Steven Pincus will be coming to speak at the Seminar in Cultural History on Wednesday, November 14, 2012. His talk is entitled “Spanish American Trade, Patriot Politics and the Shaping of the British Empire.”

Steven Pincus is Professor of History and International and Area Studies at Yale University. He has previously taught at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. Pincus received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. His primary research interests include 17th and 18th century British political history, the emergence of capitalism, the history of economic thought, the origins of the British Empire, the early modern Atlantic world, early modern nationalism, comparative revolutions, and political thought. Pincus’s publications on these subjects include: 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, co-ed., Peter Lake (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); England’s Glorious Revolution, 1688-1689: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Press, 2005); A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, co-ed., Alan Houston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1668 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996). He is currently working on a book-length publication entitled, The Origins of the British Empire ca. 1650- 1784 (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).

Britons at the turn of the eighteenth century were obsessed with objects from the East. They wore Indian calicoes. They drank tea. They displayed Chinese porcelain. Yet few in South Asia or China were interested in anything the British Isles had to offer. How did Britons pay for their cultural addictions? The answer was with bullion being mined in Spanish America. In his talk, Pincus will reinterpret the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) as a struggle within Britain over competing ideas of how to solve this political economic conundrum. The Treaty of Utrecht ending the war represented the temporary triumph of a Tory vision of empire as colonial conquest against a Whig version that focused on economic penetration of Spanish America.

Light refreshments will be served at 5:45 pm. The presentation will begin at 6:00 pm.

RSVP is required.

PLEASE NOTE that our Lecture Hall can only accommodate a limited number of people, so please come early if you would like to have a seat in the main room. We also have overflow seating available; all registrants who arrive late will be seated in the overflow area.