Short Bio

Robin Ganev is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Regina where she has taught since 2006. She specializes in eighteenth-century British Social history, particularly the history of popular ballads and popular protest. She also teaches courses on early modern and modern Britain, the history of the British Empire, and Russian history. Her recent work has focused on how ballads reflected attitudes toward charity in the decades leading up to the New Poor Law of 1834 and on ballads protesting commodity taxation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Research

Current research explores the question of why we see so little opposition to taxes and tax collectors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when seventeenth-century English taxpayers were so reluctant to accept new taxes (indeed, one could say the whole Civil War was fought over taxation).The eighteenth century is a time when the state became much more efficient at taxing the population and much better at enforcing the law. It would appear that taxes were now seen as more legitimate than in the past. Yet the eighteenth and nineteenth-century state was not a welfare state, and so could not provide the kinds of services that are seen to legitimate taxation in the modern industrialized world. Taxes were primarily used to pay the expenses of government and to wage war. Why, then, were people more willing to put up with new taxes? Popular ballads provide a clue as to how the population viewed taxation. They suggest that there was still considerable anger and resistance whenever a new tax was levied, and that commodity taxes in particular were deeply unpopular.

Courses Taught

History 225: Tudor and Stuart Britain
History 226: The Powerful versus the Poor: The Evolution of Modern Britain
History 286: The Russian Empire Since Ivan the Terrible
History 322: Sex and the City: the Pursuit of Pleasure in Britain Since 1500
History 321: The Politics of Crowds: Popular Protest in Britain Since 1700
History 422: From Wife Sales to Princess Di: Popular Culture Since 1700

Recent Publications

Songs of Protest, Songs of Love: Popular Ballads in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.