Of British Representational Practices in the Age of Capitalism/Territorialism (1743-1776)
Michal Kobialka
kobia001@umn.eduUniversity 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»References
Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511755965
Google Scholar
Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994.
Google Scholar
Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822387022
Google Scholar
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John. The Idea of a Patriot King. London, 1740. Electronic reproduction (Eighteenth century collections online). Farmington Hills, MA: Thomson Gale, 2003.
Google Scholar
Bond, Donald, ed. The Spectator. 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 [1965].
Google Scholar
“Clive, Robert Clive, Baron.” In Encyclopædia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences Literature and General Information. 11th edition, edited by Hugh Chisholm, 6: 532–536. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911. https://archive.org/details/encyclopaediabrit06chisrich/page/532/mode/2up.
Google Scholar
Cumberland, Richard. The West Indian: A Comedy. London: printed for C. Dilly, in the Poultry, 1792.
Google Scholar
Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/465144
Google Scholar
Foote, Samuel. Nabob. Dublin: printed by W. Kidd, 1778.
Google Scholar
Hatton, Edward. Comes Commercii. London: printed by J. H. for Chr. Coningsby; J. Nicholson; and D. Midwinter, 1706.
Google Scholar
Helton, Laura, Justin Leroy, Max A Mishler, Samantha Seely, and Shauna Sweeney. “The Question of Recovery: An Introduction.” Social Text 33, no. 4 (2015): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-3315766.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-3315766
Google Scholar
Hume, David. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987 [1742; 1752]. http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Hume/hmMPL24.html.
Google Scholar
Keith, William. The History of the British Plantations in America. London: printed by S. Richardson, 1738.
Google Scholar
Kobialka, Michal. “Representational Practices and Real Abstractions in Early Eighteenth-Century London.” In Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, edited by Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra, 161–175. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035608_11
Google Scholar
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.
Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Google Scholar
Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/084387140101300212
Google Scholar
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/1772278
Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya. New York: International Publishers, 1970.
Google Scholar
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1131298
Google Scholar
O’Quinn, Daniel. Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Google Scholar
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Google Scholar
Rediker, Marcus. The Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014.
Google Scholar
Richardson, Samuel. Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734) and A Seasonable Examination of Playhouses (1735). New York: Garland Publishing, 1974.
Google Scholar
Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. Translated by Martin Sohn-Rethel. London: Macmillan, 1978.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15867-6
Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Cannan. 5th edition. London: Methuen, 1904. https://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html.
Google Scholar
Trenchard, John, and Thomas Gordon. Cato’s Letters. 4 vols. Berwick, 1754 [1720]. Electronic reproduction (Eighteenth century collections online). Farmington Hills, MA: Thomson Gale, 2003.
Google Scholar
Authors
Michal Kobialkakobia001@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).
Statistics
Abstract views: 297PDF downloads: 188
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Michal Kobialka
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author grants a royalty-free nonexclusive license (CC BY 4.0) to use the article in Pamiętnik Teatralny, retains full copyright, and agrees to identify the work as first having been published in Pamiętnik Teatralny should it be published or used again (download licence agreement). By submitting an article the author agrees to make it available under CC BY 4.0 license.
From issue 1/2018 to 3/2022 all articles were published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. During this period the authors granted a royalty-free nonexclusive license (CC BY-ND 4.0) to use their article in Pamiętnik Teatralny, retained full copyright, and agreed to identify the work as first having been published in our journal should it be published or used again.
Most read articles by the same author(s)
- Michal Kobialka, Theater/Performance Historiography: A Preamble , Pamiętnik Teatralny: Vol. 70 No. 4 (2021): Theater/Performance Historiography (guest edited by Michal Kobialka)