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
Pat Thane,
IHR