This chapter explores the reception of David Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Britain by linking computational methods of text reuse detection with more traditional approaches to the history of ideas. We find that many of Hume’s essays were frequently reprinted individually, in whole and in part, including in anthologies, grammars, style guides, and collections such as The Philosophical Dictionary, where editors often moulded for their readers what they took Hume’s message to be. As the century drew to a close, Hume’s essays were firmly integrated into the diverse landscape of eighteenth-century British literary culture. We reveal which essays underwent the most extensive reuse, carefully analysing them based on their respective collections and as individual titles. We find that, just because Hume ‘withdrew’ an essay from his collection, it did not necessarily mean it was withdrawn from the public eye. Several essays by Hume experienced evolving life cycles, and numerous authors incorporated his texts discreetly, some without explicitly acknowledging their use. Taking Hume’s essays as a whole, the range of topics and venues involved in the history of their eighteenth-century reuses is striking. Our story includes not only prominent political and economic thinkers, historians, philosophers, lawyers and clergy but also scores of hack writers, anonymous authors and a range of publishers, editors and compilers. The chapter demonstrates how a more comprehensive grasp of the reception of Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Britain accommodates all these facets.

By the late eighteenth century, it was cliché to observe that the British East India Company ruled India “by the sword.” Scholarship on the colonial state, though, has tended to pay more attention to the Company’s civil infrastructure. This chapter argues that the army was in fact an influential part of this empire, at times approaching a “stratocracy” – a state ruled by its army. It situates the Company’s armies simultaneously within India’s political landscape and British imperial networks and provides a brief overview of these contexts. It further explores what it means to bring soldiers to the forefront of historical analysis. Such an approach requires acknowledging the sharp inequities in the Company’s military, most dramatically between its white officer corps and the Indian sepoys (soldiers) and officers who made up the bulk of its forces. Such inequities pose difficulties for historical research, since the former group is far more visible in the archive, but also points to a key historical process. White officers used the systemic inequity to their own advantage – not just to assert power over sepoys but to claim influence in the colonial project.