This MPhil option explores the rich, tragic and fascinating history of modern Ireland. For over 120 years ‘John Bull’s Other Island’ was part of the United Kingdom, but even partition and the creation of two states in 1921-22 (one of which remains within the UK) was not the end of the complicated Anglo-Irish relationship, or Ireland’s legacy within the former British World. This MPhil option explores some of the contradictions of Irish history through a series of case studies which span the period roughly from the 1840s until the early 2000s. Who or what was responsible for the devastating consequences of the Great Irish Famine? Were the Irish colonised or colonisers? Why have women been so threatening - and for so long - to the moral code of community and nation? How should we interpret Irish responses to the First World War in light of what we know about the Irish Revolution? Through seminar discussions and presentations, students will have the opportunity to explore a range of historiographical, critical and methodological approaches to thinking about and writing Irish history; in the final class, students can present their assessed work ahead of submission.

This option will be shared with the MPhil Modern European History

This MPhil course introduces students to the historiography of the British empire through the lens of two closely interconnected historical themes: labour and environment. British imperialism was characterised by its control of large global labour forces: even after the abolition of slavery, the empire relied heavily on different forms of coerced work, including indentured labour. Demands for labour, in many cases, also incentivised the migration of large numbers of workers across different imperial territories, resulting in fundamental changes to colonial populations as well as to their governance structures. In addition, and intertwined with the study of labour, were the important repercussions of imperial rule and labour regimes for the physical environments of imperial Britain. The extraction of resources and the cultivation of large plantations, for example - producing sugar, tea, rubber, tin, coal, and other raw materials crucial to imperial economies - relied heavily on the twinned domination of peoples and nature. How environments, at home and abroad, were conceived had significant implications for their use and has shaped the landscapes and livelihoods we live with today. This course, then, plumbs the depths of British imperial historiography, hinging on key historical debates revolving around the relationship between labour, land and environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Britain in the nineteenth century was a society transformed by astonishing population growth, spectacular urbanisation, unprecedented migration and the development of mass print culture. At the same time, older political, intellectual and religious structures were recast in new moulds as Britain moved towards mass enfranchisement and religious equality. Simultaneously, the British struggled to manage the forces unleashed by new global rivalries and interdependencies. At times the pace of change seemed overwhelming, and it demanded new institutions, new ways of living and new ways of thinking about the self. Historians of ‘modern’ Britain might understandably point to those changes as signs of ‘modernity’. And yet in the twentieth century ‘modernity’ came to be defined as a rejection of nineteenth-century responses to each of these developments. Twentieth-century observers associated ‘modernity’ with a turn against nineteenth-century politics, social policies, religion, literature, and architecture – all were condemned as non-modern and were pejoratively labelled ‘Victorian’. So what do we mean when we speak of ‘modern’ Britain? Is ‘modernity’ a meaningful concept? This course examines a number of areas in which nineteenth-century Britons were conscious of breaking with the past as they remade their society, and thereby seeks to explore what it meant (and means) to be Victorian. 

This MPhil option invites students to examine modern Britain both through and from the Caribbean. Moving chronologically from emancipation to the present day, and from the islands to the British Isles, the paper explores how Caribbean populations have sought to invest their claim to Britishness with meaning, and how this status has been variously proffered, withheld, and denied. This period has seen the region produce some of modern Britain’s most perceptive theorists and critics. Through their writing on trade, labour, political reform, migration, and so on, we will explore how the boundaries of the British nation and state have been contested over the past two centuries. 

More broadly, the paper offers the chance to think critically about the historiography of modern Britain. The Caribbean has featured prominently in recent moves to bring questions of race and empire to the forefront of modern British history. How, then, has work by Caribbean thinkers helped to shape these developments? And what might we learn from the ways in which the region has been made visible and, at other times, invisible in the literature? This, then, is not just a paper for those interested in Black British and Caribbean history, but rather for anyone interested in race, empire, and global approaches to writing modern British history.