by Dr. Brodie Waddell (Birkbeck, University of London) In 1612, the Overseers of the Poor for Finchingfield in Essex spent just over £37 on payments to the parish’s poorest residents and related expenses. However, by the early 1650s they were spending over £100 every year and by the late 1690s average disbursements were over £200 annually. The payments kept rising in the decades to come, regularly exceeding £300 in the 1740s and hitting £543 in 1758.[1] Nearly half a century later, in response to a national survey into ‘the Expense and Maintenance of the Poor in England’, Finchingfield’s overseers reported that they spent £1,626 on ‘the whole Expenditure on Account of the Poor, in the Year ending Easter 1803’.[2] The story told by these figures is, in some ways, simple and well-known. Under the so-called ‘Old Poor Law’ governed English welfare provision from 1598 to 1834, parishes across England raised money through local taxes to offer relief to ‘their’ poor. The amount they raised and distributed varied hugely across different regions and could also occasionally rise or fall suddenly from year to year, but over these two centuries parishes undoubtedly spent larger and larger sums. Finchingfield’s growing expenditures were only […]

by Dr. Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira (Singapore Management University) Back in 2012, during a break in my first year of graduate school, I found myself in my father’s travel agency in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. I remember stressing out over a thesis topic. I was planning to write about the creation of old cities in nineteenth-century France (the historical districts we know today as vieux Lyon, vieux Marseille, etc.) but was worried that the topic was overcrowded. I browsed through the bookshelf in his office as I vented (Figure 1), tracing my fingers over the spines of management tracts and history books (he’s always been a businessman with a humanist bent). One book in particular caught my attention: Peter Hoffman’s Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight, a popular biography of the Brazilian aviator published by an accomplished science writer in 2003. “This might be a fun read,” I thought to myself as I pocketed the book. A year later I was back at Princeton. I had just completed my general exams and anxiety levels concerning the thesis had reached new heights since, well, I now had to start working on it. I was certain about abandoning […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Oxford University Press who are Past & Present’s publisher, recently assembled a virtual issue on the “History of Witchcraft”. They have chosen a selection of three articles from back issues of Past & Present, many of them very recent, to include in the collection. The articles included are: “Enchantment in an Age of Reform: Fortune-Telling Fever in Post-Mao China, 1980s–1990s”, by Emily Baum (University of California, Irvine) published in Past & Present No. 251 (May 2021) “Irish Cursing and the Art of Magic, 1750–2018”, by Thomas Waters (Imperial College London) published in Past & Present No. 247 (May 2020) “Witchcraft and the State: Cameroon and South Africa: Ambiguities of ‘Reality’ and ‘Superstition’” by Peter Geschiere, published in Past & Present No. 199 (August 2008) All articles are currently free to read. Our congradulations to the authors on their work being recognised in this way.  

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was delighted to become aware that two articles published in the journal during 2021 appear in our publisher Oxford University Press’ Best of History 2021 collection. The articles which comprise this collection are amongst the “most read” pieces to have been published across Oxford University Press’ History subject area during 2021. The selection from last year’s run of Past & Present issues consists of: “Managing Food Crises: Urban Relief Stocks in Pre-Industrial Holland”, by Dr. Jessica Dijkman (Utrecht University), published in Past & Present No. 251 (May 2021) “The Political Day in London, C.1697–1834”, by Dr. Hannah Grieg (University of York) and Prof. Amanda Vickery (Queen Mary, London), published in Past & Present No. 252 (August 2021) “The Political Day in London C. 1697-1834” have been made temporary free to read by Oxford University Press. “Managing Food Crises: Urban Relief Stocks in Pre-Industrial Holland” is Open Access. Our congradulations to the authors on their scholarship being recognised in this way.

by Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (University of California, Santa Barbara) My research on the nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean quarantines started in an unlikely place — a Russian literary journal Otechestvennye zapiski (Annals of the Fatherland), beloved in tsardom’s liberal circles. I came across a curious report about a vaccination experiment in Istanbul. Written by a young doctor from Odessa, Artemii Rafalovich (1816–51), it described how, in 1846, he heated cowpox matter to test whether that would destroy the ability of the disease to pass on.[1] He then inoculated eight (allegedly) volunteer Istanbullite children with heated and unheated cowpox. Those children inoculated with heated matter would not develop pockmarks, which led the doctor to conclude that the heat annihilates the disease’s contagiousness. He conducted the experiment to bolster evidence that the heat destroys the matter of diseases, including that of plague, which had recently resurfaced in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, and that the heating technique might prove useful in treating clothes and goods in quarantines. The Russian doctor’s report was my introduction to the world of nineteenth-century medical travelogues. My research on the subject was published in an article “Ottoman and Egyptian Quarantines and European Debates on Plague in the 1830s–1840s” in […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was delighted to hear that Dr. Sonia Tycko (St. Peter’s College, Oxford) has been awarded the 2021 Sutherland Prize by the American Society for Legal History, for her article in Past & Present No. 246 (February 2020) “The Legality of Prisoner of War Labour in England, 1648-1655”. The Sutherland Prize is awarded annually for the “best article on British legal history published in the previous year”. This year the prize has been awarded to two scholars with Dr. Priyasha Saksena (University of Leeds) also being recognised for her article “Jousting Over Jurisdiction: Sovereignty and International Law in Late Nineteenth-Century South Asia” published in Law and History Review. In their citation the prize committee described Dr. Tycko’s work as: Bringing us back two centuries and across a hemisphere, Sonia Tycko’s meticulously researched and methodically argued article excavates the legal acrobatics that allowed for foreign, especially Dutch and Scottish, soldiers captured by English forces in the mid-seventeenth century to be forced to serve as labor on projects ranging from the drainage of the fens to Caribbean plantations. The Council of State and various private interests saw multiple opportunities in putting prisoners of […]

