the british isles essay

The History of the British Isles

Final honours school.

The History of the British Isles in the Further Honours School builds on the study undertaken in your Prelims year. You will take a new period to that studied in the first year and the paper will be different in a number of ways.

This format will give you some freedom to follow your own interests in the period. In the knowledge that there will be a wide range of questions, and time to do some extra reading, you will be able to probe the history of different societies in the British Isles, and to prioritise political, intellectual, social, cultural or economic history as you choose. Indeed, Finals British History has always demanded greater depth, in terms of closer engagement with specific issues in the period, of reading in monographic literature and perhaps in primary sources too, and of greater historiographical awareness. You therefore have some scope to shape your own course and can take the initiative in discussing with your tutor what you wish to cover during the term.

1- The Early Medieval British Isles, 300-1100

One of the excitements of studying this period is to realise how much of the Britain that we know today had its origins so long ago. Many of the fundamental characteristics of Western society took shape in these centuries. Out of the collapse of Roman civilization, new forms of social and religious organization emerged. The forging of ethnic and political identities brought into being the entities that we now call England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. This paper will look the makeup of Britain in this period, considering the influences of the Celts, Picts, and Vikings to name a few. It will also consider the developing artistic, literary and religious culture that was growing in Britain and what influenced it.

By 600, less than half of Britain was under English control. The West and North still comprised Celtic states, which remained Christian, literate and in contact with the Mediterranean world. The Irish, still in many respects an Iron Age society, were developing a remarkable artistic, literary and religious culture; their overseas impact involved the colonization of western Scotland and missionary activity in much of Western Europe. The conversion of the English to Christianity was associated with the building of kingdoms, and with an extraordinary interchange between Germanic, British, Irish, Gallic and Mediterranean cultures which produced such outstanding works of art as the Sutton Hoo treasures and the Lindisfarne Gospels. With the growth of continental trade, ports were established and coinage reintroduced. Prosperity financed a rich monastic culture, both in Ireland and, rather later, among the English. During c.680-750, north-east England became one of the intellectual centres of Europe, and the English launched missions to their still-pagan relatives abroad. Kingship and government operated on an ever-widening scale, though tempered by the enduring realities of warrior societies: marriage alliances, gift-giving, plunder and the blood-feud. In 850 Britain was still divided between several British and English states, while in Ireland provincial kingships were forming. But soon the political map was transformed by Viking invasions. The countryside and its inhabitants were being organised into more self-contained farming and parish communities, often under an emergent class of small proprietors. To a large extent, it was during 900-1100 that market towns, villages and local churches came into existence. Important though it was, the Norman Conquest of 1066 changed little of this fundamentally.

Students are brought into contact with fast-developing investigations, not least in archaeology and ethnology. They also have an advantage which students of later periods lack: because the written sources are limited it is possible to approach the subject (and the work of historians) in direct and sometimes original ways. Texts such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Beowulf and the other Old English poems, may be read in translation.

2 - The British Isles in the Central Middle Ages, 1000-1300

Historians have debated for centuries whether the Norman Conquest was a turning point in English history, and the controversy shows no sign of slackening. Yet part of the enduring fascination of the topic is that larger changes were transforming Europe in this period, in politics, the economy, society, culture and religion. As historians adopt new approaches to old questions, they continue to generate historical exploration and debate. It has long been obvious, for instance, that medieval England cannot be studied in isolation: the Conquest immersed England in the continent politically and culturally, while the pope’s jurisdiction expanded throughout this period (a reminder of a former EU). Yet recently historians have opened up more comparative perspectives by foregrounding the other occupants of the British Isles. The ‘English’ attempted to dominate the very different societies of Wales, Ireland and Scotland, reaching a climax with Edward I: was this ‘the first age of English imperialism’? Colonial themes have also informed the central concept of medieval lordship, through an emphasis on aristocratic aggression and expansionism, and on the nature of frontier societies.

Our view of the aristocracy has also been influenced by the recent cultural dimension in historical writing, through investigation of their lifestyle and ideals – ‘Chivalry’. The physical manifestations of kingship have also come under the spotlight, as the Plantagenets sought to reflect a dominant ideology partly through buildings (notably Westminster Abbey). A cultural concept long central to this period, the ‘twelfth-century renaissance’, in fact describes a range of changes, from the evident transformation of art and architecture (seen in the great cathedrals), through the revival of learning (and foundation of Oxford), to the spread of practical literacy, the law and social regulation and governance. A key component in the cultural approach to history is the study of perception, of the assumptions and attitudes which make up much of social life. And this raises the key chicken-and-egg question of whether changes in perceptions merely arise from or can cause more tangible changes. The position of women is a case in point: how were their lives affected by increasingly misogynistic religious ideology, and how did they respond both ideologically and practically? Or was it economic and political changes which changed family structures and thus women’s social position? Women’s history has broadened into that of gender, including patriarchy, and study of the family now extends to childhood.

Certainly these were centuries of social and economic diversification and transformation. More land was settled by an expanding population, markets and towns proliferated, and increasing trade created a more commercialized mentality (or vice versa?). How far were these processes driven from above, by lords, and how far by private enterprise amongst settlers, townspeople and peasants? Had economic growth ended before the Black Death? – this question continues to be debated by historians adopting different approaches. The history of the church has also been subjected to a more cultural approach; while issues about the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical authority remain important (most obviously focused on Thomas Becket), historians increasingly investigate religion anthropologically, from the point of view of its consumers. How were miracles understood and experienced? Why were saints important to people? What were the stories, ideas and practices which structured social experience? The history of religious practice and belief has become a central part of social history.

All these perspectives have enriched political history, and older themes have appeared in a new light, especially the constitutional relationship of king and people. The growth of the crown’s power provoked its subjects into setting safeguards on government, notably in Magna Carta; and the period ends with the deposition of a king, Edward II, on the basis of a sophisticated political ideology of royal accountability to ‘the community of the realm’.

This paper therefore offers the study of both fundamental changes to western society within the particular context of Britain, and historical debates which remain lively and innovative. 

3 - The Late Medieval British Isles, 1330-1550

This period presents the opportunity to study political, religious, economic, social and cultural history across the British Isles in an age often seen in terms of turbulence and transition. The era of ‘the expiring middle ages’ was one of social and political ferment, borne out in the depositions and murders of kings, the long sequence of popular revolts, and the coups, plots, demonstrations and battles that mark the political history of every part of the British Isles. Yet even before the age of ‘Reformation’ and ‘Renaissance’, of ‘peace, print and protestantism’, the societies of the region were maturing fast, government reaching more deeply into the population, ethnicities solidifying and mixing, architecture, commerce, craft and the arts of communication developing strongly. There is ongoing debate among historians, many of them teaching here in Oxford, about virtually every aspect of the period – both its large-scale changes and its detailed dynamics. The paper thus poses challenging questions of historical interpretation about issues as diverse as the effects of the Black Death on rural and urban society and on the status of women, the origins and persistence of academic and popular heresy, the rise of vernacular literature, the nature of aristocratic power, the qualities needed for success in English and Scottish kingship, the growth of courts, parliaments and judicial systems and the causes of the Reformation. Even the period itself is in question – is it one period or two? Medieval or early modern? An age of decline, or of growth, or of something else besides?

