Programme 2023-2024

Les séances ont lieu, sauf indication contraire, le jeudi de 17h à 18h30 à la Maison de la Recherche de Sorbonne Université (28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e), salle D421

Jeudi 5 octobre 2023 : Séance pédagogique sur les ressources en ligne en histoire britannique (Fabrice Bensimon, Stéphane Jettot et Frédérique Lachaud)

Jeudi 19 octobre : Louise Jackson (Edimbourg), ‘Gender equalities at work: writing an interdisciplinary history of feminist campaigning in the UK c. 1970-2020’

Jeudi 9 novembre : John Tolan (Nantes), ‘England’s Jews in the 13th century’

Jeudi 23 novembre : William Ashworth (Liverpool) : ‘The Early Chemical Industry in North West England and Its Legacy’

Jeudi 7 décembre : Emily Ward (Edimbourg), ‘”I witness this myself”: adolescent rulers and political “belonging” in Britain and France, c. 1150 –c. 1260’

Jeudi 21 décembre : Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq (Nanterre), sur son livre La République de Harrington dans la France des Lumières et de la Révolution (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2023)

Jeudi 1er février 2024 : Béatrice Robic (Nanterre) : « Le travail des enfants en Angleterre et au pays de Galles entre 1870 et 1914 »

Jeudi 8 février : Luke Blaxill (Oxford), ‘Text Mining and Political History: challenges and opportunities in the age of Big Data’

Jeudi 15 février : Thomas Stammers (Durham): ‘Philippe, comte de Paris and the Orleans family in Exile after 1848: Liberalism, Collecting and Empire’

Jeudi 29 février: Alison Cathcart (Stirling) : ‘James VI & I and his empire of islands’

Jeudi 14 mars : Perry Gauci (Oxford) : ‘London Private Bankers in Eighteenth-Century Society’

Jeudi 28 mars : Lauriane Simony (Cergy) : « Diplomatie culturelle, stratégies d’influence et propagande : le British Council en Birmanie après l’indépendance »

Jeudi 4 avril : Sophie Scott-Brown (East Anglia), ‘The Impolitics of Internationalism: Claude Bourdet, G. D. H. Cole, and the International Society for Socialist Studies’

Jeudi 25 avril : James Fisher (Exeter), autour de son ouvrage The Enclosure of Knowledge. Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2022)

Jeudi 16 maiOphélie Siméon (Sorbonne Nouvelle), « Anna Doyle Wheeler (1785-1848): itinéraire politique et militant d’une pionnière du féminisme »

 

Le séminaire est ouvert aux étudiants de master et doctorat, ainsi qu’à toutes les personnes intéressées. Les enregistrements de la plupart des communications sont ensuite disponibles sur la chaine YouTube du séminaire :  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCveumFeGDtmJP8GTG3S8DOQ

Sally Holloway, ‘Food, Family & Feeling: Edible Gifts and the Making of Marriage in Georgian England’ (11 mai)

Jeudi 11 mai à 17h (Serpente, salle D421)

Sally Holloway, ‘Food, Family & Feeling: Edible Gifts and the Making of Marriage in Georgian England’

It is well established that the navigation of courtship in Georgian England was shaped by a range of romantic gifts including ribbons, rings, garters, gloves, and portrait miniatures, which helped to generate feelings of love and shepherd courting couples toward the altar. Yet these were not the only items which couples had at their disposal: in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), it is the humble walnut which enables the farmer Robert Martin to express his admiration for the heroine’s protégée Harriet Smith, while in Pride & Prejudice (1813) it is the beautiful pyramids of hothouse fruits and hospitality at Pemberley which first lead Elizabeth Bennet to realise her love for Mr Darcy. Such edible offerings are largely absent from scholarship on courtship in Georgian England, though they were likely among the most common material objects routinely exchanged by and shared between couples.

