Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The History of British Political Thought: a Field and its Futures
- PART I BRITISH POLITICAL THOUGHT AND HISTORY
- 2 Thinking about the New British History
- 3 The Matter of Britain and the Contours of British Political Thought
- 4 The Intersections Between Irish and British Political Thought of the Early-Modern Centuries
- 5 In Search of a British History of Political Thought
- PART II BRITISH POLITICAL THOUGHT AND LITERATURE
- PART III BRITISH POLITICAL THOUGHT AND POLITICAL THEORY
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - In Search of a British History of Political Thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The History of British Political Thought: a Field and its Futures
- PART I BRITISH POLITICAL THOUGHT AND HISTORY
- 2 Thinking about the New British History
- 3 The Matter of Britain and the Contours of British Political Thought
- 4 The Intersections Between Irish and British Political Thought of the Early-Modern Centuries
- 5 In Search of a British History of Political Thought
- PART II BRITISH POLITICAL THOUGHT AND LITERATURE
- PART III BRITISH POLITICAL THOUGHT AND POLITICAL THEORY
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
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.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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