Servants on Grand Tour in Europe in the Eighteenth Century

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Servants on Grand Tour in Europe in the Eighteenth CenturyThroughout the eighteenth century, elite British travellers relied on their servants' skills, such as their knowledge of languages, geography, and the value of goods and services, to create a 'British' travel experience. This project, which emerges from my PhD research, will examine the roles of maids, valets, coachmen, or other British or European personal servants, to recover a group of travellers we know little about and their contributions to the success or failure of a Grand Tour. These servants travelled, not for their own business or pleasure, but for that of their elite employers. A case study approach will reshape our concept of master-servant relationships. It will examine the enforced proximity of masters and servants under travel conditions and what this tells us about the development of national and social identities, conceptualisations of class, as well as the nature of labour migration in the eighteenth century.The aims of this research are fivefold:1. To analyse servants' participation in eighteenth-century European cultures of travel. Redressing travel scholarship's tendency to focus on elites, it will foster wider historical understanding of travel as a cultural, social and economic force in eighteenth-century Europe.2. To provide a fresh account of the service relationship that emphasises the agency of domestic servants.3. To contribute to current academic and public debates on national identities, class, mobility and labour, gender, and British-European relations.4. To investigate the fluidity and connectivity between travel and migration.5. To establish, how far British high culture in the eighteenth-century was built on mundane skills of people not commonly seen as refined participants in society.Servants who deliberately developed travel expertise to appeal to employers feature only on the margins of research, as tutors or otherwise specialised and learned companions, again, further occluding the role of servants in shaping British travel culture. Studying the experiences of travelling servants will bring together into a single frame the analysis of elite and labouring class travel that are often treated separately. Tracing their histories will allow us to combine cultural and economic analyses, to reconnect the Grand Tour with the economic world of the lower orders and to add the elite, transitory, and cultural to histories of labour and migration.The elite dimension of eighteenth-century travel does not need to be doubted to accept that there is a facilitating non-elite counterpart. To understand the social, cultural, economic, and political dimension of eighteenth-century British travel we need to consider those who surrounded and supported elite travellers daily, and access new types of source material in order to understand the 'place' servants held in British travel and identity formation.Servants can be considered a particularly mobile group in the eighteenth century. The project will make use of different ideas of mobility, physical, economic, social, and contrast these with the concept of domesticity. The study will incorporate approaches taken from transnational history and gender studies and combine these with the economic and socio-anthropological insights of labour and migration studies.This fellowship is an important steppingstone in the long-term development of my postdoctoral research. By the end of the 12-month period I will be able to start work on my project in depth having laid the groundwork already. This groundwork constitutes of establishing a direction for my research profile through an increasing publication track record and building a professional network within the eighteenth-century research community. It also includes developing prescient and compelling funding proposals that demonstrate my abilities to contribute to the wider field of social, cultural, and economic eighteenth-century studies.