The 10 most-cited articles in The English Historical Review, 2016

Abstract A strand in current scholarship examines early Islam and the Caliphate against a late antique backdrop of Sasanid–Roman tension, dogmatic strife in the Church, and the maturation of rabbinic Judaism. Gibbon long ago insisted that there had been more than one road out of Antiquity, leading not just to the formation of Latin Christendom— the Papacy, German Empire and Italian Renaissance—but also to Greek Christendom and the rise of Islam. Yet this aspect of Decline and Fall remains unappreciated, especially in John Pocock’s monumental Barbarism and Religion . The present article traces the origins of Gibbon’s eastward turn in his reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Arabists, historians and travellers, and in his decision to follow East Roman history down to 1453. Not only Voltaire but also the Universal History (London, 1736–66) encouraged Gibbon to look beyond Europe and its Christian narrative, while attitudes to Islam had softened in the decades around 1700 as a consequence of greater familiarity with its literature and the weakening of theological prejudice.…

Abstract This article investigates the emergence of neo-liberalism in Britain and its intellectual relationship with each of the three main British political ideologies. The article distinguishes between different currents of neo-liberalism that have been absorbed into British political thought, and shows that this process to some extent pre-dated the electoral success of Thatcherism in the 1980s. The article further suggests that labelling recent British political discourse as unvarnished ‘neo-liberalism’, while at times analytically useful, simplifies a more complicated picture, in which distinctively neo-liberal ideas have been blended in different ways into the ideologies of British Liberalism, Conservatism and even Labour socialism. The article therefore turns the spotlight on a more obscure aspect of the making of British neo-liberalism by exploring how politicians and intellectuals of varying partisan stripes generated policy discourses that presented neo-liberal ideas as an authentic expression of their own ideological traditions. Perhaps the most surprising finding of this…

Abstract The professions in eighteenth-century Britain included sons of the aristocracy and sons of the middling sort. This article uses naval officers as a case-study for exploring the relationship between social status and merit. Using techniques made possible by the emergence of large quantities of digitised source material, it revises the work of Michael Lewis by describing and analysing a database of 556 commissioned officers who served in the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Officers came from lower down the social spectrum than Lewis found, and, above a certain social threshold, there does not seem to have been any correlation between an officer’s social background and his promotion prospects. The pressures of more than two decades of war meant that senior naval officers could not afford to overlook able candidates for promotion in favour of the social elite. For naval professionals, social background mattered less than merit; however, merit retained elements of birth-right and lineage as traditionally defined in early modern Europe. The…

Abstract This article examines the careers of a number of left thinkers who broke with the Communist Party of Great Britain in the late 1930s, committing themselves instead to a ‘politics of everyday life’ based on social investigation. Central to this moment was the social research organisation Mass-Observation, the sociologists of which argued that democracy should be built around the vibrancy and irreverence they identified in ordinary culture. This ambition gained its fullest application during the 1940s, as a number of former M-O researchers became influential in the social reconstruction effort, in Labour Party policy circles and, later, in post-war academic sociology. By tracing the sociological arguments of unaligned left intellectuals from the 1930s to the 1950s, this article emphasises the rich plurality of influences at play within British progressive thought in the mid-twentieth century—influences which spanned the worlds of far-left activism, literature, art, the social sciences, town planning and parliamentary politics. It also helps us to reassess the genesis of the…

Abstract This essay examines the historical relationship between empire and information in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Asia through a new examination of the imperial post. It argues that the creation of an Indian penny post in 1854 set in motion an information revolution which impacted regionally on literate and illiterate Indian subjects of the British Empire, on Indian publishers, and on colonial administrators. What historians have so far written about Britain’s imperial post has largely presented it as an instrument of modern colonial state-building. When it has merited attention as an engine of social communication it has been mistakenly judged an outright failure. But, as this essay argues, a study of the imperial post reveals Britain’s colonial state, within the wider context of a very illiberal British imperialism in Asia, trying to behave like a liberal one. While its desire for control and surveillance pulled it in one direction, Victorian notions of free trade, which in turn demanded an unrestricted circulation of information, pulled it in…

