The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.
John Locke’s treatise “An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government,” often called simply the Second Treatise of Government is probably the most influential work of political theory in the English language. Locke’s essay was widely read in the English-speaking world of the eighteenth century, and his arguments about government, consent, and property rights (just to name three of its main topics) became fundamental to the way that western people have conceived of these ideas ever since. Locke (1632-1704) provided some of the intellectual underpinning for the American revolution of the 1770s and 80s; many of the writers who supported the revolt against Parliament and the British Crown, such as Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, had read Locke, and you can see his emphasis on the need for government to have the consent of the governed reflected in their works.
When she published Oroonoko in 1688, Aphra Behn created one of the foundational myths of her period and of the century that followed. The story of the noble African prince tricked into slavery resonated powerfully with people in the English-speaking world for generations. This was even the case for those who never read Behn’s book. Behn’s work was adapted into a play entitled Oroonoko: A Tragedy by Thomas Southerne in 1695, and that version of the story–one that differs in key ways from Behn’s original–was one of the mainstays of the theater in Britain into the nineteenth century. Oroonoko was, like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver, a character who was introduced in a work of fiction in the decades around 1700 who would go on to have a long life outside the pages of the work in which he originally appeared.