Received from Dr. Robert Yee (Wadham College, University of Oxford) Event Overview Conference taking place 7-8 April 2025, St. John’s College, University of Oxford. Since the financial crisis of 2007/08, international rivalries, nationalist movements, a global pandemic, and the existential threat of climate change have destabilised the global economic order. From an historical perspective, such strains have many precedents in the tumultuous twentieth century. We seek to bring together scholars for a two-day conference at the University of Oxford to explore the history of global economic governance. We are particularly keen to discuss how national governments, international organisations, businesses, financial institutions and workers all responded to shocks and instability, and how these responses shaped the global economic order. Many recent historical works have explored the history of political economy, capitalism and global governance from multiple perspectives. There has been important historical research into the effects of wars and conflicts on the global economic order; the birth of global economic development initiatives; the ideological foundations of neoliberalism; and the hegemony of economic growth. Together, these works raise an array of important questions: What economic, political and social factors underpinned the evolution of national and global economic governance in the twentieth century? […]

Received from Maisie Brenchley (University of York) Event Overview Join us on April 24th at the University of York’s Berrick Saul Building in Heslington North Yorkshire for Margins to Centre 2025! This in-person conference explores Belonging, celebrating the literature, art, and histories of marginalised communities. Engage in vital discussions on identity, inclusion, and the diverse narratives shaping our world. Our conference features a diverse lineup of esteemed speakers exploring key themes, including colonialism and the construction of the ‘other,’ gender and identity through historical perspectives, marginalisation and power dynamics, exclusion and resistance, and the reassessment of marginalised and underutilised sources. This event is open to all—join us for engaging discussions with our panels. Tea and coffee will be provided. We look forward to seeing you! For inquiries or more information, please email us at marginstocentre2025@gmail.com or message us on Instagram @marginstocentre. We’re happy to help! You can also visit the event’s website Registration (free) Past & Present is pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.

Received from Dr. Noëmie Duhaut (University of Southampton) Jewish Dis/Connections across and beyond the modern Mediterranean Location: University of Warsaw, Faculty of History Dates: 6 – 8 April 2025 Keynote: Modern Jewish History in a Mediterranean Key, Prof. Matthias B. Lehmann (University of Cologne), 6 April 2025 16:30 – 18:30 Conference programme The organisers advise that attendance is free and that registration is not required. However, it should be noted that participation is entirely in person and that there is no livestream or other hybrid option to join this event.  Past & Present is pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.

recevied from Dr. Michelle Aroney (Magdalen College, Oxford) Dates: 11–13 July 2025 Location: University of Oxford, UK Submission deadline: 31 January 2025 Conference Theme and Goals Historians have studied extensively how sciences begin—but how do they end? This is a crucial question for understanding how the labour of knowledge-making evolves. Previous attention to the founding, disciplining, and professionalisation of individual sciences has provided robust frameworks for thinking through the birth and growth of knowledge-making communities. Far less attention has been directed toward how those same communities decay, dissipate, or evolve beyond the contemporary boundaries of science. This conference seeks to cultivate case studies of the ends of sciences, and thereby to motivate a new approach to thinking about the developmental trajectories of scientific disciplines, communities, institutions, and the ordering of expert knowledge. A further aim is to strengthen the community of scholars with a shared interest in studying the ends of sciences. Scope and Eligibility The conference will seek to examine the variety of ways that sciences come to an end. Thus, it will explore not just how some sciences came to be dismissed as pseudosciences, but also to understand those knowledge-making communities which chose to classify themselves as non-scientific, […]

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, […]