Download Graduate Research Symposium all abstracts

Graduate Research Day
March 16 2015
Abstracts
1) “Is the abolition of suttee decreed by the British nation… in force in India, or is it
not?”: the disruptive tale of sati in the Indian princely states in the mid-19th
century
Sue Blunn
On February 6th, 1835, the Rajah of Ahmednuggar died. Three days later, within
earshot of British troops, five of his wives were burned alive with his body,
apparently by force. In London, the Chairman of the East India Company’s Court of
Directors regretted the tragedy but stressed that the event had taken place in a
region outside British control. This apparent complaisance perplexed one letterwriter to The Times: “Is the abolition of suttee decreed by the British nation… in
force in India, or is it not?” Indeed, the much-celebrated abolition of sati in India in
1829, the result of at least two decades of nationwide Evangelical –led campaigning
in Britain, did not extend to a substantial area of India: the semi-independent
‘princely states’.
Yet the baffled letter writer’s ignorance of this fact is in no way unusual; it is a
recurring theme in the historiography from the mid-nineteenth century on. Writing
in 1928, for example, Edward Thompson noted that the “reader… generally assumes
that the 1829… Regulations were the end of suttee everywhere…” and regretted that
“there is no historian who indicates how terribly it was still practised throughout a
vast tract of territory.”
Whilst this neglect has been partially addressed by recent historians, they, like
Thompson, give no explanation for it. Yet the reasons for this contemporary neglect
are important, reflecting change in attitudes to sati and in the intellectual and
cultural framework in which they were shaped. This paper, adapted from work-in-
progress on my first chapter, will identify some of these. In particular, it will focus on
the disruption to the hegemonic, celebratory narrative of Britain’s civilising role in
suppressing a barbarous rite that sati in the princely states caused, and the
implications of it.
2) Before Numbers - how a quantitative social question was understood before social
statistics
Guy Beckett
Alain Badiou argued recently that “we live in the era of number’s despotism… what
counts - in the sense of what is valued - is that which is counted.”⁠ It is broadly agreed
by historians of knowledge and philosophers that in the nineteenth century new
knowledge tools (statistics, maps, communication networks, filing systems)
profoundly changed how states governed. However there has been surprisingly little
analysis of the transition from political life without numbers to life with data.
It is possible to date very precisely when British statistics on Indian social topics
enter political debates. The first social statistics on widow-burning were published in
London and Calcutta in 1805. The figures were collected in an innovative research
project, run by Fort William College, Calcutta.
This paper focuses on the period before 1802 when there was no published or
unpublished data. Examining how widow-burning was conceived as a social question
before statistics, it will show that quantitative questions were debated for fifty years
prior to the survey. Indeed by the 1770s there was an established academic debate
in Britain between historians and sociologists, which had reached the national press,
about whether widow-burning was widely prevalent or now largely obsolete.
How such questions were asked and answered in the pre-statistical era, and why
there was a clamour for real numbers, will be the subject of this paper. The paper
will suggest that calls to count social phenomena are intimately connected with the
desire to transform society.
3) Rome and the Bosporus: representations of urban elite within the funeral
epigraphy of the Bosporan Kingdom from first century B.C. to the fourth century
A.D.
Magdalena Bulanda
Of all the states in the Greek East, the Bosporan Kingdom, and particularly its
relationship with the Roman Empire, is the subject of least discussion in modern
academia. A significant number of written works concerned with the region have
appeared in languages inaccessible to many Western academics, such as Russian or
Polish; however, the evidence itself is by no means unreachable or lacking. This lack
of interest stems from a general tendency to regard, almost exclusively, this
peripheral state as part of the Greek world. After all it was Greek colonies that lay at
its foundation. Consequently, the archaeology and history of the state at the time of
the Roman Empire are given little or no attention. Once within the Roman sphere of
interest, Cimmerian Bosporus remained firmly under imperial influence until the
fourth century A.D. The continuity of its political authority, which extended over
approximately the same territory for a thousand years, made Bosporus unique
amongst other principalities of the ancient world. The aim of this paper is to examine
the ways in which members of the Bosporan urban class represented their social
status and identity within the local funerary context. Commonly this presentation
took a form of commemorative stele: a formal and enduring public display that
ensured memorialisation in both sculptural and epigraphical form. Analysing
patterns of commemorative practice, enables us to trace the social behaviour of the
local elite and to identify influential cultural factors. The study of ‘epigraphic habit’
within the funerary culture of the Bosporan Kingdom will significantly contribute to
our understanding of social, cultural and political life on the fringes of the Roman
Empire.
4) Studying Imperial Tommy and the Republican Boer: armies, soldiers and the AngloBoer War (1899-1902)
Amelia Clegg
Military historical methodologies of the Anglo-Boer war comprise two main
categories of investigation. The first takes a more traditional approach to the
material and operational with research focusing on the nature of weapons and
activities of armies. Recent regimental histories instead apply a more thematic
approach where greater attention is paid to the relationship between war and
society. Also referred to as the “new military history”, this approach attempts to
integrate the study of military institutions and their actions with economics, politics
and culture, for instance focusing on the social composition of armies and officer
corps, civil-military relations, and the societal impact of war on race, class and
gender. Rather than perpetuating the perpetual mundane distinction between ‘old’
and ‘new’ military historical approaches, it is suggested that researchers should
instead look to the natural division between the history of war, and the history of
the army. Yet this neat compartmentalisation risks disproportional over-analysis
which favours one method of investigation above the other. Studies of war and of
the army cannot be done in isolation, and any discussion of military institutions
should analyse war as a societal phenomenon in parallel with the army as an
institutional construct.
In this paper, I focus on the methodological challenges surrounding my thematic
study of individual soldiers and the military institutions in which they exist and
operate. The personal narratives of British and Afrikaner men who actively
participated in the Southern African colonial campaign provide a cross-section of the
primary source base from which certain ontological and epistemological
methodologies are discussed. Some of the points addressed in this paper highlight
crucial issues concerning the following:

