The Gambling Century

Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-0-19-288819-8
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 284 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 237 mm, Gewicht: 608 g

Gambling captures as nothing else the drama of the “long eighteenth century” between the age of religious wars and the age of revolutions. The society that was confronted with games of chance pursued as commercial ventures also came to grips with unprecedented social mobility, floated by new wealth from new sources that created fortunes from trade in sugar, cotton, ivory, silk, tea, or enslaved human beings. Likewise, play for money was prominent in the public imagination as money itself, deployed through an ever expanding and ever more sophisticated range of mechanisms, increasingly invaded public awareness, as when prospective spouses in period fiction were rated in terms of annual income as if they were municipal bonds. Similarly, the archetypal figure of the gambler captured the imagination of the public in fiction, media, and politics. At the same time, new interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics - encouraged and bankrolled by those in power - fostered a new and unprecedented appreciation for mathematical probability and its applications, opening the possibility that games of chance might be pursued as a profitable commercial venture.

The Gambling Century focuses like no previous work on those who enabled, facilitated, and profited from gambling, as well as on efforts to regulate or outlaw it. Using extensive archival material as well as printed sources, it follows its subjects from the Court to the coffeehouse, to private clubs and “at homes” in townhouses, all of which prefigure that quintessentially modern gambling space, the casino.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Eglin, John

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 0: Introduction: The Gambling Century

- 1: Probability and its Discontents

- 2: Court to City: Gaming in Baroque Europe

- 3: Sons of Hazard: The Sharper in Literature, Media, and Law

- 4: In the Shade of the Royal Oak: Commercial Gaming by Royal Patent

- 5: Making Bank: The Emergence of Metropolitan Gaming Concerns

- 6: The Groom Porter's Dodge: The Court and Commercial Gaming

- 7: The Bench Versus the Banks: Policing Gaming in Westminster

- 8: Commercial Gaming in the Wake of the Georgian Statutes

- 9: The Pilgrimage to Saint James's, or, Clubs are Trumps

- 10: Harmless Amusements: High Politics and High Stakes

- 11: At Home with Faro's Daughters

- 12: Breaking Even: Gaming Entrepreneurship at Century's End

- 13: Toward the Victorian Reconfiguration of Gaming, and Afterward

Über Autor(innen)

John Eglin is currently Professor of History at the University of Montana. His published work includes Venice Transfigured: The Myth of Venice in British Culture, 1660-1797 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), and The Imaginary Autocrat: Beau Nash and the Invention of Bath (Profile, 2005). He is nearing completion of his edition of James Boswell's journals in Italy and France for the research edition of the Boswell papers published by Edinburgh University Press.