This chapter focuses on Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1762), which brings together the letters from the Chinese philosopher Lien Chi Altangi and his correspondents that were published in the Public Ledger across 1760 and 1761. Referencing many European Enlightenment writers, the chapter discusses Goldsmith’s work as a text which critically reflects on the meaning – and the possibilities and problematics – of the slippery term ‘cosmopolitanism’, considering the way in which it presents as ‘cosmopolitan’ the workings of both global commerce and the elite republic of letters.

This chapter explores contexts for Goldsmith’s career as a playwright, such as competition between Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres that were factors in the moderate success of The Good Natur’d Man in 1768 and the surprise runaway hit that was She Stoops to Conquer five years later. These plays are considered in the light of how the Seven Years’ War, which greatly expanded the British empire, challenged conceptions of Britishness at home and abroad. Goldsmith’s comedies respond to the perceived effeminization of culture in the 1770s, associated with the possibility corrupting influence of luxury and commerce as a result of imperial expansion. This influence was manifested in new kinds of fashionable sociability such as the masquerade with its uppity women, and the phenomenon of the male ‘macaroni’. Goldsmith also tests the conventions of the comedy of manners in how he deploys minor characters in The Good Natur’d Man and the cross-class appeal of Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer.

War and Empire’ examines Goldsmith’s commentaries on colonial and national conflicts, wars of expansion and disasters in foreign fields, exploring two related concerns: the falling status of the ‘event’ in the historiographical and political imagination, and the decline, as he saw it, of ‘great men’. The chapter provides clear details of the major conflicts which occurred during Goldsmith’s lifetime: the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8; including the War of Jenkins’s Ear); the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), by far the most important; and finally the mounting crisis in the American colonies, its final trajectory discernible even when Goldsmith died in 1774.

Both the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue encouraged White male colonists to consider themselves “enlightened” “American” citizens devoted to advancing the public good through reasonable means. This chapter focuses on the Affiches, which flourished into the revolutionary decade of the 1790s. It situates its founding in the rise of similar metropolitan publications while showing how the colonial context informed its objectives. Like metropolitan editors, its founder Jean Monceaux was confident in the power of communication to inform and of discussion to enlighten; brought metropolitan ideas and news into the colonies; created forums for debate within it; and believed that a press served its public by furthering the collective good. Constrained by official censorship, the Affiches nevertheless expressed colonial discontent with the postwar order by publishing extensively on the British Stamp Act Crisis. In the process, it exposed readers to a robust assertion of colonial “rights” in the face of metropolitan “tyranny” and implicitly connected Saint-Domingue’s political troubles with that of British North America and the Brittany Affair in France.

The Journal de Saint-Domingue joined the Affiches Américaines in encouraging White male colonists to consider themselves members of an “enlightened” and distinctively “American” citizenry devoted to reason and the common good. While acknowledging metropolitan precedents for a general-interest publication, its editors trumpeted their publication’s novelty, claimed all of “America” as their journalistic jurisdiction, and stated their intention to generate original content, not just reprint metropolitan articles. The monthly Journal fostered the creation of American “taste” by publishing reviews and critiquing poetry by colonists. With strong ties to the local Chambres d’Agriculture and strong support from planter subscribers, it also published extensively on agriculture (Chapter 11). With the Affiches, it created a forum where colonists could appropriate the intellectually respectable terms of “political economy,” combining them with a robust rhetoric of citizenship to respond to criticism from merchants and metropolitan chambers of commerce; debate the reimposition of the trade restrictions of the Exclusif and proposed limitations on sugar refining; and seek to redefine the colony-metropole relationship.

Part II, “Creating Enlightened Citizens: The Periodicals of Saint-Domingue in the 1760s,” begins at the end of the Seven Years War. An era of deep colonial discontent, many colonists were also confident that their colony had turned the page on an earlier tumultuous history to enter a future of civilized amenities and cultural achievement. Part II explores their cultural aspirations through the colony’s new periodicals: the long-running Affiches Américaines and its ephemeral siblings, the Journal de Saint-Domingue and the Iris Américaine. Together they advanced a coherent, gendered Enlightenment project that urged readers to identify themselves as French and American, patriots and citizens, and connected those identities with the Enlightenment practices of civil discourse and civilized taste. The introduction considers the meaning of Habermas’s “public sphere” in a slave society of hardening racial barriers; it concludes by briefly sketching the political, social, and economic situation of the colony at war’s end and the tensions between planters and merchants, colonists and royal governance that generated controversy and crisis in the postwar years.

This chapter focuses on the struggle between Britain and France for imperial dominance in North America. In this period, the French and English colonies in North America were constantly at war, officially in the War of the Austrian Succession (1744-48) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), and unofficially in guerilla warfare on the frontiers of settlement. The British and their colonists in New England captured Louisbourg in 1745, prompting France to launch a massive and ultimately disastrous campaign led by the Duc d’Anville to recapture Louisbourg, which was returned to France in by the peace treaty of 1748. The British founded Halifax in 1749 to counter Louisbourg’s influence, but successive governors in Nova Scotia had difficulty reconciling Acadians and Indigenous peoples to their regime. Ultimately, the Acadians were expelled by British authorities (1755-62) and Indigenous peoples were brutally suppressed. The British captured Louisbourg in 1758, Quebec in 1759, and Montreal in 1760. By the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France ceded most of its North American empire to the British, who were already undertaking a major project of mapping the territories they claimed and planting Protestant colonists from German states and New England in Nova Scotia.

An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (2 vols., 1757–8) by John Brown (1715–66) has rarely been studied in depth by intellectual historians, incongruent to its own initial popularity at publication. The Estimatewas written in a declinist voice, following hard on the heels of Britain’s defeat by France at the Battle of Minorca in 1756. Brown was convinced that Britain’s initial bad fortunes in war against France were related to a general decline in manners and principles, exemplified by the spirit of party. Even more understudied is Brown’s final contribution on the subject: his Thoughts on Civil Liberty: On Licentiousness and Faction, published in 1765, one year before he committed suicide. In this work, Brown tried to do what many political writers, including the principal ones discussed in this book, had held to be impossible: to demonstrate how a free state could exist without the internal conflict exemplified by party.

This chapter is partly contextual, considering the political changes ushered in by the unexpected death of Henry Pelham in 1754, and partly textual, as it deals with Hume’s last essay on party (‘Of the Coalition of Parties’, 1758) and Edmund Burke’s first, unpublished essay on party (1757). Both essays were commentaries on high politics at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, as well as wider reflections on the meaning of partisanship and its problems for historical writing, the place of party in a constitutional system, and, in the case of Burke, the distinction between party and faction.