Modern British history from the Antipodes

Abstract

This article has been peer reviewed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the authors

Leigh Boucher and Kate Fullagar are both historians in the Department of Modern History, Politics, and International Relations at Macquarie University. In 2010, they were appointed together to teach, respectively, the history of the nineteenth- and the eighteenth-century ‘BritishWorld.’

Notes

1 James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also James Vernon, ‘Who’s Afraid of the “Linguistic Turn”? The Politics of Social History and Its Discontents’, Social History 19, no. 1 (1994): 81–97; and James Vernon, ed., Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For some scathing reviews, see Eugenio Biagini in International Labour and Working Class History 49 (1996): 198-201; Neville Kirk in Labour History Review 59 (1994): 71–78; and Bruce Kinzer in The American Historical Review 100, no. 3 (1995): 900–901. For a discussion of the challenges Vernon and others taking the cultural turn were offering British history, see Dror Wahrman, ‘The New Political History’, Social History 21 (1996): 343–54.

2 Vernon’s later books include Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (co-editor Simon Gunn, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), and Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).

3 See for examples: Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Zoë Laidlow, Colonial Connections 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution, and Colonial Government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (London: Palgrave, 2006); and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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

5 The workshop was sponsored by a ‘Themed Research Workshop Grant’ from the Faculty of Arts of Macquarie University, the State Library of New South Wales, and the Australian Research Council. It was held on 8–9 May 2015 at the SLNSW.

6 See Wilfrid Prest, ‘Doing British History in Australia: The Empire Strikes Back?’, AHA Bulletin, 72 (1992): 34–41; D. de Guistino, ‘British History’, in Historical Disciplines in Australasia: Themes, Problems and Debates, ed. J. A. Moses, Australian Journal of Politics and History 41 (1995): 197–204; Wilfrid Prest, ‘British History in Australia Over Two Centuries’, AHA Bulletin 89 (1999): 42–60; Christopher Hilliard, ‘Familiar with the Tradition: Twentieth-Century British History in Australia’, Roundtable III: Twentieth-Century British History – Global Perspectives, Twentieth Century British History 23, no. 4 (2012): 529–38.

7 Although the two conveners have perhaps bucked that trend: we are the two appointments in British history noted as an exception in the last ‘report’ on British history in the Antipodes: Hilliard, ‘Familiar with the Tradition’, 538: ‘[I]n 2010, Macquarie University advertised two lectureships in the history of Britain or the ‘British world’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – a big commitment for a medium-sized department, though one with long-standing strengths in British history from the eighteenth century onwards’.

8 On the question of periodisation, we recognize that 1750 does not neatly align with all (or indeed any) definitions of the start of modernity in Britain: as a marker of the eve of the first global war, from which Britain emerged a super power, however, it serves Cambridge, Vernon and this issue well enough.

9 Only eight of the nine papers appear here in revised form. Paul Pickering also contributed a paper on Scottish exceptionalism, but regretfully could not submit an article for professional and personal reasons.

10 We reiterate here that we are surveying only the last generation or so of historical work, and we date modern British history, as per the forthcoming Cambridge volume, from 1750. Due to the final make-up of the workshop participants (themselves selected for various reasons sketched above), we are mindful especially of leaving out of this analysis recent contributions in both economic and intellectual history.

11 Such a list is bound to be left wanting, but might also include Michael Roe and Angela McCarthy on migration reform, Ian Britain on Fabianism, Norman Etherington on missionaries, David Lemmings, David Barrie and Stefan Petrow on law and order, Michael Bennett on public health, Sandra Stanley Holton on suffrage reform, and many others.

12 Smith cited as among the authors of this flowering Oliver Macdonagh, Eric Richards, Ken Inglis and himself: F. B. Smith, ‘British History in Australia’, Melbourne Studies in Education 23, no. 1 (1981): 42–59.

13 Smith, ‘British History in Australia’, 42–59.

14 See David Blaazer’s article in this issue.

15 Again, a full list is a hopeless aspiration, but might also include Michael Davis, David Phillips, Alex Tyrrell, Anthony Page, Gillian Russell, and, in some incarnation, Ross McKibbin, Jon Mee and Ruan O’Donnell. Notably Tanya Evans has worked mostly in this mould rather than on reformists.

16 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 8, 11, 12.

17 See R. W. Johnson’s review of Ross McKibbin’s Classes and Cultures, in the London Review of Books 20, no. 10 (21 May 1998): 12–13.

18 An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776-1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Gen. ed. Iain McCalman, with Jon Mee, Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite as assoc. eds, and Patsy Hardy and Kate Fullagar as assist. eds.

19 Peter Conrad, ‘The Empire Writes Back’, The Australian’s Review of Books (December 1999): 7–8. See comments on the book’s ‘explicitly radical, polemical edge’ also in Alex Benchimol, Romantic Circles 4, no. 1 (2000), accessed December 2015, https://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews-blog/oxford-companion-romantic-age-british-culture-1776%E2%80%931832-ed-iain-mccalman, and Fiona Stafford, The Review of English Studies 51, no. 3 (2000): 485-6.

20 Mary Spongberg, ‘Are Small Penises Necessary for Civilisation?: The Male Body and the Body Politic’, Australian Feminist Studies 12, no. 25 (1997): 19–28.

21 See Kay Saunders, ‘From Women’s History to Gender Relations Studies in Australia’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 41, no. 1 (1995): 18.

22 Historians of Britain and colonial Australia were crucial players in the emergence of women’s and gender studies in Australia, many of whom experienced their history corridors as ‘uncongenial disciplinary areas’ for feminist historical research. These included Barbara Brookes at the University of Otago, Raewyn Dalziel at the University of Auckland, Barbara Caine at the University of Sydney, Susan Sheridan and Lyndall Ryan at Flinders University, Susan Magarey at the University of Adelaide, Marilyn Lake at Melbourne and then Latrobe University and Patricia Grimshaw at Melbourne. See Chilla Bulbeck, ‘A History of the Australian Women’s Studies Association (2006)’, accessed 20 November 2015, www.awgsa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/History-of-AWSA.pdf. And see P. Bergstrom, ed., Women’s/Gender Studies in Asia-Pacific (Bangkok: UNESCO Bangkok, 2004), accessed November 2015, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001362/136213e.pdf.

23 Some other key emblematic feminist scholars working on British historical sources include Barbara Brookes, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Michael Roper, Catharine Coleborne and (again) Barry Reay.

24 A classic example of this (though it cannot be explored here) is the role of Australian universities in nurturing and hosting what would later become Subaltern Studies. See D. Chakrabarty, ‘Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography’, Nepantla 1, no. 1 (2000): 9–32.

25 See Rhys Isaac’s obituary, citing Dening’s Beach Crossings (2005), in Uncommon Sense 126 (2009), accessed December 2015, http://oieahc.wm.edu/uncommon/126/dening.cfm.

26 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Communing with Magpies’, History Australia 11, no. 3 (2014): 9–10.

27 Mention could also be made of the ethnographic histories of Anne Salmond and Nicholas Thomas, the histories of settler law and culture by Henry Reynolds and Tim Rowse, and many others.

28 See the reports cited in note 6. See especially here De Guistino, ‘British History’.