Between 1808 and 1814 England was committed to an expensive and bloody campaign against the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. The Peninsular War, as it came to be known, was initially celebrated as a war of national independence that attracted widespread support. Soon after, it was characterised by political scandal and public controversy. Literary scholars have devoted much attention to the political, social and cultural effects of the French Revolution, but have written surprisingly little about the later years of the campaign against Napoleonic France. The principle objective of this thesis is to offer the first in-depth study of English theatre during the Peninsular War. It considers the most popular plays in performance, and asks what their staging, publication, and reception history reveal about a nation’s literary tastes and its political self-awareness. Sheridan’s Pizarro, a play about the Spanish conquest of Peru, was one of the most successful plays on the Romantic stage. A close analysis of this play considers its popularity between 1799 and 1815, and what it suggests about the flexibility of the contemporary repertoire system. Audiences’ ability to ascribe topical inflections to old plays helps explain the demand for Shakespeare and the bard’s political import to wartime audiences. This thesis explores the London patent stages and popular minor theatres, where programmes were restricted to song, dance, and spectacle. It also offers a case study of provincial theatre in Bristol, underscoring the significant limitations in assumptions that the metropolitan stage was representative of national trends. Archival research on the London and Bristol stages has been crucial to this study, which is based on an examination of playbills, memoranda, letters, playtexts, and prints. The newsprint and cartoons discussed offer an important political and historical framework, suggestive of the cultural expectations likely to have influenced contemporary playgoers.

This thesis describes the sixty years of transatlantic interaction, connection, dislocation and reconstruction in Anglo-Carolinian trade between 1730 and 1790. Focussing on about two dozen of London’s ‘Carolina traders’, it integrates their personal and collective stories of profit and loss, reputation and notoriety, and political activity and inactivity, with the broader forces they shaped and were in turn shaped by – forces of economic growth, political stability and instability, and imperial harmony and disharmony. Through their conjoined political and commercial agency – a dual role better appreciated by contemporaries than by historians – they profoundly influenced commerce between Britain and South Carolina. Their intermediation served firstly as a stabilising force in the Anglo-Carolinian polity as they procured favourable treatment for the colony’s goods and represented its grievances in the imperial metropolis. An important influence on this was their ‘absentee’ ownership of property in South Carolina and the thesis explores in depth the underappreciated prevalence and significance of this transatlantic absenteeism. From the mid-1760s, however, the traders’ political and commercial agency aggravated intra-imperial discord. Disputes between British merchants and their Carolinian correspondents reflected in microcosm the geo-political shifts of the time and reveal at an inter-personal level how resistance to British imperial authority developed among Carolinians. Furthermore, these disputes played a constitutive role in this resistance, as the purported commercial iniquities and political orientations of British merchants led their correspondents to question and reject the commercial and political norms that had once sustained Anglo-Carolinian relations. The thesis thus helps explain how South Carolina moved, often imperceptibly, against British authority during the 1760s and early 1770s by emphasising commercial discord within the growing political-economic friction. It further contributes to the burgeoning historiography of the eighteenth-century ‘Atlantic world’ by exploring the reconstruction of trading links between Britain and South Carolina after American independence. It reveals how strongly these were influenced by pre-war politics. In so doing, it demonstrates that Carolinians exercised greater commercial discretion after the war than contemporaries and historians have appreciated, and thus challenges contentions of South Carolina’s continuing commercial subservience to British trading interests.

This thesis investigates the ceremonial and artistic strategies of the British monarchy in the years following the Glorious Revolution. By adopting a range of methodologies used in the study of visual culture, the thesis considers royal ceremonies as channels for conveying political messages non-verbally. These could affect attitudes to the monarchy, and inform artistic output. By paying particular attention to the way royal participants performed ceremonially in relation to the various formal and informal architectural settings for the court, the thesis highlights the process of seeing as a communicative act. Being alert to the impact of royal ceremonial and artistic activities on contemporary audiences, the thesis also considers the dissemination of royal imagery in England by commercial means. The thesis surveys paintings, prints and medals produced in England, and places the intended audiences at the centre of the analysis. It also pays keen attention to the impact of war on royal image making, and highlights the political context of continental Europe, especially in relation to William’s role as Stadholder-King but also the exiled Stuart court at St Germain near Paris. The evidence presented here supports a number of conclusions. Firstly, war had a profound impact on all aspects of royal image making. Secondly, royal behaviour and involvement in ceremony were vital elements in the visual presentation of monarchy. Kings and queens were of paramount importance, but their consorts were highly significant. Art was also taken seriously by the monarchy and the Crown tightened controls on royal image making during the period in question. The thesis also concludes that the nationalities of the incumbent monarchs and their consorts, along with their previous experiences and personalities, influenced their individual approach to visual representation. These approaches could shift depending on political circumstances and the personal inclinations of the person concerned.

