Professor Joanna Innes
I grew up in Britain and the US. I studied at Cambridge, and have taught at Oxford since 1982. 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. In addition, for more than ten years now 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.
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 remain a member of this and several other journal editorial boards. I have spent several periods teaching or researching abroad: in Australia, Germany, Japan and France.
Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (OUP Oxford,October 2009).

Inferior Politics explores how social policy was created in Britain in a period when central government was not active in making it. Parliament proved capable of generating national legislation nonetheless-and provided a forum for debate even when it was impossible to mobilise consensus behind any particular plan. In this setting, there was a lively, and surprisingly inclusive, 'politics' of social policy-making, in which 'inferior' officers of government (what we might call 'local authorities') figured prominently.
The book explores institutional structures which shaped these debates and their outcomes, and supplies several case studies of policy-making: one focussing on some of the less well-known activities of William Wilberforce, as he attempted to promote a national 'reformation of manners'; others featuring such apparently marginal figures as imprisoned debtors and a lowly (and bigoted) London constable. A central chapter explores the history of social and economic empirical enquiry from the invention of 'political arithmetic' in the later seventeenth century through to the first census of 1801, detailing similar interaction between government and private enthusiasts.
Drawing together three decades of the author's work, including two new essays, Inferior Politics demonstrates how Joanna Innes has significantly revised and extended our understanding of the ways and means of British domestic government, in an era marked by institutional continuity but continuing and vigorously debated social challenges.
Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750-1850 (Oxford University Press, May 2015).

Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions charts a transformation in the way people thought about democracy in the North Atlantic region in the years between the American Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. In the mid-eighteenth century, 'democracy' was a word known only to the literate. It was associated primarily with the ancient world and had negative connotations: democracies were conceived to be unstable, warlike, and prone to mutate into despotisms. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the word had passed into general use, although it was still not necessarily an approving term. In fact, there was much debate about whether democracy could achieve robust institutional form in advanced societies.
In this volume, a cast of internationally-renowned contributors shows how common trends developed throughout the United States, France, Britain, and Ireland, particularly focussing on the era of the American, French, and subsequent European revolutions. Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutionsargues that 'modern democracy' was not invented in one place and then diffused elsewhere, but instead was the subject of parallel re-imaginings, as ancient ideas and examples were selectively invoked and reworked for modern use. The contributions significantly enhance our understanding of the diversity and complexity of our democratic inheritance.
- British especially English social policy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- State, society and culture in Britain 1688-1850
- Changing ideas about and practices of democracy in Europe and both Americas from mid C18 to mid C19
My current research follows two main strands. I have worked for several decades on the making of social policy in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, and in that context have moved between exploring the history of the state, social history and the history of ideas. Some of my key essays on this theme are collected in Inferior Politics. Social Problems and Social Policy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2009). I am also putting together a collection of my essays on poverty and poor relief, including some previously unpublished work. My new research focusses especially on changes in the British social policy agenda and policy-making processes c1780-1830, among other things on the beginnings of parliamentary engagement with health, education and working conditions; the renewal of parliamentary and governmental interest in the pastoral functions of the established church; changes in the ‘public sphere’ and their implications for policy making, and in the way Parliament related to the various parts of the British Isles. Many of my recent articles explore this new terrain.
I have also been involved for more than a decade in coordinating an international network exploring the 'reimagining' of democracy between the mid eighteenth and mid nineteenth centuries, across Europe and both Americas. An edited book emerging from this project, Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: France, America, Britain, Ireland 1750-1850 was published in 2013. During 2012-15 I held a Leverhulme International Network grant which allowed me and my co-organiser, Mark Philp to extend this enquiry to the Mediterranean region: we are now working on another collection of essays arising from that phase of the project, and also opening a new phase of enquiry on Latin America and the Caribbean, in collaboration with Professor Eduardo Posada-Carbo of Oxford’s Latin American Centre.
