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The literature on consumption has grown rapidly over the past thirty years and we now have a detailed understanding of how the material lives of the middling sort and elite were transformed over the long eighteenth century. With the exception of the occasional case study and the research on clothing, the poor have largely been neglected in this literature. Consequently we have very little understanding of whether the poor were also able to consume at a greater level over the period or of how their consumption patterns varied between men and women and across contrasting counties and urban-rural locations. This PhD addresses these gaps through the detailed analysis of over 350 pauper inventories from Dorset, Kent and Norfolk from c.1670 to 1834. This is the largest collection of pauper inventories ever assembled for historical analysis. These sources have been contextualised by analysis of other types of inventories of paupers, artefacts, pictorial sources, pawnbroking records, autobiographies, diaries and pauper letters. The sources suggest that the poor increasingly acquired a greater quantity and variety of household goods over the long eighteenth century and that the material lives of the poor were improving. This increased consumption, however, appears not to have been equal and uniform, as it was not until the late eighteenth century that significant numbers of paupers owned these goods in greater frequencies. Moreover, these items appear to have been consumed by greater numbers of the poor who lived in the Home Counties and urban areas, whilst fewer paupers generally owned these goods in more rural, remote and less commercial areas. Nevertheless, the changes in the poor’s material lives appear to have been considerable and signified a number of important changes in people’s domestic behaviours and everyday lives.

This thesis is a study of the formation of the collections at Longford Castle during the period c.1730 to c.1830 by the Bouverie family (later Earls of Radnor). It draws upon previously untapped archival material relating to this understudied but nationally significant collection of art, to provide a contribution to current scholarship on country houses and the history of collecting. The thesis considers issues of acquisition, patronage and display, and looks across a range of art forms, including painting, sculpture, decorative arts and furnishings, exploring the degree to which this family’s artistic tastes can be understood as conventional or distinctive for the time. By contextualising these acquisitions and commissions in terms of their setting, it is shown that although Longford Castle, an unusually shaped Elizabethan building, was appropriated and adapted for the display of art in line with eighteenth-century ideals, its owners also valued and retained aspects of its distinctive character. In addition, the thesis shows that Longford functioned both as a private home and as a public space where visitors experienced the collections. An introduction to the Bouverie family is provided, so as to further contextualise their tastes, exploring their Huguenot and mercantile heritage, and ennoblements, artistic networks, and interests during the long eighteenth century. The thesis argues that these interests were characterised by both an independent spirit and a desire to conform to contemporary trends and to articulate a sense of Englishness. The thesis takes a broad methodological approach, combining studies of architecture, interiors, gardens, furnishings, fine art and social history. It explores the castle and its contents through both archival research and object-based study, providing the first comprehensive study of Longford and its art collections.

Against a backdrop of territorial expansion, land enclosure and laissez-faire economic policy in eighteenth-century England, a mode of perception was imagined that would disrupt conventional acts of looking which, to the critical mind, were linked to an economy of selfhood. There emerged a theory of a gaze that might resist tendencies to private authority, as well as the absolutism of public power. The gaze would, with time, come to be identified with artistic vision and is here labelled indifference. This thesis seeks to characterise indifference, to use it as an optic onto liberal orthodoxies, and to evaluate its capability as a disruptor of neoliberal ideology. Selected for analysis is liberalism’s valorisation of place, to which twenty-first century cultural production has contributed. Through case studies of contemporary art, it is shown that artworks produced in order to cultivate a sense of place in the name of social welfare and a crowded public sphere may not in practice serve such ends. Rather, they threaten to reinforce hierarchies already operative in the concept of place. If they do so, their instigators are arguably complicit in the very inequalities that they propose to eliminate. The thesis examines the disruptive potential of the artist’s indifference through an analysis of artworks by Robert Smithson and Thomas Hirschhorn. Both these artists, albeit in different ways, claim indifference to site, thereby promising to negate the authority of a body politic that is sustained by place production. However, in the case of Hirschhorn, whose public commission in Holland, 2009, serves as a case study, the promise is undermined by the fact that his indifference coincided with the interests of his corporate and state backers. Consequently, his art functioned not to sublimate selfhood in the interests of the polis, but to facilitate the liberty of corporations and the Dutch state.

Over the past three decades, historians of the long eighteenth century have emphasized both the stability of the British state and the progressive growth of national sentiment over the period. The enormous mobilization of manpower during the French Wars is often characterized as the culmination of this evolution. Arming to fight the French, it is argued, was a formative process, which encouraged greater social cohesion, and forged an overarching sense of national identity. This thesis will contend that the ‘Nation-in-Arms’ interpretation has been constructed at a considerable remove from the culture and lives of common people. Adopting a ‘history from below’ approach, it will re-evaluate the popular experience of mass arming, by focusing upon two relatively neglected branches of the armed forces, the army and militia. Three central themes have been selected for investigation: The recruitment process, the experience of soldiering in the home garrison, and the role of armed force in maintaining public order. It will be shown that, between 1790 and 1805, the government was faced by a mixture of popular ambivalence and hostility towards the raising of the army and militia. It will be demonstrated that economic privation was the preeminent cause of enlistment and that, once recruited, soldiers and militiamen retained their working-class attitudes, and viewed their service primarily as a contractual form of labour. The extent to which armed service was viewed as conditional and negotiable will be emphasized through an examination of the military crimes of mutiny and desertion. Finally, an analysis of military deployments during industrial protests and food riots will demonstrate that, during the French Wars, the state became much more reliant upon armed force for maintaining public order. By adopting a ‘history from below’ approach, the limits of social stability and social cohesion will be tested, and a richer, more variegated, understanding of the popular experience of mass-arming will be offered.

