foreign trade, 16 East Indies, and England as commecial monarchy, 63 Eccles, Sir John, 130 economic behavior: and coffee house sociability, 29 – 31; and culture of association, 34; modern patterns of, 33 – 34; and social interaction, 31–33 Eden, William, Baron Auckland, 152, 191– 92, 198 Edinburgh, Scotland: cultural life of, 19, 185– 86; trading links of, 15 –16 Edwards, Bob, 6 Edwards, Daniel, 26 Ehrenberg, John, 4 Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 217 Emmet, Mary Anne, 210 Emmet, Robert, 189 Emmet, Temple, 190 Emmet, Thomas Addis, 205; influence of, on Scottish social science, 185– 87, 189– 90; and Irish Rebellion, 177–79,

family networks, and colonial trade, 131– 35, 148–49. See also Black family network

282

INDEX

English response to, 194–98; as frame for political thought, 184 – 85; and Irish context, 202; Scottish analysis of, 187– 89, 204–5 friendship, as basis of society, 121, 122, 127 Fryer, John, 39 Furniss, Tom, 196

Federalist Papers, 181 Fénelon, François, 119–20, 121, 164; Aventures de Télémaque, 119, 120 Ferguson, Adam, 14, 172, 173 –74; History of Civil Society, 173 figurism, 92, 94, 121–22, 165 Fitzgerald, Edward, 178, 179, 208 Fitzgerald, James, First Duke of Leinster, 58 Fitzgibbon, John, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, 177, 199 Fitzpatrick, David, 133 Fitzwilliam, William Wentworth, as lord lieutenant of Ireland, 199 –200 Foley, Michael, 6 Forbes, Alexander, 119 Foucault, Michel, 79 Fouquet, Jean-François, 122 Fox, Harold Munro, 141 Fox, Henry, 144 Foxite Whig party, 185 France: aid to Irish Rebellion, 178, 179, 209; Black family commitment to, 141– 42, 150; and colonial trade, 131– 32; and Jacobite political economy, 112–13, 115–16; and mystical Catholicism, 127; as a republic, 1792, 182; and textile market, 68; and universal monarchy, 63. See also French Revolution Fraser, Simon, Lord Lovat, 135 freedom, and commercial liberty, 64, 189 Freeman, William, 50 freemasonry, 122 free trade, and Ireland, 64 – 65, 68, 76, 147–48, 152 French Huguenots, 92 “French Principle,” 182 French Revolution: and British politics, 212–13; and civic constitutions, 21; consequences of, for Ireland, 183– 84;

Gaelic Catholicism, 90, 98, 101, 104 Gardiner, Luke, 58 Garraway’s coffee house, 30, 31, 32 Gellner, Ernest, 3, 10, 23, 217 George III, 181, 199 Germaine, Lord George, 136 Gibson, James, 4 Gierke, Otto von, 13 Glasgow, Scotland, and tobacco trade, 15 Glorious Revolution (1688), 12, 102; and British relationship with Ireland, 54 – 56, 78; context for, 113; and evolution of British identity, 135; inheritors of, and Jacobitism, 109; and new political and commercial possibilities, 33, 41– 44, 45 Gookin, Vincent, 72–73 Gordon, Margaret, 130 Gordon, Robert, 130 Gorey Friendly Society, 85 governance: and commercial liberty, 64; and sovereignty, 79– 80 Grant, Alexander, 111 Grattan, Henry, 199 Gray, John, 3– 4 Great Instauration, and Dublin Society, 59 Grecian coffee house, and Royal Society, 31 Greene, Jack, 51 Grenville, George, 148 Griffith, Richard, 59 Grotius, Hugo, 13, 127

283

INDEX

Hovell, John, 73, 74 Howard, Philip, 105 Howard, Robert, bishop of Elphin, 82 Huguenot theorists, and natural law, 14 Hume, David: 188, 205, 161; antagonism of, toward England, 163 –70; and civil society, 3, 52– 53, 153, 215 –16; death of, and reputation, 165 –67; Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 166; essay on suicide, 170, 171; History of England, 174; intellectual development of, 158 –63; legacy of, 169 –71; as a monster, 162– 66; “My Own Life,” 166; and “science of man,” 8, 169, 171; “That politics might be reduced to a science,” 159; Treatise of Human Nature, 157, 160; views of English liberty, 129, 168 –70 Hurd, Richard, 165 Hutcheson, Francis, Scottish moral philosopher, 83– 84, 85, 154, 164, 172; and David Hume, 155, 158 – 59 Hutchinson, Francis, bishop of Down and Connor, 82 Hutchinson, Thomas, governor of Massachuetts, 147 Hyde, Henry, Earl of Clarendon, 73 –74