There is a rich range of primary sources, many, like the Paston Letters, the Canterbury Tales and Barbour’s Bruce, the Book of Margery Kempe, the buildings of Oxford, Windsor and Westminster, the Wilton Diptych and the Holbein portraits of Henry VIII, readily available to students. The historical literature is provocative and exciting – the Oxford academic, K. B. McFarlane, and the Cambridge one, G. R. Elton, revolutionised the study of this period in the mid-twentieth century, but there is plenty of disagreement over the value and implications of their findings, and there are lots of more recent insights to consider in what is now the most widely-studied part of the middle ages. Historians increasingly try to connect culture, society and politics in this period; they employ comparisons and contrasts across the British Isles, to ask for example why Scotland had no equivalent to the Wars of the Roses and why Wales was more effectively assimilated to the English state than Ireland. Common themes from the Hundred Years War and Black Death to the Renaissance and Reformation make this a stimulating paper to study in conjunction with EWF5 ‘The Late Medieval World’. It can provide a foundation for the Special Subjects on ‘The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381’, ‘Joan of Arc and her Age, c.1419-35’ and ‘Government, Politics and Society in England, 1547-1558’; it also offers a splendid background for the Further Subject on ‘The Wars of the Roses’. It can link with paper 2 or 4 to give an understanding of the development of the British Isles over a more extended period. But it can also be studied by itself as a period of dramatic conflict and change which poses absorbing problems of historical understanding.

4 - Reformations and Revolutions, 1500-1700

Reformation, Revolution, Restoration: this is a period rich in exciting events. Throughout, political and religious authority were contested, challenged, and re-imagined afresh. The paper begins in the aftermath of the Wars of the Roses, with the Tudor dynasty consolidating a precarious grip on the English throne and a fragile hold on parts of Ireland, with a delicate peace between Scotland and England. Two hundred years later, the whole of Britain would be transformed, brought together into a Union with social and religious consequences no less important than the political implications. The long, contested process of Reformation unleashed a wide variety of religious ideas and encouraged new ways of understanding identity, community, and even family relationships. A period of sustained economic growth brought unimagined luxuries and new technologies to the growing cities, changing the social fabric of the country in complex ways. Literature, music and art flourished; Shakespeare’s plays, Tallis’s motets and Holbein’s portraits all express the grandeur and the individual anxieties of the period. And by 1700 Britain had moved from the fringes of Europe to become one of its leading powers, with a growing Empire in the Americas.

Students taking this paper have the opportunity to examine a wide range of social, political and religious developments across all three British kingdoms. The period is rich in source material, with texts and pamphlets ranging from royal proclamations to scurrilous, ‘tabloid’ newsbooks are easily accessible in libraries and online. But opinions and policies were not only formed through texts; historians are increasingly aware of the sophisticated political and religious culture which developed in this period, involving art, music and carefully staged rituals. Traces of the rich visual and artistic culture of the period can be seen across the city, in the Ashmolean and in many of the colleges, and students are encouraged to consider these sources alongside more traditional ones. Moreover, such a crucial period in British history has attracted some of the most passionate and engaged historians, and controversy over the nature of the Reformation, the flow of court politics, the causes of the civil war, and the events of the Glorious Revolution continues to arouse heated debate. No less important are questions of social and economic change, and historians now use the vast range of source materials in new and increasingly sophisticated ways. The paper offers students the opportunity to examine the central events and ideas of this period, but the flexibility of the tutorial system allows each student to spend time focusing on particular aspects of it, in consultation with their tutor.

5 - Liberty, Commerce and Power, 1685-1830

The Revolutions of 1689 had profound consequences for the British Isles. The Glorious Revolution entrenched the Westminster Parliament at the heart of government and political life in England and Wales, and established a limited form of religious toleration. Commerce and manufacturing flourished. The British and then United Kingdom state were, very largely, a creation of this period, which saw union with Scotland (in 1707) and then Ireland (in 1801). Large-scale urbanization was a very visible feature of change, with profound effects on social identities and social order, habits and patterns of association and leisure, and cultural life. Britain by as early as 1714 had become one of Europe’s major powers and a rising imperial power. The combination of economic progress, English/British liberty, and new-found European and global influence, made eighteenth-century Britain an object of fascination – at times, admiration – for a growing number of continental Europeans.

Yet Britain’s growing dynamism, power, and influence were also associated with multiple tensions and conflicts at home and overseas. Britain was at war for almost half this period, as it sought to maintain and extend its European and global interests and, at certain moments, to defend itself from invasion. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Jacobitism was the main spectre at the feast, casting a lengthy, menacing shadow over the Protestant and (from 1714) Hanoverian succession and the future of the Anglo-Scottish union. After 1760, the claim that Britain had achieved an enviable balance between liberty and order was called into question by the noisy disturbances associated with that most notorious gadfly of eighteenth-century politics, John Wilkes and British defeat in the War of American Independence 1775-1783. A new, richer world of goods may have brought greater comfort and amenity, for some at least, but anxieties that luxury and corruption were subverting the political and social order, and producing a political and social elite unsuited to leadership, intensified. The expansion of British influence in India provided a new focus for debates about empire, while the morality of the slave trade, dominated by Britain, and of slavery in the plantation colonies came under unexampled scrutiny in the later eighteenth century.

The mood of introspection and self-questioning was intensified and complicated bythe outbreak of the French Revolution, the spread of popular radicalism across the British Isles, and ensuing quarter century of war. Scotland may have become Britain’s ‘loyal province’ by the later eighteenth century, but Ireland, by contrast, offered a picture of acute political challenge and instability. The pressures, meanwhile, of population growth, rising food prices, and new patterns of economic instability raised troubling questions, and were the background to periodic waves of large-scale protest and unrest. The final part of the period is often associated with the emergence of a novel gender order, a development driven by the rise of Evangelical religion and focused within the expanding middle classes who were coming to dominate and reshape growing parts of provincial urban society in their own image. The effects of industrialisation led to contentious debate. The British-Irish union failed to deliver to Ireland the political stability and economic  prosperity glibly promised at its creation. Meanwhile, in 1828 and 1829, respectively, the claims of Protestant Dissenters and Catholic to full political rights were finally met, and in 1830 the formation of Grey’s Whig ministry placed reform and the extension and redistribution of the right to vote in parliamentary elections firmly on the political agenda.

The course explores the impact of these developments, and the ways in which they were experienced by men, women and children at all social levels. This period is of fundamental importance for the understanding of modern Britain and Ireland, attracting in recent decades scholarship of a commensurate range and quality, much of it by scholars working in Oxford, and plenty of lively debate. 

6 - Power, Politics and the People, 1815-1924

The paper covers a period which is today regarded by journalists and sentimentalists as an epoch of British ‘greatness’. That it was a very remarkable epoch is certain, and its most obvious defining feature is provided by a history of political and institutional change which appears in retrospect like a blaze of technicolor. To say this is not just a comment on heroic individuals such as Gladstone and Disraeli; rather it is reflection of what all ordinary Britons (though not necessarily Irishmen) really thought: politics lay at the centre of their historical world. The centrepiece of political struggle lay in the attempts variously to reform and to preserve England’s ‘ancient constitution’. How could it be made more compatible with modern ideas about political representation, perhaps with ‘democracy’ even? But how at the same time could one preserve those unique historic features, such as traditional English liberty under the sovereignty of Parliament, which had served Britain so well since 1688 – features which (it was alleged) would continue to protect her from foreign perils such as despotism, revolution, and dictators? The paper thus invites students to consider how satisfactory and how complete were the ‘Victorian’ reforms which still supply the basic structure of our political institutions today. Why were they so seemingly successful in Britain and so troubled in Ireland? It also asks how these notoriously insular institutions functioned in Europe and as the ultimate rulers of a large and expansive empire. Could one have both empire and liberty?

