Teaching Incidental British History around the Globe

This piece is the final in a series of essays on teaching British history outside the Anglophone academy, a topic that challenges our preconceptions of where British history is being taught and who it is for. As higher education in the US undergoes systematic attack by the federal government, this series also gives insight into how and under what circumstances it is possible for US-trained academics to find work elsewhere. You can read the first, second, third, and fourth pieces at the included links.

Incidental British history, like incidental exercise, is something you get, and ideally benefit from, while in the process of doing something else. Because I have held positions on three different continents in transnational, Chinese, global, and economic history-- but never British history-- I often find myself teaching incidental British history to unsuspecting students. What began as a practical adaptation to the challenging academic job market has evolved into a pedagogical approach that invites students to see their own histories as part of interconnected global stories. By embracing incidental British history, I've discovered that even seemingly peripheral historical knowledge can become a powerful tool for engagement, offering students entry points to understand not only Britain's past but their own national narratives within a more complex global tapestry.

My research on the connected histories of the British and Qing empires has undoubtedly led me to jobs outside of British studies, but my employment history probably also reflects the difficult state of the British studies job market which compels many of us to cast the widest net possible in terms of job description and geographical location. As a result of this strategy, I’ve often found myself teaching students for whom English is not their native language or is but one of many languages they are juggling in their personal and professional lives. Finding work outside of the “typical” locations for an American academic also means that I am often designing and teaching thematic or methodological courses because they can potentially appeal to a wider array of students. Despite (or perhaps because of) these constraints, I have found creative and meaningful ways to draw upon my specialization and incorporate a substantial amount of incidental British history into my courses.

My first two jobs out of graduate school sent me to Asia, more specifically, Hong Kong and Singapore, where English is widely spoken yet not necessarily considered anyone’s “mother tongue.” In Singapore, where I worked for almost a decade, English is but one of four national languages including Mandarin, Malay and Tamil. While most students operate in English fluently, it is often intentionally or otherwise mixed with several Chinese dialects and regional languages, forming an English-based creole, known as Singlish.

The linguistically complex and diverse landscapes of Hong Kong and Singapore are a legacy of their colonial relationship with the British empire. These important historical connections meant that British history was never a tough sell to Hong Kongers and Singaporeans. Although, as I would later find out, students were far more interested in studying the Japanese empire than the British one, they happily (and perhaps unwittingly) absorbed a great deal of incidental British history. Through my courses, such as  Microhistory, The Great Divergence Debate, Drug Empires, and the Global History of Slavery, my students learned about the English Reformation and parish sheep in a small village in Devon; the experiences of enslaved people in Jamaica and India; the causes of the industrial revolution in Britain; the social effects of the plague in Newcastle; and the Opium Wars in China.

Carl Neumann, “The Battle of Copenhagen,” 1880. Public domain. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

When I moved to Denmark two years ago to start working as a “global digital historian" at the Saxo Institute of the University of Copenhagen, I was concerned that my pedagogical strategy that had worked so well in Hong Kong and Singapore might not fly with the Danes. The task of incorporating incidental British history seemed trickier, although language was not the problem. Danish students, though extremely modest and sometimes a bit bashful about their language skills, are English-speaking phenoms. But because Denmark was not colonized by the British — in fact if you go back far enough in history to the Viking era, the opposite was true, (Dane-geld and all that) — I worried that Danish students would show little interest in British history or the British empire.

It turns out that I did not need to worry because the histories of Britain and Denmark have, in fact, been entangled for many centuries (even beyond the Viking era) in interesting and important ways. Danes are acutely aware that Denmark’s emergence as a commercial and imperial power was curtailed directly and abruptly by the British. During the 1780s, for example, the Danish Asiatic Company (DAC) was sending the biggest ships and bringing back the biggest cargoes from China. But a strategic policy by the British government to lower its tax on tea and stop Europeans smuggling tea into Britain severely challenged the DAC’s business. A few decades later during the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy bombarded Copenhagen and seized Denmark’s Navy. To Danish students, Britain’s rise as a global imperial power in the nineteenth century contrasts starkly with and is connected to Denmark’s decline. For the Danes, Britain serves as an intriguing historical rival and foil.

As a result of these historical entanglements, incidental British history has also led to some interesting and unexpected incidental Danish history. While re-reading Linda Colley’s, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, for instance, my Global Microhistory MA students and I realized that the first Europeans to visit the court of Sidi Mohammed, the enterprising Moroccan Sultan who temporarily held Elizabeth Marsh, were Danish diplomats— a historical fact I’d never noticed when teaching the book in other places. And my Global History undergrads were extremely excited to see how Kenneth Pomeranz included Denmark, whose economic strategies bore more similarity to China’s, he argues, in his study of the Great Divergence.  The Danish dimension to his book was something to which, I admit, I had never paid much attention before moving to Denmark.

Teaching incidental British (and a little Danish) history has enabled me to find a middle ground between my geographic specialization/research comfort zone and my students' interests, curiosities, and needs. What I've discovered through my experiences in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Denmark is that it's always possible to draw meaningful connections with one's specialty—particularly when that specialty is British history, such a rich sub-field of history. The global reach of the British empire, which touched and transformed societies across continents, also creates natural resonance in sometimes unexpected ways. These connections have become easier for me to identify and explore the longer I’ve lived in a particular place and owe a great deal to the insights and historical knowledge shared with me by my students and colleagues. In this reciprocal exchange, incidental British history becomes not just a practical adaptation to a challenging academic job market, but a pedagogical approach that can enrich both teaching and learning across cultural boundaries.

---

I am an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen where my research explores the history of the British empire, focusing on the Indian Ocean and China. I play with space and scale and experimented with global microhistory in my 2019 book, Mr. Smith Goes to China: Three Scots in the Making of Britain’s Global Empire. My current research project places British slavery in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean under one analytic lens to refine the theoretical scholarship on global slavery and the dynamics of the British empire.

---

The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the original author/s and do not necessarily represent the views of the North American Conference on British Studies. The NACBS welcomes civil and productive discussion in the comments below. Our blog represents a collegial and conversational forum, and the tone for all comments should align with this environment. Insulting or mean comments will not be tolerated and NACBS reserves the right to delete these remarks and revoke the commenter’s site membership.