This paper sets out how courting couples orchestrated their relationships using a breath of edible gifts from cakes and sweetmeats to apricots, peaches, pineapples, melons, duck, pork, venison, turbot, oysters, and sturgeon. These sweet treats, fruits, meats, and fish could variously be deployed as a means of flirtation, to gauge early romantic interest, underscore the status and generosity of the giver, show investment in the bodily health of the recipient as a future spouse, and bind two families together before matrimony. Together, they add a crucial dimension to our understanding of the widely recognised ‘gift mode’ during courtship, illuminate the mechanics of courtship as rooted in family homes and gardens, and the new spaces of the metropolitan public sphere, and demonstrate how natural or perishable items such as food could operate as powerful vehicles for emotional meaning.

Dr Sally Holloway is a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in History and History of Art at Oxford Brookes University. She specialises in histories of emotions, gender, and visual and material culture in Britain over the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the co-editor of Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History (Oxford, 2018), and the author of The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions and Material Culture (Oxford, 2019) which has recently been released in paperback (2022). 

Gregory Claeys : ‘Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism’ (20 avril)

Jeudi 20 avril à 17h (Serpente, salle D421)

Gregory Claeys (Royal Holloway, University of London) – Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism

 

Few can have missed the fact that humanity is facing the greatest crisis in the earth’s history. With global warming currently at 1.25°C, but headed towards 3C or more, the threat of cataclysm is more real than ever. This talk argues that notional targets of 1.5C-2C are inadequate, and that warming must be kept below 1C. In order to achieve this, a variety of measures, commencing with the immediate renunciation of carbon fuels, but extending to a severe dampening of consumer demand and consumerism as such, must be implemented. The utopian tradition fruitfully provides a range of suggestions as to how to achieve this goal.

 

Gregory Claeys is Professor Emeritus at the University of London. His eleven books, which have been translated into nine languages, include Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism (Princeton University Press, 1987); Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (Unwin Hyman, 1989), Searching for Utopia: the History of an Idea (Thames & Hudson, 2011), Mill and Paternalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Dystopia: A Natural History (Oxford University Press, 2016); Marx and Marxism (Penguin Books, 2018), Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism (Princeton University Press, 2022); and John Stuart Mill: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2022). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Turkish edn., 2017) and over forty volumes of primary sources, including Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (Hackett, 1992). He is editor-in-chief of a new collection of Paine’s collected writings in six volumes (2026, forthcoming), and Chair of the Utopian Studies Society (Europe

Florence Petroff : « La question américaine en Écosse : penser la britannicité à l’échelle de l’empire dans les années 1770 » (30 mars)

Jeudi 30 mars à 17h :

Florence Petroff (La Rochelle) : « La question américaine en Écosse : penser la britannicité à l’échelle de l’empire dans les années 1770 »

La guerre qui oppose la Grande-Bretagne à ses treize colonies d’Amérique du Nord à partir d’avril 1775 déclenche une « guerre de papier » entre pamphlétaires britanniques qui s’opposent sur la légitimité de la révolte des colons et les mesures à adopter vis-à-vis des colonies rebelles. En Écosse, les élites condamnent presqu’à l’unanimité les prétentions des colons américains à l’autonomie au sein de l’empire, puis à l’indépendance. 

Il s’agit ici d’explorer le discours écossais sur la question américaine, d’en définir les contours et de le replacer dans le débat sur la crise impériale en Grande-Bretagne ainsi qu’à l’échelle atlantique. Nous nous interrogerons sur les conceptions de l’empire et de l’identité britannique qui s’affirment dans ce discours, afin d’en évaluer la spécificité écossaise. Nous poserons ainsi la question de la place de la Révolution américaine dans le processus de fabrication de leur identité britannique par les Écossais, et plus largement de ce que l’Amérique a représenté pour ces Britanniques du Nord qui, à l’inverse des Américains, font le choix de l’intégration au prix de leur souveraineté en tant que nation. Cette intervention propose ainsi une approche atlantique de la révolution américaine, étudiée au prisme de sa réception et de son interprétation en Écosse. 

