Modern British history from the Antipodes

Abstract

This article has been peer reviewed.

When word got out that that James Vernon had been commissioned to write a new Cambridge textbook on The History of Britain since 1750, some scholars were a little surprised. Vernon’s early work on Politics and the People in the nineteenth century had cast him as the enfant terrible of British history. The determinedly poststructuralist approach of this first monograph – which argued for the cultural constitution of political possibilities – had solicited a startlingly severe backlash from a field still some way off a linguistic turn.¹ Vernon’s later work – on the ways that mobilities stretching across national borders helped to forge Britain’s ‘peculiar modernity’ – seems a bit less at odds with contemporary trends, though it is hardly the view of historiographic orthodoxy.² Cambridge ‘national histories’, on the other hand, have generally stood at (and for) the centre of academic authority. Pundits would have been forgiven for wondering if it was Vernon or Cambridge who had shifted the furthest.

From an Antipodean perspective, Vernon’s official engagement is as exciting as it is surprising. Not only have historians writing modern British history from the Antipodes taken up especially the challenge of thinking about gender, class and race in cultural terms, but the call to think about the ‘extra-national’ making of British modernity appeals, for obvious reasons, to historians who live in and work on contexts from outside the conventional borders of the British nation. Indeed, Antipodean scholars have been crucial contributors in the ‘new imperial history’ that has, since the 1990s, considered how imperialism inflected culture in Britain as much as it did in its outposts.³ And, on the latter point, we note that it is the fortieth anniversary of one key Antipodean’s famous initial plea for a new approach to British history that more adequately accounted for its expanding and contracting imperial peripheries.⁴

Vernon’s commission, then, seemed a unique opportunity to bring together the author of what will become, in some senses, a new ‘authorised’ history of modern Britain, with scholars working to rethink both the content and the contours of that national history from one of its former imperial edges. Once we had secured Vernon’s generous agreement to fly across the Pacific Ocean to Sydney from his new home in Berkeley, we set about inviting some fellow historians who work on British historical sources to a day-long workshop.⁵ (Vernon’s own interest in hearing from a group of Antipodean historians on his forthcoming enterprise was heartening and, we felt, telling.)

There was, as well, a secondary reason for bringing these scholars together. Every report on British history in our region since 1992 has told a story of decline and future gloom.⁶ While this is certainly reflected in numbers of formal appointments, hours in teaching schedules, and so on,⁷ such a story did not square with the sense of vibrancy we regularly read in research on British matters from our Antipodean colleagues. Fewer scholars in the Antipodes seem to be calling themselves ‘British historians’ than in previous generations, but there is still a thriving community of scholars working on British historical sources.

Our eventual list of participants suffered the normal scholarly restrictions of funding, geography and availability, as well as the Cambridge-imposed restriction on periodisation.⁸ We also introduced a kind of restriction on ourselves by seeking a balance of career levels and genders. These limitations meant a regrettable exclusion of many potentially rich contributions – especially from Antipodean intellectual historians who generally focus on earlier eras, and from scholars furthest-flung from Sydney. Nonetheless, we were delighted with our final range of ages, backgrounds, and period expertise. We asked our contributors to ponder a couple of interlocking questions. How does your research on the modern British past reshape ‘standard’ interpretations of its history? And, how do political and theoretical flavours of historical research in the Antipodes offer different perspectives upon modern Britain?

Vernon himself addressed both questions, if in oblique ways. His keynote presentation explained his plans for the forthcoming Cambridge textbook. His aim will be to impose a coherent narrative on British history since 1750 that yet accommodates at least some of the ‘anti-essentialism’ of his earlier critical work. In other words, he will give a causative account of the nation’s neoliberal present that simultaneously unravels some of neoliberalism’s certainties about its own progressive, self-made history. His primary argument will turn the old imperial conceit about how Britain made the world on its head. ‘My point is simply that at the beginning of the twenty-first century we should be more aware than ever that Britain was made by, and in, the modern world that it once claimed to have made all by itself’.

