Political history as citizenship

The module I designed was entitled ‘Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1760–1918’. It was partly designed as a ‘long-nineteenth-century’ module because of the curriculum I had been employed to cover, but also because of the story I wanted to tell. A key focus of the module was the campaign to reform citizenship rights that started with campaigns for manhood suffrage in the 1760s and concluded with the granting of the vote to women in 1918. Because of the space required to set up the topic, and because I argued that these two centuries of debate were essentially conducted in terms that were established in the eighteenth century, around half of the module content concerned the Georgian period.

Drawing on my PhD research – which became my first book – I argued that the key political question in this period was: what sorts of people are fit to be citizens? And specifically, who should be granted the parliamentary franchise? Since this political question involved negotiating the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in social terms, this proved to be a very good way in to political history for students who were more familiar or comfortable with social history. My doctoral research had been influenced by the linguistic turn, thinking about how the language that historical actors used informed their view of the world, and in particular how identity categories were constructed and negotiated.⁸ In the module I wanted to connect scholarship on Georgian political discourse with that on the Victorian and Edwardian periods, particularly the work on the Second Reform Act of 1867 by Catherine Hall, Keith McLelland and Jane Rendall. They argued that the Act sought to ‘define the Victorian nation’ in terms of gender, race and class: the new voters of 1867 were defined as British working men, in distinction to their ‘others’ represented by foreigners, paupers and women.⁹ In tracing a concept over a long period, the module was influenced by my experience as an undergraduate at the University of York, where third-years took a ‘Comparative Special Subject’ focusing on a theme such as ‘heroes’ or ‘revolutions’. Such modules are demanding and have an important summative function at the end of a degree.¹⁰

While the module explored various ways of defining the political subject – including national identity, social class, education and property ownership – the key focus of the module was gender. I proposed that this was the key category when negotiating the boundaries of political inclusion and exclusion, and invited the students to disagree with my proposition. In the course of tracing this theme, the module introduced the wealth of work on the political histories of gender, women and masculinity. Although this scholarship is now well established, when the module began in the 2000s it was recent and in some cases controversial: students were asked to consider whether a history of political masculinities was desirable from a feminist point of view, or whether it was just a reassertion of ‘men’s history’ in a male-dominated and traditional field. The focus on gender proved to be a useful entry point for students, who had typically studied women’s history before (partly at school but also in a first-year introductory module) but had not necessarily studied politics, and who were often vocal in expressing a preference for social history. It helped them to evaluate an otherwise unfamiliar historiography in terms of current social and political issues. Political history remains a rather ‘male’ field – both in terms of its practitioners and the people it studies – but enrolments for this module tended to be majority female.

A further reason why ‘citizenship’ was a relatable focus for students was that it was (and is) a current political issue. Citizenship has been a political buzzword in Britain since the 1990s, and remains so to this day. John Major proposed a ‘citizen’s charter’ of rights and David Cameron focused on the citizen’s obligations as part of a ‘big society’, but it was New Labour who really made it central to their project. Tony Blair introduced citizenship tests for immigrants, which included many questions about history that applicants effectively had to learn by rote (not least because many of the official ‘correct’ answers were quite problematic).¹¹ It included questions about popular culture as well as constitutional developments, suggesting that their vision of history was as much about national identity as it was about political education. After the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks, the Labour government focused on fostering a sense of belonging among groups in society who felt disaffected and excluded. This included the introduction of citizenship as a subject in schools. The educationalist Audrey Osler has reviewed Labour’s approach to citizenship in their education policy, and notes that there was a fundamental tension between their desire to prescribe ‘British’ values and their cosmopolitanism. Blair argued that ‘democracy, rule of law, tolerance and equal treatment for all’ were British values, whereas the foreign secretary Jack Straw noted that these were international values that had developed in a unique way in Britain over the course of its history.¹² It was therefore necessary, Straw argued, that Britons knew their nation’s story in order to understand the country they lived in today.

