Emma MacLeod (University of Stirling) : «  A British conversation about the French Revolution: the Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence, 1789–1797 » (15 mai)

Jeudi 15 mai 2025 à 17h à la Maison de la Recherche (28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e), salle D421

Emma MacLeod (University of Stirling) :  «  A British conversation about the French Revolution: the Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence, 1789–1797 » 

This paper emerges from a study of the long and rich correspondence between Rev. James Wodrow (1730–1810) of Ayrshire, Scotland, and his great friend Samuel Kenrick (1727–1811) a banker in Bewdley, near Birmingham. They had become friends as students at Glasgow University in the 1740s and began corresponding soon after Kenrick graduated, a habit that continued for the rest of their lives. The Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence, 1750–1810 is co-edited by Martin Fitzpatrick, Emma Macleod and Anthony Page. Volume 1: 1750–1783 (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Volume 2: 1784–1790 (OUP, 2024) will be followed by volumes 3: 1791–1797 and 4: 1798–1810.

     In this paper I will discuss their conversation about the French Revolution which forms such a major proportion of the letters written between 1791 and 1797. Like the opinions of many other British people on the Revolution in France, their ideas, while formed by their existing political convictions, were to some extent fluid over these years, as events developed both in France and in Britain. Because this is such a substantial bilateral correspondence, however, we can, unusually, see how their opinions were also shaped by their debate between themselves and by their reading and discussion of a large number of the most seminal British publications on the French Revolution and the war. The paper is therefore located at the intersection of political history, cultural history, book history and the history of friendship.

Emma Macleod is a senior lecturer in History at the University of Stirling, Scotland. She has published A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars Against Revolutionary France, 1792–1802 (1998) and British Visions of America, 1775–1820: Republican Realities (2013); and she has co-edited Political Trials in an Age of Revolutions: Britain and the North Atlantic, 1793–1848 (2019), with Michael T. Davis and Gordon Pentland. She co-edited the Scottish Historical Review 2018–2023.

Simeon Koole: ‘Lines of Force: Bodies, Tides, and the Scales of Global History in London’s Docklands, c.1870-1928’ (10 avril)

Jeudi 10 avril à 17h : Simeon Koole (Bristol): ‘Lines of Force: Bodies, Tides, and the Scales of Global History in London’s Docklands, c.1870-1928’.

 

Abstract : This paper examines changes in the bodies and environment of labourers carrying timber imported into London’s docks to provide a history of global capitalism from the ground up. Moving between London and Sweden between the 1860s and 1920s, it shows how microphysical changes in docker skeletons, the wood they carried, and rivers in both countries materialized and modified ‘macro’-level changes in tides, forestry, and shipping. Repurposing the concept ‘lines of force’ from nineteenth-century physics, the paper argues that lines—material, temporal, and spatial—reveal hidden relations between bodies and environments than those traced by global history’s typical focus on the movement of people and things. Lines etched into bones or running through tree grain show how humans and other-than-humans were exposed to one another across varying distances, and how this exposure accentuated under industrial capitalism. Second, they show how this mutual exposure operated over multiple timescales, from a worker’s lifetime to century-long changes in tree growth and river flows. Finally, such lines reveal how ‘the world’ was not simply a space which steamships crossed but a predicament, unique to and made by the relations living beings had with one another.

 

Simeon Koole est senior lecturer en Histoire à l’université de Bristol. Il est l’auteur de Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain’s Cerebral Age (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press 2024)