Time: 6:30pmVenue: ArtsTwo Lecture Theatre, ArtsTwo Building, Mile End Campus
The English country house stands as an icon of English national identity, carefully preserved and publically displayed by cultural organisations such as English Heritage and the National Trust. This lecture explores the life and successive homes of the Maharaja Duleep Singh (1838-1893) to re-position that nationalist history in a broader global context. Declared ruler of the kingdom of Lahore as a child of five, Duleep Singh came under the protection of the English East India Company at the end of the First Anglo-Sikh War (1845-46) but lost his throne to the British at the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848-49). Deprived of his palaces in the Punjab, Duleep Singh travelled to Britain, where he resided in a succession of Scottish castles before purchasing an English country house, Elveden (in Suffolk). The Maharaja's Many Mansions: Duleep Singh and the 19th-century Country House Tradition asks what Duleep Singh's domestic dislocations can tell us about the 'Englishness' of the English country house tradition.
Margot Finn is Professor of Modern British History at UCL. The author of After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848-1874 (Cambridge, 1993) and The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914 (Cambridge, 2003), she is co-editor (with Professor Michael Lobban of LSE and Professor Jenny Bourne Taylor of Sussex University) of Legitimacy & Illegitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Law, Literature and History (Palgrave, 2010). Margot is the Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme Trust-funded East India Company at Home project (http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/eicah/), which publishes online-open access case studies that explore the impact of British imperialism in the Indian Ocean World upon British domestic cultures. The project’s ‘Trappings of Trade’ display, co-curated with National Trust staff and volunteers, is open at Osterley House and Park until early November www.nationaltrust.org.uk/osterley-park/things-to-see-and-do/events