While there, he wrote two essays comparing Shakespeare and classical Greek drama in 1850 and 1851,[6] the latter of which won him a Beaufoy Prize, now held by the Heberden Coin Room, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

[11] Seeley developed his own approach to reconciling religion with the needs of modern society, which bore fruit in 1865 with his first published book, Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ.

In 1869 Gladstone, having become Prime Minister the previous year, bore the duty of recommending a new Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, an appointment that went to Seeley despite his lack of publications in the field, after two other preferred candidates dropped out.

[2] Despite his Cambridge appointment, the couple maintained their main home in London until 1880, although Seeley often stayed in lodgings at the University in term time.

"[14] and proposed to investigate these by studying Jesus biographically, without relying on the established views of religious authorities but looking at "the facts themselves, critically weighed".

[15][16] It purports to show how Jesus, through the impressiveness of his personality and the brilliance of his plan, created a "divine society...that...has extended over a large and the most highly civilised portion of the earth's surface, and...continues full of vigour at the present day",[17] and how, for the members of this society, Jesus "raised the feeling of humanity from being a feeble restraining power to be an inspiring passion".

But others found it to be a sincere-sounding defence of faith for the modern-minded from the more extreme scepticism propounded in the Lives of Jesus written by David Strauss and Ernest Renan.

Its anonymous status also added a significant dimension to the controversy surrounding its publication, as readers sought to discover the author's identity.

George Eliot, John Henry Newman, William Ewart Gladstone and Napoleon III were some of the more well-known figures believed to have written the book.

Written in his best manner, that essay answered to his theory that history should be used for a practical purpose and pointed out how and why Britain gained its colonies and India, the character of the British Empire and the light in which it should be regarded.

[30] His last book, The Growth of British Policy, written as an essay and intended to be an introduction to a full account of the expansion of Britain, was published posthumously.

[27] Inagaki Manjiro dedicated his Japan and the Pacific and the Japanese View of the Eastern Question (1890) to Seeley, who had taught him at Caius College.

Correspondence to and from Seeley, including that relating to the publication of and reactions to Ecce Homo, is held by the archives in Senate House Library.

In 1968 the Seeley moved to the Sidgwick Site of Cambridge University as part of the new History Faculty building designed by James Stirling.

Seeley wrote that the first chapter of the history of British India "embraces chronologically the first half of George III's reign, that stormy period of transition in English history when at the same time America was lost and India won... [and] covers the two great careers of Robert Clive and Hastings... [T]he end of the struggle is marked by the reign of Lord Cornwallis, which began in 1785".

Seeley was far more astute than many later imperial historians, as he complained that very transformation had made possible a national amnesia about the significance of empire in the history of England itself.

His lectures were filled with a critique of the blinkers of English historiography: "They [our historians] make too much of the parliamentary wrangle and the agitations about liberty, in all which matters the eighteenth century of England was but a pale reflection of the seventeenth.