The Sixth Anglo-Japanese Conference of Historians

British history 1600-2000: expansion in perspective

Tokyo, 16-18 September 2009

Junior sessions on Saturday, 19 September

 

The following eight British historians will lead their sessions by reading their keynote papers.

Their preliminary proposals follow.

Revised 3 August 2009

 

 

 

Maxine Berg (Warwick) on Friday morning

Wealth and knowledge: global history and euseful knowledgef

 

Simon Kuznets argued in 1965 that euseful knowledgef was the source of modern economic growth (Kuznets, 1965). Social scientists and historians have continued since to pursue the complex connections between knowledge, economic change and productivity growth.  Joel Mokyr in his 2002 book, The Gifts of Athena connects this euseful knowledgef with technology. This is conveyed for a broader and student readership yet more vigorously in his new book, The Enlightened Economy: an Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 (forthcoming 2008).  eUseful knowledge is knowledge of ewhatf, that is knowledge about natural phenomena and regularities, and it is knowledge of ehowf, or prescriptive knowledge and techniques.   He argues that the egreat divergencef between the West and the rest of the world did not arise from differences in resource endowments, but from a eknowledge revolutionf that took place in the West and not elsewhere.f eUseful knowledgef was developed with an aggressiveness and single mindedness no society had experienced beforef (Mokyr, 2005,).  Kenneth Pomeranz who coined the egreat divergencef and has led the new global comparative history of Europe and Asia, especially China, focussed his explanation of Europefs modern economic growth on ecological advantages in access to land and to coal reserves.  Neither he, nor many of the protagonists in the extensive debate which ensued on the egreat divergencef focussed seriously on knowledge and technology (Pomeranz, 2000). 

My paper will aim to revise some of the key questions of edivergencef, to focus on euseful knowledgef, and to move beyond an old discourse of egreat inventorsf vs. craft skills.  I seek to compare and to connect Asian systems of euseful knowledgef to those of Europe.  A broadening of concepts of natural knowledge in the historiographies of China and India is only beginning.   With different questions, histories of artisanal groups and institutions and periods of technological momentum can be brought together, compared and connected with research on other parts of Asia and on Europe.

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Huw Bowen (Swansea) on Thursday morning

@ Asia and British economic development 1750-1820

 

This paper re-considers the effects of imperial and commercial expansion in Asia upon patterns of economic activity and development in Britain.  It is commonly asserted by economic historians, and especially those who adopt a enationalf framework of analysis, that Britainfs overseas trade and empire did not exert any great influence upon the domestic economy during the long eighteenth century.  The paper challenges this view by re-examining the ways in which the multifarious domestic activities of the East India Company and its associated private trading interests linked provincial economies to the Asian trade and empire ]in ways that could serve to exert powerful stimuli on local economic growth and development.   Accordingly, the paper will re-visit the old and contentious issue of the 'drain of wealth' from India, and I will offer a new approach, new evidence, and a detailed case-study of South Wales which suggest that historians have significantly underestimated the influence of 'East Indian' trade and finance upon a number of different sectors and regions within the British economy.  As such, I will be drawing on the extensive new data collected for my current project 'Reconstructing British trade with Asia, 1760-1820: values, volumes and geographical profile', and then applying it to the current debate about the dynamics of economic growth in Britain. 

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John Darwin (Oxford) on Thursday afternoon

Empire and global history

 

There are powerful reasons why global history has begun to assume greater importance on almost every historianfs agenda. Our contemporary awareness of the mobility of goods, information and people, the astonishing scale of modern migrations and diasporas, the ever-growing permeability of nation and state frontiers, and the demand for new histories that reflect the experience of migrant communities, have combined to make histories that are based predominantly upon a single state unit look old-fashioned at best, self-deluding at worst.  That there is a global dimension to most forms and fields of history, is now widely acknowledged. Indeed, there is even a tendency to see the conjunction of eglobal and localf as of greater significance (in some places at least) than the integration of local and enationalf – the enation-building process studied by historians of past generations with obsessive attention.

But how are we to study the history of the world as a whole, as an historical unit? The tendency of much that passes for global history is to fragment and disaggregate, focussing intensely on the global connections of a single region or group, but with little concern for the larger context. Of course, there are a number of huge global themes around which we might organise the study of the world as a whole: diasporas and migrations; the exchange of commodities and the cultures they embodied; the various sea zones into which the world was divided – the Mediterranean, Atlantic or Indian Ocean eworldsf; the eempiresf of religion or perhaps even of language. However, in this paper I want to argue for the utility of empire in the political sense (defined as political units that cross ethnic, physical and ecological boundaries) as a way of making most sense of the unpredictable changes in the distribution of wealth and power across different parts of the world – the motor of world historical change. The paper will focus on three key periods: the eEurasian revolutionf of the late 18c when the balance of power between the European and Asian empires was upset; the eimperial crisisf of 1917-1924 when the imperial order of the late 19c was partially dismantled; and the edecolonization crisisf of 1947-1963 which left in place a bi-polar neo-imperial order that lasted until 1990.

