The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency
John Eglin
Jan 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Dan Calley
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10 hr 45 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Gambling 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 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 and unprecedented appreciation for mathematical probability and its applications, opening the possibility that games of chance might be pursued as a profitable commercial venture. The Gambling Century focuses like no previous work on those who enabled, facilitated, and profited from gambling, as well as on efforts to regulate or outlaw it.
About the author
John Eglin is currently professor of history at the University of Montana. His published work includes Venice Transfigured: The Myth of Venice in British Culture, 1660-1797 and The Imaginary Autocrat: Beau Nash and the Invention of Bath.
Dan Calley is a professional voice-over artist with more than two hundred audiobooks to his credit.
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