From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

Chapter 3 looks at the port city of London, where the Plague of Provence caused waves of fear, opposition, and intellectual inquiry. Taking place against the backdrop of the recent South Sea Bubble, the epidemic became a major topic of discussion among politicians, journalists, scholars, physicians, grocers, and merchants as they protested perceived infringements on their civil liberties, or debated the nature of contagion and the usefulness of quarantine. In 1720, just as plague cases emerged in the south of France, the bursting of the South Sea Bubble unleashed a wave of anxiety and suspicion. Passionate attacks against the perceived injustices of the Crown as it attempted to enact quarantines and impede illicit commerce were filled with accusations that government authorities and “South Sea scheme men” meant to take away the inviolable rights of the people under the pretext of a foreign plague. Meanwhile, debates between contagionists and anti-contagionists about the transmission of infectious disease also erupted with special force in the wake of the 1720 plague. This chapter explores these reactions within the larger historical context of early-eighteenth-century politics and diplomacy and considers the various factors that came into play as England designed its new public health policy.

The Conclusion traces the afterlife of the knots of memory examined in earlier chapters in two printed genres: the multi-volume histories of the nation that became popular in the late eighteenth century and the historical novel in the hands of Walter Scott. Works such as David Hume’s and Tobias Smollett’s histories replicate some of the counter-memories that were produced in the earlier printed discourse on the nation. Scott, however, transforms the complicated knots of memories and counter-memories by drawing attention to and framing them. Waverley, for example, both acknowledges the power of counter-memories and prevents their re-activation by including them within a narrative that connects a progressive sense of a consolidated British cultural memory with a model of media succession.

Chapter 4 turns to the historiography of Thomas Babington Macaulay to investigate tensions between classical eloquence and the emergence of mass politics. Macaulay’s influential History of England revived the classical notion of history as a branch of rhetoric, as well as the classical practice of narrating political change through simulated speech. For Macaulay, writing history as rhetoric had a clear normative value: it was an effort to glamorize practices of political judgment that he saw as increasingly endangered by mass politics. While Macaulay contributed to the growth of political participation through his advocacy of the Reform Act, he also feared the ways in which mass politics might render political life less susceptible to classical norms of eloquence. His History is a response to this fear: an attempt to educate a judging public. The chapter concludes by contrasting his attempt with Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime. In comparison to his contemporary Macaulay, Tocqueville fixed his attention on secrecy rather than publicity, long-term processes rather than charged moments of persuasion, and tragic necessity rather than deliberative contingency. Nevertheless, Macaulay’s historiography offers something that Tocqueville’s lacks: a temporally sophisticated account of rhetoric, in which the orator’s responsibilities include cultivating practices of judgment over time.