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This essay analyses E. A. Freeman’s views on the past, present, and future of the British Empire. It elucidates in particular how his understanding of Aryan racial history and the glories of Ancient Greece helped to shape his account of the British Empire and its pathologies. Freeman was deeply critical of both the British Empire in India and projects for Imperial Federation. Yet he was no ‘little Englander.’ Indeed, it is argued that Freeman’s scepticism about modern European forms of empire-building was informed by an ambition to establish a globe-spanning political community composed of the ‘English-speaking peoples’. At the core of this imagined racial community, united by kinship and common citizenship, stood the Anglo-American connection, and Freeman repeatedly sought to convince people on both sides of the Atlantic about their collective history and their shared destiny. For Freeman, the institutions of formal empire stood in the way of this grandiose vision of world order.

This concluding essay examines the nature and significance of the Jamaica controversy in the wider sweep of modern English political and legal history. That the Jamaica affair became so thoroughly infused with legal ideas and procedures is a trademark of English political culture. With the advent of the Jamaica affair, leading Englishmen like John Stuart Mill attempted to use the courts to resolve (what is identified as) a defining contradiction of mid-Victorian English politics: the simultaneous commitment to law and empire. For a host of reasons their initiative failed. While the Jamaica litigation generated a number of important judicial pronouncements on the English jurisprudence of political and military power, the courts could not, perhaps cannot, provide a definitive resolution to what, after all, are timeless and intractable issues at the core of political liberalism.

The opening chapter sets the scene with respect to ways in which language ideologies evolve discursively. The argument is sociocognitive. At the bottom of all discursive activity lie conceptual metaphors of language and other related abstract concepts such as the “nation-state”. Possible statements derived from these conceptual metaphors form the stuff of which culturally valid myths are constructed, and these drive the construction of hegemonic discourses on language. As no discursive formations can be free of ideology (in the political and nonpolitical sense of the term), hegemonic discourses will eventually lead to the formation of discourse archives, in which certain things may be said (i.e., are “true”) and others not, and it is through the power of archives to shape our construction of the language worlds in which we live that canonical “histories” appear. A further argument here is that canons, linguistic or literary, must be challenged.

It has often been claimed that crosslinguistically the position of DPs in the clause is influenced by information structure: given information comes early, with new information placed late. This chapter reports on a small pilot study, the first step in a planned exploration of the roles of syntax and information structure in the positioning of objects in the history of English. The study confirms that at least in one Old English clause type—subordinate clauses with finite main verbs—there is indeed a significant correlation between object position and information status. It establishes that object weight is also significant and independent from information status. Finally, it is shown that as object position becomes more fixed, the proportion of new objects in postverbal position approaches the overall proportion of new objects for the clause type. This demonstrates that even within the Old English period, a correlation exists between the increasingly fixed object position and the decreasing role of information status.

Chapter Three examines the influence of FR Leavis, architect of the Great Tradition, on the thinking of Kamau Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, two of the leading theorists of postcolonial literature. The chapter argues that Leavis's emphasis on a "living language," as he called it - that is, his belief that a robust spoken dialect is the basis of any great literary tradition - would be rearticulated by Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ in their calls for vernacular literature. The chapter goes on to discuss the close but fractious connections between the English department and postcolonial literature, arguing that Leavis's complex professional relationship with the discipline was one of his major bequests to postcolonial studies.

This chapter discusses the incorporation of World Englishes into a History of the English Language (HEL) course, addressing questions about how to grapple with the geographical and geopolitical planes along which World Englishes have grown. Other questions considered here include diachronic formation, cultural contexts, relationships with other languages, and effects of globalization on forms of English that are both related to and yet quite distinct from the model of Standard English that frequently orients the HEL course. Two possible strategies for incorporating World Englishes into an HEL course are suggested. One strategy consists of focused lectures on the external history, social and cultural influences, linguistic features, and so on, of just one or two World English varieties, which can be combined with a second strategy that involves handing the research and even some of the teaching over to the students.

Chapter Six examines Heinemann Educational Book's African Writers Series, the preeminent literary institution of anglophone Africa. Critics have repeatedly asked whether the series is fundamentally imperialist - because of its links to the metropolitan publishing industry - or anti-imperialist - because it gave voice to so many politically engaged writers. This chapter, by contrast, places the series in the context of global changes in English studies. In the US and in metropolitan Britain, the series seemed to be participating in the fragmentation of the discipline: the breakup of Leavis's Great Tradition and the incorporation of minority writers into the canon. In Africa, however, it is possible to read the series as a part of an expansion and consolidation of English language and literary studies. How the series managed this apparent contradiction is the main topic of the chapter.