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Julian Hoppit (UCL) on Wednesday afternoon

@ Compulsion, compensation and the sanctity of property in Britain 1660-1800

 

The 'sanctity of property' is often held to have been a central feature of late Stuart and Georgian Britain. For example, Douglass North and others have argued that a key explanation of Britain's precocious industrialization was the considerable security of property rights enjoyed there after 1688. Similarly, Douglas Hay argued that the 'bloody code' was built solely to preserve property. Yet occasionally some were forced by the state to sell or give up the property that they owed. The most notable instance of this was in 1834 when, as Nick Draper has recently shown, to abolish slavery the British state paid out £20million to owners for the freedom of their enslaved. This was not the first such example of 'compulsory purchase' however. Others included, for example, some landowners at the Restoration, South Sea annuitants in 1720, owners of Scottish heritable jurisdictions in 1746, and the loss of tithes and use rights when land was enclosed.

In this paper, I will, with regard to the period between 1660 and 1800, explore what arguments were employed to force property to be sold, redistributed or given up and what sorts of compensation might be granted.

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Derek Massarella (Chuo University) on Thursday morning

@ The East India Company, religion and gthe remote and dark corners of the earthh

 

Short of the discovery of new source material about the English East India Companyfs presence in Japan from 1613 to 1623, there is nothing new to add to the now familiar narrative of the early English presence in Japan. However, a lot more can be said about the larger issue of encounter between Japan and Europe in the early modern period, an encounter in which the English were active participants, and, in particular, about the religious encounter, or rather, in the case of the English, the lack of such an encounter. My paper will explore the question of why, at a time when, at home, religion was an issue of immense importance, it was largely irrelevant to the East India Companyfs activities in Japan. Amongst other things, the paper will focus on the career of the Rev. Patrick Copland, an East India Company chaplain, who visited Japan during the Hirado years and subsequently played a part in the English colonial project in Virginia.

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James Raven (Essex) on Wednesday afternoon

   Chance and containment: the popular and the official history of lotteries

 

The history of the English and Irish state lotteries is still very largely unknown, yet it opens up discussion of many issues in eighteenth-century political, economic and social history. The lottery was an important element in the development of the fiscal-military state (as some have called it) supporting expenditure in wartime but also contributing the completion of important public buildings. In order to maintain the lottery as a monopoly, however, the state needed to ensure its policing.

This concern forms the focus of this paper, analysing the efforts of ministers and magistrates to close down illegal, subsidiary lotteries and the consequences of this. Study of this allows new insight into the history of gaming and gambling but also of policing and court and penal practice. Much of the lottery involved ritual - the drawing and the promotion of the annual draw - but there is also a parallel cultural history of the illegal 'little goes' that rewards investigation.

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Alastair Reid (Cambridge) on Friday afternoon

   Components of the British counterculture

 

In much of the now growing literature on 'The Sixties' the@counterculture is presented as a post-war middle-class radical movement made up of two main components. First, a romantic artistic rebellion against utilitarianism, heavily under the influence of North American Beat literature. Second an idealistic moral revolt against corruption in the political establishments of both East and West, resulting in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the 'New Left'. This paper will consider the ideas and activities of two of the key figures in the 'Underground' of the 1960s, Alexander Trocchi and R. D. Laing, and suggest that the common characterisation of the counterculture at least leaves out some important components and may significantly mischaracterise the whole movement. For Trocchi and Laing were only romantics in a deeply ironic way, that is to say they were modernists, heavily under the influence of European Surrealism and Existentialism. Moreover, they were deeply sceptical of all forms of ambitious left-wing project, favouring instead a sort of 'revisionist anarchism' which emphasised libertarian solutions to the immediate problems of everyday life. Finally, we should note that they were 'post-war' in a more significant way than just chronologically, that is they were dealing with serious war traumas, both directly from their own experiences of military service in and after the Second World War and indirectly through the impact of the First World War on the longer traditions with which they were affiliated. Thus the British counterculture was more European and more serious, as well as more lasting in its effects, than is often recognised.

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Rosemary Sweet (Leicester) on Friday morning

   British perceptions of Italian cities in the long eighteenth century

 

The social elites of eighteenth-century Britain travelled to Italy in their thousands, spending weeks or months at the principal cities of Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice.  The reaction of these tourists to the art, architecture and antiquities for which these cities were renowned has been well documented, as has the impact of Italian culture upon Britain in this period.  Less attention has been given to how the British responded to the cities themselves and how the representations of cities in British accounts changed over the eighteenth century. This paper will analyse how the British described and experienced the major cities of Italy as spatial entities; how they understood the cities as products of historical processes; and how their reactions were shaped by their own expectations of urban society.  Clear distinctions can be drawn between the ways in which each city was characterized and the meanings that they embodied for the British. These meanings were not static, however, and this paper will also discuss how British responses evolved over time: reactions to the physical environment of cities became increasingly perceptive and acute and observations grew more comprehensive in their scope.

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The six historians below are also among the British team to the AJC 2009:

  Pene Corfield, RHUL

  Martin Daunton, Cambridge

  Joanna Innes, Oxford

  Patrick O'Brien, LSE

  Miles Taylor, IHR

  Pat Thane, IHR