by Prof. Karin Sennefelt (Stockholm University) One evening in 1695, the retired non-commissioned officer Lars Ekroth sat down in his home in Stockholm to smoke a pipe. While he was smoking, he received a vision he was sure came from the Holy Spirit. What was revealed to him was that the whole city, including the royal palace, would be destroyed in a great fire, and that the Swedish king Charles XI would die from poisoning (this is related to research I have recently published – Open Access – in Past & Present No. 253 through the article “A Pathology of Sacral Kingship: Putrefaction in the Body of Charles XI of Sweden”) God’s wrath would come upon the country because there was so much sinfulness, ostentation, mistreatment of the poor, and people trying to rise above their station. In particular, it was the sins perpetrated by the Royal Council that had awoken God’s wrath, Ekroth came to understand. When he later related his experience, he said that he was unsure whether he had been awake or asleep during the episode, only that it was when he took his pipe of tobacco that the vision came to him.   Tobacco smoke had […]

by Dr. Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia/University College, London – School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies) Being a Minority in Times of Catastrophe served as the BASEES Study Group for Minority History’s inaugural event. Although our original intention had been to host it in hybrid format, with those outside the UK taking part via videoconference link, the ongoing uncertainties surrounding the public health restrictions led to us deciding to divide the event into two parts. The first involved a two-day remote symposium comprising a keynote and five research panels, which took place on 25-26/06/2021. The second, was an authors’ workshop for participants who had expressed interest in having their paper feature as part of a post-symposium publication. This subsequently took place at the Wiener Holocaust Library in central London on 22/10/2021. Given the symposium’s theme, it now feels somewhat fitting that the process of setting up and registering the Study Group mostly took place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020. Indeed, our decision to explore the consequences of historical crisis and natural disasters, stemmed in part from the tragic implications that have unfolded over the last two years. Surveys by the British Medical Association […]

by Théo Rivière (Cardiff University) This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Sir Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. In recognition of this momentous milestone, the Past & Present Society generously supported “50 Years of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic,” an event jointly organized by Michelle Pfeffer, Jan Machielsen, and Robin Briggs. The event was held in the Old Library of All Souls College, University of Oxford, and was also livestreamed via Microsoft Teams. Attendees were able to live react to the celebrations using the Twitter hashtag #SirKeithFest. Originally published in 1971, Religion and the Decline of Magic offers an incredibly vast and detailed overview of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English supernatural. While some early reviewers critiqued the book for making use of “out of date” anthropological approaches, Thomas’s book has since been heralded as a landmark of socio-historical research and has become a classic point of reference for scholars and students of early modern religion and culture. The event was a resounding success, with more than 300 people joining in both virtually and in-person to celebrate the rich legacy of Religion and the Decline of Magic. It was divided into three […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was delighted to hear that Dr. Michael Martoccio (University of Oxford) has won the 2021 Society for Italian Historical Studies Article Prize for Medieval and Early Modern Italian History. The award has been made for his article “The Art of Mercato: Buying City-States in Renaissance Tuscany” which appeared in Past & Present No. 252 (August 2021). The prize’s Award Committee citation runs as follows: “The committee unanimously and enthusiastically agrees to award the SIHS prize for Medieval and Early Modern History to Michael Martoccio for his article ‘The Art of the Mercato: Buying City-States in Renaissance Tuscany’ (Past & Present, 2021). Carefully positioned in the existing scholarship and supported by a meticulous and insightful analysis of a variety of primary sources, Martoccio’s essay reveals the logistics and meanings of the early modern Italian financial and political practice of buying city states. Uncovering an important aspect of Renaissance political life and exploring the links between the money-market economy and the language of empire, this article stirs us to consider the overlapping valences of Italian imperial projects that were at once commercial, territorial, and moral.” A full news story about the prize […]