THE FIRST section, entitled ‘Emergence of new political and social practices’, traces the foundations of British sociability to identify when and due to what factors a different kind of sociability emerged in different parts of Britain. Several key examples provide a vivid picture of a burgeoning social life increasingly organised around distinctive social institutions and driven by new social norms and behaviours.

Tracing the origins of sociability back to the Restoration provides a starting point for defining the nature of sociability, and the historiographical approach chosen by Brian Cowan in the opening chapter helps one to understand the connection between the history of sociability and politics. Arguing that the history of post-Restoration sociabilities must be a social history of politics, the author shows that the development of many new social spaces (coffeehouses, clubs, theatres, pleasure gardens, etc.) was integrally related to the political divisions that helped to contribute to the development of political parties, the most important political innovation of the Restoration era.

The establishment of a new and distinctly modern regime of British sociability was also determined by spatial factors. This aspect is emphasised in the second chapter, which identifies discrepancies as well as coordination between the urban environment and social structure. Supported by some new cartographic and geopositioning methods, Marie-Madeleine Martinet's objective is to highlight the correspondence between urban design and social functions, with buildings designed for specific traditional activities. At the same time, the spatial turn adopted by this analysis reveals various emerging networks of hidden economic and scientific sociability.

In fact, the formation of social networks and the shaping of British practices of sociability were very much stimulated by the emergence and development of these new social institutions. Valérie Capdeville argues in chapter 3 that the first gentlemen's clubs, which multiplied in London from the Restoration years into the reign of Queen Anne, answered new ‘sociable’ aspirations in post-Restoration Britain. The success of club sociability and the development of its polite and exclusive character not only depended on the emergence of an ‘alternative political nation’ but also on the rise of a commercial society and an urban culture that were specifically British.