Habsburg Spain, and nation-states, 8 Haitian revolution, 10 Hamilton, William, 210 Hancock, David, 46, 50, 168 Hand in Hand Fire Office, 30 happiness: and citizenship, 207; and civic virtue, 86, 87; and civil society, 213; pursuit of, and politics, 108; as social ethic, 61– 62 Hardt, Michael, 216 Hardy, Thomas, 198 Harrington, James, 8, 25, 74; Oceana, 25 Harris, Benjamin, Publick Occurances, 29 Hastings, Warren, 152 Havel, Vaclav, and values of civil society, 4 Hayton, David, 82 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 212 Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, 106 Henry II, 65, 123 Henry VIII, 12 Herries, Robert, 29 Higgins, Francis, 178 Hill, Jacqueline, 57 Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, with Leon de Winter, “Civil Society and Hybrid Cars Will Defeat Islamists,” 5 History of the Works of the Learned (1739), 164 Hobbes, Thomas, 31; Leviathan, 27; and natural right theory, 13; and political power of sovereignty, 156– 57 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 156, 174; Sketches for the History of Man, 174 Home, John, 162 Hooke, Luke Joseph, 118 Hooke, Nathaniel (1), 113, 118, 119 Hooke, Nathaniel (2), 118 Hooke, Robert, 31 Hooke family, and Jacobitism, 117 Hope, Charles, Lord Granton, 186 Hope, John, 139 Horkheimer, Max, 154– 55 Hornes, George, 165

identity: flexibility of, and international commerce, 142; modern, 154. See also British identity; national identity; political identity imperial policy, and territorial empire, 147 improvement: and Catholic participation, 90, 125; and civil society, 54– 62, 82– 84; and Jacobite political economy, 115 independence, and political participation, 197 Independent Whig, 138, 140 India, and British Empire, 141, 152, 216 – 17 India trade, 49. See also East India Company 284

INDEX

Irish Presbyterians, and Irish Rebellion, 178 Irish Protestants, 66, 69 –79 passim; and civil society, 58, 125, 175; Convention of 1660, 102 Irish Rebellion, 177– 85, 202– 5 Irish trade: and Bordeaux network, 131– 32; independent development of, 114 – 16; and parliamentary reform, 179; restrictions on, 56, 207. See also free trade Irish Volunteers, 181, 182 Isle of Man, and illicit trade, 145 –46, 147– 48 Italian music, and baroque ritual, 105– 6

individualism, and English coffee houses, 34 Innes, Thomas and Lewis, 117 insurance brokers, and coffee houses, 30 Insurrection Act, in Ireland, 200 –201 international trade: coordination of, 34; and England, 40, 41– 53; and Jacobite political economy, 112–13; and modern nations, 8 – 9 Ireland: and Atlantic trade, 56 –57, 80– 81, 98, 131– 32; and British Empire, 52– 53, 54 –62, 88, 137, 152– 53; and civil society, 3, 8–9, 52– 53, 57–62, 77– 84, 183, 189 –94, 198, 205 – 9; and commerce, 56 –57, 76, 80 –81, 126, 183; dependency of, 65– 67, 75 –76, 78, 79, 88; and free trade, 64 – 65, 68, 76, 114, 147– 48, 152; and Irish identity, 74, 126; reform politics in, 180 – 85; sovereign power and governance, 52, 79 – 80, 198; union with Britain, 209–11, 215; and urbanisation, 15. See also Irish Catholics; Irish Parliament; Irish Rebellion Irish Catholics: authority of, and moral order, 90–95; and Black family network, 143, 144; economic participation by, 124–25; elite of, 95, 96–97, 106–7; and Jacobitism, 108–9, 110, 119; participation of, in political society, 95–108 Irish College, in Paris, 103 Irish Constitution, 66, 123 –25, 126, 192, 199, 200 Irish Council of Trade, 58 Irish Municipal Reform Act (1840), 16 Irish National Library, 59 Irish Parliament, 55, 56; and Catholic participation, 95 – 96; improvement efforts by, 57– 58; and Jacobite political economy, 113–14, 116; and reform, 179, 181– 82; rejection of Anglo-Irish trade pact, 152

