Religion and Politics in Early Modern Europe
Order and Disorder in Early Modern Britain
Growth of a Metropolis: Society and Economy in London, 1550-1700
The Enlightenment, 1720-1799
Peasant Societies, Economies and Polities: Western Europe c.1750-c.1950
Social Unrest, Emancipation and Nationalism: the European Revolutions of 1847/52
Power and Government in Modern Europe
Varieties of Modernism in Britain and Europe, 1870-1920
Building Jerusalem: Utopianism in British Thought since 1890
The Changing Character of War in the twentieth century
Europe’s Mid-Century Crisis 1930-1950
Source criticism
Historical concepts, methods, and controversies

(A) Optional Subject classes in Modern European History

Religion and Politics in Early Modern Europe

(Convenors: Mr Nicholas Davidson and Dr David Parrott)

The interaction between politics and religion is central to an understanding of the history of early modern Europe, and represents an area of extensive and lively debate between historians. The course explores this interaction through a substantial number of case studies, extending over a chronological period from the early sixteenth century through to the last decades of the seventeenth century. The course will examine politics in the widest terms, giving attention to traditional issues such as the formulation and pursuit of state policy within an international arena, but also focussing intensively on the relationships between secular government and the institutional churches, between central and local powers in the pursuit of politics with religious institutions in the construction and defining of communities. It will consider the political implications of official religious policies and attention will also be given to multi-confessional communities. Religious policy at an international level will certainly represent a key component in the structure of the course.

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Order and Disorder in Early Modern Britain and Ireland

(Convenor: Dr Felicity Heal)

The themes of order and disorder embrace some of the most important issues and much of the liveliest historiography of early modern Britain. This course will consider the mechanisms employed to maintain order, the threats posed to public order, the varieties of disorder, and the ways in which disorder could be contained. Its focus will be on England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will examine propaganda, enforcement, local government, and social welfare; the forms of lawlessness that could result if order broke down; the ways in which central and local authorities responded to disorder.

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Women, Religion and Modernity

(Convenors: Dr Ruth Harris and Professor Dame Olwen Hufton)

This course will address the role of religion in the spiritual and practical lives of women in western Europe from the reform movements of the sixteenth century to c.1970. Its aim is to examine the distinctive expressions of female religiosity and to explain the gradual feminisation of religion apparent in Europe since 1800. Taking its tone from the Enlightenment, this process has been criticised by mainstream historiography, which sees women as the embodiment of obscurantism. They argue that, when faced with secular awakening, women resisted rationalism and the increasing authority of the state. Such a reductionist interpretation dopes not do justice to the complexities of women’s experience and attitudes. Spiritual activism and practical social commitment, as well as a recognition of the limitations of scientific innovation and state welfare provision, sustained the appeal of religion for many women. Women as the transmitters of religious culture were also integral to the shaping of community, regional, national and ethnic identities critical to an understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflict.

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The Enlightenment 1720–1799

(Convenors: Professor Laurence Brockliss, Dr John Robertson and Dr Jan Spurlock)

Historical understanding of the Enlightenment has been transformed in the last quarter of the century. This course offers students the opportunity to explore and to draw together the different strands of modern Enlightenment studies, including the ‘Republic of Letters’ in Scotland, Germany, Italy, France and America, which ranged across philosophy and politics, science and medicine, freemasonry and censorship.

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Social Unrest, Emancipation and Nationalism:
the European Revolutions of 1847/52

(Convenors: Dr Michael Broers and Professor Robert Evans)

The course will focus on reasons why there was a Europe-wide revolution despite the economic, social and political differences in the various countries. Subjects for study include: national and constitutional problems; confrontation between revolution, reform and reaction; emancipatory trends and reformist movements; the immediate consequences of the revolution and its long-term effects. The course will make extensive use of recent research in the fields of cultural history, social analysis, gender issues and international relations.

