Ian McBride (KCL)

This course brings together two of the most lively and innovative areas of early modern historical studies, the ‘new British history’, and the history of political ideas.  It offers students the opportunity to explore how power, identity and politics were conceptualized in the English-speaking world during a period of social and economic change.  The ‘long eighteenth century’ experienced the beginnings of industrialization and population growth, the emergence of a class society, the erosion of the monopoly exercised by the established church over religious life, and the spread of mass literacy.  It was also the period when the modern British state was consolidated and a colonial empire assembled across the Atlantic.  Finally, the rise of Grub Street and the emergence of a popular press, facilitated by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, made London the largest centre of print culture, pamphleteering and political journalism in the world. The course involves studies, at an advanced level, of the debates surrounding the revolutions of 1688, 1776 and 1789, the unions of 1707 and 1801, and the growth of commerce and ‘politeness’; it also introduces students to more specialised methodological issues than those raised at undergraduate level.