by the Past & Present editorial team Edited by Prof. Renaud Morieux (Pembroke, University of Cambridge) and Jeppe Mulich (City, University of London) 2024’s Past & Present supplement “Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World” is the seventeenth that the journal has published. It can be accessed here via the website of the journal’s publisher Oxford University Press. From “Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World’s” the Back Matter “This Supplement is premised on the notion that oceans were governed and not lawless spaces. Although this idea is now widely shared, the scholarship still tends to focus, on the one hand, on governance and regulatory frameworks, and on the other, on forms of resistance. The concept of `ordering’ enables historians to bypass this dichotomy. The structural changes that took place between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, with respect to state formation, empires, global trade and migrations, were inherently the product of inter-imperial and interpolitical dynamics, processes that happened at sea and not just on land. A focus on the water margins and the polyglot peoples inhabiting them shows how much these changes were shaped from below and from the peripheries. The contributors give centre stage to the plurality of actors, both […]

Dr. Dan Haines (University College London) For Jean Kingdon-Ward, the night of 15 August 1950 should have been ordinary. She and her husband Francis, a well known British botanist, were travelling in the borderlands between northeast India and Tibet, looking for plants. All seemed calm. Suddenly, a huge earthquake shook the ground underneath their tent. Jean wrote in her memoir, ‘I felt the camp bed on which I was lying give a sharp jolt . . . The realization of what was happening was instantaneous, and with a shout of “Earthquake!” I was out of bed’. Despite feeling many earthquakes during her years in the region, this was the first time she experienced ‘the uttermost depths of human fear’. ‘Incredibly’, she went on, ‘after an interval that can only be measured in terms of eternity, we found ourselves back in the more familiar dimensions of space and time’. Frank also wrote about the experience. ‘I find it very difficult to recollect my emotions during the four or five minutes the shock lasted’, he wrote in the scientific journal Nature, ‘but the first feeling of bewilderment — an incredulous astonishment that these solid-looking hills were in the grip of a force […]

by Dr. Sarah Moxey (Open University) Over the last decade or so contemporary Scottish politics has been a dominant topic on the news agenda, however, Scottish political history has not received the same spotlight. The Histories of Scottish Politics in the Age of Union c.1700-1945 conference, held at Durham University in July with the support of the Past and Present Society, put Scottish political history firmly into the limelight. Spread over two days, this conference featured the very best in research and innovation in the field of Scottish political history. The timeframe of the conference showed how much politics has been democratised over the centuries, from Laura Stewart’s paper on the Scottish Constitution, showing the declining influence of the church in politics; to the role of the aristocracy through political networks and clan politics, as explored by Brendan Tam, Edwin Sheffield and Tom Pye; and the breakthrough of the working classes into Scottish politics, including through the Chartists and cooperative communities, as discussed by Dominic Barron-Carter, Sonny Angus and Dave Steele. All these papers highlighted the vast changes in political engagement within Scottish society and Scottish politics over three centuries. This was also seen in the opening panel on courtroom […]

by Prof. Pierre Asselin (San Diego State University) As I sit here and reflect on the contemporary relevance of my Past & Present article “National liberation by other means: US visitor diplomacy in the Vietnam War” (August 2024) on US citizens who visited North Vietnam during the Vietnam War (1965-75), it strikes me how some world leaders learn from the past while others completely ignore or refuse to heed the lessons and other insights it offers. The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War is a telling example.  Consciously or serendipitously, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has borrowed from the North Vietnamese wartime/revolutionary playbook to offset his army’s inferiority relative to Russia’s, and frustrate Moscow’s geo-strategic designs over his country, as of the time of this writing at least.  He has done so by undertaking an aggressive diplomatic campaign à la Ho Chi Minh to win foreign hearts and minds, and vital military aid along with that.  While Hanoi at the time managed to secure material, economic, political, and moral support from a broad range of state and non-state actors – including the socialist bloc, Third World governments, and progressive action groups in the West –, Kyiv has been most successful at winning over state leaders and publics […]

