History 3152: British History Since the 17th Century

Here is the list of possible essay topics. Please share your suggestions with the rest of the class, but be sure to specify which question your comment pertains to. Feel free to ask question if you're in the dark.

On the exam itself, for the cumulative portion you will be given only one question from the two topics below, so be sure to prepare for both. On the essay from midterm forward, two of the three topics below (under the heading "Essay for the second half of the term") will appear on the test and you wil choose one to write on. That means that you only need to prepare 2 of the three topics to be sure you're covered. Remember that these are just the general topics; the actual questions on the exam might be a bit different than the wording you see here.

Good luck!

Cumulative portion:

1) The changing meanings of and conditions of belonging in the political nation. To prepare this essay, think about who has been considered part of the nation and who has been held at a distance from the beginning of the modern era through the present. You might consider race, property, sex/gender, labor, religion among others. Also think about the methods and tools of inclusion/exclusion.

2) The expansion of English power in the isles and British power in the world from the 17th century to the present. You might want to think about the processes of decolonization, devolution, and nearing European Union as "contraction" (or implosion), but you could also analyze them more in terms of new and different (but not necessarily more limited) expressions of state power in the latter half of the 20th century.

Essay for the second half of the term:

1) The economic, social, and cultural dimensions of empire and decolonization. This is another chance to use Orwell. You might also draw on Cromer, Kipling, Lugard, Colley, Conekin, Milne, and especially the essays from British Culture and the End of Empire.

2)The invention, development and decline of the welfare state. You might prepare by starting with Pedersen's article and working forward, keeping in mind the role of war, political parties, and changing meanings of citizenship.

3)British-Irish relations and radical Irish nationalism from 1798 through the present.

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I found this documentary on Google video. It's very looooong but extremely interesting. It has lots of footage of Ian Paisley and many interviews with people who lived through the troubles. It's in 8 half-hour segments.
The last six are here but in the extended entry. If you want to see this in full screen, go to google video and type "the troubles" in quotes. When you view it there you have the ability to do full screen.

Continue reading "The Troubles" »

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This is the place to divulge your secret strengths (or weaknesses) going into the exam. Any questions you have or advice to offer will be helpful. If you're having trouble finding the relevance of an id term or if you would like to offer your thoughts on some of the "big questions" that might be covered in preparation for that comprehensive essay, let loose here. If you haven't found them yet, the list of possible ids has been slowly compiled each week as the last slide of the lecture presentation. Study the "terms to remember" for each week since midterm and this will be a breeze.

Good luck!

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As promised after our discussion of race and Kramer last night, here are a couple of links. The first is from Stuart Hall lecturing on the topic of "Race: The Floating Signifier." The popping bass music and intro from Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing dates it as sometime around the early 1990s. Hall is from Jamaica (a British possession since the era of Cromwell with a slave-labor regime until the 1850s), and we will talk more about him (and read something from him) when we get back from the holiday.

Here is a much longer version of the Stuart Hall video than the one I originally posted. It has most of the lecture as well as an interview with Hall.

The second video is Michael Richards (better known as Seinfeld's Kramer) apologizing on the David Letterman show for his racist tirade at the Laugh Factory comedy club in LA. If you want to see his tirade, it's easy enough to find. In this clip, after the really uncomfortable moments at the beginning, Richards tries to explain racism from his personal vantage point.

We'll be talking a lot more about race, racism, and multiculturalism over the next few weeks, so any comments here are appreciated. What is Race and racism for Hall? What about Richards?

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As we discussed last week, if you're not able to make class tonight because of Thanksgiving travel plans you can get class credit by participating in this blog assignment.

First of all, before you begin make sure you have a good hour to spend, assuming, of course, that you've already read Orwell's "England Your England," Why I Write," and the Beveridge Report highlights. Below I have listed a few web sites related to World War II, and you should choose one to thoroughly explore and comment upon.

