Graduate Research Day

Graduate Research Day

March 16 2015

Abstracts

1)“Is the abolition of suttee decreed by the British nation… in force in India, or is it not?”: the disruptive tale of sati in the Indian princely states in the mid-19th century

Sue Blunn

On February 6th, 1835, the Rajah of Ahmednuggar died. Three days later, within earshot of British troops, five of his wives were burned alive with his body, apparently by force. In London, the Chairman of the East India Company’s Court of Directors regretted the tragedy but stressed that the event had taken place in a region outside British control. This apparent complaisance perplexed one letter-writer to The Times: “Is the abolition of suttee decreed by the British nation… in force in India, or is it not?” Indeed, the much-celebrated abolition of sati in India in 1829, the result of at least two decades of nationwide Evangelical –led campaigning in Britain, did not extend to a substantial area of India: the semi-independent ‘princely states’.

Yet the baffled letter writer’s ignorance of this fact is in no way unusual; it is a recurring theme in the historiography from the mid-nineteenth century on. Writing in 1928, for example, Edward Thompson noted that the “reader… generally assumes that the 1829… Regulations were the end of suttee everywhere…” and regretted that “there is no historian who indicates how terribly it was still practised throughout a vast tract of territory.”

Whilst this neglect has been partially addressed by recent historians, they, like Thompson, give no explanation for it. Yet the reasons for this contemporary neglect are important, reflecting change in attitudes to sati and in the intellectual and cultural framework in which they were shaped. This paper, adapted from work-in-progress on my first chapter, will identify some of these. In particular, it will focus on the disruption to the hegemonic, celebratory narrative of Britain’s civilising role in suppressing a barbarous rite that sati in the princely states caused, and the implications of it.

2)Before Numbers - how a quantitative social question was understood before social statistics

Guy Beckett

Alain Badiou argued recently that “we live in the era of number’s despotism… what counts - in the sense of what is valued - is that which is counted.”⁠It is broadly agreed by historians of knowledge and philosophers that in the nineteenth century new knowledge tools (statistics, maps, communication networks, filing systems) profoundly changed how states governed. However there has been surprisingly little analysis of the transition from political life without numbers to life with data.

It is possible to date very precisely when British statistics on Indian social topics enter political debates. The first social statistics on widow-burning were published in London and Calcutta in 1805. The figures were collected in an innovative research project, run by Fort William College, Calcutta.

This paper focuses on the period before 1802 when there was no published or unpublished data. Examining how widow-burning was conceived as a social question before statistics, it will show that quantitative questions were debated for fifty years prior to the survey. Indeed by the 1770s there was an established academic debate in Britain between historians and sociologists, which had reached the national press, about whether widow-burning was widely prevalent or now largely obsolete.

How such questions were asked and answered in the pre-statistical era, and why there was a clamour for real numbers, will be the subject of this paper. The paper will suggest that calls to count social phenomena are intimately connected with the desire to transform society.

3)Rome and the Bosporus: representations of urban elite within the funeral epigraphy of the Bosporan Kingdom from first century B.C. to the fourth century A.D.

Magdalena Bulanda

Of all the states in the Greek East, the Bosporan Kingdom, and particularly its relationshipwith the Roman Empire, is the subject of least discussion in modern academia. A significant number of written works concerned with the region have appeared in languages inaccessible to many Western academics, such as Russian or Polish; however, the evidence itself is by no means unreachable or lacking. This lack of interest stems from a general tendency to regard, almost exclusively, this peripheral state as part of the Greek world. After all it was Greek colonies that lay at its foundation. Consequently, the archaeology and history of the state at the time of the Roman Empire are given little or no attention. Once within the Roman sphere of interest, Cimmerian Bosporus remained firmly under imperial influence until the fourth century A.D. The continuity of its political authority, which extended over approximately the same territory for a thousand years, made Bosporus unique amongst other principalities of the ancient world. The aim of this paper is to examine the ways in which members of the Bosporan urban class represented their social status and identity within the local funerary context. Commonly this presentation took a form of commemorative stele: a formal and enduring public display that ensured memorialisationin both sculptural and epigraphical form. Analysing patterns of commemorative practice, enables us to trace the social behaviour of the local elite and to identify influential cultural factors. The study of ‘epigraphic habit’ within the funerary culture of the Bosporan Kingdom will significantly contributeto our understanding of social, cultural and political life on the fringes of the Roman Empire.