Vernon also noted in his presentation that ‘British history, and indeed much of its defining historiography, has often been written overseas’. The nine papers that followed Vernon well exemplified this observation, representing and in many ways extending the particular strengths of recent Antipodean approaches to the British past.⁹ Although very few of the nine scholars who followed Vernon’s keynote identified as practitioners solely of ‘British history’, together they suggest something of a riposte to the decline narrative. Certainly, they indicate a vibrant discussion in our region about the modern British nation – both how it emerged and what it produced.

Most of all, the nine papers engaged at varying levels with Vernon’s central contention that Britain was made by the world – or at least by reflections on, or connections with, or resistances from the rest of the world. Before delving into an analysis of the resultant articles, however, it seems worth pausing to dissect in a little more detail what exactly constitutes this recent Antipodean take on the British past. Of course, this collection can hardly be said to ‘stand in’ for the ‘state’ of modern British history in Australia and New Zealand. The four, more specific genealogies that we sketch below emerged very much in response to the papers, rather than the other way around. But they do, we hazard, highlight some of the textures of our vibrancy in the last few decades. Even as our survey risks the professional affronts that haunt any discussion of significance, it also intimates the ways in which Antipodean scholars have for a while now been pondering the constitution of Britain in and by the rest of the world.¹⁰

* * *

The first mini-genealogy might be said to centre on reform and middle-class sensibility. Earlier dominated by the figure of F. B. (Barry) Smith, who himself moved from parliamentary reform to social reform measures (especially in public health), from the 1980s this line included scholars as disparate as Pat Jalland on political reform and everyday life, Michael Roberts on moral reform and medicine, Patricia Grimshaw on missionaries and Wilfrid Prest on the law. Mostly written as political, social, or legal history, what chiefly unites these historians is an interest in the emergence of middle-class power in the nineteenth century.¹¹

If Barry Smith can be taken as the godfather of such a line in the Antipodes, his own sense of where it came from is illuminating. In a review from the 1980s, Smith claimed that this interest in ‘the bourgeois century’ was not in fact new then but instead a continuance of a ‘flowering’ that had held since the 1960s.¹² He thought that what made Antipodean historians ‘fresh and important’ was their ‘detached, amused, skeptical’ attitude towards middle-class ‘orthodoxies’. They did not take ‘Mr Gladstone, the Fabians [or] the Church of England … at face value’ because their isolation from the metropolis gave them a keener sense of the ‘contingent’ than their British peers possessed.¹³

Notably all the scholars mentioned here as emblematic also published histories of Australia or New Zealand: their research led them to pursue their reformers, jurists, intellectuals, philanthropists, and lobbyists wherever these subjects travelled for their causes, which in almost all cases was, at some point, the Antipodes. Historians of the nineteenth-century middle class thus usually ended up moving beyond the nation simply through force of their own topic. They may not have come up with a critique of the nation, or of the metropole-periphery model, but they certainly showed how modern British history stretched beyond the Isles alone. The final trio of articles in this issue – by Evans, Greenhalgh, and Swain – are the most obvious inheritors of the reform-oriented strand of Antipodean scholarship. They each investigate a key form of middle-class aspiration from the 1850s to the present, though together these articles may be seen to be forming a new perspective on the centre-margins relationship (discussed below). The tradition is also evident, in part, in the articles by Blaazer and Boucher, as they track monetary reformers and liberal reformers respectively.

A second significant strand of Antipodean research into British sources began in many ways – like its counterpart in Britain itself – as a reaction to histories of the middle class. Antipodean exercises in British ‘history from below’ had their chief antecedent in the work of George Rudé, who wrote his most significant histories on British popular protest from South Australian universities at the same time as Smith and company were publishing their reform histories. History from below, or what has elsewhere been called radical social history,¹⁴ began as an enterprise to recover the voices and stories of people lost beneath the victorious rise of the middle class. Just like its bible, E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, though, this scholarly endeavour soon moved from a project of recovery to one of investigation into the very role of the disempowered in British history. In the last thirty years, key Antipodean radical social historians have included, to name just a few, Iain McCalman, Barry Reay, Paul Pickering, Michael Durey, Cassandra Pybus and Christopher Hilliard.¹⁵ Each of these scholars has endeavoured not only to rescue the underdogs of the modern British past ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’ but also to suggest that these same underdogs were ‘present at their own making’ – that is, that they were not merely the products of middle-class intervention but might indeed even constitute, in Thompson’s words, ‘the most significant factor in British … life’.¹⁶

