Library Results | Royal Museums Greenwich

Landscapes of London : the city, the country and the suburbs, 1660-1840 /Elizabeth McKellar. The idea of a "Greater London" emerged in the 18th century with the expansion of the city's suburbs. In Landscapes of London, Elizabeth McKellar traces this growth back to the 17th century, when domestic retreats were established in outlying areas. This transitional zone was occupied and shaped by the urban middle class as much as by the elite who built villas there. McKellar provides the first major interdisciplinary cultural history of this area, analyzing it in relation to key architectural and planning debates and to concepts of national, social, and gender identities. She draws on a wide range of source materials, including prints, paintings, maps, poetry, songs, newspapers, guidebooks, and other popular literature, as well as buildings and landscapes. The author suggests that these suburban landscapes--the first in the world--were a new environment, but one in which the vernacular, the rustic, and the historic played a substantial part. This fascinating investigation shows London as the forerunner of the complex, multifaceted modern cities of today. [2013]. • FOLIO • 1 copy available. 7.047(21:421)"1660/1840"

Nelson's Navy : recruitment, promotion, discipline and death /Dr Nicholas Slope. "In this insightful work, Dr. Nicholas Slope, naval historian and archaeologist, presents a social history of the Royal Navy during the time of Vice Admiral Nelson. He analyses the muster, pay and log books of three Royal Navy Frigates, HMS Trent, Amazon and Glenmore, during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, using computer databases to explore life on board from 1793-1815. This book covers themes such as recruitment, officer development, child labour, promotion, desertion and death."--Provided by the publisher. 2019. • BOOK • 1 copy available. txt

Sons of the waves : the common seaman in the heroic age of sail, 1740-1840 /Stephen Taylor. "British maritime history in the age of sail is full of the deeds of officers like Nelson but has given little voice to plain, 'illiterate' seamen. Now Stephen Taylor draws on published and unpublished memoirs, letters, and naval records, including court-martials and petitions, to present these men in their own words. In this account, ordinary seamen are far from the hapless sufferers of the press gangs. Proud and spirited, learned in their own fashion, with robust opinions and the courage to challenge overweening authority, they stand out from their less adventurous compatriots. Taylor demonstrates how the sailor was the engine of British prosperity and expansion up to the Industrial Revolution. From exploring the South Seas with Cook to establishing the East India Company as a global corporation, from the sea battles that made Britain a superpower to the crisis of the 1797 mutinies, these 'sons of the waves' held the nation's destiny in their calloused hands."--Provided by the publisher. 2020. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 359.0092241

Hero in the footnotes : the life and times of Richard Cadman Etches : entrepreneur and British spy /Michael Etches. "The book tells the story of Richard Cadman Etches, born in Warwickshire in 1753, who left home while still a youth to seek his fortune in London. He set up a successful liquor and wine importing business and soon acquired his own ship to deal directly with European suppliers. When, in 1784, news came from James Cook's fatal expedition that huge profits could be made from buying sea otter pelts from local tribes on the North Pacific coast of America and selling them in China, he seized his opportunity and set up a trading base in Nootka Sound. Unfortunately, one of his vessels was captured by Spanish forces who believed they controlled the coast, and this almost led to a war with Britain. Richard then became a full time British agent during the turbulent times of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars and, among his many exploits was the organisation of Sir Sidney Smith's escape from a Paris gaol. He died in penury in a debtors' prison in London in 1817."--Provided by the publisher. 2021. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 942.07092

From Ushant to Gibraltar : the Channel Fleet, 1778 -1783 /Quintin Barry. "In 1778, when the expected war finally broke with France, Lord Sandwich, the long serving First Lord of the Admiralty, had to find the resources to match the French fleet not only in the Channel but in other theaters of war such as the West Indies, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. In addition, the Royal Navy had to protect Britain's extensive maritime commerce, covering the large inbound and outbound convoys on which the country's economy depended. This book is a study of the men who led and the men who managed, both afloat and ashore, the Channel Fleet."-- 2022. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 359.009

Empires of complaints : Mughal law and the making of British India, 1765-1793 /Robert Travers. "This book shows how British empire-builders in eighteenth century India co-opted and transformed Mughal practices of doing justice to petitioning subjects. Drawing on English and Persian sources, it explores the judicial mechanisms behind colonial state-building, revealing how the British attempted to ground their empire on a reconstituted version of Mughal law"-- 2022. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 349.54/30903

