Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>A Night at the Inn follows the experiences of an elite traveller on a journey through the North Atlantic world of the late seventeenth to early nineteenth century. What becomes clear along the way is that inns were much more than somewhere for a drink, a meal, and a bed for the night; they played a central role in what was first a British, later Anglophone, process of national and imperial place-making. Whether in Scotland, Virginia, or Jamaica, ‘principal inns’ contained the useful spaces and things that society’s ruling elites needed to establish and maintain power. Moreover, familiar in their sameness, from one inn to the next the material world experienced inside principal inns shaped elite inn-goers’ perceptions of place, confirming that here—wherever here was—was somewhere familiar, somewhere civilized, somewhere British.</jats:p>