Antipodean radical social history has not thrown up its own Barry Smith to reflect upon its specific properties. But many reviewers of specific works have speculated about the role of their origin.¹⁷ Most overtly, Peter Conrad in a review of the explicitly radical Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832, led by McCalman and a small posse of like-minded Antipodeans, suggested that the background of this collective enterprise had done much to shape the book’s overall temper.¹⁸ Antipodean radical social historians, Conrad implied, sought and elevated the politically and socially marginal. They wrote in ‘tangy, demotic, disrespectful’ ways in order ‘to make amends for the low-born, the ethnically other or the sexually dissident’ that they somehow identified with their own multiply-marginal subjectivity. In this sense, they practiced, Conrad wrote in one particularly memorable line, ‘history from below … supplemented with history from behind’. They were ‘grudge-settling, gynaecocratic academics’, Conrad thought, but in their ‘tangy’ insistence on the importance of underdogs in creating British modernity, they had helped to ‘redefine the cultural field’.¹⁹

Like their colleagues who studied the middle class, historians from below also often published on Australian and New Zealand history. As for their colleagues, this was in part because they followed their marginalised subjects wherever they led. In this case it was not to the reformist societies of the Antipodes but in large part to their prisons. It was also due, however, to a commitment to see the mechanics of Thompsonian history everywhere; that is, to see how the marginal acted upon the centre at least as much as the centre acted upon, or made, the margins. In this way, Antipodean historians edged towards a more explicit model for thinking about how Britain related to its global outposts. They suggested more than a mere extension of the boundaries; they implied instead a mutually constitutive relationship between metropole and periphery. The articles in this issue most evidently indebted to such an approach are those by Fullagar and McKenzie. Fullagar traces popular discourse more than popular movements, and McKenzie illuminates popular politics through one of its enemies rather than one of its heroes, but both share a doubly-displaced perspective (in terms of both class and colonialism) on the mainstream. They view the past through the lens of the plebeian as well as the lens of the imperial other. This strand of historical writing has also left discernible traces on the articles by Blaazer and May.

Working in tandem with these twin concerns, to retrieve the marginal and to consider the ways in which it shapes historical transformation, is a third key strand of Antipodean research on Britain – the oft-noted strength of feminist scholarship in the Antipodes. The journal Australian Feminist Studies (founded 1985) was a crucial space for the development of this kind of work. Antipodean feminist historians shared a fascination with the ‘tangy, demotic [and] disrespectful’ that characterised so much history from below, but turned their gaze equally to the masculinist dynamics of such fascinations. Feminist historians took their cues, at least in part, from a deep dissatisfaction with the macho poetics of so much history from below in the Antipodes. This was perhaps most clearly demonstrated when Mary Spongberg, British historian and soon-to-be editor of Australian Feminist Studies, brought some of the vernacular bravado of radical history down to size by asking if ‘small penises are necessary for civilisation?’²⁰

Feminist historians in Australia have long stood at the ‘vanguard’ of intersections between second-wave feminist politics and theory and the vibrant emergence of women’s and gender history as a consequence.²¹ As centres of women’s studies and/or gender studies emerged in the 1980s across Antipodean universities, historians of Britain and its colonial legacies became crucial practitioners in this inter-disciplinary endeavour.²² So too, internationally significant Antipodean feminist theorists like Moira Gatens, Anna Yeatman and Elizabeth Grosz worked in close dialogue with historians of the British World from the 1990s. The debates that reverberated across these institutional settings, however, took some of the questions about marginality in a different direction. These were demonstrated in the contested debates about the move from women’s history to the history of gender relations, and the losses and possibilities that greeted that widespread transformation. Women’s history, for many, became gender history, which, nourished by the anti-essentialist framing of post-structuralism, argued for a relational and discursive approach to power relations.