London and the Georgian Navy / Philip MacDougall. "At a time when the Royal Navy was the biggest and best in the world, Georgian London was the hub of this immense industrial-military complex, underpinning and securing a global trading empire that was entirely dependent on the navy for its existence. Philip MacDougall explores the bureaucratic web that operated within the wider city area before giving attention to London's association with the practical aspects of supplying and manning the operational fleet, and shipbuilding, repair and maintenance. His supremely detailed geographical exploration of these areas includes a discussion of captivating key personalities, buildings and work. The book examines significant locations as well as the importance of Londoners in the manning of ships and how the city memorialised the navy and its personnel during times of victory. An in-depth gazetteer and walking guide complete this fascinating study of London and her Royal Navy." 2013. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 359.10942109033

The occupation of Havana : war, trade, and slavery in the Atlantic world /Elena A. Schneider. "In 1762, British forces mobilized more than 230 ships and 26,000 soldiers, sailors, and enslaved Africans to attack Havana, one of the wealthiest and most populous ports in the Americas. They met fierce resistance. Spanish soldiers and local militias in Cuba, along with enslaved Africans who were promised freedom, held off the enemy for six suspenseful weeks. In the end, the British prevailed, but more lives were lost in the invasion and subsequent eleven-month British occupation of Havana than during the entire Seven Years' War in North America. The Occupation of Havana offers a nuanced and poignantly human account of the British capture and Spanish recovery of this coveted Caribbean city. The book explores both the interconnected histories of the British and Spanish empires and the crucial role played by free people of color and the enslaved in the creation and defense of Havana. Tragically, these men and women would watch their promise of freedom and greater rights vanish in the face of massive slave importation and increased sugar production upon Cuba's return to Spanish rule. By linking imperial negotiations with events in Cuba and their consequences, Elena Schneider sheds new light on the relationship between slavery and empire at the dawn of the Age of Revolutions."--Provided by publisher. 2018 • BOOK • 1 copy available. 326(729.1)

Despatches of Rear-Admiral Philip Durell 1758-1759 and Rear-Admiral Lord Colville 1759-1761 / ed. by C. H. Little. 1958. • • 2 copies available. 355.49"1758/1761"(71)

The recapture of St John's, Newfoundland : dispatches of Rear-Admiral Lord Colville 1761-1762 /ed. C. H. Little. 1959. • • 2 copies available. 355.49"1761"(718)

War and trade in eighteenth-century Newfoundland / Olaf U. Janzen. Janzen, Olaf Uwe, 2013. • BOOK • 1 copy available. NN 4040

Life in Georgian Lancaster / Andrew White. "A lively, yet authoritative account of social life and conditions, for rich and poor alike, in this important provincial town in the eighteenth century. Written by an excellent and well-known historian. We associate the Georgian period with elegance, fine furniture, confidence, prosperity and humanity. Yet in Lancaster, as elsewhere, it also had its dark side - slavery; prostitution; a savage penal code that included the death penalty for quite minor offences; social inequality; unfair political representation; and appalling conditions in early factories which made the lot of many people anything but secure and elegant. But there were also many redeeming features. The country was thinly populated; economic inequality was less marked than it was to become later in the nineteenth century; the city was less crowded and disease-ridden; society less rigid. The Georgian period in Lancaster has left us a legacy of fine buildings, furniture and art. It has also left a sense of a period more akin to our own than the intervening stuffy and pious Victorian era. It appears to us an age filled with humanity, common sense and enlightenment. In this survey of social conditions for every rank of Lancaster inhabitant in the eighteenth century, well-known local historian Andrew White examines what it was really like to work and live in the Georgian town."--Provided by the publisher. 2004. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 332.158(427.2)"17/18"

The Channel : England, France and the construction of a maritime border in the eighteenth century /Renaud Morieux. "Rather than a natural frontier between natural enemies, this book approaches the English Channel as a shared space, which mediated the multiple relations between France and England in the long eighteenth century, in both a metaphorical and a material sense. Instead of arguing that Britain's insularity kept it spatially and intellectually segregated from the Continent, Renaud Morieux focuses on the Channel as a zone of contact. The 'narrow sea' was a shifting frontier between states and a space of exchange between populations. This richly textured history shows how the maritime border was imagined by cartographers and legal theorists, delimited by state administrators and transgressed by migrants. It approaches French and English fishermen, smugglers and merchants as transnational actors, whose everyday practices were entangled. The variation of scales of analysis enriches theoretical and empirical understandings of Anglo-French relations, and reassesses the question of Britain's deep historical connections with Europe"-- 2016. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 327(42:44)"17"

