Historiography Of Britain Research Articles

Channelling Ottoman Armenian Refugees During the Hamidian Massacres: Immigration Restrictions and British Liberal Imperial Humanitarianism at Stake (1894–1898)

ABSTRACT This article examines British refuge to Ottoman Armenians in the aftermath of the 1894–1897 Hamidian massacres, an episode absent from the historiography of Britain and refuge, and largely from historical refugee studies. Analysed against the backdrop of the restrictionist Aliens Bills (1894–1905), refuge offered by Britain to tens of thousands of Ottoman Armenians seems a contradiction in terms. This article seeks to go beyond this contradiction and reflects on why and how the British Conservative Prime Minister, originator of the 1894 Aliens Bill when still in the Opposition, actively helped channelling Ottoman Armenians outside of the Ottoman Empire. Rather than encouraging movement to Britain, Salisbury urged to propose a British tradition of welcome more in keeping with current sensibilities in terms of domestic immigration. In so doing, Salisbury first sought to revive a tradition of British refuge as imperial. As it largely failed, he explored alternative, liminal loci (Bulgaria) outside of the formal Empire where British humanitarians, with the official support of the Foreign Office, might provide aid to Ottoman Armenian refugees – in the margins of international law. This case study thus offers new ways of envisaging British refuge in the late nineteenth century.

Spain! Why? Jawaharlal Nehru, Non-Intervention, and the Spanish Civil War

This article analyzes British non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War through the lens of Indian anti-fascism. To date, non-intervention, Aid Spain campaigns, and appeasement have dominated the historiography of Britain and the Spanish Civil War. Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain faced an impossible decision between supporting fascism or communism (as some in Britain understood it). In due course, they tried to contain the conflict. However, Indian intervention in the Spanish Civil War complicates this narrative of non-intervention. I contend that in addition to a difficult crisis for England, the Spanish Civil War was also an opportunity for Indian anti-colonialists to demonstrate their independence from the British Empire.

Inevitable Decay: Debates over Climate, Food Security, and Plant Heredity in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Climate change and the failure of crops are significant but overlooked events in the history of heredity. Bad weather and dangerously low harvests provided momentum and urgency for answers to questions about how best to improve and acclimatize staple varieties. In the 1790s, a series of crop failures in Britain led to the popularization of and widespread debate over Thomas Andrew Knight’s suggestion that poor weather was in fact largely unconnected to the bad harvests. Rather, Knight argued, Britain’s older varieties—particularly its fruit trees—were coming to the natural end of their lifespans. At a period when Britain was trying to maximize its agricultural land usage, Knight campaigned that his fellow farmers ought to set aside land and resources in order to cultivate new varieties—an expensive and time-consuming procedure—in order to avoid disaster. In this paper, I argue that Knight’s lifelong commitment to his position demonstrates the role played by changes in climate and weather on popular understandings of plant heredity. Further, drawing upon the historiography of Britain’s climate and agriculture, I show that despite reliable weather and good harvests, Knight’s campaign survived for several decades before the continued health of Britain’s trees was finally treated as sufficient evidence to dispense with Knight’s warnings. This case provides a means of thinking about the history of heredity as it is shaped and impacted by changes in climate and local conditions.

Two flags in the sand: anti-Communism in early Cold War Northern Ireland

ABSTRACTThis article reveals how the Cold War impinged upon not just national, but local political considerations and became woven into communal narratives. It contributes to the examination of religion in the conflict, adds to the historiography of Britain and the Cold War, and provides a context by which British Cold War experience and responses can be assessed. With Northern Ireland’s political similarities to Great Britain, its consistency with European norms and its overlaps with popular sentiment in the United States, Northern Ireland offers a gauge to better understand the nature of anti-Communism in the Cold War’s first decade and offers an unexplored perspective on the conflict.