Unlike many practitioners of history from below, who profess an uneasy relationship with historians of the middling orders, then, several key Antipodean feminist historians of Britain moved quickly to interrogate relations and figures of power. To take three prominent examples, Joanna Bourke moved from an interest in the Irish working class to agents of rape and killing in Britain, Australia and the US; Angela Woollacott moved from a concern with women munitions workers in Britain to a confrontation with frontier masculinity in the Australian colonies; and Barbara Caine moved from plucky Victorian feminists to the gendered nature of all European history.²³

Because feminist politics in Australia was both confronted by, and engaged with, questions about race and colonialism, many of these historians saw the empire as a formative element of the gendered story of Britain and its legacies. As such, they developed ever more sophisticated modelling of the centre-periphery relationship, producing cultural histories of interdependent identities and subjectivities rather than political and social histories of specific ‘groups’. Among the scholars in this issue, the imprint of Antipodean feminist inquiry is perhaps strongest on Leigh Boucher, as well as Evans and Swain. Boucher’s focus on the manliness at the core of nineteenth-century liberal thought and his consistently deconstructive approach are indebted to later feminist interventions. Evans and Swain are interested in pushing one of the great topics of both British and women’s history – that of welfare – much further by thinking through the implications of incorporating imperial matrices.

As with many feminist researchers, a recursive and sometimes uneasy relationship with ‘theory’ has also nourished a fourth important recent line of Antipodean inquiry into modern British history – that of postcolonial analysis (broadly conceived). The Antipodes were a crucial, if now sometimes forgotten, proving ground for scholars working on race and colonialism.²⁴ The figures of Greg Dening, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Patrick Wolfe might be taken as illustrative of this line as it is relevant to the writing of the British past. All three, notably, were colleagues at one point in the History Department of the University of Melbourne. Dening is best known as a scholar of the Pacific past, but his ethnographic approach to cross-cultural encounters in the South Seas had much to say about the small island of Britain and its various modes of beach-crossing to the rest of the world. One of his many admiring obituaries pointed out Dening’s peculiarly Antipodean training, inspired by the indigenous-centred archaeology of John Mulvaney – an experience that ever after made him favour ‘the history of the “other side of the beach”’, and the history of Britons ‘whom the world would esteem as “little”’.²⁵

Chakrabarty, like Dening, is more often considered a historian of a once-colonised region than of Britain. His landmark subalternist approach to the Indian past, however, served to deconstruct, in irreversible ways, some of the central pillars of the European modernity associated with Britain. Recently – in the pages of this journal in fact – Chakrabarty noted how his experiences in the Antipodes, and particularly the ‘debates that broke out in the 1980s and 1990s over Aboriginal history and cultural studies’, were a ‘subterranean influence’ on his thinking and work.²⁶ Noting a vibrant conversation between the emerging fields of Indigenous History, Ethnohistory, Postcolonial Theory and Subaltern Studies in Australia, Charkabarty sees his attempt to ‘provincialise’ so many of the turning points of modern Britain as taking shape in this Antipodean ferment.

That ferment equally shaped the thinking of Wolfe who, whilst influencing a generation of scholars writing the history of settler colonialism, is almost never understood as a British historian, even as the case study that underpinned his theorisation of settler colonial practice concerned changes in specifically ‘British’ ideas about race. His uneven recognition is also, perhaps, because his work has been so generative within Native American studies, where another national form exerts such influence over scholarly geographies.

Sprinkled between the emblems of Dening, Chakrabarty and Wolfe fall large bundles of Antipodean scholars who – like these three – might be more readily identified with the postcolonial dissection of the history of race or colonial practice than with Britain per se, but who have nonetheless had significant things to say about what made Britain modern. To name just a few, these might include Warwick Anderson and Alison Bashford on colonial medicalising discourses, Damon Salesa and Tony Ballantyne on cultural and intellectual discourses, Donald Denoon and James Belich on settler capitalism, Penelope Edmonds and Tracey Banivanua-Mar on settler cultures, and Julie Evans and Lisa Ford on settler sovereignty.²⁷ In this issue, it is perhaps Boucher and May who most readily indicate the influence of Antipodean postcolonialism. Both share strong ties to the University of Melbourne. Boucher’s direct engagement with Wolfe and other settler colonial theorists is clear throughout his article. May’s article adopts much of the ethnographic emphasis of Dening. Broad interests in the discursive formation of imperial culture also inform the articles by Fullagar and McKenzie.

