Speaker:  Professor David Armitage, Harvard University

Chair: Professor Richard English, Queen's University Belfast

About the Lecture

Founding documents are parsed, revered and preserved but they can also be misread, mythologised and overlooked. This lecture examines the entangled fates of two such documents, the Scots “Declaration of Arbroath” (1320) and the US Declaration of Independence (1776), at a moment between the 700^th anniversary of the one and the 250^th anniversary of the other. It shows that the two “declarations” were both diplomatic texts, rhetorically shaped, and part of sequences of similar documents that have been largely forgotten. Some recent commentators  have suggested that Arbroath influenced the US Declaration; on the contrary, I argue that the Declaration influenced Arbroath, at least in its reception and its construction as an alleged charter of Scottish independence. I conclude by presenting fresh evidence for the presence of Arbroath in Philadelphia in 1776, to reflect on the sometimes surprising ways in which documents become, or do not become, foundational.

About the Speaker

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches intellectual history and international history. He is an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, an Honorary Professor at Queen's University Belfast and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. He was educated at the University of Cambridge and Princeton University; before moving to Harvard in 2004, he taught for eleven years at Columbia University. A prize-winning teacher and writer, he has lectured on six continents and has held research fellowships and visiting positions in Australia, Britain, China, France, Germany, South Korea and the United States. David Armitage is the author or editor of eighteen books, most recently Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017). Among his earlier works are The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), which won the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), which was chosen as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013) and The History Manifesto (co-auth., 2014), a New Statesman Book of the Year and one of the Chronicle of Higher Education's most influential books of the past 20 years.

In 2006, the National Maritime Museum in London awarded him its Caird Medal for “conspicuously important work ... of a nature that involves communicating with the public” and in 2008 Harvard named him a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for “achievements and scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history or art”. In 2015, he received Cambridge University's highest degree, the LittD, for “distinction by some original contribution to the advancement of science or of learning”. He is a Corresponding Member of the Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid; a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities; and a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea.

The Lecture is funded by the R M Jones Bequest, administered by the Alumni Engagement and Philanthropy Office at Queen's University Belfast.