March 15-16, 2002
at the Clark Library
arranged by
J.G.A. Pocock, Johns
Hopkins University
During the wars against the American and French Revolutions, there emerged in Britain the phenomenon of an opposition so far convinced that these wars were wrong as, at times, to welcome revolutionary victories against British forces or those of their allies. This attitude was new in being based less on religious conviction than on “enlightened” and “liberal” principle, and within Britain it displayed less revolutionary intention than sympathy with the revolutions of others. Americans who remember the 1960s will know that this mindset is an enduring force in modern history, and this conference will investigate its origins in the Britain of George III. Some lay in the politics of Whiggism, others in the politics of Dissent; and the European war against the universal claims of the French Revolution is situated within a period of civil war within the British empire, from America in the 1770s to Ireland in 1798. It will be suggested that the characters of patriotism, loyalism, and their opposites, including treason and subversion, changed significantly during these years.
Friday, March 15
9:30 a.m. • coffee
10:00 a.m. Peter H. Reill, UCLA, and J. G. A. Pocock, Johns Hopkins University
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Morning sessions chaired by Peter H. Reill
Session 1 —
Jonathan Clark, University of Kansas
Edmund Burke’s Reflections
on the Revolution in America (1777): The Emergence of Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary
Positions in Late Eighteenth-Century England
Jack Fruchtman Jr., Towson
University
Tracking and Locating Paine: Revolution and Reform
in the Age of Enlightenment and Dissent
Session 2 —
Eliga H. Gould, University of New Hampshire
“The Revolution We Escaped”: Herbert Butterfield’s
Political Crisis of 1780 Revisited
James E. Bradley, Fuller Theological Seminary
The Social, Legal, and Political Sources of the Dissenters’
Revolutionary Sympathies, 1770–1800
1:00 p.m. • lunch
2:00 p.m.
Session 3 —
Afternoon sessions chaired by John Christian Laursen, University of California, Riverside
J. E. Cookson, University of Canterbury, Christchurch,
New Zealand
Service without Politics? Army, Militia, and Volnteers
in Britain during the American and French Revolutions
Lisa Steffen, University of
South Carolina Spartanburg
Loyalty Transformed: The Making of Traitors in the
Late Eighteenth Century
Roundtable discussion moderated by J. G. A. Pocock
4:45 p.m. • reception
Saturday, March 16
9:30 a.m. • coffee
10:00 a.m.
Morning sessions chaired by chaired by Perry Andersen, UCLA
Session 4 —
Gregory Claeys, Royal Holloway, University of London
Divided Loyalties: Varieties of Whiggism, 1790–1793
James Epstein, Vanderbilt University
Disloyal Subjects: “Jacobin” Performance
in the 1790s
Session 5 —
Ian McBride, King’s College London
“English Difficulties and Irish Opportunities”: Revolution,
War, and the Birth of Irish Separatism
Philip Harling, University of Kentucky
A Tale of Two Conflicts: Critiques of the British War
Effort, 1793–1815
1:00 p.m. • lunch
2:00 p.m.
Session 6 — Afternoon sessions chaired by Kirstie M. McClure, UCLA
F. P. Lock, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario
Burke and the Rhetoric of Numbers
Pamela Edwards, Richmond University, London
Coleridge’s Canon of British Philosophy: An Attack
on the “Monstrous Popular Sophism of Locke”
Concluding roundtable discussion moderated by J. G. A. Pocock
Registration Information
Opposition, Dissent, and Revolutionary Sympathies: Origins
of the British Left, 1770–1800
—— March 15–16, 2002 ——
Registration deadline:
March 8, 2002.
Please be aware that space at the Clark is limited and that registration
closes when capacity is reached.
Fees: UC faculty & staff: $15; students with id: no charge;
others: $25.
Fees cover lunches, refreshments, and advance copies of papers.*
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