The Introduction provides the general context for what this book calls the communal currency tradition in British society. Its chronology starts in the early 1790s when the French revolutionary government’s experiment with the state-issued fiat paper currency, the assignat, caused heated discussion in Britain, which eventually consolidated Britain’s currency exceptionalism. The recent revival of the state theory of money (neo-chartalism) provides a reference point for the book’s unique theoretical outlook, which is explained by drawing upon the existing literature on economics, sociology and historical studies. After an overview of the development of monetary ideas, the communal currency tradition, which was closely associated with the idea of voluntary acceptance, is further explained based upon the writings of Edmund Burke and his involvement in the legal ban on the circulation of assignats in England. The broad outline of the book’s discussion is delineated by presenting the scope of communal currency as it impacted the economic, political, cultural and social aspects of British society.

This chapter examines the aversion to theories and programs of natural rights in much mainstream nineteenth-century British political discourse. Following on the heels of their Enlightenment and revolutionary efflorescence, writers in Great Britain articulated various critiques of natural rights philosophies and declarations. Moving from early critics such as Burke and Bentham to later Victorian writers and statesmen – most importantly, J. S. Mill – the chapter traces several threads of skepticism toward natural rights. British writers, it argues, were preoccupied less with the unsound conceptual foundations of natural rights theories than with the perceived consequences of belief in natural rights, which was seen as leading in anarchic, destabilizing, and antinomian directions. Natural rights platforms, it was contended, appealed to passion, ignored context and the weighing of costs and benefits, and undermined both the rule of law and state authority. In addition, natural rights theories were perceived by critics to be connected to a range of worrying trends (democratization and the rise of socialism, among others). Natural rights theories, furthermore, stood in stark contrast to the utilitarian and historicist attitudes towards law and government which prevailed in Britain during these decades. Finally, the conclusion offers a glance at nineteenth-century France, contrasting the loyalty toward natural rights across the Channel with British hostility, and revealing that many of the fears that Britons articulated about the dissemination of natural rights ideas were harbored by the French with regard to the spread of consequentialism.

This chapter addresses the relationship between rights and property and the role of each in determining the form of government. It begins by challenging J. G. A. Pocock’s division of the history of political thought into liberal and republican traditions, with the first based on a juridical conception of politics and the second focused on political participation to the exclusion of a concern with rights. David Hume, whose skepticism led him to deny that justice was a natural virtue, traced property rights to an appreciation of their social utility. In addition, like Montesquieu, Hume denied any necessary relation between the degree of political participation in government and the security of rights. Edmund Burke accepted that fundamental rights were ultimately derived from nature, but objected to how the French revolutionaries ignored the role of prescription in stabilizing justice. Ultimately, Hegel broke down the distinction between rights and welfare, drawing on Rousseau and Kant’s emphasis on freedom as the true source of justice and humanity.

Yoon Sun Lee discusses how Enlightenment understandings of race shaped ideas about inheritance, such that property ownership came to be understood in racialized terms and race came to be understood in economic terms. Burke’s and Kant’s writings about heritability thus shed light on the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, whereby, as Lee puts it, “enslaved women of African descent bore children who counted not as population that could inherit things but as property that could be inherited by others, on the basis of a color that had to be ascribed or assumed as the material sign of a legal condition.”

Goldsmith was a prominent member of the Irish diaspora in London. This chapter details recent research on the London’s Irish population in the eighteenth century and offers a picture of his many connections and friendships within this community, with particular reference to compatriots in his social and professional milieux. The chapter demonstrates how London saw a level of social intermingling and professional collaboration between Irish of different denominational origins which was hardly achievable in Ireland.

The correspondence of authors became increasingly recognized as a form of literary output throughout the eighteenth century. Compared to the output of other significant writers of the eighteenth century such as associates Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, only a small corpus of Goldsmith’s letters remains. This chapter gives an overview of Goldsmith’s extant correspondence, places it into discrete clusters, and considers why so few letters remain. The chapter suggests that the brevity of Goldsmith’s life prevented him from developing an equivalent epistolary vocation to his peers.

This chapter reads Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men as staging not merely a political argument with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, but a political economic one. By exhuming the obscured economic substrata of Burke’s work, Wollstonecraft exposes the injustices of the socio-economic order which he sought to naturalise and attacks the economic order on which late eighteenth-century society was founded. Wollstonecraft shows how Burke weaponises ‘specious’ human feeling in defence of existing structures, and how he defends a political economy which subjugates human feeling to a defence of the status quo. In contrast, Wollstonecraft resists the separation of political economic concerns from questions of liberty, equality, and happiness. By insisting that sympathetic feeling for others should be used to reform human community and to motivate political actions to sustain human happiness, she asserts human feeling as an alternative ground of value.

This essay challenges the historiographical myth of salutary neglect on many levels, beginning by exploring how it came to its current, dominant interpretive status. I argue that it grows out of a desire to see the colonies as relatively democratic and independent, but that such a perception is deeply problematic. The levers of imperial control were powerful throughout the colonial period; colonial political systems did not develop “in a state of nature”; the tendrils of legal control were invidious and far-reaching; and force–the power of empire–was never far away. British navies, in particular, supplemented by occasional armies and colonial militias under the command of the Governor, along with all the mechanisms of legal control–sheriffs and executions, heads on stakes at the public crossroads–lurked always on the horizon, ready to intervene if necessary, sometimes only in the public imagination, but often in fact. This chapter is a call to think deeply about the power of empire during the colonial period. Doing so will lead to a richer understanding of what broke down between 1763 and 1776, but also of what came before. Salutary neglect it was not.

