In the late eighteenth century, the viceroyalty of New Spain extended its control over Alta California, introducing secular cultural practices like music, dance, and drama which gained popularity among traders, soldiers, and hybrid communities, blurring the traditional boundaries of race, gender, and class. These societal shifts foreshadowed the forthcoming wars of independence (1810–1821) and clashed with missionary liturgy, accentuating the growing divide between monastic orders and secular society. This chapter focuses on the censorship of Fermín de Reygadas’s play, Astucias por heredar, un sobrino a un tío ("Tricks to Inherit: a Nephew and His Uncle"). Initially censored in the viceroyalty, the play was later transported and performed in Alta California, only to be concealed by Hubert Bancroft, who omitted all references to it in his History of California. This play survived two forms of censorship: Spanish colonial moral censorship and Anglo-American disregard towards a text and a performance that did not fit his racialized historiographic narratives. The chapter also explores the play’s staging in Villa de Branciforte near the Santa Cruz mission and concludes by comparing two performances of the play, considering the role of language, location, and early Californio history in contemporary decolonial reenactments.

White cultural elites in the US capital of Philadelphia in the 1780s and 1790s depicted Native Americans (or “Indians”) as vanishing peoples, soon to be replaced by Anglo culture. The fledgling nation’s premier naturalist Bejamin Smith Barton and the consecrated poet of the American Revolution Philip Freneau turned to Spanish American antiquarianism to invent a glorious antiquity for North America. They learned from Antonio de Ulloa’s Noticas Americanas (1772) and Francisco Javier Clavijero’s Storia Antica del Messico (1781) how to practice antiquarian materialism, then chose early Republican literary and scientific periodicals to disseminate their conquest of the Native American past. Those two americanistas in particular showed how to collect Indigenous artifacts, assemble them, and invest them with European meanings, which inspired the first generation of US Americanists to relegate Native American life to the dustbin of prehistory and at once fabricate their own Whiteness.

For all that scholars have challenged the notion that the novel rose in conjunction with Enlightenment individualism, empiricism, and the modern nation-state, it’s still largely seen as an essentially Eurocentric form that can tell us much about how authors and readers thought about the rest of the world but little about the world itself. Ultimately turning to Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas as an example, this chapter makes a case for how decentralizing Europe from our perceptions of eighteenth-century geographical discourse changes what literary scholars might see and say about the continuities between the realist novel and the global contexts from which it grew.

Although a product of his time – the literary traditions of Pope, Addison, and Swift; the Toryism and churchmanship of the eighteenth century – Samuel Johnson also transcended it through his own gifts and forceful character. After a difficult early life, marked by melancholy, a troubled relationship with his family, and an early departure from Oxford University, Johnson began to find his way in the 1730s. He married Elizabeth Porter, moved to London, and began to make his mark through work at the Gentleman’s Magazine and works such as the Life of Savage. He achieved renown as an essayist and fame as the compiler of the Dictionary but also suffered from bereavement and continuing financial insecurity. After the award of a government pension in 1762, Johnson’s works have a more relaxed style, and his final major work, the Lives of the Poets, helped to establish this era as the Age of Johnson.

The chapter examines the distinctiveness of this composite freedom suit; the unorthodox Afro descendant community that took it to the highest imperial tribunal in Madrid; and the larger historical context that triggered the legal action in the early 1780s. It lays out the significance of the notions of “collective freedom” and “natives of a pueblo” deriving from colonial customary practices and from political, social, and juridical discourses rooted in the Spanish Atlantic world here reworked into novel proposals that challenged the approaching tsunami of slavery expansion in Cuba and the Atlantic world amid the Age of Revolutions, and it even presented a colonial alternative to slave-based plantation and extractive regimes. Linkages are made between the local, colonial, and imperial levels in which legal and political mobilizations unfolded. The chapter also surveys the various historiographies of slavery, race, Afro descendants, Indians, and law, politics and society that intersect in this study and discusses the sources and archives on which the study is based.

The early essay in English was a fluid and malleable form. It was thus ‘fugitive’: it could be deeply topical, fleeting, and perishable, taking up the ephemeral and the occasional, and could easily travel across media from reader to reader given its portability. This chapter studies how writers exploited the affordances of the essay, first in seventeenth-century newsbooks and pamphlets, and then in early eighteenth-century periodicals. It retraces the origins of the English newsbook in a highly regulated media ecology, and examines the essayistic writings of Marchamont Nedham as a case study in stylistic innovation and rhetorical self-fashioning. During the era of licensing (1662–95) and the first decades of the eighteenth century, essayists continued to adapt the form, finding in the emergent print media of this period a ready site for politics and polemic.

The main aim of this chapter is to show that sexuality and capitalism are intrinsically related. Such an endeavour demands extracting sex from the domains of nature, reproduction, and the private, and relating it to the intricate norms of capitalism. The first part of the chapter looks at why capitalism and sexuality have been articulated as belonging to separate spheres of life. How did it come to seem that “being a sex” and “having sex” is so entirely removed from the “investment of money to make more money”? The second part of the chapter provides an overview of the historical evolution of capitalism and its relationship to sexuality, focusing on the nineteenth-century transition from the household family-based economy to a fully developed capitalist free labour economy. The main characters of this chapter are homo economicus and his economically invisible wife, the producers of valuable social relations, as well as various “reformable” or “irreformable” others whose sex is deemed of no value or even against value. The chapter presents social relations as capitalist and sexual, and treats the dichotomies social–natural, public–private, and economic–cultural as interwoven in the (de)politicization of both sexuality and capitalism.

Eighteenth-century Paris was the site of multiple sexual cultures ranging from permissive to conservative. All these sexual cultures operated within a set of prescriptive legal, religious, and moralistic discourses that prohibited sex outside of marriage while often supporting sexual pleasure within it. Many Parisians ignored these prescriptions, often with impunity. The police concerned themselves with public sex and intervened in private affairs only when asked to do so. Paris was home to a diverse permissive sexual culture. It was comprised of a portion of the financial, social, political, and intellectual elite, often identified as libertines, for whom sex outside marriage was both widespread and widely accepted. It also included men who had sex with each other as part of Paris’s extensive sodomitical subculture, though there is little evidence of a modern homosexual identity. Prostitution was endemic in Paris, encompassing numerous forms of transactional sex that translated into a sort of hierarchy, with women kept as mistresses by men of the elite at the top and those catering to marginal men at the bottom. We know least about the sex lives of other ordinary people, though evidence suggests many had sex outside of marriage and many cared deeply for their spouses.

The sexual culture of eighteenth-century Philadelphia was relatively open, particularly when compared with other North American colonial cities. This was due in part to its diverse, multi-national and multi-racial population and traditions, as well as to a steady stream of new ideas. During this period perceptions about gender, sexuality, and marriage were evolving, influenced by new scientific theories, Enlightenment thought, and republican ideology, disseminated by its changing population and the availability of printed sources. In addition, many laws changed as the colony became a state, and within the city new prisons and almshouses were built. Nevertheless, rape, as now, was seldom reported or prosecuted, and especially in the nineteenth century Black women and women considered ‘unrespectable’ were often blamed for enticing men. During the eighteenth century men and women easily moved in and out of relationships, sexual relationships outside marriage were frequently tolerated, and women had some sexual freedom. Prostitution was not confined to one section of the city; neither were the births of illegitimate children. Women could obtain abortifacients, and erotic literature was widely read. However, by the nineteenth century such behaviour was increasingly considered deviant, and Philadelphia was a much less tolerant place.