Un apprentissage impérial : William Beckford et la cité de Londres

Ces dix dernières années ont vu un très grand regain d’intérêt pour l’Empire britannique du XVIIIe siècle, sans que l’on ait réussi à s’accorder sur son importance pour les villes britanniques, ou, plus précisément, pour ses élites urbaines. Bien que des historiens de l’économie reconnaissent depuis longtemps l’incroyable croissance des fortunes de villes comme Glasgow, Dublin et Liverpool grâce à l’Empire, d’autres discutent encore la mesure dans laquelle cette richesse a pu influencer le st..

Companies, Commerce and Politics: The Hudson's Bay, Levant and Russia Companies, 1714 - 1763

The operations of the chartered trading companies in the eighteenth century have long been regarded as a mere afterthought to their activities in the previous two centuries. Recently, however, there has been renewed interest in the Royal African and East India companies, and this thesis concerns the three other major chartered companies which survived as trading entities in the eighteenth century – the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), the Levant Company and the Russia Company. The thesis re-examines, for the period 1714-63, the commercial operations of the three companies as well as the relationship between their commercial operations and politics. The hundreds of merchants in these three companies represent a broad and important sample of London merchant enterprise. The companies had different organizational structures and employed different strategies, but a common attribute of the three companies was that they were in the vanguard of change in terms of their use of financial services to manage their operations and the involvement of their members on the boards of joint stock companies. An inability to match French cloth prices was the principal reason for the decline of the Levant Company during this period. The HBC also lost significant market share to their French rivals, but was able to consistently produce strong financial results because of rising prices for beaver fur in London. Strong demand for its imports allowed the Russia Company to become one of the great success stories of eighteenth-century commerce. The mid-century parliamentary attacks on the Levant Company and the HBC were fundamentally motivated by the economic impact of French competition on key stakeholders in their businesses. The companies were able to call on support from a range of sources, which crucially included the government, and they skilfully used the parliamentary process to counter a popular prejudice against monopoly companies.</p

The Atlantic at work: Britain and South Carolina's trading networks, c. 1730 - 1790

This thesis describes the sixty years of transatlantic interaction, connection, dislocation and reconstruction in Anglo-Carolinian trade between 1730 and 1790. Focussing on about two dozen of London’s ‘Carolina traders’, it integrates their personal and collective stories of profit and loss, reputation and notoriety, and political activity and inactivity, with the broader forces they shaped and were in turn shaped by – forces of economic growth, political stability and instability, and imperial harmony and disharmony. Through their conjoined political and commercial agency – a dual role better appreciated by contemporaries than by historians – they profoundly influenced commerce between Britain and South Carolina. Their intermediation served firstly as a stabilising force in the Anglo-Carolinian polity as they procured favourable treatment for the colony’s goods and represented its grievances in the imperial metropolis. An important influence on this was their ‘absentee’ ownership of property in South Carolina and the thesis explores in depth the underappreciated prevalence and significance of this transatlantic absenteeism. From the mid-1760s, however, the traders’ political and commercial agency aggravated intra-imperial discord. Disputes between British merchants and their Carolinian correspondents reflected in microcosm the geo-political shifts of the time and reveal at an inter-personal level how resistance to British imperial authority developed among Carolinians. Furthermore, these disputes played a constitutive role in this resistance, as the purported commercial iniquities and political orientations of British merchants led their correspondents to question and reject the commercial and political norms that had once sustained Anglo-Carolinian relations. The thesis thus helps explain how South Carolina moved, often imperceptibly, against British authority during the 1760s and early 1770s by emphasising commercial discord within the growing political-economic friction. It further contributes to the burgeoning historiography of the eighteenth-century ‘Atlantic world’ by exploring the reconstruction of trading links between Britain and South Carolina after American independence. It reveals how strongly these were influenced by pre-war politics. In so doing, it demonstrates that Carolinians exercised greater commercial discretion after the war than contemporaries and historians have appreciated, and thus challenges contentions of South Carolina’s continuing commercial subservience to British trading interests.This thesis is not currently available in ORA

Final Report to the Leverhulme Trust for Research Project F264/H: English Merchant Culture: The Overseas Trader in State and Society, 1660-1720

End of funding report to the Leverhulme Trus

Investigating the Effects of a Multinutrient Supplement on Cognition, Mood and Biochemical Markers in Middle-Aged Adults with &lsquo;Optimal&rsquo; and &lsquo;Sub-Optimal&rsquo; Diets: A Randomized Double Blind Placebo Controlled Trial

Background: Previous randomized controlled trials examining cognitive and mood effects of combination multivitamin supplements in healthy, non-clinical adults have reported mixed results. One purported explanation for this is that the dietary status of participants at the start of supplement interventions may influence the magnitude of the effect of supplementation. Methods: In this study, we evaluated the effect of a multinutrient formula containing B group vitamins, Bacopa monniera and Ginkgo biloba on memory, attention, mood and biochemical markers of nutrient status in middle-aged adults (M = 52.84 years, n = 141) with &lsquo;optimal&rsquo; and &lsquo;sub-optimal&rsquo; diets over 12 weeks. We hypothesised that active supplementation would differentially improve memory and attention in those with a &lsquo;sub-optimal&rsquo; diet. Results: Mixed model, repeated measures analysis revealed that, in comparison to placebo, active treatment was associated with significant increases in B vitamin status (B1, B6, B12). Regarding behavioural outcomes there was no significant benefit to memory (F(1, 113.51) = 0.53, p = 0.470) nor attention (F(1,113.77) = 1.89, p = 0.171) in the whole cohort. Contrary to our hypothesis, there was a significant beneficial effect of supplementation on attentional performance in individuals with an &lsquo;optimal&rsquo; diet prior to supplementation (F(1,57.25) = 4.94, p = 0.030). In the absence of a main effect of supplementation across the entire cohort, there were also a number of significant three-way interactions (treatment by time by diet group) detected in secondary outcomes including lower state anxiety and mental fatigue in those with an &lsquo;optimal&rsquo; diet. Conclusion: These findings suggest that the cognitive benefit of B vitamin and herbal supplementation may be dependent on diet quality, supporting the concepts of &lsquo;co-nutrient optimisation&rsquo; and interdependency of nutrients. This warrants further investigation. This study advocates characterising the diet of participants prior to supplementation as it may influence the effect of a nutraceutical intervention