Global Encounters and the Archives: Britain’s Empire in the Age of Horace Walpole

Considerations upon a Reduction of the Land-tax, 1749

After 1748, the staggering expenses of the War of the Austrian Succession brought Britain face to face with the highest national debt it had ever confronted. This, in turn, catalyzed political economic debates at home and across the empire over the best way to raise revenues necessary to reduce that debt and finance imperial stability abroad. This book, a compilation of various proposals for financial reform, demonstrates that these debates over taxation and the national debt were published and disseminated across Britain's robust imperial public sphere. Together these essays reveal a public deeply divided on questions of imperial finance, and also one engaged with questions of taxation and imperial governance long before the Stamp Act crisis of 1765. Catalog Record

Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library

Robert Nugent

Pamphlet Collection (1640-1760)Horace Walpole collected hundreds of pamphlets on historical and political debates during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These cover an impressively wide variety of topics and contain several rare tracts.Extent: 120 volumesSummary: This is an indispensable collection for any scholar interested in the political culture of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or curious about the collection of Walpole himself. Over the course of his life, Horace Walpole collected a broad range of printed pamphlets that form an extensive collection of 120 volumes now at the Lewis Walpole Library today. Robert Nugent's Considerations upon the Reduction of the Land-Tax, Robert, Lord Clive's speech to Parliament and the anonymous pamphlet, A Short View of the Dispute between the Merchants of London, Bristol, and Liverpool, and the Advocates of a New Joint-Stock Company: Concerning the Regulation of African Trade are three items highlighted in this exhibit, but they— and the volumes in which each is bound— form only a small sample of the tracts and pamphlets available for consultation. This collection includes political and historical tracts in prose and verse dating from 1640 to 1760, many of which are rare and annotated.