Mellon Foundation Grant
We are pleased to announce that the Nicholson Center for British Studies has received a substantial grant from the Mellon Foundation to support a program of joint research conferences between the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley. The conferences will address the history of Britain's political economy, and will take place over the next three academic years (2005-2008).
Because a key priority of both Chicago's and Berkeley's centers for British Studies has been to address the serious shortfall of graduate fellowship support in British Studies, limited funds have relegated much of their excellent activity to events that are confined to the campus communities. Now the two centers will pool their joint resources in early and late modern British history to create a multi-sited research program, which will foster a sustained and developing conversation between their institutions, as well as with scholars at other institutions within their respective regions.
As with European history more broadly, British history has been characterized by an unhelpful division between the early modern and late modern periods. Rather than critically examine this division, historians of each period are rarely in conversation with each other: they attend different conferences, work in different archives and are trained at different institutions. It is, then, unsurprising that they tend to think of their work as being driven by different questions.
Similarly, although the problems of political economy have had a long and special interest for students of British history, the questions raised in this originally global field were all too quickly divided and made the preserve of particular disciplines. Within the discipline of History, this process was reflected in the emergence of the particular concerns of economic, political, imperial, intellectual, social and cultural history, and the further subdivisions of family history, labor history, urban history and women's history. The consequence has been to generate an ever-narrower set of questions appealing to ever smaller audiences.
We have identified a broad set of questions regarding political economy and modernization that straddles the chronological divide between the early and late modern periods, and engages both communities of scholarship.
By doing so, we imagine a newly invigorated discussion of political economy, and a return to old questions asked with both a stronger dose of contingency and skepticism, and with comparative and imperial concerns at the heart of the discussion. Our aim throughout is to resituate British political economy and its successor disciplines within their proper cosmopolitan contexts. We envision each year focusing on one of the following themes:
1. Economic Modernization
Why did England 's economy deviate from the European norm? And what relationship did that deviation have to the so-called "Rise of the West"? Traditionally this question has been posited in terms of the mercantile, financial, commercial and industrial revolutions where England 's unique place has been assumed rather than proven. By shifting the question to an explicitly comparative frame, scholars have been able to focus on several key variables while also raising broader questions about the particularities of the social, political and cultural conditions of Britain 's economic divergence. If we have a sound understanding of many broad macro-economic changes though, we have yet to explore how these relied upon everyday micro-practices of comprehension, production and exchange. How did people come to understand themselves and act as subjects of a national, imperial or global economy? Click here for more information on Chicago's February 2007 regional conference on this subject, "Economies of Empire: British Political Economy and Modernization."
2. Modernizing Political Culture
Smith knew that political economy was necessarily concerned with generating a new market ethic, but did it also generate new political ethics? Is it possible, in consequence, to discern changes in the way political corruption was understood and practiced both in Britain and its empire? How did the new institutions of the emergent state and representative political system gain the trust of the population? How might we trace a history of modern trust or distrust in politicians and administrators, especially in light of the fact that the British and its imperial civil services were designed to bypass problems of clientelism and corruption? What effects did imperial acquisition and imperial disintegration have on notions of trust and corruption? Problems of political clientelism have become the centerpiece of much recent discussion of new democracies, but those discussions are as methodologically sophisticated as they are historically shallow. Click here for more information on Chicago's May 2005 regional conference on this subject, "Modernizing Politics?".
3. The Social Sciences and the Making of Modern Society
The study of the emergence of the social sciences and welfare state in Britain has for the most part been remarkably insular, eschewing comparisons with, or the influence of, cognate developments in North America and continental Europe. Our aim is to provoke discussion of their emergence in comparative terms that extend beyond the current focus on intellectual and institutional traditions and histories in which Britain is often seen as trailing behind. In many ways concepts of civil society and social welfare, as well as the methods of anthropology and comparative politics emerged earlier in the British Isles. How and why did this come about? How was society increasingly conceptualized as having its own laws and rhythms distinct from economy, politics and culture? What were the visions of metropolitan and colonial society, past and present, that the British social sciences developed, and to what extent did these become the normative basis for developing welfare regimes? To what degree were the British social sciences and the practices of social welfare shaped by the imperial encounter or by European or American traditions? We would like to relocate the emergence of the social sciences and welfare state in Britain within a broader transnational context. Click here for more information on Chicago's April 2009 regional conference on this subject, "Empire, Modernity, and the British Social Sciences: 1700-1950".
Beginning in September 2005, we will hold one Berkeley-Chicago consortium conference every year. In each of the first two years we will have a conference - at Berkeley in the first year, at Chicago in the second - involving faculty and graduate students at the consortium institutions. In the third year we will hold a major international conference. These conferences will involve all of the graduate students at Berkeley and Chicago, as well as those from other regional campuses who have participated in the program. Students will be encouraged both to present papers from their research and to participate as discussants of the faculty's work. In order to deepen exploration of the theme as much as possible by faculty and graduate students from both regions, we shall invite a handful of speakers working on these questions from other institutions in the US and the UK . This will allow students and faculty to explore methodological and interpretative differences emerging between the UK and US.
Starting January 2006, both Berkeley and Chicago will host two-day regional conferences for faculty and graduate students each year. The host institution will announce an open-call for papers within its catchment area, but particular priority will go to graduate students returning from research trips in the UK . We envisage workshop presentations of pre-circulated papers with short commentaries by senior scholars from the region, open forums for discussion of particular problems or secondary works, and more familiar 20 minute paper presentations. In each case we would also invite one speaker from outside the catchment area.
In order to enliven their intellectual communities, the Mellon grant will also provide for visiting faculty appointments at each institution. Each year, Berkeley and Chicago will invite scholars from regional universities and colleges to apply for a visiting faculty appointment in order to work in the year's chosen theme. The visitor will come for one term, teach one upper division undergraduate and graduate course on that theme (possibly in conjunction with a core faculty member of the two Centers), and deliver workshop presentations on their own research.
By combining the strength of both institutions and remaining in continuing conversation with other British historians in their respective regions, we hope to provide graduate students with a broader intellectual and institutional framework for their studies. This more expansive framework will allow the graduate students to initiate conversations and explore methodological tensions at early stages in their careers, and should stimulate rich cross-fertilizations. |
