Islands of Art History

From the vantage of 2019, one of the most striking aspects of the Social History of British Art is its insularity. The influential writings of John Barrell, Ann Bermingham, David Solkin, and Andrew Hemingway are almost exclusively focused on art produced in England, and they dwell on a set of socio-cultural changes rooted in English land, capital, and labor developments. Rarely does it take note of the ways that global trade and imperial expansion shaped British politics (such as the integration of Scots-Irish into imperial statecraft), economics (including the profits produced by enslaved labor, forced dispossession, and mercantilism), and humanitarian principles (in the conception and management of citizenship, crime, and state sponsored violence). To the extent that a social history of art takes the social and economic base to be a determining factor in the superstructural production of art, then these oversights surely distort our understanding of British art. Returning to key passages in the social history of British art, this talk asks whether this insularity was necessary and useful in the cultural milieu of the 1980s and 1990s. It then asks whether the imperial turn of recent decades is antithetical to a social history of art. How might these two approaches find meaningful common ground, and what might be gained and lost in the undertaking?