Josiah Tucker, who was the Anglican Dean of Gloucester from 1758 until his death in 1799, is best known as a political pamphleteer, controversialist and political economist. Regularly called upon by Britain's leading statesmen, and most significantly the Younger Pitt, to advise them on the best course of British economic development, in a large variety of writings he speculated on the consequences of North American independence for the global economy and for international relations; upon the complicated relations between small and large states; and on the related issue of whether low wage costs in poor countries might always erode the competitive advantage of richer nations, thereby establishing perpetual cycles of rise and decline. As a vehement critic of war in all its forms, Tucker was a staunch opponent of Britain's mercantile system – a pejorative term connoting, amongst other things, the aggressive control of global trade for the benefit of the mother country so as to encourage imperial expansion throughout known parts of the world. Though recognising Tucker to be a pioneer of the anti-mercantilist free trade school, extant Tucker scholarship has tended to concentrate on the perceived similarities and dissimilarities between he and the classical economists, particularly Adam Smith. Yet whilst acknowledging the veracity of these various connections and claims, this thesis approaches Tucker from an alternative perspective. Placing Tucker in his proper historical context, the main purpose of this study is to explore the intellectual, political and theo-philosophical background to Tucker's economic thought. Its most original and profound contribution consisting in a detailed and critical analysis of Tucker's links with his ecclesiastical mentor Bishop Joseph Butler, its central concern is to argue the case for Butler's crucial influence over Tucker's free trade ideas – particularly in the guise of the neo-Stoic, Anglican providentialism that buttressed much of Butler's own theories in the field of meta-ethics and moral philosophy.

This thesis examines instances of sustained or regular encounter between British and French nationals in the second half of the eighteenth century and considers the evolution and form of a national identification which occurred for the English participants in the light of such contact. It is distinguished from previous historical studies of British nationality at this time in several respects. First, it is an approach derived from anthropological studies which have examined episodes of interaction between proximate national groups to consider the impact these have on the development of national awareness or identity. In choosing this approach the thesis, therefore, looks at encounters between people as opposed to between discursive frameworks, so often in the eighteenth century informed by stock and inaccurate stereotypes of the French to be found in British print culture and which constituted a form of 'virtual' encounter between the two nationalities. This study is distinguished in a further capacity in that it uses archival source material that was not produced with the intention of mass publication or readership, but which instead reflects personal or private opinion and identity with respect to the nation. That the French nation occupied an important and influential position in the development of national identities in Britain at this time is fully recognised. However, the principal argument is that notions of Anglo-French opposition and enmity frequently portrayed in the British press were inevitably modified by the experience of encounter between various respective national groups. As a result, the binary model of a developing British nationality in contrast and opposition to perceived French characteristics must likewise be re-assessed. Instead, this study demonstrates that the form of a national identification and its course of evolution, for those who engaged in regular encounter with the French, was fluid and differentiated for a variety of individuals and groups. Understood in terms of a process, this then has implications for the way in which nationality developed among those individuals and groups who had experienced no direct contact with the French.

The history of retail and consumption during the eighteenth-century has enjoyed interest from historians for a number of decades, yet few studies have concentrated on large cities or utilised a case study method to develop an in-depth and longitudinal understanding of change across the whole century. This study seeks to rectify this by concentrating on the city of Norwich, which was the second largest city in England in 1700, in order to build up a detailed social history of retail, shopping and consumption. The research seeks to clarify the exact nature of change in urban retail and consumption, exploring the existence of consumer and retail 'revolutions' and the relationship between them. Using a variety of archival sources the study uncovers the extent of the consumption of novel goods, the changing nature of the economic character of each of Norwich's thirty-four parishes and uncovers the dual personality of the city, with evidence for a leisured town set within the larger industrial city. Detailed mapping of directory data points to a concentration of luxury retail in key streets, making up a cultural thoroughfare which linked the traditional cultural centre of the city in the east to the new purpose-built leisure arena on the western boundary. The character of retail change and the role of the shopkeeper is assessed through newspaper advertisements, trade cards, probate inventories, diaries and contemporary visual representations of the city centre. While a clear transformation was detected across the century, the evidence suggests that change was cumulative rather than a big shift at a fixed point in time. However, although the changes noted in this research did not constitute 'revolution' in an immediate sense, the modifications in urban spaces, retail and consumption, which were evident from the beginning of the century, were undoubtedly significant in their long-term effects by laying the foundations for current practice.

