Of British Representational Practices in the Age of Capitalism/Territorialism (1743-1776)

Michal Kobialka

kobia001@umn.edu
University of Minnesota (United States)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6698-4140

Abstract

The issue addressed in this essay is how the notion of history was altered by the embedding of commerce into the discursive field of eighteenth-century Britain. Even though current eighteenth-century, and Enlightenment, studies draw attention to historiographic questions challenging traditional modes of periodization, the methods by which we acquire and organize knowledge, or the extent to which accounts of the eighteenth century have been driven by the imperatives of the times, this project argues that one historiographic issue that has been significantly underplayed is a different concept of history produced in eighteenth-century Britain by the fundamental operation of mercantile society, its logic of exchange, and the predominance of trade within it. David Hume and Adam Smith’s historiographic trajectory was obscured (and, ultimately, eliminated) by the scientific or materialist notion of history advanced in nineteenth-century historiography.


Keywords:

commerce, history, archive, historiography, David Hume, Adam Smith, «Nabob»

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Published
2021-12-20

Cited by

Kobialka, M. (2021) “Of British Representational Practices in the Age of Capitalism/Territorialism (1743-1776)”, Pamiętnik Teatralny, 70(4), pp. 41–59. doi: 10.36744/pt.981.

Authors

Michal Kobialka 
kobia001@umn.edu
University of Minnesota United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6698-4140

Michal Kobialka is a Professor of Theatre in the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance at the University of Minnesota.  He has published over 100 articles, essays and reviews on medieval, eighteenth-century and contemporary European theatre, as well as theatre historiography in the North American, South American, and European journals. He is the author of Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre (2009) and This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (1999). He is the editor of A Journey through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944–1990 by Tadeusz Kantor (1993) and Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory (1999); and a co-editor (with Barbara Hanawalt) of Medieval Practices of Space (2000); (with Rosemarie Bank) of Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (2015) and (with Natalia Zarzecka) of Tadeusz Kantor’s Memory: Other Pasts, Other Futures (2018).



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