On 20 October the IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar will be hosting a hybrid seminar in-person and via Zoom with Frederick Hyde. Frederick will be presenting his paper ‘China on the Hustings: The Arrow Affair and British Identity during the 1857 Election‘. There will be a question and answer session following the presentation. The seminar will take place in-person at the IHR (Room NB02) and via Zoom. Please contact seminar@histparl.ac.uk for Zoom details.
Abstract
This paper connects two fields of nineteenth-century historical enquiry: the study of British foreign policy and the study of British elections. Both fields are prospering; foreign policy has been well-integrated into domestic British history, and Victorian elections are used as windows into cultural and social issues. Yet the two fields remain unconnected; the electoral aspects of foreign policy debate are oddly overlooked, despite the frequency with which foreign crises coincided with British elections in the nineteenth century. This paper uses the 1857 General Election, which centred on the Arrow Affair and Britain’s entry into the Second Opium War with China, to demonstrate the compatibility between these fields. It examines the language of the China debate in four constituencies across the United Kingdom – Newcastle upon Tyne, Aberdeen, Denbighshire and Cork City – and the range of ways in which national identity was articulated by candidates, voters, non-voters and the press in relation to the Arrow Affair. It finds that, contrary to previous assumptions, China became a proxy for a whole host of political, cultural and moral anxieties, and the debate functioned as a site for negotiating British, English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish identities.
Frederick Hyde is a History PhD student at the University of Southampton. He specialises in the relationship between foreign policy and national identity in Victorian Britain. He is supervised by Professor David Brown and funded by a University of Southampton Presidential Scholarship. He read History at Durham University and studied for a master’s degree in War Studies at King’s College London. He sits on the Council of the Society for Army Historical Research and has worked as a lecturer at the University of Bournemouth. His work has appeared in Historical Research and Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