WHO OWNS INDIA’S HISTORY? A CRITIQUE OF SHASHI THAROOR’S INGLORIOUS EMPIRE

The historiography of Britain's colonial past has always been problematic, shaped by conflicting mythologies about Britain's role as benefactor or exploiter. In the wake of Indian independence in 1947 it was in the interests of India's national identity to present what had gone before as a period of unmitigated oppression challenged by a united people. The consequence was widespread ignorance about the realities of British rule and of the Indian economy prior to and after British rule, exemplified by a current best-seller written by a well-known Indian political figure, Dr Shashi Tharoor, whose main arguments are examined; in particular, his central claim that India was a wealthy nation prior to Britain's colonial intervention reduced to poverty by Britain's ‘depredations’.

Thinking Black: Peter Fryer’s Staying Power and the Politics of Writing Black British History in the 1980s

Now entering its fourth decade, Peter Fryer's Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain remains a centrally important text for British historians studying the metropolitan dimensions of race and empire. However, as a milestone in British, black British and radical historiography it is frequently acknowledged but far less often critically engaged. While other foundational texts and figures in radical and left historiography have received growing attention in recent years, and while the epistemologies of their practices have been constantly debated, Fryer's contributions are largely undiscussed and his assumptions about what constitutes black British history unexplored. Narrating the genesis of Fryer's text within a wider black radical formation, this article emphasizes the alternative routes for radical historiography in Britain which constituted black British history as a radical field, and asks where, when and why this field emerged. Through this, the article also proposes that paying attention to how Fryer framed his understanding of black history is important for how we understand the field today. By looking closer at Fryer's text we can see both how different is the field of black British and postcolonial history today, and which questions remain, often unresolved.

A History of Historical Distances

A History of Historical Distances Jason H. Pearl (bio) The term “distance” has become a buzzword among literature scholars for new interpretive methods. How closely should we read individual texts? How heavily can we rely on abstract models to provide greater distance and perspective on numerous texts? In On Historical Distance (Yale, 2013), Mark Salber Phillips reminds us that historians have their own questions of distance, in particular the question of how distantly, or proximately, to understand and represent earlier episodes in history. Of course, the two kinds of distance are discipline specific, but each raises roughly similar methodological issues about engagement and identification on the one hand and detachment and estrangement on the other. What concerns Phillips is the always-variable relationship between actual temporal distance and represented historiographic distance, as well as the kinds and combinations of distance that make up particular historical vantage points. These matters have gone largely unacknowledged, or acknowledged only indirectly, except for a few notable exceptions, including David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country, Carlo Ginzburg’s Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, and a new volume of essays edited by Phillips, Barbara Caine, and Julia Adeney Thomas, entitled Rethinking Historical Distance.1 What the monograph under review gives us is a more sustained treatment of the concept that makes it both mobile across history and especially pertinent to the historiography of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is worth pointing out that Phillips claims always to have been interested in issues of distance. This will come as no surprise to readers of his previous book, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820, the introduction and conclusion of which offer brief statements on distance that get further developed in the new book.2 In Society and Sentiment, an appreciation of the complexities of historical distance is one of the keys to recuperating the historical work of David Hume and others before Leopold von Ranke, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Jules Michelet. On Historical Distance returns to several of the same topics, as well as topics in Phillips’s earlier books on Florentine [End Page 391] and Italian history, and although this might seem redundant to some readers, the new book is aimed at a broader audience, and moreover it reinterprets the familiar material and intersperses it with much that is new.3 The most far-reaching insights come in the introduction, where historical distance is defined as encompassing the various ways history writing orients us toward different periods of the past. Distance is a primary idea of human understanding; it is a mediatory and relational concept that helps us understand historical parts and reconcile them with historical wholes. Here and throughout the book, Phillips is keen to demonstrate the complexities of distance, to show that “the plasticity of distance produces richly variable designs” (9). Holding history close does not necessarily entail identification; seeing the past more remotely does not always result in a cooler sense of proportions. The introduction elaborates four specific types of distance: “Every representation of history incorporates elements of making, feeling, acting, and understanding” (6). The first category comprises the media, genres, and conventions that give history writing its formal structures. The second refers to its affective qualities. The third denotes its ideological summons, the fourth its epistemological bases. Although these categories overlap, a certain valence in one never necessitates a corresponding valence in another, and Phillips avoids what he calls “a fixed combinatory logic,” preferring instead to consider individual texts on their own and presume a wide range of possibilities for signification (9). The rest of the book delves fairly deeply into individual historical works clustered around three moments in Western history: 1500, 1800, and 1968. Indeed, the organization of the book is a bit peculiar, though what is intended is not a comprehensive survey but “ten experiments around a central idea” (xii). Two earlier chapters concern Renaissance historiography; six middle chapters— the bulk of the book— treat different aspects of the transition from Enlightenment to Romantic historiography in Britain; and two at the end are devoted to the late twentieth century. From chapter to chapter, Phillips ranges widely, examining not...

