In 1796, as Britain fought endless wars within Europe and overseas, one of the three leading theorists of the picturesque, Uvedale Price, contemplated the ideal relationship between landscapes and visual arts:

Living through the French Revolution and its aftermath, Price here suggests that the only semblance of stability could be found in the vindication of the established order. This is evident in his advocacy of the preservation and heightening of the features of a given landscape. The result is a blend of politics and aesthetic choices that necessitates framing one correctly in order to truly appreciate the other.

As ethnic competition gained momentum on the local level, similar developments occurred at the regional level. Decolonization in the postwar period involved constitutional reform and the slow development of African political parties. The British government used constitutional reform to ensure its political and economic interest to maintain the status quo, while emerging African political parties engaged constitutional reform to make various claims for self-determination. The British government insisted African political parties operate at the regional level and discouraged any efforts to form broad, multi-ethnic, cross-regional nationalist parties, such as the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) had aimed for. By 1952, broad nationalist sentiments had distilled into a regionally focused politics. In this context, ethnic majorities within each region had more power than their minority counterparts. The emerging regionalist politics informed the development of a minority consciousness among Niger Delta elites in the 1950s, and they engaged the constitutional reform process through their positions as minorities to claim the right to self-determination.

This chapter surveys the role of quantitative methods in diachronic studies which investigate the past and present stages of English. We begin with simple bivariate analyses, such as tracing frequency developments, discuss inferential models and explain the advantages of multifactorial (including hierarchical) modelling. Moreover, we trace changing productivity, association strengths, lexical biases and collocational preferences within constructions. We also discuss methods for exploratory analysis of multidimensional data and provide a brief overview of methods drawing from machine learning and other scientific disciplines (e.g. word embeddings and agent-based modeling). To illustrate our methodological points, we include small-scale hands-on analyses on the variation between will and be going to constructions as markers of future-time reference from the ARCHER and COHA corpora.

Thirty-two years after Debendranath dictated and wrote out Brāhmo Dharma, the reformer, writer, and public intellectual Keshab Chandra Sen (Figure 3.1) created a unique institution titled “Pilgrimages to Saints.” From 1880, and lasting only a few years, this featured historical pageants to great figures in the history of religion, from the Prophet Muhammad, to Caitanya, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other wise men drawn from across time and space. Drawing from the spirit of comparative religion embodied most clearly by Max Müller, this pilgrimages project transcended mere appreciation of texts or ideas. Drawing from the European intellectual traditions he admired, it rather featured a synthesis of a diversity of texts and appreciation for non-textual sources. This approach, defined by him as “subjective” and which “endeavors to convert outward facts and characters into facts of consciousness,”1 included the facts and character traits of Jesus Christ, as well as a host of other individuals in religious history. Included in this line of saints were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, prominent North Americans central to the mid-nineteenth-century history of religion, as analyzed in chapter 2.

Alive from 1838 to 1884, living through the 1857–1858 rebellions, which shook India, the British Empire, and the world, Keshab emerged as a figure who would pioneer new definitions of religion, building upon the comparative religious scholarship of Rammohan and Debendranath.

The vernacular historiographical tradition has evolved since the ninth century through merging core genres like annals, chronicles and historical narrative with empirical antiquarian treatises. It became clearly distinguished from religious and fictional writing only in post-medieval times, thus also adapting its concept of truth and its methods. While its earlier history is best described by way of a discourse tradition (Koch), a Wengerian community of practice emerges in the late modern period. Starting off as a purely narrative text-type, historiographical writing developed into a typical narrative–expository–argumentative conglomerate over the early and late modern periods. The heteroglossia so typical of historiography becomes less literary or dramatic and more evidential in nature, also evolving citation styles and footnotes. The evaluative and ideological potential of historiography is present from the start and realised by such means as group/person labels, evaluative lexis and superlatives.

During the 1730s, the nawab of Bengal, Shuja Khan, warned the Mughal court in Delhi against the renewal of the EIC's commercial rights, the most important of these being the duty-free trade farman granted by Emperor Farukhsiyar in 1717. According to him, although it had previously been possible for the Mughals to maintain control over them, the EIC had now become exceedingly entrenched in Bengal and could undermine the very imperial framework that had allowed and facilitated their presence in the first instance. The nawab made a rather stark assessment of the Company's affairs, stating:

As subsequent events were to prove, Shuja Khan was not wrong. While conventional narratives of Britain's imperial art usually commence with the late eighteenth century, imaginative visions of India had begun to permeate English visual arts earlier on. However, colonial overtures until that point take on a layer of meaning that remains to be fully explored.

To study the history of spoken English is to study its extant vestiges in written texts. This chapter draws upon work that connects speech and writing in historical English to present a framework for contextualising written documents and the particularities of their relationships to spoken language. It examines how written English represents spoken English through different styles and genres of text and across different chronological periods. A late medieval deposition might provide certain clues to the English spoken at the time owing to the non-standard orthography and the regional morphosyntax. By contrast, a contemporary poem might provide different clues to the twentieth-century English spoken in the Caribbean owing to the representation of local English through lexical, syntactic and orthographic means. Neither of these is a perfectly faithful record of speech, however, and each reflects different constraints of genre, style, writing practices and pragmatic pressures in the Englishes that they depict.

Generative approaches to synchronic linguistics attempt to describe what is part of a language in a mathematically precise way, and generative approaches to the history of English and other languages model diachronic changes as a sequence of stages of the language with differing formal properties. Formalising the grammars of these stages makes falsifiable predictions about what was grammatical in each stage. Generative accounts include phonological analysis, but this chapter focuses on accounts of morphosyntactic changes. Generativists take child language acquisition to be the locus of language change, which is assumed to occur when children are exposed to different Primary Linguistic Data from what older generations encountered, due to factors like phonological change and language contact. Syntactic changes that have been studied extensively within generative frameworks include the development of modal and other auxiliary verbs, clausal negation and changes in word order, particularly in the positioning of the tensed verb.