Abstract This article examines the concept of the three orders of society (oratores, bellatores, laboratores) in the works of Ælfric of Eynsham (d. c.1010) and Wulfstan of York (d. 1023). Paying attention to the immediate contexts in which Ælfric and Wulfstan formulated their views on social order, the article contrasts the varying uses of the metaphor with the discussion on social change and social mobility current around the turn of the first millennium. The reiteration of these categories seems to have surfaced in situations of particular political turbulence, as a means of convincing audiences that contemporary society was in a state of disorder which had to be remedied. The article incorporates analysis of a text previously excluded from discussions of the concept, Napier 50, and reviews some interpretations according to which the three orders functioned as part of criticism of extensive upward social mobility at the beginning of the eleventh century.

Abstract The historian and socialist R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) was one of the most influential works of non-fiction to be written in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. Fusing historical, religious and social thought, it is the central work of Tawney’s oeuvre, but commentary upon it has focused narrowly on its historiographical significance. When attention is paid to the text and its context, it becomes clear that it arose from Tawney’s project of renewing Christian teaching on economic and social conduct. Crucial to the recovery of Tawney’s purposes here is his contribution to a Church of England report on Christianity and Industrial Problems (1918), a key text in the growth of socialism in the established church in the inter-war years. This article draws on the hitherto unused papers of the committee behind this report to demonstrate for the first time that Tawney was its main author; and it reveals that this was the first place in which he set out the ideas which would become Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. These discoveries…

Abstract In 1542, Henry VIII authorised the first of a series of debasements of the English silver coinage which would collectively come to be known as the ‘great debasement’ of the mid-sixteenth century. The debasement was accompanied by a period of inflation and political change, and for contemporary observers these phenomena were inextricably linked. The coinage became the subject of a growing critical discourse, and governors feared that popular discontent threatened to spill over into riot and disorder—and perhaps even the subversion of the commonwealth. Moving away from the details of mint policy and quantitative assessments of the circulating medium that have previously occupied historians, this article explores the coinage as a topic of political discourse in the mid-Tudor period. As a matter of state, the coinage was a topic on which ordinary subjects were supposed to be silent and even Crown agents had to be circumspect, as criticising the coinage could be classed as sedition and mishandling it was a treasonous offence. But because of its status as common currency, the…

There is little doubt that ‘Atlantic history’, or the study of the ‘Atlantic world’, has been one of the most rapidly growing fields in recent decades.1 It has two basic premisses. Firstly, the connections across this oceanic basin—connections which emerged most visibly during the early modern period—justify using the Atlantic as a meaningful unit of historical analysis. Secondly, taking such an oceanic perspective can challenge traditional national or imperial histories, and reveal hitherto obscured connections and encounters. These ideas have achieved considerable traction. While there is no scholarly society concerned with Atlantic history alone, it has been sponsored by many organisations with wider remits. Numerous university departments around the world offer Atlantic history courses. There is a specialist journal named Atlantic Studies, and many publishers now run dedicated Atlantic book series. The amount of research devoted to this topic has risen remarkably, and the number of lectures, conferences, seminars and published and unpublished studies about the Atlantic world is,…

In the present age of enlightened and pious philanthropy, no Institutions of Charity have gained a larger share of public approbation, than those established for the Board, Clothing, and Education of Destitute Orphans. 1 We live in an age of elections—at one time or another we almost all apply to be elected into clubs for pleasure or for profit—into great Corporations, the House of Commons, and what not; and three-fourths of us associate our ambition with an election of some sort or other … 2 As these two quotations indicate, the nineteenth century in England was the age of philanthropy as well as that of elections. The first remark was made in an address at the British Orphan Asylum in 1831; the second was a comment made by Charles Dickens at the anniversary dinner of the Royal Hospital for Incurables on 21 May 1857. The subject of this article—charity electioneering—was one product of this particular conjuncture of philanthropy and elections. Both the British Orphan Asylum and the Royal Hospital for Incurables were famous for—and proud of—their system of choosing individual…