Jake Bransgrove, interviewed by Tiéphaine Thomason
Historian Highlight is an ongoing series sharing the research experiences of historians in the History Faculty in Cambridge and beyond. For our latest post, we sat down with Jake Bransgrove, a second-year PhD candidate at Trinity Hall, who will be taking over our Historian Highlight series this academic year. We discuss what he calls his ‘maximalist’ approach to research, archival finds, and what makes ‘good’ historical writing.
What are you currently researching?
My research takes three prongs. The first is my PhD research, which looks at Sir Joseph Banks. I’m interested in how he built his influence and how that depended on the cultivation of a vast and multifaceted social network. I call this his ‘associational world’. The second prong – on architecture and empire – is based on my studies of the English architect Sir Herbert Baker, and his architecture in England especially. As for the third prong, which concerns a general interest in the society and culture of the long-eighteenth century, I’m currently quite interested in ceramics – Wedgwood especially – but also in the crowd politics of urban spaces.
What led you to research these topics?
They all came from different places. My interest in Banks started when I was a student in Auckland, where I’m from. I was tasked with transcribing a selection of letters between Banks and others, as well as James Cook and others. At the time I was doing a master’s thesis on the Great Fire of London and how the politics of the period conditioned responses to it. I was interested in the Royal Society, and this justified an exposure to Banks, who was its President for forty-two years. I’d thought about Banks as someone very peculiar. I had this notion that his influence, as I saw it, extended from his social contacts – and this is borne out in the historiography. That was the basis of the PhD.
My other big interest is in architectural history. Baker was the architect of a postgraduate residence I lived at when I was at The Courtauld in London – a place called Goodenough College. He was the architect of the main building, London House. When I first arrived, I found it a curious design and I started looking into it, and that took me to Baker and to his broader œuvre. From this, I realised that there was space to look at Baker from a historiographical point of view. I continued on with that task and I’m still doing it!
Keeping with Banks – you’ve alluded to there being some very interesting scholarship on him out there. What would you say is the most exciting material available on him?
In terms of Banks and his archive – it’s vast. This has furnished past studies of Banks very well. He specialised as a botanist and was also embedded in what has been called the ‘Second British Empire’ by some historians of the late-eighteenth century.
His endeavours, which tended towards public improvement, lent themselves to the cause of empire as he saw it. The main way in which this was done, according to historians such as Richard Drayton – and also John Gascoigne to an extent – was through plant transfers and the management of biota between the wider empire as it was developing.[1] London and especially Kew Gardens, which Banks was very important in developing, became a kind of entrepôt for biota and especially plant life. The historiography on Banks covers this and draws from a vast paper archive – which is itself far-flung. Harold Carter, who has written the best biography of Banks, spent much of his life figuring out where most of Banks’s archive was, copying it and collating it on microfilm.[2] This is an ongoing enterprise which Neil Chambers now looks at.[3]
Though the majority of Banks’s archive is paper, I think that the most interesting part of it is its visual and material aspects. These have not really been given their due. Where they have been discussed, this has been with regards to exploration and empire, by scholars such as Bernard Smith and Harriet Guest.[4] The material aspect to the archive of Banks characterises what I think of as my approach. That is, looking to incorporate the study of objects into a study of social networks. This has also driven me into the direction of science and technology studies, as well as sociology, looking at people like Bruno Latour and John Law.[5]
Building on this – what’s one of your favourite historical sources?
Something that I’ve made a special study of is India House, which is another one of what Baker called his ‘empire houses’ in London, and it was designed as and continued to be the High Commission of India. I find that fascinating. It encapsulates the things about Baker that are most of interest, both as an architect and as a figure of empire. One of those things is the importance of interior spaces. He’s been much maligned as an architect with his work in England. That’s partly because a lot of the good work he did in England is inside these buildings, which are not necessarily open to the public. And, where they are open to the public, it’s a dribble of visitors who don’t know what they’re looking at! India House is very interesting from this point of view and from the perspective of – I hesitate to use the word hybridisation – the coming together of multiple cultures all in one place.
If I wanted to pinpoint one object instead of a building, it would be what Baker called his ‘empire clocks.’ One of these exists in London House and it’s one of the more interesting aspects of the place. What they did was show the time in England and, at the same time, they had a second revolving dial that showed the time across different places in the empire. There’s something to be said there about time and empire, time and power, and the material trace of that. Baker also worked with his son in making these. There’s something very personal about these too, as he’s almost putting his son into these buildings through these objects. I’m still thinking about this – how there’s a very personal touch at play there, but it’s also speaking to questions of empire.
You spend a lot of time with objects and in the archive – so what would you say is your best or most unusual experience in an archive?
There are various archives for Banks that I’m yet to come to. But for Baker, I had one experience in the Royal Institute of British Architects Drawings and Archives Collection. I went there on my own a couple of years ago now. The material that was in there was uncatalogued and I didn’t know what was in these particular drawing packets. They’re A1-sized, so they’re very large, and you really hurt your back clawing over and opening these things, stretching them, and moving these – often quite tatty – drawings around. These are drawings which, for the most part, have just been shoved in cupboards or in drawers.
I was going through the material, folder after folder, and I was quite struck by what I was finding. It was mostly drawn, visual material from Baker’s office. Some of it was by Baker himself, though most of it was by his assistants. I found a piece in there which I had been tracking down. It was an original watercolour of the exhibition room at India House. It’s a phenomenal piece. When I came across it, it was mixed in with a bunch of ecclesiastical drawings – and I thought ‘oh, how about that?’ I had seen versions of it, but that was the piece.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given as a historian?
