The early essay in English was a fluid and malleable form. It was thus ‘fugitive’: it could be deeply topical, fleeting, and perishable, taking up the ephemeral and the occasional, and could easily travel across media from reader to reader given its portability. This chapter studies how writers exploited the affordances of the essay, first in seventeenth-century newsbooks and pamphlets, and then in early eighteenth-century periodicals. It retraces the origins of the English newsbook in a highly regulated media ecology, and examines the essayistic writings of Marchamont Nedham as a case study in stylistic innovation and rhetorical self-fashioning. During the era of licensing (1662–95) and the first decades of the eighteenth century, essayists continued to adapt the form, finding in the emergent print media of this period a ready site for politics and polemic.

The main aim of this chapter is to show that sexuality and capitalism are intrinsically related. Such an endeavour demands extracting sex from the domains of nature, reproduction, and the private, and relating it to the intricate norms of capitalism. The first part of the chapter looks at why capitalism and sexuality have been articulated as belonging to separate spheres of life. How did it come to seem that “being a sex” and “having sex” is so entirely removed from the “investment of money to make more money”? The second part of the chapter provides an overview of the historical evolution of capitalism and its relationship to sexuality, focusing on the nineteenth-century transition from the household family-based economy to a fully developed capitalist free labour economy. The main characters of this chapter are homo economicus and his economically invisible wife, the producers of valuable social relations, as well as various “reformable” or “irreformable” others whose sex is deemed of no value or even against value. The chapter presents social relations as capitalist and sexual, and treats the dichotomies social–natural, public–private, and economic–cultural as interwoven in the (de)politicization of both sexuality and capitalism.

Eighteenth-century Paris was the site of multiple sexual cultures ranging from permissive to conservative. All these sexual cultures operated within a set of prescriptive legal, religious, and moralistic discourses that prohibited sex outside of marriage while often supporting sexual pleasure within it. Many Parisians ignored these prescriptions, often with impunity. The police concerned themselves with public sex and intervened in private affairs only when asked to do so. Paris was home to a diverse permissive sexual culture. It was comprised of a portion of the financial, social, political, and intellectual elite, often identified as libertines, for whom sex outside marriage was both widespread and widely accepted. It also included men who had sex with each other as part of Paris’s extensive sodomitical subculture, though there is little evidence of a modern homosexual identity. Prostitution was endemic in Paris, encompassing numerous forms of transactional sex that translated into a sort of hierarchy, with women kept as mistresses by men of the elite at the top and those catering to marginal men at the bottom. We know least about the sex lives of other ordinary people, though evidence suggests many had sex outside of marriage and many cared deeply for their spouses.

The sexual culture of eighteenth-century Philadelphia was relatively open, particularly when compared with other North American colonial cities. This was due in part to its diverse, multi-national and multi-racial population and traditions, as well as to a steady stream of new ideas. During this period perceptions about gender, sexuality, and marriage were evolving, influenced by new scientific theories, Enlightenment thought, and republican ideology, disseminated by its changing population and the availability of printed sources. In addition, many laws changed as the colony became a state, and within the city new prisons and almshouses were built. Nevertheless, rape, as now, was seldom reported or prosecuted, and especially in the nineteenth century Black women and women considered ‘unrespectable’ were often blamed for enticing men. During the eighteenth century men and women easily moved in and out of relationships, sexual relationships outside marriage were frequently tolerated, and women had some sexual freedom. Prostitution was not confined to one section of the city; neither were the births of illegitimate children. Women could obtain abortifacients, and erotic literature was widely read. However, by the nineteenth century such behaviour was increasingly considered deviant, and Philadelphia was a much less tolerant place.

Poetry and medicine have long been intimately linked. William Carlos Williams noted in a worn prescription pad that the ‘use of poetry is to vivify’. Poetry has a history of being used to define life in ways that medical language sometimes cannot. This chapter traces the intersection of poetry and medicine through the figure of the physician-poet, specifically in the eighteenth century. It explores how poetry has been used to question what medical theories mean for broader philosophical questions about the human body and the self. Through poetic works by Sir Richard Blackmore, Samuel Garth, John Arbuthnot, and John Armstrong, this chapter places Williams’s note on poetry’s vivifying quality in the history of physicians using poetry to explore and define aspects of life within the human body.

The chapter shows the outsize influence of the British periodical essay tradition, represented in publications like Addison and Steele’s Spectator (1711– 12), on eighteenth-century American periodical essays. The British series presented themselves as the musings of fictional personae who lived in cities. The persona (almost always male) wandered about town, reflecting on what he observed and overheard in coffeehouses, streets, theaters, and other places of business or leisure. He was often diverted and sometimes frustrated by his fellow citizens; he also strived to enlighten with casual criticism of the arts or musings on the relevance of religion and history to everyday life. A pervasive, low-level irony was common in these writings. American essayists such as Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, and Judith Sargent Murray borrowed from the British model, customizing it for an American readership. The most original early American essay series sketch in their personae a knowing independence of mind amid a distracted and unreflective urban crowd, a rhetorical standpoint that paradoxically would come to define a newly nationalistic body of literature in the nineteenth century.