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Power and Government in Modern Europe

(Convenor: Dr Jane Caplan)

This course examines the shaping of political power and governmental practice in the modern state, focussing mainly on the history of 19th-century western Europe. It investigates the new relationship between states and their subjects that emerged as government - a key concept in the course - entered into ever more areas of human behaviour and interaction in this period, creating new fields of knowledge and official expertise and new regimes of control and freedom. The course will explore government not only as a large-scale project of social organization but also through the techniques and technologies by which this was carried out in practice. As Proudhon put it in 1851, ‘To be governed is to be noted, registered, enumerated, accounted for, stamped, measured, classified, audited, patented, licensed, authorized, endorsed, reprimanded, prevented, reformed, rectified, and corrected, in every operation, every transaction, every movement.’ Following Proudhon into the history of the everyday methods of identification and classification, the course will explore a wide variety of topics, including the history of the personal name; official statistics; birth certificates, passports and other identity documents; fingerprints, tattoos and police photography; and the history of the filing cabinet.

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Varieties of Modernism in Britain and Europe, 1870-1920

(Convenor: Dr Christina de Bellaigue and Dr William Whyte)

This course adopts a comparative and cross-national approach to the study of a movement (or cluster of movements) whose influence and frame of reference, even when closely linked to ideas of ‘nationalism’, largely transcended national boundaries. The course assumes no prior definition of what modernism entailed, but explores its meaning in different contexts and disciplines (including the social and natural sciences, aesthetics and the visual arts, political thought, theology and philosophy. Some of the most challenging contributions to ‘modernist’ thought came from thinkers who were deeply conscious of earlier traditions, and this tension will be given due emphasis. The subject will be taught from contemporary and other primary sources.

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The Changing Character of War in the twentieth century

(Convenor: Dr Rob Johnson)

This challenging and synoptic series seeks to assess change in the character of war and in the historiography of war. The series is organised in such a way as to take a thematic and comparative view of the nature of war across the twentieth century.

It is concerned with the structures of war: the purpose of war, strategy, the modalities of war, systems of mobilisation, the nature of total war, and the ‘sinews [economics] of war’.

It is also concerned with the human dimensions of war: the social history of soldiers, militarism, enlistment and conscription, command and leadership, collaboration and resistance, identity and war, civilians - as refugees or participants, atrocities, morale, casualties, and combat.

The course embraces a global perspective and takes a critical look at Eurocentric and Western hegemonic interpretations of war and military history. Whilst the course is structured in a chronological order, it does not follow a slavish narrative of battles and campaigns, but rather highlights episodes and issues thematically. Consequently, there is an opportunity for students to develop both a general evaluation of change in war across the twentieth century and issues within specific case studies of conflicts, including, for example, colonial wars and wars of decolonisation-liberation, theatres and campaigns of the First and Second World Wars, the conflicts of the Cold War such as the Malayan Emergency, Vietnam, Aden or Algeria, and the wars of the late twentieth century such as the Gulf War, Counter-Insurgency operations and terrorism.

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Europe’s Mid-Century Crisis, 1930–1950

(Convenors: Dr Jane Caplan)

This course offers an introduction to a momentous and fast-moving period of European history. On the one hand, it was marked by the maturation of political and economic problems catalyzed by the First World War and culminating in the crisis of the liberal capitalist order - represented by more than a decade of murderous civil and international wars that were destructive of both the European and imperial orders. On the other hand, the defeat of fascism, together with the survival of the Soviet Union, presented new opportunities for the (re)-foundation of an intra-European order, while the terms of that defeat also remade the framework within which Europe was able to engage with the extra-European world. Existing trends in the social and cultural sphere such as female emancipation, the populist use of new technologies and the rise of a culture of consumption were accelerated and intensified by the political and economic developments of this period. Examining this period from the perspective of the early 21st century offers students a chance to get to grips with some of the defining events of contemporary Europe, to explore different approaches to examining the period and to consider the relationship between large-scale interpretation and focused empirical research.