The place of citizenship in education, and the relationship of history education to citizenship, has long been a key political issue in Britain. Peter Yeandle argues that history education was central to citizenship in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but that it was not primarily conveyed in history books themselves but rather in texts such as literacy primers. He further argues that the Victorians sought not to inculcate ‘crude’ nationalism but rather to foster citizenship and morality: rather than just telling schoolchildren that the empire was a good thing, for example, it emphasised that the English were an ‘imperial race’ with suitable qualities and a special mission.¹³ John Tosh agrees that history has had a special place in citizenship education in Britain. He argues that the purpose of citizenship classes in recent years has been to ‘intensify the sense of belonging … by anchoring it securely in shared narratives about the past’. History teachers may not have been involved much in delivering the citizenship curriculum, but that is only because history ‘is still regarded as a course in citizenship in all but name’.¹⁴ If this was true of New Labour, it is even truer of the Conservatives’ reform of the national curriculum for history in the 2010s. The education secretary Michael Gove argued that British schoolchildren should learn their ‘island story’ in chronological order, so they could value the progression of its political institutions. This distinctly Whig attitude came under criticism from the historian Richard Evans, who argued that history education should foster critical skills rather than be used as a vehicle for identity politics.¹⁵

Tosh too has taken issue with the way in which history has been appropriated for prescribing models of citizenship, and argues that there are more productive ways for conceiving of the relationship between history education and citizenship. Most historians would agree that their subject ‘provides a training in the rational evaluation of evidence and argument’. This is surely a good thing, but history is hardly the only subject that does this. More fundamentally, it provides a historical perspective, which ‘enhances the citizen’s capacity to make informed judgements about the issues of the day, to participate in public discourse, and to make intelligent use of the vote’. Approaching the present in this way – ‘thinking with history’ – enables students to illuminate current issues and to think about what is distinctive about the past.¹⁶ A key justification for the value of history should therefore be that it makes its learners informed, critical citizens.

These questions were addressed directly in the module. Education is a key theme in feminist history, since Georgian feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Hannah Wheeler saw deficiencies in women’s education as a cause of their subordinate condition and education reform as a means of improving it. Another week focused on Victorian debates about education with respect to the moral qualities educators were supposed to foster, such as ‘character’ and ‘independence’. We discussed the role of education in preparing children for citizenship, and how the introduction of compulsory education was explicitly linked to the widening of the parliamentary franchise. As the Liberal Robert Lowe argued in 1867, it was necessary ‘to prevail on our future masters to learn their letters’.¹⁷ This session was of particular interest to the students taking the module who were seeking careers in teaching, and in successive years more of the students had themselves studied citizenship at school. They were therefore able to reflect critically on that experience and to connect their own knowledge of education and political debates today to the historical context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Pedagogic strategies

The design of the module was by no means revolutionary. Indeed, it was organised in a fairly conventional way, but I did employ a number of strategies with a view to enhancing student learning and engagement. The module ran in one term of eleven or twelve weeks, with a weekly workshop of around three hours. This time was used flexibly, with short lectures, discussions, document exercises and other activities. The module size varied from about ten to about thirty: in years when it was larger, I split the group in two in the third and fourth hour to give the students more of a seminar experience. A typical format for the class would be to start with a concept (such as the public sphere or feminism) which we would then put into historical context in the second hour. In the final section we would focus on a case study (such as the Queen Caroline Affair or military volunteering) which we would introduce with a student presentation and then explore in small groups with documents. As Peter Frederick notes, small-group work can provide an ‘energy shift’ and can empower students to talk about their ideas in a space that may feel safer than a whole class.¹⁸ At the conclusion of the session, we would evaluate the concept in the light of what we had discussed, and set up the learning for the following week.

The first session of the module was entitled ‘What is citizenship?’ After setting up the practicalities and aims of the module, we explored the concept in detail without necessarily getting into the eighteenth-century context. We began with a brainstorm, getting students to think about what citizenship entailed in terms of rights, duties and attachments. They discussed this in small groups and filled in a grid on a worksheet, which we then fed back to the class to come up with an agreed list on the whiteboard. This was invariably a rich discussion that lasted over an hour. Students discovered that this was actually a tricky concept to define, and the examples they drew upon from ancient history to the present day did not necessarily fit the model consistently: the lesson of the exercise was ‘it depends’, since citizenship has meant different things in different times and contexts. Along the way, I used various examples and sources to stimulate discussion. Among these was the film Starship Troopers, which I had encouraged them to watch as preparation for the module. I showed a clip of the opening scenes where the characters debate the nature of citizenship in a school classroom, before joining the military to fight aliens. Although Starship Troopers is on the face of it an unsubtle sci-fi war movie, it is based on a novel by Robert A. Heinlein that advocates a classical republican form of citizenship, where ‘citizens’ earn their rights through military service and ‘civilians’ are second-class citizens.¹⁹ The 1997 film adaptation by Paul Verhoeven sends up the fascism of this source material, so is a sharp political satire. The clip led to a discussion about the reciprocal nature of citizenship, and we referred back to it later in the module when examining wartime contexts where political rights were earned through service to the nation, such as during the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War.

