James Vernon
University of California, Berkeley, History, Faculty Member
This roundtable is the first in a projected series that will take global soundings of the present state of twentieth-century British history, consciously pushing away from the shores of the British Isles to involve scholars not based... more
This roundtable is the first in a projected series that will take global soundings of the present state of twentieth-century British history, consciously pushing away from the shores of the British Isles to involve scholars not based institutionally in the UK. We begin in North America where British history has had a long, distinguished, if now perhaps uncertain, life in American and Canadian universities. To start in North America is not an unthinking reflex or a paean to some kind of intellectual 'special relationship', but rather an acknowledgement of the importance of the research and teaching about Britain traditionally carried out in the USA and Canada. The North American Conference on British Studies and the Journal of British Studies are, for instance, critical venues for the discussion of British history for scholars around the world. In addition, the articles published by TCBH and other British-based journals stand as a continuing testament to the Atlantic crossing made in scholarship on twentieth-century Britain. Three of the past four winners of the TCBH Postgraduate Essay Prize have, for example, come from North America. But though historians of twentieth-century British history on both sides of the ocean share a common field, it is often apparent that they are separated by distinctive approaches, concerns and structural frameworks. The twentieth-century British past may or may not be a 'foreign country', to evoke L.P. Hartley, but, across the water, that past is nonetheless done somewhat differently. 1 The brief offered to the contributors to this roundtable was an open one: to reflect upon the state of twentieth-century British history in whatever way they thought appropriate. It is pleasing that this has produced four contributions that not only work well on their own, but also speak to one another in important ways. Laura E.
In the past 200 years Britons have responded to famines in particular ways. This article explores these particularities by focusing not simply on the remarkably unchanging humanitarian representation of the victims of famine but on the... more
In the past 200 years Britons have responded to famines in particular ways. This article explores these particularities by focusing not simply on the remarkably unchanging humanitarian representation of the victims of famine but on the changing technologies through which relief was collected and distributed. It shows how technologies of famine relief were created from the need to govern colonial populations rather than from the development of new sentimentality and ethics. The authors seek to demonstrate that, despite the changing nature of these technologies, the forms of expertise that sustained them, a set of routines and practices developed that allowed the performance of a British way with famine that slowly extended from the empire to the world. In the wake of two world wars these forms of expertise were extended to Europe and became internationalised through the work of voluntary organisations. After the formal end of Empire, these technologies were retooled and used to assist places in postcolonial Africa. They also helped create a new type of global citizen, informed of technologies of relief and invested in the Global South through the rise of a humanitarian culture.
I propose a global history of modern Britain around an account of the rise, demise and reinvention of a liberal political economy that reified the market as the organising principle of government. It is a story that is inseparable from... more
I propose a global history of modern Britain around an account of the rise, demise and reinvention of a liberal political economy that reified the market as the organising principle of government. It is a story that is inseparable from the growth and collapse of the British Empire, as well as the continuing, if precarious, global hegemony of the Anglosphere. The liberal political economy that germinated within the British Empire may have had a world system built around it, but events, processes and peoples far beyond the Anglosphere shaped the history of its rise, demise and reinvention. This history of Britain is then a global story, not because of that old imperial conceit that Britain made the world, but because the world made Britain. This article has been peer reviewed.
The making of the neoliberal university in Britain did not inevitably follow the apparent crisis of welfare capitalism that accelerated from the late 1960s, or the structural adjustment program instituted by the International Monetary... more
The making of the neoliberal university in Britain did not inevitably follow the apparent crisis of welfare capitalism that accelerated from the late 1960s, or the structural adjustment program instituted by the International Monetary Fund in 1976, or the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. It was not until the 1990s that a variety of discourses and practices-that were not reducible to a set of class interests, ideologies, or political formations-gradually marketized, privatized, and financialized higher education in Britain. In doing so they sought to establish a new type of academic subject and an economized common sense about the purpose, management, and experience of higher education. That common sense has been challenged by
Visit Representations Online | Subscribe Issue 116 Fall 2011, Special Issue: THE HUMANITIES AND THE CRISIS OF THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY Colleen Lye, Christopher Newfield, and James Vernon Humanists and the Public University (free download!)... more
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Issue 116
Fall 2011, Special Issue:
THE HUMANITIES AND THE CRISIS OF THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY
Colleen Lye, Christopher Newfield, and James Vernon Humanists and the Public University (free download!)
