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

Annus Mirabilis (Britain's Year of Wonders), 1759

Spanning the continents of Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa, the Seven Years' War (1756 –1763) was by most accounts the first true world war. Less well known is the significance of this global conflict for the British Empire, which ejected the French from North America and emerged as Europe's principal imperial superpower by war's end. This account offers a history of 1759, when the war turned in Britain's favor. The triumphalist tone in this author's account of Britain's "miraculous year" was soon belied by the problems of governing so expansive an empire. From South Asia to North America, Britain's territorial expansion after 1763 only exacerbated the problems it aimed to resolve; in addition to fomenting powerful indigenous resistance in North America and Bengal, the expense of defending such vast territories inspired Prime Minister Grenville to pass the Stamp Act in 1765. Within ten years, these imperial tensions brought the colonies to the brink of revolution. Catalog Record

Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library

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.