Construction of knowledge and identity

Limitations of individual intention and meaning in historical narratives

The manner in which information is collected, categorised and examined

Analytical limitations of private correspondence

Contextualisation of texts

Conclusions drawn from the various interactions of the causal relationships
and the nature of the different systems in which they were constructed

The implications of representation when using individual experience to
provide insights into institutions
5) Muslims, education and the state in Britain: the Bradford situation
Helen Carr
This paper will deal with the politics of religious diversity and what we now call
multiculturalism as it developed in Modern Britain in the context of immigration
from South Asia.
During the 1970s, and early 1980s Britain’s recently settled Muslim communities
negotiated with local education authorities over Muslim educational needs in the
state system. The response of LEAs was generally sympathetic, with attempts to
meet the majority (though, significantly, not all) of the needs being made. In the
early 1980s in Bradford, the sense of goodwill and cooperation began to shift, with a
campaign to create voluntary-aided Muslim schools on the basis that the state
system was not meeting Muslim needs, threats to the provision of halal meat in
Bradford’s schools, and the Honeyford Affair. Muslims, who had previously been
represented by either race or community relations groups, or by local organisations
such as the Council for Mosques, found themselves being represented by single issue
groups which were often aggressive and vocal in their approach. Bradford council in
turn appeared to cease to be so conciliatory in its approach to Muslim requests.
To understand this shift, it is necessary to consider two policy changes made by
Bradford council. The first was the ending of the policy of dispersal – “bussing” – in
1981. The second was a move away from separate education for boys and girls – a
crucial Muslim need, which had previously coincided with council policy – towards a
policy of co-education. The effect of these two policy shifts was to concentrate
Bradford’s Muslim school population in certain schools, and to highlight that, while
the LEA was willing to make certain concessions in the spirit of religious pluralism,
there were considerable differences in attitude and belief between the LEA and the
city’s Muslims. On particular issues, these differences left Muslim needs unfulfilled,
and unlikely to be fulfilled. This created conflict which, left unresolved, heightened
tension and created an inflammatory situation and a widening and seemingly
unbridgeable gulf between the concerned parties.