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A Day Conference at the King's Manor

Saturday 19 November 2005

Bringing the Empire Back Home c.1700-1820

This conference, which is open to all staff and students interested in the study of the 'long' eighteenth century, will focus on how imperial experiences, ideas, and material contacts played central, rather than peripheral, roles in British society and culture. There will be papers on the controversial work of women as authors of serious analysis of 'alien' societies [as opposed to impression or anecdote], on the political and material resources which Scotsmen brought 'back' from India or South Africa to Britain, and on the presentation of exotic eastern products and cultural images for eighteenth century consumers and audiences. They take an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of the arts, of political and military institutions, and of various kinds of written texts as contributions to the study of British involvements in a wider world.

Speakers include John MacKenzie [author of Proganda and empire, The empire of nature, Orientalism: history, theory, and the arts], who has played a key role in the broadening of imperial history to include its cultural , social and popular aspects in recent years, Jane Rendall [author of The origins of the Scottish Enlightenment,The origins of modern feminism, Defining the Victorian nation, Eighteenth Century York] whose contributions to gender and women's history include important work on ideas of empire, and Andrew Mackillop [author of Military governors and imperial frontiers 1600-1800, 'More fruitful than the soil': army, empire, and the Scottish Highlands 1715-1815] whose research is expanding our understanding of the distinctively Scots dimension to British imperial history.

PROGRAMME

9.30-10.00 Registration, tea and coffee

10.00-11.00 Professor John Mackenzie, Scots, Scotland and the Cape in the early nineteenth century - the interaction of two societies

11.00-11.30 Refreshments

11.30-1.00 Dr Jane Rendall, Gender, enlightenment and Scottish orientalism: The "philosophical observations" of Maria Graham (1785-1842)
Dr Andrew Mackillop, Domesticating the east, the impact of the eastern empire on Scotland 1740-1820

1.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00-3.00 Dr Joanna de Groot, The exotic and the commercial: desiring "the orient" in the eighteenth century

3.00-3.30 Tea

4.00-5.00 Plenary session led by Professor Miles Taylor