In late-eighteenth-century Dublin, options were limited for an expanding reading public who wished to consult quality printed works. During this period of the Anglican Ascendancy, membership to institutional libraries or participation in associational activities was largely limited to elites and those from the Established Church. The Dublin Library Society provided a public reference library service without restrictions of confession, connection, elections, or status—with admission based only on ability to pay the initial two-guinea charge (and one thereafter). Using hitherto neglected primary sources, particularly contemporary newspapers, this thesis will examine the origins of the Dublin Library, public reaction towards it, and its position promoting cultural patriotism and inclusivity in public library service provision in late-eighteenth-century Dublin. Also, a detailed prosopographical analysis of the library’s founding subscribers, specifically for their occupational backgrounds and associational activities, will show that the library represented a cross-section of Dublin’s reading public and help identify the social and cultural milieu in the capital. Through a combination of historical and prosopographical research on the library and its members, this study aims to contribute to both library history and the wider fields of social, cultural, and urban history of Dublin. The library was founded amidst a backdrop of Irish patriotism evidenced by the achievement of legislative independence from Britain. Dubliners expressed their patriotism through participation in clubs and societies that promoted Irish cultural, commercial, political, and social improvement and self-sufficiency. Further Enlightenment ideals of toleration and intellectual cultivation were embodied in these associations. By the end of this examination, the Dublin Library Society will be regarded not only as significant in the expansion of Dublin’s literary public sphere, but also a noteworthy location of the Irish Enlightenment in the capital.

abstract: Tobias Smollett was an eighteenth-century surgeon, writer, novelist, and editor. He was a Scotsman who sought his fortune in south Briton. Throughout his life and career he experienced many of the cultural and political influences that helped to shape the British identity. His youth as a Lowland Scot, student and apprentice, and naval surgeon enabled him to embrace this new identity. His involvement in nearly every aspect of the publishing process in London enabled him to shape, define, and encourage this identity. His legacy, through his works and his life story, illustrates the different ways in which the United Kingdom and its inhabitants have been perceived throughout the centuries. As a prominent man of his time and an enduring literary figure to this day, Smollett offers an ideal prism through which to view the formation of the British identity. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2011

It is a serious problem for some well-known accounts of moral motivation, that is, accounts of what ought to motivate us, that what is supposed to provide motivation to act well instead provides motivation to self-deceive. I term this the Self-Deception Problem. Any theorist who offers an account of moral motivation that has the Self-Deception Problem has reason for concern with our tendency to self-deceive. In this dissertation, I create a taxonomy of accounts of moral motivation, which provides a structural explanation for which accounts of moral motivation are liable to the Self-Deception Problem. Using this taxonomy, I am able explain why Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Joseph Butler are concerned with self-deception as a moral problem in a way that Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Francis Hutcheson are not. But the application of my taxonomy is not limited to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I also show how it fits the work of the contemporary psychologist Augusto Blasi and the contemporary philosopher Christine Korsgaard. Neither Blasi nor Korsgaard discusses self-deception in any thoroughgoing way but, as I argue, since both their accounts have the Self-Deception Problem, both of them have reason to do so. The most interesting theorist of moral motivation and self-deception, though, is Joseph Butler. Through a close reading of his arguments for the authority of conscience, I show how his account gives rise to the Self-Deception Problem, and how his sermons on self-deception serve as explanations of and responses to that problem. But the link is even tighter than that: on my novel interpretation of Butler's arguments in favor of the authority of conscience, what he is in fact arguing for is an appropriate degree of self-trust. His discussion of self-deception can accordingly be understood as seeking a proper degree of self-suspicion. On Butler's view, moral agency is not just a matter of recognizing our divinely set proper ends. Nor is it just a matter of acting as a self-legislating agent. It is primarily a matter of correctly modulating self-trust and self-suspicion.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century the British presence in India meant that East India Company servants were at the forefront of European researches into the region's history, culture and religion. This thesis offers an analysis of the work of four such Company writers, all of whom produced accounts of what they perceived to be India's native and original religion: J.Z. Holwell (1711-1798), Alexander Dow, (1735-1779), N.B. Halhed (1751-1830), and Charles Wilkins (1749-1836). It argues that their particular interpretation of what they termed the 'Hindoo' or 'Gentoo' religion was based on their own preoccupations with European religious debates, from a perspective that can loosely be described as deist. At the centre of this thesis is the claim that these British interpretations of Hinduism instigated an important shift in the way that Indian theology and philosophy was understood in eighteenth-century Europe. This new paradigm moved away from characterisations of the religion according to eye-witness accounts, towards a construction of Indian religion based on the claim of British researchers that they were penetrating the original philosophical origins of a much maligned and ancient system of thought. This new interpretation of a philosophic Hinduism was both based in and shaped Enlightenment intellectual culture, to the extent that by the turn of the century it had firmly cemented its place in not only the thought of prominent figures such as Voltaire and Raynal, but also constituted a significant topic in the emergent discourses of German idealism. The notion of a British interpretation of Hinduism has previously been discussed as both a marker in what some have termed the invention of Hinduism, and by those researching the history of Orientalism as an academic discipline. In the first instance, these authors are characterised as moments in a process, with some suggesting that the real invention occurred as part of the nineteenth-century imperialist project. In the second place, these authors are most often seen as unscholarly precursors to the work of the first true British Indologist, Sir William Orientalist Jones (1746-1794). This thesis will challenge these positions by positing these four authors as the architects of the shift towards a European conception of Hinduism as a rational and philosophical religion.

