Imperial entertainments: The British Empire, the early United States, and enduring Atlantic connections

Abstract

This paper brings together recent developments in leisure and entertainment history in the British Empire and Early America to suggest the opportunity for a new focus on the implications of the circulation of British imperial entertainments outside of Britain and its colonies. Since the last third of the twentieth century, scholars of Britain and its empire have been deeply interested in tracking and explaining the emergence of new forms of entertainment over the early modern and modern periods. Meanwhile, historians of Early America have been invested in uncovering the importance of entertainments in the making of the American Revolution and in advocating for competing visions of the new American nation. These two fields have largely developed independently. Nevertheless, British imperial entertainments continued to be important in the Early Republic. Work on American Anglophilia and Anglo‐American politics has begun to reconsider the lingering importance of Britain to the early United States. The implications of British entertainments in naturalizing imperial and Orientalist pursuits and ways of thinking in the United States and other emerging nation states remain to be explored.