Valérie Capdeville – författare

This book examines the cultural transfer of the British club model to the English-speaking colonies of North America. The gentlemen’s club, which flourished in eighteenth-century Britain, became a highly exportable institution throughout the Empire. This study shows that this unique model of sociability played a central part both in transmitting British values and in shaping a new colonial identity. It argues that the success of clubs in British America depended on the emergence of favourable cultural, economic and political factors, on the agency of some decisive social actors such as Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Alexander Hamilton, and on the creation of networks of influence and power, therefore shedding new light on the circulation of individuals, ideas and practices in the colonies from 1720 to the eve of the American Revolution.

This innovative collection explores how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe.The study of sociability in the long eighteenth century has long been dominated by the example of France. In this innovative collection, we see how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe.The contributors use a wide range of sources - from city plans to letter-writing manuals, from the writings of Edmund Burke to poems and essays about the social practices of the tea table, and a variety of methodological approaches to explore philosophical, political and social aspects of the emergence of British sociability in this period. They create a rounded picture of sociability as it happened in public, private and domestic settings - in Masonic lodges and radical clubs, in painting academies and private houses - and compare specific examples and settings with equivalents in France, bringing out for instance the distinctively homo-social and predominantly masculine form of British sociability, the role of sociabilitywithin a wider national identity still finding its way after the upheaval of civil war and revolution in the seventeenth century, and the almost unique capacity of the British model of sociability to benefit from its own apparent tensions and contradictions.