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The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. This book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, it shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, the book demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits, and explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today.

Through a study of Coleman Street Ward, the citadel of London puritanism, this book explores the English Revolution as an Atlantic event shaped by the reciprocal development of the “old” and “new worlds.” Blending early modern social history with the history of political thought and action, the story follows militant Protestants into the puritan underground to trace the rise of English republicanism as a popular movement that embraced political revolution as a means to perfecting the Protestant Reformation. It shows how volatile Indian-settler relations conditioned conflicting programs of puritan reform in the colonies, programs that culminated in the first wave of republican constitution-making in the Atlantic, a process where antinomian radicals also challenged existing gender and emerging racial hierarchies. Back in England, radical republicans, led in part by returned colonists in the Leveller and Fifth Monarchist movements, condemned the conquest of Ireland and the invasion of the Spanish West Indies (or Western Design), events that marked the English state’s first concerted attempt to build an Atlantic empire. Promoting social justice over capitalist economics and defining themselves against an emergent political economy of empire, republican radicals tried to end established religion, prerogative government, forced indentured servitude, military conscription, and racial slavery. Here, at its zenith, the radicalism of the English Revolution rendered the Reformation into a common crusade for the liberty of the body and the soul (religious liberty). As the book reveals, at the intersection of these freedom stories lay the ideological origins of abolition, the most significant yet neglected legacy of the English Revolution.

The book examines the production of more than 200 books of exploration and travel in the period between James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific Ocean, and John Franklin’s sensational death on Arctic ice. It traces the journey of these texts from ‘in-the-field’ notebooks and manuscripts to final printed narratives. With reference to works of non-European travel and exploration published by John Murray—Britain’s leading literary house in the nineteenth century—the book explores how the ‘travels into print’ of these works involved complex negotiations between author and publisher, and required that authors establish clearly the basis in truth of what they recounted in print. Travels into Print is the first such volume to examine these issues for Britain’s leading publisher of travel and exploration accounts at a crucial period in terms of geographical and public knowledge about the world.

The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed in a storm of fire and brimstone sent from heaven, as recorded in Genesis. The biblical story provided perhaps the most important reference point in early modern England for those wanting to explore the nature of sexual excess and especially homoerotic desire. Visions of Sodom examines the different ways in which the story of the wicked cities was interpreted and read from the early modern period to the nineteenth century, and how it shaped understanding of homoerotic desire. During that period, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah provided a myth describing the origin of “fornication,” but also contained other important elements. Sodom was not only a marker of sexual sins, but also the epitome of false religion, the archetype of a city, an example of hell’s fire and what would happen at the end of the world, the symbol of a sinner’s permanent torment, and a mysterious physical site – a real place that could be searched for and visited. Sodom had a fourfold unity as an iniquitous city, a symbol of eternal punishment, an actual place, and a complex of often unnameable and terrible sins. Visions of Sodom describes how these various readings were used to make homoerotic desire visible and explicable in Protestant Britain.

Imprisoned in the Tower of London after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, Sir Walter Ralegh spent the next seven years producing his massive History of the World. Created with the aid of a library of more than five hundred books he was allowed to keep in his quarters, this work of English vernacular would become a bestseller with nearly twenty editions, abridgments, and continuations issued in the years that followed. This book uses Ralegh's History as a touchstone in its exploration of the culture of history writing and historical thinking in the late Renaissance. From it we learn why early modern Europeans ascribed heightened value to the study of the past and how scholars and statesmen began to see historical expertise as not just a foundation for political practice and theory, but a means of advancing their power in the courts and councils of contemporary Europe. The rise of historical scholarship during this period encouraged the circulation of its methods to other disciplines, transforming Europe's intellectual—and political—regimes. More than a mere study of Ralegh's book, this book reveals how the methods historians devised to illuminate the past structured the dynamics of early modernity in Europe and England.

This study looks at the lives of the most famous “wild children” of eighteenth-century Europe, showing how they open a window onto European ideas about the potential and perfectibility of mankind. The book recounts reports of feral children such as the wild girl of Champagne (captured in 1731 and baptized as Marie-Angélique Leblanc), offering a fascinating glimpse into beliefs about the difference between man and beast and the means once used to civilize the uncivilized. A variety of educational experiments failed to tame these feral children by the standards of the day. After telling their stories, the book turns to literature that reflects on similar experiments to perfect human subjects. The examples range from utopian schemes for progressive childrearing to philosophical tales of animated statues, from revolutionary theories of regenerated men to Gothic tales of scientists run amok. Encompassing thinkers such as Rousseau, Sade, Defoe, and Mary Shelley, the book shows how the Enlightenment conceived of mankind as an infinitely malleable entity, first with optimism, then with apprehension. Exposing the darker side of eighteenth-century thought, this book demonstrates how advances in science gave rise to troubling ethical concerns, as parents, scientists, and politicians tried to perfect mankind with disastrous results.