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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.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief background of William of Newburgh. Despite William's celebrity as historian, knowledge of his personal life is minimal, based on a few sparse references in his writings. The chapter then provides an overview of Book I of the History of English Affairs. It explores the principal themes in that portion of the History and offers a summary indication of the contents of Books II–V. Such an approach is possible because the History, like most medieval historical writing, proceeds chronologically rather than being structured around sustained and systematic exposition of particular topics throughout, so that each book is relatively self-contained. Within the period covered in each book, the author responded to events which caught his interest, so that the attention he devoted to political or ecclesiastical matters, to England or overseas, varied as he was led by his material, and the History may strike a twentieth-century reader as lacking overall shape. William did not write according to modern historical conventions, yet whatever he chose to discuss was treated with a robust common sense and an acuity of judgment. Finally, the chapter considers the background and sources of History, as well as William's Latinity.

This chapter provides the commentary of Book 2 of The History of English Affairs written by William of Newburgh. It includes Anno a partu Virginis, which Newburgh uses to underline the chronology at the beginning of a reign or the date of some event of major significance. It also analyzes mystica unction that represents the notion of sacred mystery but with a wider application than merely to the formal sacraments and bears the wider sense of being symbolic. The chapter elaborates castella noua, in which Newburgh recalls a statement that the number of castles had risen to 1,115 during Stephen's reign, which reflects contemporary awareness of the threat of disorder posed by castles outside royal control. It discusses the fonticulum, which is the hilltop with two water sources.

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.

This chapter provides the text and translation of Book 2 of William of Newburgh's The History of English Affairs, which includes the beginnings of the reign of Henry II and how he restored the royal domains to their former condition. It describes the site of Scarborough Castle as a rock of astounding height and breadth that is made virtually impregnable by precipitous cliffs on all sides. It also details the siege and surrender of Bridgnorth and how the king of Scots restored the northern region of England to the king of the English. The chapter recounts Richard I's war with the Welsh and how the Welsh regained the king's favour as remnants of the Britons, who were the first inhabitants of England.

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.

This chapter focuses on English Historian William of Newburgh, who was born in 1136 near Bridlington in Yorkshire and received early education at Newburgh Priory, one of the numerous houses established by the Augustinian Canons in twelfth-century England. It looks at William's activities or movements during the first decades of his religious life and describes how he played an active role in the spiritual and academic formation of young entrants to the Priory school. It also mentions William's five books of The History of English Affairs that were written in a relatively short period between 1196 and 1198. The chapter explains how he devoted the greater part of Book I to the reign of Stephen, Books II and III to the extensive rule of Henry II, and Books IV and V to the years of Richard 1. It recounts William's intention to complete his history with the death of Richard in April 1199, since each of the first four books concludes at such a significant juncture with appropriate closing remarks.

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.

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.

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.