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IAS Junior Research Fellow, Dr Ellen Filor is researching this theme.
Past Events
Short Histories of the British Empire, 1816-1856
While historians have often sought out big events and explosive moments, this geographically wide-ranging conference seeks to explore what short histories, individual biographies and innovative timespans can tell us about the British empire. By excluding the Napoleonic War and the Indian Revolt of 1857, we seek to move away from these large-scale, historically dominant events. Building on a vibrant field of imperial history, this conference roots itself in geographical specificities of individual imperial hubs and plays close attention the routes between the metropole and settler and sojourner British colonies.
Examining four set of key themes (rule and resistance, work and capital, movement and networks, and knowledge) this conference offers the specificities and dislocations of the local in a time of extraordinary and accelerated change. Steampower, increasing bureaucracy, the end of the slave trade and developments in warfare all contributed to a period when the British empire expanded at a swift rate.
By bringing together historians, geographers, art historians, and architects at the interdisciplinary UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, this conference will ask how approaches from disparate regions might fruitfully inform one another. Drawing attention to the 'short' but important events that shaped the British empire, we will propose revisionist chronologies and open up new terrains for study.
Programme:
10:00-10:15 - Introductory remarks: Sascha Auerbach (Nottingham)
10:15-11.15 - Rule and Resistance: Law, Justice and Governance: Natasha Eaton (UCL) Comment
- Ellen Filor (UCL) - Sex, Virginity and Consent in Colonial Bombay: Circumventing the Cornwallis Reforms, c. 1820-1830
- Kristy Warren - Enslavement and Childhood on Sugar Plantations in St Kitts
11:15-11:30 - Coffee Break
11:30-13:00 - Work and Capital: Economy, Labour and Social Experience: Jon Wilson (KCL) Comment
- Kate Boehme (Sussex) - Reforming Everywhere and All at Once: Emancipation, convictism and indenture across the British Empire 1837-1838
- Fae Dussart (Sussex) - 'Such an establishment and such arrangements!' Marianne Williams, her household and colonial community in 1840s New Zealand
- Meleisa Ono-George - 'Procuring a Livelihood': The Politics of Interracial Concubinage in Jamaica, 1829-1833
13:00-13.45 - Lunch
13.45-15.15 - Movement and Networks: Emigration, Immigration and Migration: David Lambert (Warwick) Comment
- Andrea Major (Leeds) - 'Hill Coolies': The Globalisation of Indian Labour, 1834-1838
- Hannah Young (UCL) - The absentee Duchess: Jamaican emigration and the English country estate
- Chris Wingfield (Cambridge) -The Art of Travel: Missionary authors as collectors in southern Africa, 1816-1856
15.15-15.30 - Coffee Break
15.30-17.00 - Knowledge: Science, Technology and Medicine: Kate Smith Comment
- Tania Sengupta (UCL) - Colonial Life-worlds: Cutcherry spaces, record rooms and mufassal administration in Bengal
- Onni Gust (Nottingham) - 'Emotion and empire: Maria Edgeworth's Ennui as colonial narrative'
- Pete Mitchell (Sussex) - Propulsive change: steam, the East India Company and global governmentalities in 1838
17.00-17.30 - Reflections and round up: Catherine Hall (UCL)
17.30-19.00 - Wine Reception
19.30-21.00 - Conference Meal
Please register here.
IAS Talking Points: Corruption and Race in the East India Company, 1800-1857
6 - 8 pm, 1 June 2016
IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing, Wilkins Building
Ellen's paper will explore the shifting meanings of corruption in the colonies at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Utilising a database of the hundred or so cases of corruption brought to the attention of the East India Company board of directors, this paper will explore the gap between the legislative aims of legal reforms and the workings of such laws in practice. Over the period, the numbers of Europeans being accused of corruption declined steadily between 1800 and 1857 while the number of Indians accused rose steadily. This period, therefore, saw a shift in the ways that corruption was perceived on the subcontinent: it became something the 'native' did rather than the ruling Briton. As anthropologists have suggested, accusations of corruption are one way that non-Western nations can be 'Othered' and thus tarred as 'backward' or 'traditional' societies. Examining this racialising of corruption in nineteenth-century India complicates anthropological and social science approaches to contemporary corruption.
Respondents will be Dr David Hudson, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy in the Department of Political Science and Dr Natasha Eaton, Reader in History of Art.
All welcome. Please register here.
