In O the Roast Beef of Old England, one of his most famous paintings, William Hogarth appears as himself, drawing the fortifications at Calais just before being wrongly caught as a spy in 1748. It's hardly a scenario that you'd describe as subtle. The raggedy French troops are on their last legs, barely surviving on weak soup, while a swarm of fishwives look just like the flounder they're selling from their tatty basket.

A big, hungry friar is attempting to get his hands on a succulent beef joint that has just been unloaded and is on its way to one of Calais' numerous English restaurants (only 200 years earlier the town had belonged to Britain). By inference, British citizens do not spy, however the image of Hogarth busy drawing to one side serves as a caution not to dismiss John Bull as dense.

Hogarth's "Old England" is prosperous, plentiful, and unrestricted. Meanwhile, the French have been reduced to a series of degrading stereotypes: stupid, scandalous, and completely devoted to the absolutist Roman Catholic church (you can just make out some gorgeously attired priests and abasing peasants in the background).

It's easy to understand why Hogarth is regarded as the father of a distinct stream of painting that is distinctly British: figurative, narrative, and unafraid to poke fun at itself. His most renowned social satires, such as A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode, are sometimes described as a mix between a Shakespearean play and a Carry On film, with more disguises, reversals of fortune, libidinous women, and drunken boys than a bottle of gin can hold.

However, Tate Britain’s new exhibition Hogarth and Europe sets out to prove that the artist was far from anyone’s conception of a “little Englander”. Rather, he felt himself as a sharp citizen of a fast globalizing economy, and he was perceived as such.

Hogarth not only traveled around Europe, but he also attracted a large number of Italian and French artists to his own London, forming strong networks of cross-pollination, mutual support, and sometimes thieving. Even those artists who preferred to remain at home could now keep a close watch on the competition. Engraving, which Hogarth embraced, enabled exact reproductions of masterworks to travel far and wide, resulting in the formation of a new virtual community of art professionals.

In this new light, O the Roast Beef of Old England takes on a new meaning. Hogarth's work bears an obvious tribute to Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, the French Academician whose work he had lately visited in Paris and whose exquisite still lifes he knew so well, in the delicious still-life elements – notably that lovely marbled beef. Then there's the way Hogarth employs the easily identifiable topography of the Calais gate as a framing technique, firmly placing his picture in the growing genre of city views, which was simultaneously being perfected by Canaletto, who was living and working in London at the time.

Meanwhile, recent research has proven that Hogarth's vicious anti-Catholic iconography was influenced by his numerous Huguenot associates, French Protestant exiles fleeing religious persecution in London. Hogarth's old friend and skilled engraver John Pine, a man thought to be of African heritage and one of the 3% of Londoners who were black at the time, modeled the image of the obese, greedy friar.

Finally, the way Hogarth's Old England painting was copied on punchbowls and vases painted in China for the English market contributed to its saturation.

The Tate curators are looking for unexpected links, echoes, and even dust-ups by placing Hogarth's work alongside that of his European contemporaries Chardin, Pietro Longhi, Cornelis Troost (often referred to as "the Dutch Hogarth"), Giuseppe Crespi, and Nicolas Lancret. In the 1730s, when the Venetian painter Jacopo Amigoni was awarded the project of adorning the stairwells in the new buildings for St Bartholomew's hospital in London, Hogarth rushed in and insisted on finishing the work for free. There was a limit to how welcoming one could expect the competitors to be.

The common sense of what it meant to be an artist in the contemporary world binded these men together, and sometimes caused them to clash. "The first creative freelancers were Hogarth and his contemporaries," says co-curator Martin Myrone. "Artists were no longer reliant on royal or aristocratic patronage and were free to establish themselves on their own." (The Mozart family, for example, visited Britain on their own initiative rather than at the request of the king or empress.)

New places for independent artists and their studios gradually become available. Long Acre was the name of the street in London, whereas Rue St-Jacques was the name of the street in Paris. In the function of establishing relationships between consumers, suppliers, and the artists themselves, commercial neighborhoods have taken the place of royal courts and exclusive universities.

