Jonathan Parry

Jonathan Philip Parry (born 1957), commonly referred to as Jon Parry, is emeritus professor of Modern British History at the University of Cambridge and Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College. He has specialised in 19th and 20th century British political and cultural history and has developed a later interest in the relationship between Britain and the Ottoman Empire.

Parry was born in 1957. He was educated at Dover Grammar School for Boys before matriculating at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1975, subsequently becoming a Fellow of that college before moving to Pembroke College in 1992. In 2009 he was appointed as a professor in the university's history faculty.

Parry was for some time the Director of the Isaac Newton Trust, a post that he relinquished in 2015 when he took academic leave. He was President of Pembroke College in 2018–2019.

A revised version of Parry's PhD thesis, which had been supervised by Derek Beales, was published in 1986 as Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party 1867-1875. A review of this noted that Parry was from a similar school of thought as Maurice Cowling, another Petrean don of whom he later wrote various posthumous accounts.

The scholarly literature on British historiography includes Parry as a leader of the Cambridge school of modern politics, as shown by Alex Middleton in 2021.

A festschrift was published in Parry's honour in October 2024, a year after his retirement, titled Culture, Thought and Belief in British Political Life since 1800: Essays in Honour of Jonathan Parry. Edited by Paul Readman and Geraint Thomas, the contributors included David Cannadine, Michael Bentley and Boyd Hilton.

Works

• Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal party, 1867-1875 (Cambridge, 1986)
• The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain. Yale University Press (New Haven & London, 1993). ISBN 978-0-300-06718-7.
• Parliament and the Church, 1529-1960 (ed. with Stephen Taylor, 2000)
• "The impact of Napoleon III on British politics, 1851-1880," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2001)
• The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, national identity and Europe 1830-1886 (Cambridge, 2006)
• Benjamin Disraeli (Oxford, 2007)
• Liberalism and liberty, in Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, ed. P. Mandler (Oxford, 2007)
• "Whig monarchy, Whig nation: Crown, politics and representativeness, 1880-2000," in The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the present, ed. A. Olechnowicz (Cambridge, 2007)
• "The decline of institutional reform in nineteenth-century Britain," in Structures and Transformations in Modern British History, ed. D . Feldman and J. Lawrence (Cambridge, 2011)
• "Steam power and British influence in Baghdad, 1820-1860," Historical Journal (March 2013)

Further reading

• Bahners, Patrick. "Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain, 1993." Francia 22.3 (1995): 228–229. online in German
• Middleton, Alex. "‘High Politics’ and its Intellectual Contexts." Parliamentary History 40.1 (2021): 168–191. online

External links

• Blog entries at gov.uk