British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2005

26 April 2005

Abstracts

ABOUT THIS EVENT | PROGRAMME

Dr Holger Hoock

Art, Politics and War: Rethinking Hanoverian Cultural History

Between the early eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, Britain evolved from an artistic backwater to a leading cultural power in Europe. Historians have explained this dramatic change largely in terms of the commercial and social forces driving cultural production and consumption. As a result, politics and the state have received short shrift in cultural history, just as the arts have not featured prominently on the agenda of political historians. By contrast, my work demonstrates that politicians, politics, and political institutions were more significant agents and sites of cultural change than has hitherto been allowed. War in particular was a catalyst not only of state formation and nation building, but also of the emergence of notions of 'national culture' and of the forging of the cultural state. Drawing on research on art institutions, the history of collecting, and national monuments, this talk will argue that by writing politics, the state, and war back into the cultural history of Hanoverian Britain, we gain both a more rounded view of artistic and cultural politics and a more nuanced notion of political culture.

Dr Holger Hoock holds degrees from the Universities of Freiburg and Oxford, and has held Fellowships at the Huntington Library, California, Yale University, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London. A historian of 18th and early 19th century Britain, he has published The King's Artists. The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760–1840 (Clarendon Press, 2003; paperback 2005), the proxime accessit in the 2003 RHS's Whitfield Prize, and articles on the social and political history of art institutions and on the history of naval and military commemoration. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has been using his British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Selwyn College, Cambridge, to research a book tentatively entitled Creative Britannia. The Arts, Politics, and War 1750–1850. Holger is a Research Curator for the Nelson and Napoleon exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (July 2005) and convenor of Trafalgar 1805–2005 at the British Academy (January 2006).