However, it is a guiding principle of this paper – and one reflected in the introductory lecture provision – to make equal provision for the study of politics and society, where ‘society’ is broadly defined to include culture and the economy. In considering British society students will be able to draw on rich and established traditions of writing on the working classes and on the traditional landed élite, alongside a more recent and open-ended body of writing on gender, to say nothing of that elusive residuum the ‘middle classes’. Of course social class can no longer be seen simply as a material fact, or as a reflection of the workplace, important though this dimension undoubtedly was. Social situation also requires a consideration of social cultures and mentalities. Of these some were class bound and some were not, and here the histories of religion and of ethnicity  occupy a prominent place in the focus of the paper, both of them relatively new and expansive areas of research inquiry. In social history, too, students are invited to reflect on features which render England and Britain unique in a European context. For example: a notorious preoccupation with wealth creation; a religious geography based on the peculiarly Anglo-Saxon polarity between established Churches and Dissenters, and the absence of any tradition of a prestigious state bureaucracy on the Continental model. Were these distinctive traditions a source of comparative advantage, or did they render the British Isles merely backward and provincial? Both points of view were advanced with much enthusiasm by Britons and Europeans alike over the lifetime of this paper.

7 - Changing Identities, 1900-present

This paper is a history of the British Isles in the twentieth century. The significance of the twentieth century lies in the speed and extent of political, economic and social change, and in the immense national and international pressures to which British society was subject. The twentieth century, for example, produced two world wars whose intensity and destructiveness, the demands they made on the combatants, were unprecedented. Britain alone of the major powers fought in both wars from their beginnings to their ends; and the British spent per capita on these wars more than any other nation. At the end of the First World War the formal British Empire in both territory and numbers reached its apogee. At the end of the second world war not only was that Empire still in place, but British troops occupied the French and Dutch empires in the East, much of the Mediterranean littoral, and large parts of Germany and Austria. Yet within less than a generation that Empire had disappeared, the British had withdrawn from Asia and the Mediterranean, Germany was restored and Britain was a middling power struggling to remain competitive with the rest of the world. One of the themes of this paper, therefore, is Britain in the world; and more particularly Britain’s relations with Germany and the United States – the two powers who have had, negatively and positively, most influence on Britain – and with the nationalist movements which eventually made formal British imperialism untenable.

Nationalism was also active within the British Isles. The relations between Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and Ireland have been central to British history: as much in the twentieth as in previous centuries. The end of the Union with Ireland, and the establishment of the Irish Free State (later the Irish Republic), did not, however, settle the ‘Irish Question’. Dormant for some time in the 1950s it re-emerged in 1968 in the North and once again relations between Great Britain and Ireland became of political significance. Although their historical experiences diverged with the repeal of the Union, the histories of Britain and Ireland cannot be understood in isolation from each other. Thus the history of Ireland in the twentieth century – both North and South – is an important part of BIF7, as are the electorally powerful nationalist parties which developed in Scotland and Wales in the last third of the century, a development which in turn led to major constitutional changes within Great Britain.

In 1900, although there had been significant Jewish migration since the 1880s, the British Isles were overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic; at the end of the century, much less so. In fact, the century has seen constant  demographic movement. There was continuing Irish migration to England until the 1970s; Jewish migration before 1914, then again in the 1930s. From the 1950s there was migration to Britain from the West Indies, East Africa, West Africa and Southern Asia which has had profound social and cultural consequences. In the 1990s there has been large-scale migration from the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The changing ethnicity of the British Isles – and all that follows from it – is thus inevitably also an important part of BIF7.

In the twentieth century the process by which Britain became a political democracy was more or less completed. In 1900 Britain was a semi-democracy: a majority of men were enfranchised (though many were not), but no women were. Two Labour MPs were elected in the general election of that year but the prime minister was one of the grandest of Britain’s peers and was soon to be succeeded by his nephew. At the end of the century all men and women over the age of 18 were enfranchised, there were no hereditary peers in government, most of the hereditary peers no longer sat in the House of Lords and the Labour Party had over 400 seats in the House of Commons. The consequence of such change has been the fact that, despite two world wars, increasingly British politics have centred around, not empire and war, but social and economic issues – broadly speaking, who gets what of the country’s economic and cultural wealth. Furthermore, arguably one result of Britain’s wars was actually to accelerate the speed with which this happened. Political democratisation widened the notion of citizenship and thus of social rights and entitlements. Another of the aims of this paper, therefore, is to see how far the social and economic issues raised by an ever expanding definition of democracy were settled, if they were settled, and how far the country’s political institutions adjusted or failed to adjust to democracy. Why, for instance, was the Conservative Party, a party based upon well-defined social hierarchies, to be so successful throughout much of the twentieth century?

Many of the most important questions of domestic politics were ‘standard-of-living’ ones. As a result, the performance of the British economy – its capacity to meet the expectations of its citizens as well as strategic-military demands – was a fundamental preoccupation of domestic politics. Although real income and personal wealth rose in the twentieth century at rates never before attained, there was often a sense of economic failure – and not just during the interwar depression – which we examine. Was this sense of failure justified and what were its consequences?

The core of the paper is political, but the definition of politics is broad. Much of what is normally thought of as ‘social history’ is embodied in the paper. Social class, both as a concept and a fact – how can we define classes and how did they change over the century – is central. We examine not just the political consequences of large-scale migration to Britain but its cultural impact. A significant determinant of political allegiance in Britain has been religion; but religion has been important to many as personal faith. We are interested not only in its political significance, but in the nature of religious belief in the twentieth century, and how far we can legitimately speak of the ‘secularization’ of the British Isles. Similarly, we are concerned not just with the political significance of feminism, but the effect of the women’s movement on society and social life more generally. And we study what is usually called ‘popular culture’; both in its own terms and its wider political significance. How far, for example, has Britain been ‘Americanized’ via popular culture or is British popular culture simply part of a common Anglo-American culture which has now become internationally predominant?

Theme Paper a - Bodies of Feeling: Gender and Sexual Identity since c. 1500

The human body, gender, and sexuality each have histories. Pioneering studies since the late-1970s have shown how what bodies mean has changed over time as societies have idealised, represented, and regulated the body in distinct ways. The experience of being male, of having sex, of desiring someone of the same gender, of speaking with a feminine voice, of growing old in a relationship, or of changing gender was not the same in 1600, 1800 and 2000.  This paper asks how, why and with what consequences people have made gender and sexual identities from embodied experience in the British Isles since 1500.

The paper examines how state, religious, medical and cultural authorities have categorised and regulated bodies including, most powerfully, in establishing binaries of gender identity and of sexual orientation. What made certain appearances, acts and relationships normative? How did ideas of bodily ‘deviance’ change over time?

The paper also examines how people accepted, negotiated, subverted or rejected these categories through their everyday actions and sense of self. How did people’s experiences of their bodies, desires and relationships change over five-hundred years? What circumstances enabled individuals or groups to alter what bodies might do, how they looked, and what they meant? How did gender and sexual identities interact with each other and with identities founded, for instance, in class, race, health, or religion? These, more archivally demanding, questions allow us to think about how individual, social and cultural change happened across more than five-hundred years.

This reading list is arranged in three parts to help navigate the reading. There is no requirement to answer questions that are associated with each part of the paper in the ‘take home’ exam. Many of the readings could be included on multiple reading lists and the headings are often arbitrary, particularly for the large central topics on gender and sexuality. So, do form connections between your weekly topics to identify the cross-cutting themes that interest you.

The first part offers some introductory conceptual and methodological readings, which may also be of interest as part of work for Disciplines of History. The over-arching historiography of this paper engages critically with three linear narratives of historical change: of progressive liberation and the rise of individual freedoms; of increasing regulation and discipline; and of continuity in human biology and desires. This case study of the British Isles allows these accounts to be scrutinised by considering how people disseminated – and contested – the gendered and sexual meanings of bodily experience across localities, the nation, empire, and globe.

