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

王室是17世纪和18世纪支撑英国经济和帝国发展的制度结构中不可或缺的一部分，对吸引他们支持的项目授予特许状、专利权和垄断权。在此期间，他们形成了一个包括王室、宫廷和议会在内的三方经济和帝国监督体系的一部分。然而，尽管英国王室直接支持皇家非洲公司和东印度公司等组织，或支持在美洲建立所谓的“直辖殖民地”，但对英国新兴帝国的研究很少考虑王室是如何理解或参与这些活动的。由于对HRP建筑和藏品的帝国背景的研究不发达，这种情况更加严重。皇室成员与来自英国新兴帝国的货物、人员和思想进行了互动。这种有限研究的一个后果是，缺乏对王室参与企业和帝国的完整理解。为了克服这一挑战，这个CDP项目将通过将个人文件和国家文件与皇室在宫廷空间的生活经历结合起来，来审视皇室在帝国中的角色。关键的研究问题包括：皇室本身在帝国发展中的作用是什么？王室在创造和支持这些新的制度范式方面发挥了什么作用？他们在宫廷中的生活如何塑造了他们对不列颠新兴帝国的理解以及他们在其中的地位？为了回答这些问题，这个CDP项目将重新将皇室纳入对英国帝国和经济发展的研究中，利用HRP宫殿的建筑环境和其中的皇家收藏品，并通过多学科方法和不同的视角对它们进行分析。该项目将不再把皇室视为“国家”，而是更多地将其视为一群个人，他们的特定经历、身份、兴趣以及与物质世界的情感接触塑造了他们思考和推动帝国的方式。它将侧重于一系列历史和基于对象的案例研究（由博士研究员确定，因为他们形成了他们的研究议程），这些案例研究将以HRP在汉普顿宫、肯辛顿和基尤的物业为基础。从1660年皇家冒险家公司和皇家学会的成立到1775年美国独立战争的爆发，这种方法将有助于揭示皇室如何参与帝国扩张，而不仅仅是签署他们面前的专利。为了实现这一雄心勃勃的研究议程，该博士项目将从一开始就采用一种联系的方法，既利用皇家宫廷的物质世界（通过该合作计划提供额外的培训和访问机会），也利用使用档案和印刷材料的更传统的研究（每个导师都是专家）。总之，这种联系将支持对这一主题富有成效和新颖的方法，并将有助于有效地询问皇室参与创新经济和帝国项目与宫廷身份、网络和文化塑造之间的相互关系。通过这一分析，该项目将呈现对“国家”在帝国中的作用的解释，超越了简单的特许状的授予，并开始准确地质疑“为什么”和“如何”皇室选择推动英国新兴帝国的特定方向。

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.