‘Some Abstract Socialistic Ideal or Principle’: British Reactions to New Zealand's 1938 Social Security Act

This article, utilising British and New Zealand primary sources, examines the impact of New Zealand's 1938 Social Security Act on British health care reform. The Act, brought in by the Dominion's first Labour government, sought to socialize health care. It was opposed by most New Zealand and British doctors, organised by the British Medical Association in both countries; but supported by the political left in both New Zealand and Britain. This episode is neglected in the historiography of Britain's National Health Service but what happened in New Zealand significantly shaped British thinking about health care reform in the late 1930s and 1940s.

Un siècle après, retour sur la masculinité et les blessures de la Première Guerre mondiale

In the year of the centenary of the First World War, it is timely to reflect upon the rise of masculinity studies and its impact on the historiography of Britain’s military culture and the changing landscape of focused studies of the war. To be sure, many historians now regard gender and war as ‘inevitably intertwined’, as Alison Fell recently argued. In this essay, I will examine the historiography of the First World War, as it relates to the study of military masculinities, the rising schol...

A peripheral vision: Communist historiography in Britain

A peripheral vision: Communist historiography in Britain

The Cragg Family Memorandum Book: Society, Politics, and Religion in North Lancashire During the 1790s

The Cragg family memorandum book is a detailed source for society and politics in the rural area around Lancaster, a region often neglected by historians in favour of the archive-rich south Lancashire. It records local and national events from the point of view of provincial Quaker yeomen. The most striking entries are republican radical in character. They attack the government and aristocracy about the war, taxes, and militia ballot. This was a period when the older ideological world of the eighteenth century was being eroded by the new forces of a wider free market in both economy and politics, but where the more ideologically-certain world of the mid nineteenth century had not yet solidified to fill up the void. The memorandum book deals with all three debates and is a reflection of this unstable world. A key theme in the memorandum book is a sense of place. The historiography of Britain during the French wars emphasizes a growing identification with the Britishness shared by most inhabitants. The memorandum book illustrates how this identification was filtered through local mechanisms of power and regional identities: a 'Lancashire Britishness'.

Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership

Contents: Introduction Fred M. Leventhal and Roland Quinault The case for coercing America before the Revolution, P.J. Marshall The American Revolution in Britain's imperial identity, Eliga H. Gould Transatlantic trade in the era of the American Revolution, David Hancock Manners and character in Anglo-American perceptions, 1750-1850, Paul Langford Queen Victoria and the United States, Walter L. Arnstein 'America' in the Victorian cultural imagination, James Epstein Anglo-American attitudes to democracy from Lincoln to Churchill, Roland Quinault Free trade and the international order: the Anglo-American tradition, 1846-1946, Anthony Howe Irish nationalism and Anglo-American relations in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , Alan O'Day Was there an Anglo-American feminist movement in the earlier twentieth century?, Christine Bolt Public face and public space: the projection of Britain in America before the Second World War, Fred M. Leventhal Commitment and catastrophe: twentieth-century conservative historiography in Britain and America, Reba N. Soffer War and Anglo-American financial relations in the twentieth century, Kathleen Burk America and the representation of British history in film and television, D. L. LeMahieu Discord or accommodation? Britain and the United States in world affairs, 1945-92, Peter L. Hahn Index.

‘inebriates’, ‘heathens’, templars and suffragists: Scotland and imperial feminism c. 1870-1914

This article examines the extent to which the British Empire was central to the women's suffrage debate within the Scottish Christian Union. This analysis follows two trends in the historiography of Britain and of women's suffrage: an integration of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘imperial’ in the historiography of Britain; and a recognition of internationalism within women's suffrage. This discussion points to regional diversity within Great Britain and to the influence of imperialism and evangelicalism on women's activism in the so-called Celtic fringe. In so doing, this article aims to contribute to a more complex representation of middle-class women's participation in Britain's temperance and women's suffrage movements.

