Location: University of Warwick

The University of Warwick will be hosting a one-day workshop which will bring together established academics and postgraduate students who have been involved in recent moves to rethink the colonial and global dimensions of Britain’s ‘Age of Reform’.

The workshop will facilitate a discussion about the varieties of reform which existed across a range of colonial and international settings in the period between 1780 and 1850. This workshop aims to address a number of outstanding questions about the use of the term ‘reform’ outside metropolitan Britain. For example, to what extent can reform be used as an organising category in the history of India, South Africa and Australia in this period? How were reformist languages emanating from Britain adapted in different colonial and international settings? What contribution did reform communities outside Britain make to the reform of the metropolitan polity?

SPEAKERS
Joanna Innes of the University of Oxford will give a keynote lecture at the event. Joanna Innes co-edited Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780-1850 (2003), a volume which stands as an important milestone in the historiography on reform in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Subsequent shorter research papers will explore the connections between reformers and reform movements in Britain and the British Empire. Speakers include:

• Alan Lester (University of Sussex)
• Zoe Laidlaw (Royal Holloway)
• Philip Salmon (History of Parliament)
• Jon Wilson (King’s College London)

BOOKING
Registration for the event is now open. The £10 registration cost includes lunch and refreshments. Postgraduate students are warmly encouraged to attend and bursaries are available to cover graduate registration costs.

Registration Deadline: Friday May 29th, 2009