History News

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) poet, essayist, and Whig politician is now best remembered as the great nineteenth century historian of England but in this lecture Professor Hall will focus on the ways in which his ideas about empire, particularly India, and about race, critically informed his thinking about England and Englishness. These ideas have important implications for current debates about race, ethnicity and 'the multicultural question'.

Catherine Hall is Professor of History at University College London. Her research focuses on re-thinking the relation between Britain and its empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on issues of gender, empire, colonialism and history writing. Recent publications include Civilising Subjects: Metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830-1867 (winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Prize of the American Historical Association); Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A reader. Professor Hall is currently completing a book on Macaulay as historian.