Here are the sites I would like you to examine. If you want to look at more than one or hunt for others on the web, feel free.

http://www.snaithprimary.eril.net/wcontent.htm

http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/cos/index.html

http://www.isreview.org/issues/10/good_war.shtml

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/w2frm.htm

What I would like you all to consider with these few sites is how the Second World War is being remembered through them. How do these sights give meaning to the war? Some of the interpretations may be subtle and others more direct. What do you think the target audiences are? Do you see a political purpose in the way your site presents its history? Finally, do you think the memorialization in the website you've chosen affirms or challenges Orwell's view of the British people in "England Your England"? Explain why or why not?

Also, below are some thoughts on the topics of interwar cooperation, "national unity" (a topic of interest to Orwell in "England Your England"), and popular memory of the war.

I spoke last week about the "spirit of cooperation" of the interwar years and how an emphasis on cooperation can be found in a variety of social, cultural, and governmental venues. In the domestic politics of the interwar period, economic depression seemed to recommend a pulling together of the disparate interests for national recovery, and yet the period saw a spike in labour/management/government conflict over issues of pay, work hours, and dilution culminating in a General Strike in 1926. . . . .

Continue reading "World War II and "England Your England"" »

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I've been obsessed with YouTube lately, and I came across these audio/still photo clips of Foucault lecturing on "the Disciplinary Society." In the second part, he explains the difference between real "Disciplinary Institutions" and "Disciplinary Rationalities" (which for him are more important than the real "total institutions). This helps to explain why he can see Bentham's never-really-realized dream of a Panopticon Prison as significant even when it was rarely employed as a true "institution" with real brick walls and cells, backlighting, and all-seeing-eyeballs etc.

Part 1

Part 2

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Historians love to draw big conclusions from documents that themselves were intended for relatively narrow purposes. Patrick Joyce, for instance, might derive significance from the mundane and probably rather boring reports from municipal administrators in London and Manchester. What looks like plans to lay sewage pipes can hold all sorts of other, unintended meanings concerning liberalism; private property and privacy, individualism, or the importance of a notion of "freedom" and circulation to people's understandings of themselves, the city, the nation. I think a good verb for this practice is "to glean." Today, we tend to think of gleaning as a mental practice (e.g. "I gleaned something from their presentation"), but I like the older definitions. If you have some time, you should plug your favorite words into the Oxford English Dictionary (linked through the "indexes" page of our library's site) and see where they've travelled in the universe of variable and contingent meanings over the past millenium or so. "Gleaning" used to be something the rural poor in England did to survive. During the harvest season, gleaners would walk through the fields picking up wasted corn or fruit that the reapers had missed, discarded, or accidentally dropped. Depending on the harvest, families could survive off what was gleaned.
With this idea of gleaning in mind, let's practice gleaning with a document like Rathbone's "Disinherited Family." What kinds of meanings can we pick up from what Rathbone accidently leaves behind. For this exercise, let's forget about the political debate on family allowances (her motivation for writing) and just focus on the stuff she drops unintentionally. What can we say about the interwar period from her writing. Look at the little things - references to the world outside - that might appear insignificant to her overall argument. What historical claims can we make by avoiding her actual point? Is there someting in her style, the form, the things she takes for granted, the kinds of authorities she marshals, that tell us something about the period? Take a shot - no right answers to be found on this one.

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Since we're talking about Orwell (and writing about him) over the next few weeks, I wanted to give you a place to post comments as you read. So here it is.
So, what do you think of Orwell? Let's start with these pieces on imperialism. What is his purpose in writing "Shooting an Elephant"? What insights does his discussion of Rudyard Kipling provide for our understanding of empire and the British public? Any questions and coments are welcome.

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Here's a place to post question you might still have after studying for the exam. Anyone should feel free to ask for help and to answer exam-related questions here.