The module had a strong focus on primary sources and source analysis, which is appropriate for final-year study. For every session I produced a worksheet with multiple primary sources for students to analyse in class: this was usually on paper, but I used electronic versions during the COVID-19 pandemic for online or socially distanced classes, which worked equally well. Many of these were extracts from texts, which students read individually then discussed in groups, before reporting back for a whole-group discussion. In early classes, these required quite a bit of scaffolding – with context to set them up and direct questions to draw out the analysis – but as the students grew more familiar with the material, they were increasingly able to do this without direction from me. Every week we also used visual sources, particularly satirical prints from the Georgian period and cartoons from later periods. Students often assume that pictures are easier to analyse than texts, but they quickly appreciated that visual satire has a complex language that would have been familiar to contemporaries but can be obscure today. Over the course of the module they therefore learned the lost art of ‘reading’ a Georgian print, and they became more confident doing this with practice. Students made links between the highly visual political culture of the Georgian period and that of today, which is characterised by video clips and internet memes. In later years I also introduced material sources such as badges and memorabilia, so the evolution of the module reflected my own development as a historian, away from the linguistic turn and towards histories of objects and embodiment.

A further way in which textual source material was brought alive was through performance. In the third week on ‘political masculinities’, we studied an extract from a political stage play of 1757, The Fall of Public Spirit. This introduced the characters of Old Time and Ancient Spirit, who travelled through time from ancient Britain to 1757 – a time of moral panic and military disaster – and were appalled at the immorality and decadence that they beheld.²⁰ This text is fairly flat on the page, but contemporaries would likely have experienced it in performance rather than through silent reading, so getting the students to recreate it as a performance provided insights into the source. In particular, it brought out the force of the political message and how models of masculinity were embodied and politicised. In the following week on the culture of elections, we studied some election songs from the infamous Westminster Election of 1784. Music was a prominent feature of elections at the time, and new lyrics were written to popular songs of the day to support particular candidates and comment on the political situation. Since we know the tunes to which they were set, it is possible to perform them. I played an audio clip of the sea shanty ‘Roast Beef of Old England’, then led the group in a rendition of ‘The Female Patriot: Or, The Devonshire Duchess’, which had been set to this tune.²¹ Singing is a very accessible form of musical performance that does not necessarily require equipment or training. Although some students found the exercise slightly embarrassing, taking students out of their comfort zone is a positive experience in the classroom if it is managed sensitively. Discomfort can take you radically out of the present and lead to reflection: in this case, it highlighted the emotion and physicality of singing an election song, leading to insights about what an election would have been like to experience in bodily and sensory terms.

As a ‘special subject’-type module, the module involved in-depth work on the historiography, and necessarily had an extensive reading list. Most history modules involve a great deal of reading in order to prepare for classes and to work on assignments. History is not a subject where a set body of knowledge is acquired in a sequential order, and tends not to rely on textbooks or primers to deliver this, preferring to focus on specialist literature.²² For the most part, history lecturers either set specific reading for a given class or provide a reading list from which students can make selections, and assume that this is going on in the background. As Effie MacLellan cautions, however, undergraduate students in general ‘are not proficient readers’. They can of course read, but ‘reading to learn’ is a distinctive skill that has to be fostered.²³ Reading is fundamental to the learning of history, and is often the start of the learning process, so this is part of our disciplinary practice that needs to be ‘decoded’ if students are going to get the most out of it.²⁴

This module therefore had a very explicit focus on the reading process. In the 2006–7 session I carried out a study within the module, with the intention of gaining a greater understanding of how students read. I also hoped that, in the process, students would think about how they themselves read: sometimes it is useful to have a ‘triggering event’ to encourage students to reflect on their learning practices.²⁵ I used a series of anonymous weekly questionnaires that asked students what they had read, how long they had spent on it, whether and how they had taken notes, and what they got out of it. In general, this revealed that the students were not reading as much as I had assumed, but that I could improve the way that I set up the activity to help them to get more out of it. The students reported that they appreciated knowing what to look for in their reading – such as a research question or a theme – which provided a focus for their preparation. This made note-taking more of an active ‘research’ activity rather than a passive exercise in fact-gathering. Some students revealed that they had quite sophisticated methods of note-taking, which enhanced their understanding of the material. MacLellan advocates ‘elaboration strategies’ such as paraphrasing and summarising as ways for students to gain ownership of their reading, and to promote deep, active learning.²⁶ I applied these insights to the module in subsequent years and set up reading activities with much greater care.

