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The Wiles Lectures, given at The Queen's University of Belfast, is a regular, occasional series of lectures on an historical theme, sponsored by the University and published (usually in extended and modified form) by Cambridge University Press. The lecture series was established in the 1950s with the encouragment of the historian Herbert Butterfield, whose 1954 inaugural lecture series was published as 'Man on his Past' (1955). Later lecture series have produced many notable Cambridge titles, such as Alfred Cobban's 'The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution' (1964), J. H. Elliott's 'The Old World and the New' (1970), E. J. Hobsbawm's 'Nations and Nationalism since 1780' (1990), and Adrian Hastings' 'The Construction of Nationhood' (1997).

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20 results in The Wiles Lectures

Cities of Strangers
  • Making Lives in Medieval Europe
  • Miri Rubin
  • Published online:
    09 March 2020
    Print publication:
    19 March 2020
  • Cities of Strangers illuminates life in European towns and cities as it was for the settled, and for the 'strangers' or newcomers who joined them between 1000 and 1500. Some city-states enjoyed considerable autonomy which allowed them to legislate on how newcomers might settle and become citizens in support of a common good. Such communities invited bankers, merchants, physicians, notaries and judges to settle and help produce good urban living. Dynastic rulers also shaped immigration, often inviting groups from afar to settle and help their cities flourish. All cities accommodated a great deal of difference - of language, religion, occupation - in shared spaces, regulated by law. But when, from around 1350, plague began regularly to occur within European cities, this benign cycle began to break down. High mortality rates led eventually to demographic crises and, as a result, less tolerant and more authoritarian attitudes emerged, resulting in violent expulsions of even long-settled groups. Tracing the development of urban institutions and using a wide range of sources from across Europe, Miri Rubin recreates a complex picture of urban life for settled and migrant communities over the course of five centuries and offers an innovative vantage point on Europe's past with insights for its present.

Empires of the Mind
  • The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present
  • Robert Gildea
  • Published online:
    28 February 2019
    Print publication:
    28 February 2019
  • 'The empires of the future would be the empires of the mind' declared Churchill in 1943, envisaging universal empires living in peaceful harmony. Robert Gildea exposes instead the brutal realities of decolonisation and neo-colonialism which have shaped the postwar world. Even after the rush of French and British decolonisation in the 1960s, the strings of economic and military power too often remained in the hands of the former colonial powers. The more empire appears to have declined and fallen, the more a fantasy of empire has been conjured up as a model for projecting power onto the world stage and legitimised colonialist intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. This aggression, along with the imposition of colonial hierarchies in metropolitan society, has excluded, alienated and even radicalised immigrant populations. Meanwhile, nostalgia for empire has bedevilled relations with Europe and played a large part in explaining Brexit.

The Egalitarian Moment
  • Asia and Africa, 1950–1980
  • D. A. Low
  • Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    24 November 1995
  • General histories of the twentieth century will have much to say about the establishment, spread, maintenance and sudden collapse of Soviet Communism. This book outlines a major feature of twentieth-century world history that arguably affected more people than the rise and fall of Soviet Communism. It was the first to discuss as related developments the many attempts in Asia and Africa in the third quarter of the twentieth century to create egalitarian rural societies (landlord abolition in Egypt, India and Iran; ujamaa in Tanzania; land reform in Indonesia; collectivization in China, Vietnam and Ethiopia), their failure, and the differentiated rural regimes which, despite landlord abolition, remain there to this day. The case studies include Egypt, India, the three East African countries, Papua New Guinea, Iran, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ethiopia, China and Vietnam. The book highlights a major and hitherto disaggregated aspect of twentieth-century world history.

Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome
  • Conflict, Competition, and Coexistence in the Fourth Century
  • Edited by Michele Renee Salzman, Marianne Sághy, Rita Lizzi Testa
  • Published online:
    05 November 2015
    Print publication:
    12 November 2015
  • This book sheds new light on the religious and consequently social changes taking place in late antique Rome. The essays in this volume argue that the once-dominant notion of pagan-Christian religious conflict cannot fully explain the texts and artifacts, as well as the social, religious, and political realities of late antique Rome. Together, the essays demonstrate that the fourth-century city was a more fluid, vibrant, and complex place than was previously thought. Competition between diverse groups in Roman society - be it pagans with Christians, Christians with Christians, or pagans with pagans - did create tensions and hostility, but it also allowed for coexistence and reduced the likelihood of overt violent, physical conflict. Competition and coexistence, along with conflict, emerge as still central paradigms for those who seek to understand the transformations of Rome from the age of Constantine through the early fifth century.

