Malcolm Chase
Professor of Social History
Deputy Head of School
Director of Research
Tutor for Mature Students
e: m.s.chase@leeds.ac.uk
t: +44 (0)113 34 33183
Biography
I graduated in History from the University of York in 1978, and then from Sussex University (MA in Modern European Social History, 1979, and DPhil, 1984). In 1981-82 I was a tutor in History at the University of Exeter. I then joined the University of Leeds, to work at an adult education centre that the University ran in Middlesbrough. I taught at the centre and in many localities across Teesside and North Yorkshire. In 1994 I transferred to the University’s main campus, but continued to specialise in adult education as a member of the School of Continuing Education (where, among other things, I was the Chair, 2002-05).
I joined the School of History in 2005. It is a great place for a specialist in British social, and local and regional, history. The Brotherton Library is one of the very best in the UK for these fields, and elsewhere in Leeds and Yorkshire there are many major resources for historical research.
I am a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Research interests
My longest-established research interest is in radical agrarianism (i.e. ideas about the distribution of landed property and proposals for its redistribution) in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. I continue occasionally to publish in this field but my main interests are now in the labour movement and radical politics generally during the same period. I am particularly interested in the formative years of trade unionism and in the Chartist movement. Adjunct interests are in the history of environmentalism in Britain, and Teesside and Cleveland local history.
Current Research Projects
I am currently working on labour historiography for two publications linked to the forthcoming jubilee of the Society for the Study of Labour History. This influential national body was founded in 1960 (largely by staff from the University of Leeds: Asa Briggs, J. F. C. Harrison and E. P. Thompson). One publication will look at the evolution of labour history from the mid-nineteenth century up to 1960. The other piece (which I am writing jointly with Dr Joan Allen, University of Newcastle) will be a critical analysis of publications since 1960 relating to British labour history of the period circa 1750-1900.
My next major project will be a book on the British Isles in 1820. Taking its cue from Shelley’s famous sonnet England in 1819 (written in 1820), this will seek to broaden our understanding of a year which is generally seen from the narrow perspective of the consequences of ‘Peterloo’ and George IV’s infamous divorce of Queen Caroline. Although these two events were of obvious significance, I want to explore the wider world of popular culture and politics in this momentous year: these included the Cato Street Conspiracy (to assassinate the Cabinet) and serious unrest in Scotland (which the predominantly Anglo-centric narrative of nineteenth-century British history too-often ignores). Equally importantly, though, the book will analyse the conditions that inclined the British Isles to social and political stability at a time when, ostensibly, the political establishment faced the sternest test of its authority since the French Revolution. My hope is that the book may also offer something of a response, from the perspective of historical studies, to James Chandler’s acclaimed contribution to the ‘return to history’ in literary studies, England in 1819 (1998).
In the longer term, my intention is to do some serious work on the history of environmentalist thought in Britain, particularly the evolution of ideas about scarcity.
Past Research
My first monograph, The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775-1840 (Oxford UP, 1988) remains the most substantial study of the political thought and influence of the agrarian reformer Thomas Spence (1750-1814). I have continued to publish on Spence and those he influenced, for example in contributions to the Dictionary of Labour Biography, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and, most recently, the British Library’s Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism. These also link to an abiding interest in life-writing and autobiography. Here my most important publication is a critical edition (1994) of The Life and Literary Achievements of Allen Davenport, an important early Victorian working-class autobiography, by an early socialist and Chartist (and biographer of Spence). Davenport’s Life was first published in 1845 but it was long-thought lost. However, a copy was discovered in – of all places – Nashville, Tennessee, in 1983.
Believing agrarianism to be significant means that I am sceptical about conventional approaches to labour history that see the labour movement mainly as part of a narrative of modernisation, through its response to ‘the industrial revolution’. Ideas about land reform were a vital part of the British labour movement well into the twentieth century. Similarly, the mentalité of early British trade unions owed a great deal to forms of workers’ association and ideas about skill that significantly pre-dated the eighteenth century. While the term ‘trade union’ was coined in the mid-nineteenth century, it is possible to trace trade unionist ideas as far back as the seventeenth century and even earlier. This was one of the arguments of my second monograph, Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (Ashgate, 2000).
My most recent book is Chartism: A New History (Manchester UP, 2007), completion of which was made possible by AHRC-funded research leave in 2005-2006. The book did not quite take twenty years to write (as a couple of reviewers thought!) but it did emerge from a sustained interest in what, in effect, was Britain’s formative civil rights movement. I published a case study of Chartism on Teesside as long ago as 1988 (in Northern History, volume 24). Subsequently I explored the agrarian aspects of Chartism through two articles in English Historical Review (1991 and 2003) and a chapter contributed to Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison (1996), a festschrift I co-edited with the late Ian Dyck. I have also published on the portraiture of Chartist leaders (in J. Allen and O. Ashton, eds, Papers for the People,2005) - research which inspired a small exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2006.
Chartism: A New History was reviewed in the Institute of Historical Research’s on-line feature, Reviews in History. See http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/saundersr.html
Academic-related activities
- Series editor, Studies in Labour History (published by Ashgate)
- Member, Executive Committee of the Social History Society
- Secretary to the Management Committee of Northern History
- Formerly Chair of the Society for the Study of Labour History
- Formerly Editor of Labour History Review
- Formerly Honorary Editor for the Cleveland & Teesside Local History Society
Postgraduate Supervision
I welcome enquiries from potential postgraduate students in appropriate areas of later-eighteenth and nineteenth century popular politics, radicalism, and northern history.