This dissertation builds on existing work by members of the ‘Occupational Structure of Britain 1379-1911’ project, led by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and E.A. Wrigley. It addresses three central problems of the project, namely (a) the lack of geographical and temporal coverage by the project’s existing data sources before the nineteenth century, (b) the allocation of the numerous men with the indistinct denominator of ‘labourer’ to occupational sectors, and (c) the correction of occupational structures derived from single-occupation denominators for the (presumed) ubiquity of dual employments in the early-modern world. The solutions to these problems result in a set of estimates for the male occupational structure of England and Wales between 1600 and 1850, in twenty-year time intervals, at the level of sectors (primary, secondary, tertiary) and sub-sectors (farmers, miners, textile workers, transport workers, etcetera), at national, regional, and local geographical scales. These estimates raise important questions regarding the validity of conclusions drawn in the highly influential national accounts literature. Firstly, they place the structural shift from agriculture to industry firmly in the seventeenth and, to a lesser degree, even the sixteenth century, well before the Industrial Revolution. This, in turn, means that productivity growth in the secondary sector during the Industrial Revolution must have been much higher than previously thought, and thereby also the effects of technological and organisational innovation. Secondly, it provides strong evidence that although economic developments during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century may seem to have been limited and gradual at the national scale, this surface calm hides diverging regional developments which were anything but limited and gradual, held together by a persistently growing transport sector. The result was a regionally specialised yet integrated economy, firmly in place at the eve of the Industrial Revolution which – in light of the known role of small, specialised regions as incubators of technological innovation and novel forms of economic organisation in present-day economies – may well have contributed to Britain’s precocious transition to modern economic growth.

This article proposes an approach to the integration of the city of Buenos Aires within the trade flow which connected the Atlantic area with the Viceroyalty of Peru, through a political-cultural analysis of the relationship between a peripheral space and the Crown, which lends meaning and legitimacy to the failure to comply with royal provisions and to the successive requests by local powers to bring about the commercial opening of the port. Specifically, we address the problem of building a political discourse at the heart of the cabildo of Buenos Aires, between the years 1610 and 1660, through which was revealed a conceptualization of the enclave, of its relationship with the Crown and of its function within a larger political body. / Este artículo propone una aproximación a la integración de la ciudad de Buenos Aires en el flujo mercantil que articulaba el espacio atlántico y el virreinato del Perú a través del análisis político-cultural de la relación de un espacio periféricoc on la Corona, en el que adquieren sentido y legitimidad el incumplimiento delas disposiciones reales y las sucesivas peticiones del poder local para conseguirla apertura comercial del puerto. Específicamente se aborda el problema de la construcción de un discurso político en el seno del cabildo de Buenos Aires, entre los años 1610 y 1660, por medio del cual se desplegó una conceptualización del enclave, de su relación con la Corona y de su función dentro de un cuerpo político mayor.

