Introduction:

Historian T. H. Breen has written at length about the process of Anglicization, whereby colonists became more culturally English over time as they imitated and sought British goods in the eighteenth century. They learned about British fashions by reading novels, newspaper advertisements, magazines about English country life, and stories about the royal family. In this excerpt, Breen addresses how such news spread.

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Excerpt:

 “…after 1740 London and to a lesser extent the rest of England acted as a powerful magnet pulling the colonists ever closer to the defining center of the good life…. The cultural messages issuing forth from the cosmopolitan center [London] percolated down through provincial society, from major port cities to small farming villages, until the latest intelligence about good taste and polite behavior eventually reached [the remote] corners of the globe.”