Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received
The Editor
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© F.Coakley , 2026
The late Ann Harrison, writing towards the close of the 20th Century, in the period of planning for the New History gave her thoughts and plans for an academic thesis that could also provide a useful element in this history, which actually produced the volume covering the modern period post 1830 as its first published volume in 2000 - 26 years and a new publisher later there is still one volume outstanding.
In a justification of her proposed work she wrote:
The modern volume of the new Millenium History of the Isle of Man is notable in many ways. Primarily because it is the first academic investigation into the history of the Island for a century, but also because it embodies the first historical analysis based on documentary evidence of the interaction of Manx men and women in the specific grouping of the association: the voluntary, purposeful, versatile union for common action with all its concomitant information on social life in general and the social and political identities of the members in particular.
The Island has only a modest body of received and established historical information as a base for the researches of the Manx historian . The main contributors to the corpus of its written history have not been professional historians, though the first sources, from Camden and the British antiquaries, are serious contemporary records. There are also significant personal commentaries, and often useful anecdotal views, by visitors and incomers, in various capacities. As Lord, the Lord's delegated Governor, and patrolling British Customs Officer, for example. Respectively, the seventh Earl of Derby(1607-1651) William Sacheverell, Governor of the Island 1692 -1696, and George Waldron, Chief Customs Officer, c.1721. Then in the last two hundred years, among the studies of emerging local scholars, the work of a growing number of academics from many disciplines and countries
They have all contributed to the building up of the restricted source list on which the writers of this volume of the New History have necessarily based their investigations. A.W.Moore's pioneering, record-based history, whose centenary has been the inspiration of the Millenium History project, still has a part to play in Manx historical studies, but now serves chiefly as a chronological outline of the central administrative processes of church and government. The later historical insights of three geographers, R.H. Kinvig 1 in 1944, 1950 and 1975, and most recently, in 1990, Vaughan Robinson and Danny Carroll 2 are still useful, but it cannot be denied that there are many breaks and holes in the web of historical material at the historian's disposal.
In Britons 3, her recent study of the 'new' nation of Great Britain in the eighteenth century, Linda Colley comments on contemporary writing on the great developments of the period. 'To read most history books is to gain the impression that these organisational changes took place in a human vacuum'. The historiography of the Island has so far largely produced the same bleak effect. No social historian has attempted to investigate Manx society in its class divisions in the manner of R.J. Morris in his standard work on the associations of Leeds, 1820 -1850 4 and there are only two political histories, [Samuel Norris's Manx Memories and Movements , Spencer Walpole's The Land of Home Rule: an essay on the History and Constitution of the Isle of Man , London, 1893] to set against the unrecorded centuries in which, the Isle of Man, in a period of dynamic development and expansion, changed from a feudal possession into a politicised and powerful Island, a fact of life which still today goes virtually unrecognised. This has concentrated attention on relations with the British Government and the abstraction of constitutional questions rather than the study of Manx people themselves in life and action and the inner social tensions of an Island which is a microcosm of modern society in the British Isles.
The physical Island, its settlements and monuments, the 'sense of place' of Robinson and Carroll, and the acts of the old-established institutions of church and state thus still appear in isolation, bathed in a cold and impersonal, 'dawn of history light'. The activities of the proverbially Sociable, 'lively, loquacious' Manx people,N, in their various groupings and alignments, interacting with authority over the years to inform and direct the Island's development, have hardly been recognised and rarely considered in their true extent and significance. This is a critical gap in Manx knowledge which the Study of the Associations of the Isle of Man from 1764 to 1914, designed as a support to the History aims eventually to close.
She goes on to add her plans:
First the production of a directory of Manx associations of the late modern period, which will establish their range of public interests and concerns both in as firm a chronology as possible and by classified purpose, and second, through the new associational approach, the identification of the social and cultural imperatives of the Manx, in person and in the public sphere, and the evaluation of their impact and lasting effect, politically and socially, on the Island in the period covered. A first study, to be completed with expedition in support of the Manx New History project.
1 R.H.Kinvig, History of the Isle of Man(Douglas, 1944); History of the Isle of Man, (Liverpool, 1950); History of the Isle of Man, (Liverpool, 1975)
2 Vaughan Robinson, Danny McCarroll, (eds.) The Isle of Man ,Celebrating a Sense of Place (Liverpool, 1990)
3 Linda Colley, Britons, Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (Yale, 1992)
4 RJ. Morris, Class, Sect and Party : the Making of the British Middle Class, Leeds, 1820-1850 (Manchester, 1990)
Ann Harrison's papers are held by Manx Museum MS 15752 and MS 10933
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Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received
The Editor |
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