Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-xxrs7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T13:51:14.215Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - In Search of a British History of Political Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

David Armitage
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

Despite the Britannic turn that early-modern historiography has taken over the last couple of decades, what it means to write a British history of political thought remains an under-explored subject. Colin Kidd elsewhere in this volume shows how we might write a history of British political thought as a history of political thinking about the concept of Britain. By a British history of political thought, however, I have in mind something different: how we integrate the study of political thought into the writing of the (so-called) new British history. We have been taught, of late, that many of the problems that afflicted the Stuarts in the seventeenth century, for example, stemmed from their problematic multiple-kingdom inheritance. Might not what contemporaries thought about ‘the British problem’ be characterized as British political thought, and is not the history of this thought that we proceed to write British history? If so, then what kind of a British history? John Morrill also observes that there are various broad types of British history currently being written – among them, the ‘incorporative’ (using the Britannic context to explain problems of English, or alternatively Scottish or Irish, history), the ‘confederal’ (parallel accounts of developments in all Three Kingdoms) and the ‘perfect’ (most notably, the study of important individuals, such as the Earl of Antrim, who saw their Irish, Scottish and English worlds as one) – and suggests that the incorporative approach is the one that has appealed most to historians of ideas.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×