British Worlds, 1750-1919

British history is increasingly researched, written and debated in places much beyond the isles which constitute the modern nation state. This paper explores modes of conflict, accommodation, conquest and governance between Britain and the wider world through the long nineteenth century. The title of this paper emphasises the plural ways in which Britain remade the world and in which various worlds remade Britain. In stretching out the conceptualisation of British world-making like this, it introduces students to many vibrant ways in which the meaning of British history is being cast anew in historical writing today. 

The long nineteenth-century was the critical period of the so-called ‘Second British Empire’ which followed the American Revolution. Yet the paper is not a survey of the 'rise and fall' of empire. Rather, the emphasis will be on reciprocal as well as violently unequal engagements between all manner of peoples, Britons and non-Britons, in addition to the histories of people who were drawn into or who resisted British power. In spanning the world from the Pacific to the Caribbean and from South Asia to Africa, the paper discusses where and how British ideas of self, society, liberalism, culture, heritage, race and gender were forged. It interrogates debates about revolutionary times and moments of major uprisings against British imperialism, about coerced labour and abolition, and about science, culture, knowledge and political thought. The status of people of colour in metropolitan Britain, and British imperial politics, as also how British publics and writers envisaged the wider world will be considered. 

Students will engage with sailors, voyagers, settlers, convicts and governors who were travelling out from Britain, as well as enslaved people, Indigenous communities, indentured labourers, mutineers and rebels, who had itineraries across many sites of British worlds. The paper ends with the First World War, not only as a moment of crisis for British worlds, but also as one of a new emphasis on British worldmaking. 'British Worlds' will introduce students to key areas of theory and historiography including settler-colonial studies, material-culture histories, Indigenous studies, global intellectual history and science and technology studies, all of which have been reinvigorating British histories and World histories in parallel pathways.

The paper will set a foundation for undergraduates wishing to combine interests in Britain and the world as they proceed to later stages of the Tripos.