The Construction of Nationhood
  • Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism
  • Adrian Hastings
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    06 November 1997
  • The Construction of Nationhood, first published in 1997, is a thorough re-analysis of both nationalism and nations. In particular it challenges the current 'modernist' orthodoxies of such writers as Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, and it offers a systematic critique of Hobsbawm's best-selling Nations and Nationalism since 1780. In opposition to a historiography which limits nations and nationalism to the eighteenth century and after, as an aspect of 'modernisation', Professor Hastings argues for a medieval origin to both, dependent upon biblical religion and the development of vernacular literatures. While theorists of nationhood have paid mostly scant attention to England, the development of the nation-state is seen here as central to the subject, but the analysis is carried forward to embrace many other examples, including Ireland, the South Slavs and modern Africa, before concluding with an overview of the impact of religion, contrasting Islam with Christianity, while evaluating the ability of each to support supra-national political communities.

The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution
  • 2nd edition
  • Alfred Cobban
  • Introduction by Gwynne Lewis
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    27 May 1999
  • Alfred Cobban's The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution is one of the acknowledged classics of post-war historiography. This 'revisionist' analysis of the French Revolution caused a furore on first publication in 1964, challenging as it did established orthodoxies during the crucial period of the Cold War. Cobban saw the French Revolution as central to the 'grand narrative of modern history', but provided a salutary corrective to many celebrated social explanations, determinist and otherwise, of its origins and development. A generation later this concise but powerful intervention was reissued in this 1999 edition with an introduction by Gwynne Lewis, providing students with both a context for Cobban's own arguments, and assessing the course of Revolutionary studies in the wake of The Social Interpretation. This book remains a handbook of revisionism for Anglo-Saxon scholars, and is essential reading for all students of French history at undergraduate level and above.

Revolution and the People in Russia and China
  • A Comparative History
  • S. A. Smith
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 April 2008
  • A unique comparative account of the roots of Communist revolution in Russia and China. Steve Smith examines the changing social identities of peasants who settled in St Petersburg from the 1880s to 1917 and in Shanghai from the 1900s to the 1940s. Russia and China, though very different societies, were both dynastic empires with backward agrarian economies that suddenly experienced the impact of capitalist modernity. This book argues that far more happened to these migrants than simply being transformed from peasants into workers. It explores the migrants' identification with their native homes; how they acquired new understandings of themselves as individuals and new gender and national identities. It asks how these identity transformations fed into the wider political, social and cultural processes that culminated in the revolutionary crises in Russia and China, and how the Communist regimes that emerged viewed these transformations in the working classes they claimed to represent.

Politics in the Ancient World
  • M. I. Finley
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    07 July 1983
  • The business of politics - the vital process of conducting government through the dynamics of argument, conflict and decision-making - offers us one of the most revealing areas of insight into any society. Sir Moses Finley's exploration of politics in the city states of Greece and republican Rome yields insights into the arenas of political debate which have made a major impact on our understanding of the ancient world. The early political involvement of the free lower classes, the effect of war and conquest on political stability, and the ideological pressures which influenced the course of internal conflicts are salient themes in this stimulating investigation of the nature of government in Greece and Rome.

Succeeding John Bull
  • America in Britain's Place 1900-1975
  • D. Cameron Watt
  • Published online:
    05 November 2011
    Print publication:
    29 March 1984
  • This book is based on the Wiles lectures for 1981 delivered at the Queen's University of Belfast in October 1981. It is not a history of Anglo-American relations in the century; its theme deals with how the United States of America came to replace Britain as the primary world and oceanic power confronting a grouping of land-based continental powers, the position Britain occupied throughout the nineteenth century. This theme is examined in the light of how the process of replacement was conceived and perceived by those groups which had the primary responsibility for the formulation and conduct of foreign relations in each of the two powers, Britain and America. The author, whose earlier study of 1965 of the British foreign-policy-making elites pioneered this approach in Britain, argues the existence and continuity over much of this century of similar groups in the United States.

Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety
  • Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine
  • E. R. Dodds
  • Published online:
    01 June 2011
    Print publication:
    02 January 1965
  • Interest in the world of Late Antiquity is currently undergoing a significant revival, and in this provocative book, now reissued in paperback, E. R. Dodds anticipated some of the themes now engaging scholars. There is abundant material for the study of religious experience in late antiquity, and through it Professor Dodds examines, from a sociological and psychological standpoint, the personal religious attitudes and experiences common to pagans and Christians in the period between Marcus Aurelius and Constantine. He looks first at general attitudes to the world and the human condition before turning to specific types of human experience. World-hatred and asceticism, dreams and states of possession, and pagan and Christian mysticism are all discussed. Finally Dodds considers both pagan views of Christianity and Christian views of paganism as they emerge in the literature of the time. Although primarily written for social and religious historians, this study will also appeal to all those interested in the ancient world and its thought.