The middle class and the underdog; women, identities, and subjectivities; race, colonial practice, and the intricacies of cross-cultural encounter: these, then, have been among the most commanding topics for the last generation of Antipodean analysts of British sources. They have produced at least four distinct lines of inquiry into the relationship between Britain and the rest of the world, which have produced in turn a peculiarly (if mixed) Antipodean contribution to thinking about the British nation and its legacies.

* * *

As intimated, Vernon’s address to our symposium, which comprises the opening article here, summarised his intentions for his forthcoming Cambridge textbook. His organising principle of choice for his new history – the concept that will both explain and deconstruct Britain’s modern past within the volume – is liberal political economy. Or, rather, it is the ‘changing understandings of the market and its role in organising not just the economy but [modern] social, cultural, and political life too’. As such, his prospective book ‘clearly draws on the tradition of Marxist historiography that I have spent a career critically engaging with, but it leans more heavily on Polanyi and Foucault than Marx, as it moves from politics to economy and society’.

Vernon’s article in this issue spotlights three separate decades from the 250-year span of his survey – decades which illustrate both his argument about the ‘rise, demise, and reinvention of liberal political economy’s market rationalities’ and British history’s deep implication with imperial and global imperatives. The 1770s, the 1870s, and the 1970s, were all turning points in the history of Britain’s political economy, and all were profoundly shaped by external factors – imperial war, colonial trade, and the demands of former colonies respectively.

Vernon’s article is followed by the two authors most engaged with his particular topic, David Blaazer on one key element of liberal political economy and Leigh Boucher on liberalism in theory. Blaazer’s focus is the ‘creation of a unified monetary order’ in Britain – or, in other words, one of the key effects of political economy’s ‘rationalities’. He takes an explicitly cultural-historical approach to a topic that is often left to Whiggish economists: his question is less about the effectiveness or modernity of sterling and more about ‘how, when and why currency [became] deeply entwined with British national identity’. He identifies four major turning points in the history of monetary union that, it is worth noting, were all moments of confrontation with the outside world. Blaazer argues that public support for currency emerged in these periods of international reckoning, which equally shaped national identity itself.

Boucher’s focus is on the ways in which recent insights from settler colonial studies might reconfigure one of the great pillars of British historiography, the politics of reform or liberalism. Specifically, Boucher asks how the problematic of settler sovereignty – so long occluded from accounts of nineteenth-century domestic British politics – bears on the history of the making of the liberal subject. A deconstructive account throughout, he uses the little-studied ‘small histories’ of some liberal reformers in colonial Victoria to think about how their contests over self-government were at the same time always ‘contingent determinations of … territorial sovereignty’. Far from being secondary to, or already secured by, the definition of the rights-bearing subject, territorial sovereignty was, Boucher contends, at the very core of its production. Far more than most, then, he insists that the ‘imperial context’ – or at least debates about its political boundaries – was critical to the making of modern Britain’s foremost political identity.

Interestingly, Blaazer is the contributor most resistant to the idea of an Antipodean perspective. He admits his Antipodean background (both inside and outside a British heritage) probably made him attuned to the peculiarity of his topic, but he is skeptical of any local intellectual forces. Yet his article bears throughout the mark of the particularly intense interest in radical social history that has flourished here for over a generation – it is just that in this case that mark is revealed, indeed almost motored, by his constant frustration with the absence of discussion on currency by historians from below. How is it possible, he asks, to discuss the economic disadvantages of ‘common people’ without any mention of the medium in which economic power was transacted? Boucher’s argument about the fruitful potential for thinking about settler colonial politics when writing the history of British liberalism shows more obviously his link to the Antipodean strength in postcolonial studies. His writing emerges from (among other things) a reflection on the combined contributions to British history of Antipodean postcolonial scholars. Both Blaazer and Boucher suggest, too, if indirectly, the mark of the local strength in feminist research, which helped produce here the kind of cultural history favoured by Blaazer as well as the deconstructive interest maintained by Boucher.