Jackson, Thomas, 210 Jackson, William, 198 Jacobite rising (1745), 135 Jacobites, 92, 94; and Black family network, 143, 144; culture of, and commerce, 108 –23; political economy of, 94– 95, 113 –16; social power in Ireland, 54– 55 Jacobitism: commitment to virtue and moral order, 116 –19; as crime against British monarchy, 135; as political identity, 108; political thought of, and civil society, 98, 127; and Scottish intellectuals, 117–23; as source of pluralism, 112 Jamaica: coffee exports of, 36; and territorial empire, 48, 151–52 Jamaica Coffeehouse, 29 James I, King of Great Britain, 42, 46 James II, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 16, 92; Glorious Revolution and, 54; and Irish Catholics, 107–14 passim; support for, from Irish and Scottish intellectuals, 60–61, 118 –19. See also Jacobitism Jansen, Cornelius, bishop of Ypres, 103 285

INDEX

Jansenism, 90, 92, 93, 103, 112 Jerusalem coffee house, 29 – 30 Jobson, Cirques, 25 Johnson, Samuel, 119, 166 Jonathan’s coffee house, 29 Jonson, Ben, 28, 32 Joy, Henry (1), 201–2; with Henry Bruce, Belfast Politics, 214; “Thoughts on the British Constitution,” 201 Joy, Henry (2), 214 Jurieu, Pierre, 92 justice, as political virtue, 157

Lawton, John, and family trading network, 132 Leadbeater, Mary (Mary Shackleton), “The Annals of Ballitore,” 202– 4 Le Gros, Nicolas, 92 Leighton, C. D. A., 98 Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, 108 letter writing: and Black family network, 133–35, 144; and Shackleton family, 203 Levellers, 40 Leyburn, John, 102 liberty: and British identity, 129, 136–37, 138, 151, 183; and civil society, 195, 201, 218; commercial, 63, 64, 128, 146, 168– 70; and industry, 75; and Irish Catholics, 206; and law as guarantor, 212; and national identity in Ireland, 55; and Scots social theorists, 155; and self-realisation, 189; and territorial empire, 150– 52; and universal monarchy, 9 linen manufacture, 149 linen trade, and Ireland, 68 Lisbon College of St. Patrick, 104 Lloyd, Edward, and marine insurance, 30 Locke, John, 42; and natural law, 7; and natural rights, 78, 213; and Revolution Settlement, 44; and trade, as model for empire, 46– 47 London, England, 170; and Black family network, 148; business press, and commodity market, 33; and coffee houses, 26, 29, 37–40; commercial predominance of, 113; and management of commerical empire, 48–49 Louis XIV, of France, 9, 33, 104, 113; absolutism of, 93, 105; and Ireland as theatre of war, 54; and reconfiguration of state power, 33; and universal monarchy, 9, 44 Louis XV, of France, 141, 143

Kane, Robert, 59 Keane, John, 2 Keating, Geoffrey, 100 –102; Foras Feasa ar Éireann, 9, 100; Trí bior-gaoithe an bháis, 101–2 Keith, Earl Marshal, 164 Keohane, Nannerl, 94 Kilkenny, Ireland, 28 King, William, 78 Kirwan, Richard, 59, 189 Knights, Mark, 45 land, as basic resource, and civil society debate, 197 Land Bank, and Jacobites ideas of value, 116 land enclosure, 110 landholding: and civil society, 208; and Jacobite politcal economy, 114 land ownership: and Irish Catholics, 95, 96– 97, 208; and political power, 151; and property rights, in Ireland, 55– 56 Laoghaire, Airt Uí, 81, 96 La Rochelle, France, as Irish trading partner, 131 Law, John, 115–16, 159 Lawrence, Richard, 58, 72, 73

286

INDEX

Louis XVI, of France, 181, 182 love, pure, and moral action, 120 –21 Lucas, Charles, 66, 78 luxury, and consumption of foreign commodities, 87

