This Gedenkschrift by former students and colleagues celebrates the career of an Oxford historian of eighteenth-century Britain, whose scholarly legacy will be furthered by the research and reflections collected here. Paul Langford (1945–2015) was Professor of History at the University of Oxford, where he spent his entire career. On completing a doctorate supervised by John Owen and Lucy Sutherland, he published The first Rockingham administration, 1765–66 (1973). As Tutor in History at Lincoln College, Langford taught a great many undergraduate and graduate students how to achieve a historical understanding of Britain between the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and the political and cultural crises of the American and French revolutions. Langford's early career focused on high politics, with influential articles and books including Walpole and the Robinocracy (1986). He spent the 1980s amassing research for two major outputs – A polite and commercial people, England 1727–1783 (1989) and Public life and the propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (1991). Langford served the wider academy in a series of prestigious offices, including General Editor of the Writings and speeches of Edmund Burke, but his major books are both very Oxford products. Public life and the propertied Englishman arose from his Ford Lectures, while A polite and commercial people remains a landmark in the New Oxford history of England series, rarely matched in its pithy summation of complex cultural change alongside an authoritative account of political developments. Langford's later work on social behaviour was more relaxed, resulting in Englishness identified: manners and character, 1650–1850 (2000).

Langford's insights into the interaction of politics and cultural change remain a more robust basis for the study of eighteenth-century Britain than the arguments made by historians who have pursued cultural history without paying attention to the politics and commerce that shaped the age. The volume under review is a fitting memorial to that scholarly achievement. As the editors set out in their introduction, Revisiting the polite and commercial people is structured around key themes of concern to Langford and his students. The introduction also explains how A polite and commercial people itself provided a carefully crafted history that shifted perspectives on Hanoverian Britain. This widely-read book replaced an elitist view of powdered wigs, party politics and high-handed imperialism with a recognition of the commercial middling sorts in making a market-based society at the heart of an expanding (and contracting) empire. From today's vantage point, Langford overemphasised emulation as a mechanism for explaining the historical agency of the middle class. But generally the book stands well 30 years on. ‘The birth of sensibility’ chapter remains a sensitive and compelling account of a crucial cultural shift, as the artifice of early Georgian politeness gave way to late Georgian sentiment and a new sympathy for nature, natural hair, animals, the poor, prisoners and the enslaved. Langford – together with his Oxford colleague Joanna Innes – promoted the view that the American crisis of the 1760s through 1780s destabilised English politics, triggering the onset of the ‘age of reform’. Reform reached its apogee in the 1830s amid new levels of industrialisation and population, but its antecedents in the eighteenth century remain under-appreciated. As the editors point out, Langford understood that nineteenth-century England in many ways sprang from developments in the eighteenth century.

In the afterword to this volume, Joanna Innes provides a public service to historians of the period by pointing out the neglected significance of Langford's major study into Public life and the propertied Englishman. Arising from the same massive research effort that underpinned A polite and commercial people, this second book was, in many ways, more original because it was unconstrained by the demands of a commissioned volume. Public life is a subtle and wide-ranging book, focusing on the ways in which property became, and remained, central to political participation from the Revolution of 1689 through to the 1790s. In an important essay, Innes sets out the ways in which Public life remains a major statement on how the politics and culture of eighteenth-century England arose from the conflicts and discourse that closed the seventeenth century. The most important issue for contemporaries – and thus for Langford as an historian – was the heightened significance of holding ‘property’. Langford elucidates how property came to underpin the public life of men engaged in political office – embracing the world of middling-sort townsmen and country yeomen along with the more prominent public politics of landed or monied gentlemen and parliaments. As Innes indicates, Langford's major study of the ‘propertied mind’ in relation to male political participation has yet to make its mark on the historiography.

The other essays in this volume are organised under three headings, aptly reflecting Langford's own carefully defined intellectual range. On ‘Politics’ we are treated to insightful essays from William Pettigrew on the ‘sanctity of property’ in relation to the Royal African Company and Parliament; Perry Gauci on the politics of improvement in Georgian London; Paul Seaward on the gallery of the old House of Commons; and Cindy McCreery on visual representations of King William IV. Studies of ‘Society and culture’ include Ian Doolittle on The City; Bob Harris on the Lottery; and Hannah Barker on religion and trade in Manchester. Of particular interest to this reviewer is Rosemary Sweet's informative essay on the turn to domesticity in the late eighteenth century, where Sweet demonstrates how domestic life became the subject of antiquarian history writing and picturesque picture making. A final section on ‘England, Britain and the world’ reflects Langford's acute awareness of the centrality of politics and cultures overseas to life on the island of Britain. Peter Marshall explores the British in St Vincent; Andrew O'Shaughnessy revises perspectives on British imperial policy towards America, and Leslie Mitchell highlights the continuity in cross-channel Anglo-French connections amid war and revolution. Elaine Chalus continues the focus on the cultural reverberations of political crises in her sensitive essay on gender, politeness and revolutions. The volume ends with a bibliography of Langford's major works.

This highly accomplished publication has done a marvellous tutor proud. I was privileged to take my Oxford Special Subject with Paul Langford on ‘Politics, reform and imperial crisis, 1774–1784’ in 1994–1995. Like so many of the contributors to this volume, Dr Langford taught me the value of elegantly expressed historical scholarship, which should be intellectually calibrated but never go beyond the written, visual or material evidence.