The day the world discovered the sun : an extraordinary story of scientific adventure and the race to track the transit of Venus /Mark Anderson. On June 3, 1769, the planet Venus briefly passed across the face of the sun in a cosmic alignment that occurs twice per century. Anticipation of the rare celestial event sparked a worldwide competition among aspiring global superpowers, each sending their own scientific expeditions to far-flung destinations to time the planet's trek. Anderson reveals the stories of three Venus Transit voyages-- to the heart of the Arctic, the New World, and the Pacific-- that risked every mortal peril of a candlelit age. 2012. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 523.42/09

Caribbean New Orleans : empire, race, and the making of a slave society /Câecile Vidal. "Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cecile Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city's development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans' rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city's streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana's capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America's most intriguing city."--Provided by the publisher. 2019. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 306.3/620976335

Secret cures of slaves : people, plants, and medicine in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world /Londa Schiebinger. "In the natural course of events, humans fall sick and die. The history of medicine bristles with attempts to find new and miraculous remedies, to work with and against nature to restore humans to health and well-being. In this book, Londa Schiebinger examines medicine and human experimentation in the Atlantic World, exploring the circulation of people, disease, plants, and knowledge between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. She traces the development of a colonial medical complex from the 1760s, when a robust experimental culture emerged in the British and French West Indies, to the early 1800s, when debates raged about banning the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself. Massive mortality among enslaved Africans and European planters, soldiers, and sailors fueled the search for new healing techniques. Amerindian, African, and European knowledges competed to cure diseases emerging from the collision of peoples on newly established, often poorly supplied, plantations. But not all knowledge was equal. Highlighting the violence and fear endemic to colonial struggles, Schiebinger explores aspects of African medicine that were not put to the test, such as Obeah and vodou. This book analyzes how and why specific knowledges were blocked, discredited, or held secret."--Provided by the publisher. 2017. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 610.72/408996073

Hogarth and Europe / edited by Alice Insley and Martin Myrone ; contributions by Sonia E. Barrett, Josephina de Fouw, Meredith Gamer, Cora Gilroy-Ware, et al. "It was a century of war (mostly) and peace (occasionally), of extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty, gargantuan appetites and desperate famines, high ideals and hypocrisy, a century of intellectual, social and religious turmoil. In this fertile turbulence flourished one of Britain's greatest artists: painter, printmaker, satirist, and social critic William Hogarth, of whom the essayist and poet Charles Lamb once said, 'Other pictures we look at; his pictures we read'. Illustrating the full range of Hogarth's most important paintings and prints, this book shows them in a new light, juxtaposed with work by major European contemporaries who influenced him or took their inspiration from him in their painting of modern life - including Watteau, Chardin, Troost and Longhi. Hogarth is revealed not only as a key figure in British art history, but also as a major European artist. It is also a tale of four cities: London, Paris, Venice and Amsterdam, represented in maps from the period. The themes of city life, social protest, sexuality and satire which come to the fore in the art of Hogarth and his contemporaries are very much live today."--Provided by the publisher. 2021. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 940.2

The gun, the ship, and the pen : warfare, constitutions, and the making of the modern world /Linda Colley. "A work of extraordinary range and originality, The Gun, the Ship and the Pen traces the global history of written constitutions from the 1750s to the twentieth century, modifying accepted narratives and uncovering the close connections between constitutions and war. In the process, Linda Colley both reappraises famous constitutions and recovers those that have been marginalised but were central to the rise fo the modern world. Colley shows how - while advancing epic revolutions and progressively enfranchising white males - constiutions also served over the long nineteenth century to marginalise indigenous peoples, exclude women and people of colour, and expropriate land. Simultaneously she investigates how these devices were adapted by peoples and activists outside the West seekign to resist European and American power. She describes how Tunisia generated the first modern Islamic constitution in 1861; how Africanus Horton of Sierra Leone devised pioneering plans for self-governing nations in West Africa; and how Japan's Meiji constitution of 1889 became a model for many Indian, Chinese and Ottoman nationalists and reformers. Throughout, Colley illumines the links between the rise of constitutions and wider cultural histories and brigns to life some of the remarkable men and women invovled in their writing."--Provided by the publisher. 2021. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 320.3