Middle Eastern culture, and coffee houses, 39– 40 Miege, Guy, 42 Miles coffee house, Westminster, 25 militarisation, of Ireland, 200–201 military force, and commercial republics, 62 Militia controversy, 175 Mill, John Stuart, 215, 216 –17 Milton, John, 28, 113 Mississippi Scheme, and Land Bank concept, 116 Molasses Act, 51 Molesworth, Robert, 75, 78 Molloy, Tobias, 192 Molyneux, William, 66, 78; Case of Ireland Stated, 56 monarchy: and British Empire, 137; and civil liberty, 195; commercial, 62– 64; composite, and constitutional status, 12; universal, 9, 62 Money Bill dispute, and political life in Ireland, 78 Monmouth rebellion, 118 Montesquieu, Baron de la Brède et de, 10, 118, 119, 125, 188 Moore, George, 204, 209–10, 212 Moore, James, 158 Moore, James Stewart, 200 Moore, John, 209 Moore, Michael, provost, Trinity College, 114 moral action, and pure love, 120–21 moral reform, directed toward agriculture and commerce, 82– 83 Mossner, Ernest Campbell, 159, 160 Municipal Corporations Act (1835), 16 Munro, Thomas, 217 Murat IV, Sultan, 37 music, and poetry, of native Irish people, 126

MacIntyre, Alasdair, 23, 154 Mackintosh, James, 186 – 88, 192, 201, 211, 212; lectures on natural law, 204– 5; Vindiciae Galliae, 187 MacLauchlan, Daniel, 86 Madden, Richard, 190 Madden, Samuel, 60, 61, 67, 77, 78, 85– 88 Magennis, Eoin, 57 Maginn, Patrick, 104–5 Maison du Roi, 59 Malcolm, John, 217 Mandeville, Bernard, 31, 127, 158 Manent, Pierre, 212 Man’s coffee house, 31 manufacture, Catholic, restrictions on, 96 manufacturing networks, 150 Manx trade. See Isle of Man marine insurance, and coffee house evolution, 30 Marsh, Narcissus, Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, 82 Marshall, Peter, 11, 128 Martin, Martin, 77–78 Mastnak, Tomaz, 5 Maxwell, Henry, 61, 67, 68 – 69 McBride, Ian, 91 McCarthy, Donough, 95 McNeven, William James, 179, 182, 190 McTier, Martha, 183– 84 Mediterranean trading network, 132 merchant networks, 131 Mermaid coffee house, 28 Metcalfe, Charles, 217

287

INDEX

North America: and civil society, 18; trade with, and British dominion, 141 North Atlantic world: and British commerce, 43, 132; communicative techniques of, 39, 85; and territorial empire, 147 The North Briton, 167 North Briton Extraordinary, 168 Northern Star, 184, 210 Nugent, Christopher, 118, 119 Nugent, Robert, 118 Nugent, Thomas, Chief Justice of Ireland, 118 Nugent family, 117

Mussendun, William, 148 Mutiny Act (1694), 41 Nagle, Honora, 97 Nary, Cornelius, parish priest of Saint Michan’s, Dublin, 98–100, 102, 103, 107 national identity: and British monarchy, 18 –19, 135 – 37; and concepts of empire, 7– 9; and English liberties, 111. See also British identity; identity naturalism, and David Hume, 161 natural law: and civil society, 13–15, 21– 22, 121–23, 171; and figurism, 93; and nation-states, 7– 9; Protestant tradition of, 127, 157; and revival of Catholic political life, 127; Scottish theorists of, 157, 204 – 5; and separation of state and society, 187 natural rights: of the Irish, 67; theory of, 13; views of, 191– 92, 213 Navigation Acts, 46, 64, 159 Negri, Antonio, 216 Neilson,Samuel, 210 networks. See family networks; merchant networks Nevill, Henry, 27 New England: coordination and management of, and British Empire, 48 – 49; and family networks, 131 New Light Presbyterianism, 79, 84, 156, 158 New Rules of 1672, 78 news, and conversation, in coffee houses, 25 –27 newspapers: advertisements in, 204– 5; and coffee houses, 25, 26, 29; Corke Journal, 98; in private clubs, 48 Newton, Issac, 20, 46– 47 Nicole, Pierre, 93 –94 Niebhur, Carston, 37 North, Douglass, 33, 34

