History

This research group is devoted to the history and politics of English-speaking countries, using methodological tools from social, intellectual and cultural history to ask questions about political identities and political subjectivities, and about the interconnectedness of politics and everyday life. History is understood in a longue durée, with scholars working on the 17th century to the 21st century. The aim of our group is stimulate interdisciplinary research across the social sciences and develop work cutting across time periods, questioning the nature of an ‘English-speaking’ world and its boundaries and looking at its links to the wider world.

Statement for Larca website:

‘As historians based at LARCA (UMR 8225, Université de Paris – CNRS), we stand with our colleagues in the UK who are calling on the UK Home Office to urgently review its current ‘Life in the UK Test’ and the attendant official handbook. As explored in this essay by Frank Trentmann, requiring would-be citizens of the UK to learn such a distorted and offensive version of the British past is unacceptable. We share his suspicions about the motivation, for example, to misconstrue key events in British history relating to the Second World War and the violence inherent to the British imperial project and decolonisation. Given the richness of historical research done, and being done, on these topics to reveal their complexity (not just for academics but for a wider public audience), it’s wholly unacceptable that the UK government has endorsed such a simplistic and dangerously misleading historical narrative in an official document.’

Members of the history research group, LARCA (UMR 8225, Université de Paris – CNRS)

The group’s research is organised around five main themes:

Colonial and imperial questions
International policies and diplomatic networks in the English-speaking worlds
Migrations, discriminations, racial and ethnic inequalities
History of social policies
Democracy, democratization and politization in North America and the UK
The Atlantic space and the first globalization, 1600-1850

The group has close connections with the research group on gender and the different transversal groups (Writing history from the margins; popular classes; material culture) which stem from the History group.

Yves Figueiredo and Daniel Foliard