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Growth of a metropolis: society and economy in London, 1550-1700
(paper borrowed from Economic and Social History)

(Convenor: Dr Ian Archer)

This course is intended to explore the causes, and consequences for London, of its rise to dominance. It will begin with some consideration of European urban development more generally in the period, and the growth of other capital cities and ports, and then concentrate on London: its demographic and spatial growth; their roots in the city’s role as commercial entrepôt and as social and political capital; their consequences for social structure, balance of occupations, social problems, and mechanisms of government and social regulation. Particular attention will be paid throughout to the growing social and economic contrasts between City, West End, and eastern suburbs.

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Peasant societies, economies, and polities: Western Europe, c. 1750 - c. 1950
(paper borrowed from Economic and Social History)

(Convenor: Dr David Hopkin)

Peasants, although probably the largest social group in most West European countries before 1900, more often appear as the objects of historical forces than as actors in the processes of economic, social and political change.  They were defined by their unequal relationship to the landlord, the priest, and the state.  Under the seigneurial regime they supported the landed elite, but no sooner had this been undone than they were being doomed to extinction by both socialists and free-marketeers, who believed they would be swept away by unstoppable economic and political modernisation (mechanisation, concentration, urbanisation, class and state formation…).  More recently, social scientists have even doubted whether peasants, by some definitions, ever existed.  Yet by other measures, European peasantries have been surprisingly resilient.  This course follows peasant communities from seigneurialism through the revolutionary period, the impact of industrialisation and the development of a national and global agricultural markets in the late nineteenth century, to the protectionist reaction of the early twentieth century, to see how they have managed these changes.  We will make use of the sources left to us by peasants (not nearly as rare as is alleged, if we extend our corpus beyond memoirs and letters to include oral literature and material culture) to investigate the ways that peasants were complicit in, perhaps even initiators of, historical change. 

To achieve this we will be drawing on anthropological and sociological research on contemporary peasant societies, both in Europe and beyond.  Anthropological expertise in the day-to-day operation of small scale, face-to-face communities will be particularly important in achieving a “peasant-eyed view” of historical change, though we will also be calling on historians’ knowledge of the institutions of mass society such as bureaucracies, trade unions, political parties, the media…  Each session will concentrate on one of the dominant relationships in the peasant’s life – to the land, to the household, to the community, to the lord, to the market, to the State, to the Church, and to the social scientist.  In addition to observing peasants, we will be observing the observers of peasants, and thus trying to understand the peasants’ place in the intellectual sphere.

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Building Jerusalem: utopianism in British thought since 1890

(Convenor: Dr William Whyte and Dr Ben Jackson)

The utopian tradition in British thought is often neglected by historians. Whilst the work of writers like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley remains of perennial interest, the context in which they wrote is disregarded. This course, by contrast, explores the utopian imaginings of a much wider group of people: from politicians to playwrights; from philosophers to film-makers; from architects to authors. Taking a genuinely interdisciplinary approach, it will shed new light on Britain's utopians and on British history more generally.

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(B) Methodology classes in Modern European History

Source criticism

(Convenor: Professor Robert Gildea and Dr Nick Stargardt)

This compulsory paper provides graduates with training in the critical assessment and use of different kinds of primary sources. These include memoirs, autobiographies, diaries and letters; oral sources; statistical and economic sources; government and administrative records; judicial, police and church records; the press, visual and audio sources. - This course is taught in fortnightly classes during Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and is examined by a three-hour unseen paper at the end of Trinity Term.

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Historical concepts, methods, and controversies

(Convenor: Dr Ruth Harris and Professor Jane Caplan)

On their return from research work on their dissertation, in the Hilary Term of their second year, students take their second core research methodology paper, in which they work with course convenors to consider wide-ranging methodological and conceptual issues, as well as the intellectual problems and controversies thrown up by their research interests. Students will be helped to choose a topic, which should come from an area relevant to their dissertation subject, but which may not substantially replicate any material included in the dissertation or submitted for examination in any other part of the degree. This course will be taught in eight classes and will be examined by one oral seminar presentation and a conceptual and methodological essay about a field of research.

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