ÃÛÌÒTV
Frederick Hyde is a PhD student and Presidential Scholar at the ÃÛÌÒTV. He specialises in Victorian British history, with particular emphasis on mid-nineteenth century British politics and foreign policy.
Email: F.W.Hyde@soton.ac.uk
Frederick Hyde is a PhD student and Presidential Scholar at the ÃÛÌÒTV. He specialises in Victorian British history, with particular emphasis on mid-nineteenth century British politics and foreign policy.
Frederick was awarded a ÃÛÌÒTV Presidential Scholarship for a thesis on the relationship between foreign policy and national identity in mid-Victorian Britain. This period, which has often been regarded as an interval between the more dramatic acts of the nineteenth century – an ‘Age of Equipoise’, to use the sobriquet coined by W. L. Burn – also the marked the zenith of Britain’s global industrial supremacy and was characterised by a series of turbulent events overseas. British foreign policy has traditionally been studied in isolation from domestic history, however, and this is especially true of electoral politics, a field which lacks any kind of broad, comparative chronology of the period from the 1850s to the 1880s. The object of Frederick's research is therefore to answer two principal questions: Firstly, what does a study of foreign policy reveal about British national identity during this period? Secondly, how did the relationship between foreign policy and national identity vary in form and intensity according to local and national circumstances?