The construction of Burke as the ‘founder of conservatism’ was also a product of developments in education. The increasing study of Burke arose out of several converging movements: in publishing and technology; in philosophical thought; in the increasing disposable income and leisure time of greater portions of the population; and in education movements for men and women at all levels. The popularity of topics such as the French Revolution, Romanticism, and late eighteenth-century history meant that Burke became a feature of lectures and examinations. At university, Burke was of particular interest to philosophical Idealists, English literature professors and students, and a generation of historians who taught increasingly modern courses. By analysing how Burke was studied at this much more popular, general level it is possible to pinpoint how Burke’s ‘conservative’ political thought was taught to swathes of new students—it took more than gentlemanly erudition to establish a scholarly orthodoxy.

Dictionaries—especially historical dictionaries—are full of historical facts and judgments about English. Thus, students can find out a lot about English by looking in dictionaries. But they can learn things about the history of English by looking at dictionaries, too. As cultural artifacts, dictionaries help to bridge so-called inner and outer histories of English, which at times seem almost to be competitive concerns in the history of English classroom. Perhaps most important, students in a history of English course can make glossaries and dictionaries, individually or in groups, even groups as large as a whole class. In writing such a glossary, a student isn’t just writing about the history of English but is actually being a historian of English, and the experience, as well as the knowledge it produces, is likely to stay with the student for a long time.

What follows is a contact-based account of the emergence of English. Though the role of language contact in the development of World Englishes is often addressed as a coda within History of the English Language (HEL) courses, this chapter presents an alternative story, highlighting contact situations in Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English. The creolist perspective offered here suggests that History of English instructors should look closer at the received doctrine of HEL and consider whether an ecological model should not be used to make sense of the story of Englishes. A periodized history of colonization and of the ensuing population structures that influence language contact appears to explain a great deal about the differential evolution of English in various parts of the world, including what distinguishes colonial English dialects from their creole counterparts.

This chapter provides some suggestions for the inclusion of the history of American English into the larger context of the History of the English Language (HEL). By touching on themes found throughout within the external and internal history of English, for example, language contact and specific morphological and phonological processes, respectively, one can include lessons on American English and its varieties as an extension of the History of English, demonstrating to students that language “evolution” is an ongoing process and that variation within the language is a natural result of historical, linguistic, and social forces. This chapter begins with a (brief) general narrative of the development of American English and then offers a series of possible themes that could be incorporated into a HEL class for special focus, along with assignments and/or additional resources that encourage students to engage with the focus topics more deeply.

This chapter addresses how the history of English as a linguistic topic has been taught in one South African university. The author focuses on the traditional Old–Middle–Modern English trichotomy as well as colonial and postcolonial synchronic varieties. Subsequent to a curricular shift from historical to applied linguistics in English departments, students taking History of the English Language (HEL) come to the course with little or no background in Old and Middle English. The author offers practical examples of how he accommodated this change in student preparation. Additionally, he addresses how the postcolonial era and globalisation have “revitalised the story of English.” Pidgins, Creoles, and World Englishes problematise the earlier genealogy of the Standard Language, making a linear history less easy to uphold. The author’s discussion of his complementary “Pidgins, Creoles, and New Englishes” course includes helpful pointers to instructors teaching these varieties within a HEL course.

The History of the English Language (HEL) is a largely ideological enterprise keyed to fitting literary evidence into expected categories, and yet recent work has suggested that we can no longer simply assume that phenomena such as the Great Vowel Shift were “real,” historical, systematic changes. Contemporary debates on language change and use have historical precedent; social arguments about language are part of a very long tradition; languages in contact have generated linguistic change and adaptation, and language and national identity, as well as personal self-consciousness, have long gone together. This chapter will explore the ways in which the historical and institutional associations of HEL and the “medievalist” are contingently driven, and then to suggest some ways in which the redefinition of the “medievalist” in the twenty-first century can productively include a newer, critical sensibility about the place of HEL in the teachings of social vernacular literacy.

This chapter appeals to the early reception history of Beowulf to show why Old English remains an integral part of the history of the English language. It explains via examples how even a small amount of knowledge of the vernacular of England before 1066 is advantageous for the study of English from later periods and different geographical locations. As implied by its aliases “Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxon,” Beowulf’s language was not recognized as English until the 1870s. Nineteenth-century philology gave rise not only to Beowulf studies but also to the history of English as we know it. This chapter compares publications on the history of the English language as a case study to show how the approach to the subject changed after the introduction of the “new philology” in the nineteenth century.

This introductory chapter addresses the challenges and opportunities that come with teaching the History of the English Language (HEL). HEL is a traditional course whose instructors are tasked with balancing a great number of institutional, curricular, and student needs. Additionally, the course’s prodigious subject poses challenges for new as well as veteran instructors, few of whom have comprehensive training in English linguistics, literature, and the language’s historical varieties. The course encompasses a broad chronological, geographic, and disciplinary scope and, in the twenty-first-century classroom, has come to account for English’s transformative relationship with the internet and social media. In Approaches to Teaching the History of the English Language, experienced instructors explain the influences and ingenuity behind their own successful pedagogical practices. This introduction explains the value of that approach. Additionally, it includes a survey of the volume’s scope and organization.