by Dr. Peter Hill (Christ Church) and Dr. Hussein Omar (Pembroke) University of Oxford (workshop organisers) ‘Beyond Circulation: The Intellectual and the Material in the History of the Arab Nahda’ is an international research workshop to be held at the University of Oxford between 21 and 23 June 2018, organised by Peter Hill and Hussein Omar. It is supported by the University of Oxford via the John Fell OUP Research Fund and the History Faculty’s Sanderson Fund, and by the Past & Present Society via a conference grant. The Arab ‘Awakening’ or Nahda of the long nineteenth century has been the object of a growing number of new histories. In these recent works, the Nahda has been regarded as the paradigmatic moment of social transformation, as Middle Eastern society was brought into ever more intense contact with expanding European imperialism and global capitalism. Yet this rich and emergent historiography has tended to be methodologically divided: with those who primarily examine the material – or how the region was integrated into the capitalist world-system – and those who predominantly examine the cultural-intellectual – or attempts to reconcile modernity with tradition – remaining unreconciled. This three-day workshop, leading to a special issue of […]

from Dr. Alison Hudson (British Library) Showcasing the latest research on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts To coincide with the British Library’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition, the Library is holding a two-day international conference with papers by leading scholars in the fields of history, literature and art history. This will be followed by a one-day symposium for early career researchers on 15 December. These multidisciplinary, international events will re-evaluate the roles and uses of writing, manuscripts and inscribed objects in early medieval England and beyond, during a period when uses of writing and writing technologies changed and expanded considerably. Papers will cover libraries and readers, objects inscribed in runes, highly illuminated manuscripts, literary manuscripts and documentary writing up to Domesday Book. The papers will place the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in wider geographical, cultural and political contexts. The conference will begin with a keynote lecture on ‘The European context of manuscript illumination in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, 600–900’, given by Professor Lawrence Nees, and will conclude with a second keynote lecture on ‘Exon Domesday, the English and the Normans’, by Professor Julia Crick. reserved The conference will also include a private view of the exhibition. Tickets Two-day tickets are available for the International Conference only, on Thursday 13 and […]

by the Past & Present editorial team We were delighted to hear that Dr. Jamie Kreiner (University of Georgia) recently was awarded the Agricultural History Society’s Wayne D. Rasmussen Award. Dr. Kreiner received the award for her article “Pigs in the Flesh and Fisc: An Early Medieval Ecology” which was published in Past & Present last summer (No. 236, pp. 3-42). The Agricultural History Society awards the Wayne D. Rasmussen prize annually “for the best article on agricultural history published outside [the Society’s own] journal Agricultural History in the preceding twelve months. In addition to the honour of the prize, recipients are granted a year’s membership of the Society, free registration at their annual conference and two hundred US Dollars in cash. In recognition of Dr. Kreiner’s achievement and to ensure the widest possible readership for her award winning research, out publishers OUP Academic have made “Pigs in the Flesh and Fisc” free to access until 29th June 2018. It also offers our web editor an excuse once again to share “The Pig[er] Picture” Dr. Kreiner’s blog post about her research which he considers “amongst the most exuberant things [he] has ever published”.   

Dr. Chris Evans (University of South Wales) and Dr. Göran Rydén (Uppsala University) What took us so long? We first got interested in “voyage iron”, one of the currencies of the Atlantic slave trade, two decades back, so why does our (open access) article on the subject only appear in Past & Present in 2018? Archival research takes time, of course, but not always twenty years. The real reason lies in our failure to ask the right questions. So, not so much “What took us so long?”, more “Why were we so obtuse?”. Voyage iron came to our attention in the late 1990s. Like so many historians at the time, we were trying to push at the boundaries of Atlantic History. We were convinced that early modern Sweden had an unsuspected Atlantic dimension, one provided by its iron industry, which exported huge volumes of bar iron to Britain. As late as the 1780s, it should be remembered, most iron on the British market was shipped in from the Baltic. In some sectors of the economy there was total reliance on Swedish material. Every steel manufacturer in Britain, for example, depended upon high-grade Swedish iron. That had important Atlantic consequences. It meant […]

from Prof. Peter Jones (University of Birmingham) We are delighted to let you know that the programme of A Date with History – the second edition of our annual Franco-British collaboration with the York Festival of Ideas – is now available! Over the 9th and 10th June, this second edition Imagining Revolutions will bring together top historians including Peter Mandler of the University of Cambridge, Laura Lee Downs of the European University Institute, Florence Tamagne of the University of Lille, Helen Rogers of Liverpool John Moores University, Mike Savage of the London School of Economics (LSE) and David Andress of the University of Portsmouth! Over the weekend, leading historians from France and the UK will discuss how national narratives are written, from revolutions and empires, to the industrial revolutions in France and Britain during the following panel discussions: –          Were the 1960s a Revolution? (Sat 9 June, 12.30pm – 2pm) –          Revolutions and Empires (Sat 9 June, 2.30 – 4pm) –          Gender Revolutions (Sat 9 June, 4.30 – 6pm) –          Industrial Revolutions and Social Welfare in France and Britain (Sun 10 June, 11am – 12.30pm) –          Revolutions in History Writing (Sun 10 June, 1.30pm – 3pm) –          A Revolution in Universities (Sun 10 June, 3.30pm – 5pm) We are looking forward to welcoming you! We would be grateful if you could spread the word around […]