The next trio of articles moves into the culture and society of the British Empire. Kate Fullagar’s article focuses on the history of popular discourse about empire within eighteenth-century Britain, arguing that this popular discourse both appeared at an earlier date and was more ambivalent than often thought. She reads this discourse through the prism of responses to indigenous visitors from various corners of the empire through the 1700s. Her argument underscores the recent cultural-historical emphasis on the infiltration of empire throughout the domestic British past, but suggests – adopting an insight from the great Antipodean intellectual J. G. A. Pocock – that this was a far more contested infiltration than usually assumed. Fullagar, though, pushes Pocock into the history of popular political cultures, a place where he is rarely to be found, demonstrating the ways in which the same ideas that intellectual historians interrogate through elite ‘texts’ were equally at play in everyday social and cultural practices.

Kirsten McKenzie moves us forward to the early nineteenth century with her investigation into one of the main government spies on radical activities throughout the age of reform. She notes that historians have treated ‘Oliver the Spy’ separately as a British figure or a South African figure but never as both. She asks why this has occurred, ‘when contemporaries made such strong connections between … British and colonial politics?’ She then ponders ‘what might be the benefits of bringing them closer together?’ Her combined answer is that the separation has been due to later nationalist influences in both Britain and the former colonial world, but that a conjoining now of Oliver’s two histories offers a chance to see up close the precise mechanics of how domestic and imperial politics were connected.

Andrew May moves us still further into the nineteenth century, but, like Boucher, he also includes explicit discussion of present-day preoccupations. May, like Fullagar and McKenzie, is interested in the cultural and social history of empire, but argues explicitly for the merits of ethnographic microhistory as the best means for resisting the hubris of much imperial and world history. May is less interested in modelling the centre-periphery relationship than in unpicking it via ‘small histories’ of ‘single actions’ and ‘insignificant places’.

All three scholars of this middle trio extend the Antipodean traditions of both history from below and postcolonial cultural history together. Fullagar’s popular press reflects upon indigenous subjects. McKenzie’s radical agents connect keenly with settler affairs. And May’s ‘little Britons’ meet and converse with Indian Khasis on the plain of Cherrapunji and elsewhere in long-scattered texts around the globe. Arguably, such combinations reflect the sensibility of scholars affected by specifically Antipodean concerns.

The final trio of papers in the collection emerge at a fascinating meeting point between the distinguished Antipodean tradition of research into middle-class Britain and its thorough problematisation by scholars informed by feminist and postcolonial thinking. Whilst Barry Smith suggested that Antipodean histories of the middle class were anchored by a healthy skepticism about the claims of its reformers, the work of Evans, Greenhalgh, and Swain reorients this skepticism to suggest that we need to think more carefully about the ‘castes of mind’ that made such public interventions possible. Evans traces how the Social Science Association – that key instrument of middle-class reform in nineteenth-century Britain – was linked in a complex web of personal and professional connections to Antipodean reformers. Whilst the archives of the SSA have already been conceptualised as a gold-mine for social historians because they contain so much ‘data’ about marginal lives, Evans offers a different lens for viewing this material, considering instead the mental frames through which knowledge about these subjects and objects of reform took shape. Taking her cues from Michael Roberts’ work on reform, especially, and from feminist questions about political power and private worlds, Evans unearths a network of exchange that stretched between metropole and periphery and between the public and domestic world of these Victorian moralisers. So too, she notes that the work of women philanthropists from the colonies within this network defies any neat characterisation of the condescension of English morals.

Greenhalgh’s article, in some ways, tells the next chapter of Evans’s story. Examining the Antipodean background to practices of mass observation and social science research in mid-twentieth-century Britain, Greenhalgh finds a dynamic laboratory of Antipodean experimentation and exchange. In another sense, Greenhalgh offers an argument about the importance of seeing these Antipodean locations on their own terms. We need to do more than simply recruit Antipodean research ‘into’ metropolitan historiographies. We need to attend to the ways in which social science research provided frames through which ‘ordinary’ voices shaped national cultures in Britain, New Zealand and Australia.

