This book is a political tract written by Wills Hill, the Marquis of Downshire, in 1799. Hill proposed a plan for unifying the governments of Great Britain and Ireland, which at the time were separate nations with separate parliaments. His proposal called for a federal system that would preserve the distinct identities of the two countries while allowing for greater cooperation and coordination. This book is of interest to political scientists and historians of the British Isles. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Seventeenth-century 'English Literature' has long been thought about in narrowly English terms. Archipelagic English corrects this by devolving anglophone writing, showing how much remarkable work was produced in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and how preoccupied such English authors as Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell were with the often fraught interactions between ethnic, religious, and national groups around the British-Irish archipelago. This book transforms our understanding of canonical texts from Macbeth to Defoe's Colonel Jack, but it also shows the significance of a whole series of authors (from William Drummond in Scotland to the Earl of Orrery in County Cork) who were prominent during their lifetimes but who have since become neglected because they do not fit the Anglocentric paradigm. With its European and imperial dimensions, and its close attention to the cultural make-up of early modern Britain and Ireland, Archipelagic English authoritatively engages with, questions, and develops the claim now made by historians that the crises of the seventeenth century stem from the instabilities of a state-system which, between 1603 and 1707, was multiple, mixed, and inclined to let local quarrels spiral into all-consuming conflict. This is a major, interdisciplinary contribution to literary and historical scholarship which is also set to influence present-day arguments about devolution, unionism, and nationalism in Britain and Ireland.

Across eight volumes, this two-part collection of selected texts focuses on autobiographies and biographies of courtesans, directories of whores, erotic poems dedicated to harlots, jocular descriptions of prostitutes and jest books on strumpets.