Overview
A bold reinterpretation of Georgian Britian 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.
Full Product Details
Author: Daniel Maudlin (Professor of History and Heritage, Professor of History and Heritage, University of Plymouth)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 16.20cm
, Height: 2.00cm
, Length: 24.00cm
Weight: 0.607kg
ISBN: 9780198867050
ISBN 10: 0198867050
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 11 June 2026
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
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Author Information
Daniel Maudlin specialises in the architectural and material culture histories of Britain and its global contexts, focussing on the North Atlantic world of the long eighteenth century. He is Professor of History and Heritage at the University of Plymouth. He studied at the University of St Andrews, undergraduate and postgraduate, followed by a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellowship at Dalhousie University, Canada. He has since held fellowships at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the universities of Glasgow, Guelph, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Before turning to academia he worked at Historic Environment Scotland, National Galleries of Scotland and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
