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.

[pt] Desde o momento em que Cristóvão Colombo colocou seus pés pela primeira vez nas Américas, o espectro da violência privada no mar esteve por perto, fosse ela empreendida pelas mãos dos próprios espanhóis, fosse por aqueles que disputavam com eles o direito de explorar as riquezas recém-descobertas. Nesta tese argumentamos que os relatos de navegação deixados por corsários, piratas e bucaneiros nos séculos XVII e XVII foram parte fundamental para a criação do imaginário europeu acerca do Novo Mundo e de seus habitantes. Procuramos explorar uma diversidade de relatos que, cada qual à seu modo, representaram os dilemas políticos que vieram a desembocar na criação do Estado e do sujeito político modernos. Este processo, contudo, não foi linear, como em uma escala de progresso em direção à civilidade. Pelo contrário, a leitura dos relatos de navegação nos revela uma experiência diversa e frequentemente contraditória. O escopo desta tese abarca os séculos XVI e XVII. Neste período as instituições sociais herdadas da idade média tardia que ordenaram a relação entre indivíduos e sociedade estavam em franco declínio, processo este que somente se aprofundou com a reimaginação da geografia planetária após os descobrimentos. Argumentamos nesta tese que a figura do pirata foi um ator central nesta reimaginação do mundo a partir de suas margens, de suas áreas limítrofes. Ao longo do trabalho, abordamos os relatos de André Thevet e Jean de Léry, Francis Drake, Anthony Knivet, Alexander Exquemeling e, por fim, o romance Rosbinson Crusoé, de Daniel Defoe. Cada um destes trabalhos trouxe algo de novo para a complexa equação que teve lugar nos dois séculos em questão. / [en] Since when Christopher Columbus first came into the Americas, the specter of private violence stood nearby. This thesis argues that the accounts of navigations left by the privateers, pirates and buccaneers of the XVI and XVII centuries were crucial parts for the making of the European imaginary about the New World, its inhabitants, and the European place in it. We explore the diversity of accounts that, each in its own way, represents the political dilemmas that came to a close at the Modern Estate and the Modern political subjects. This process, thought, should not be represented as an unambiguous tale of progressive civilization. On the contrary, the reading of the accounts of navigation reveals a much more ambiguous and frequently contradictory experience. The scope of this thesis encompass the XVI and XVII centuries. During this time, the late medieval social and political institutions that mediated the relations between society and individuals were at a steady decline. The discoveries made by the Spanish and the Portuguese and the following re-imagination of global geography only aggravated the problem, and from the ashes of the late medieval system modernity arose. We argue that the pirate figure was a central actor in this process acting from the margins. During this thesis we explore the accounts of Andre Thevet and Jean de Léry, Francis drake, Anthony Knivet, Alexander Exquemeling and the novel Robinson Crusoé, from Daniel Defoe. Each one of these accounts brought something new to the complex operations that were taking place in those transitional centuries.