Speaker: Dr Oliver Cox (Heritage Engagement Fellow, TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, Radcliffe Humanities, University of Oxford)
Title: ‘‘Interchangeable venues of social and political life’: Horseracing and the public sphere in England and Ireland in the long eighteenth century’
Synopsis:
In A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783, Paul Langford observed that, 'Westminster and Newmarket were more or less interchangeable venues of social and political life'.Coffee houses, associations, clubs and supper clubs, theatres and pleasure gardens, town houses and country houses, have all been explored in detail, but the racecourse sits outside and disconnected from most eighteenth-century scholarship. This paper suggests that the eighteenth-century racecourse is that century's last great under explored space, and asks what happens, and what changes, when we put horse racing, and horses, back at the heart of the narrative.