THIS VOLUME has explored British sociability in the long eighteenth century through a wide range of perspectives and case studies. The authors of the collection have used a combination of macro and micro analyses of sociability to define British sociability as distinctive from other national models and have raised the question of its hybrid nature. The singularity of British sociable practices justifies a close investigation of their emergence, of their evolution and of some of their inherent resisting forces and paradoxes. Therefore, an argumentative and chronological thread has guided our examination of British sociability, shedding new light on a phenomenon that transformed eighteenth-century British society and mentalities.

While male gatherings mainly conducted in public drinking houses were a central forum for the art of conversation in this period, as exemplified by social institutions such as coffeehouses, taverns, clubs, Masonic lodges and art academies, female sociable practices were also instrumental in the definition of distinctive British trends in sociability, as shown through the tea-table phenomenon, their predominant role in epistolary sociability or their involvement in networks and literary circles in late eighteenthcentury Scotland. Moreover, the link between sociability, gender and education definitely played a central part in the fashioning of a national model of sociability. Various examples of hetero-social practices existed in eighteenth-century Britain; yet, as this volume has proved, the prominence of gendered practices and spaces of sociability as a characteristic feature of British social life should not be under-estimated. Education remained a fundamental tool for the formation of sociable practices. If public sociability has largely been associated with masculine sociability in Britain, recent scholarship has questioned the theory of separate spheres and underlined a more complex mapping of sociable practices across both spatial and gender lines. For instance, Michèle Cohen has reassessed the role of domestic sociability in the education of women, and especially the key function of accomplishments, including conversation, in the sociable education of British women as well as children.

In the eighteenth century, France was still considered as the ‘sociable nation’ par excellence. In a famous passage from his Lettres Persanes, Montesquieu suggested the superiority of the Frenchman's sociable nature over other nationalities.