The Rev. Edmund Jones (1702-1793), the 'Old Prophet' of the Transh, Pontypool, is a fascinating character for many reasons, not least of which is his writing on apparitions, spirits, fairies, and magic in his Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account of the Parish of Aberystruth (1779) and Relation of Apparitions of Spirits in the Principality of Wales (1780). These works were not merely written for an antiquarian purpose, but rather present a defence of Jones's deep-seated belief in these spirits' existence. On the surface, such a belief, professed so late in the eighteenth century, may seem 'unenlightened' or atavistic, but far from it, Jones's belief was consistent with his overarching cultural worldview which was set within and influenced by the environment in which he lived. This study examines that environment in an attempt to understand the contexts and formation of Jones beliefs and writings. It begins by examining the socio-economic changes occurring in eighteenth-century north-western Monmouthshire, focusing on changes in transport and communication, industry and social composition, literacy and the availability of printed word, the medical industry, and systems of charity and welfare; and the impact of these different social elements on the way in which the supernatural was conceptualized in local culture. The second section focuses on Jones's role as a religious figure involved in the eighteenth-century religious Revival and the state of religion in the area before turning to Jones's theology and how this impacted on his conceptualization of spirits and their interaction with the mundane realm. The study then turns to the intellectual environment in which Jones wrote and how his works fit with contemporary intellectual trends. Finally, the thesis examines the folkloric content of Jones's works and the ways in which all of the disparate environmental elements discussed throughout demonstrate themselves in his writings.

En Russie, le XVIIIe siècle est l’époque d’une modernisation accélérée, dont la phase la plus intense correspond au règne de Catherine II, coïncidant avec l'intégration du nouvel Empire dans le système politique international. Malgré l'hostilité réciproque qui dominait les relations diplomatiques franco-russes à cette époque, le théâtre français était considéré comme l'expression la plus parfaite de l'art dramatique. Il fut importé dans le pays au même titre que d'autres instruments de modernisation sociale et moyens de représentation politique. Depuis les monographies de Robert-Aloys Mooser, spécialement consacrées à l’opéra-comique, la première période du théâtre francophone en Russie n'a pas été étudiée de façon systématique. Le premier objectif de ce travail est donc de recueillir les données dispersées et inédites concernant les représentations des pièces en français jouées à la cour. La liste de ces spectacles et l'inventaire des pièces représentées accompagnent cette étude dans un volume séparé. Il s’agit en outre d'explorer la diffusion des textes et des pratiques théâtrales à Saint-Pétersbourg, dans un essai sur la sociologie et l'idéologie des circulations théâtrales. La scène principale de la capitale se trouvait, en effet, à la cour, mais elle n'était pas unique : le théâtre de la ville, les théâtres dans les établissements d'éducation, les théâtres de société – plusieurs entreprises théâtrales accueillaient les spectacles francophones. Après avoir constaté leur interdépendance avec le modèle curial, je m'interroge sur les raisons de cette multiplication des espaces de spectacle et sur son rapport avec les expériences théâtrales des publics. / Eighteenth-Century Russia was a period of accelerating modernisation, where specifically, under the reign of Catherine II, the new Empire launched into the international political scene. Despite real diplomatic hostility between France and Russia during the period, French theatre was always considered the most perfect expression of the dramatic arts. French theatre was imported into Russia as an important means to provide and influence social and political representation.From the earliest studies, including Robert-Aloys Mooser’s work on the opéra-comique, this important period of Francophone theatre in Russia has never been systematically analysed. Thus the first goal of this present study is to gather the diverse and geographically dispersed elements regarding the Francophone theatre of Russian courts at the time. A chronological list of these performances, as well as an inventory of plays preformed, accompanies this study as a separate volume. My second goal is to explore the diffusion of these dramatic texts and theatrical practices in Saint Petersburg in an analytical essay on the sociology and ideology of theatrical circulation. Although the main stage of the capital was at the Russian court, this was not the only theatrical venue: the city’s theatre, school stages, théâtres de société (private theatres owned by local nobility)—several theatrical enterprises welcomed Francophone performances at the time. After having examined how these theatres were influenced by the court, I analyse the reasons behind this dramatic diversity and its affect on the theatrical experiences of Russia’s multiple theatre publics.

