Miles Taylor, BA, PhD (Cantab), FRHS

Director of the IHR and Professor of History

Miles Taylor joined the IHR in 2008. He has held chairs at the universities of York and Southampton, having taught at King’s College London and Christ’s College, Cambridge, and studied history at Queen Mary, University of London, Harvard and Cambridge.

Professor Taylor’s four main areas of interest are in modern British history: first, 19th-century Chartism and radical politics, especially the ideas, literature and historiography of these movements; secondly, the history of parliamentary representation in the UK during the heyday of limited male suffrage, c.1820-1914; thirdly, the impact of the empire on the British state, political system and social policy in the 19th and 20th centuries: how the experience of empire shaped the modern British polity - its monarchy, armed forces, parliament, gender relations, religion and social policy, and finally, the historiography and heritage of Victorian political and cultural life. Professor Taylor is currently writing a book on the history of parliamentary representation in Britain since the late 18th century, and a study of the Victorian monarchy and India.

Professor Taylor has served on the Research Review Panel of the AHRC and on the editorial board of the RHS’s Studies in History series. He is currently a member of the History of Parliament editorial board and a member of the Council of the Royal Historical Society.

Selected publications

Authored Books

  • Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics, 1819-69 (Oxford UP, 2003)
  • The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847-1860 (Oxford UP, 1995)

Edited Books

  • Southampton: Gateway to the British Empire (IB Tauris, 2007)
  • (co-ed.), Palmerston Studies (2 vols, Hartley Institute, 2007)
  • (co-ed.), The Victorians since 1901: Histories, Representations and Revisions (Manchester UP, 2004)
  • Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (Oxford World’s Classics, OUP, 2001)
  • (co-ed.), Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Scolar Press, 1997)
  • The European Diaries of Richard Cobden, 1846-1849 (Scolar Press, 1994)

Articles

  • ‘Joseph Hume and the reformation of India, 1819-33’ in G Burgess & M Festenstein (eds.), Radicalism in English Political Thought, 1550-1850 (Cambridge UP, 2007)
  • ‘Queen Victoria and India, 1837-61’, Victorian Studies, 47, 1 (Winter, 2004)
  • ‘Empire and parliamentary reform: the 1832 Reform Act revisited’ in A. Burns & J. Innes (eds.), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, c. 1780-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
  • ‘Labour and the constitution’ in D. Tanner et al (eds.), Labour's First Century (Cambridge UP, 2000)
  • ‘The 1848 revolutions and the British empire’, Past & Present 166, (Feb., 2000)
  • ‘The six points: Chartism and the reform of parliament’ in Owen Ashton et al (eds.), The Chartist Legacy (Merlin Press, 1999)
  • ‘The beginnings of modern British social history ?’, History Workshop Journal, 43, (Spring, 1997)
  • ‘John Bull and the iconography of public opinion in England, c. 1712-1929’, Past & Present, 134, (Feb., 1992)

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