What comes to mind is advice about teaching – and it wasn’t specifically given to me, it was something I found in a book –a collection of essays by Eric Hobsbawm.[6] There was something in there on teaching as a historian. What he says is that we, as teachers, aren’t there for the people that do very well – the people who sail through assignments. We’re here for the people who are at the other end of the spectrum, who are finding it more difficult.
There’s a tendency to have a favourite student in someone who is doing very well, but we should be spending more time with those struggling to help them develop their skills. I think about it a lot, especially since contact hours are so rare these days, and they’re getting rarer and rarer. That’s something that I carry with me.
And the worst?
I won’t name names, but I did have somebody say something about their practice in the archive when working on twentieth-century sources, which I disagree with. They said that when they were going through a mountain of correspondence or memoranda, most of it would be typewritten, and they could get through that very easily. But when they came to a handwritten thing, they would just skip it. As someone who has worked with seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century documents, I think this is kind of atrocious.
That material is almost more revealing. There’s something more intimate about somebody’s hand. This especially comes out with architectural draughtsmen; you can learn a lot about the person from the way that they’re drawing. It becomes quite literally a signature. To simply brush that away because it’s too difficult was borderline reprehensible.
We’ve talked quite a bit about sources, but less about historical writing. What, to you, makes good writing in this field?
This is something I think a lot about, because I think that history as a discipline grows out of a tradition of rhetoric, in a humanistic vein. I think that my favourite historians, almost without question, are good writers. I think that they tend to be imaginative, they know how – not even how to tell a story – to communicate the human aspects of the story. Two people come to mind, at least right now.
One of them is Alan Bray, whose book The Friend is one of my favourite books of history.[7] That’s a very human book. It was published posthumously, and I think it’s a distillation of everything that he was capable of, at least in a historical sense. It really cuts to the heart of the matter, which is saving people’s experiences from oblivion.
Someone else who comes to mind is William Cronon, particularly the first thing I read of his, called ‘Kennecott Journey: The Paths Out of Town.’[8] It’s usually thrown in the mix with global history and transnational history and things like that. It tells the story of this small village in Alaska, which became a copper boom town, and draws the connections between this small ‘isolated’ place and the wider world in terms of who needed copper. I used it when I was a tutor at the University of Auckland, with a first-year global history paper. Students would be in one of two camps. Either they would find it nonsensical, or think it was doing a very good job. It almost skipped over what we think of as history – it was that good.
Building on this, what’s the most interesting historical piece you’ve either read, listened to or watched within the last month?
I’ve recently read a biography of James Lees-Milne, who was an English architectural historian and was very important in the early history of the National Trust.[9] He was also an inveterate diarist, and will probably be remembered in time for his diaries. I found him to be a fascinating character. He’s one of those people you know is connected to a lot of influential people, but whose story hasn’t been told yet – until this biography. I really like individuals like him, people with very rich inner lives, and very rich outer lives, who do a lot, and who are often in the company of other interesting people. I think of Brian Eno’s notion of ‘scenius.’ It’s the collective which produces the conditions for great works of art – it’s not just the ‘genius,’ it’s the ‘scenius.’
If you could make people read one book that conveyed the importance of your area of research, what would it be?
A book which encapsulates a lot of what I like to do, want to do, or aspire to do, is John Brewer’s The Pleasures of the Imagination.[10] It’s a big beefy tome, but it’s a product of many years of work. Brewer’s very interesting because he made that shift from political to cultural and social history – very much like J. H. Plumb, who was known to him. That would be indicative of what I would like to do as a historian.
How do you keep yourself excited by your research?
It’s very hard to remain excited – for lack of a better word – about a topic, day after day after day. Before I go further, I should say, losing excitement is normal, everyone feels that way sometimes, and you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it if you’re a young historian, as I am, or a younger historian, as others may be.
At least with the main thing that you’re doing – and let’s say that’s a PhD project– devise something that is rich and multifaceted so that you have variety in-built into the project itself. Otherwise, I like to jump between different projects which are at a reasonable distance from each other. It’s a kind of maximalist approach to the reading and writing and thinking of history. It allows me to maintain momentum, because I can move at the same pace just in different places. It keeps me very busy, which is fun, but is also something which I don’t expect to be the case forever!
And finally, what is your ‘must-do’ Cambridge experience?
As a student, I would say to dine at as many of the colleges as is possible, which I think is a nice little mission, especially if you’re here for a three- or four-year degree! As a tourist my mind goes to the architecture – I can’t help it – I think the Wren Library at Trinity College is an absolute must. Such a brilliant building!
[1] See Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000); John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
[2] Harold B. Carter, Sir Joseph Banks, 1743-1820 (London: British Museum (Natural History), 1987).
[3] See the Sir Joseph Banks Archive Project, https://www.ntu.ac.uk/research/groups-and-centres/projects/the-sir-joseph-banks-archive-project.-registered-charity-1116997.
[4] Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages, 2nd edn.(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); Harriet Guest, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: James Cook, William Hodges, and the Return to the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
[5] See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and John Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination (London: Routledge, 1991).
[6] Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Abacus, 2002).
[7] Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003).
[8] William Cronon, ‘Kennecott Journey: The Paths out of Town,’ in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, eds. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992).
[9] Michael Bloch, James Lees-Milne: The Life (London: John Murray, 2009).
[10] John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (London: Harper-Collins, 1997).
Doing History in Public 