Center for British Studies
Mellon Consortium Conference on British History
The University of California, Berkeley
September 25-26, 2009
THE STATE IN BRITISH HISTORY
The state is a central organizing principle of British/English historiography, and the precocious development of the state is often seen as one of Britain’s/England’s most significant contributions to European modernity. However, historians of different periods and subjects within British history often locate the state in very different places, gauge its significance using very different criteria, and imagine its significance in very different terms. The goal of this conference is to facilitate discussion among scholars studying the state in British history, to think about our different methodologies and perspectives, and perhaps to produce a more coherent account of the British/English state over the last five hundred years.
Unlike traditional conferences, this conference will have no formal papers but rather will consist in a series of structured conversations. Its main events will be four “roundtable” sessions, each of which will feature a moderator and four prominent historians covering different periods and aspects of British history. The panelists will each have roughly ten minutes to describe their perspective on the subject, and then there will follow a long conversation, based around a series of questions that the conference participants will have received in advance. The four conversations will be organized around the following subjects:
- Where was the State?
- Violence and the State
- Religion and the State
- When was the State?
In addition, there will be several workshops for graduate students to think about how their own projects fit within the broader issues of the conference, as well as scheduled time for graduate students to receive advice from faculty about their work.
This is the first of three major conferences funded through a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation to create a Mellon Consortium on British History, intended to support research at the University of California, Yale University, the University of Texas, and the University of Chicago.