O’Brien, Patrick, 48 Ó Ciardha, Eamonn, 116 O’Connor, Arthur, 179, 190; and civil society, 180, 182, 205 –9; as editor of The Press, 185; State of Ireland, 206 O’Conor, Charles, 91, 96, 123–26, 164 Oldmixon, John, The British Empire in America, 11 opinion, as response to empire, 216, 217 Orange Order, 179, 200, 210 Ossian controversy, 175 Ostend Company, 143 –44 Oswald, Richard, 29 Oxford, England, coffee houses in, 25, 31 Paine, Thomas, 185, 187, 188; Agrarian Justice, 213; agrarian radicalism of, 197; and natural rights, 191 Paris, France: coffee house culture in, 37; and David Hume, 170 –71; Irish College, 103 Parliament. See English Parliament; Irish Parliament patriot merchants, 146 –47 Patriot Party, and Irish dependency, 66– 67

288

INDEX

Patten, Jane, 190 Patt’s coffee house, 28 pawnship (debt bondsmen), in slave trade, 50, 51 Peace of Amiens, 150 Peace of Paris (1763), 19, 22 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 7, 20 Peale’s coffee house, 28 Pelham, John Holles, Duke of Newcastle, 140 Penshurst Place, home of the Sydney family, 32 Pepys, Samuel, 27, 105 Perry family network, 131 Perth, Scotland, trading links of, 15 Petty, William, 69, 73, 74; on governance and sovereignty, 79 –80; Political Anatomy of Ireland, 79, 80 philanthropic foundations, in Ireland, 97– 98 Philips, John, 113 Phillipson, Nicholas, 11, 60 Philp, Mark, 212–13 Physico-Historical Society, in Ireland, 58 Pincus, Steven, 26, 27, 40, 111 Pitt, William: Anglo-Irish trade pact, 152; as British Prime Minister, 141, 199, 200; Catholic Relief Act (1793), 181– 82, 185; and world empire, 147 Pittock, Murray, 109 plantations: and English commercial strength, 75 –76; and imperial British identity, 151–52 Plunkett, Emilia, 118 Plunkett, Lady, lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Braganza, 106 Plunkett, Lucas, First Earl of Fingall, 106 Plunkett, Luke, Second Earl of Fingall, 107 Plunkett, Luke, Third Earl of Fingall, 106 Plunkett, Nicholas (1), 106

Plunkett, Nicholas (2), “The Improvement of Ireland,” 106–7 Plunkett, Oliver, Archbishop of Armagh, 107 Plunkett, Peter, Fourth Earl of Fingall, 118 Plunkett family, 106 –7 pluralism: and civil society, 6; and Jacobitism, 112; and religious beliefs, 93– 94 Pocock, J.G.A., 11, 21; on British empire, 137– 38; The Discovery of Islands, 137 poetry, and music, of native Irish people, 126 Poiret, Pierre, 93 Poker Club, 19, 52 polis, love of country, 121 political authority, and Irish political organisation, 123–27 political culture: changes in, after the Glorious Revolution, 41– 53; Irish Catholic participation in, 95–104; in seventeenth-century England, 40 – 41 political discourse: and coffee houses, 24– 27, 31; in Ireland, and Catholicism, 98 –100 political economy, 33; and dependency, 159; in Ireland, 81, 111, 113 –16; and Irish reform, 183–84; and Jacobites, 113–15; and local tradition, 79–80; and trade coordination, 33–34 political freedom: and state power, 6; and territorial empire, 147 political identity: and Black family, 149, 151; and civil experience, for Catholics, 22, 90–95, 104 –8; and religious faith, 212–13; and Scotland, 18 –20 political virtues, 121 politics: and civil society, 4 –7, 157, 193, 194 – 98, 201, 205– 9, 215; and nationstates, 7–9; and religion, as cultural resource, 105, 212–13

