Global Encounters and the Archives: Britain’s Empire in the Age of Horace Walpole
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By the early 1770s, Britain’s policies toward South Asian and North American indigenous peoples had changed significantly. Robert Clive’s acquisition of diwan from Mughal Emperor Shah Alam had transformed the British Company into territorial sovereigns of Bengal, while the ejection of the French from North America catalyzed an insatiable demand by settlers for expansion into the Ohio Valley. This document, when considered alongside the 1774 “Considerations on the Agreement of the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury with the Honourable Thomas Walpole and the Associates for Lands upon the River Ohio, in North America,” show that South Asian and North American indigenous peoples both faced new imperial policies that reduced their status within the empire in entangled ways. Robert Clive, who was synonymous with new forms of governance in India, used his speech to Parliament to frame “inferior” Bengalis as “servile” and “mean” and “superior” Bengalis as “effeminate” and “cruel.” Thomas Walpole’s agreement also downplays indigenous peoples’ status by casting the Six Nations Iroquois not as North American power brokers, but as agents for the transaction of territory to white settlers. Thomas Walpole’s papers help to explain this overlap; before leading his group of investors to seek the Iroquois land grant in North America, he had in fact served as an East India Company director and influenced company policy in India.
What else is in this collection?
The Lewis Walpole Library's collection of pamphlets is an indispensable resource 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.
The Rockingham Ministry repealed the Stamp Act in March 1766, responding to fervent protests by Patriot Whigs in Britain and across its empire. This artist’s depiction of repeal is rich with symbolism. In the background, ships come into port bearing the names of those ministers who ushered in repeal, including that of Henry Seymour Conway. In the foreground, those ministers responsible for the Stamp Act—men like George Grenville, the Duke of Bedford, and Lord Bute in his Scottish plaid—mourn as this legislation is buried in a “family vault” donning kulls that correspond with the 1715 and 1745 Scottish Highland Rebellions. The numbers on their flags correspond with the numbers of votes against repeal in the Lords and Commons.
Despite his role in repealing the Stamp Act in the Rockingham Ministry, Henry Seymour Conway was dismissed from his ministerial role under the Duke of Grafton’s new administration in 1768. Horace Walpole wrote this letter to Conway, his cousin, upon hearing the news. Walpole excoriates the Duke of Grafton for dismissing Conway, writing that Grafton “would be puzzled to give a tolerable reason for” his choice. Also of note is Walpole’s global perspective; destabilizing this ministry would prove dangerous with “London and Middlesex distracted, the colonies in rebellion, Ireland ready to be so, and France arrogant and on the point of being hostile.”
What else is in this collection?
The Horace Walpole Papers form the most well-known collection at the Lewis Walpole Library. Containing over 3,000 letters to and from Walpole and 3,000 transcripts of correspondence from other public and private repositories, this collection offers a window into the life of the seminal cultural figure, Horace Walpole (1717-1797). While the immense amount of correspondence is available electronically through the digital collections of the Lewis Walpole Library, a rich body of supplemental materials, including account books, travel journals, commonplace books, manuscript copies and translations of printed texts, music manuscripts, poetry and examples of fine prints and graphic satire are available to scholars and students who visit the Lewis Walpole Library. The library also holds a broad array of items that Walpole himself collected, including several bound manuscripts on a variety of topics and an extensive run of pamphlets (refer to below for manuscripts and pamphlets) and many theatrical playbills.
The artist presents female personifications of Africa, America, Asia, and Europe contemplating the effects of the British North American colonies’ rebellion against the metropole’s “Tea Tax” and “Stamp Act.” Father Time uses a magic lantern (a projection device) to forecast an explosive outcome. “Europe” and “Asia,” shown in intimate contact, scarcely acknowledge the scene; instead, they confer with one another, as though discussing an alliance. “Africa” expresses concern, her body casting a large shadow on the projection, perhaps indicative of the relationship of transatlantic slavery to empire. “America,” figured as an indigenous woman with a bow resting at her side, reaches out from the shadows as though consigned to the periphery, even as her doppelganger in the projected scene (standing in for white British “America”) reaches for the cap of “liberty.” The presence of a turbaned man among the “American” forces on the right perhaps suggests that “Europe’s” (or Britain’s) supposed influence in Asia might be undermined by the American colonists’ actions.
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.
What else is in this collection?
The Lewis Walpole Library's collection of pamphlets is an indispensable resource 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.