Royal Enterprise: Reconsidering the Crown's Engagement in Britain's Emerging Empire, 1660-1775

The royal family were an integral part of the institutional structures that underpinned Britain's economic and imperial development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, granting charters, patents, and monopolies to projects that attracted their support. During this period, they formed part of a tripartite system of economic and imperial oversight that included the crown, the court, and, increasingly, parliament. Yet, despite the crown's direct support for organisations such as the Royal Africa Company and the East India Company, or for the establishment of so-called 'crown colonies' in the Americas, studies of Britain's emerging empire rarely consider precisely how the royal family understood or participated in these activities. This is exacerbated by underdeveloped research into the imperial contexts of HRP's buildings and collections, where royals interacted with goods, people and ideas from across Britain's emerging empire. A consequence of this limited research is that a complete understanding of crown involvement in enterprise and empire is lacking.

To overcome this challenge, this CDP project will situate the examination of the royal role in empire by bringing together personal papers and state documents with the lived experience of royals in their courtly spaces. Key research questions include the following: what was the role of the royal family itself in imperial developments? What agency did royals have in the creation and support of these new institutional paradigms? How did their lives at court within the royal palaces shape how they understood Britain's emerging empire and their place within it?

In answering these questions, this CDP project will reintegrate the royal family into the study of British imperial and economic development, drawing on the built environment of HRP's palaces and the royal collections within them, and analysing them through multidisciplinary methodologies and diverse perspectives. The project will consider the royal family less as 'the state' and more as a group of individuals whose specific experiences, identities, interests, and emotional engagements with the material world shaped the ways in which they thought about and promoted empire. It will focus on a series of historical and object-based case studies (identified by the PhD researcher as they shape their research agenda) that will be grounded in HRP's properties at Hampton Court, Kensington, and Kew. This approach will help uncover how the royal family engaged with imperial expansion beyond simply signing patents placed before them, starting with the establishment of the Company of Royal Adventurers and the Royal Society in 1660 to the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775.

To deliver this ambitious research agenda, this PhD project will, from the start, adopt a connected methodological approach that draws on both the material world of the royal court (with additional training and access provided through this collaborative scheme) with more traditional research using archival and printed materials (of which each supervisor is expert). Together, this connection will support a fruitful and novel approach to this topic and will serve to effectively interrogate the reciprocal relationship between the royal family's involvement in innovative economic and imperial projects and the shaping of identities, networks, and culture at court. Through this analysis, the project will present an interpretation of the 'state's' role in empire that moves beyond the simple granting of charters and start to question precisely 'why' and 'how' royals chose to drive Britain's emerging empire in specific directions.