viii Preface development but also help to condition patterns of economic mod- ernization.3 Yet, paradoxically, there is a recognition that associational vitality cannot be taken for granted. Recent studies of the role of voluntary organizations in contemporary Britain and America have suggestedadeclineinpublicparticipation,withaconsequentthreatto civil society at the end of the twentieth century.4 These approaches raise many issues: when and why do voluntary societies emerge? What forms do they take? Who joins them and for what reasons? Where are they located? What do they do? How stable and effective are they? And what is their impact? For Britain (and the United States) the historical evolution of clubs and societies, the predominant species of modern voluntary association, and their advent as a major social institution remains obscure, with many of the key questions concerning their development only starting to be explored.Thenineteenthcenturyhasoftenbeenseenasthegreatage of British societies, when their numbers multiplied and they made a central contribution to public policy and community life.5 In fact, the origins of the movement are considerably earlier. As we will find in this study, clubs and societies were not some kind of Darwinian outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution, but the product of that expansive period of English social and economic development from thetimeoftheEnglishRevolutiontothelateeighteenthcentury.This was a period of accelerating urbanization which also brought forth a host of other innovations—from spas and seaside resorts to hobbies andspectatorsports,illuminatedstreets,window-shopping,andeven- tuallysteam-poweredfactories.Theoriginofclubsandsocietiesisnot simply a point of historical genealogy. It is arguable that the special pressures and conditions of the early modern period moulded the distinctive character of British clubs and societies,and so their role in modern society. Equally significant, the Georgian period saw the institution exported to other parts of the English-speaking world, notleasttoitssecondhomeinNorthAmerica.Toanswertheoriginal question: there is a good case for saying that we cannot understand modern society without understanding the world of the modern 3 R. D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ, 1993). 4 Id.,‘WhoKilledCivicAmerica?’,Prospect(Mar.1996),66–72;B.KnightandP.Stokes, TheDeficitinCivilSocietyintheUnitedKingdom(Birmingham,1996). 5 e.g.R.J.Morris,‘Clubs,SocietiesandAssociations’,inF.M.L.Thompson(ed.),The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, Vol. III (Cambridge, 1990), 405–43; see also below,ch.13 Preface ix voluntary association, and we cannot understand that without under- standing its pre-industrial origins. I came to the subject of this book from two directions: first, from my research on British towns, in which clubs and societies emerge during the Augustan era as one of the key elements of that urban cultural renaissance so brilliantly described by Peter Borsay; secondly, and more directly, from my earlier study of public drinking houses, where I discovered that after the Restoration inns, taverns, coffee- houses, and alehouses lodged an ever-increasing number and variety of clubs and societies. Impressed by their diversity, their strange names, and their infiltration of urban society, I began hunting down associations in archives and libraries, first in England and later in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and North America. I attempted a brief, preliminary survey of the rise of this social institution in my H. J. Dyos Lecture Sociability and Urbanity: Clubs and Societies in the Eighteenth Century City (Leicester, 1986). The importance of the subject seemed increasingly evident. If a British Enlightenment did exist, then one of its principal engines was the Georgian voluntary society. Fanning out across the English-speaking world, clubs and societies may have served as a vector for new ideas, new values, new kinds of social alignment, and forms of national, regional, and local identity. By the late eighteenth century there are indications of the emergence of modern-style voluntary societies with stronger administrative struc- tures and a detailed public agenda. Attemptingtotrackdownandclarifythesedevelopments,however, has posed many problems. One is the nature of the documentation, voluminous in quantity but often poor in quality; this issue is dis- cussed in more detail in Chapter 1. Another problem is that for any systematic discussion of the rise of associations in early modern Britain one needs to address not only the domestic history of the institution, but alsoitsinteraction with a host ofwider developments: the growth of towns and cities, the rise of public sociability and conspicuous consumption, the evolution of private and public space, growing gender differentiation, and much else. To try to contain this increasingly gargantuan topic, I decided to conclude the main analysis at1800,bywhichtime,arguably,thesingularimportanceandprincipal features of British associational life had been established. Even with this somewhat arbitrary chronological closure, however, it is obvious that the investigation is limited and incomplete. More needs to be done on mapping and quantifying the growth of voluntary associ- ations,oncarryingoutregionalandcommunitysurveys,onunravelling