The second part, ‘Making identities’, asks us to think thematically about patterns of continuity, change and diversity across five centuries. Each topic is centred upon individual corporeal experience. The topics examine how embodied experience not only shaped gendered and sexual selfhood, but also how subjective experiences were mobilised to create collective identities and sometimes social change. Intersectionality is integral to each reading list, so that the question of how bodies have been classed, racialised or disabled are always interrogated in relation to the central themes of gender and sexuality.  

The third section, ‘Making categories’, focuses on eight chronological moments that historians have identified as ‘turning points’ in the categorisation, regulation and conceptualisation of gendered and sexual identities.  These topics enable thematic arguments to be developed in greater depth for particular decades. It is also important to reflect on how the evidence that each time period offers shapes historians’ arguments.

This paper examines experiences and ideas that people formed from, and about, bodies. Evidence about the past – and therefore the possibility of historical study – is often the product of violence, abuse and distress, including graphic descriptions of people’s experiences. In addition, many primary and secondary sources use language and express attitudes that are not acceptable in Britain today. We have an ethical responsibility as historians to make sense of these past experiences and viewpoints while communicating in ways that are sensitive and appropriate to our society. This material is thought-provoking, controversial, and important for us all, but we will each be affected in different ways when we interrogate these topics as historians. Please be aware of the content of this paper before choosing to study it, but do not hesitate to talk to a tutor at any point if any of the topics you study are raising particular concerns for you.

Theme Paper b The Making and Unmaking of the British Isles, 1603-present

Although the Scots voted, albeit more narrowly than generally anticipated, to remain within the United Kingdom in the referendum of 2014, the result and unfolding repercussions of the 2016 referendum on British membership of the EU have only underlined the uncertainty that hangs over the configuration, nature, and future of the Union state. This course examines the creation and key episodes and themes in the histories of the two unions out of which the United Kingdom was formed. It starts with the Union of Crowns in 1603, although debates over British union go back considerably further, and then takes up the parallel stories of the fortunes of the incorporating Anglo-Scots union of 1707 and the relationship between the British state and Ireland, a crucial moment in which was the forging of the Anglo-Irish union in 1800 and thus the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Key focuses are the attempts to fashion, first, a workable British union state and then a workable British-Irish union, attempts which had starkly contrasting outcomes, although the British-Irish Union endured for 120 years. In the more recent period, issues to be tackled include the place of Northern Ireland in the politics of the United Kingdom, devolution, and the dramatic rise of the Scottish National Party to its current position of political dominance in Scotland. This course strongly emphasizes the importance of locating current debates about the condition and future of the Union state in a broad and deep historical context. It offers students the opportunity to think in a sustained manner, and across a long period, about shifting relationships between England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, the interactions between British and other national identities within the British Isles, and, more broadly, the institutions, experiences, and leadership which serve to illuminate the changing character and longevity of the Union state, and also its vulnerabilities, past and present.

Please note that the options listed above are illustrative and may be subject to change.

Assessment:  This paper is examined by 3 x 2000 word essays. Known as the 'take-home' paper these essays are completed over a 9 day period in weeks 8 & 9 of trinity (summer) term. 

• Research Paper
• Book Report
• Book Review
• Research Proposal
• Annotated Bibliography
• Answers Questions
• Multiple Choice Questions
• Dissertation
• Proofreading
• Powerpoint Presentation
• Poster Presentation
• Excel Exercises
• Thesis Proposal
• Discussion Board Post
• Dissertation Abstract
• Dissertation Introduction
• Dissertation Literature
• Dissertation Hypothesis
• Dissertation Methodology
• Dissertation Results
• Dissertation Discussion
• Dissertation Conclusion
• Movie Critique
• Literary Essay
• Article Critique
• Article Review
• Blog Writing
• Capstone Project
• Movie Review
• Response Paper
• Marketing Plan
• Reaction Paper
• Business Plan
• Grant Proposal
• IB Extended Essay
• Application Letter
• Literature Review
• Motivation Letter
• Questionnaire
• Scholarship Essay
• White Paper

Example Of British Isles Geography Essay

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: England , World , Geography , Business , Commerce , Trade , Agriculture , People

Published: 10/17/2022

ORDER PAPER LIKE THIS

The British Isles comprises two islands that are large and many other small islands. England has three mountainous areas in the southwest, west and north and two lowland areas in the east and southeast. The northern highland area includes the Pennine Range which is the backbone of England. The countryside which connects the British Isles regions has rich agricultural plains which have seen British Isles people producing their own food and even exporting the extra to the other parts of the world (Pulsipher and Alex, 30). The plains have made British Isles gain recognition worldwide over years as agricultural producers. Wales is mainly covered by Cambrian Mountains and its land is well known around the world to be suitable for pasture. The British Isles geography continues to take a vital role in its foreign currency conduct. Its resistance to adopt the Euro which is used by other members of the European Union was a clear indication of its attitude of separation. British Isles has played the spoiler role to German and French ambitions to achieve higher levels of unity. Even though Geography has contributed much to the history of England, it has not clearly enabled it to arrive at the internal unification level which the English people aimed to accomplish. In the fifteenth century, England majorly dwelt on commerce which contributed much to the growth of its economy. The policies and provisions of Edward III provided a good environment for commercial activities and it is through these commercial activities that England connected to the world (McFarlane and Gerald 47). Apart from the staples, there was growth of the cloth-making industry which provided more goods for trade both within and outside England. During the century, there was rebirth of education i.e. renaissance where many educated writers and thinkers including Erasmus who was known as the great humanist came up. Trade and education, therefore, contributed much to the development of England in the fifteenth century enabling it to gain more recognition from other parts of the world. The scholars who came up at that time contributed much in terms of ideas which were implemented to transform England and by extension, British Isles.

Works cited

Pulsipher, Lydia, and Alex Pulsipher. World Regional Geography: Global Patterns, Local Lives. New York: W.H. Freeman & Company, 2011. Print. McFarlane, Bruce, and Gerald, Harriss. England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays. London: Hambledon press, 1981. Print.

Cite this page

Share with friends using:

Removal Request

Finished papers: 2834

This paper is created by writer with

ID 283514451

If you want your paper to be:

Well-researched, fact-checked, and accurate

Original, fresh, based on current data

Eloquently written and immaculately formatted

275 words = 1 page double-spaced

Get your papers done by pros!

Other Pages

Ethical and religious directives for catholic health care case study, example of teacher s name research paper, asean and beyond a critique of its role and function in the age of globalization critical thinking sample, good example of essay on human resource development, studies exemplar personal statement to follow, transborder latin american migration exemplar essay to follow, inspiring essay about performance action plan, free essay on social work practice in organizations, free case study about discounted cash flow, responses to questions on morality and abortion as well as euthanasia essay you might want to emulate, expertly written argumentative essay on utilitarianism to follow, chemistry assignment on finding the relationship of variables, good argumentative essay about morality, combining 2 and 3 gives 4 report you might want to emulate, free essay about team performance in crisis situations, the melting pot questions answers example, draw topic writing ideas from this report on company background, perfect model research paper on waiting for godot, good example of essay on sustainable built environment practices, journalism discussion questions exemplar critical thinking to follow, education in a multicultural society question answer example, good example of argumentative essay on public school vs private school in the united states, example of what makes people do not support gay marriage research paper, facebook and privacy big brother likes us a sample research proposal for inspiration mimicking, the national electrical code nec and nfpa a top quality engineering assignment for your inspiration, example of general strain theory on criminal coping research paper, free private policing question answer top quality sample to follow, good case study on social interaction at the micro level the sociology of subjective experience, spirituality a sample question answer for inspiration mimicking, expansion creative writings, store creative writings, mother creative writings, partner creative writings, staff creative writings, citizen creative writings, survey creative writings, press creative writings, damage creative writings, premier essays, profitability essays, cybercrime essays.