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Florence Petroff est maîtresse de conférences en histoire moderne à l’université de La Rochelle. Sa thèse de doctorat sera prochainement publiée aux éditions Honoré Champion, sous le titre « La Révolution américaine et l’Écosse : regards croisés (1765-1783) ». Ses travaux portent sur la circulation des idées et des représentations au sein du monde britannique ainsi que sur les usages de l’histoire au XVIIIe siècle.

Rémy Duthille, «  Les Britanniques au miroir des révolutions de 1830 »  (16 mars)

Jeudi 16 mars  à 17h : Rémy Duthille (Bordeaux Montaigne), «  Les Britanniques au miroir des révolutions de 1830 » 


Résumé: Des Britanniques, on le sait peu, ont célébré les révolutions européennes de 1830, dans un contexte de troubles sociaux et politiques, et de crise constitutionnelle à la veille de la réforme parlementaire de 1832. L’examen de ces célébrations s’inscrit dans l’historiographie récente dégage le caractère transnational des mouvements révolutionnaires de 1830-1834. Les multiples modalités de célébrer la révolution à l’étranger éclairent la diversité des conceptions de la révolution et de la réforme, suggèrent l’étendue de la participation politique et illustre les perceptions britanniques de la France.

Rémy Duthille est Maître de Conférences HDR à l’Université de Bordeaux-Montaigne et membre du laboratoire CLIMAS. Il a publié Le discours radical en Grande-Bretagne, 1768-1789 (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment 2017) et récemment coordonné un numéro de Leaves, “Sociability and democratic practices in Britain and Ireland, 1789-1832″  avec Magalie Fleurot et Laurence Machet. 

Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière, « Les biographies de Giordano Bruno par Annie Besant (publiées entre 1876 et 1911) : entre stratégie de justification et autobiographie occulte » (9 mars)

Jeudi 9 mars à 17h: Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière (Sorbonne Université), « Les biographies de Giordano Bruno par Annie Besant (publiées entre 1876 et 1911) : entre stratégie de justification et autobiographie occulte »

Le long parcours d’Annie Besant (1847-1933), libre-penseuse puis théosophe, socialiste, féministe, et anti-impérialiste en Inde, a longtemps décontenancé ses biographes, prompts à y voir fractures et inconsistance (cf. Arthur Nethercot, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant et The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant, 1960-3). Pourtant, si la quête intellectuelle et spirituelle de Besant connut plusieurs étapes, son développement n’en fut pas moins sous-tendu par une continuité de pensée, qu’un travail sur l’ensemble de ses écrits permet de retracer. Ainsi, parmi les textes de Besant négligés jusqu’ici par la recherche, se trouvent quatre biographies du philosophe de la Renaissance Giordano Bruno, mort au bûcher, à Rome, en 1600, publiées par Besant entre 1876 et 1911. Leur étude montre que la fascination de Besant pour Bruno forme une passerelle entre sa libre-pensée et sa théosophie. De plus, ces textes révèlent un fort processus d’identification, au point de pouvoir être lus comme des autobiographies occultes, qui permettent à Besant de prolonger les stratégies de justification de ses choix et de ses luttes, entamées dans ses Autobiographical Sketches (1885), et dans Annie Besant: An Autobiography (1893).

Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière est maîtresse de conférences en civilisation britannique (époque victorienne) à Sorbonne-Université. Son domaine de recherche actuel porte sur les liens entre le féminisme, le socialisme et le renouveau spirituel de la fin de l’époque victorienne. Sa biographie Annie Besant (1847-1933): Struggles and Quest a été publiée chez TPH, à Londres, en 2017.

Séance du 16 février annulée

En raison de l’appel à une journée de mobilisation interprofessionnelle contre la réforme des retraites,  nous annulons la séance du 16 février avec Sally Holloway, que nous réinviterons à une date ultérieure.

Prochaine séance, le 23 février : Charles West (Sheffield),  “The Lost Kingdom: a British perspective on the collapse of Lotharingia”.