This dissertation interrogates correlations between imperial expansion and the history paintings produced for London audiences by the American-born artist Benjamin West (1738-1820) during his first decade in England (1764-1774). Within that ten-year span, Grand Manner academic history painting shaped and reflected the imperial anxieties that elite Britons experienced as a result of dramatic territorial gains, consolidations and losses in North America and South Asia. To follow the trajectory of history painting’s rise, relevance and obsolescence is to track Britons’ negotiation of their global status as a “free though conquering people.” As England’s pre-eminent history painter, West secured for himself a place within the discourses of the imperial self-imaginary by developing two types of iconographic program. First, the selective appropriation of narratives from classical antiquity allowed West and his patrons to inculcate their audiences with visual models for British imperial virtue. Advancing the cause of imperial self-ratification through classical narrative, West cast the English as the natural heirs to the Roman empire. The resulting images paralleled and buoyed contemporary textual discourses of empire and intersected with antiquarian collecting practices, both of which were based on the notion of modern British proprietorship of classical antiquity. Second, developing and refining a model introduced by Francis Hayman (1708-1776) at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1761, West contrived a pictorial format which introduced persons living and recently dead into a realm of visual expression formally reserved for characters from biblical and classical textual sources. Invoking some of history painting’s most familiar compositional and figural conventions, West recombined history painting, portraiture, landscape and genre to formulate the iconographically hybrid heroics of empire, complete with its own set of pictorial motifs through which West and his followers styled their subjects exemplars of classical imperial virtue. Imperial anxiety afforded history painting its short-lived relevance among English-speaking audiences during the second half of the eighteenth and first quarter of the nineteenth centuries, and imperial self-acceptance rendered that most highly-esteemed of artistic genres obsolete. Through the visual heroics of empire, Benjamin West established history painting as a viable form of Anglophone cultural production during his first decade in London. / text

On 1 February 1793, the National Convention of Revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain and the Netherlands, expanding the list of France's enemies in the War of the First Coalition. Although British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger had predicted fifteen years of peace one year earlier, the French declaration of war initiated nearly a quarter century of war between Britain and France with only a brief respite during the Peace of Amiens. Britain entered the war amid both a nadir in British diplomacy and internal political divisions over the direction of British foreign policy. After becoming prime minister in 1783 in the aftermath of the War of American Independence, Pitt pursued financial and naval reform to recover British strength and cautious interventionism to end Britain's diplomatic isolation in Europe. He hoped to create a collective security system based on the principles of the territorial status quo, trade agreements, neutral rights, and resolution of diplomatic disputes through mediation - armed mediation if necessary. While his domestic measures largely met with success, Pitt's foreign policy suffered from a paucity of like-minded allies, contradictions between traditional hostility to France and emergent opposition to Russian expansion, Britain's limited ability to project power on the continent, and the even more limited will of Parliament to support such interventionism. Nevertheless, Pitt's collective security goal continued to shape British strategy in the War of the First Coalition, and the same challenges continued to plague the British war effort. This led to failure in the war and left the British fighting on alone after the Treaty of Campo Formio secured peace between France and its last continental foe, Austria, on 18 October 1797.

This dissertation examines the political origins of Loyalism in New York City between 1768 and 1778. Anchored by an analysis of political mobilization, this dissertation is structured into two parts. Part I has two chapters. Using a variety of private and public sources, the first chapter analyses how 9,338 mostly white male Loyalists in New York City and the counties of Kings, Queens, Suffolk and Westchester were mobilized. Chapter 1 argues that elites and British forces played a fundamental role in the broad-based mobilization of Loyalists in the province of New York. It also recognises that colonists signed Loyalist documents for many different reasons. The second chapter of Part I is a large-scale prosopographical analysis of the 9,338 identified Loyalists. This analysis was based on a diverse range of sources. This analysis shows that a majority of the province’s Loyalist population were artisans aged between 22 and 56 years of age. Part II of this dissertation examines political mobilization in New York City between 1768 and 1775. In three chapters, Part II illustrates how elite and non-elite white male New Yorkers coalesced into two distinct groups. Chapter 3 concentrates on the emergence of the DeLanceys as a political force in New York, Chapter 4 on their mobilization and coalescence into ‘the Friends to Liberty and Trade’, or ‘the Club’, and Chapter 5 examines the political origins of what became Loyalism by studying the social networks of three members of ‘the Club’. By incorporating an interdisciplinary methodology, Part II illustrates that members of ‘the Club’ developed ties with one another that transcended their political origins. It argues that the partisanship of New York City led members of ‘the Club’ to adopt inward-looking characteristics that affected who they interacted with on an everyday basis. A large proportion of ‘the Club’’s members became Loyalists in the American Revolution. This dissertation argues that it was the partisanship that they developed during the late 1760s and early 1770s that defined their allegiance.