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline

• Search Menu
• Advance articles
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access
• Why Publish with EHR?
• About The English Historical Review
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Dispatch Dates
• Books for Review
• Terms and Conditions
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

• < Previous

Monastic Life in the Medieval British Isles: Essays in Honour of Janet Burton, ed Karen Stöber Julie Kerr and Emilia Jamroziak

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Claire Macht, Monastic Life in the Medieval British Isles: Essays in Honour of Janet Burton, ed Karen Stöber Julie Kerr and Emilia Jamroziak, The English Historical Review , Volume 135, Issue 573, April 2020, Pages 468–470, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceaa030

• Permissions Icon Permissions

A glance at the list of contributors to this book, edited by Karen Stöber, Julie Kerr and Emilia Jamroziak, quickly illustrates the impact of Janet Burton’s forty years of research, teaching and writing in the field of monastic history. Contributors to this Festschrift include leading academics, heritage professionals and several directors and contributors to large-scale research projects. Each essay addresses the topics on which Burton herself has written, and, as any good tribute should, builds on her work to address the questions, explore the nuances, and examine the untapped sources which her efforts have brought to light.

The editors avoid the potential randomness inherent in a tribute volume by dividing the collection into the three areas with which Burton’s own scholarship engaged: religious orders, the relationships between religious and laity, and female monastic life. The review of Burton’s work provided in the introduction emphasises two aspects of her writing which do not fit neatly into these divisions: its regionality, especially her focus on Yorkshire and Wales; and its concentration on the Cistercians and Augustinian canons. However, the current arrangement does allow for each contribution to orient itself with some aspect of Burton’s scholarship and then expand beyond it, following her own practice of positioning both locally focused and order-specific studies in a wider context. More than half of the chapters focus on changes to varying aspects of monastic life in the late Middle Ages in England, while the articles by Colmán Ó Clabaigh and Edel Bhreathnach on the church in Ireland and David Austin’s contribution on the Welsh Strata Florida Project provide welcome geographical diversity.

The first section, ‘Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain’, begins with an examination by James Clark of the changing historical sensibilities of late medieval Cistercian communities, directly continuing from Burton’s work on the foundation chronicle of Byland and Jervaulx abbeys. He pinpoints the crucial role of conventual obedientiaries, especially the abbot, in maintaining and developing these sensibilities through renewed record-keeping efforts and adding an emphasis on the role of the monastic patron, a quality that is perhaps responsible for the survival of some of these texts through the Reformation. Martin Heale investigates the often-difficult role of the prior in late medieval English monasteries, detailing how this office evolved to encompass a large degree of responsibility for the internal welfare of the community as the abbot withdrew to focus on external issues. The important distinctions which he marks in how the role operated in smaller monasteries provide a useful counterpoint to that in more-studied larger institutions. This is followed by Colmán Ó Clabaigh’s careful examination of Trinity College Dublin MS 97, a composite codex from the Victorine Abbey of St Thomas the Martyr, which contexts, he concludes, reflect the theological, constitutional and devotional concerns of a specifically Victorine training manual for novices. David Austin’s chapter on the Strata Florida Project closes this section and provides an example of how Burton’s scholarship has contributed to the development of a modern heritage project.

The second section, ‘Religious and Laity’, includes six wide-ranging chapters, beginning with Edel Bhreathnach’s meticulous exploration of the tensions between the dual loyalties of bishops who were also in religious orders during two centuries (1050–1230) of significant change in the Irish church. She points to how tensions were complicated still further by the often-elite origins of these leaders. Michael Carter’s contribution, the sole chapter to consider monastic art, is a somewhat brief, but nonetheless effective, consideration of what the material remains of late medieval Rievaulx can reveal about the state of monastic observance prior to the Dissolution. Carter adds evidence to the argument against a decrease in monastic rigour in the late Middle Ages, arguing that observance at Rievaulx developed into an amalgam of Cistercian and locally focused devotional practices. Claire Cross continues the argument against late medieval monastic decline with her study of how the personal connections and actions of the last abbot of Bridlington priory conspired to bring to ruin one of the two largest Augustinian houses in Yorkshire. In her exploratory article, Marsha Dutton carefully picks through Aelred’s Relatio de Standardo to suggest some solutions to the intriguing question of how a man, well known for his peacemaking efforts, produced such a strongly xenophobic portrayal of the Glaswegians in this work. Philippa Hoskin returns to the theme of episcopal relationships with monastic orders in her study of Robert Grosseteste’s attitudes towards the monastic houses in his diocese. She concludes that his actions can only be fully understood if viewed within the context of his own concept of diocesan pastoral care. Andrew Prescott explores important differences between urban and rural aims in the 1381 Revolt through an examination of the connections between widespread disturbances in Norfolk, and specifically the attacks on the rural abbey of St Benet Holme. He illustrates how geographically dispersed events in this county reflected a complex, and more co-ordinated, movement than previously thought.

The third section, ‘Women in the Medieval Monastic World’, begins with a ‘state of the industry’ by Kimm Curran in which, while reviewing a number of large-scale projects, she focuses on the benefits and shortcomings of prosopography as a means of extracting information from often scant source material. Brian Golding and Veronica O’Mara both provide well-argued examples of how to do just that in their examinations of corrodies and preaching, respectively. O’Mara’s chapter especially is able to eke out suggestive, if tenuous, conclusions about the frequency, manner and content of preaching to women and how this changed in the diocese of Norwich up to the Dissolution. The volume concludes with a list of Burton’s numerous publications.

The uniformly high quality of the chapters in this volume, while drawing deeply and in detail from the archival and archeological record, fittingly embody the quality that informs so much of Burton’s work, this being an acute awareness of the individual humanity of the monks, nuns, bishops, patrons and laity of the Middle Ages.

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1477-4534
• Print ISSN 0013-8266
• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

A Visual Essay: The British Isles 2014 - 2016.

A Visual Essay: The British Isles 2014 - 2016. Updated 2023 1 / Independence Referendum, 2014 2 / EU Referendum, 2016

The problem with English

Is earth’s most-spoken language a living ‘gift’ or a many-headed ‘monster’ both views distract us from the real dilemma.

by Mario Saraceni   + BIO

In 400 years, English went from being a small language spoken in the British Isles to becoming the most dominant language in the world. In the year 1600, at the end of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, English was spoken by 4 million people. By the 2020s, at the end of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, that number had risen to nearly 2 billion. Today, English is the main language in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; and it’s an ‘intra-national’ language in former British colonies such as India, Singapore, South Africa and Nigeria. It is Earth’s lingua franca.

For some, English is Britain’s greatest ‘gift’ to the world. In an online interview with ConservativeHome in May 2022, Suella Braverman, now the UK’s Home Secretary, said she was proud of the British Empire for giving its colonies infrastructure, legal systems, the civil service, militaries and, in her words, ‘of course, the English language’. On the other side of the political spectrum, in 2008 Gordon Brown, then the prime minister, delivered a speech in which he stated that he wanted ‘Britain to make a new gift to the world’ by supporting anyone outside the UK who wished to learn English. In the same year, The Times announced proposals for a new museum dedicated to the language, to ‘celebrate England’s most elaborate gift to the world’. And, more recently, Mark Robson of the British Council described English as ‘the UK’s greatest gift to the world’. The notion of English as a gift from Britain to the planet is so commonplace it’s almost unremarkable.

