British Political History Research Articles

The Impact of the Magna Carta on Medieval English Politics

This research examines the influence of the Magna Carta during the reign of King John, a time characterized by his authoritarian governance and fiscal requisitions. The study examines the impact of the Magna Carta, which arose from the rebellion of the barons against King John. It altered the balance of power by questioning the notion of the divine right of kings and laying the groundwork for the establishment of parliamentary systems and legal changes. The study emphasizes the Magna Cartas significance as not just a legal instrument, but also as a catalyst for change in English political history. The Magna Carta championed individual liberties and laid the foundation for a system of government where representatives are elected and the principle of legal governance is upheld. The research finishes by highlighting the modern relevance of the Magna Carta in government and education, and advocating for a more profound comprehension of its historical and present importance.

The Royal Treatment

The Royal Treatment

The political alignment of presidents of the early Royal Society of London

PurposeThis study aims to identify the political alignment and political activity of the 11 Presidents of Britain’s most important scientific organisation, the Royal Society of London, in its early years 1662–1703, to determine whether or not the institution was politically aligned.Design/methodology/approachThere is almost no information addressing the political alignment of the Royal Society or its Presidents available in the institution’s archives, or in the writings of historians specialising in its administration. Even reliable biographical sources, such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography provide very limited information. However, as 10 Presidents were elected Member of Parliament (MP), The History of Parliament: British Political, Social and Local History provides a wealth of accurate, in-depth data, revealing the alignment of both.FindingsAll Presidents held senior government offices, the first was a Royalist aristocrat; of the remaining 10, 8 were Royalist or Tory MPs, 2 of whom were falsely imprisoned by the House of Commons, 2 were Whig MPs, while 4 were elevated to the Lords. The institution was Royalist aligned 1662–1680, Tory aligned 1680–1695 and Whig aligned 1695–1703, which reflects changes in Parliament and State.Originality/valueThis study establishes that the early Royal Society was not an apolitical institution and that the political alignment of Presidents and institution continued in later eras. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the election or appointment of an organisation’s most senior officer can be used to signal its political alignment with government and other organisations to serve various ends.

Teaching Modern British Political History in a Politically Polarised and ‘Post-Truth’ Environment

Abstract This article assesses the challenges that university-level teachers of modern British political history currently face in what is often described as a ‘post-truth’ and polarised political environment. It argues that, whilst these challenges do not always present entirely new pedagogical considerations, the sociocultural and political terrain in Britain today requires careful navigation, particularly in an academic field which addresses recent historical topics that are routinely politicised and contested in contemporary discourse. Although there is a lack of scholarly literature on the topic of teaching modern British political history in a higher education setting, this article draws upon a wide array of educational studies to map out the contours of a successful pedagogical strategy that could facilitate ‘deep’ learning in the current contextual environment. To this end, it suggests that by utilising modern British political history's interdisciplinary foundations, applying teaching techniques that help students to explore topics from multiple viewpoints, devising new and stimulating interactive tasks, and capitalising on the opportunities afforded by the Internet age, learning can be enhanced and many of the more academically problematic features and characteristics of the current political climate can be counteracted.

Why do Historians Ignore Digital Analysis? Bring on the Luddites

AbstractThis article argues that historians have failed to grasp the profound opportunities afforded by computational analysis. Despite the abundance of machine‐readable data liberated by digitisation—alongside tools and exemplar studies—there has been no widespread embrace of text mining or revival of cliometrics. This ambivalence has arisen mainly through apathy and side‐lining of computational analysis to a specialist methodological niche. The absence of justification is damaging to the intellectual vitality of the discipline and its capacity to face the dawning age of data science.The article calls for an urgent debate about the historian and the computer. More than anything else, this requires sceptics to come forward to meet the advocates to discuss how we face the future. British political history has a proud tradition of methodological innovation and there is no better subfield in which to begin a debate that has fundamental implications for the whole discipline.

Introduction: The Future of British Political History

AbstractPolitics and history are closely intertwined and historians play a vital role in British public life. Yet, British political history, which has a critical contribution to make for understanding British politics today, faces two urgent challenges. First, academic history has retreated from subjects that remain hugely popular in media and trade publishing and of interest to social scientists, such as the histories of political institutions and formal power structures. Second, political history is disconnected from innovative trends in the wider historiography of modern Britain. Combined, these issues leave political historians in an ambiguous position in relation to the wider field, to other academic disciplines and to contemporary political debates. After discussing these challenges, this introduction surveys this special issue, which reflects on what (if anything) is distinctive about political history as practised today, and what its contribution to historiography, social science and public life should be. It ends by posing key questions for historians of all methodological stripes who investigate Britain's political past.

