A Night at the Inn

A bold reinterpretation of Georgian Britain and North America that puts inns at the heart of the imperial project.

Inns were ubiquitous across the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period, inn going was universal among the elite citizens of that world and they feature prominently in contemporary accounts and literature as places of rest, refreshment, and good cheer.

A Night at the Inn follows the experiences of an elite traveller on a journey through the North Atlantic world. What becomes clear along the way is that inns were much more than somewhere for a drink, a meal and a bed for the night; they played a central role in what was first a British, later Anglophone, process of national and imperial placemaking. Whether in Scotland, Virginia, or Jamaica, 'principal inns' contained the useful spaces and things that society's ruling elites needed to establish and maintain power. Moreover, familiar in their sameness, from one inn to the next the material world experienced inside principal inns shaped elite inn-goers' perceptions of place, confirming that here—wherever here was—was somewhere familiar, somewhere 'civilised', somewhere British.

Highly illustrated and drawing on extensive field studies, archival and literary sources, A Night at the Inn offers a new reading of the everyday places and spaces that made and sustained the British Empire, and whose legacies continue to reverberate today.