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What’s British about the social history of art? This panel joins ongoing conversations about what the social history of art is and what its stakes might be for us today. Specifically, it takes a “localized” approach to this model of art history as it developed in and out of Britain and its former colonial territories. Whether of an “activist” Marxist or more general “art and society” cast (Clunas 1996), it is striking that key protagonists of the social history of art—from Hauser, Antal, and Klingender to Baxandall, Clark, and Pollock—were born, trained, or based in the UK. At the same time, the social history of art has been a dominant frame adopted by historians of British art itself, beginning with field-defining studies of landscape painting by John Barrell, David Solkin, and Ann Bermingham. How do we account for the strength of this distinctive art historical mode in Britain? Has it received peculiarly “British” inflections? What impact has it had on the study of British art and on the writing of art history more broadly, in Britain and elsewhere? What possibilities has it generated? What others has it foreclosed? Topics could include, but are not limited to: histories of émigré and expatriate scholars; institutional, public, and popular histories; the relationship with feminist, postcolonial, and/or visual studies approaches; the social history of art in and after recent turns to empire and the global.