This collection provides new insights into the 'Age of Revolutions', focussing on state trials for treason and sedition, and expands the sophisticated discussion that has marked the historiography of that period by examining political trials in Britain and the north Atlantic world from the 1790s and into the nineteenth century. In the current turbulent period, when Western governments are once again grappling with how to balance security and civil liberty against the threat of inflammatory ideas and actions during a period of international political and religious tension, it is timely to re-examine the motives, dilemmas, thinking and actions of governments facing similar problems during the 'Age of Revolutions'. The volume begins with a number of essays exploring the cases tried in England and Scotland in 1793-94 and examining those political trials from fresh angles (including their implications for legal developments, their representation in the press, and the emotion and the performances they generated in court). Subsequent sections widen the scope of the collection both chronologically (through the period up to the Reform Act of 1832 and extending as far as the end of the nineteenth century) and geographically (to Revolutionary France, republican Ireland, the United States and Canada). These comparative and longue duree approaches will stimulate new debate on the political trials of Georgian Britain and of the north Atlantic world more generally as well as a reassessment of their significance. This book deliberately incorporates essays by scholars working within and across a number of different disciplines including Law, Literary Studies and Political Science.

Macleod examines changing British conceptions of America across the political spectrum during a period of political, cultural and intellectual upheaval. Macleod incorporates British writers of conservative, liberal and radical views.

Macleod examines changing British conceptions of America across the political spectrum during a period of political, cultural, and intellectual upheaval. Split into two parts, covering the years 1775-1783 and 1783-1815, this book incorporates British writers of conservative, liberal, and radical views.

Reverend James Wodrow (1730-1810), minister of the Church of Scotland at Stevenston in Ayrshire, and Samuel Kenrick (1728-1811), tutor to a Renfrewshire family until 1763, and subsequently a merchant and banker in Bewdley, Worcestershire, began corresponding soon after leaving the University of Glasgow in 1750. They continued to do so until James Wodrow's death in 1810. Unusually, around 85% of the letters on both sides survive, held in manuscript in Dr Williams's Library, London. Volume I of this edition covers the years 1750-1783. Their correspondence is an exceptionally rich resource for the study of British culture and society in the era of Enlightenment and revolutions but one which has been underused, despite its value, and which ought to be much more widely known and available to scholars working in a range of fields. In lively and highly readable letters, Wodrow and Kenrick discussed politics, religion, reform, revolution, theology, international affairs, society, the economy, education, family, friendship, health, books, and many other concerns. Sustained over six decades, the correspondence reveals the lives of two highly literate provincial men and their families during the high and late Enlightenment, and the age of revolutions. Because they disagreed on some matters, notably the American and French Revolutions, they wrote lengthy and passionately-argued letters about them which are here made easily available to scholars for the first time. Samuel Kenrick lived in England from 1765, and the men only met again in 1789, so their friendship was carried out almost entirely on paper for forty-five years. The correspondence constitutes a remarkable record of a friendship.