Diversifying British Political History

AbstractThis article explores what the diversification of British political history might look like. Building on an expanded definition of citizenship and attention to ‘ordinary’ politics, it suggests several questions which might diversify political history's content and approach. Whom do we count as political actors? Who has access to democratic processes and where does politics happen beyond these processes? To what forms of political thought do we attend? Drawing on examples from my own research on refugees and asylum seekers in modern Britain, and on the wider field of modern British history, I demonstrate the possibilities of diversification as a way to enliven political history's future.

His(Tory): why British History needs Conservatives

AbstractBritish academia today is overwhelmingly left‐leaning in its political orientation and especially pro‐Labour. This article examines what impact this is having on British political history. It begins by demonstrating just how recent this left‐wing preponderance is and how, as late as the 1990s, there remained a strong grouping of right‐leaning political historians. This, the article argues, helps in part explain the relative vibrancy of political history in that era compared to today. Turning to the advantages a larger number of conservative voices would bring to the sub‐discipline, the article identifies how those on the right are more likely to subscribe to different methodological approaches, have different historical interests and be interested in different kinds of political questions from their left‐leaning colleagues. Most of all, it stresses how political diversity would help historians of every persuasion better recognise the ideological frameworks that inform their own work.

The Future of British Political History: Concluding Remarks

AbstractThese concluding remarks reflect, in the light of the preceding articles, on two themes that recur throughout the collection. First, how can historians maintain an effective presence in public debate about politics in Britain? Second, how should political historians position themselves within the discipline, at a time when—it is suggested—political history is losing ground among British academic historians? It is argued here that, in each case, they should reflect on what they can most distinctively contribute, either as historians or as political historians; and that they should frame their interventions accordingly.

Towards the Vernacular, Away from Politics? Political History after the ‘New Political History’

AbstractThis article considers how modern British political history has changed since the ‘new political history’ of the 1990s. It focusses on the ‘vernacular’ histories which have emerged in the last decade or so. The vernacular ‘turn’ is frequently framed by its proponents in opposition to the new political history, with its focus on the rhetoric of politicians and subsequent tendency to reproduce the perspectives of political elites. This article, however, identifies continuities between these approaches, noting their shared interest in advancing a more complex understanding of the relationship between politics and people in the past. It argues that the real challenge posed by the vernacular lies in the necessary reckoning with the ‘apartness’ of politics from the perspective of ordinary people. Yet here too, this piece suggests, the vernacular turn can be seen as the latest stage in a continual rethinking of the relationship between political, social and cultural history.

Ideas in Politics in International Context

AbstractThis article asks how we might rethink the study of ‘ideas in politics’ in modern Britain. It suggests that historians need to set the problem in its international contexts in a more structured way. Focussing on the nineteenth century, the article reflects on conceptual angles opened up by ‘global intellectual’ and ‘entangled’ approaches to political ideas and behaviour. While stressing that these methods have their pitfalls, the article argues that a reconsideration of the seams where international and intellectual contexts meet can help to reconnect modern British political history with wider historical debates.

Women and the Labour Party: Gender and the Writing of British Political History

AbstractThis article takes stock of the state of women's political history in the twentieth century and suggests new lines of enquiry, drawing on the authors’ own work on the Labour Party. It identifies a number of key themes which have enriched histories of women and gender in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and considers how these might be developed. Firstly, it examines the significance of the local, and more particularly, the neighbourhood, in women's political lives. Secondly, it asserts the value of focussing on the membership, including the economic, social and cultural shifts that shaped their lives, the intersection of gender with factors such as age or ethnicity, and their own political identities. Finally, it stresses the importance of interrogating masculine cultures to understand how gendered dynamics played out. It concludes with a reminder that inserting women into established political narratives is insufficient: the point is to transform those narratives.

The Politics of Race and the Future of British Political History

AbstractThis article addresses the field of British political history's blind spot when it comes to race. Where modern British political historians are comfortable approaching politics in ‘high’ and ‘popular’ forms as well as in terms of ideas, institutions and policy, they often struggle even to see a politics of race in operation. Using examples drawn from research on the post‐1945 history of the white supremacist movement in Britain, this article maintains that the means to render race visible in the political history of modern Britain lies in the incorporation of previously overlooked perspectives. In search of these perspectives, it looks to black British history and critical studies of race. In particular, it highlights analyses and critiques of British racism by black political activists, from those who organised in response to the 1959 murder of Kelso Cochrane, to the Black Power groups of the 1970s.