I am also interested in how historians conceptualise their subject matter. I have published on the concept of the public sphere (in Japanese only); on ‘networks’, and on the history of emotions (in the introduction to a forthcoming collection, Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850, eds. Michael J. Braddick and Joanna Innes. I recently organized an interdisciplinary workshop on the history of words and concepts.
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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 -
Introduction
January 2018|c-book© Oxford University Press 2018. The ancient word ‘democracy’ was given new meanings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, in the Mediterranean region among others. It is a mistake to think of southern Europe as having come to democracy late: re-imagining of the term began in parallel with similar developments in France and the United States, and was associated with the development of representative government, operative in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece by the 1860s. In the Ottoman world, concepts and practices were distinct, though there were some parallel elements. In this region, the process of re-imagining democracy took place in the course and in the aftermath of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which radically reshaped both international political relationships and national political structures and cultures. In this context, ever more political actors gradually came to suppose that establishing some form of ‘democracy’ might provide a means of resolving crises of legitimacy. -
Popular consent and the european order
January 2018|Chapter|Re-Imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean, 1780-1860© Oxford University Press 2018. New ideas about how people should relate to power played out in relations between as well as within states. The French revolution promoted rights of self-determination, and devices (later termed plebiscites) for legitimating both new regimes and transfers of territories. Napoleon further instrumentalized, then abandoned, such practices. His enemies criticized his pursuit of ‘conquest’-but thereby raised questions about their own habits. After the wars, fuzzier notions of consent featured in discourses around ‘legitimacy’. Revolutions, which continued to be employed to constitute would-be-lawful regimes, tested prevailing ideas. In the Ottoman world, instruments that could be conceptualized as constitutions played a part in negotiations around overlordship. From the 1850s, plebiscites came back into use, alongside other means of registering consent to boundary change. Increasing involvement of European powers in attempts to resolve conflicts within Ottoman domains (thus Mount Lebanon, Crete) encouraged cross-fertilization between what were in some ways already convergent practices. -
Re-imagining the social order
January 2018|Chapter|Re-Imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean, 1780-1860© Oxford University Press 2018. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw attempts around the Mediterranean world to replace an old order of privilege and delegated power with one in which all subjects were equal before the state. Across southern Europe, revolutionary France provided the model: under French and subsequently liberal regimes, privilege in state, church, and economy was cut back; there were analogous changes in the Ottoman world. Legal change did not always translate into substantive social change. Nonetheless, new conceptions of a largely autonomous ‘society’ developed, and new protocols were invented to relate state to ‘society’, often entailing use of tax status as a reference point for the allocation of rights and duties. The French Doctrinaires argued that the abolition of privilege made society ‘democratic’, posing the question, how was such a society best governed? By the middle of the nineteenth century, this conception was widely endorsed across southern Europe. -
Happiness Contested: Happiness and Politics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth centuries
August 2017|Chapter|Suffering and Happiness in England, 1550-1850 Narratives and RepresentationsSuffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850 pays tribute to one of the leading historians working on early modern England, Paul Slack, and his work as a historian, and enters into discussion with the rapidly growing body of work on the ... -
Suffering and Happiness in England, 1550-1850 Narratives and Representations
August 2017|c-bookSuffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850 pays tribute to one of the leading historians working on early modern England, Paul Slack, and his work as a historian, and enters into discussion with the rapidly growing body of work on the ... -
Consensus and the Majoritarian Principle in English Parliamentary Politics during the 18th and 19th Centuries
May 2017|Chapter|Consensus and Representation -
‘Networks’ in British History
March 2016|Journal article|East Asian Journal of British History
Current DPhil Students
- Myungsu Kang
I would be willing to hear from potential DPhil students regarding:
British History 1700-1850;
Topics associated with the history of democracy c1750-1850
I currently teach:
Prelims |
FHS |
British History V |
British History V |
General History IV |
General History X |
Theories of the State |
General History XI |
Haiti and Louisiana |
FS: Metropolitan Crucible, London 1688-1815 |
SS: Debating social change: Britain and Ireland 1775-1825 |