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It might be said that Britain's long eighteenth century, beginning with the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and going through the Napoleonic Wars to 1815, included almost every important development associated with modernity. The union of kingdoms into a nation-state based on the consent of the governed, a global economy dominated by European commercial interests, the rise of a public sphere, the demand of citizenship and individual human rights for all, the beginnings of industrialism, and the adoption of a scientific approach to the study of society. We are going to study this century in Britain and the developments mentioned above mainly through reading, discussing, and analyzing a group of influential books written by eighteenth century British men and women -- John Locke's Two Treatises for which he could have been hanged, if the Glorious Revolution had turned out differently, James Boswell's portrait of the quintessential public sphere intellectual, Samuel Johnson, a pioneer of intensely conservative views, whose life was much more interesting than his major literary works, even though almost nothing ever happened to him. The same could not be said for Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, whose short life was one drama after the other. Other authors include, Adam Smith, Frances Burney, Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Malthus. In their work we pick up the conflict and turmoil that otherwise is obscured by time and by the spin put on the past by later generations. |