4)Studying Imperial Tommy and the Republican Boer: armies, soldiers and the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902)

Amelia Clegg

Military historical methodologies of the Anglo-Boer war comprise two main categories of investigation. The first takes a more traditional approach to the material and operational with research focusing on the nature of weapons and activities of armies. Recent regimental histories instead apply a more thematic approach where greater attention is paid to the relationship between war and society. Also referred to as the “new military history”, this approach attempts to integrate the study of military institutions and their actions with economics, politics and culture, for instance focusing on the social composition of armies and officer corps, civil-military relations, and the societal impact of war on race, class and gender. Rather than perpetuating the perpetual mundane distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ military historical approaches, it is suggested that researchers should instead look to the natural division between the history of war, and the history of the army. Yet this neat compartmentalisation risks disproportional over-analysis which favours one method of investigation above the other. Studies of war and of the army cannot be done in isolation, and any discussion of military institutions should analyse war as a societal phenomenon in parallel with the army as an institutional construct.

In this paper, I focus on the methodological challenges surrounding my thematic study of individual soldiers and the military institutions in which they exist and operate. The personal narratives of British and Afrikaner men who actively participated in the Southern African colonial campaign provide a cross-section of the primary source base from which certain ontological and epistemological methodologies are discussed. Some of the points addressed in this paper highlight crucial issues concerning the following:

• Construction of knowledge and identity
• Limitations of individual intention and meaning in historical narratives
• The manner in which information is collected, categorised and examined
• Analytical limitations of private correspondence
• Contextualisation of texts
• Conclusions drawn from the various interactions of the causal relationships and the nature of the different systems in which they were constructed
• The implications of representation when using individual experience to provide insights into institutions

5)Muslims, education and the state in Britain: the Bradford situation

Helen Carr

This paper will deal with the politics of religious diversity and what we now call multiculturalism as it developed in Modern Britain in the context of immigration from South Asia.

During the 1970s, and early 1980s Britain’s recently settled Muslim communities negotiated with local education authorities over Muslim educational needs in the state system. The response of LEAs was generally sympathetic, with attempts to meet the majority (though, significantly, not all) of the needs being made. In the early 1980s in Bradford, the sense of goodwill and cooperation began to shift, with a campaign to create voluntary-aided Muslim schools on the basis that the state system was not meeting Muslim needs, threats to the provision of halal meat in Bradford’s schools, and the Honeyford Affair. Muslims, who had previously been represented by either race or community relations groups, or by local organisations such as the Council for Mosques, found themselves being represented by single issue groups which were often aggressive and vocal in their approach. Bradford council in turn appeared to cease to be so conciliatory in its approach to Muslim requests.

To understand this shift, it is necessary to consider two policy changes made by Bradford council. The first was the ending of the policy of dispersal – “bussing” – in 1981. The second was a move away from separate education for boys and girls – a crucial Muslim need, which had previously coincided with council policy – towards a policy of co-education. The effect of these two policy shifts was to concentrate Bradford’s Muslim school population in certain schools, and to highlight that, while the LEA was willing to make certain concessions in the spirit of religious pluralism, there were considerable differences in attitude and belief between the LEA and the city’s Muslims. On particular issues, these differences left Muslim needs unfulfilled, and unlikely to be fulfilled. This created conflict which, left unresolved, heightened tension and created an inflammatory situation and a widening and seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the concerned parties.