English may have become universal, but not everyone believes it is a gift. In fact, many hold diametrically opposite views. In an article in The Guardian in 2018, the journalist Jacob Mikanowski described English as a ‘behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief’, highlighting that the dominance of English threatens local cultures and languages. Due to the ways in which English continues to gain ground worldwide, many languages are becoming endangered or extinct . This not only impacts relatively small languages like Welsh or Irish, but also larger languages, such as Yoruba in Nigeria, which are pressured by English in business, trade, education, the media and technology.

For this reason, a number of scholars in the field of sociolinguistics consider English a killer language and have described it as a kind of monster, like the deadly multi-headed Hydra from Greek mythology. Those who see English from this perspective consider its global roles a form of linguistic imperialism, a system of profound inequality between English and other languages, which are crushed under the might of a former colonial power, Britain, and the current world superpower, the US. In The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes (2017), the sociolinguists Robert Phillipson and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas note how ‘the international prestige and instrumental value of English can lead to linguistic territory being occupied at the expense of local languages and the broad democratic role that national languages play.’

The concept of linguistic imperialism is a reminder that the historical root of the dominance of English is four centuries of British Empire. English has a heavy load on its conscience. Its spread through space and time from the end of the 16th century until the end of the empire in the second half of the 20th century occurred in conjunction with imperial expansion, involving land-grabbing, genocide, slavery, famine, subjugation, looting and exploitation. This ought to be central in any discussion about English as a global language, not only because it is historically accurate but also because, in the words of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe in 1965, English ‘came as part of a package deal which included many other items of doubtful value and the positive atrocity of racial arrogance and prejudice’.

So, why is the English language not foregrounded in debates about decolonisation? In the early 21st century, decolonisation has been discussed primarily in relation to museums or celebrated historical figures with clear links to empire. But the global reach of English is just as much a product of empire as the British Museum or the statue of Cecil Rhodes adorning one of the colleges at the University of Oxford.

W hat exactly do I mean by ‘decolonisation’? Here, I’m not referring to the political process through which colonies gained their independence in the second half of the 20th century. One of the main ways we understand decolonisation in the 21st century is as a challenge to a system of knowledge that was put in place during colonisation and systematically imposed by the colonisers to provide a moral justification for colonisation itself. This justification revolved around a central principle: the coloniser was superior to the colonised, and therefore was not only justified to rule the colonised, but also morally obliged to do so. Based on this principle, the coloniser and the colonised were placed at opposite ends of the civilisation spectrum:

coloniser < – – – – > colonised civilisation < – – – – > savagery religion < – – – – > superstition democracy < – – – – > absolute rule nations < – – – – > tribes literature < – – – – > oral tradition languages < – – – – > dialects

The political decolonisation of the 20th century – when colonies gained independence – did not automatically dispel this system of knowledge on which colonisation was based, both in the Global North and in the Global South. The legacy of that mentality persists and pervades the way we see and understand the world. So 21st-century decolonisation is concerned with the goal of attaining what the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o in 1986 called ‘decolonising the mind’: first, becoming aware of and rejecting the coloniser’s system of knowledge that still lingers today; then, replacing it with more balanced, diverse, complex and locally relevant understandings of human societies and the relationships between them; and, finally, changing practices as a result. It’s a long and tortuous process, much more so than replacing one flag with another, or swapping one national anthem for another.

It’s a necessity if we are serious about rebalancing a worldview long skewed by colonisation

What the English language, the British Museum and Cecil Rhodes have in common is their problematic colonial legacy and the debates that go on about them being like ‘gifts’ or ‘monsters’. The Benin Bronzes on display at the British Museum – more than 900 decorative sculptures from the Kingdom of Benin in today’s southern Nigeria – may offer an opportunity for people to admire historical artworks but they are also tangible evidence of the systematic depredation that went on during colonial times. The Rhodes statue at the University of Oxford may celebrate this British politician’s generosity to the institution, but it is also a highly controversial visual image of a statesman who acted according to his firm belief that the ‘whites’ were the ‘supreme race’ during British rule in South Africa.

Artworks and statues of historical figures have been the subjects of heated debate because of the problematic colonial legacy they represent. Museums are under increasing pressure to consider the return of artefacts to their places of origin, especially when the ‘acquisition’ of such artefacts demonstrably took place through looting during colonial times. In this sense, the restitution of the looted Benin Bronzes to Nigeria would not only right a wrong, but also take on symbolic significance in the process of countering the very colonial system of belief that allowed the stealing of the bronzes in the first place. In other words, it would be an act of decolonisation. Similarly, the removal of the Rhodes statue from the University of Oxford is seen by many as a necessity if we are serious about rebalancing a worldview that has long been skewed by colonisation and its protracted ideological legacy.

O f course, there is also considerable resistance to this idea. Those who are sceptical about decolonisation tend to interpret the prefix de- as a form of censorship. For them, de- colonising anything would erase any and all connections to the colonial experience. For example, in response to the toppling of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in June 2020, Boris Johnson, then the UK’s prime minister, Tweeted that: ‘We cannot now try to edit or censor our past.’ In a similar vein, responding to the suggestion that the Victoria and Albert Museum should be decolonised, Tristram Hunt – its director – remarked in February 2020 that ‘the origins of the Victoria and Albert Museum are embedded in the British imperial and colonial stories’ and that, for this reason, ‘to decolonise the V&A in many ways doesn’t make sense because you can’t.’

Understood as a form of erasure, decolonisation easily becomes an impossible or even undesirable task. But the problem with this interpretation is that it completely turns the meaning of decolonisation on its head. As I explained above, decolonisation entails first and foremost a profound and critical engagement with the colonial past, not its erasure.

What about the English language, though? What would the decolonisation of English look like? In this regard, there have been two main positions. One considers English a sort of ‘unwanted gift’ that, given its status as a global language, can be pragmatically-but-reluctantly accepted so long as it can be adapted, re-forged, and bent into different shapes. This ultimately de-anglicised English would be turned into an African and Asian language. In other words, English stops being the exclusive property of the British and the Americans, and becomes appropriated elsewhere in the world.

English spread around the world with the empire, and continues to be an inherently imperialistic language

Several African and Asian writers have been staunch proponents of this idea, from Achebe in the 1960s, to Salman Rushdie in the 1980s, all the way to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie more recently. However, this position has also been criticised for being excessively optimistic and relevant only to a restricted and rather privileged elite, such as that of internationally renowned English-speaking novelists. From this point of view, the critics say, de-anglicising and claiming ownership of English is the prerogative of a few and remains well out of reach of the many, who continue to suffer from the erosion of their languages, cultures and identities.

The second position takes a more radical approach. From this perspective, English not only spread around the world with the empire, but it continues to be an inherently and unavoidably imperialistic language. From this perspective, appropriating the language is a mere illusion that acts as a distraction from the real problems: English continues to affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, invading their societies as local languages are pushed out of education, the media and culture in general. So the decolonisation of English would entail a greater and healthier equilibrium between English and local languages, where the latter thrive and regain the status and roles that they lost due to the English juggernaut.

Of course, some don’t see any meaningful connection between the English language and decolonisation. Gordon Brown, in the same speech mentioned above, described English as: ‘the pathway of global communication and global access to knowledge’; ‘the vehicle for hundreds of millions of people of all countries to connect with each other’; ‘a bridge across borders and cultures’; and ‘a source of unity in a rapidly changing world’. For Brown, English is hardly a candidate for decolonisation. Tellingly, he described the spread of English as the result of an ‘accident of history’. Similarly, in one of the British Council’s many publications, The English Effect (2013), the language is described as something that ‘drives growth and international development’ and ‘changes lives’. The conclusion is: if English is a ‘gift’, it should be celebrated, not questioned.