Wendy Brown The End of Educated Democracy
Geoffrey Galt Harpham From Eternity to Here: Shrinkage in American Thinking About Higher Education
Sarah Amsler Beyond All Reason: Spaces of Hope in the Struggle for England's Universities
Christopher L. Connery Marches Through the Institutions: University Activism in the Sixties and Present
Suzanne Guerlac Humanities 2.0: E-Learning in the Digital World
Bob Meister Debt and Taxes: Can the Financial Industry Save Public Universities? (free download!)
Randy Martin Taking an Administrative Turn: Derivative Logics for a Recharged Humanities
REFLECTIONS ON A YEAR OF PROTEST AT BERKELEY Ananya Roy, Shannon Steen, and George Lakoff
Issue 116
Fall 2011, Special Issue:
THE HUMANITIES AND THE CRISIS OF THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY
Colleen Lye, Christopher Newfield, and James Vernon Humanists and the Public University (free download!)
Wendy Brown The End of Educated Democracy
Geoffrey Galt Harpham From Eternity to Here: Shrinkage in American Thinking About Higher Education
Sarah Amsler Beyond All Reason: Spaces of Hope in the Struggle for England's Universities
Christopher L. Connery Marches Through the Institutions: University Activism in the Sixties and Present
Suzanne Guerlac Humanities 2.0: E-Learning in the Digital World
Bob Meister Debt and Taxes: Can the Financial Industry Save Public Universities? (free download!)
Randy Martin Taking an Administrative Turn: Derivative Logics for a Recharged Humanities
REFLECTIONS ON A YEAR OF PROTEST AT BERKELEY Ananya Roy, Shannon Steen, and George Lakoff
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Over the past decade, historians, journals, conferences, and even job advertisements have devoted attention to a new field of inquiry, "Britain and the world." This emergent category is far from coherent but, despite a variety of... more
Over the past decade, historians, journals, conferences, and even job advertisements have devoted attention to a new field of inquiry, "Britain and the world." This emergent category is far from coherent but, despite a variety of approaches, shares a common assumption that Britain's interactions with the world beyond its shores enable us to better understand the histories of both Britain and the globe. Writing the history of Britain from a comparative, imperial, or transnational perspective is not wholly new. British historians have long worked comparatively in a predominantly European frame, while historians of empire and internationalism have also highlighted the importance of transnational and global frameworks. What, then, is signified by the articulation of "Britain and the world" as a new field? What do historians of Britain, and indeed historians of its empire and the world, stand to gain or lose from the promotion of Britain and the world as a field? What new skills, methodologies, and archives are required to become a historian of Britain and the world? We invited historians from different generations and national academies as well as with different ways of approaching the history of Britain in an extranational frame. Our hope is that these essays will open up debate and stimulate broader discussions about the changing nature of the field and our work as historians of Britain.
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In the past 200 years Britons have responded to famines in particular ways. This article explores these particularities by focusing not simply on the remarkably unchanging humanitarian representation of the victims of famine but on the... more
In the past 200 years Britons have responded to famines in particular ways. This article explores these particularities by focusing not simply on the remarkably unchanging humanitarian representation of the victims of famine but on the changing technologies through which relief was collected and distributed. It shows how technologies of famine relief were created from the need to govern colonial populations rather than from the development of new sentimentality and ethics. The authors seek to demonstrate that, despite the changing nature of these technologies, the forms of expertise that sustained them, a set of routines and practices developed that allowed the performance of a British way with famine that slowly extended from the empire to the world. In the wake of two world wars these forms of expertise were extended to Europe and became internationalised through the work of voluntary organisations. After the formal end of Empire, these technologies were retooled and used to assist places in postcolonial Africa. They also helped create a new type of global citizen, informed of technologies of relief and invested in the Global South through the rise of a humanitarian culture.