Current students
- Mike Brennan - Thomas Livsey and local government in the first half of the Nineteenth Century
- Janette Martin - Popular Political Oratory and Itinerant lecturing in Yorkshire and the North-East in the age of Chartism (c.1837-60) (White Rose Graduate Studentship – joint supervisor with Professors Miles Taylor [Institute of Historical Research] and Colin Divall [University of York])
- John Shaw - Demographic change in a West Yorkshire settlement during the Nineteenth Century, based upon the analysis of Census Returns between 1840 and 1901 (joint supervisor with Dr Simon Green)
- Sarah Summerscales - Theosophical, Space and Political Culture, 1875- 1935 (jointly supervised with Professor John Chartres)
- Angharad Houlden - Education as a site of tension between parents and the State, 1870-1914 (MA by Research, jointly supervised with Professor Katrina Honeyman)
Past students
David Bentley: Capital Punishment in Northern England 1750-1870 (MA by research, 2008). Following a distinguished legal career, Dr Bentley undertook this research as a retirement project, which he is now pursuing further as a writer for the popular local history market.
Teaching
Undergraduate Modules
- Environment and Environmentalism in Britain, c. 1750-1972 (HIST2120)
- Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour, 1660-1870 (HIST2121)
- Chartism: popular politics and authority in northern England, 1838-1858 (HIST3300)
- Memories: autobiographies and memoirs as historical sources (HIST3470)
All of my second and third level teaching is closely linked to research interests, conspicuously my special subject on the Chartist movement. Of my second level modules, one relates to my core interest in the formation of trade unions and the ways in which they reflected popular ideals about masculinity and work. The other reflects a book that’s half-written (in my head, at least!).
I owe a great debt to the students who have taken my modules. Their energy and enthusiasm continually throws up new perspectives, and it’s great to have one’s ideas subjected to bracing scrutiny.
Postgraduate Modules
- History of Yorkshire, c. 1780-1985 (jointly taught with Dr Simon Green) (HIST5101) which I usually teach on the MA in Modern History and MA in Local and Regional History, however this module is not running in 09/10
- Reading the Eighteenth Century (jointly taught with Professor John Chartres) (HIST5200) which I teach on the MA in Eighteenth Century Studies
I have taught local and regional history in localities as diverse as Leeds and Loftus (a former ironstone mining village on the northern edge of the Yorkshire Moors). Trying to make sense of this vast county in a single module is a challenge; but MA students always bring established interests and expertise that help make it possible. Local and Regional History is about moving from an understanding of the particular to the general. Eighteenth Century Studies might be characterised as the opposite. Reading the Eighteenth Century offers a very broad, multi-faceted approach to ‘the long eighteenth century’, out of which students develop the research interests that form the basis of their MA dissertation.
Outreach / Wider Community
Public lectures:
- I have been invited to give the Ian Dyck Memorial Lecture at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada in Autumn 2010
- "Enquire Within Upon Everything': Robert Kemp Philp (1819-82) and the Democratisation of Knowledge', Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British History and Politics seminar at the University of Oxford, November 2009
- 'The Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor', Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery (where Feargus O'Connor's buried) and local history groups and trade unions, 31 October 2009
- 'Early Victorian Leeds Greatest Newspaper' (Leeds Metropolitan University, 'Talk About the North' public lecture series), 4 November 2009
- Keynote address, 'Rethinking Welsh Chartism' to a study day organised by Llafur (the Welsh People's History Society), June 2009
- 'Trade Unionism and Chartism' for the Ford-Maguire Society of Leeds, June 2009
- Lecture on 'The Northern Star & Leeds General Advertiser: Chartist pioneer of newspaper circulation wars', to the Thoresby Society, Leeds, February 2009
- James Bronterre O'Brien Oration for 2008 (London O'Brien Memorial Committee), June 2008
- 'Using Home Office Papers for local historical research', Cleveland & Teesside Local History Society, Middlesbrough (University of Teesside), March 2008
- 'Paine, Spence and the Real Rights of Man' (The Paine Memorial Lecture for 2008), Thomas Paine Society, London, March 2008
- 'Chartism's black activists', anti-slavery dayschool, Barnsley Trade Council Black & Ethnic Minorities Initiative, January 2008
Previous outreach work has included giving a lecture at the National Portrait Gallery, London, linked to an exhibition of Chartist portraits. This was based on my research 'Building identity, building circulation: engraved portraiture and the Northern Star', in Papers for the People, ed. J.Allen and O.Ashton, 2005.
I provided research advice and was an on-screen "expert" for the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? programme about Jeremy Irons in October 2006. I also contribute short articles on labour history issues to the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are Magazine. In October 2007 I authored an article on 'Chartism's Black Activist', pp. 20-22 for History Today.
Publications
Forthcoming
- ‘Resolved in defiance of fool and of knave’?: Chartism, children and conflict’, in Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn (eds), Culture and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Palgrave, 2009)
- ‘Chartism and the land: “The mighty people’s question”’, in Matthew Cragoe and Paul Readman (eds), The Land Question in Britain (Palgrave, 2009)
- Joan Allen, Malcolm Chase, ‘Great Britain to c.1900’, in J. Allen, A. Campbell and J. McIlroy (eds), Histories of Labour: National and Transnational Perspectives (Merlin Press, 2010)
- ‘The “prehistory” of labour history’, Labour History Review 76: 1 (April 2010)
- ‘Unemployment without protest: the ironstone mining communities of East Cleveland in inter-war Britain’, in Matt Perry and Matthias Reiss (eds), Beyond Marienthal: Understanding Movements of the Unemployed (2010)
Recent
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