Description
Book SynopsisGambling captures as nothing else the drama of the long eighteenth century between the age of religious wars and the age of revolutions. The society that was confronted with games of chance pursued as commercial ventures also came to grips with unprecedented social mobility, floated by new wealth from new sources that created fortunes from trade in sugar, cotton, ivory, silk, tea, or enslaved human beings. Likewise, play for money was prominent in the public imagination as money itself, deployed through an ever expanding and ever more sophisticated range of mechanisms, increasingly invaded public awareness, as when prospective spouses in period fiction were rated in terms of annual income as if they were municipal bonds. Similarly, the archetypal figure of the gambler captured the imagination of the public in fiction, media, and politics. At the same time, new interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics - encouraged and bankrolled by those in power - fostered a new an
Table of Contents0: Introduction: The Gambling Century 1: Probability and its Discontents 2: Court to City: Gaming in Baroque Europe 3: Sons of Hazard: The Sharper in Literature, Media, and Law 4: In the Shade of the Royal Oak: Commercial Gaming by Royal Patent 5: Making Bank: The Emergence of Metropolitan Gaming Concerns 6: The Groom Porter's Dodge: The Court and Commercial Gaming 7: The Bench Versus the Banks: Policing Gaming in Westminster 8: Commercial Gaming in the Wake of the Georgian Statutes 9: The Pilgrimage to Saint James's, or, Clubs are Trumps 10: Harmless Amusements: High Politics and High Stakes 11: At Home with Faro's Daughters 12: Breaking Even: Gaming Entrepreneurship at Century's End 13: Toward the Victorian Reconfiguration of Gaming, and Afterward