T o decolonise or not to decolonise? To understand the nuances of that question, it’s worth reflecting on why both sides of the debate share something fundamental in the way they talk about and imagine English: they describe the language through metaphor. A ‘gift’, a ‘monster’, a ‘bully’, a ‘vehicle’, etc are all things that are not literally language. And, indeed, this is what metaphor does at its most basic level: it talks about X as if it was Y.

Sometimes, as in the examples just cited, this mechanism is very overt. But most of the metaphorical expressions we use to describe the language go unnoticed. This is because they don’t include an obvious ‘X is Y’ form – as in ‘English is a pathway to success’ – and also because they are so conventionalised that we don’t tend to think of them as involving metaphor or creativity at all. For example, when we talk about languages, we often use words such as ‘birth’, ‘life’, ‘growth’, ‘development’ and ‘death’ – as if a language were a living organism. An expression such as ‘language develops all the time’ does not immediately appear metaphorical, as language is not explicitly described as something else. Talking about language as if it were a living organism is so conventionalised that, in the way we typically conceptualise it, language is a living organism.

We have to carefully consider grammar and meaning to parse the metaphorical essence

We use metaphors all the time, especially when describing complex phenomena via concepts that are simpler, more familiar and more readily understood. And language – as a complex social practice that is intricately embedded in culture and society – is a prime candidate for being talked about via metaphor. But metaphor is not only a rhetorical device used to make complex phenomena easier to understand. By treating something as if it was something else, metaphor can be a very powerful tool to encode and express ideology. Depending on the ‘something else’ we choose, we can use metaphor to express distinct ideological positions. Describing English as a ‘gift’ portrays the language as highly beneficial: a means of improving global communication and enhancing people’s prospects in life. Describing it as a ‘monster’ depicts the language as a threat to cultural and linguistic diversity: a weapon serving Anglo-American neo-imperialist interests.

However, things become more interesting with metaphors that are highly conventionalised and therefore less visible. When the British Council states that English ‘drives growth and international development’ and ‘changes lives’, we have to carefully consider grammar and meaning to parse the metaphorical essence. To say that English drives growth and changes lives is to treat English as an entity that is somehow capable of performing actions. This involves a grammatical and a semantic shift, from English as an object that is learned, spoken and used by people, to English as something that can act upon other things or people – a doer. So, even if not explicitly stated, the ‘X is Y’ metaphor that we can retrieve from expressions such as ‘English changes lives’ is ‘English is a doer.’ And, once English has agency, it can also act on its own, independently of people. This can become powerfully ideological.

I n English as a Global Language (2nd ed, 2003) – one of the most popular accounts of English as a global language by one of its best-known scholars – the British linguist David Crystal offers a perfect example that illustrates the ideological power of metaphor. In his book, we learn that ‘a common theme which can help us explain the remarkable growth of this language’ is the fact that it ‘has repeatedly found itself in the right place at the right time’. On the surface, a statement like that may appear to be mundane, but it’s loaded with ideology. Apart from the ‘living organism’ metaphor contained in the word ‘growth’, this statement treats English as if it were a traveller that fortuitously happened to be in particular places at particular times in its journey around the world. The traveller metaphor also portrays English as possessing human-like qualities and its own volition, suggesting that language expanded across the world due to actions that English took at various points of its ‘life’. Through the logic of this metaphor, what spread English was English itself, not colonisation. If English is a traveller, empire is erased. Its spread? Just ‘an accident of history’, in the words of Brown.

Once empire is edited out of the equation, the global expansion of English is sanitised, and emphasis can be placed on how remarkable such expansion has been, how beneficial the presence of English is globally, and so on. In other words, English can be talked about as a true ‘gift’ to the world, without having to deal with the uncomfortable ‘package deal’ that the ‘gift’ came with. Crystal’s account of English as a global language – that ‘repeatedly found itself in the right place at the right time’ – has been described by critics such as Robert Phillipson as being ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘triumphalist’ and in need of being decolonised.

English is not an animate being with the capacity to ‘open doors’, ‘change lives’ or ‘kill’ other languages

On the other side of the debate, English is also described though metaphor. An illustration of this is a collection of essays titled English Language as Hydra (2012), which aims to discuss ‘the immense power that is being wielded around the world by the English language’. In this volume, English is not a ‘gift’. Instead, it is referred to as a thief, a bully, a monster, and so on. In the introduction, by the editors Vaughan Rapatahana and Pauline Bunce, we read that:

Wherever [English] goes, it takes with it, via its inherent discourses and structures – in a seemingly beneficial fashion – a whole panoply of inherent controls, expectations, attitudes and beliefs that are often counter to those of the learners themselves.

And, also, that:

today’s English language Hydra has managed to increase its geographical range to span the planet. English has adapted to a wide range of environments by developing different heads in different places and sometimes different heads in the same place. It has also developed its own symbiotic relationships with societies, businesses, governments and education systems.

While I am sympathetic to the sentiments underpinning these statements, I think that this way of representing English does not do full justice to the aim of decolonising our discourse about it. English continues to be described as an entity capable of making its own decisions and moving independently of people. The quotes above portray English as a traveller and a kind of supernatural being that is phenomenally and insidiously capable of transforming as it expands across the world. Just like Crystal’s traveller, who happened to be in the right place at the right time, these representations deflect attention away from the fundamental issue: a world order that was shaped and is still heavily determined by 400 years of European imperialism.

The figure of the gift is powerful. But attempting to counter it with metaphors of monsters draws critical voices into a rhetorical battle in which the rules of engagement have been set by their opponents. At most, what this can achieve is the usual conclusion that reality is complex. Within this frame, English is neither all ‘bad’ nor all ‘good’. In the meantime, the ideal scenario – where English retreats to a less dominant role, and other languages recover lost ground – remains just that: a theoretical aspiration without a credible and implementable plan of action.

The decolonisation of English should be approached more radically by changing the way we understand it and talk about it. Language is not an object or a thing, like an artefact in a museum or a statue in a city. And it’s certainly not an animate being equipped with the capacity to ‘open doors’, ‘change lives’ or ‘kill’ other languages. Instead, it is integral to and enmeshed with social practice. We all use language as we go about our daily lives – often more than one. No language, including English, is inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’, nor is it ‘rich’, ‘powerful’ or ‘arrogant’. No language, including English, ‘does’ anything. It does not expand, it does not adapt, it does not evolve, it does not dominate. These are all shortcuts that obscure relationships between people and language.

It is people, not languages, that are powerful, under threat, greedy, generous and more. It is people, not languages, who expand their influence, adapt to situations, change their practices (including the ways they use language), dominate others, are subjugated by other people, and so on.

The ‘dominance’ of English in the world and the concomitant loss of other languages, identities and cultures are direct consequences of the very significant inequality that exists in the world, which is a direct consequence of colonisation and its long-lasting effects. The English ‘monster’ is a symptom of a serious disease, not the cause of it.

The decolonisation of English does not involve removing or returning an object. It involves reassessing what English is and, more crucially, what it is not.

Stories and literature

On Jewish revenge

What might a people, subjected to unspeakable historical suffering, think about the ethics of vengeance once in power?

Shachar Pinsker

Design and fashion

Sitting on the art

Given its intimacy with the body and deep play on form and function, furniture is a ripely ambiguous artform of its own

Emma Crichton Miller

Learning to be happier

In order to help improve my students’ mental health, I offered a course on the science of happiness. It worked – but why?

Consciousness and altered states

How perforated squares of trippy blotter paper allowed outlaw chemists and wizard-alchemists to dose the world with LSD

The environment

We need to find a way for human societies to prosper while the planet heals. So far we can’t even think clearly about it

Ville Lähde

Archaeology

Why make art in the dark?

