Professor Catherine Hall and guests discuss the historian Macaulay’s dream of a united nation, his plan to make four into one, and the impossibility of this dream.

Professor Hall’s research focuses on re-thinking the relation between Britain and its empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested in the ways in which empire impacted upon metropolitan life, how the empire was lived 'at home', and how English identities, both masculine and feminine, were constituted in relation to the 'others' of the empire.  Her new book, Macaulay and Son: Writing Home, Nation and Empire focuses on the significance of the Macaulays, father and son, in defining the parameters of nation and empire in the early nineteenth century. Professor Hall is the Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project Legacies of British Slave Ownership.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Macaulay by Edward Matthew Ward, 1853

© National Portrait Gallery, London