Operation ‘Surgeon’ and Britain's post-war exploitation of Nazi German aeronautics

After 1945, Allied acquisition of intelligence on Nazi Germany's wartime aeronautical innovations became one of the most important immediate post-war aims. From July 1945 to July 1947, Operation ‘Surgeon’ became the focus of British efforts to exploit Nazi aeronautical advances. The objectives of the operation were the evacuation of state-of-the-art equipment from aeronautical research institutes and the recruitment of high-grade aviation experts for postwar work in Britain. This article analyzes the conduct and results of Operation ‘Surgeon’. The limited literature on this topic has fuelled a popular orthodoxy which holds that the UK intelligence effort and policies to recruit German defence scientists were classic examples of the ‘British disease’, or a more general inability to exploit a technological opportunity that was harnessed so effectively by the other victorious Allies. Drawing on the experience of Operation ‘Surgeon’, the article challenges this orthodoxy that has dominated the historiography of Britain's intellectual reparations from the Third Reich.

‘Why should we be always looking back?’‘Christian art’ in nineteenth‐century historiography in Britain

For George Eliot in Middlemarch availability of literature on Christian art separated the world of the 1870s from that of fifty years before. ‘Christian art’ indeed emerged punctually in the mid‐1830s as a category unconnected with any existing stylistic or period designation, but as coterminous with Christian faith. This essay examines its context in religious crisis and Utopian thought as ‘Christian art’ was translated from architectural revival to historiography of the figurative arts by English writers taking various approaches to the challenge. Among these the most systematic revivalist was Lord Lindsay in his Sketches of the History of Christian Art (1847). The most critical was Anna Jameson, who in ‘The House of Titian’ (1845) questioned in fundamentally historical terms the possibility, and desirability, of recreating the art of the past.

The rise and fall of ‘critical’ historiography? Some reflections on the historiographical agenda of the left in Britain, France and Germany at the end of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT This article compares the rise and fall of ‘critical’, that is to say oppositional and emancipatory, historiography in Britain, France and Germany since 1945. It argues that the prolonged crisis of the old ‘critical’ paradigm from the late 1970s onwards had much to do with political disillusionment and methodological weaknesses. It concludes by suggesting that any new ‘critical’ historiography will have to explore the opportunities inherent in the multitude of radical histories which developed in the 1980s and 1990s (most notably history‐from‐below, cultural, feminist and post‐modernist histories), without attempting to homogenise and synthesise these diverse and separate forms of historical writing into some new super‐paradigm, which would only produce new closures and erasures.

Leisure, culture and the historian: reviewing the first generation of leisure historiography in Britain

A comprehensive and critical review of 15 years or more of scholarly production in the social history of leisure in Britain, c. 1700 to the present, under three headings: the broad chronology or developmental schema suggested by historians, their various and disputed interpretations of the major forces and relationships in modern leisure formation, and an overall assessment of the field and suggestions for future work. The review notes historians' growing appreciation of the complexity of leisure's role in social change and class relationships, their attention to the significance of continuities amid change, and their broadening understanding of cultural dynamics, but argues that the field needs some recharging from more imaginative and theoretically informed approaches to leisure as text, discourse and performance.

Clio's Mirror: Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands

Clio's Mirror: Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands

An Examination of Spencer's Sociology of Music and Its Impact on Music Historiography in Britain

The last dozen years or so have seen a substantial and most welcome revival of interest in the many aspects of Victorian evolutionary sociology. It is welcome because it helps us to understand a period in the history of sociology which was to shape decisively for a good many years its problems and methods, and also because, in detailing and evaluating the arguments promulgated by the social evolutionists, it furnishes us with a range of criticisms to aim at any sociologists of today who might revamp the old themes.

A Concise Economic Historiography of Britain in Recent Times

A Concise Economic Historiography of Britain in Recent Times