Laurent Curelly, “Edward Sexby et Killing Noe Murder : pour une histoire radicale de la Révolution anglaise?” (9 fév.)

Jeudi 9 février à 17h (D421 à Serpente)

Laurent Curelly (Mulhouse) : “Edward Sexby et Killing Noe Murder : pour une histoire radicale de la Révolution anglaise?”

Au printemps 1657 fut publié en Flandres et diffusé en Angleterre Killing Noe Murder, pamphlet sulfureux qui non seulement légitimait le recours au tyrannicide mais appelait spécifiquement à l’assassinat d’Oliver Cromwell, Protecteur d’Angleterre. L’objet de mon intervention est d’explorer les différentes facettes de ce texte, dont François-René de Chateaubriand écrivit qu’il s’agissait du « pamphlet le plus célèbre de son époque ». On étudiera les circonstances dans lesquelles il fut diffusé. On tentera également d’identifier son auteur. On se penchera enfin sur ses divers avatars anglais et français. Ces différentes pistes permettront de brosser un tableau de la Révolution anglaise des années 1640-1650, mais aussi de réfléchir aux lectures possibles de l’époque révolutionnaire qui l’enfanta et, ce faisant, de promouvoir une certaine histoire radicale des îles Britanniques.

David Armitage : ‘John Locke, Treaties, and the Two Treatises of Government’ (2 fév.)


Maison de la Recherche, 28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e, de 17h à 18h30, Salle D421 (La séance aura lieu en présentiel uniquement. Un enregistrement sera diffusé ultérieurement sur la chaine youtube du séminaire).
 
Jeudi 2 février 2023 à 17h. David Armitage, Harvard/ Queen Mary University London: ‘John Locke, Treaties, and the Two Treatises of Government’


In the Two Treatises of Government (1690), John Locke offered an account of the separation of powers that was at once novel and almost entirely without influence. In chapter XII of the Second Treatise, he divided the powers of government conventionally between the legislative and the executive; unprecedentedly, the third power he enumerated was the “federative,” “the power of War and Peace, Leagues and Alliances, and all the Transactions, with all Persons and Communities without the Commonwealth”. Just why Locke highlighted the federative in this way—and then almost immediately collapsed it back into the executive power—presents a conundrum. This paper accounts for its prominence by tracing Locke’s engagement with treaties and treaty-making across his career, from his earliest appearance in print (with two poems celebrating a treaty), via his early diplomatic activities, his trafficking in treaties in France and the Netherlands, his notes on treaties in his journals and elsewhere, and his engagement with treaties as a colonial administrator in both the early 1670s and the late 1690s. It shows that Locke was deeply immersed in the burgeoning treaty culture of his time and that this hitherto unremarked interest shaped his peculiar and mostly unparalleled account of the royal prerogative as it stood on the eve of the Glorious Revolution. The paper concludes with reflections on how we might construe the relationship between Locke the diplomatic actor and student of treaties on the one hand and Locke the constitutional analyst and political theorist on the other. 


David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University and currently also an Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author or editor of eighteen books, among them The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013) and Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017). He is currently completing an edition of John Locke’s colonial writings for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke and working on a new global history of Britain through its treaties and on a study of opera and international law.

Frank Rynne, ‘The Queen v. Parnell: A state trial and the  Irish Land War, 1879-82’ (26 jan. 2023)

The Queen v. Parnell: A state trial and the  Irish Land War, 1879-82

In nineteenth century Ireland, the end result of state trials was generally a foregone conclusion with conviction inevitable. State trials were political trials aimed at thwarting sedition or  political movements. Examples include the trial of Daniel O’Connell and others in 1844 and the Fenian Special Commission in 1866.  However, during the Irish Land War 1879-82 much had changed in Ireland. The case, The Queen v. Parnell and others was a more nuanced and complicated affair. From the outset the government had little confidence that they would secure convictions. The Irish Land War, 1879-82, resulted from a compact between the transnational Fenian movement and radical politicians in Ireland led by Charles Stuart Parnell. Central to the agitation, which ostensibly sought to gain peasant proprietorship for tenant farmers, was a national organisation, The Irish National Land League. Through the summer and autumn of 1880 Land League branches were founded throughout Ireland with mass meetings being held even in the remotest districts.