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... 2 May 1997 0307-1022 © Routledge 1997 Page 2. May îgçj 'The mirage of modernity' 209 ... The mood of introspection is also evident in History Workshop Journal:see Raphael Samuel, 'Reading the signs', History... more
... 2 May 1997 0307-1022 © Routledge 1997 Page 2. May îgçj 'The mirage of modernity' 209 ... The mood of introspection is also evident in History Workshop Journal:see Raphael Samuel, 'Reading the signs', History Workshop Journal, xxxii (1991), 88-109 and xxxiii (1992), 220-51. ...
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Englishness: The Narration of a Nation - A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist's Imagination. By John Taylor. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+400. $75.00. - Writing Englishness, 1900–1950: An Introductory Sourcebook on National Identity. Edited by Judy ...more
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As Patrick Joyce is a scholar who likes to say a lot with the titles of his work I take my own from his ego-histoire.1 While many see Joyce’s engagement with ‘theory’, or what in Britain is often still referred to as ‘postmodernism’, as... more
As Patrick Joyce is a scholar who likes to say a lot with the titles of his work I take my own from his ego-histoire.1 While many see Joyce’s engagement with ‘theory’, or what in Britain is often still referred to as ‘postmodernism’, as the defining feature of his work, I want to situate him as a historian historically. Hence this unmistakably British title (who else would understand the valence of ‘secondary modern’?) that speaks to a specific generational experience of class, as well as the particular one of Joyce’s north London, Irish catholic, working-class childhood that continue to shape his sense of being an outsider.2 And yet despite this sense of alienation Joyce was in many ways a good subject of British social democracy. A product of the emergent welfare state, he progressed from Cardinal Manning Secondary Modern School, through the burgeoning world of adult education, to the recently created University of Keele, before finally ‘arriving’ in Oxford, at Baliol College, as ...
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This roundtable is the first in a projected series that will take global soundings of the present state of twentieth-century British history, consciously pushing away from the shores of the British Isles to involve scholars not based... more
This roundtable is the first in a projected series that will take global soundings of the present state of twentieth-century British history, consciously pushing away from the shores of the British Isles to involve scholars not based institutionally in the UK. We begin in North ...
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Over the past decade, historians, journals, conferences, and even job advertisements have devoted attention to a new field of inquiry, “Britain and the world.” This emergent category is far from coherent but, despite a variety of... more
Over the past decade, historians, journals, conferences, and even job advertisements have devoted attention to a new field of inquiry, “Britain and the world.” This emergent category is far from coherent but, despite a variety of approaches, shares a common assumption that Britain's interactions with the world beyond its shores enable us to better understand the histories of both Britain and the globe. Writing the history of Britain from a comparative, imperial, or transnational perspective is not wholly new. British historians have long worked comparatively in a predominantly European frame, while historians of empire and internationalism have also highlighted the importance of transnational and global frameworks. What, then, is signified by the articulation of “Britain and the world” as a new field? What do historians of Britain, and indeed historians of its empire and the world, stand to gain or lose from the promotion of Britain and the world as a field? What new skills, met...