289

INDEX

ety, 125, 164 –65; and David Hume, 160 –61, 165; Discourse on the Theology and the Mythology of the Pagans, 122; and François Fénelon, 119–23; Voyage of Cyrus, 122 reason, as democratic, 196 – 97 reform movements, in Ireland, 180–85 Reid, Thomas, 205 Reily, Hugh, Ireland’s case briefly stated, 116 – 17 religion, as cultural resource for politics, 104–6, 212, 213 Repeal and Attainder Acts (Ireland), 55 Restoration, in England (1660), 102 Revestment Act (1765), 148 revolution, and political change, 206–7. See also French Revolution Revolution Settlement, 44, 55, 125 Rightboy movement, in Cork, 110 Riley, Patrick, 120 Robertson, John, 60, 158 Robertson, William, 9, 172 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 2 Rosée, Pasqua, 26 Rosehearty, religious community, 119 Rosse, David, 145 Rota Club, and political debate, 25, 27 Rothkrug, Lionel, 119 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 164; “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” 87– 88 Rowley, Hercules, 67, 97 Rowthmell’s coffee house, 47 Royal Agricultural Society, 59–60 Royal Burghs, in Scotland, 16 Royal College of Saint Canice, Kilkenny, Ireland, 114 Royal Exchange coffee house, 30 Royal Society, and experimental science, 31–32, 39 Royal Society of Arts, 47 The Rules and Orders of a Coffee House, 26 –27

Ponsonby family, in Ireland, 199 Poor Law, in England, 45 Poovey, Mary, 80 Pope, Alexander, 118 Popkin, Richard, 160 Portugal: and anti-imperial politics, 104; and Black family network, 132; empire of, and hybridisation, 50 potato, as staple food, in Ireland, 81 poverty, and concept of reason: 197 Powis House, in London, 43, 44 Poynings’ Law, 114 Prades, Abbé de, 118 Presbyterians: in Ireland, 79; in Scotland, 70, 156 The Press (Ireland), 185, 193– 94 Price, Jacob, 46– 47, 131 Price, Richard, 184 Priestley, Joseph, 187 print politics, 43, 45 Prior, Thomas, 60, 61, 67, 75, 76, 78 Protestant Ascendancy, 56, 96 Protestant liberty, 138, 206 Protestants: Anglican community in Ireland, 81– 82; and ideals of community and improvement, 58, 84; political rights of, 41– 42. See also Irish Protestants Protestant Succession, 42 public debt, politics of, 44 Publick Occurances, 29 Pufendorf, Samuel, 9, 94, 127 Putnam, Robert, 218, 219 Quakers, and civil life, 40, 203 Quebec Act (1774), 129 radicalism: and civil society, 197, 212–13, 215–16; in Ireland, 177– 83 Raleigh, Walter, 28 Ramsay, Andrew Michael: and civil soci-

290

INDEX

British Empire, 46, 112, 128, 129, 169; and British identity, 141, 146, 150 Shackleton family, 203 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 20, 47 Shakespeare, William, and David Hume, 162– 64 Sharp, Richard, 204 Sheares, Henry and John, 136, 178, 180, 208 Sheehy, Nicholas, 96 Sheridan, Thomas, 203 shipbuilding, in Ireland, 114 Sidney, Algernon, 32 Simon, Issac, 139 Skinner, Quentin, 21 slaves: and dependency, 75–76; and imperial power, 151; and slave trade, 50–51, 186 Sleyne, Bishop John, 95 Small, Stephen, 182 smallpox inoculation, Turkish origins of, 39 Smith, Adam, 154, 173 –74, 185, 192; and civil society, 14, 53, 172, 175; and commercial society, 207; and David Hume, 166, 170, 175; The Theory of Moral Sentiment, 187; Wealth of Nations, 173, 187 Smith, Charles, 29 Smollet, Tobias, editor, The Briton, 167 smuggling trade, 145– 46, 148, 211 Smyth, Jim, 69 social norms, and coffee house manners, 28–29 social relations, and politics, 6, 194– 98, 207 Societé royale des sciences, 189 societies: in Edinburgh, Scotland, 186 – 87; and governance of states, 59–60. See also associations; clubs; Dublin Society