This dissertation explores how feeling was of central importance to the religiosity of Protestants in the north west of England between 1660 and 1740. It demonstrates how in their personal, familial, public and voluntary religious practices these Protestants understood the cultivation of emotions, or more precisely 'affections', as indispensable for the fulfilment of their devotional exercises. Each of these practices was constructive of communities that were linked by feeling and within which different forms of affective norms were expected. These communities preserved much of that godly culture which had otherwise characterised English Protestantism in the earlier seventeenth century. Moreover, by doing so they frequently minimised in part the importance of conformity to the Church of England. Friendships were maintained between conformists and nonconformists and they shared in a culture of religious feeling, which drew on the same topoi in their religious activities. This thesis will make original contributions to a number of debates. It challenges the prevailing narratives of a 'reaction against enthusiasm' dominating the religious discourse of the period. In contrast, it suggests that through the cultivation of feeling, Protestants in the period between the re-establishment of the Church of England and the Evangelical Revival continued to experience a vital religiosity. It thus also questions the suitability of describing some religious movements as inherently more 'emotional' than others. A more viable exploration can be found in differing forms of emotionality in different religious cultures. By examining the north west of England the thesis also revises the notion that the region was spiritually impoverished before the rise of Methodism, or that the religion provided by the Church of England and Protestant nonconformity failed to engage its attendants. The thesis is divided into five chapters which explore the affective communities to which English Protestants of the period and region belonged. These communities were concentric and sequential, in that the individual Protestant might pass between all of them depending upon their devotional practice. Chapter One examines personal religious devotion, conducted mostly alone. It demonstrates the unity between feeling and reason in personal experience of God. Chapter Two examines family religion and how it was defined by a meditative affect and engaged in by a broad spectrum of Protestant affiliation. Chapter Three explores public worship and its central role within the devotional economy; being both the affective crescendo of devotional practice and being a source of pious affections. Chapter Four looks at voluntary religious practices, showing how friendship was defined by its devotional nature and how the various religious societies of the period continued to promote an affective religiosity. Chapter Five considers clerical communities and how these were maintained across lines of conformity and also provided significant spiritual succour to the ministers of conformity and nonconformity in the region.

Este trabalho objetiva analisar alguns reflexos em torno das relações tecidas entre o Egito faraônico e a Núbia na antiguidade africana, focando especificamente na política expansionista faraônica no período da XVIII dinastia, prelúdio do recorte denominado pela egiptologia de Reino Novo, em relação à Núbia, vizinha do Egito a sul e composta por reinos e chefaturas heterogêneos. Neste contexto, marcado pelo avanço egípcio a áreas geograficamente adjacentes sob desígnios de expansão e controle político, tanto o Egito quanto as áreas núbias viram-se imersas em novas realidades a partir da presença de egípcios nos territórios núbios bem como de núbios no espaço egípcio no período em questão. Foco desta análise, um exemplo destes reflexos de expansão faraônica na Núbia e presença núbia no Egito deu-se a partir da política egípcia de apresamento de filhos de chefes núbios na corte, com o intuito de educa-los aos moldes egípcios para que retornassem a seus locais de origem para governar de acordo com o faraó, sob conexões administrativas de convívio social. A partir de aportes que busquem compreender os limites e porosidades da imposição do domínio faraônico sobre a Núbia, almeja-se investigar na cultura material concernente a estes herdeiros núbios reflexos dos interstícios entre diferenças e engajamentos destes sujeitos sob deslocamentos em um cenário de movimentação cultural nas fronteiras do espaço núbio/egípcio da antiguidade africana.