BA History

The nineteenth century has been long-established as a period of enormous social, economic, and political upheaval. This course will provide students with an overview of the transformation of intellectual life in nineteenth-century Britain as well as a more detailed sense of some of the dynamics of intellectual change in this period. It has been designed as a critical examination of key ideas and themes in the intellectual and cultural history of this period through primary and secondary material. The topics covered range from ideas about identity and history, through conceptions of progress in natural and social science as well as anti-industrialization and economic commentary, to questions of gender, race, and democracy. This course will equip students with skills in reading, analysing, and contextualizing texts in the history of ideas.

This module is only available to students on History-owned programmes; Euro Studies programmes; and History joint honours programmes owned by other subject areas. Available to students on an Erasmus programme subject to VSO approval.

• To develop foundational knowledge of the social and political thought of nineteenth-century Britain.
• To examine the ways in which significant concepts, such as liberty, or powerful ideologies, such as liberalism and conservatism, were products of historical change and circumstance.
• To explore established historical topics in Modern British History such as race, gender, and industrialization through the lens of published primary texts.
• To challenge traditional understandings of the ‘History of Political Thought’ and reassess what and who counts in the history of ideas.

• Demonstrate a broad understanding of some of the main ideologies and intellectual movements in nineteenth-century Britain.
• Develop a more nuanced, contextualized understanding of key themes and concepts in modern political and social thought.
• Understand the defining features and concerns of intellectual life in Victorian Britain, including the channels through which ideas were circulated and disseminated.

• Critically assess the ways in which abstract ideas are generated in particular historical contexts.
• Analyze online primary source material from a variety of perspectives and genres in class and in written work.
• Investigate and synthesize secondary scholarship on specific intellectual developments and their contexts, and deliver persuasive independent interpretations orally and in written work.

• Confidently navigate relevant digital humanities resources (e.g. Nineteenth-Century British Library Newspapers, The Making of the Modern World, British Periodicals Online).
• Independently synthesize and organize primary and secondary source material.
• Communicate findings and interpretations in oral and written formats.
• Contribute to group discussions.

• Articulate complex ideas to groups as oral presentations and seminar contribution as well as in written work.
• Critical thinking and analytical skills.
• Completion of independent research on an identified problem or question.
• Engage collaboratively as part of a team.
• Confidence in navigating of online research tools.

• G. Stedman Jones and G. Claeys, eds., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (2011)
• H. S. Jones, Victorian Political Thought (2000)
• Robert Saunders, ‘Parliament and the People: The British Constitution in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Modern European History, 6, (2008)
• P. Mandler, ed., Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (2006)
• Emily Jones, Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830-1914: An Intellectual History (2017)
• Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930 (1991)
• S. Collini, D. Winch, J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (1983)
• Christopher Kent, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism, and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England (1978)