Kathleen Wilson

Stony Brook University | Stony Brook · Department of History

How did the American War affect ideas of nationality, identity, and belonging for the widely dispersed and varied British subjects? This article addresses this question through an examination of the performances of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comic opera The Duenna (1775) in Kingston, Jamaica, and his comedy The School for Scandal (1777) in Calcutt...

How can performance studies sharpen our modes of historical analysis and writing? This essay proposes “three theses” that demonstrate the multifold ways in which attention to performance, theatrical and social, can highlight aspects of cultural, political, and festive life in the hybrid spaces of empire that that would otherwise be ignored. Perform...

I am not a Marxist, but I was one, sort of, in 1978. This is when I landed at an east-coast Ivy League university for graduate school (Yale), a refugee from the law (well, from law school anyway) and an aspiring historian of Anglo-American radicalism. As an undergraduate I had attended a public university on the opposite coast (University of Califo...

NechtmanTillman W.. Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 280. $104.00 (cloth). - Volume 51 Issue 4 - Kathleen Wilson

Scholars from Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown to Mita Choudhury and Joseph Roach have documented the complex ways that eighteenth-century drama reflected and intervened in Britain's overseas expansion and materialized its transoceanic flows. But what do we do with plays that, although performed wherever the British dared to tread, were not "about...

SalmondAnne. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook's Encounters in the South Seas. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003. Pp. 506. $30.00 (cloth). WilliamsGlyndwr, ed. Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments. Regions and Regionalism in History, vol. 2. Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, NY: Boyde...

The fittest man in the world for the command’ of the Mediterranean, Lord Minto declared of Horatio Nelson on 24 April 1798, following Nelson’s inventive assault on Spanish ships off Cape St Vincent. ‘Admiral Nelson’s victory [at Aboukir, the mouth of the Nile] … [is] one of the most glorious and comprehensive victories ever achieved even by British...

Kathleen Wilson The British Atlantic World, 1600-1800. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. In the past decade or so, the 'Atlantic World' has emerged as one of the most fertile areas of scholarship in British and American studies. Leading the charge has been Paul Gilroy. Building on the brilliant insights...

If recent publishing lists on the eighteenth century are any indication, ours is an era of renewed fascination with the aristocratic rake and the fine lady. For the former, the Georgian decades are represented as having afforded a limitless playground for the pursuit of pleasure and sexual gratification, for the latter, new opportunities for social...

Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.1 (1996) 69-96 --Rev. George Fothergill, 1758 --Ignatius Sancho, 1779 --Walter Benjamin, 1940 The debates over "modernity" that have reverberated in European cultural theory and history since World War II have not unduly troubled most historians of eighteenth-century Britain. Suspicious of any species of "Whig" (that i...

Preface. 1. England and the East in the sixteenth Century. 2. The Formative Years. 3. The Restoration of the Company and its Trade, 1660-1709. 4. The Company's Expanding University 1709-1763. 5. From Trading Company to Political Power, 1748-1763.6. The Fall from Grace, 1763-1784. 7. The Company Set Adrift, 1784-1813. 8. The Lull and the Storm, 1813...

The Revolution , the Glorious British Revolution, which the Americans have rejoiced in, and will ever rejoice in as the pride of the age in which it was brought about, and the admiration and blessing of succeeding times, must be looked up to with reverence as a precedent, the grandest precedent, that modern times have exhibited for the justificatio...

Scholars from Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown to Mita Choudhury and Joseph Roach have documented the complex ways that eighteenth-century drama reflected and intervened in Britain's overseas expansion and materialized its transoceanic flows. But what do we do with plays that, although performed wherever the British dared to tread, were not "about...