Russell, Lord John, 44 Russell, Richard, 104 Russell, Thomas, 182, 183 Sacheverell, Henry, 42 Saint-Malo, France, as Irish trading partner, 131 Sales, François de: and French mystical Catholicism, 103– 4; Introduction to the Devout Life, 103 salons, and civil conversation, 24 salted meat, and Irish trade, 131 Sarsfield, Patrick, 143 scepticism, as ethical stance, 160 sciences, experimental, and Royal Society, 31 Scotland: Act of Union (1707), 18, 52, 70; allegiance to British crown, 135; and British Empire, 7, 18, 22, 65– 66, 116; and civil society, 3, 9–22, 52– 53, 185– 86, 197– 98, 207; Claim of Right (1689), 18; Declaration of Arbroath (1320), 18; and foreign trade, 8, 15–16; and intellectual Jacobitism, 109 –10, 117–23; societies and clubs in, 19, 52; and theorists of civil society, 154–76, 185– 88, 207; union with Britain, 11, 18–20, 70; universities of, 19; Western Isles of, 77, 78 Scots College, Paris, 117 Scottish Burgh Reform Act (1833), 16 Scottish Enlightenment: as critique of England, 60, 168; and David Hume, 154 –71; and French Revolution, 204– 5; influence of, on Irish poltics, 184; and theorists of civil society, 171–76 secession, as political option, 138 Selden, John, 13 self-determination, democratic idea of, 6 Seligman, Adam, 20 Seven Years War: aftermath of, and

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INDEX

Strahan, William, 166 Sun Fire Office, 30 Swift, Jonathan, 30, 67, 70, 78, 213 Swiney, Eugene, printer of the Corke Journal, 98 Sydney, Philip, The Countess of Pembroke’’s Arcadia, 32 Synge, Edward, Archbishop of Tuam, 99 Synge, Edward, Bishop of Elphin, 99

Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, 47 Solar, Peter, 45 Somerset House, and Irish Catholics, 106 South American trade, 8, 141 South Sea Company, 44 sovereign power: attributes and ideals of, 197, 198; and civil society, 7; and natural law, 14; and political empires, 216 Spain: and Black family network, 132, 145; and British trade, 145; empire of, and Portugal, 104; and Jacobite naval action, 144; and trade in South America, 8, 141; trading monopoly of, 132 Spectator, 28, 29 Speculative Society, 186, 187 Spence, Thomas, and agrarian radicalism, 197 Spenser, Edmund, 74, 100 Sprat, Thomas, 32, 39 Stanhope, Philip Dormer, Earl of Chesterfield, 57, 147 Stanhope, William, First Earl of Harrington, 140 Stanihurst, Richard, De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis, 100 –101 Stapleton, William, 50 states, context of, and civil society, 7– 9 Steele, Ian, 30, 132 Steele, Richard, 28 Stein, Barbara, 132 Stein, Stanley, 132 Stepney, George, 60 Steuart, James, Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, 116 Stewart, Dugald, 186, 205 Stewart, Henry, Viscount Castlereagh, 179 Sthael, Peter, 31, 47 St. James coffee house, 28 Stock Exchange coffee house, 29

Taaffe, Francis, Earl of Carlingford, 108 – 9, 118 Talbot, Richard, Earl of Tyrconnell, 73, 108, 114 Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles-Maurice de, 145 Tatler, 28 Taylor, Charles, and models of civil society, 6, 23, 154, 155 –56, 217–18 Taylor, Martha, 133 Taylor, Robert, 85 Taylor, Susannah, 211–12 Tehran, coffee houses in, 39–40 Temple, Sir John, Irish Rebellion, 72 Temple, William, 62 territorial empire: and British identity, 151–52; and imperial policy, 147 Test Acts, 72, 79 textile market, and Ireland, 68 Thelwall, John, 208; The Rights of Nature, 213 Thévenot, Jean de, 37 Thistlewood, Thomas, 151 Thompson, Mark, 135 Thurlow, Edward, Lord Chancellor, 152 tillage, and agricultural improvement, 85 Tillyard, Arthur, 25 Tillyard’s coffee house, 31, 47 tithe payments, and reform, 110, 179

