A Night at the Inn: material culture and the elite experience of empire, 1650 - 1850

Following the experiences of an elite traveller staying at inns while on the road in the British Atlantic world of the long eighteenth century, A Night at the Inn makes the case for the significance of architecture and material culture in the creation, maintenance and extension of the British nation and Atlantic empire.
A Night at the Inn is the principal outcome of the Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, ‘The Inn and the Traveller in the Atlantic World’. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research in the UK, Ireland, Canada, the United States and the Caribbean, the book identifies and analyses a transatlantic pattern of inn building and use that enabled transatlantic mobility, sociability and urbanism. Moreover, spending time inside an inn defined elite perceptions of nation and empire as somewhere familiar, somewhere British.