The opening of Astley’s Amphitheatre on the outskirts of London in 1770 marked the beginning of the modern circus by providing the essential model that would be refined and expanded as it grew into a global form of entertainment during the nineteenth century. Although many components – equestrian feats, acrobatics, performing animals, rope walking – long antedated Astley’s early displays, it was their combination into a singular show staged within a ring of spectators that gave form to what came to be known as the circus. In this chapter Matthew Wittmann examines the origins of the circus in late eighteenth-century London, contextualising its emergence and tracing its dynamic diffusion across Europe and the Americas during the half century that followed.

The fourth chapter argues that Dean Mahomet’s English memoir, The Travels (1793), and Abu Taleb Khan’s Persian travelogue, Masir-i Talibi-fi-Bilad-i-Afranji [“Travels of Talib in the Lands of the Franks”], are bookend ruminations on Ireland before and after the 1798 revolt. Their ambivalent feelings about war are implicated in the dense web of social relations that link India to Ireland. I first examine Mahomet’s account of the 1781 British capture of the Rajah of Benares Chayt Singh, as mediated by newspaper reports about Irish MP Edmund Burke’s condemnation of unmanly colonial abuses in India during the Hastings impeachment trial (1788–1796).Then I discuss Abu Taleb’s reaction to the 1799 British defeat of the sultan of Mysore Tipu Sultan, as celebrated in the Dublin circus production of Philip Astley’s The Siege and Storming of Seringapatam. These writers’ patriotic responses to the theatrics of power imply a kinship with Irish hosts who, in their minds, belong to an Indo-Celtic Eurasia.