A Man’s Sphere? British Politics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

The study of masculinity is now well established within the discipline of history, but its impact has been uneven. As the essays in this collection show, historians of different periods, regions and topics have often explored it in quite distinctive ways. The study of masculinity in British politics is a case in point. This is a national context where gender clearly plays a huge role in political culture, but the particular ways in which the histories of gender and politics have developed in Britain has meant that a dedicated history of political masculinities has struggled to take off. This chapter will survey work that has been done in this field and I will get into this question by reflecting on my own experiences of working across masculinity and politics over the last two decades. We will see that the field has very specific contours in modern British historiography, with particular chronologies and accounts of historical change. The second half of the chapter will then survey the key themes in the literature and will consider how the field is poised to develop in future.Like many historians of masculinity, I did not start out as one. My PhD thesis began as a political study, exploring the emotive idea of 'independence' in the Georgian period. Like many postgraduate students in the 1990s, I was influenced by the linguistic turn's approach to social description and political traditions, 1 and so I was seeking to explore the role of an important keyword in political life. As the doctorate became more focused on the notion of The original version of this chapter was revised: For detailed information please see erratum. The erratum to this chapter is available at https://doi.