Britain & Ireland 1745-1901

The relationship between Britain and Ireland is explored here across a number of articles. Particular themes assessing and exploring social reform on matters such as housing, industrial change and emerging civil rights are included here. Key individuals from the world of politics, science and women’s rights are also examined in detail.

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  • The Scottish Enlightenment

    Article

    In recent decades, Scotland's distinctive contribution to the Enlightenment has been of increasing interest to scholars. Often very remarkable in an analytical view, such studies may nevertheless miss their sense of the story by treating Scottish insight in abstraction from Scottish life. Taking a more concrete approach, the present study...

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  • The Northern Ireland Question 1886-1986

    Article

    The nature of the rights of majorities and minorities is one of the most intractable of the issues raised by the Northern Ireland question, especially since much depends on definitions. Ulster Protestants are a majority in that province but a minority in both Ireland and the United Kingdom, while Catholics,...

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  • Chartism

    Article

    It is not surprising that Chartism has attracted a great deal of interest from historians and students, for at no other period in British history, with the possible exception of the second and third decades of the twentieth century, has so much excitement and activity been aroused at the working-class...

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  • Polychronicon 129: Reinterpreting Peterloo

    Article

    The Peterloo massacre is one of the best-documented events in British history. It was the bloodiest political event of the 19th century on English soil. At St Peter's Fields in central Manchester on Monday 16 August 1819, a rally of around 60,000 people seeking parliamentary reform was violently dispersed by...

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  • Were industrial towns 'death-traps'? Year 9 learn to question generalisations and to challenge their preconceptions about the 'boring' 19th century

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Kimberley Anthony and her history colleagues were troubled by Year 9's assumption that World War II was the only interesting thing that they were going to do in Year 9. Nineteenth-century industrialisation, even their own...

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  • Child labour in eighteenth century London

    Article

    On 1 March 1771, thirteen year-old John Davies, a London charity school boy, left his home in Half MoonAlley and made his way to Bishopsgate Street. There he joined thirteen other boys of similar age who, like him, were new recruits of the Marine Society, a charity that sent poor...

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  • The Chapel and the Nation

    Article

    The Noncoformitst chapel has played a crucial role in the history of the English and Welsh nations. When the great French historian Elie Halevy sought to explain the contrast between the turbulent history of his own country and the peaceful evolution of England in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...

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  • Votes for Women in Britain 1867-1928

    Article

    This classic pamphlet takes you through the Votes for Women in Britain movement from its origins to its eventual success, following the case for women's suffrage presented, tactics and strategies, the anti-suffragist argument, party political complications, international perspectives, the Pankhursts and militancy, the revival of non-militant suffragism, the impact of...

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  • The Enlightenment

    Article

    Can a movement as varied and diffuse as the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century be contained within the covers of a short pamphlet? The problem would certainly have appealed to the intellectuals of that time. Generalists rather than specialists, citizens of the whole world of knowledge, they relished the challenge...

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  • Understanding Slavery

    Article

    Teaching the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition in British history is now a compulsory component of the revised KS3 History curriculum. The Understanding Slavery Initiative (USI) is a national education project set up in 2003. The initiative has been developed in partnership with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich,...

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  • Northamptonshire in a Global Context

    Article

    Produced by the Northamptonshire Black History Association and originally published in 2008, this is one of a set of resources for schools offering a more inclusive map of the past that includes an appreciation of Black History within the local, national and global context. The resources provide a range of opportunities to promote diversity within the curriculum....

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  • Role Play 1: The Society Game

    Article

    Applicable to Britain 1066-1500, Britain 1500-1750, Britain 1750-1900, and many aspects of GCSE and AS/A2 courses. The version given in full here is for use in a study of Victorian Britain. This tackles the troublesome concept of relative status in a changing society. Exactly what is it that bestows status...

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  • Polychronicon 131: At your leisure

    Article

    Leisure time - like time itself - is fluid, and keeps changing its social meanings. From a ‘serious' high political perspective there is no history of leisure and leisure is trivial. Such perspectives have long lost their grip on the historical imagination, of course, and we have had histories of...

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  • The Pennsylvanian Origins of British Abolitionism

    Article

    It can have escaped the attention of very few people in the United Kingdom that 2007 marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in British ships. Slavery itself continued to be legal in Britain and its colonies until the 1830s, while other nations continued both to...

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  • Disraeli, Peel and the Corn Laws: the making of a conservative reputation

    Article

    125 years after his death, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, still provides the political lode-star for generations of Conservatives. Lately, for the first time in 30 years, Disraeli's name and example has been enthusiastically evoked by the party leadership and David Cameron has projected himself as a Disraeli for the...

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  • Attitudes to Liberty and Enslavement: the career of James Irving, a Liverpool slave ship surgeon and captain

    Article

    Prior to abolition in 1807, Britain was the world’s leading slave trading nation. Of an estimated six million individuals forcibly transported from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, almost 2.5 million (40 per cent) were carried in British vessels.2 The contemporary attitudes and assumptions which underpinned...

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  • The Slave trade and British Abolition, 1787-1807

    Article

    In the 1780’s the British slave trade thrived. In that decade alone more than one thousand British and British colonial slave ships sailed for the slave coasts of Africa and transported more than 300,000 Africans. There was little evidence that here was a system uncertain about its economic future. If...

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  • Polychronicon 123: Gladstone and Disraeli

    Article

    Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' focuses on the interpretations of Gladstone and Disraeli.

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  • How Nelson Became a Hero

    Article

    The fittest man in the world for the command' of the Mediterranean, Lord Minto declared of Horatio Nelson on 24 April 1798, following Nelson's inventive assault on Spanish ships off Cape St. Vincent. 'Admiral Nelson's victory [at the Nile]… is one of the most glorious and comprehensive victories ever achieved...

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  • Thomas Muir and the 'Scottish Martyrs' of the 1790s

    Article

    From the 1750s, after more than a century of intense political and religious disputes and of economic stagnation, Scotland began to enjoy several decades of almost unprecedented political stability, religious harmony, economic growth and cultural achievements. Jacobitism had been crushed and most propertied and influential Scots rallied to the Hanoverian...

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