Emeritus Professor, Department of English Queen Mary University of London

Hello

In my latest book, Imagining War and Peace in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1690-1820, I’m concerned with moral responses to war.

If you want to see my blog about this, it’s here: link

I got interested in responses to war through my work on William Blake and Walter Scott. Radical Blake and Tory Scott seem far apart in their interests—but they both lived through an era of violent revolution and warfare, and they were both fascinated with responses to war. In quite different terms, they each explored the way humanitarian responses to the violence of war could work to justify it.

That’s the starting point of Imagining War and Peace…

The book looks at the ways in which the horrors of war were made acceptable to Britons as they learned to think of themselves as humane and benevolent. And it considers how the pursuit of peace became bound up with the violent expansion of empire.