By autumn 1880 government appointees in Ireland were at loggerheads with Gladstone over his refusal to continence a coercion act for Ireland. While Gladstone resisted draconian measures, the Irish administration sought to appease  potentates who demanded habeas corpus suspension. It was clear to the Dublin Castle administration that should the trial fail to result in convictions Gladstone’s hand would be forced and he would have to introduce a coercion in Ireland. Thus, the state invested a vast amount of human and financial capital in pursuing the case.  

The documentation associated with the preparation for the trial and the evidence presented offers unique insights into the Irish National Land League’s rapid growth and also the nature of government in Ireland in the 1880s. The trial itself and its aftermath, which included the introduction of habeas corpus suspension in Ireland, illustrates the complexity of the Irish political situation during the Land War. It is also clear that the  leaders of the Irish Nationalist movement revelled in the prospect of a state trial for conspiracy; confident in acquittal and relishing such a platform for promoting their agenda. This paper will also examine the preparation for the trial and the remarkable throve of evidence the government compiled. It is clear that rather than being a further example of what nationalists might have concluded was the judicial suppression of a political movement, The Queen v. Parnell illustrates a symbiotic propaganda exercise by both the government in Ireland and the Land League.

Frank Rynne is a Senior Lecturer in British Studies and Irish history at CY Cergy Paris Université and a Visiting Research Fellow at The School of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin. He is a member of Agora (EA 7392) CY Cergy Paris Université and an associate member of Prismes (EA 4398) Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Philippa Carter, “Diseased brains and diseased souls in Reformation England” (15/12)

In Mystical Bedlam: The World of Madmen (1615), the Calvinist preacher Thomas Adams warned his readers that “there is a double madnesse, corporal and spirituall. That obsesseth the braine, this the heart”. Adams develops this extended simile throughout his sermons. Yet similes depend on points of difference as well as likeness. Focusing on the latter, Adams treats the difference between ‘corporal’ and ‘spiritual’ madness as though it were simply self-evident. For many of his contemporaries, however, it was not. Madness was troubling precisely because it seemed to afflict the whole person, including the rational faculties traditionally attributed to the soul. This paper explores English theologians’ attempts to disentangle soul, mind and brain in the aftermath of the Reformation. 


Philippa Carter is a historian of early modern medicine, natural philosophy, and religion. She is Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine and Health before 1800 at the History and Philosophy of Science Department, Cambridge, and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. She is currently working on a first monograph, provisionally entitled Phrenitis: Madness, Brain Disease and the Soul in Early Modern England.

Jane Humphries, ‘“The best job in the world”: breadwinning and the capture of household labour in 19th and early 20th-century British coal mining’ (8/12)

Jeudi 8 décembre 2022 à 17h (salle D421 à Serpente) :

Jane Humphries (Oxford / LSE ), ‘“The best job in the world”: breadwinning and the capture of household labour in 19th and early 20th-century British coal mining’

This paper, written with Ryah Thomas, explores the effects of gender inequality and women’s disempowerment in the context of historical coalmining. Across the US and Europe, ex-coalmining regions are characterized by significant deprivation. While there are many reasons for persistent problems, this study focuses on the restrictions imposed on women’s involvement in economic life. Families in mining communities exemplified the male breadwinner structure, in which men’s earnings supported wives and children who provided domestic services in return. This article, however, exposes a different reality of household economics and relations of dominance and subordination: All family members were integrated into the coalmining production process and the creation of profit. Women’s unpaid work did not simply provide domestic comfort; it transferred well-being from women and children to men and simultaneously contributed to the colliery companies’ profits. These findings revise accounts of mining families while providing insight into the intransigence of deprivation in ex-coalmining areas.