Ours is the age of the Jacobite restoration – not in dynastic terms, but in historical scholarship. Parliamentary Jacobitism in the period after 1710 has particularly attracted recent attention. While disagreement persists among historians as to the extent and seriousness of tory involvement with the Jacobite cause, few would deny that the issue is significant. By contrast, the influence of Jacobitism on politics under William III has been almost entirely neglected. Beyond the shadowy conspiracies that have long fascinated researchers, little is known of the role of Jacobite sentiment in the political life of England between 1688 and 1702. Not much has been added to Keith Feiling's sixty-year old assessment of the Jacobites as ‘that right wing of Toryism, in which the whole pre-Revolutionary sentiment survived’.
For historians, as for revenue officers, the bold English smuggler of the eighteenth century has been an elusive figure. His motives, the structure of his business, and his relationship to broader social and economic trends, remain far from clear. This is partly because the sources for histories of smuggling are fragmentary and obscure, but it also reflects the inadequacies of proposed interpretations. The early chroniclers of the smuggling trade represented it as an assertion of popular rights, bravely, if at times violently, defended against the agents of an intrusive government. This somewhat romantic view has recently been reformulated by Cal Winslow, who has depicted southcoast tea smuggling in the 1740s as a “social crime,” sanctioned by the laboring classes but condemned by those in authority. Conversely, economic historians have written of smuggling as a “big business” that accounted for one-third of English trade with France and Holland and had an effect both on the level of prices and the distribution of goods. The tea smuggler, as Hoh-cheung Mui and Lorna Mui have noted, “was indeed an important complement to his legal counterpart and as such contributed to the commercial expansion of the kingdom.” He “became a virtual pioneer in developing trade facilities,” especially in remote areas, and helped to expand the market for luxury commodities like brandy and tea by undercutting the prices of the great merchants and established companies.
The past quarter‐century has seen an efflorescence of studies of Jacobitism, within both political and cultural history. The scope and impact of these studies are considered in the present article, which ranges across the major fields of research that are now associated with Jacobite Studies. They include plots and conspiracies; rebellions and uprisings; Irish Jacobitism, particularly as it was embodied in poetic works; the Jacobite diaspora to the European continent; the Stuart courts in exile; and Jacobite culture, including literature. The significance of Jacobitism for English literary history is examined, and major controversies, including the debate over Samuel Johnson, are discussed.
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