History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950

by Edited by Stefan Collini , Richard Whatmore , Brian Young

• ISBN13: 9780521626385
• ISBN10: 0521626382
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Modern British intellectual history has been a particularly flourishing field of enquiry in recent years, and these two tightly integrated volumes contain major new essays by almost all of its leading proponents. The contributors examine the history of British ideas over the past two centuries from a number of perspectives that together constitute a major new overview of the subject. History, Religion, and Culture begins with eighteenth-century historiography, especially Gibbon's Decline and Fall. It takes up different aspects of the place of religion in nineteenth-century cultural and political life, such as attitudes towards the native religions of India, the Victorian perception of Oliver Cromwell, and the religious sensibility of John Ruskin. Finally, in discussions which range up to the middle of the twentieth century, the volume explores relations between scientific ideas about change or development and assumptions about the nature and growth of the national community.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
General introduction	1	(21)
Stefan Collini
Presentation of History, Religion, and Culture	22	(9)
Part I
Historical distance and the historiography of eighteenth-century Britain	31	(17)
Mark Salber Phillips
Gibbon and the primitive church	48	(21)
J. G. A. Pocock
Gibbon's religious characters	69	(22)
David Womersley
Part II
`The Lust of Empire and Religious Hate': Christianity, history, and India, 1790--1820	91	(21)
Brian Young
The Victorians and Oliver Cromwell	112	(24)
Blair Worden
Religion and politics in the Quarterly Review, 1809-1853	136	(20)
William Thomas
Ruskin's way: tout a fait comme un oiseau	156	(23)
John Drury
Part III
The politics of anatomy and an anatomy of politics c. 1825--1850	179	(19)
Boyd Hilton
Images of time: from Carlylean Vulcanism to sedimentary gradualism	198	(26)
John Burrow
`Race' and `nation' in mid-Victorian thought	224	(21)
Peter Mandler
Political thought and national identity in Britain, 1850--1950	245	(25)
Julia Stapleton
List of contributors	270	(2)
Acknowledgements	272	(1)
Index	273