The Newtonian Revolution
  • I. Bernard Cohen
  • Published online:
    04 May 2010
    Print publication:
    31 January 1981
  • This volume presents Professor Cohen's original interpretation of the revolution that marked the beginnings of modern science and set Newtonian science as the model for the highest level of achievement in other branches of science. It shows that Newton developed a special kind of relation between abstract mathematical constructs and the physical systems that we observe in the world around us by means of experiment and critical observation. The heart of the radical Newtonian style is the construction on the mind of a mathematical system that has some features in common with the physical world; this system s then modified when the deductions and conclusions drawn from it are tested against the physical universe. Using this system Newton was able to make his revolutionary innovations in celestial mechanics and, ultimately, create a new physics of central forces and the law of universal gravitation. Building on his analysis of Newton's methodology, Professor Cohen explores the fine structure of revolutionary change and scientific creativity in general. This is done by developing the concept of scientific change as a series of transformations of ecxisting ideas. It is shown that such transformation is characteristic of many aspects of the sciences and that the concept of scientific change by transformation suggests a new way of examining the very nature of scientific creativity.

Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150-1650
  • Brian Tierney
  • Published online:
    23 February 2010
    Print publication:
    31 March 1982
  • To understand the growth of Western constitutional thought, we need to consider both ecclesiology and political theory, ideas about the Church as well as ideas about the state. In this book Professor Tierney traces the interplay between ecclesiastical and secular theories of government from the twelfth century to the seventeenth. He shows how ideas revived from the ancient past - Roman law, Aristotelian political philosophy, teachings of Church fathers - interacted with the realities of medieval society to produce distinctively new doctrines of constitutional government in Church and state. The study moves from the Roman and canon lawyers of the twelfth century to various thirteenth-century theories of consent; later sections consider fifteenth-century conciliarism and aspects of seventeenth-century constitutional thought. Fresh approaches are suggested to the work of several figures of central importance in the history of Western political theory. Among the authors considered are Thomas Aquinas, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Gerson, Nicholas of Cues and Althusius, along with many lesser-known authors who contributed significantly to the growth of the Western constitutional tradition.

Aristocratic Century
  • The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England
  • John Cannon
  • Published online:
    29 January 2010
    Print publication:
    06 December 1984
  • Since the work of Butterfield and Namier in the 1930s, it has commonly been said that eighteenth-century England appears atomised, left with no overall interpretation. Subsequent work on religious differences and on party strife served to reinforce the image of a divided society, and in the last ten years historians of the poor and unprivileged have suggested that beneath the surface lurked substantial popular discontent. Professor Cannon uses his 1982 Wiles Lecture to offer a different interpretation - that the widespread acceptance of aristocratic values and aristocratic leadership gave a remarkable intellectual, political and social coherence to the century. He traces the recovery made by the aristocracy from its decade in 1649 when the House of Lords was abolished as useless and dangerous. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the peerage re-established its hold on government and society. Professor Cannon is forced to challenge some of the most cherished beliefs of English historiography - that Hanoverian society, at its top level, was an open elite, continually replenished by vigorous recruits from other groups and classes. He suggests that, on the contrary, in some respects the English peerage was more exclusive than many of its continental counterparts and that the openness was a myth which itself served a potent political purpose. Of the prospering burgeoisie, he argues that the remarkable thing was not their assertiveness but their long acquiescence in patrician rule, and he poses the paradox of a country increasingly dominated by a landed aristocracy giving birth to the first industrial revolution. His final chapter discusses the ideological under-pinning which made aristocratic supremacy acceptable for so long, and the emergence of those forces and ideals which were ultimately to replace it.

Religion, Politics and Preferment in France since 1890
  • La Belle Epoque and its Legacy
  • Maurice Larkin
  • Published online:
    27 January 2010
    Print publication:
    09 March 1995
  • This book investigates the problems that committed Catholics allegedly faced if they sought careers in state employment under the Third French Republic. Using ministerial and Masonic archives, the book explores the broad divergence of practice between individual ministries and between particular governments. It also examines the factors that underlay these discriminatory attitudes - notably the claims of Catholic involvement in the right-wing subversive activities of the late 1890s at the time of the Dreyfus affair. It investigates the increased difficulties that French Catholics faced after the change of pope in 1903. Later chapters explore the degree to which wariness towards committed Catholics in the public services evaporated under later regimes - despite the traumas of the Vichy years.

