This module takes an innovative approach to introducing you to aspects of life in Britain and Europe between about 1740 and 1815. This is an exciting period of change, often seen as the beginning of the modern world. Ideas about human nature and society that still shape our own lives came into circulation in the eighteenth century. It was a period marked by rapid changes in transportation and communication, rising literacy, debates about gender, an explosion of consumer goods (including the ‘invention’ of fashion), and an urban renaissance that reconfigured, redeveloped and brightened towns. The global entanglements generated by trade and colonisation —with both the first British empire in North America and then the second British empire in India and the East, brought new consumer goods and fashions to England, but also raised questions about the valorization of cultural identities, racial and religious tolerance, and British exceptionalism. By 1815, and the end of what was effectively a generation of war, Britain was the world’s super power, with political interests in the formation of modern Europe as well as increasingly widespread imperial engagements. Politically, demands were growing for electoral reform and Radicals were calling for the introduction of manhood suffrage. Economically, the country was heading for a post-war recession that would hit the agricultural interest and their tenants hardest — agricultural poverty, rising rents and the introduction of new machinery would lead to incendiarism, rick-burning, machine-breaking and riots — but there was also increasingly industrialisation and factory production, especially in the Midlands and Northwest; intellectually, the country was well-served by newspapers and periodicals, and aspiring towns established debating societies, libraries, and literary and philosophical institutions; and domestically, an ever-growing variety of consumer goods, new fashions in clothing, domestic furnishings and architecture, as well as a new emphasis on the family and domesticity, bolstered and informed by the personal piety of the Evangelical Revival, brought new challenges and developments to Regency Britain.
HLAC200 gives you an insight into this fascinating period and familiarizes you with the range of materials and methods that are used in research in eighteenth-century studies. Interactive lectures, seminars and fieldwork encourage a hands-on, immersive, approach to learning. You will start by inventing an eighteenth-century character early in the semester and you will then follow that character through various experiences typical of the period — including shopping, reading, travelling, and thinking about political issues of the day. In so doing, you will be encouraged to be curious about the historical lived experience and to develop your capacity for asking questions about the past, and for using your research skills to answer them.