Abstract
Attitudes to war, international relations and foreign policy have been generally neglected in treatments of eighteenth-century cultural and intellectual life. However, they were an important dimension, and consideration of them is instructive. Such consideration is particularly important as Britain emerged as a leading world power during the century. Protracted periods of conflict played a major role in British society and any approach to British culture that ignores such conflict would be misleading. There was a national debate on questions of foreign policy and it was important to other spheres of political debate.2
I am grateful to Jonathan Clark, Grayson Ditchfield and Bill Gibson for their comments on an earlier draft.
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Notes
Jeremy Black, A System of Ambition? British Foreign Policy 1660–1793 (London, 1991).
[Samuel Johnson], London: A Poem, In Imitation of the Third Satire of JuvenaI (London, 1738), lines 25–30. For the public debate see, most recently
Philip Woodfine, Britannia’s Glories: The Walpole Ministry and the 1739 War with Spain (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 128–53.
Jeremy Black, ‘The Tory View of Eighteenth-Century British Foreign Policy’, HJ, 31 (1988), pp. 469–77.
Jeremy Black, ‘The Revolution and the Development of English Foreign Policy’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), By Force or By Default? The Revolution of 1688–89 (Edinburgh, 1989 ), pp. 135–58.
Jeremy Black, America or Europe? British Foreign Policy 1739–63 (London, 1997).
Ragnhild Hatton, War and Peace 1680–1720 (London, 1969).
For these see, in particular, Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship and ‘Robinson Crusoe’ (Cambridge, 1991)
Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution ( Cambridge, 1996 ). More generally see
Jeremy Black, ‘Confessional State or Elect Nation? Religion and Identity in Eighteenth-century England’, in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds.), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650-c. 1850 (Cambridge, 1998 ), pp. 53–74.
Jeremy Black, Britain as a Military Power 1688–1815 (London, 1999).
J.A. Downie, ‘The Conduct of the Allies: The Question of Influence’, in C.T. Probyn (ed.), The Art of Jonathan Swift (London, 1978 ), pp. 108–28.
D. Coombs, The Conduct of the Dutch: British Opinion and the Dutch Alliance during the War of the Spanish Succession ( The Hague, 1958 ). For the background
John Hattendorf, England in the War of the Spanish Succession: A Study of the English View and Conduct of Grand Strategy, 1701–1713 (New York, 1987).
Swift, Prose Works III, p. 45. On the Duke see, most recently, J.R. Jones, Marlborough (Cambridge, 1993).
For the debates see, most recently, Robert Harris, A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s (Oxford, 1993) and Woodfine, Britannia’s Glories.
Swift, Prose Works VI, p. 23. For a reassertion of Whig views, H.M. Scott, ‘The Second “Hundred Years War”, 1689–1815’, HJ 35 (1992), pp. 443–69. See, in contrast
Jeremy Black, ‘The Theory of the Balance of Power in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century: A Note on Sources’, Review of International Studies, 9 (1983), pp. 55–61. A recent valuable approach, from a continental perspective, is provided by
Heinz Duchhardt, Balance of Power und Pentarchie 1700–1785 (Paderborn, 1997), pp. 7–19.
[Samuel Johnson], Thoughts on the late Transactions respecting Falkland’s Islands (London, 1771), pp. 33–4.
Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989)
Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995).
Richard Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century. The British Expedition to the West Indies, 1740–1742 (Woodbridge, 1991).
K.W. Schweizer, ‘Foreign Policy and the Eighteenth-century English Press: The Case of Israel Mauduit’s “Considerations on the present German war”’, Publishing History, 39 (1996), pp. 45–53.
Jeremy Black, British Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolutions 1783–1793 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 225–56.
Jeremy Black, ‘Gibbon and International Relations’, in Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault (eds.), Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge, 1997 ), pp. 217–46.
D.B. Horn, British Public Opinion and the First Partition of Poland (Edinburgh, 1945 ).
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Black, J. (2002). Samuel Johnson, Thoughts on the Late Transactions respecting Falkland’s Islands, and the Tory Tradition in Foreign Policy. In: Clark, J., Erskine-Hill, H. (eds) Samuel Johnson in Historical Context. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522695_7
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