Coffeehouse Culture in the Atlantic World, 1650-1789,

Abstract

studies ranging from the American colonies, the Caribbean, Africa, and India, the treatment of each is quite uneven and seemingly comes at the cost of a more wholistic treatment of ‘Britain’ itself. There is very little discussion of Scotland and Wales and the question of Ireland’s place within the empire and its incorporation into the domestic state after 1801 goes almost unnoticed. This seems something of a missed opportunity in a work discussing the interconnections between the domestic and imperial, particularly if one considers the extent to which the British state relied on the Irish establishment for the provision of pensions and sinecures. Readers of this journal will no doubt be pleased with the very broad conception of corruption adopted by Knights. Not only does he pay a substantial amount of attention to the religious and moral origins of the term and their continued resonance, he also highlights the extent to which discussions of corruption were both shaped by and helped to shape broader cultural conventions, such as the division between public and private and the ways in which officeholding and its emoluments were bound up in what Paul Langford called the ‘propertied mind’ of the eighteenth-century British elite. In Trust & Distrust, Knights has produced a work of significant importance and breadth, one which deserves to be read by historians and non-historians alike with an interest in the politics and culture of early modern Britain and its empire.