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��� e grow old writing academic books. We spend years (even decades) figuring it out, doing research, grinding out the prose, talking through and testing the arguments with friends and colleagues. Then we wait patiently for more years as... more
��� e grow old writing academic books. We spend years (even decades) figuring it out, doing research, grinding out the prose, talking through and testing the arguments with friends and colleagues. Then we wait patiently for more years as the process of peer review and revision slowly gives way to production, the anti-climax of publication, and the long, dreaded wait for reviews. It is thus a real thrill and honor to have three terrific scholars engage with one’s work in Victorian Studies. Thanks to the editors and the respon dents for this opportunity. It reminds me why I write books and that growing old with them is not so bad. It is a particular pleasure that Distant Strangers has been recog nized in this way by Victorian Studies . A decade ago I wrote in these pages about the implosion of Victorian studies as an interdisciplinary project and discussed why historians of Britain—especially those less interested in the then still reasonably new imperial history—had relo cated their interests to the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. 1 The following year, Martin Hewitt wrote a spirited but somewhat contradic tory defense of the coherence of the Victorian age as an “assemblage” of diverse and not necessarily related processes with “fuzzy” chrono logical and geographical boundaries (397, 396). The recent “Mani festo of the V21 Collective,” and Hewitt’s “10 Alternative Theses,” only serve to dramatize the deepening impasse in the understanding of what the field of enquiry is, how it is to be understood, and for what purposes. 2 In some measure, Distant Strangers was for me a way of thinking through why the nineteenth century should still matter for historians, how it is still foundational for the broader field of British history, and whether it may still be useful for historians of other parts of the world to think with.
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List of Figures Preface 1 What Is Modernity? 2 A Society of Strangers 3 Governing Strangers 4 Associating with Strangers 5 An Economy of Strangers Conclusion Notes Index
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n February 28, 1929, Colonel Leslie Ivor Victor Gauntlett Bligh Barker was arrested for contempt of court, having failed to appear at a bankruptcy hearing the previous December. Removed to Brixton Prison, Barker was subjected to a routine... more
n February 28, 1929, Colonel Leslie Ivor Victor Gauntlett Bligh Barker was arrested for contempt of court, having failed to appear at a bankruptcy hearing the previous December. Removed to Brixton Prison, Barker was subjected to a routine medical inspection, during which he was discovered to be a woman and immediately transferred to the all-women Holloway prison.' By March 6, the news had leaked to the press and led to a series of sensational revelations that dominated the front pages of the press for a week. Barker, it was disclosed, had been born a biological female in 1895 and christened Lilias Irma Valerie Barker by her parents of independent means. In 1918 she had been married briefly to one Lieutenant Harold Arkell-Smith before having two children with her subsequent lover, Earnest Pearce-Crouch. Yet, after this relationship collapsed in 1923, Barker had begun life as a man and married Elfreda Haward. This marriage also had not lasted long and was followed by a series of relationships with other women, with whom Barker appeared to live as a common-law husband, earning a living variously as a farmer, actor, antique-shop owner, kennel manager, laborer, restaurateur, and gentleman of leisure. As these revelations were investigated by the police, Barker was charged on two counts of perjury for having falsely signed the register at his marriage to Haward. The subsequent trial at the Old Bailey took place amid great publicity and resulted in Barker's being imprisoned as a woman for
Research Interests: History, Cultural Studies, Medicine, Gender Identity, Deception, and 7 moreNewspapers, Humans, Female, Male, Transsexualism, Great Britain, and Signs
The precarity of the humanities today is symptomatic of the broader reassessment of the value and utility of the public university. This helps explain the prevalent role of humanists in the recent struggles for public education, but it... more
The precarity of the humanities today is symptomatic of the broader reassessment of the value and utility of the public university. This helps explain the prevalent role of humanists in the recent struggles for public education, but it now also demands from humanists a new level of institutional engagement and reflexivity about the conditions of their labor.
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... 2 May 1997 0307-1022 © Routledge 1997 Page 2. May îgçj 'The mirage of modernity' 209 ... The mood of introspection is also evident in History Workshop Journal:see Raphael Samuel, 'Reading the signs', History... more
... 2 May 1997 0307-1022 © Routledge 1997 Page 2. May îgçj 'The mirage of modernity' 209 ... The mood of introspection is also evident in History Workshop Journal:see Raphael Samuel, 'Reading the signs', History Workshop Journal, xxxii (1991), 88-109 and xxxiii (1992), 220-51. ...
