A 1755 advert in the Gloucester Journal listed for sale, 'A MODERN-BUILT HOUSE, with four rooms on a floor, fit for a gentleman'. In the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 'gentlemen's houses' like the one described evolved as a cultural norm. This thesis offers a social and cultural reading of an under-studied group of small free-standing classical houses built in the west of England between 1680 and 1770. By developing a profile of eighty-one gentlemen's houses and one hundred and thirty-four builders and owners, this study unites subjects such as the history of architecture, landscapes, domestic interiors, objects and social development that are often treated separately. The design, spatial arrangement, and furnishings of gentlemen's houses precisely defined the position of their builders and owners in the social hierarchy. The 1720s marked an important shift in the location and meaning of building that corresponded to an alteration in the background of builders. Small classical houses moved from a relatively novel form of building for the gentry to a conventional choice made by newcomers often from commercial and professional backgrounds. Gentlemen's houses projected status in a range of settings for both landed and non-landed elites, highlighting the house as a form of status-enhancing property rather than land. Moreover, gentlemen's houses had adaptable interior spaces and were furnished with an array of objects that differed in number and quality from those lower and higher in society. The connections between gentlemen's houses and important processes of social change in Britain are striking. House-building and furnishing were measured strategic activities that calibrated social status and illustrated mobility. This thesis demonstrates that gentlemen's houses are one key to understanding the permeability of the English elite as well as the combination of dynamism and stability that characterized eighteenth-century English society.

This dissertation examines how news and information circulated among select colonies in the British and French Caribbean during a series of military conflicts from 1763 to 1804, including the American War of Independence (1775-1783), French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). The colonies included in this study are Barbados, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue. This dissertation argues that the sociopolitical upheaval experienced by colonial residents during these military conflicts led to an increased desire for news that was satiated by the development and improvement of many processes of collecting and distributing information. This dissertation looks at some of these processes, the ways in which select social groups both influenced and were affected by them, and why such phenomena occurred in the greater context of the 18th and early 19th century Caribbean at large. In terms of the types of processes, it examines various kinds of print culture, such as colonial newspapers, books, and almanacs, as well as correspondence records among different social groups. In terms of which groups are studied, these include printers, postal service workers, colonial and naval officials, and Catholic missionaries. The dissertation is divided into five chapters, the first of which provides insight into the operation of the mail service established in the aforementioned colonies, and the ways in which the Atlantic Revolutions impacted their service in terms of the different historical actors responsible for collecting and distributing correspondences. Chapter two looks at select British and French colonial printers, their print shops, and the book trade in the Caribbean isles during the 18th century. Chapter three delves into the colonial newspapers and compares the differences and similarities among government-sanctioned newspapers vis-à-vis independently produced papers. It uses the case of the Haitian Revolution to track how news of the slave insurrection was disseminated or constricted in the weeks immediately following the night of 22 August 1791. Chapter four examines the colonial almanac as a means of connecting colonial residents with people across the wider Atlantic World. It also surveys the development of these pocketbooks from mere astrological calendars to essential items that owners customized and frequently carried on their person, given the swathes of information they featured after the American War of Independence. The final chapter looks at the daily operations of Capuchin and Dominican missionaries in Martinique and Guadeloupe at the end of the 18th century and how they maintained their communications within the islands and with the heads of their Catholic orders in France, as well as in Rome. Overall, this project aims to fill in some of the gaps in the literature regarding how select British and French colonial residents received and dispatched information, and the effect this had in their respective Caribbean islands. It also sheds light on some of the ways that slaves were incorporated into the mechanisms by which information was collected and distributed, such as their encounters with printers, employment as couriers, and use as messengers to relay documents between colonial officials. In doing so, it hopes to encourage future discussion regarding how information moved in the British and French Caribbean amid periods of revolution and military conflict, how and why these processes changed, and the impact this had on print culture and mail systems in the post-revolutionary period of the 19th century.