In similar vein, Swain’s critical interrogation of the long history of child-welfare reforms and their politicised legacies in Australia and Britain makes a compelling claim to reconfigure our assumptions about national specificity while continuing to recognise local differences. Placing these histories in the context of recent contests over official apologies and historical justice, Swain reveals a long history in which Antipodean and British reformers activated and then elided connections between their respective practices. Entering into a scholarly conversation often dominated by sociologists and social policy commentators, Swain’s article demonstrates the ways in which historical accounts of welfare and social reform can function to anchor public policy in the present. Examining how Antipodean inquiries and state apologies have emerged at the intersection of historical research and individual memory, Swain suggests that British fears about activists seeking financial restitution seem unfounded in the Australian context. Crucially, collaborations between survivor groups and professional historians in Australia have produced a policy frame for restitution and justice in Australia; this setting seems uniquely capable of creating shared histories in the present that recognise both the psychological and political needs of ‘victims’ without animating a culture of victimised complaint.

Taken together, these last three papers demonstrate the long history of the Antipodes as a site of modernity’s experiments and the ways in which reformers continually remember and forget these connections. All three remind us that a straightforward moral judgment about any of these practices does little to help us understand their historically contingent effects. A confrontation with the past in the Antipodes might once more have some lessons to teach the old world.

* * *

Reading these articles together, then, suggests that British history in the Antipodes is alive and kicking, though perhaps the ‘British History’ slippers do not fit quite as snugly as they used to. Indeed, very few of the scholars in the collection see themselves only, or sometimes even tangentially, as historians of modern Britain. Why, we might ask, does a disavowal of British history exist among historians in Australia and New Zealand? Why do so few Antipodean scholars who work on what used to be termed ‘modern British history’ still own or engage with that label, even though they work on British sources and speak to and with key figures in British historiography?

At one level, our query is answered by the apparent turn away from national framings in recent historical writing: the rise of transnational studies and the influence of new thinking about the history of empire have encouraged many scholars to redefine their work along thematic lines as they trace connections, circulations, mobilities and flows that undermine the conceit that the imperial world was made by a single nation, whether purposefully or by accident. So too, the ever-increasing volume of work on Britain and its empire has meant there is less need, these days, to situate our work in relation to British history; specialist journals in feminist history, indigenous studies and settler colonialism, for example, produce different historiographic canons.

At another level, though, a turn towards the nation (or at least a nation) can also explain Britain’s loosening grip on historians in the Antipodes. In every report on the decline of British history in Australasia from 1992 onward, the reason proffered has been the turn towards Australian and New Zealand ‘cultural nationalism’, and a corresponding ‘Anglophobia’, among historians of the Antipodes.²⁸ Antipodean scholars who might once have understood themselves to be both living and writing a history shaped by its British past now work within a context where claims of national distinctiveness and specificity (not to mention publishing requirements) have encouraged the production of ‘our’ histories as their own Island Stories. These same contexts have also, as we have seen, produced their own distinctive set of historiographic styles, and a quick survey of the genealogies and representations of those styles here offers some riposte to the counter-veiling decline narrative.

Finally, it is worth noting the sense of political engagement that seems to underwrite most of the work in this special issue. These are a group of historians acutely aware of the ways in which histories (national or otherwise) shape the horizons of the present – and how could it be otherwise? In the past few decades, Australia and New Zealand, like so many other settler nations, have been gripped by divisive contests over the meaning of their past. Whilst contests over national histories about troubling pasts might have unfolded across the world in recent decades, the question of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations has clearly oriented Antipodean historians in specific ways. History matters for the present in a settler colony because the colonial relation has not, and cannot, be resolved. It is little wonder, then, that the authors collected here are working to open out different horizons and possibilities in the present or, at the very least, to bring a sense of contingency to the histories that so often orient our present-day political worlds.

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.’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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’.