This address explores the writing of history in Britain during the Georgian and Victorian eras, arguing for the need both to trace British historiographical genealogies along routes that extend from Europe to the Indian subcontinent and to acknowledge the importance of material histories for this evolution. Focusing on military men who served in the East India Company during the Third Anglo-Maratha and Pindari War (1817–18), it examines the entangled histories of material loot, booty and prize on the one hand, and archival and history-writing practices developed by British military officers on the other. Active in these military campaigns and in post-conflict administration of conquered territories, a cadre of Company officers (assisted by ‘native’ interlocutors trained in Indian historical traditions) elaborated historical practices that we more conventionally associate with the Rankean historiographical innovations of the Victorian era. The Royal Historical Society's own history is shaped by these cross-cultural material encounters.

Our understanding of the development of secular institutional governments in Europe during the central Middle Ages has long been shaped by an implicit or explicit opposition between royal and lay aristocratic power. That is to say, the growth of public, institutional and/or bureaucratic central authorities involved the decline and/or exclusion of noble aristocratic power, which thus necessarily operated in a zero-sum game. While much research has shown that this conflict-driven narrative is problematic, it remains in our understanding as a rather shadowy but still powerful causal force of governmental development during this period. This paper compares the changing conceptualisation of the relationship between royal and aristocratic power in the French and Scottish kingdoms to demonstrate, first, how narratives built at the periphery of Europe have important contributions and challenges to make to those formed from the core areas of Europe and, second, that state formation did not involve a decline in aristocratic power. Instead, the evidence from royal acta in both kingdoms shows that aristocratic power was formalised at a central level, and then built into the forms of government which were emerging in very different ways in both kingdoms in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Set in broader perspective, this suggests that governmental development involved an intensification of existing structures of elite power, not a diminution.

This paper investigates the representation of marital relations in some of the most successful broadside ballads published in seventeenth-century England. It explains the manner in which these have been selected as part of a funded research project, and it proceeds to question an existing historiographical emphasis on ballads in which marriages were portrayed as under threat due to a combination of wifely failings (scolding, adultery, violence) and husbandly shortcomings (sexual inadequacy, jealousy, weakness). Best-selling ballads were much more sympathetic to married women in particular than we might have expected, and the implications of this for our understanding of the ballad market and early modern culture more generally may be significant. These ballads, it is argued, were often aimed particularly at women, and they grew out of an interesting negotiation between male didacticism and female taste. Throughout the paper, an attempt is made to understand ballads as songs and visual artefacts, rather than merely as texts.

Long regarded as a medieval tradition which declined into insignificance after Luther, pilgrimage expanded considerably from the mid-sixteenth century, until well after 1750. This paper examines long-distance journeys to shrines, rather than sacred sites themselves, to explore how landscapes travelled were perceived, experienced and used by pilgrims in the Counter-Reformation. Using theory such as phenomenology, the focus is on autobiographical accounts of pilgrimages to two case-study sites, the Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, northern France, and Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, north-west Spain, roughly between 1580 and 1750. These were shrines with origins in the early medieval period and which attracted a clientele over long distances. These pilgrimages were also in some way affected by religious conflict in the sixteenth century, whether by direct attack by Huguenots as at the Mont, or by war-time disruptions of its routes as with Compostela, as well as the theological and polemical attacks on the practice of pilgrimage itself by Protestant authors. Pilgrimage studies have examined ‘place’ – the shrine – but a focus on ‘landscape’ allows for a consideration of wider religious and cultural contexts, relations and experiences in this period of religious change.

Castles are some of Japan's most iconic structures and popular tourist destinations. They are prominent symbols of local, regional and national identity recognised both at home and abroad. Castles occupy large areas of land at the centre of most Japanese cities, shaping the urban space. Many castles have their roots in the period of civil war that ended in the early seventeenth century, and now house museums, parks and reconstructions of historic buildings. The current heritage status of Japan's castles obscures their troubled modern history. During the imperial period (1868–1945), the vast majority of pre-modern castles were abandoned, dismantled or destroyed before being rediscovered and reinvented as physical links to an idealised martial past. Japan's most important castles were converted to host military garrisons that dominated city centres and caused conflict with civilian groups. Various interests competed for control and access, and castles became sites of convergence between civilian and military agendas in the 1920s and 1930s. This paper argues that castles contributed both symbolically and physically to the militarisation of Japanese society in the imperial period. The study of these unique urban spaces provides new approaches to understanding militarism, continuity and change in modern Japan.

Beginning with a surprisingly exuberant response to the landscape recorded by a distinguished scholar, this paper explores the agency of things and places though time. It argues that the recent ‘material turn’ is part of a broader re-enchantment of the world: a re-enchantment that has parallels with a similar process at the turn of the nineteenth century. Tracing this history suggests that within the space of a single generation the material world can be enchanted or disenchanted, with things and places imbued with – or stripped of –agency. In other words, different periods possess what we might call different regimes of materiality. Any approach which assumes the existence of material agency throughout history, or which imports our assumptions into a period which did not share them, will necessarily fail. Before we look at the material world, therefore, we need to examine how the material world was looked at, how it was conceptualised and how it was experienced. We need to apprehend its regime of materiality.