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If you haven't seen this before, check out this little clip. Makes me think I'm trying too hard with my lectures.
Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFPsOMYwXNk

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Someone brought up a good point in class last week that unfortunately we wandered away from without really addressing. The comment was basically this: if Charles Booth's mapping project of London declared some areas "vicious" and "semi-criminal" we should not automatically assume this is merely the speculative bias of an elite social scientist. In poor areas of cities, there is, indeed, more crime of all sorts."
I agree with this. I think it is almost one of these "social facts" we've been discussing. Poverty tends to make certain acts against state authority (the law) thinkable in a way that comfortable living does not. However, I don't think this has anything to do with anyone's natural penchant for crime (I don't think the person who posed the question thinks this either). Rather, criminality can often be seen as acts of survival and challenges to a particular social group's monopoly of power. Cast in this light, middle class and wealthy people commit fewer crimes than poor people today because the laws are written by middle class and wealthy men and women for their own protection and preservation of their property (I'm thinking, for example, about the fact that there are no laws effectively controlling the menace of SUVs; yet, there are smoking bans in cities around the world. A regular Jane or Joe with no car stands little chance on their bicycle or on foot against an SUV should there be a collision, yet we have military-size vehicles roaming the streets [the Hummer] as a celebration of American freedom [or something]. What's funny is that these incredibly dangerous, not to mention gas-guzzling, toxin-emitting, vehicles (SUVs) are constantly marketed for their safety value, and, indeed you are safer if you're riding inside one, but what about everyone else? Whose safety and liberty are valued here? Can you imagine the possibility of a city-wide ban on SUVs?)
That's just one example of the class biases rooted in the laws that govern today, but I invite you to come up with more (or, if you disagree, let's hear it).
More importantly, though, I want to hear what you think about the law and class society in 18th- and 19th-century Britain, to get back to our original question. Was there more crime in poor areas of London? Do you see any relationship between property and the laws of the period?

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One of the things I want us to discuss tonight and in this blog is the notion that the new liberal formations of government and civil society contain within them the possibility of universal application. So many of the emerging political philosphies in the 17th century and foundational documents of new "nations" (like the U.S.) dress themselves in a rhetoric of universality. After all, what's more universal than a "state of nature" or more objective and fair than natural economic law? Some critics of liberal philosophy, however, argue that inequality is written into these documents and inescapable as long as people continue to be committed to to the social systems and governmental institutions spawned in the 18th century. They point to Locke's Second Treatise and his comments on marriage, the family, slavery and political rights, Smith's preference for small gentry over the irresponsible masses in Wealth of Nations, Jefferson's own ideas of the importance of property ownership for a voice in government (as well as his ownership of slaves, several of whom were his own children) as evidence that liberal societies are rotten at their roots and therefore no good for the present.
Others argue we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, that the transformations of the 17th and 18th century opened up a public sphere and that, over time, marginalized people have been able to elbow their way into civil society. The egalitarian documents that formed the nations of Great Britain (the Bill of Rights), the U.S. (the Declaration and Constitution), and France (Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen) may have been written by racist, sexist, classist men, but they provide everyone access to rights through the slow, painful, democratic processes of civil society.
What do you think? Should we call civil society out as a lie and a handy tool for the privileged to rationalize and legitimize their rule - a lie we give credence to every time we go through the pointless ritual of voting? Or, is liberal civil society, despite its early faults in aiding and abetting empire, racism, sexism, the exploitation of the poor, etc., a work in progress that will eventually show itself as the most perfect organization of peoples?

Finally, what kind of monkey wrench does Foucault throw into this debate with his focus, not on the power of law in civil society, but on disciplinary forces that come before civil society?

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The new science looks away from the past and toward the present utility of knowledge as well as the future possibility of applying science to practical human problems. This all seems really great, no? But what is unmistakable to me is the language of mastery that is all over the text. Here is my favorite quote from the New Organon:
"But any man whose care and concern is not merely to be content with what has been discovered and make use of it, but to penetrate further; and not to defeat an opponent in argument but to conquer nature by action; and not to have nice, plausible opinions about things but sure, demonstrable knowledge; let such men (if they please), as true sons of the sciences, join with me, so that we may pass the antechambers of nature which innumerable others have trod, and eventually open up access to the inner rooms.�

Bacon’s understanding of nature and the intellect is like an edifice – brick by brick we will build our knowledge of the world. We can master it by strokes. But the method of accumulation must be deliberate and must have a purpose. All sorts of good things can come from this – practical things that can change people’s lives even if the common man doesn't understand how we arrived at this knowledge. There is the implication in this that man can shape and exercise his mind to near perfection. Oh, the handle we can get on the world!

