Postgraduate Spotlight: Basil Bowdler

Basil is a second-year Modern History PhD candidate investigating the Anglo-Dutch public sphere in the late seventeenth century.

Born and raised in London, Basil’s love of history was first fed by the screen. Simon Schama and Elizabeth Taylor (i.e., Cleopatra) were early heroes of his. It took a little longer for Basil to appreciate historic buildings, though. Visiting the Vatican at age fourteen he flatly commented ‘I don’t believe in God, what am I doing here?’ Basil’s dad, a long-term employee at English Heritage, was speechless. Thankfully for his dad, Basil was lucky enough to be taught by three charismatic and passionate history teachers (Henley Henley-Smith, James Newton, and Benjamin Dabby), who helped him to focus his enthusiasm for history. After finishing school, Basil spent a year working in his local pub and travelled from St Petersburg to Shanghai by train. He firmly resists calling this a gap year.

When he went on to study history at Oxford, Basil was initially drawn to late-medieval Britain. His undergraduate dissertation explored the masculinity of Edward III and his court’s chivalric culture. A second-year lecture on mass communication in fourteenth-century England was a watershed moment which ignited Basil’s interest in public politics and political communication. Two factors were decisive in his pivot towards the seventeenth century. The first was a third-year paper on Britain during the turbulent years of the Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. The second was another film, The Draughtsman’s Contract. Having swallowed the Kool-Aid of all those wigs and flowery words, Basil went to Cambridge to study an MPhil in Early Modern History. There are many ways to look after yourself during a global pandemic. Spending nine months mostly in one room writing about patriotism and xenophobia during the reign of William III is not necessarily one of them.

After a year back in London, Basil began his PhD in St Andrews in autumn 2022. His thesis focuses on Anglo-Dutch diplomacy and public relations from 1685 to 1713. In the face of a Dutch invasion of Britain and a century of economic and political conflict between the two peoples, how did the English and the Dutch manage to fight together against France for twenty-five years? Basil is trying to answer this question by focusing on the activities of Anglo-Dutch diplomats. Rather than viewing diplomacy as an elite and rather secretive business, he is keen to emphasise the lengths that seventeenth-century diplomats went to in order to actively shape public opinion abroad.

Alongside his PhD, Basil is an associate of the Universal Short Title Catalogue and blog editor for the Northern Early Modern Network. He set up the St Andrews Early Modern Workshop this year, along with Zachary Brookman. At the end of the day, Basil goes back to St Salvator’s Hall, where he’s an Assistant Warden.

When he’s not struggling to translate Dutch pamphlets or shutting down parties at 3am, Basil likes to unwind with a book or by going for a run. He’s finally come round to visiting old buildings too and is enjoying exploring the history of Scotland through its castles and churches. He still enjoys going to the cinema, though there’s always the risk that a good historical epic will convince him to go off and study something apart from the seventeenth century.

Read more at the St Andrews School of History blog.