At the height of the October Revolution in Moscow – a much bloodier affair than the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd – the Orthodox Church installed Tikhon (Bellavin) as Russia's first patriarch since 1700. At the most obvious level, this was a counter-revolutionary gesture aimed at securing firm leadership in a time of troubles. It was nevertheless a controversial move. Ecclesiastical liberals regarded a restored patriarchate as a neo-papal threat to the conciliarist regime they hoped to foster; and since Nicholas II had explicitly modelled himself on the Muscovite tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, the potential for renewed conflict between church and state had become clear long before 1917. Whilst previous historians have concentrated on discussions about canonical and historical precedent, this paper emphasises the extent to which a single individual haunted the whole debate. For, until the last moment, it was widely assumed that the new patriarch would be not the little-known Tikhon, but Archbishop Antonii (Khrapovitskii), whose attempts to model himself on Patriarch Nikon – the most divisive of seventeenth-century Muscovite patriarchs – helped to make him the most controversial prelate of the age.

Ordinariness was a frequently deployed category in the political debates of 2016. According to one political leader, the vote for Brexit was ‘a victory for ordinary, decent people who've taken on the establishment and won’. In making this claim, Nigel Farage sought to link a dramatic political moment with a powerful, yet conveniently nebulous, construction of the ordinary person. In this paper, I want to historicise recent use of the category by returning to another moment when ordinariness held deep political significance: the years immediately following the Second World War. I will explore the range of values, styles and specific behaviours that gave meaning to the claim to be ordinary; consider the relationship between ordinariness, everyday experience and knowledge; and map the political work ordinariness was called upon to perform. I argue that the immediate post-war period was a critical moment in the formation of ordinariness as a social category, an affective category, a moral category, a consumerist category and, above all, a political category. Crucially, ordinariness itself became a form of expertise, a finding that complicates our understanding of the ‘meritocratic moment’.

This paper presents an alternative interpretation of Scottish politics between 1945 and 1970, a period that witnessed the decline of a once-powerful Unionist tradition, the revival of Liberalism and the rise of the Scottish National party (SNP). While existing accounts have focused principally upon social and economic factors, this study foregrounds the role of ideology and rhetoric. During the 1940s and early 1950s, Scottish Unionists were, like their Conservative colleagues elsewhere in Britain, able to construct a popular, but essentially negative, anti-socialist coalition that prioritised the defence of individual liberty. This electoral alliance, defined by opposition to Labour's programme of nationalisation and expressed via an individualist idiom, was able to attract broad support; it was, however, always provisional, and proved increasingly difficult to sustain after the Conservative party returned to office in 1951. It was, this paper suggests, the fragmenting of this anti-socialist coalition in the late 1950s and early 1960s that created the opportunity for both the Liberals and the SNP to present alternative renderings of this individualist appeal, and to emerge as credible political alternatives. Crucially, by the 1960s, individual liberty was beginning to be understood in constitutional rather than economic terms.

This paper explores the risks and rewards involved in directing undergraduate students engaged on an oral history project in Belfast. It advocates the role of oral history as a tool through which to encourage students’ engagement with research-led teaching to produce reflective assignments on the nature of historical evidence, particularly autobiographical memory. The particular challenges of conducting oral history in a city beset by ethno-sectarian divisions are discussed. This factor has ensured that the historiography of Belfast has focused extensively on conflict and violence. The city's social history is poorly understood, but employing oral history enables the exploration of issues that take undergraduate historians beyond the Troubles as a starting point. This project probed what is called the troubles with a lower case t, via an analysis of deindustrialisation and urban redevelopment in Sailortown (Belfast's dockland district). It provided evidence with which to offer a new assessment on existing historiographical discussions about working-class nostalgic memory and urban social change, one that supports those scholars that problematize attempts to categorise such memory. The testimony also differed in significant ways from previous oral history research on post-war Northern Ireland.

This paper argues that the last eighty years of American politics can be understood in terms of the rise and fall of two political orders. The first political order grew out of the New Deal, dominating political life from the 1930s to the 1970s. The history of this order (the New Deal Order) is now well known. The other order, best understood as ‘neoliberal’ in its politics, emerged from the economic and political crises of the 1970s. This paper is one of the first to elucidate the political relationships, ideological character and moral perspective that were central to this neoliberal order's rise and triumph. The paper's narrative unfolds in three acts: the first chronicles the 1980s rise of Ronald Reagan and the laissez-faire Republican party he forced into being; the second shows how the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s accelerated the globalization of capitalism and elevated neoliberalism's prestige; and the third reveals how a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, facilitated his party's capitulation to neoliberal imperatives. Political orders encourage such capitulation, the paper argues, by universalizing their own ideological principles and making alternative ideologies seem marginal and unworkable. A coda shows how the Great Recession of 2008 fractured America's neoliberal order, diminishing its authority and creating a space in which different kinds of politics, including the right-wing populism of Donald Trump and the left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders, could flourish.

The 150th anniversary of the Royal Historical Society offers an opportunity for an investigation into its publications over the longue durée. Its slow transformation from an association of literary dilettanti to a body of professional historians in the period 1890–1910 was accompanied by changes to its publication programme: the appointment of a literary director, an improvement in the quality of papers read, the merger with the Camden Society and the commitment to a programme of historical bibliographies established the basis of the Society's publishing programme for much of the twentieth century. The interwar years saw new initiatives including the launch of Guides and Handbooks, but the Society was already losing momentum, and an ill-fated foray into the publication of diplomatic records stymied its reputation. The 1950s and 1960s were a period of ongoing stasis, from which the Society was rescued in the early 1970s by G. R. Elton and his allies, who promoted a monograph series and the Annual Bibliographies. The momentum of change was sustained by the early commitment to an electronic version of its bibliographies, and still more recently by a commitment to open access monographs. The changing profile of the Society's publications by gender of author, period and area is charted, raising questions about future directions.