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INDEX

union, with Britain: and distinction between Ireland and Scotland, 70–71; and Ireland, 209–11, 215. See also Act of Union (1707) United Irishmen, 198, 200, 202; and civil society, 180, 182, 190; critique of Irish governance, 192– 93; and Irish Rebellion, 177–80, 204; and landholding, 208; and Scottish social theory, 184; and Thomas Addis Emmet, 189; and union with Britain, 210 universality, and civil society, 155 universal monarchy, 9, 62 urbanism, in British Isles, 15, 16–17, 27–28 Ussher, Christian, 85 Ussher, James, 72 utilitarianism, 6, 84, 154, 215 –16, 217 utopianism, and concepts of civil society, 5– 6

tobacco: as new object of consumption, 35; and trade networks, 131, 146 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 5, 214 Todorov, Tsvetan, 155 Toland, John, 45, 71, 72, 112 tolerance, as ideal of civil society, 191 Toleration Act (1689), 41–42, 45 Tompion, Thomas, 31 Tone, Russell, 190 Tone, Theobald Wolfe, 179, 182, 190, 198; Argument of behalf of the Catholics, 91, 92, 180; Memoirs, 190 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 14 Tooke, John Horne, 198 Tories: and financial institutions, 44; and White’s (private club), 47– 48 trade: and communication, 30 –31; cosmopolitan values of, 151; as defining factor of modern nations, 8; and as instrument for empire expansion, 139; and Irish Catholics, 96– 97; reorientation of, and Scotland, 15–16; restrictions on, and Ireland, 64, 67– 69, 76. See also Atlantic colonial trade; contraband trading; free trade Travernier, Jean-Baptiste, 37 treason trials, and British identity, 135 – 36 Treaty of Limerick, 55, 116 Treaty of Nijmegen, 113 Treaty of Paris (1763), 175 Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 43, 146 Tridentine religious identity, 102, 117 Triennial Act, 41 Trinity College, Dublin, 72, 114 trust, and British merchant practices, 139 Tudor revolution, and Ireland, 123–24 Tull, Jethro, The New Horse Houghing Husbandry, 85 Turkish civilization, and coffee house culture, 37, 38, 39 Turnly, Kitty, 141

Vincent de Paul, 103 Virginia coffee house, 29–30 Virginia Company, 49, 130 virtues, of commerce and society, 121, 154 Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet), 10, 45; Age of Louis XIV, 120 Wadding, Luke, bishop of Wexford, 103 Wales, and British Empire, 12, 16 Walker, Mack, 20–21 Wallis, John, 31 Walpole, Robert, and Black family trading network, 140 –48 passim Walzer, Michael, 5– 6 war: and British dominion, 141; as instrument for empire expansion, 139 Warburton, William, 165, 167 War of Austrian Succession, 138, 142– 43 War of Jenkins’ Ear, 138, 145 War of Spanish Succession, 118 Wehler, Ulrich, 136 –37

293

INDEX

ipation of Irish Catholics, 95–96; and political reform, 41– 44; political relationship with Ireland, 56, 108 –9; and sovereign power in Ireland, 124 Will’s coffee house, 28 wine and brandy, and trade networks, 131–32, 146 Witherspoon, John, 169 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and language of politics, 21 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 184, 187, 196– 97 Wood, Anthony, 25, 47 Woodward, Richard, 191 Wool Acts, 68 woollen trade, 63, 64, 75 Wren, Christopher, 31, 32, 46 –47 Wyse, Thomas, 91, 123

Weingast, Barry, 33, 34 Western Isles of Scotland, 77, 78 West Indies: and coffee exports, 36; coordination and management of, 48; and England as commercial monarchy, 63; and Molasses Act, 51– 52; slave plantations of, 152; and trade, 29 Whelan, Kevin, 110 Whiggery: polity of, and Jacobitism, 109; rhetoric of, and Irish Catholics, 91, 127 whiggism, British, and humanist tradition, 168 Whig party, 16, 42, 185; and Brooke’s (private club), 47– 48; and commercial empire, 43, 45, 47; and English liberty, 169–70; and models of empire, 78, 140; politics of union, and Ireland, 181, 199 Whiteboy secret societies, 110 Wickham, John, library of, 120 Wilkes, John, and English nationalism, 167– 68 William III, King of England, 46, 82; and French commerce, 113; political partic-

Yemen, market for coffee in, 36, 37 Yeomanry, as counter-force to United Irishmen, 179, 200 Zakaria, Fareed, 5, 218 Zastoupil, Lynn, 216 –17

294