Hogarth, who was born in London in 1697, was well positioned to capitalize on these trends. His despondent father intended to be a man of literature, but following the failure of a coffee shop where customers were expected to know Latin, he was imprisoned for debt.

Young William began his career as an apprentice to a silver-plate engraver, but soon left his teacher to work as an independent copperplate engraver, making book drawings, tickets, and trade cards — something that would have been professional suicide just 50 years ago. Hogarth broke out new paths to financial success and artistic liberty as a self-published artist.

In addition, his written views on the art world, together with his drive to preserve artists' copyright (which was passed into law in 1735), demonstrated a clear understanding of how creative people needed to protect themselves from economic exploitation and danger.

All of this is captured in The Painter and His Pug, his renowned self-portrait. According to X-rays, Hogarth began by portraying himself as an artist in a magnificent fashion, complete with a wig and a formal coat with gold buttons. He abruptly changed course in 1745, presumably after a trip to Paris, and began to dress like a working professional in a casual jacket and hat.

He even shows off his scar. The way he emphasizes the similarities between his own smudgy, snub-nosed face and those of his pug reminds me of Lucian Freud's works, which juxtapose human and animal forms. And the fact that Hogarth chose a pug — a Dutch breed that originated in China – shatters whatever illusions he could have had about himself as a bold patriot who would only pose with a British bulldog.

Hogarth's images of women reflected the same expanded notion of selfhood. Until recently, only princesses and empresses had their bodies decorated, and the emblems of their spouses' riches were hung from their bodies like fleshy Christmas trees. But Hogarth takes a different approach, attempting to discover what makes a lady unique.

Miss Mary Edwards, an heiress who received £8 million in today's money at the age of 23, is his most renowned picture. She married a nobleman named Lord Anne Hamilton (whose Christian name adds to the mystery) who consented to bear her surname. When Lord Anne began swindling Mary's riches, she demanded a divorce and was able to establish that her marriage was unlawful, despite the fact that she had made her son illegitimate in the process.

Mary is surrounded by symbols of genderless liberty in this image by Hogarth, which hasn't been seen in Britain in almost a century: a gun dog, a celestial globe, portrait busts of Alfred the Great, and documents that contain a statement of individual rights. She looks at the spectator confidently, a new lady for a new world.

When Hogarth draws his sisters, he exhibits the same distinct sense of personality. Subjectivity was no longer the exclusive domain of the wealthy and aristocracy, but could also be personified by working-class women. His photos of Mary and Anne are not glamour photographs, but precise likenesses, with snub noses and soft jaws that easily identify them as his siblings.

The ladies had the grim, apprehensive expressions that come with having a spendthrift father. They understand what it's like to go to work - they own a children's clothes store together – and they know how much money is enough. Hogarth's portraits of his servants, which he portrays as people rather than "types," are as remarkable.

According to the Tate curators, Hogarth may have been influenced by drawings from Jean-Antoine Watteau's sketchbook, in which the French artist, well known for his whimsical fêtes galantes, draws figures of African heritage.

While the Tate exhibition is eye-opening in the way it recasts Hogarth the bold nationalist as a well-informed European, Myrone believes it is incorrect to label him a revolutionary. Hogarth has long been seen as a class fighter and daring opponent of expanding capitalism by the progressive left. A Harlot's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode, for example, are a scathing condemnation of men and women debased by their new appetites for gin and sex, but also of the heaps of goods – silk shawls, sugar cones, gaudy geegaws – that were flooding into Britain as a consequence of its expanding empire.

But claiming that Hogarth despised capitalism is as deceptive as claiming that he was a proto-Brexiteer. His first and foremost commitment was to himself. In 1757, he was overjoyed to succeed his brother-in-law as Serjeant Painter to the King, just as his closest European buddy Chardin gladly accepted a governmental pension.

The Hogarth who emerges from this show is not a saint nor a sinner, nor a leftist nor a rightist, but a contemporary artist who realized where his best interests were in a fast changing society at any given time.

Thanks to Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.