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Englishness: The Narration of a Nation:A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist's Imagination John Taylor; Writing Englishness, 1900-1950: An Introductory Sourcebook on National Identity Judy Giles, Tim Middleton; Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain Andrew...more
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... Lewes' town-crier 1844-71, in full ceremonial dress 125 29 Statue of'Blind Joe,' Oldham's town-crier c. 1820-1860 126 30 Henry Mayhew's 'Long-Song Seller' 128 31 ... xviii... more
... Lewes' town-crier 1844-71, in full ceremonial dress 125 29 Statue of'Blind Joe,' Oldham's town-crier c. 1820-1860 126 30 Henry Mayhew's 'Long-Song Seller' 128 31 ... xviii Acknowledgements To my postgraduate supervisors, Patrick Joyce and Frank O'Gorman, my ...
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... James Vernon is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. ... 1. On Strachey's ambivalent relation to the Victorians see... more
... James Vernon is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. ... 1. On Strachey's ambivalent relation to the Victorians see Taddeo. [End Page 278]. ...
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This volume of essays is about something which (for many) does not exist and yet which remains central to our understanding of English politics, history and national identity - the constitution. As Eur- opean integration and demands for... more
This volume of essays is about something which (for many) does not exist and yet which remains central to our understanding of English politics, history and national identity - the constitution. As Eur- opean integration and demands for constitutional reform have once ...
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... Lewes' town-crier 1844-71, in full ceremonial dress 125 29 Statue of'Blind Joe,' Oldham's town-crier c. 1820-1860 126 30 Henry Mayhew's 'Long-Song Seller' 128 31 ... xviii... more
... Lewes' town-crier 1844-71, in full ceremonial dress 125 29 Statue of'Blind Joe,' Oldham's town-crier c. 1820-1860 126 30 Henry Mayhew's 'Long-Song Seller' 128 31 ... xviii Acknowledgements To my postgraduate supervisors, Patrick Joyce and Frank O'Gorman, my ...
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Part of a forum on Distant Strangers responding to essays by Paul Saint-Amour, Emma Griffin and Keith McClelland
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I propose a global history of modern Britain around an account of the rise, demise and reinvention of a liberal political economy that reified the market as the organising principle of government. It is a story that is inseparable from... more
I propose a global history of modern Britain around an account of the rise, demise and reinvention of a liberal political economy that reified the market as the organising principle of government. It is a story that is inseparable from the growth and collapse of the British Empire, as well as the continuing, if precarious, global hegemony of the Anglosphere. The liberal political economy that germinated within the British Empire may have had a world system built around it, but events, processes and peoples far beyond the Anglosphere shaped the history of its rise, demise and reinven-tion. This history of Britain is then a global story, not because of that old imperial conceit that Britain made the world, but because the world made Britain. This article has been peer reviewed. Tony Abbott's government spent much of 2014 and 2015 attempting to remove the cap on tuition fees so that Australian universities become entirely debt-financed by students. No other country in the world has yet reached this precipice, although much of the former British world is racing to catch-up. The privatisation of higher education and the fashioning of a neoliberal university has proceeded faster and further in the so-called Anglosphere than anywhere else. Arguably, Britain itself (with the notable exception of Scotland), is playing catch up. Take the student debt funding of higher education. 1 In 1989 and 1990 Australia and New Zealand followed Canada's example by introducing tuition fees and student loan programs. Tuition fees were not introduced in Britain until 1997 and their extension through a government-backed, income-contingent loan system in 2004 was explicitly modeled on the systems in Australia and New Zealand. University administrators from these countries, with first-hand experience of privatisation, were in big demand in Britain during the 1990s and 2000s. To take just one example: the University of Manchester hired Alan Gilbert in 2004 the year before the private campus he had created at the University of Melbourne was 1 We need more studies of how university management practices, national systems to measure the productivity of academic labour, as well as the protests against the student debt-financing of higher education, have taken remarkably similar forms across the British world. On the latter see Tania Palmieri and Clare Solomon, eds, Springtime: The New Student Rebellions (London: Verso, 2011).
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An attempt to begin thinking about the global career of the hunger march
