ABSTRACT
Anyone who makes even a cursory examination of the historiography of eighteenth-century England over the last twenty years will be forcibly struck by how much of it is urban-based. Urban studies have transformed our understanding of the workings of eighteenth-century politics and society and the relationship between the metropolis and the provinces. Paul Langford’s choice of title, A Polite and Commercial People (1989), for his volume covering the eighteenth century for the New Oxford History of England series, reflected the recent historiographical interest in urban society, and helped to ensure that issues surrounding the essentially urban polite and commercial society have remained to the fore in most subsequent scholarship. Some of the most fruitful recent research in eighteenth-century history, on the growth of the press and the public sphere, the rise of a consumer society, and the construction of class and gendered identities, has been carried out in a specifically urban context. The growth of urban society in the eighteenth century was demonstrably one of the most important elements in the dynamics of change which saw early modern England emerge from being a second-rate European power, essentially rural, under-industrialized, and with a system of ‘confessional’ politics, to being the leading world power with many recognisably modern attributes: an industrial, market-led economy; highly developed communications; and an increasingly secularised and liberal society. The study of towns and urban society, therefore, allows us access to many of the most important developments in eighteenth-century society. However, despite this fact, it is still relatively difficult to find any straightforward account of what it was like to live in a town, how towns functioned in terms of their government and administration, or 2how they slotted into the larger structure of the nation state. The aim of this book is to provide an outline of the main characteristics of government and society in the English town over the long eighteenth century.