The Last Byzantine Renaissance
  • Steven Runciman
  • Published online:
    09 January 2010
    Print publication:
    02 July 1970
  • During the last two centuries of its existence the Byzantine Empire was politically in a state of utter decadence, but, in contrast, its intellectual life has never before shone so brilliantly. In these four lectures the author discusses the leading scholars of the period, their erudition, their intense individualism, their controversies and their achievements.

The Swedish Imperial Experience 1560–1718
  • Michael Roberts
  • Published online:
    06 January 2010
    Print publication:
    06 September 1979
  • In his Wiles Lectures for 1977 Professor Roberts examines some of the problems raised by Sweden's brief career as a great power, and seeks to answer some of the questions that flow from them. Were the underlying considerations which prompted the unexpected development geopolitical, or social, or economic? How was it possible to produce the financial resources and the manpower which the enterprise demanded? How far was seventeenth-century Sweden a militarized society? What importance had official propaganda and national myths? Did the consititutional situation help to make an expansionist foreign policy easier? The structure of the empire is next examined: its administration, the ties that held it together, the differing interests of the provinces, the varying responses of the metropolitan power was there, in fact, anything deserving the name of an imperial policy? How did the provinces view the Swedish connexion? In a final chapter the author tries to answer the question why, if Sweden could acquire an empire without undue strain, she could not retain it; why the collapse was so rapid and so total; and whether her career as a great power had real relevance to the country's subsequent history. On almost all these topics little information is available in English, and no comparable treatment of them on this scale exists in any language.

Martyrdom and Rome
  • G. W. Bowersock
  • Published online:
    06 January 2010
    Print publication:
    06 April 1995
  • This book examines the historical context of the earliest Christian martyrs, and anchors their grisly and often wilful self-sacrifice to the everyday life and outlook of the cities of the Roman empire. Professor Bowersock begins by investigating both the time and the region in which martyrdom, as we know it, came into being. He also offers comparisons of the Graeco-Roman background with the martyrology of Jews and Muslims. A study of official protocols illuminates the bureaucratic institutions of the Roman state as they applied to the first martyrs; and the martyrdoms themselves are seen within the context of urban life (and public spectacle) in the great imperial cities. By considering martyrdom in relation to suicide, the author is also able to demonstrate the peculiarly Roman character of Christian self-sacrifice in relation to other forms of deadly resistance to authority.

Modernizing England's Past
  • English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970
  • Michael Bentley
  • Published online:
    10 December 2009
    Print publication:
    12 January 2006
  • What came before 'postmodernism' in historical studies? By thinking through the assumptions, methods and cast of mind of English historians writing between about 1870 and 1970, this book reveals the intellectual world of the modernists and offers a full analysis of English historiography in this crucial period. Modernist historiography set itself the objective of going beyond the colourful narratives of 'whigs' and 'popularizers' in order to establish history as the queen of the humanities and as a rival to the sciences as a vehicle of knowledge. Professor Bentley does not follow those who deride modernism as 'positivist' or 'empiricist' but instead shows how it set in train brilliant new styles of investigation that transformed how historians understood the English past. But he shows how these strengths were eventually outweighed by inherent confusions and misapprehensions that threatened to kill the very subject that the modernists had intended to sustain.

Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe
  • Peter Burke
  • Published online:
    07 December 2009
    Print publication:
    16 September 2004
  • In this magisterial study, Peter Burke explores the social and cultural history of the languages spoken or written in Europe between the invention of printing and the French Revolution, arguing that, from a linguistic point of view, 1450 to 1789 should be regarded as a distinct period. One major theme of the book is the relation between languages and communities (regions, churches, occupations and genders as well as nations) and the place of language as a way of identifying others as well as a symbol of one's own identity. A second, linked theme is that of competition: between Latin and the vernaculars, between different vernaculars, dominant and subordinate, and finally between different varieties of the same vernacular, such as standard languages and dialects. Written by one of Europe's leading cultural historians, this book restores the history of the many languages of Europe in a large variety of contexts.

Philosophers of Peace and War
  • Kant, Clausewitz, Marx, Engles and Tolstoy
  • W. B. Gallie
  • Published online:
    24 October 2009
    Print publication:
    02 February 1978
  • Intellectual eminence apart, what did Kant, Clausewitz, Marx and Engels, and Tolstoy have in common? Professor Gallic argues that they made contributions to 'international theory' – to the understanding of the character and causes of war and of the possibility of peace between nations – which were of unrivalled originality in their own times and remain of undiminished importance in ours. But these contributions have been either ignored or much misunderstood ; chiefly because, as with all intellectual efforts in unexplored fields, they were often imperfectly expressed, and were also overshadowed by their author's more striking achievements. Professor Gallic has sorted out, compared and contrasted, criticised and re-phrased the teachings of his chosen authors on peace and war.