New research transports us back to the shadowy firelight of ancient caves, imagining the minds and feelings of the artists

Izzy Wisher

High School 2

NOTE: This page is under construction. Videos will be added frequently.

Year-at-a-Glance Schedule

Course how-to videos.

Teacher Helps

Unit grade tracker sheet, tips for grading insights journal, course reading challenge, pdf - course reading challenge, spelling dictation, how to complete spelling dictation, spelling dictation sentences for units 1-10, essay feedback form, spelling dictation audio recordings, sentence #1, sentence #2, sentence #3, sentence #4, sentence #5, sentence #6, sentnece #3, unit videos and resources, vocabulary exercise, writing a personal narrative, comma rule 5, coordinating adjectives—exercise 3, "i heard the bells on christmas day." text by henry wadsworth longfellow (1807-1882), music by john baptiste calkin (1827-1905), produced by jenny phillips, arranged by tyler castleton, vocal by patch crow, "a girl of the limberlost" group discussion, appositives, correlative conjunctions, business writing—model examples, "a basket of flowers" group discussion, the life of henry wadsworth longfellow by catherine owens peare.

View all Videos for Sentence Diagramming and the Grammar and Writing Guide

You are leaving The Good and the Beautiful to visit Toolboxes for Teaching, which is not owned or run by The Good and the Beautiful. The Good and the Beautiful does not handle any fulfillment or customer support for Toolboxes for Teaching.

Privacy Overview

Advertisement

Supported by

How Election Deniers Claimed the Upside-Down Flag

The practice started with sailors signaling distress but evolved into a form of protest, most recently among Trump supporters who believe the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen.

• Share full article

By Michael Levenson

It has been a widely recognized symbol of distress since the nation’s founding, when sailors turned the American flag upside down to signal that their ships were sinking, on fire or trapped in ice.

But over time, the upside-down American flag became a symbol brandished more often by protesters across the political spectrum to signal that they believed the nation itself was in grave peril.

After President Biden won the 2020 election, supporters of former President Donald. J. Trump rallied around the inverted flag, displaying it at their homes, on their cars and on social media to show that they believed Mr. Trump’s lie that the election was stolen. Some began doing so before the votes were even counted.

Now, the practice has burst into the national conversation after The New York Times reported on Thursday that it had recently obtained images of an upside-down flag flying outside the home in Alexandria, Va., of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in January 2021. At the time, the Supreme Court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case.

Justice Alito said in an email to The Times that he had “no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag.”

“It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs,” he wrote, referring to his wife, Martha-Ann Alito.

Flying an inverted flag was once a call for help at sea.

Before it became an emblem of political protest, flying a nation’s flag upside-down was one of the only ways for sailors to call for help.

The practice seems to have originated in the British Isles in the 17th century, likely during the Anglo-Dutch wars, according to the North American Vexillological Association, a group dedicated to the study of flags.

Ted Kaye, the association’s secretary, said he had seen 18th-century engravings of the American flag flying upside down on lifeboats and on New England whaling vessels locked in ice. “It was the easiest way to signal distress without having any special flag,” Mr. Kaye said, “and distress is the most urgent signal that one might want to send from a ship.”

That meaning was reflected in the U.S. flag code, an official set of guidelines for the flag, which was first published in the 1920s. It reads: “The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.”

The convention endured for decades. In 1974, a 67‐year‐old clam digger named Julius Novickis flew the inverted flag after he suffered a stroke on a barren island off Nassau County, on Long Island, and successfully summoned a police helicopter.

It has been used to protest slavery and the Vietnam War.

The upside-down flag also has a long history as a political emblem.

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau delivered a scathing antislavery speech while standing under an upside-down American flag on a stage with Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison, who held up a copy of the Constitution and set it on fire to jeers and groans from the audience, according to “ Henry David Thoreau: A Life ,” by Laura Dassow Walls.

In the 1960s and ’70s, protesters carried the flag upside-down as a symbol of opposition to the Vietnam War, said Marc Leepson, the author of “Flag: An American Biography.” Some put flag stamps upside down on their letters, sending a subtler antiwar message, he said.

A backlash sometimes ensued.

In his first campaign for Congress in 1972, John F. Kerry, the Vietnam veteran turned antiwar activist who went on to become a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, presidential nominee and secretary of state, was bitterly attacked for having published a book, “The New Soldier,” with a cover that showed a group of bearded veterans holding the American flag upside down.

The Kerry congressional campaign tried to explain the flag’s position as the international signal of distress. He lost that election.

Robert Justin Goldstein, a professor emeritus of political science at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., said that before Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that burning the American flag was protected under the First Amendment, some Americans were prosecuted for turning the flag upside down.

It was considered desecration of the flag, he said.

In more recent years, the inverted flag has been displayed by Tea Party activists who opposed the re-election of President Barack Obama and by protesters demonstrating after Michael Brown, a teenager, was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. In 2020, an Associated Press photo of a protester carrying a U.S. flag upside down next to a burning building in Minneapolis circulated widely, capturing the fire and fury in that city after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officers.

It is now associated with the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, which denies Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat.

In 2020, the upside-down flag became more firmly established as an emblem of Trump supporters who denied the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s victory, said Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

“It’s very, very common in MAGA communities and QAnon communities,” he said. “It caught on among hard-core MAGA people in the ‘Stop the Steal’ ecosystem in 2020.”

Matthew Guterl, a professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University, said that flying the flag upside-down “seems to have become a part of our hyperpartisan symbolic surround, especially on the right, where it symbolizes the impending death of the nation and a call to arms.”

Other symbols include thin-blue-line flags, a pro-police symbol, and a Punisher skull, based on the comic-book vigilante, he said.

“I’m sure if a Navy skiff hung its flag upside-down, anyone who saw it would assume calamity and come running to help,” he said in an email. “But the meaning of things is also sticky. Once the flag is associated with the right’s call to arms, it is likely to adhere for a long time.”

Jodi Kantor contributed reporting and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

Michael Levenson joined The Times in December 2019. He was previously a reporter at The Boston Globe, where he covered local, state and national politics and news. More about Michael Levenson

Our Coverage of the 2024 Election

Presidential Race

President Biden and Donald Trump have agreed to two debates  on June 27 on CNN and Sept. 10 on ABC News, raising the likelihood of the earliest general-election debate  in modern history. Here’s how each of them might try to win the debates .

Trump’s search for a running mate is still in its early stages, but he is said to be leaning toward more experienced options  who can help the ticket without seizing his precious spotlight.

Biden commemorated the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, meeting with plaintiffs and their families at the White House as he tries to shore up support among Black Americans , who helped deliver him the White House in 2020.

As Trump’s criminal trial winds down, a center-left group is trying to goad him into testifying through an ad . Trump instead is visiting Minnesota, where his campaign says it can broaden the electoral battlefield with a play for the state  that always disappoints Republicans.

A Remarkable Pivot:  Larry Hogan, the former two-term Republican governor of Maryland who won his party’s nomination for the state’s open Senate seat, said that he supports legislation to codify abortion rights  in federal law.

Gavin Newsom Accuses Trump:  The California governor, speaking at the Vatican, used sharp language to describe the former president’s  appeal to fossil fuel executives for campaign donations, calling it “open corruption.”

How Rich Candidates Burned Cash:  It is a time-honored tradition in U.S. politics: wealthy people burning through their fortunes  to ultimately lose an election.

Montana’s Senate Race:  Republicans are trying to paint Senator Jon Tester as a Washington sellout, while their own candidate, Tim Sheehy, faces scrutiny over his credibility and how he sustained a gunshot wound. It all comes down to the question of trust.