Women’s Activism in Twentieth-Century Britain: Making Difference across the Political Spectrum. By Paula Bartley

Women’s Activism in Twentieth-Century Britain introduces a wonderfully diverse range of campaigns, protests, and political engagement women undertook as they sought to bring about change at a local, national, and international level during the twentieth century. Activism occurred through formal and informal organizations or even individually, like Mrs Roberts, a mother of two who in the 1960s chained herself to a noticeboard at the council offices because she needed a council house. The many areas discussed in the book are a real indication not only of Bartley’s research but also of the seismic growth of women’s history and resources available to historians of women in the last 40 years. Taken as a whole, this book thus broadens the reader’s understanding of the scope of women’s activism and makes an argument for its importance to twentieth-century British political history. The introduction opens with a discussion of the Anglo-Indian social reformer Olive Malvery, whose writing exposed the: ‘lives of women and the sharp end of exploitation: factory and ship workers, waitresses, barmaids, costermongers and seamstresses’. [P1] She is one of the many women who lifted the lid on the unseen exploitation women experienced in the workplace. Indeed, this volume has a strong focus on Labour and working-class histories, including women’s industrial action during the First and Second World Wars. This is to be expected from a historian whose recent publications have included books on Ellen Wilkinson and Labour Cabinet Ministers. However, as Bartley explains there were multiple different reasons why women took action such as redressing injustice, creating a better world, or even a response to loss. Thus, this book’s scope is not limited to campaigns around women’s issues; for example, Women against Pit Closures and Lilian Bilocca, who led a huge protest again poor safety standards on Hull trawlers in which her sons and husband worked. Overall, these women’s campaigns for the lives and livelihoods of their men also find a place in the text.

Book Review: Spectres of John Ball: The Peasants’ Revolt in English Political History, 1391–2020, James Crossley

Book Review: Spectres of John Ball: The Peasants’ Revolt in English Political History, 1391–2020, James Crossley

Choreography of Defeat: The Fall of the 1979 Government

AbstractThis article reassesses the attempt by the Labour government in 1979 to overcome challenges faced without an overall majority; the collapse of the Lib‐Lab Pact; internal party dissent; and referendum results on Scottish and Welsh devolution. The efforts to patch together a parliamentary majority with other parties’ MPs while allaying opponents of devolution within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) ultimately failed. Although the chronology of the defeat is well established and has formed the basis of many studies of British political history, less well understood is the choreography of defeat, the sequence of discussions and negotiations with smaller parties and internal debates within the government on how to respond to the results of the devolution referendums in Wales and Scotland held on 1 March 1979. Documents from the National Archives, Kew, including detailed accounts of the prime minister's conversations and discussions with cabinet colleagues and other party leaders, as well as an analysis of the decision‐making process inside 10 Downing Street highlight the limited choices available to the prime minister. It shows the difficulties the prime minister had in assessing the likely behaviour of MPs from the smaller parties as well as his own. James Callaghan rejected proposals from his deputy, Michael Foot, to avert defeat, preferring instead to avoid the possibility of dividing his party. This resulted in defeat in the no confidence vote that precipitated the general election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power.

Petitions from Lincolnshire, c. 1200–c. 1500 ed. by Gwilym Dodd, Alison K. McHardy, and Lisa Liddy

