Joanna Innes
Senior Research Fellow; Professor Emeritus of Modern History
I grew up in Britain and in the US. I studied at Cambridge, and was a tutorial fellow at Somerville for 36 years, 1982-2018. I hold the title of Professor of Modern History from the university, and continue to supervise graduate students.
I am interested in government, society and ideas, in Britain, Europe and the larger European world, between the later seventeenth and mid nineteenth centuries. More specifically, my research and writing has two main strands. One concerns developments in British, especially English social policy during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: my monograph Inferior Politics pulls together some of writings on that topic. In addition, for about twenty years I have been running an international collaborative project about changing attitudes to and practices associated with democracy in Europe and both Americas in the same period. We have published three books arising from that project, and are now at work on a fourth and final volume, which focusses on what we call central and northern Europe: broadly, Germany and lands adjacent. I see the academic study of history as a collaborative exercise, and have been involved in collaborative projects throughout my career. Between 1990 and 2000 I was co-editor of Past and Present, and have recently retired from a position as chair of that journal’s editorial board. I’m also on the boards of several other English and French-language history journals. I have spent several periods teaching or researching abroad: in Australia, Germany, Japan, France and most recently Finland.
Publications
Poverty, autonomy and control: Patrick Colquhoun’s Treatise on Indigence (1806)
April 2024
Article in book
Poverty and the enlightenment Re-imagining democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1780-1860
September 2023
c-book
The experience of ‘reform’ in English local governance in the era of the ‘Reform ministry’ (1830-41)
December 2022
Article in book
Civic continuities in an age of revolutionary change Expanding the polis, transforming sovereignty
December 2022
Article in book
Cultural History of Democracy in the Age of Enlightenment Seeing like a surveyor: imagining rural reform in the early nineteenth-century UK
June 2022
Article in book
Reform and its complexities in modern Britain.
Essays inspired by Sir Brian Harrison
The Regulation of Charity and the Rise of the State
August 2021
Article in book
Epilogue 1: Early modern ottomans
March 2020
Journal article
Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association
Polite and Commercial’s Twin: Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689-1789
January 2019
Chapter
Revisiting The Polite and Commercial People Essays in Georgian Politics, Society, and Culture in Honour of Professor Paul Langford
Re-imagining democracy in the Mediterranean, 1780-1860
November 2018
c-book
Democracy from book to life: the emergence of the term in active political debate, to 1848
June 2018
Chapter
Democracy in Modern Europe: A Conceptual History
Christopher Ferguson. An Artisan Intellectual: James Carter and the Rise of Modern Britain, 1792–1853.
April 2018
Journal article
The American Historical Review
Popular consent and the European order
January 2018
Chapter
Re-Imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean, 1780-1860
Re-imagining the social order
January 2018
Chapter
Re-Imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean, 1780-1860
Happiness Contested: Happiness and Politics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth centuries
August 2017
Chapter
Suffering and Happiness in England, 1550-1850 Narratives and Representations
August 2017
c-book
Consensus and the Majoritarian Principle in English Parliamentary Politics during the 18th and 19th Centuries
May 2017
Chapter
Consensus and Representation