HIST051 - Modern Britain 1700-Present

In this course, we will investigate the extraordinary story of Britain's rise to global predominance and the question of its "decline" in the twentieth century. Our readings and discussions will engage with dominant ideas, social processes, and popular beliefs; we will look at the structure of government and the texture of everyday lives. We will encounter Britons in all corners of the world even as we explore the complexities of metropolitan British history. Big ideas were born there: industrial captialism, political liberalism, and scientific racism. Britain's political system, with its early form of (limited) democracy, gave shape to party politics around the world. We begin in the early eighteenth century--focusing on the agricultural and social changes that accompanied the onset of the Industrial Revolution. We'll examine the rise of the Hanoverian fiscal-military state, and its consolidation and transformation in the course of the Napoleonic Wars. We end in the present day, looking at a Britain which may have lost an Empire, but which retains a strong welfare state, a global cultural presence, and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Should we understand its rise and subsequent retraction as a store of an ascent and a decline? We will interrogate that narrative throughout the semester. The course moves roughtly chronologically, but by way of discrete units that provide different perspectives on British politics, economics, and culture.