The study of how the law worked at a local level in rural communities, and in the role of the rural magistrate at summary level, has been the subject of relatively little attention by historians. More attention has been given to the higher courts, when the majority of plebeian men and women who experienced the law during the long eighteenth century would have done so at summary level. Although some work has been carried out on summary proceedings, this has also tended to focus either on metropolitan records, a small number of sources, or on a specific, limited, number of offences. There has not been a broader study of rural summary proceedings to look at how the role and function of the rural magistrate, how local communities used this level of the criminal justice system, as complainants, defendants and witnesses, and how they negotiated their place in their local community through their involvement with the local magistrate. The research presented here uses the surviving summary notebooks of 13 magistrates working across central and southern England as primary sources, taking both a quantitative and qualitative approach to examine how rural summary proceedings operated. It shows that there was wide participation in the summary process in rural England, and that rural magistrates had a more individualised approach to their summary work and decision-making than their London equivalents. It reveals how even the poorest members of rural societies were able to employ agency and display authority in their appearances before the magistrate, and demonstrates the extent to which the use of discretion, mediation and arbitration were key functions of the rural justice.

When William Carew (1689–1744) and Reginald Pole-Carew (1753–1835) unexpectedly inherited the Antony estates in the southwest of England, each invested in material culture to create, maintain and justify his distinction as a landowning member of élite society. Discourses around the uses of visual and material culture throughout the eighteenth century are usually framed in contrast: either the ostentatious collections of the hereditary nobility which denoted rank, wealth and power, or the status-seeking “middling sorts” who used luxury goods to paper over social and cultural gaps. In the space between these two social groups were the Carews (and a great number of landed gentry like them) who built relatively unpretentious country houses and who commissioned, collected and displayed luxury goods as statements of an identity not based on declarations of affluence, prestige, or social mobility. Using original, unpublished, archival research and testing the findings against historical and contemporary studies, the interdisciplinary approaches in this thesis will analyse the Carews’ uses of luxury goods – in country-house building, landscaping and portraiture– to cultivate an identity commensurate with their aims. Unpacking a strategy of distinction for each of William Carew and Reginald Pole-Carew offers a new perspective on eighteenth-century conspicuous consumption. The findings assert that what the Carews commissioned, collected and displayed fills a gap in current scholarship and must be integrated into any comprehensive understanding of the uses of luxury goods throughout the century.

This thesis focuses on the experiences of the ‘disorderly’ neighbourhood of Rosemary Lane and Rag Fair in the eastern suburbs of London in c.1690 to 1765. Rosemary Lane and Rag Fair possessed one of the most powerfully articulated reputations for disorder of any London street. In the imagination of both novelists and social investigators it was thought to be squalid, dangerous, dirty - the stereotypical ‘den of iniquity’. Using a wide range of material including parish records, Middlesex session papers, eighteenth century newspapers, and digital sources such as the Old Bailey On-Line and London Lives this thesis will explore the streets and alleyways of Rag Fair. It will go beyond the simple perception of a disorderly neighbourhood, to describe the individual communities and forces which created that disorder. It will show that the poor of Rosemary Lane, generally, did not see themselves as a problem waiting to be solved, they were resourceful and they had their own way of surviving - they were active players in a changing City that was shaking off its medieval roots and embracing the modern. By looking in detail at this community; at its structures and divisions, and at its power relations, its self-identity will be revealed.

This thesis, which focusses on the relationship between Lord Holland and Portugal, investigates aspects of political, diplomatic and cultural history. It covers the period between 1793 and 1840 and traces the evolution of Holland's views on Portugal from the time of his first visit to Spain to his later contribution to the establishment of a constitutional regime in Portugal. Particular attention is given to the Hollands' visits to Portugal in 1804-5 and 1808-9. Their journals and correspondence reveal their impressions of the people, culture and history of Portugal. On their travels, they met a number of prominent Portuguese, notably Palmela, who were to remain in contact with Holland House - especially during periods of exile - for many years into the future. The Portuguese journeys and the continuing contact with people like Palmela were to play an important part in the development of Lord Holland's views, not only on Portugal but also on broader political and constitutional issues. Thus the thesis investigates Lord Holland's influence on ' the establishment of a constitutional regime in Spain in 1809-10 and - indirectly and unintentionally - in Portugal in 1820-23, It includes a study of Holland's contribution to the settlement of a government in Brazil in 1808 - that is at the time the Bragancas moved from Portugal to Rio de Janeiro - and his indirect influence on the establishment of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves in 1815, as well as his role in the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade and the effects of abolition on Anglo-Portuguese relations. Lord Holland's contribution to the establishment of a Liberal regime in Portugal in 1834 is examined at some length. It includes a study of the extent of Holland's support for the Portuguese Liberal Cause after Dom Miguel's usurpation of the throne in 1828 and of his subsequent role in the 'Liberal invasion' of Portugal. To this end it investigates relations between Portuguese emigres and the Holland House Circle, Holland's role in the triangular diplomacy between Lisbon, St James and South Audley Street in 1828 and later. Finally, it considers Holland's contribution to the end of the Portuguese Civil War in 1834 and to the subsequent establishment of a constitutional regime in that country.