The Historian

Three Centuries of European Intellectual History: Reflections on State, Stability, and Society

The first part of the colloquium consisted of four absorbing papers that spanned three centuries of political thought from a gamut of ideological perspectives, ranging from Francois Fenelon’s Catholic absolutism to the radical social criticism of Adorno.

In two of the four papers the spectre of the French Revolution loomed large, whether as a consequence of political philosophy or as a stimulant for new ideas. First, Catherine Hulse presented a challenge to the received wisdom about Rousseau’s influence on the most bloodthirsty and tyrannical aspects of Jacobinism. Her paper on Rousseau’s ideas of liberty and legitimacy emphasised Rousseau’s commitment to a conception of freedom that was antithetical to absolute state power and therefore incompatible with totalitarian ideas. Adela Halo also challenged the consensus about the relationship between the Revolution and a major French thinker, this time Germaine de Staël. Halo showed that even in the depth of de Staël’s “republican moment”, at the height of the Revolution, she retained an admiration for the British political system, with its admixture of conservative and progressive institutions.

Conor Bollins focused on another source of anxiety in eighteenth-century political thought: perceptions of the changing size and character of populations in European states. Although the link between population theories and politics is most often associated with Thomas Malthus, Bollins unearthed an earlier debate that preoccupied thinkers from Adam Smith to Montesquieu, with the shift from an agrarian to urban population prompting fears for the “propagation of the species” and even leading to calls for the liberalisation of divorce laws.

Finally – and continuing the theme of political thought as a response to crisis – Emily Steinhauer offered an intriguing reinterpretation of the ideas of Horkheimer and Adorno in the aftermath of World War II. Shifting focus from the 1960s to the 1950s as the key decade in their thought, Steinhauer nuanced the idea that the Frankfurt School’s critical mission was purely negative. Alongside the undisputed influence of Marxism, she identified a strand of Adorno and Horkheimer’s thought that owed much to social democratic ideas, and to the liberal belief in human progress.

Material Culture and Everyday Objects in the Eighteenth Century: From Masculinity-Making to Mantua-Makers

In the second panel of the day, Ben Jackson and Rebecca Morrison, both supervised by Amanda Vickery, spoke about their innovative research into eighteenth-century material culture. While Jackson tackles masculine materiality and Morrison the female mantua-maker, both are interested in the history of material objects (from rocking horses to gowns), as well as the history of the social relationships around their use. The talks situated objects as fundamental markers of rank and gender, and read the creation of these objects within their socio-economic contexts.

Jackson’s presentation examined eighteenth-century boys’ toys, of which children of the period had an abundance in comparison to their early modern counterparts. However, little has been said about the role of these toys, especially in gender identity. Issues of effeminacy remain overstated and Jackson instead insists boy’s toys should be read as an encouragement of politeness and refined manliness from childhood onwards.

Rebecca Morrison’s project, a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between QMUL and the V&A Museum, focuses on the eighteenth-century mantua-maker, a highly skilled women’s dressmaker. Clothing, argues Morrison, is one of the most human parts of history, yet often it is approached only in terms of the development of fashion. Sharing her hands-on work, Morrison reads the seams, cuts, and pinning of two eighteenth-century sack-backs to tell a tale of their creation. She deconstructs the gowns, taking note of their different materials, waistlines, and piecing, finding clues as to how they were made, and who for.

(Self-) Perceptions and Otherness: Religious, Political, and Cultural Encounters from Brazil to Brixton

Spanning four continents and over four hundred years, the third panel of the day examined the profound ambiguities of the cultural encounter. Rejecting clear-cut binaries between self and other, these papers explored the different ways in which religious tribes, warring superpowers, and racial communities sought to make sense of each other across the cultural divide. Kicking off proceedings with her paper ‘The Society of Jesus and the Spatiality of Conversion in Brazil and Ethiopia, c.1540-1700,’ Emma Newman emphasised the importance of space in mediating encounters between Jesuit missionaries and native communities. By examining how missionaries were required to navigate existing spaces of religious meaning, as well as creating their own, Newman brought into question simplistic divisions between colonisers and the colonised.

Similar ambiguities were explored in Adam Boon’s following paper, ‘Kremlinology and U.S. Foreign Policy-Making in the 1950s.’ Focusing on the Eisenhower administration’s attempts to scrutinise the shadowy political developments of the Soviet politburo, Boon argued that meetings and conferences between delegates of the superpowers became key sites of intelligence-collection.

In his paper ‘You’ll Never Get a Band to Play Brixton: Race, Slumming, the Legacy of Empire, and the Brixton Academy,’ Steve Bentel situates the music venue alongside the Brazilian backcountry and the Cold War conference room as an important site of cultural encounter. Exploring the history of the Academy in the mid-1980s, Bentel proposes that its early concerts, ranging from The Clash to UB40, provided novel opportunities for white and black Londoners to interact in the racially divided capital. Taken together, these three papers thus emphasise both the creative and contentious possibilities of encounters which reach across entrenched religious, political, and racial divides.

Medicine and Emotions in Modern Britain: From Early Theories of Grief to the Many Dimensions of Digestion

After a pleasant afternoon tea break came the final panel of the colloquium, which examined the connections between the histories of medicine and emotion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. In his paper ‘Mourning before Freud: Psychologies and Pathologies of Grief in Britain, 1850-1914’, Edgar Gerrard Hughes explored grief in a Late Victorian and Edwardian context, using Charles Darwin as a case study to examine popular and scientific elements of grieving. Gerrard Hughes used two moments of Darwin’s life – the death of his mother and death of his daughter – in an effort to demonstrate how Darwin grieved for both events differently, internalizing the death of his mother as opposed to grieving over the death of his daughter in a more emotional way.

Evelien Lemmens tackled emotional and physical health in the same period when she presented her paper ‘”Demon of Dyspepsia”: Fear and Emotional Indigestion in Britain (1850-1914)’ which sought to tackle the intersection of social and emotional elements of digestive health. Lemmens presented on the wide swathe of ailments that existed under the blanket of dyspepsia. Her work differed from previous writing about the history of dyspepsia through examining religious and mythological responses to dyspepsia as well as medical responses.

Dave Saunders closed out the panel discussing the links between nutrition and nationalism in the context of World War II, in his paper ‘Swallowing One’s Pride: Wartime Nutritional Research and the British Citizen, 1939-1945’. Saunders presented the case of a food deprivation study conducted in the early days of the war. He shows how responses to scientific research were used to brand people as more or less noble wartime citizens.

The panel overall proposed a number of significant ways in which medical thought and the emotions can intervene in social, political and intellectual histories. It was an excellent panel to finish off a day of impressive presentations.

The speakers would like to thank Amanda Langley, Florence Largilliere, Hannah Mawdsley, and Magdaléna Jánošíková for their hard work in organising this year’s PGR Colloquium.