The history of Britain is dead; long live a global history ofBritain

Abstract

I propose a global history of modern Britain around an account of the rise, demise and reinvention of a liberal political economy that reified the market as the organising principle of government. It is a story that is inseparable from the growth and collapse of the British Empire, as well as the continuing, if precarious, global hegemony of the Anglosphere. The liberal political economy that germinated within the British Empire may have had a world system built around it, but events, processes and peoples far beyond the Anglosphere shaped the history of its rise, demise and reinvention. This history of Britain is then a global story, not because of that old imperial conceit that Britain made the world, but because the world made Britain.

This article has been peer reviewed.

Keywords:

• Britain
• British World
• imperialism
• liberalism
• political economy
• the market

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Kate Fullagar and Leigh Boucher for inviting me to the ‘Modern British History Workshop’ and forcing me to think harder about the book I am writing and why I am writing it! I learnt a lot at that workshop and thank all of those who participated in it for sharing their work and generating such a rich discussion. Initially written as a talk about a textbook that has no footnotes, this article only cites the historiography it engages with, not the archival bases of its evidence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the author

James Vernon, is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Politics and the People (1993), Hunger: A Modern History (2007) and Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (2014). He is also editor of Rereading the Constitution (1996) and co-editor of The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (2011), ‘The Humanities and the Crisis of the Public University’ Representations 116 (2011) and ‘The Berkeley Series in British Studies’ with University of California Press. The Cambridge History of Britain Since 1750 will be published in spring 2017.

Notes

1 We need more studies of how university management practices, national systems to measure the productivity of academic labour, as well as the protests against the student debt-financing of higher education, have taken remarkably similar forms across the British world. On the latter see Tania Palmieri and Clare Solomon, eds, Springtime: The New Student Rebellions (London: Verso, 2011).

2 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject,’ Journal of Modern History 47, no. 4 (1975): 601–21.

3 Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester Manchester University Press, 2013).

4 Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject,’ 620, 621.

5 Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

6 Conrad Russell, ‘The British Problem and the English Civil War,’ History 72 (1987): 395–415; Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Brendan Bradshaw and John Morril, eds, The British Problem c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Raphael Samuel, ‘British Dimensions: Four Nations History,’ History Workshop Journal 40, no. 1, (1995): i–xxii.

7 For good overviews see David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds, The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (London: Palgrave, 2002); Jack Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

8 K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: From the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures and Self (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Edward Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Matt Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples and Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds, Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land and People (London: Palgrave, 2014).

9 Jonathan Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); John Brewer, Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1838 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, eds, Comparison and History: Europe in Cross National Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

10 Antoinette Burton, After the Imperial Turn? Thinking With and Through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Dane Kennedy, ‘The Imperial History Wars,’ Journal of British Studies 54, 1 (2015): 5–22.

11 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, eds, Selected Subaltern Studies (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For historians of Britain Antoinette Burton’s ‘Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating “British” History,’ Journal of Historical Sociology 10, no. 3 (2002) quickly became iconic.

12 Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: Colonisers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire: Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Bill Schwarz, White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

13 Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Holt, 2005); Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Catherine Hall, et al., Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013)

14 P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism vols 1 & 2 (London & New York: Routledge, 1993–2002).

15 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Andrew Thompson, Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

16 Indeed histories of whiteness, and the racialisation of settler society, often through biopolitical regimes, have been one important strand of this work that was more closely related to the new imperial history. See Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (London: Palgrave, 2004); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

17 Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of the World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

18 See Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (London & New York: Routledge, 2001); Alan Lester and Zoë Laidlaw, eds, Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World (London: Palgrave, 2015).

19 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (New York: Cape, 2002); Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

20 Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Histories for a Less National Age,’ American Historical Review 119, 1 (2014).

21 David Held and Anthony McGrew, The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).

22 Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

23 Nigel Dower and John Williams, eds Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction (London & New York: Routledge, 2002).

24 David Cameron, ‘British Values are Not Optional, They’re Vital’, Daily Mail, 14 June 2014.

25 David Abulafia, ‘The “Historians for Britain” campaign believes that Britain’s unique history sets it apart from the rest of Europe,’ History Today, 11 May 2015. The group’s website is http://historiansforbritain.org.

26 ‘The All New British Citizenship Test – Take the Quiz,’ Guardian, 26 March 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/quiz/2013/jan/27/british-citizenship-test-quiz-new. I am quite pleased to report that I got 8 out of 10!

27 Tony Taylor and Robert Guyver, eds, History Wars and the Classroom: Global Perspectives (Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2012). See also Ann Curthoys, ‘We’ve Just Started Making National Histories and You Want us to Stop Already,’ in Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn, 70–89; Richard Evans, ‘Michael Gove’s History Wars,’ Guardian, 13 July 2013; James Grossman, ‘The New History Wars,’ New York Times, 1 September 2014.

28 Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt, ‘It’s a Small World After All: The Wider World in Historians’ Peripheral Vision’ http://smallworldhistory.org/Its_a_Small_World_After_All/Findings_files/2012-09%20Small%20World-full%20report.pdf. See also, for slightly different figures, Richard Evans, Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13. I have not been able to find any comparable study of historians in Australia or New Zealand.

29 Susan Kingsley Kent, A New History of Britain Since 1688: Four Nations and an Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Stephanie Barczewski, et al., Britain Since 1688: A Nation in the World (London & New York: Routledge, 2015); T.W. Heyck and M. Veldman, The Peoples of the British Isles: 1688 to the Present. A New History, 4th ed. (Chicago: Lyceum, 2014); Jamie Bronstein and Andrew Harris, Empire, State and Society: Britain since 1830 (Chichester: Wiley, 2012); Ellis Wasson, A History of Modern Britain: 1714 to the Present (Chichester, Wiley, 2010); Paul K. Monod, Imperial Island: A History of Britain and its Empire, 1660–1837 (Chichester, Wiley, 2009); Philippa Levine, The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (London & New York: Routledge, 2007).

30 Wasson is here the exception, but an unhappy one, for his text is a romance for tradition and a celebration of freedom and democracy. Wasson, A History of Modern Britain, xiv–xvii.

31 For recent laments of the interpretive fragmentation of the field see Modern British Studies at Birmingham University, ‘Working Paper No.1’ (February 2014), https://mbsbham.wordpress.com; V21 Collective, ‘Manifesto of the V21 Collective,’ http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/.

32 Festschrifts proliferate: at least for the men! See David Feldman and Jon Lawrence, eds, Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Simon Gunn and James Vernon, eds, The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Clare Griffiths, John Nott and William Whyte, eds, Classes, Cultures and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

33 This has been one of the few consistent threads of my work over the last decade, see James Vernon, ‘On Being Modern and Other Things,’ Victorian Studies 57, no. 3 (2015): 515–22.

34 For a powerful articulation of this view see Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). That is to say, pace Lyn Hunt, it is possible to write global histories that do not render the cultural and the political an effect of economy.

35 Brewer, Sinews of Power.

36 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Joel Mokyr, Enlightened Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

37 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

38 Walter Bagehot, ‘The Postulates of English Political Economy No.1,’ Fortnightly Review CX (February 1876): 215.

39 Ben Jackson, ‘The Think-Tank Archipelago: Thatcherism and Neo-Liberalism,’ in Making Thatcher’s Britain, ed. Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 43–61.