Reviewed by: Petitions from Lincolnshire, c. 1200–c. 1500 ed. by Gwilym Dodd, Alison K. McHardy, and Lisa Liddy Mark Ryan Geldof Gwilym Dodd, Alison K. McHardy, and Lisa Liddy, eds., Petitions from Lincolnshire, c. 1200–c. 1500. The Lincoln Record Society 108 ( Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020), lxvi + 375 pp. With the growing ubiquity of digitized collections of primary sources, one could be forgiven in thinking there is little desire for, or value in, the "traditional" output of printed collections sponsored by records societies. The present volume is one of those collections that reminds readers why this particular type of academic scholarship remains important. While it is a major simplification, one can think of the medieval English justice system as "complaint-based," where offended parties seek remedy, rather than having central judicial authorities seek wrongdoing. These complaints form the content of medieval petitions as well as the petitioning system of legal remedy itself. Dodd and McHardy, with assistance from Liddy, have assembled a diverse collection of material with roots in Lincolnshire that share the form of petitions—documents written to persuade readers and elicit sympathy and support for the petitioner—composed between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Dodd's extensive experience with this genre is evident, as the collection does not limit itself to the Parliamentary petitions alone; also included are petitions addressed to the court of Chancery, Justiciars, and regents (when and where they are present in the course of English political history). Thus, the range of issues, varieties of claimants, defendants, and interested parties is as diverse a group as possible. More than just a collection of abstracted and transcribed records, this volume contains a lengthy introduction to the genre of rhetorical petitioning, its goals as persuasive texts, the routes petitioners used to seek remedy, and the subtle and unsubtle ways petitions obscured, amplified, or manipulated facts, motives, and interests. While many of these texts describe disputes in ways that are frustratingly oblique and that further research can little differentiate, the value of the petitions themselves—as examples of persuasive or argumentative writing—hold value beyond the specifics they may or may not contain about the period, place, and people they discuss. Of the 190 petitions in the collection, the majority date from the fourteenth century (120) with another 52 from the fifteenth century. Fifteen petitions date to the thirteenth century, while only one petition is included from the sixteenth. Each petition is given its current archival or institutional reference, established or presumed date of production, a detailed abstract (which in some cases is a translation of the original text), a transcription of the original document, and, finally, a detailed (in many instances, probably exhaustive) contextual discussion that notes previous occasions of publication and collection details. These [End Page 245] extensive notes are where this sort of collection really shows its value, as each petition turns into a kind of "worked example," which demonstrates just how much one can learn from sources that superficially seem too thin on content or too obscure in subject to justify close analysis. Those notes also show us just how far scholarship has progressed since the early years of the record societies, which printed collections such as these with little or no contextual material or even abstracts. Of course, the audience for such works has changed and so too has their value as research and teaching aids. Because of the chronological and contextual scope of this collection, readers can more clearly see the ways that the petition genre changed over time. Changes in the choice of Latin, French, or English are obvious but less so are the changes in the way arguments are made, and who they addressed. Some petitions exhibit a careful strategy of omission, often when petitioners are less than innocent of offence themselves. Others play on the readers sympathies or appeal to their obligations as powerful arbitrators or sources of justice. Very little of this sort of rhetorical content appears in the more numerous but less argumentative material in the records of the common law. This collection adds considerable detail and variety to our understanding of the social, economic, and political contexts in which these petitioners, and their communities, lived. Mark...

Commerce and Republicanism in the Atlantic World

English-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century have long fascinated historians on both sides of the North Sea and beyond. The three Anglo-Dutch Wars fought between 1652 and 1674 have traditionally attracted the most attention. Another aspect of the complex relationship that has received significant consideration in the past few decades is that of the ways in which the Dutch Republic shaped English society and institutions. The most obvious example of Dutch influence on the shaping of the English state is that of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 in which the Dutch stadholder William III invaded England in order to disrupt an Anglo-French alliance and to ensure that the island-nation remained Protestant. Jonathan Scott, a historian at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and a specialist of seventeenth-century English political history, has contributed extensively to the scholarship about the English fascination with the Dutch Republic. In his latest book, Scott...

‘Since this is a Document of Record’: Collecting the Oral Histories of the Brexit Parliament

AbstractThis article brings together over thirty on‐the‐record interviews with politicians and political strategists at the centre of British politics during the Brexit gridlock. Prompting political elites to retell their oral histories allows us to begin to understand areas of institutional change and continuity, with the aim of beginning the process of ‘historicising’ Brexit. These interviews demonstrate three areas where the norms of the UK political system were tested and challenged between June 2017 and January 2020: attempts at sustained cross‐party activity in the House of Commons, efforts to rebalance legislative‐executive relations, and the temporary fluidity of the UK's party system. Boris Johnson's ultimate success during this period of (what is now) British political history provides a salutary lesson in the durability of majoritarianism within Westminster, even in the face of sustained challenge on multiple fronts.

“The System of Odd and Even Numbers”: Lewis Namier the Diplomatic Historian

ABSTRACT Sir Lewis Namier has left a deep, if contested, imprint on studies of eighteenth-century British political history. Namier the student of great power relations, by contrast, has been largely allowed to slide into oblivion. It is a curious fate, for in his day his public profile as a commentator on international affairs was very high. This article attempts to reconstruct Namier as a diplomatic historian, the intellectual assumptions that underpinned his work, the manner in which he framed the study of European great power politics, and the methods he employed.