Nobility And The Making Of Race In Eighteenth Century Britain

Nobility and the Making of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain focuses on 18th-century Britain and Ireland at a time when race theory as we know it today was steadily emerging in the realm of natural philosophy to examine the structural relationship between nobility and race. This ground-breaking book examines texts from the fields of naturalism, political philosophy, medicine, and colonial venture, as well as interrogating works of drama and literature, in order to track how climate-based understandings of human variety at this time became increasingly imbued with noble traditions of genealogical purity and hierarchies of descent. This process, the book argues, allowed British naturalists and wider society to understand global populations according to an already familiar pattern of genealogical inequality, and offered the proponents of race theory a ready made model of natural supremacy. In this highly original and meticulously researched book, Tim McInerney explains why nobility and race developed in the way they did and how the premise of each promoted a certain idea of superiority. The result is a necessary in-depth understanding of how genealogical exclusivity works as a power strategy, vital to students and scholars alike.

"Examines how race theory was created and established in 18th-century Britain and Ireland"--

Nobility and the Making of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain focuses on 18th-century Britain and Ireland at a time when race theory as we know it today was steadily emerging in the realm of natural philosophy to examine the structural relationship between nobility and race. This ground-breaking book examines texts from the fields of naturalism, political philosophy, medicine, and colonial venture, as well as interrogating works of drama and literature, in order to track how climate-based understandings of human variety at this time became increasingly imbued with noble traditions of genealogical purity and hierarchies of descent. This process, the book argues, allowed British naturalists and wider society to understand global populations according to an already familiar pattern of genealogical inequality, and offered the proponents of race theory a ready made model of natural supremacy. In this highly original and meticulously researched book, Tim McInerney explains why nobility and race developed in the way they did and how the premise of each promoted a certain idea of superiority. The result is a necessary in-depth understanding of how genealogical exclusivity works as a power strategy, vital to students and scholars alike.

Since the work of Butterfield and Namier in the 1930s, it has commonly been said that eighteenth-century England appears atomised, left with no overall interpretation. Subsequent work on religious differences and on party strife served to reinforce the image of a divided society, and in the last ten years historians of the poor and unprivileged have suggested that beneath the surface lurked substantial popular discontent. Professor Cannon uses his 1982 Wiles Lecture to offer a different interpretation - that the widespread acceptance of aristocratic values and aristocratic leadership gave a remarkable intellectual, political and social coherence to the century. He traces the recovery made by the aristocracy from its decade in 1649 when the House of Lords was abolished as useless and dangerous. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the peerage re-established its hold on government and society. Professor Cannon is forced to challenge some of the most cherished beliefs of English historiography - that Hanoverian society, at its top level, was an open elite, continually replenished by vigorous recruits from other groups and classes. He suggests that, on the contrary, in some respects the English peerage was more exclusive than many of its continental counterparts and that the openness was a myth which itself served a potent political purpose. Of the prospering burgeoisie, he argues that the remarkable thing was not their assertiveness but their long acquiescence in patrician rule, and he poses the paradox of a country increasingly dominated by a landed aristocracy giving birth to the first industrial revolution. His final chapter discusses the ideological under-pinning which made aristocratic supremacy acceptable for so long, and the emergence of those forces and ideals which were ultimately to replace it.

Rooted in a period of vigorous exploration and colonialism, this innovative study takes the idea of the English as an 'Island Race' and shows how this concept is key to understanding British imperial history in the eighteenth century.

In 1666 King Charles II introduced a fashion that developed into the three-piece suit. This text examines the inspiration behind this royal revolution in masculine attire.