Portfolio assignment
Weeks 1-5: 1815-1918
a) How did debates about free trade shape the politics of nineteenth century Britain?
b) Did the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884 represent a fundamental transformation of British politics and society? Why or why not?
a) Was the nineteenth century an age of ‘laissez-faire’? Why or why not?
b) Were the British ‘absent-minded imperialists’ in the nineteenth century?
c) How did events in Ireland shape British politics from the 1840s until the First World War?
Weeks 6-10: 1919-2021
a) Was the interwar period characterised by crisis? Why or why not?
b) Should we understand Britain between the 1940s and the 1970s as an era of ‘decline’ and ‘austerity’, or as a golden age of ‘affluence’? Why?
c) What was ‘consensus’ politics, and was it doomed to fail?
d) What were the characteristic of ‘Thatcherism’ as an ideology, and how did it respond to the politics of the 1950s, 60s and 70s?
e) Was New Labour a continuation of, or departure from, the social and economic policies that characterised Thatcherism?
2) 400 word secondary source analysis: analyse one of the articles or book chapters listedbelow (all of which have also been assigned for tutorials).
The purpose of this exercise is to help you understand the way academic articles and chapters add new knowledge and intervene in other historical debates – skills you will use when you write dissertations in Year 3.
If you would like to discuss an article or chapter that is not listed below that may be fine but you must confirm with me by email.
In your analysis, describe and discuss:
• The key insights and arguments offered by the article or chapter.
• What other scholarly arguments the author is responding or reacting to (either positively or negatively).
• How the article or chapter enriches and deepens our understanding, or offers a new perspective, on the topics covered (in lectures and tutorials) in the week for which it was assigned.
References: Cite at least three sources, one of which should be the article or chapter itself.
Articles and chapters:
Weeks 1-5: 1815-1918
• Kenneth Morgan, ‘The Abolition of the British Slave Trade’ in Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (2007)
• Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, and Keith McClelland, ‘Introduction’ to Catherine Hall et al. ed. Legacies of British Slave Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (2014)
• Judith R. Walkowitz, ‘The Contagious Diseases Acts and their advocates’, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (1980)
• Ben Griffin, ‘The domestic ideology of Victorian patriarchy’, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture, and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (2012)
• Antoinette Burton, ‘New Narratives of Imperial Politics in the Nineteenth Century’ in Catherine Hall and Sonya O’Rose ed. At Home with Empire, 2006
• Bernard Porter, ‘Empire and Society’in The Absent Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain, 2004. Weeks 6-10: 1919-2021
• Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence and the Fear of Brutalisation in Post-First World War Britain’, Journal of Modern History 75 (2003), 557-589.
• David Jarvis, ‘Mrs Maggs and Betty: The Conservative Appeal to Women Voters in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History (1994)
• Jose Harris, ‘War and Social History: Britain and the home front during the Second World War’, Contemporary European History 1:1 (1992)
• Camilla Schofield, ‘The War Within, 1968-1970’ in Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (2013) pp. 208-263
• Rob Saunders, ‘Crisis? What Crisis? Thatcherism and the seventies’ in Rob
Saunders and Ben Jackson ed. Making Thatcher’s Britain (2012)