But let's situate this within its historical context. First of all, this is a text fitting the context of transcontinental exploration. Bacon is conscious of this when he essentially states: What a shame if we explore the world and fail to expand our intellectual world.

But look, too, at how this intellectual adventure lends itself to the kind of relationships between English people and other peoples of the world and between people and the natural world that will be sadly characteristic of the next few centuries. First of all, a question Bacon doesn't really ask here is where do human beings end and the mystery of nature begin? What is natural and up for mastery and who exactly is the objective agent of science and industry? As the English move about in the world, they are making all sorts of assessments about other people in the world, and many of these are scientifically informed. But the scientific information is already derived from the prejudices the scientist approaches it with, since the notion of the objective observer of nature tends to have hard wired in his mind the mandate of human beings to master nature. It is science, then, that comes up with theories of race that place Africans as natural beings to be numbered, classified, and ultimately mastered. Remember, this is also the era, well almost, that the English acquire Jamaica (a Cromwellian expedition) and deprive many Irish of their homes and offer them up to Presbyterian collaborators in their Civil War – later the best science will confirm that the Irish are a different and inferior race than the English (which makes them great servants but bad politicians) and that the Finns are really descendents of the Mongoloid race (asiatic people) and don’t deserve the same treatment as whites. Really, the English are becoming Masters at the same time they are becoming scientists. What does this tell us about the potential of boundless progress for science and civilization that Bacon seems to be anticipating? Do scientists have to be masters? What about social scientists? What about historians?

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Hobbes is most known for his contributions to political philosophy, especially his focus on the state of nature. Yet, his work on what a commonwealth is and should be, who can wield power over people, and what the people's role in government is comes from his thinking about even more abstract things - like sense, reason, language, reality and imagination. These abstractions were the focus of the pieces you read for class.

So how does this realm of ideas on nature and human understanding relate to the political and social worlds of the 17th century?

What do you think Hobbes theory of sense and reason suggests about how he might view institutions of authority in the mid-17th century? Remember, the foundation of the political authority of the monarch rested on a notion of divine right of kings. Given Hobbes' theory of sense and language (in which human beings create the rules by which we even understand the world - e.g. his discussion of reason as nothing but mathematics) how do you think divine right holds up?

To illustrate the impact of Hobbes' philosophy, it's helpful to look at Rochester. Rochester was a contemporary of Hobbes and was considered to be a Hobbite (a follower of Hobbes). "A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind" can be read as a lyrical distillation of Leviathan (in fact, Rochester's subversion of the notion of "the light of reason" with "ignis fatuus" (a false light produced by swamp gases that only served to get people lost) is pulled straight from a line of Hobbes you read ("Of Reason"). Rochester's verse caused a huge stir in the 1670s. It was so scurrilous that it couldn't be printed in London. Most of it circulated in manuscript form and would be recited and passed on in pubs. Anglican ministers (and Bishops) railed against him from the pulpit, and he fought back with satire. The "Satyr Against Reason and Mankind" was actaully written as a response to one minister's denouncement of Rochester in a sermon.

Look at the "Satyr" closely. What are the orthodoxies that Rochester takes aim at? Does he really despise Reason? What kind of Reason bothers him? Does Rochester care about the ideal world or the ideal commonwealth? Is there a divine image to man? Where does power and authority come from? What is man like in nature and how does Rochester see natural man behaving in relation to other men (look toward the end of the satire for this, when he's talking about Jowler [a dog])?

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I'll be posting something on science later, but I wanted to give people an opportunity to share any evidence they might have on the issue of Shakespeare's authorship. I'm including a few links. One is to a page full of information defending Shakespeare as writing Shakespeare. The second is to the Shakespeare Oxfordian Society, dedicated to "honoring the true bard" (Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford). The third is a summary of evidence for the case that Francis Bacon wrote the plays.

My question is: Does it matter who wrote Shakespeare? Why? or Why not?

http://shakespeareauthorship.com/
http://shakespeare-oxford.com/
http://www.sirbacon.org/links/evidence.htm

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