The assessment strategy for the module changed over the course of its life, partly due to shifts in departmental and institutional policy. The module was assessed by a combination of essay, presentation and examination: in some years it was all three, and in others it was the essay with one of the other two. Of all the assessments, the presentation was probably the most conducive to active learning. Students were tasked with finding a primary source from the period covered by the module, to deliver a spoken presentation about it in class and to take questions from their colleagues. Students could select a text or an image, and in both cases they drew on the skills in source analysis that we had developed over the course of the module. Presentations on visual images worked particularly well, since students could demonstrate how they were ‘reading’ the visual elements while displaying the image on a screen. This assessment was therefore set up as a ‘research’ task, and some students went to considerable lengths to find sources that addressed the module’s themes and to research contextual information about them. This demonstrated the benefits of treating students as researchers, and the possibilities for including research tasks in undergraduate teaching outside of its traditional locations such as the dissertation.²⁷

Conclusion

Overall, the module provided an effective way in to Georgian politics for students who had not studied it before. The focuses of ‘citizenship’ and ‘gender’ had several benefits. By thinking about the social and cultural nature of the political world, they enabled students to discuss politics using familiar methodologies, and without the need for substantial factual background knowledge. They connected politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to political and social issues in the present day, and the focus on ‘citizenship’ in particular highlighted the historical background to many of today’s controversies such as immigration, education policy, Scottish independence and Brexit. They also emphasised the importance of historical study to good citizenship, since it is vital to understand the nature of our political system if we are to participate in it in an informed way and make reasoned decisions about political questions. Indeed, both the students and I would frequently switch between discussions of the historical context and the present day. Students often arrive at university with a sense that historians should avoid presentism and bias, but this module demonstrated that a contemporary and personal perspective enriches our understanding both of the past and the present. This strong contemporary focus contributed to the active learning and higher-level understanding that the module sought to promote.

By way of a coda, the module is unlikely to run again as my role at the university has changed. But in a sense it will live on, since I published a book based on the module in 2019.²⁸ This was explicitly written as a student textbook and a teaching aid, and I hope that it will be used in similar courses elsewhere. Writing the book was also a learning process for me, since I went about it in a very different way to my previous research publications. Rather than being driven by primary research, it was based on my class materials and my experience of teaching. Instead of a lengthy bibliography, each chapter has a brief guide to further reading. The style of writing was intended to be accessible to the non-specialist, and it was challenging to explain big ideas in a clear and readable way. Writing the book forced me to reflect on how public history should be communicated, which was in itself a lesson in good citizenship.

Notes

1. 1  Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History (Ann Arbor, MI: Bell, 1931).

2. 2  E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963); Geoge Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

3. 3  James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 5.

4. 4  For example: Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds), Women in British Politics 1780–1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000); Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003); Mark Knights, Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and Its Empire 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Joan Coutu, Jon Stobart and Peter Linfield (eds), Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800 (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2023).

5. 5  Marcus Collins, ‘Historiography from Below: How Undergraduates Remember Learning History at School’, Teaching History, 142 (2011), 34–8 (36).

6. 6  Louis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan, 1929).

7. 7  Elaine Chalus, Elite Women in English Political Life, c. 1754–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Amanda Foreman, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (London: HarperCollins, 1998).

8. 8  Matthew McCormack, ‘ “The Independent Man” in English Political Culture, 1760–1832’ (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2002). This became The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).

9. 9  Catherine Hall, Keith McLelland and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race and Gender in the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

10. 10  Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker and John Tosh, ‘Skills and the Structure of the History Curriculum’ in The Practice of University History Teaching, ed. Alan Booth and Paul Hyland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 47–59 (p. 58). They are still a feature of the York history degree, but are now called ‘Comparative History Modules’.

11. 11  ‘Historians Call for a Review of Home Office Citizenship and Resettlement Test’: open letter to the journal History (21 July 2020), https://historyjournal.org.uk/2020/07/21/historians-call-for-a-review-of-home-office-citizenship-and-settlement-test (accessed 31 January 2023).

12. 12  Audrey Osler, ‘Patriotism, Multiculturalism and Belonging: Political Discourse and the Teaching of History’, Educational Review, 61:1 (2009), 85–100 (86).

13. 13  Peter Yeandle, Citizenship, Nation, Empire: The Politics of History Teaching in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 2, 174.

14. 14  John Tosh, Why History Matters (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2008), pp. ix, 125.

15. 15  Robert Guyver, ‘England and the UK: Conflict and Consensus over Curriculum’ in Teaching History and the Changing Nation State: Transnational and Intranational Perspectives, ed. Robert Guyver (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 159–74.

