Call for Papers!
The Rothermere American Institute is pleased to invite paper proposals for a summer 2025 conference entitled Conservatism in an Age of Atlantic Revolutions, 1830 – 1880 (26-27 June 2025). The conference is part of a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust on the theme of “conservatism.” Specialists in the history of Britain, the United States and Latin America are welcome at any career stage.
We are looking for papers that seek to understand what "conservatism" meant to the people who invoked it and how it was embedded in everyday political thinking, rather than assuming that it constituted a coherent ideology. We are starting from the assumption that the language of “conservatism” legitimized political objectives and regimes, and interacted with other key concepts in nineteenth-century political culture. The term also emerged during a revolutionary crisis in the Atlantic world which linked the uprisings across Europe and the Americas in the 1830s and 1840s to the revolutionary upheaval of Civil War and Reconstruction in the US.
Our conference will explore the ways in which political actors invoked the term "conservatism" to make sense of the revolutions that broke out across Europe and the Americas in the 1830s to the 1870s. Just as "conservatism" emerged simultaneously in the 1820s and 30s in different polities, so in the 1870s and 80s, regimes used "conservative" ideas to consolidate their position, whether in the post-Reconstruction US South, or the Diaz government in Mexico, ending a period of revolutionary instability. By telling this story, we can see this latter period, not as a mere counter-revolution or era of reaction, but one that built upon powerful "conservative" impulses within the Age of Revolutions itself.
Please submit a 250-word proposal and CV to gwion.jones@rai.ox.ac.uk by January 6 2025. Final papers will be pre-circulated and around 9,000 words in length. For more information, contact mark.powersmith@rai.ox.ac.uk, or visit https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/conservatisms.