In 1799, Mahlaqa Bai “Chanda”, “The Moon”, presented a book of her songs to the Deputy British Resident of Hyderabad, John Malcolm, in the middle of a music and dance party. Renowned as the first Indian courtesan to write a collection of Urdu poetry, she was equally famous for her affairs with powerful men at the Nizam’s court. Obscured by Mahlaqa Bai’s luminescence today is the man behind the Moon, her ustād (master-teacher) Khushhal Khan “Anup”. A hereditary musician in exile from Mughal Delhi, Anup left behind an enormous corpus of songs, several music-technical treatises, and an illustrated rāgamālā. In this chapter I use the illustrated writings of this single hereditary musician to unravel the stories of musical life, and the lives of these two extraordinary figures and their patrons, in Nizami Hyderabad c.1780−1830.

Khanum Jan was a celebrity courtesan at the court of Lucknow in the 1780s. She became famous again in twentieth-century musicology because of her musical interactions with an Englishwoman, Sophia Plowden. Plowden’s involvement in the “Hindustani Airs” episode has been told before from the European side. In this chapter, I focus instead on Plowden’s collection of song lyrics in Persian and Indian languages, alongside writings by Indian musicians and patrons about their views of Europeans and their music. Reading Indian-language sources and European papers and notations together make it possible to get much closer to how songs from the Lucknow court may have sounded in the 1780s. But it also gives us a much richer understanding of Lucknow courtesan culture between late Mughal and early colonial patronage.

The reign of Emperor Muhammad Shah (r. 1720−48) ushered in a significant revival of Mughal courtly arts. Right at the centre of this vibrant milieu was the Emperor’s singing teacher and master of his atelier, Khushhal’s grandson Anjha Baras Khan. But posterity has forgotten him—it is his rivals Ni‘mat Khan “Sadarang” and Firoz Khan “Adarang” whom we remember as the greatest musicians of the eighteenth century. Why? As Delhi was repeatedly invaded and sacked 1739−61, Mughal court musicians scattered all over India, and had to seek new strategies to survive. What happened to Delhi’s musicians and their music is documented in a genre new to writing on music at this time: the tazkira (roughly, biographical collection). In this chapter I show that the proliferation of musicians’ biographies and genealogies were both a product of upheaval, dispersal, and enforced diversification; and a record of these things, particularly in anecdotes of rivalry.

This chapter examines the conflictual context of the slave trade on the Loango coast. European slave merchants competed with each other, and French slave merchants from various ports clashed as well. French slave traders provided local agents with goods that had local demand and also attempted to respond to the specific tastes of local rulers and agents, to whom they paid customs, often referred to as presents. When these arrangements failed, ship captains did not hesitate to give themselves the upper hand by sabotaging their European rivals. The chapter shows how, on occasion, French traders also physically assaulted even their compatriots by stealing their cargos of commodities and human beings. Despite European pressures to monopolize the trade in the region, the rulers of Ngoyo, Kakongo, and Loango kept significant control over their territories during the eighteenth century. However, on some occasions, Ngoyo’s Woyo residents of Cabinda supported the French to fight the Portuguese who also attempted to control the region. Likewise, in some situations, local traders sided with specific French traders in detriment of others as well. Understanding these conflicts is central to grasp the importance of gifts of prestige and local agents in the trade of enslaved Africans on the Loango coast.

This chapter argues that Byron is famous as a leading figure in Romantic poetry, but his own allegiance was to eighteenth-century culture. I argue that on the one hand he confirms the distinction between the two and yet he also overturns it. This is because he enters so deeply into the contradictions and character of eighteenth-century culture that he is part of their generation of something different. In this he resembles Burke’s deep relation to Whig culture and Newman’s to the Church of England, both of whom by this brought about the transformation of what they revered into something new and yet sourced in the past. I argue that is bound up with a larger historical transition between judging actions as open possibilities and accepting behaviour as an unalterable given. Byron is, as he claimed to be, an ethical poet because his attention is primarily to the former of these.

The focus is on how Smith realizes his ends and investigates in what sense WN is to be understood as a work of ‘science’ in general and ‘social science’ in particular. Central to Smith’s argument is the correct identification of causes and the demonstration that the interactions of commercial life instantiate a few key principles (exchange, betterment and self-interest) which constitute a system that is grounded in the predictable constancy of human nature. This enterprise was never conceived as an end in itself, it was to be put to the service of improving human life. While these are also hallmarks of an eighteenth-century notion of ‘science’, WN emphasizes that a genuinely social science must recognize, and proceed on the basis that social life is a complex historical formation resistant to simplifying abstractions.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian elite used a plethora of languages, situated in a complex web of shifting social values. This chapter charts the development of this multilingualism. Looking closely at the nature of language hierarchies in imperial Russia through a close study of a variety of archival materials, it questions the oft-repeated narrative of a Russian high society speaking predominantly French, to the detriment of their Russian skills. The chapter also examines whether the Russian case is, as is often claimed, unique, and argues that multilingualism in Russia shared characteristics with elite multilingualism found in other places and times.