Abson & Company : slave traders in eighteenth-century West Africa /Stanley B. Alpern. "Yorkshireman Lionel Abson was the longest surviving European stationed in West Africa in the eighteenth century. He reached William's Fort at Ouidah on the Slave Coast as a trader in 1767, took over the English fort in 1770, and remained in charge until his death in 1803. He avoided the 'white man's grave' for thirty-six years. Along the way he had three sons with an African woman, the eldest partly schooled in England, and a bright daughter named Sally. When Abson died, royal lackeys kidnapped his children. Sally was placed in the king's harem and pined away; her brothers vanished. That king became so unpopular as a result that the people of Dahomey disowned him. Abson also mastered the local language and became an historian. After only two years as fort chief, he was part of the king's delegation to make peace with an enemy, a unique event in centuries of Dahomean history. This singular book recounts the remarkable life of this key figure in an ignominious period of European and African history, offering a microcosm of the lives of Europeans in eighteenth-century West Africa, and their relationships with and attitudes towards those they met there."--Provided by the publisher. 2018. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 92ABSON

Coastal defences of the British Empire in the Revolutionary & Napoleonic eras / Daniel MacCannell. "Far more than an architecture book, Coastal Defences of the British Empire in the Revolutionary & Napoleonic Eras is a sweeping reinterpretation of the Martello towers, Grand Redoubts, Royal Military Canal and other new defence infrastructure. Lavishly illustrated with period maps, views, portraits, cartoons and newly commissioned colour photographs, it includes not only these structures' forerunners, and plans that were never executed, but also the grand strategy that informed them. At its best, this saw Britain's position as a vast land battle, with the deadly threat of the French-held Antwerp navy yards on its own 'left wing', and Lisbon as the enemy's 'weak left' to be 'turned'. The book also takes in the astonishingly inventive, bold and bloody small-boat wars that raged from the Baltic and Channel coast to Chesapeake Bay and Lake Ontario, and provides vivid pen-sketches of the now-obscure and sometimes deeply flawed strategic visionaries, engineers, inventors, and fighting men who held the line as - even after Trafalgar - the forces of an ever more powerful French empire circled like sharks. Along the way, it traces a fundamental change in the nature of war and society: from a ponderous game of fortresses and colonies played by rulers, to murderous 'foot by foot' defence of the whole territory of the nation by 'both sexes and every social type'."--Provided by the publisher. 2021. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 355.4509171241

Captivity's collections : science, natural history, and the British transatlantic slave trade /Kathleen S. Murphy. "Cashews from Africa's Gold Coast, butterflies from Sierra Leone, jalap root from Veracruz, shells from Jamaica--in the eighteenth century, these specimens from faraway corners of the Atlantic were tucked away onboard inhumane British slaving vessels. Kathleen S. Murphy argues that the era's explosion of new natural knowledge was deeply connected to the circulation of individuals, objects, and ideas through the networks of the British transatlantic slave trade. Plants, seeds, preserved animals and insects, and other specimens were gathered by British slave ship surgeons, mariners, and traders at slaving factories in West Africa, in ports where captive Africans disembarked, and near the British South Sea Company's trading factories in Spanish America. The specimens were displayed in British museums and herbaria, depicted in published natural histories, and discussed in the halls of scientific societies. Grounded in extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Captivity's Collections mines scientific treatises, slaving companies' records, naturalists' correspondence, and museum catalogs to recover in rich detail the scope of the slave trade's collecting operations. The book reveals the scientific and natural historical profit derived from these activities and the crucial role of specimens gathered along the routes of the slave trade on emerging ideas in natural history"-- [2023] • BOOK • 1 copy available. 508.0941

The Wager : a tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder /David Grann. "On 28 January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, which had left England two years earlier on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain and had been wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. Six months, another even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who had landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court-martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death - for whomever the court found guilty could hang. The Wager is a grand tale of human behaviour at the extremes told by one of our greatest non-fiction writers. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound. Most powerfully, he unearths the deeper meaning of the events, showing it was not only the Wager's captain and crew who were on trial - it was the very idea of empire."--Provided by the publisher. 2023. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 910.91641

The diary of Samuel Pepys : a new and complete transcription /edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews. Pepys, Samuel, 1995-2000 • BOOK • 11 copies available. 92PEPYS(093.32)

To the high and honourable houses of lords and commons assembled in parliament : the most humble petition of a multitude of poore widows, and orphans, maimed souldiers and others, men and women (the remaines of the warres of England, and massacres of Ireland) in behalfe of themselves, and of all the poore of England, and Wales. ca.1700?] • RARE-PAMPH • 1 copy available. 323.234(42):094

Explore our Collection