Joint UC-Berkeley-UChicago Mellon
Foundation Conferences Grant
We are pleased to announce that the Center for British
Studies has received a substantial grant from
the Mellon Foundation to support a program of
joint research
conferences between the University of Chicago
and the University of California at Berkeley.
The
conferences will address the history of Britain
's political economy, and will take place over
the next
three academic years (2005-2008).
(Click here for the University
of Chicago British Studies/Melon Program website.)
We envision each year focusing on one of the following themes:
1. Economic Modernization
Why did England 's economy deviate from the European norm?
And what relationship did that deviation have to the so-called "Rise
of the West"? Traditionally this question has been posited
in terms of the mercantile, financial, commercial and industrial
revolutions where England 's unique place has been assumed
rather than proven. By shifting the question to an explicitly
comparative frame, scholars have been able to focus on several
key variables while also raising broader questions about the
particularities of the social, political and cultural conditions
of Britain 's economic divergence. If we have a sound understanding
of many broad macro-economic changes though, we have yet to
explore how these relied upon everyday micro-practices of comprehension,
production and exchange. How did people come to understand
themselves and act as subjects of a national, imperial or global
economy?
(September 23-25, 2005 Conference; Program)
2. Modernizing Political Culture
Smith knew that political economy was necessarily concerned
with generating a new market ethic, but did it also generate
new political ethics? Is it possible, in consequence, to discern
changes in the way political corruption was understood and
practiced both in Britain and its empire? How did the new institutions
of the emergent state and representative political system gain
the trust of the population? How might we trace a history of
modern trust or distrust in politicians and administrators,
especially in light of the fact that the British and its imperial
civil services were designed to bypass problems of clientelism
and corruption? What effects did imperial acquisition and imperial
disintegration have on notions of trust and corruption? Problems
of political clientelism have become the centerpiece of much
recent discussion of new democracies, but those discussions
are as methodologically sophisticated as they are historically
shallow. (For more information on Chicago's May 2005 conference
on this subject, click here.)
3. The Social Sciences and the Making of Modern Society
The study of the emergence of the social sciences and welfare
state in Britain has for the most part been remarkably insular,
eschewing comparisons with, or the influence of, cognate developments
in North America and continental Europe. Our aim is to provoke
discussion of their emergence in comparative terms that extend
beyond the current focus on intellectual and institutional
traditions and histories in which Britain is often seen as
trailing behind. In many ways concepts of civil society and
social welfare, as well as the methods of anthropology and
comparative politics emerged earlier in the British Isles.
How and why did this come about? How was society increasingly
conceptualized as having its own laws and rhythms distinct
from economy, politics and culture? What were the visions of
metropolitan and colonial society, past and present, that the
British social sciences developed, and to what extent did these
become the normative basis for developing welfare regimes?
To what degree were the British social sciences and the practices
of social welfare shaped by the imperial encounter or by European
or American traditions? We would like to relocate the emergence
of the social sciences and welfare state in Britain within
a broader transnational context.
Starting January 2006, both Berkeley and Chicago will host two-day
regional conferences for faculty and graduate students
each year. The host institution will announce an open-call
for papers within
its catchment area, but particular priority will go to
graduate students returning from research trips in the
UK . We envisage
workshop presentations of pre-circulated papers with short
commentaries by senior scholars from the region, open forums
for discussion
of particular problems or secondary works, and more familiar
20 minute paper presentations. In each case we would also
invite one speaker from outside the catchment area.
To view a copy of the Program for the 13-14 January 2006 Mellon Regional Workshop of Modern British Historians, click here.
(Note: This workshop is open only to invited speakers and guests).