The subject of this thesis is the by now traditional grouping of certain innovative works of historiography produced in eighteenth-century Britain and France; namely the historical works of Voltaire, and the historical writings of the philosophes; and, in Britain, the histories of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. This thesis gives a historical and expository analysis of the individual strategies of literary self-fashioning and generic appropriation which underlie this impression of resemblance. It particularly demonstrates that the major characteristics of the contemporary vision of philosophic historiography – the idea of a European history of manners or l’esprit humain, and the insistence on the rejection of the practices of the érudits – which have become incorporated within scholarly definitions of ‘Enlightenment historiography’, are well-established generic tropes, adapted and affected in France as in Britain, by authors of diverse ambitions. The invitation to assume inauthentic connections contained within the practice of philosophic historiography is shown to be embraced by Gibbon, in a notable literary challenge to the paradigms of intellectual history. This study contrasts the textual evidence of these authors’ experience of literary, personal, and political challenges regarding the definition of their role as public, intellectual writers, to the acquired image of an ideal of ‘Enlightenment writing’. It considers the Frenchness of philosophie, and the potential Britishness of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. As part of its wider analysis of the practice of intellectual writing with a historical focus, its scope includes the writings of British clerics and writers on religion; of French academicians; and of the late philosophe Volney, and Shelley his interpreter. The major conclusion of this thesis is that eighteenth-century British and French history writing does not support any synthesis of an Enlightenment historical philosophy, narrative, or method; while it is suggested that one of the costs of the construct of ‘Enlightenment’, has been the illusion of familiarity with eighteenth-century intellectual culture, in France as well as Britain.

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.

Existing accounts of the music profession argue that between 1750 and 1850 musicians acquired a new identity as professional ‘artists’ and experienced a concomitant rise in their social and cultural status. In the absence of sustained investigation, it has often been implied that these changes affected male and female musicians in similar ways. As this thesis contends, this was by no means the case. Arguments in support of female musical professionalism, artistry, and their function in public life were made in this period. Based on the gender-specific nature of the female voice, they were an important defence of women’s public engagement that has been overlooked by gender historians, something which this thesis sets out to correct. However, the public role and professionalism of female musicians were in opposition to the prevailing valorisation of female domesticity and privacy. Furthermore, the notion of women as creative artists was highly unstable in an era which tended to label artistry, ‘genius’ and creativity as male attributes. For these reasons, the idea of female musicians as professional artists was always in tension with contemporary conceptions of gender, making women’s experience of the ‘rise of the artist’ much more contested and uncertain compared to that of men. Those advocating the female singer as professional artist were a minority in the British musical world. Their views co-existed alongside very different and much more prevalent approaches to the female singer which had little to do with the idea of the professional artist. Through examining debates about female singers in printed sources, particularly newspapers and periodicals, alongside case studies based on the surviving documents of specific singers, this thesis builds a picture of increasing diversity in the experiences and representations of female musicians in this period and underlines the controlling influence of gender in shaping responses to them.

protein chemistry, unnatural amino acids, chemical biology, proteomicsThe foundation of political societies is a central theme in Rousseau's work. This is no surprise coming from a man who was born into a people who had their own celebrated founder and foundations, and immersed himself in the writings of classical republicans and the quasi-mythical histories of ancient city-states where the heroic lawgiver played an important and legitimate role in political foundations. However, Rousseau's propositional political writings (those written for Geneva, Corsica, and Poland) have been accused of being unsystematic and running the spectrum from conservative and prudent to radical and utopian. It is this seeming incongruence which is the subject of this thesis. In particular, it is argued that this confusion is born out the failure to recognize a systematic distinction between "founding" and "re-founding" political societies in both the history of political thought, and Rousseau's own work (a distinction in Rousseau which has rarely been noted, let alone treated to a study of its own). By recognizing this distinction one can identify two Rousseaus; the conservative and prudent thinker who is wary of making changes to established political systems and constitutional foundations (the re-founder), and the radical democrat fighting for equality, and claiming that no state is legitimate without popular sovereignty (the founder). In demonstrating this distinction, this thesis examines the ancient concept of the lawgiver, the growth and expansion of the idea leading up to the eighteenth century, Rousseau's own philosophic writings on the topic, and the differing political proposals he wrote for Geneva, Corsica, and Poland. The thesis argues that although there is a clear separation between these two types of political proposals, they remain systematically Rousseauvian.