16. 16  Tosh, Why History Matters, pp. 120–1.

17. 17  Quoted in A. Ottway, Education and Society: An Introduction to the Sociology of Education (Oxford: Routledge, 1953), p. 62.

18. 18  Peter J. Frederick, ‘Motivating Students by Active Learning in the History Classroom’ in The Practice of University History Teaching, ed. Booth and Hyland, pp. 101–11 (p. 104).

19. 19  Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers (New York: Putnam, 1959).

20. 20  Anon., The Fall of Public Spirit: A Dramatic Satire in Two Acts (London, 1757).

21. 21  History of the Westminster Election, Containing Every Material Occurrence … (London, 1785), p. 494.

22. 22  Contrast, for example, economics: Paul W. Richardson, ‘Reading and Writing from Textbooks in Higher Education: A Case Study from Economics’, Studies in Higher Education, 29:4 (2004), 505–21.

23. 23  Effie MacLellan, ‘Reading to Learn’, Studies in Higher Education, 22:3 (1997), 277–88 (277).

24. 24  David Pace, ‘Decoding the Reading of History: An Example of the Process’, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 98 (2004), 13–21.

25. 25  MacLellan, ‘Reading to Learn’, p. 283.

26. 26  MacLellan, ‘Reading to Learn’, p. 281.

27. 27  Adrian Jones, ‘Teaching History at University through Communities of Inquiry’, Australian Historical Studies, 42 (2011), 166–93 (189).

28. 28  Matthew McCormack, Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688–1928 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).

References

• Anon., The Fall of Public Spirit: A Dramatic Satire in Two Acts (London, 1757).
• Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (Ann Arbor, MI: Bell, 1931).
• Chalus, Elaine, Elite Women in English Political Life, c. 1754–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Collins, Marcus, ‘Historiography from Below: How Undergraduates Remember Learning History at School’, Teaching History, 142 (2011), 34–8.
• Coutu, Joan, Stobart, Jon and Linfield, Peter (eds), Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800 (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2023).
• Foreman, Amanda, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (London: HarperCollins, 1998).
• Frederick, Peter J., ‘Motivating Students by Active Learning in the History Classroom’, in The Practice of University History Teaching, ed. Alan Booth and Paul Hyland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 101–11.
• Gleadle, Kathryn and Richardson, Sarah (eds), Women in British Politics 1780–1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000).
• Guyver, Robert, ‘England and the UK: Conflict and Consensus over Curriculum’, in Teaching History and the Changing Nation State: Transnational and Intranational Perspectives, ed. Robert Guyver (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
• Heinlein, Robert, Starship Troopers (New York: Putnam, 1959).
• ‘Historians Call for a Review of Home Office Citizenship and Resettlement Test’, History (21 July 2020), https://historyjournal.org.uk/2020/07/21/historians-call-for-a-review-of-home-office-citizenship-and-settlement-test (accessed 31 January 2023).
• Hitchcock, Tim, Shoemaker, Robert and Tosh, John, ‘Skills and the Structure of the History Curriculum’ in The Practice of University History Teaching, ed. Alan Booth and Paul Hyland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 47–59.
• Jones, Adrian, ‘Teaching History at University through Communities of Inquiry’, Australian Historical Studies, 42 (2011), 166–93.
• Knights, Mark, Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and Its Empire 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
• MacLellan, Effie, ‘Reading to Learn’, Studies in Higher Education, 22:3 (1997), 277–88.
• McCormack, Matthew, ‘ “The Independent Man” in English Political Culture, 1760–1832’ (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2002).
• McCormack, Matthew, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
• McCormack, Matthew, Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688–1928 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).
• Namier, Louis, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan, 1929).
• Navickas, Katrina, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).
• Osler, Audrey, ‘Patriotism, Multiculturalism and Belonging: Political Discourse and the Teaching of History’, Educational Review, 61:1 (2009), 85–100.
• Ottway, A., Education and Society: An Introduction to the Sociology of Education (Oxford: Routledge, 1953).
• Pace, David, ‘Decoding the Reading of History: An Example of the Process’, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 98 (2004), 13–21.
• Richardson, Paul W., ‘Reading and Writing from Textbooks in Higher Education: A Case Study from Economics’, Studies in Higher Education, 29:4 (2004), 505–21.
• Rudé, Geoge, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
• Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963).
• Tosh, John, Why History Matters (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2008).
• Vernon, James, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
• Wilson, Kathleen, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003).
• Yeandle, Peter, Citizenship, Nation, Empire: The Politics of History Teaching in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).