This work is a social and cultural history of the participation of enslaved and free Blacks in the Seven Years’ War in British America. It is, as well, an intellectual history of the impact of Blacks’ wartime actions upon conceptions of race, slavery, and imperial identity in the British Atlantic world. In addition to offering a fresh analysis of the significance of Britain’s arming of Blacks in the eighteenth century, it represents the first sustained inquiry into Blacks’ experience of this global conflict. It contends that, though their rhetoric might indicate otherwise, neither race nor enslaved status in practice prevented Britons from arming Blacks. In fact, Blacks played the most essential role in martial endeavors precisely where slavery was most fundamental to society. The exigencies of worldwide war transformed a local reliance upon black soldiers for the defense of particular colonies into an imperial dependence upon them for the security of Britain’s Atlantic empire. The events of the Seven Years’ War convinced many Britons that black soldiers were effective and even indispensable in the empire’s tropical colonies, but they also confirmed that not all Blacks could be trusted with arms. This work examines “Tacky’s revolt,” during which more than a thousand slaves exploited the wartime diffusion of Jamaica’s defensive forces to rebel, as a battle of the Seven Years’ War. The experience of insecurity and insurrection during the conflict caused some Britons to question the imperial value of the institution of slavery and to propose that Blacks be transformed from a source of vulnerability as slaves to the key to the empire’s strength in the southern Atlantic as free subjects. While martial service offered some Blacks a means to gain income, skills, a sense of satisfaction, autonomy, community, and even (though rarely) freedom, the majority of Blacks did not personally benefit from their contributions to the British war effort. Despite the pragmatic martial antislavery rhetoric that flourished postwar, in the end the British armed Blacks to perpetuate slavery, not to eradicate it, and an ever more regimented reliance upon black soldiers became a lasting legacy of the Seven Years’ War. / text

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This dissertation investigates the diverse ways in which the Portuguese language expanded in Brazil, despite the multilingual landscape that predominated prior to and after the arrival of the Europeans and the African diaspora. It challenges the assumption that the predominance of Portuguese was a natural consequence and foregone conclusion of colonisation. This work argues that the expansion of Portuguese was a tumultuous process that mirrored the power relations and conflicts between Amerindian, European, African, and mestizo actors who shaped, standardised, and promoted the Portuguese language within and beyond state institutions. The expansion of Portuguese was as much a result of state intervention as it was of individual agency. Language was a mechanism of power that opened possibilities in a society where ethnic, religious, and economic criteria usually marginalised the vast majority of the population from the colonial system. Basic literacy skills allowed access to certain occupations in administration, trading, teaching, and priesthood that elevated people’s social standing. These possibilities created, in most social groups, the desire to emulate the elites and to appropriate the Portuguese language as part of their identity. This research situates the question of language, identity, and power within the theoretical framework of Atlantic history between 1695 and 1822. Atlantic history contributes to our understanding of the ways in which peoples, materials, institutions and ideas moved across Iberia, Africa and the Americas without overlooking the new contours that these elements assumed in the colony, as they moved in tandem, but also contested each other. Focusing on the mining district of Minas Gerais for its economic and social importance, this dissertation draws on multiple ecclesiastical and administrative sources to assess how ordinary people and authoritative figures daily interacted with one another to shape the Portuguese language.

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Between 1648 CE and 1666 CE, news, rumours, and theories about the messiah and the Lost Tribes of Israel were disseminated amongst diverse populations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Employing a world history methodology, this thesis follows three sets of such narratives that were spread through the American colonies, England, the Dutch Republic, the Italian peninsula and the Ottoman Empire, connecting people separated by linguistic, religious, national, and continental divides. This dissertation starts by situating this transmission within a broader context that dates back to 1492 CE and then traces the three-stage process in which eschatological constructs originating in the Americas in the 1640s were transmitted across Europe to the Levant in the 1650s, preparing the minds of Jews and Christians for the return of these ideas from the Ottoman Empire in the 1660s. In this manner, this study seeks to make three contributions to the existing literature. It brings together often isolated historiographies, it unearths fresh archival sources, and it provides a new conceptual framework. Overall, it argues that one cannot understand the growth of apocalyptic tension that reached its peak in 1666 without examining the major historical events and processes that began in 1492 and affected Jews, Christians, and Muslims across the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds.

This research examines the career of Robert Searle, an English privateer, that conducted state-sponsored attacks against the Spanish and Dutch in the Caribbean from 1655 to 1671. Set within the Buccaneering Period of the Golden Age of Piracy (1650-1680), Robert Searle’s personal actions contributed to the rise of the English in the Caribbean to a position of dominance over Spain, which dominated the region from 1492 until the 1670s. Searle serves as a window into the contributions of thousands of nameless men who journeyed to the Caribbean as a member of Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design Fleet. These men failed in their endeavor to take Hispaniola from the Spanish, successfully invaded Jamaica, and spent the next fifteen years securing England’s largest possession in the region, transitioning Jamaica from a military outpost to a successful plantation colony. These men, including Searle himself, have been overshadowed in the history of English Jamaica by more well-known figures such as Sir Henry Morgan, the famed “Admiral of the Buccaneers.” Searle and his compatriots pursued the objectives of the core in London throughout the contested periphery of the Caribbean region. These goals were first framed as the complete destruction of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and later as achieving trade between Jamaica and Spain’s American colonies. The examination of Robert Searle through the core-periphery relationship between the metropole and the Caribbean illustrates how the totality of his actions contributed to the rising English position in the Caribbean. Ultimately, Searle and his fellow privateers proved vital to Spain conceding to England the rights of trade and formal recognition of their colonies in the region with a series of succeeding Treaties of Madrid.