Dr Lindsay Aqui was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy (2019–2020). Prior to joining POLIS in 2018, she completed a PhD in history and politics at Queen Mary University of London. Her thesis explored the UK’s relationship with the European Community in the period from British accession on 1 January 1973 to the referendum on 5 June 1975. Before starting her doctorate, Lindsay was a civil servant in the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills.
Following her ESRC fellowship Lindsay started a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Westminster. She is writing a prosopography of the British officials and politicians that worked in the European Commission between 1973 and 1992.
Research interests
Lindsay’s research focuses on modern British politics and international history, with a particular emphasis on UK-EU relations. She is interested in the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy; post-1945 international history; the history of international institutions; and the history of the UK’s Conservative Party.
Her first book is published by Manchester University Press, under the title The First Referendum: Reassessing Britain’s Entry to Europe, 1973–75. It explores the UK’s early experiences of European Community (EC) membership under the government of Edward Heath, the renegotiation conducted by Harold Wilson’s government, and the 1975 referendum which ultimately confirmed the UK’s membership of the EC by a majority of 67 per cent.
Key publications
Lindsay Aqui, The First Referendum: Reassessing Britain’s Entry to Europe, 1973–75 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). Link: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526145192/
Lindsay Aqui, Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, ‘’The Empire of England’: Enoch Powell, Sovereignty and the Constitution of the Nation’, Twentieth Century British History (2020). DOI: doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwaa022
Lindsay Aqui, ‘Government Policy and Propaganda in the 1975 Referendum on European Community Membership’, Contemporary British History 34:1 (2020): pp. 1–21. DOI: doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2019.1588115
Lindsay Aqui, Contingency Planning: The 1975 and 2016 Referendums, Bennett Institute Research Report, jointly published with UK in a Changing Europe, March 2019. Link: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/publications/contingency-planning-1975-and-2016-referendums/
Lindsay Aqui, ‘Macmillan, Nkrumah and the 1961 Application for European Economic Community Membership’, The International History Review 39:4 (2017): pp. 575–591. DOI: doi.org/1080/07075332.2016.1245675