Scholarly attention to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French art has focused on the importance that Johann Joachim Winckelmann attributed to the male nude figure in his definition of ideal beauty, and the impact of his work on debates over the 'beau idéal' in French art and art criticism. In contrast, Winckelmann's extensive interest in the detail of ancient costume, the folds of drapery, and the teleological and aesthetic significance that he ascribed to them, has been underplayed. The role played by costume and drapery as components of the 'beau idéal' in French art and aesthetics has also not been fully explored. This thesis examines the way in which costume and drapery formed an important component and embodiment of ideal beauty in the work of Winckelmann and in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French artistic circles, providing new insights into the arguments over the meanings of Truth, Beauty and Nature in this period. The thesis proposes that ideal beauty in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century France was conveyed in works of art through the accurate rendering of costume and the expressive qualities of drapery in combination with the perfect form and contour of the nude body. The first part of the thesis sets up a proposition that costume and drapery formed part of the definition of ideal beauty in the work of Winckelmann. Highlighting the significance of Winckelmann's work on costume and drapery in French art theory, it demonstrates how the definition of ideal beauty in France also incorporated the accurate rendering of costume and the aesthetic impact of drapery. In demonstrating the significance of costume and drapery to both Winckelmann and French theorists it is proposed that the application of a meta-historical approach of costume and drapery to French art theory can provide new understandings and readings of the definition of ideal beauty, the hierarchy of the genres and the broader aesthetic concerns of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century French art. The second part of the thesis applies the proposed hermeneutic of costume and drapery to a small selection of theoretical work on the nature of ideal beauty and on a significant collection of Salon criticism. With this approach to the primary material this thesis demonstrates how French artists were able to express the 'beau idéal' within the traditional academic conventions and hierarchies, and negotiate the sense of public unease over the use of nudity in contemporary art.

This thesis examines the theory of diplomacy in the formative phase of the European states-system. From the viewpoint of the discourse on the 'ideal ambassador', it explores early modern diplomacy as cultural history encompassing ideas, discourses, perceptions and 'codes'. The scope of study is the century following the Peace of Westphalia (1648), and three states and regions (France, Britain, the Holy Roman Empire) serve as case studies for a comparative approach of diplomatic theory and practice. In five parts, the adaptation of the theory and practice of diplomacy to the new demands of international relations after 1648 are considered. The first section sets the stage by illustrating that the mid-seventeenth century was regarded as a turning point in the practice of diplomacy. Part II examines diplomatic theory as a particular 'language' in its intellectual and socio-professional contexts. While published treatises on the 'ideal ambassador' build the core of this study, related genres of international law theory, ceremonial theory and political and state science are also taken into account. From the viewpoint of this diplomatic theory, the following section examines the ways in which the instruments and practices of diplomacy were aligned to the new framework. These ranged from changes in the structural framework of diplomacy to the evolution of norms and procedures of negotiation, international law and ceremonial. Part IV reconsiders the issue of 'professionalism' in diplomatic theory with regard to the preparation and training of diplomats. Special attention is given to proposals for diplomatic 'academies', which are for the first time examined in comparison. Finally, section V recasts the findings of this thesis in a comparative perspective. It underlines that, with the emergence of a states-system, the techniques of diplomacy became formalised and uniform, constituting a common European diplomatic practice. Against the background of the different regional and structural conditions, the alleged model role of France in the evolution of diplomatic theory and practice is re-evaluated.

The problem discusses the influence that tea trade between England and China may have had on eighteenth-century English garden architecture and aesthetics. Five chapters include an historical overview of non-Oriental influences on the garden, the relationship between Britain and China, the evolution of the tea trade, the motifs and decoration of tea wares, and a summary with conclusions. Conclusions reached were that tea was responsible for importation of porcelains in Britain, architectural structures in the garden were inspired by scenes on tea wares, predilection for Chinese motifs in the minds of the English may have resulted from their drinking tea, and it seems probable that affected garden aesthetics but there is no conclusive evidence.