Blog Posts
Currently Filtering by Category: Pre-dissertation awardMarch
23
2017
Blog Post by the 2016 NACBS Pre-Dissertation Award Winner
Posted by rdaily under Pre-dissertation award | 0 Comments
2016 NACBS Grad Student Prize Winners’ Blog Post--Kevin Luginbill
I think that I can say with some confidence that when I began my graduate work, I did not expect to end up with the dissertation project I now have. While I had always intended to study British imperial history, Joseph Chamberlain's 1903 tariff reform movement was probably not the first idea to come to mind. I first "discovered" tariff reform while reading the political memoir of the Tory politician Leopold Amery, a strident imperialist and an acolyte of Joseph Chamberlain. He described a speech Chamberlain had made in Birmingham, and spoke ecstatically about the speech's profound, world-shaking power and magnitude. At that point I knew I had to discover what was so gripping about a revision in British trade policy that it could be labeled “a challenge to free thought as direct and provocative as the theses which Luther nailed to the church door at Wittenberg.”
My work most closely related to the debates about the nature of British imperialism so central to the "new imperial history" of the last generation, so I was intrigued at how the rhetoric of empire was deployed by both tariff reform's advocates and its opponents. To Chamberlain and his ilk, it would be the first step in the creation of a cohesive imperial economic bloc, and the foundation of a grand project of the federation of the empire. To the tariff reform movement's detractors, it threatened to strike a blow at the central pillar of British greatness, the liberal principles of freedom, even in the guise of imperial rule. I was also surprised at how little attention Chamberlain's imperial reform movement has been given in recent years. In particular, I discovered a wealth of imperial rhetoric was deployed within these political debates, reflecting an impressive diversity of opinion about how Britons conceptualized and valued their empire. My dissertation project, tentatively titled "Building an Imperial World: Ideologies of Imperialism and the Tariff Reform Movement in Britain, 1900-1914," examines the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of British imperialism as articulated in the debates surrounding Joseph Chamberlain's tariff reform movement and the broader advocacy of imperial federation. Empire was quite clearly a central element of British society at the turn of the century, the "height" of European imperialism, but what the British Empire meant, what it should mean, and what it could become in the future, was always contested and reflected diverse and often contradictory ideologies of imperialism at work in the life of British society.
I had received funding from my university, Northern Illinois University, to conduct preliminary archival research in the summer of 2015, so I was able to build on that groundwork for my research in July-August 2016 that the NACBS's Pre-Dissertation Grant was funding. My first destination was the papers of Joseph Chamberlain, housed at the University of Birmingham's Cadbury Research Library. My experience there was nothing short of excellent. Every single one of their policies seemed designed to facilitate an easier and more productive research experience. Perhaps the most productive moments of my research were the result of the archive's staff retrieving folios and documents on their own initiative after having heard my description of project. It certainly resulted in the most unusual find, an illustrated anti-tariff reform-themed children's ABC book buried amongst a box of unsorted documents from the Chamberlain estate. Whether its sarcastic descriptions and disparaging renderings of Tory politicians and the tariff reform agenda resonated with an upcoming generation of future British voters remains uncertain, however.
More certain than that is the amount of research that I was able to complete because of the grant. Following my time in Birmingham, I proceeded to the University of Warwick, which holds the few surviving papers of the Tariff Reform League, and from there on to London. While there, I explored the papers of many British politicians in the Parliamentary Archives and the British Library, including its ever-expanding digital collection of newspapers. And finally, at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, I was able to access the papers of Richard Jebb, an imperialist thinker and reform advocate. One quite striking feature of this time in the archive was the extent to which the digital age has opened up possibilities for research. Whether ordering items ahead of time through an archive's computer system, browsing their online catalogs before arrival, or simply entering the archive armed with a digital camera, battery charger, and enough space on a memory card, the amount of research that can be carried out in a set amount of time seems to have grown exponentially. And in an era of diminishing funding opportunities, it makes grants such as those provided by the NACBS all the more important when it makes access to the archives for dissertation research possible.
Kevin Luginbill is a PhD Student in the department of history at Northern Illinois University.
Categories
2016
2016 annual meeting
adam matthew
AFIHR
AHA
Announcement
annual conference
Award
BISI
BISI,
Blog
blog post
Brexit
British and Irish Studies Intelligencer
Call for Editors
CFP
conference
conference, NACBS 2014
conference, NACBS 2019
conference, NACBS 2020
Conferences
Coronavirus
COVID19
database
deadline extension
Digital Humanities
Editorials
Emergency Funding Grants
emergency grant
endorsement
executive committee endorsement
executive director
extended deadline
Folger Fellowship
Grants and Awards
h-albion
IHR
international students
Interview
JBS
Jobs
MA essay prize
MACBS
Meeting
meeting minutes
member news
mentorship program
MWCBS
my NACBS
MyNACBS
NACBS
NACBS Membership Offers
NECBS
new book
new officers
Obituaries
obituary
op-ed
pedagogy
photographs
Pre-dissertation award
pre-dissertation grant
Priya Satia
Prize
prizes
publication
reception
Regionals
report
RHS
Rights Task Force
RTF
SCBS
Seminar
statement
Teaching
Test
test category
Trump
visas
walter d love prize
“White House Conference on American History”