by Dr. Chiara Blanco (Newcastle University) The academic conference ‘The Epistemology of Ancient Embryology’ took place over three days from the 1st to the 3rd of July 2024 at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge in a hybrid format, and it included a total of 14 speakers and a peak of 53 attendants (22 in person and 31 online) from all over the world. The conference explored ancient theories concerning the formation and development of the embryo, and how ancient physicians and philosophers sought to address this complex issue by applying their own doctrines and beliefs. This latter, particularly fascinating, aspect entailed a discussion of a plethora of different methodological solutions adopted by ancient thinkers, from analogies mostly based on artifacts, plants and other animals, to cosmological and mathematical calculations. Thus the conference provided a platform to compare different ancient views about the topic, while highlighting connections and the development of such ideas in the ancient world; its epistemological angle, along with its focus on interactions between different authors, which went beyond Classical antiquity, and also embraced ancient Egypt and China, constitutes a true novelty for the field. Caterina Pellò (Geneva) opened the conference with a paper discussing some […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past and Present was pleased to learn that Dr. Somak Biswas (Cambridge) has been awarded the 2024 UK Royal Historical Society’s (RHS) Gladstone Prize. The RHS website explains: “The Gladstone Book Prize was launched in 1998 following a founding donation from the Gladstone Memorial Trust on the centenary of William Gladstone’s death. The prize offers an annual award of £1,000 for a work of history on a topic not primarily related to British history that is the author’s first sole book publication. In 2015, the Linbury Trust made a generous donation of £12,500 in support of the Gladstone Prize.” Dr. Biswas was awarded this year’s prize for his book Passages through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890–1940 (Cambridge, 2023) which he worked on while a Past and Present Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London. The judges citation states: “We are very pleased to award this year’s prize to Somak Biswas’s ‘Passages Through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890-1940′. The panel agreed that is an elegantly written and inventive study that provocatively unsettles our historical understandings of leading Hindu Indian figures (including Gandhi, Tagore, […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past and Present was pleased to learn that Dr. Damilola Adebayo (York University) was awarded two prizes at July’s Joint ICOHTEC-SHOT 2024 annual meeting at Viña del Mar, Chile. The prize was awarded for his Open Access article “Electricity, Agency and Class in Lagos Colony, C.1860S–1914” which was published in Past & Present No. 262 (February 2024). Dr. Adebayo was awarded the International Commitee for the History of Technology’s (ICOHTEC) Maurice Daumas Prize. The Maurice Daumas Prize is awarded annually by ICOHTEC: “…to the author of the best article submitted which deals with the history of technology in any period of the past or in any part of the world and which was published in a journal or edited volume in last two consequent years.” Dr. Adebayo was also awarded the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize. The Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize is: “…awarded annually to the best paper in the history of electrotechnology – power, electronics, telecommunications, and computer science.” Our congradulations to Dr. Adebayo on his research being recognised with these two prestigious awards.  

by Dr. Nathan Cardon (University of Birmingham) and Dr. Paul Lawrie (York University) On Thursday, 25 April 2024, thanks to the generosity of the Past and Present Society, historians gathered at the University of Birmingham for a one-day workshop to discuss how we might translate new historical work on the intersections of race, technology, and temporality to a wider audience with science and technology museums as sites of intervention. In recent years, the extension of racial exclusion to new technologies has made headlines around the world. It is clear that new technologies rather than disrupting racial biases have continued them: whether that it is in face- and voice recognition software, generative AI replicating racist stereotypes to new technologies of surveillance and social media’s metastasizing the networks and discourse of white supremacy. As sociologist Ruha Benjamin has made clear, current forms of online technology and software not only reproduce anti-Black racism but are products of it, leading her to claim we live in a period of a ‘New Jim Code’.1 What is striking about many of these conversations is the lack of historical questions. Historians seem to be absent from a seat at the table thus exacerbating notions of technology as […]

by Dr. Matilda Greig (National Army Museum, London) Humanitarianism and the military should no longer be seen as parallel but separate subjects, and our understanding of both ‘military humanitarianism’ and its chronology need to significantly expand. Rather than seeing it as post-Cold War phenomenon, could we trace the roots of military–humanitarian interaction back to the early nineteenth century, or beyond? This was the central provocation behind the call for contributions for an edited volume, issued in early 2023 by Margot Tudor and Brian Drohan, which was tested on 15th and 16th January 2024 in discussions at a workshop at City, University of London, where contributors to the volume shared the findings from their first drafts. Present to ponder over these questions was a room full of international historians, political scientists, representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, myself as an over-eager literary historian, and the most superior conference pastries I’ve ever encountered. Broadening the definition of military humanitarianism beyond simply military interventions motivated or justified by humanitarian ideals, the editors had challenged us also to think about the many points of connection between the armed forces and humanitarian organisations, and the influence of humanitarian ideals upon military identities […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was pleased to learn that Dr. Jessica O’Leary (Australian Catholic University) has recently been awarded two prizes for her Open Access article “The Uprooting of Indigenous Women’s Horticultural Practices in Brazil, 1500–1650” which was published in Past & Present No. 262 (February 2024). Dr. O’Leary was awarded the biennial Philippa Maddern ECR Publication Prize by the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS). As ANZAMEMS explain: “The Philippa Maddern ECR Publication Prize is awarded to an Early Career Researcher (ECR) for the best article-length scholarly work in any discipline/topic falling within the scope of medieval and early modern studies, published within the below date range.” More recently Dr. O’Leary was awarded the Australian Women’s History Network’s Mary Bennett Prize. This prize is awarded “to the best article or chapter bearing the hallmarks of advanced historical scholarship and contribution to the academic field of women’s history”. The award is only made in years when a piece of scholarship is deemed to have reached the levels of quality and significance required to obtain it. When awarded the prize consists of an award of two hundred Australian Dollars and […]