History in Conversation

Racism – a Global History

Professor Bethencourt formerly headed the Biblioteca Nacional of Lisbon and the Gulbenkian Cultural Centre in Paris. He is now the Charles Boxer Professor of History at King’s. His many works on imperial, intellectual and cultural history include The Portuguese Overseas Expansion (with Diogo Curto) and a pioneering recent book on The Inquisition: a Global History. He is working on the history of racism.

Francisco Bethancourt (King's College London)

10 March 2010

Cigars and Politics: An Intersectional and Transnational Approach to Cuban Women's Immigration and Work in the United States, 1880-2000

Jay Kleinberg (Brunel University)

1 October 2012

A Sinew of Power? Ireland and the Fiscal-Military State, 1690-1782

Patrick Walsh (University College London)

16 January 2013

Eighteenth-century histories of Norwich and the political vernacular

Daniel Howse (University of East Anglia)

11 January 2012

'Rusty old Queen Anne's many suitors': Firearms and inter-communal violence in Armagh, 1783-1790

Stephen Duane Dean Jr (King’s College London)

8 February 2012

Britain's Lost Revolution: Remembering the Gordon Riots on their 230th Anniversary

A symposium with Ian Haywood and John Seed (Roehampton), Tim Hitchcock and Matthew White (Herts)

22 June 2010

The Origins of a Coming Ideal: Meritocracy in Britain 1750-1850

Penelope J. Corfield is Emeritus Professor at Royal Holloway and Visiting Professor at Centre for Urban History, Leicester; and working on big project Meritocracy 1780-1914.

25 May 2010

Pitt and the poor laws: government and the politics of social policy in the 1790s.

Joanna Innes (Somerville College, Oxford)

19 January 2011

The material life of the militia man

Matthew McCormack (Northampton)

27 June 2012

Rethinking the interests of eighteenth-century Britain

Julian Hoppit looks at the current state of research into eighteenth-century Britain. His assessment is not entirely positive; seeing, for example, that the continued use of ‘class’ as a concept is harmful to our studies. In the period, Hoppit believes that personal ‘interests’ of British society were talked about rather than class. Interest groups have, for instance, been neglected by historians. In the eighteenth century interest groups proliferated spurred on by significant changes that had occurred in parliamentary government since 1688. These groups were, however, very rarely permanent or general in nature but rather focused on specific interests. The weakness of historian’s study of the period then, is to look at the distinctive, the particular, and the unique, whilst ignoring the central question of what was common and what was not!

Julian Hoppit (University College London)