IAS Conflict, Confrontation and Justice Seminar: Representation and Form in Art and Politics
5 - 7.30 pm, 2 June 2016
IAS Common Ground, South Wing, Wilkins Building
The event will involve a presentation of short papers by Dr Larne Abse Gogarty (UCL) and E.C. Feiss (UC Berkeley) followed by a discussion with respondent Dr Amna Malik (Slade, UCL) and the audience.
Collective and socially engaged art has frequently been discussed as inheriting a critique of representation from earlier politicised forms of art including conceptual art and institutional critique. However, as this event will discuss, how can we understand the critique of representation within social practice as founded not only upon a deconstruction of artistic form, but also one that makes assumptions about the relationship between artistic and political representation? This is founded upon a notion that 'subject participants' might, through the artwork, gain access to political rights, an assumption which reveals a troubling slippage between the form of aesthetic and political representation. Our papers will engage in questions of political strategy and reform, seeking to produce a more dialectical view of the formation of collective subjects.
Larne Abse Gogarty will address group formation and collective art practice, exploring the relationship between psychic and political experience and E.C. Feiss will address some relations between artistic and juridical forms, and their potentialities and limits within political and aesthetic discourses of emancipation.
All welcome. Please register here.
IAS Conflict, Confrontation and Justice Seminar: Sex in the City
6 - 9 pm, 9 March 2016
IAS Seminar Room 20/22, First Floor, South Wing, Wilkins Building
Join the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies for a seminar on the research theme of Conflict, Confrontation and Justice entitled Sex In The City. There will be talks on Sex in Britain (Soazig Clifton, Research Associate, UCL Department of Infection and Public Health) and ChemSex (David Stuart, Substance Use Lead, 56 Dean Street) and the event will be chaired by Dr Shema Tariq (UCL Department of Infection and Public Health).
Title: Sex in Britain
What? Who with? How often? The British National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) have interviewed representative samples of the population every 10 years since 1990. This talk will share findings from the latest survey of more than 15,000 people aged 16-74.
Biography: Soazig Clifton is a survey researcher specialising in sexual health, based at UCL. She is part of the core Natsal study team, and has taken the findings to festivals, museums, pubs, and other public venues around the UK. For more information and findings from Natsal see www.natsal.ac.uk. For more on Soazig's events and projects, follow her on twitter @soazigclifton.
Title: ChemSex
ChemSex has been identified as a public health concern for gay men internationally. David Stuart will be discussing the challenges it represents to the health sector and gay communities, as well as exploring the psychosexual/psychosocial, cultural and historical drivers behind this phenomenon.
Biography: David Stuart is the Substance Use Lead at 56 Dean Street addressing the sexualised drug use by gay men (the practice commonly referred to as 'ChemSex'). He has been involved in the development of London's pioneering services Antidote, Club Drug Clinic and CODE clinic, and has been instrumental in placing ChemSex issues firmly on international Public Health agendas. He has been consulted by the governments and public health bodies of many countries across Europe, Australia and USA, including the World Health Organisation/UNAIDS.
Confronting past injustices by teaching 'forgotten' histories
12 noon - 3 pm, 16 December 2015
IAS Common Ground, South Wing, Wilkins Building
Kristy Warren and Kate Donington
Dealing with the legacies of past injustices necessitates a multi-pronged approach, of which teaching 'forgotten' histories is a vital part. This talk will explore this issue using Local Roots/Global Routes, a collaborative project run by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at UCL and Hackney Museum and Archives, as an example. The project explored Hackney's links to transatlantic slavery, helping to expand the history already being taught about abolitionists in the area to also reflect the presence of slave-owners and people of African descent. It did this through archival research, explorations of built heritage, and direct engagement with teachers and young people. In the process, the project also addressed constructs of the past that either ignored or distorted the histories of people of African descent, particularly the history of Africa before European contact and the role played by enslaved Africans in the fight against slavery.
All welcome to attend.
Corruption on Celluloid: Screening of Seven Days in May (1964)
5 - 8 pm, 4 December 2015
IAS Common Ground, South Wing, Wilkins Building
This showing and discussion of the corruption and conflict in Seven Days in May is led by film historian Hannah Graves and hosted by Institute of Advanced Studies Junior Research Fellow Ellen Filor. Written by The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling and starring some of the foremost actors of the era (Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Fredric March), this film follows an attempted military coup to overthrow the American president because he supports a nuclear disarmament treaty. Graves will unpick the Cold War paranoia of the era and show how outside events impacted its reception by examining how Kennedy's assassination shortly before the release led to a new strategy for the premiere.
Refreshments will be provided.