This chapter explores the extensive discussion of the sublime in eighteenth-century English, Irish and Scottish philosophy, often considered as laying the groundwork for the Romantic sublime. The chapter also examines academic histories of these eighteenth-century discussions of the sublime, showing how such histories have at times over-simplified the relationship between competing philosophical approaches and national traditions. The chapter pays particular attention to the increasing centrality of the association of ideas to descriptions of the sublime in Anglophone philosophy, identifying it as a key marker of difference from the German idealist tradition that has been the focus of so many scholarly accounts of the Romantic sublime.

In the decade after Warren Hastings’ departure (1785–98), his idea of conciliation encountered new and formidable opposition. He relied on the idea in his defense against impeachment in parliament, but his principal accuser, Edmund Burke, identified it with corruption. Conciliation also acquired a bad name in India, where Hastings’ acting replacement, John Macpherson, made it the watchword of his scandalous administration. Hence, it fell to Lord Cornwallis to rid the idea of its unsavoriness, as part of his attempt to restore metropolitan faith in the Company state. The governor-general’s alliance with Sir William Jones helped in this regard. In the 1790s, pressure on the Company state and on the idea of conciliation abated. Yet this was to be a temporary reprieve. Soon, both would be challenged afresh by the governor-generalship of Lord Wellesley.

“Indulgence: The Stuart Declarations of Indulgence and Their Afterlives,” analyzes the concept and procedure of indulgence during the Restoration and its persistence in the eighteenth century. It argues that the Stuart Declarations of Indulgence as mechanisms of religious liberty were not superseded by toleration; rather, they articulated a formal and affective structure for political and personal relations that persisted as a minor form in the eighteenth century, as exemplified in the writing of David Hume, Edmund Burke, Samuel Richardson, and Olaudah Equiano. While tolerance is a policy and a practice grounded in a theory of formal equality, indulgence persists as a way to imagine relationships with women, with children, and with enslaved and colonized people.

This chapter argues that the essay begins the eighteenth century as a bourgeois form and ends it as a radical one. Over the course of the century the form and style of periodical essayists such asRichard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and the Earl of Shaftesbury are taken up by writers with revolutionary politics, such as Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean-Paul Marat, and Karl Marx.

This chapter focuses on some of the principal ways in which the family has been viewed, or theorized, in political-economic thought, but focuses in particular on the legacy of Edmund Burke’s conservative defense of that institution against radical challenge on the grounds that inheritance materially underpins moral and cultural continuity. Tracing the the complex evolution of this essentially elitist argument in relation to Malthusianism, as well as through both the discourse of eugenics and literary responses to the emergence of a “mass society,” the chapter also highlights the role of Burkean traditions in affirming an orthodox heteronormativity against sexual liberationist movements, theorists, and writers. Ultimately, though, the conclusion demonstrates that the commodification of queer sexuality has contributed to new forms of sociocultural tension at the heart of our contemporary politics.

Prior to shaping literary depictions of a nature classed both wondrous and terrible, sublime discourse addressed uplifting, transporting encounters with the written word. Nicolas Boileau’s influential French translation of Longinus’ ancient treatise On the Sublime (ca. first century CE) restyled the branch of sublime discourse dedicated to discourse itself, suggesting that sublime literature is not elevated simply because it is complex or because it is marked by a high or lofty style. Rather sublime works of verbal art carry a peculiar charge, a charge or spark relayed to audiences taking in sublime textual encounters. This emphasis on a charged sublime encounter would underwrite prominent philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sublime nature penned by Kant, Wordsworth, Burke, and Keats. Such literary representations of sublime nature are famously ambivalent, with aesthetic renderings of earthquakes, fires, or floods bearing out fraught questions of agency. Kantian and Wordsworthian models of sublime nature suggest human agencies of mind transcend vast powers of nature. Burkean and Keatsian accounts of dread nature or astounding material sublimities ultimately humble humankind.

This chapter explores the high hopes for Irish commerce that were aroused by the American Revolution, and their complex interactions with British attempts to reform and consolidate the remnants of its mercantile empire following its American debacle. Irish campaigns for ‘free trade’ and ‘legislative independence’ were animated by the hope that the liberation of the Kingdom’s foreign trade would enable it to chart its own course in a more peaceful Europe. This vision clashed fundamentally with a rival, British reform agenda, embodied in William Pitt the Younger’s unsuccessful Irish Commercial Propositions of 1785, which balanced an extension of imperial trading privileges to Ireland with its closer integration into the British market. The rejection of Pitt’s proposals by the Irish parliament, after their heavy modification by British slaving and manufacturing interests, produced an unstable equilibrium, dominated by patronage and executive power, that was ripe for criticism by the more radical forces that would take up the fallen mantle of Irish ‘patriotism’ in the 1790s.

This chapter identifies the emergence of an Enlightenment critique of empire in Ireland. This laid the intellectual foundations for the Union of 1801 by connecting the exclusion of the Irish Kingdom from free participation in imperial and European trade with the exclusion of its Catholic subjects, under the terms of the ‘Penal Laws’, from the benefits of property and political representation. For thinkers such as Josiah Tucker and David Hume, the suppression of Irish commerce was striking evidence of how British policy carried ‘jealousy of trade’ to extremes that jeopardised the security of the empire. For Charles O’Connor, Edmund Burke, Arthur Young, and Adam Smith, meanwhile, the Penal Laws had ruined Ireland’s prospects for ‘improvement’ by alienating the Irish majority from property and the state. It was Smith who linked these two problematics together, creating a new kind of argument for a parliamentary union between Britain and Ireland.