by Dr. David Chan Smith (Wilfrid Laurier University) There is in an old British entrepreneurial tradition for those keen to escape regulation: find an ancient liberty, preferably an island (or an abandoned Maunsell Fort in the North Sea), and declare it free. Richard Score seized the opportunity in 1716 when he leased the island of Lundy and claimed that it was beyond British taxes and duties ‘like the Isles of Man, Guernsey etc’. Stretching just three miles long in the Bristol Channel, Lundy was ideally poised to serve the bustling smuggling economy on the coasts of southern Wales and southwest England. Score knew this business well because he had been a Customs officer in Penzance. He had succumbed, as contemporaries often said, to the ‘temptation’ of smuggling. During this period of high duties fortunes were made on islands such as Jersey and Guernsey that served as entrepots in the running trade. And now Score had his very own – at least for a time. His story is part of the long history of tax havens and hidden economies, spaces and structures that continue to shape the global economy. Through the lens of early modern smuggling, my research explores the offshore […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present sponsored the creation of six blog posts by postgraduate students, which documented and critically engaged with the Past & Present supported workshop series hosted by Dr. David Geiringer (QMUL) and Dr. Helen McCarthy (Cambridge) under the title ‘Rethinking Britain in the 1990s: Towards a new research agenda’. The series ran between January and March 2021, bringing together contemporary historians from a range of career stages to map existing work and stimulate new thinking on a decade which, from the perspective of our present times, looks very unfamiliar indeed. Blog Posts When Was the Nineties? by Matt Beebee (University of Exeter) The Political Narratives of Britian in the Nineties by Alfie Steer (Hertford College, Oxford)  Cultural Narratives of the Nineties by Jessica White (University of Manchester) Global Narratives of Britian in the Nineties by Christopher Day (University of Westminster) Digital Narratives of the Nineties by David Dahlborn (St. John’s College, Cambridge) What is the Archive of the Nineties by Amy Gower (University of Reading) The blogs above are presented in chronological order from the earliest event, to the latest in the series. Past & Present was pleased to support these events […]

Received from Shyam Sridar (Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford)  States, local jurisdictions and borderlands in Europe and the Americas, c.1713-1914 is a free to attend international conference on the processes of state building in the 18th and 19th centuries. It will take place online via Zoom on the 1st and 2nd June 2021 Event Overview “States, local jurisdictions and borderlands in Europe and the Americas, c.1713-1914” is an international conference organised by Luis Gabriel Galán-Guerrero and Shyam Sridar (University of Oxford) with the support of the Past & Present Society and the Latin American Centre, University of Oxford. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, populations and settlers in Europe and the Americas set up a wide range of public offices, administrative bodies and corporations that asserted their own jurisdictions within monarchies and republics. In recent years, more nuanced interpretations on the process of state formation have highlighted the process of negotiation within republics and ‘composite monarchies’, and acknowledged the importance of corporations, legal pluralism, overlapping jurisdictions, local elites and borderlands in the functioning of the state. This conference extends these existing lines of enquiry into the nature of states and aims to establish connections and comparisons on the processes […]

by the Past & Present editorial team We were delighted to hear that Dr. Antoine Acker (University of Zurich) has been awarded the 2021 Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Prize by the Brazilian section of the Latin American Studies Association for his article “A Different Story in the Anthropocene: Brazil’s Post-Colonial Quest for Oil (1930–1975)” which appeared in Past & Present No. 249 (November 2020). In recognition of this acheivement and so as to enable as many people as possible to read Dr. Acker’s award winning scholarship our publisher Oxford University Press have made “A Different Story in the Anthropocene: Brazil’s Post-Colonial Quest for Oil (1930–1975)” free to read for the next few months.    

This post is the sixth in a series of six blogs which will document and critically engage with a workshop series hosted by Dr. David Geiringer (QMUL) and Dr. Helen McCarthy (Cambridge) under the title ‘Rethinking Britain in the 1990s: Towards a new research agenda’. Running between January and March 2021, the series brings together contemporary historians from a range of career stages to map existing work and stimulate new thinking on a decade which, from the perspective of our present times, looks very unfamiliar indeed. by Amy Gower (University of Reading) Neoliberal consensus? A digital revolution? A cultural feedback loop? Over this past term, historians have problematised these metanarratives of Britain in the nineties and suggested alternative frameworks of analysis. But how might the collections, archives, and sources of the nineties help us to answer these questions? In this final workshop, a panel of historians and archivists explored the archive of the nineties as it stands, and crucially, what we might shape it into. Government papers, voluntary sector archives, and the Mass Observation Project were all shown to be potentially transformative for understanding the nebulous relationships between citizen and state, the connections between high politics and the everyday, and […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present‘s Co-editors Prof. Mathew Hilton (Queen Mary College, London), Prof. Alexandra Walsham (Jesus College, Cambridge) and the Chair of the Board Prof. Joanna Innes (Sommerfield College, Oxford) have co-signed the letter below which was partially published in the Sunday Times on the 21st March 2021. The Royal Historical Society, together with the heads of other leading UK historical organisations, has written asking the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden MP, to clarify the government’s position on the funding of historical research. An excerpt of the letter has today been published in The Sunday Times (Letters, p.26). The letter comes with the news that Dame Helen Ghosh, master of Balliol College, Oxford, has apologised for the historical acceptance of donations linked to the Atlantic slave trade. The full text of the letter, together with its signatories: “Dear Sir, We write to express our concern as historians about ministers’ illegitimate interference in the research and interpretation done by our arm’s length heritage bodies such as museums, galleries, the Arts Council and the lottery heritage fund. In particular we deplore the position, attributed to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Department in the press recently, that Professor Corinne Fowler’s […]

This post is the fifth in a series of six blogs which will document and critically engage with a workshop series hosted by Dr. David Geiringer (QMUL) and Dr. Helen McCarthy (Cambridge) under the title ‘Rethinking Britain in the 1990s: Towards a new research agenda’. Running between January and March 2021, the series brings together contemporary historians from a range of career stages to map existing work and stimulate new thinking on a decade which, from the perspective of our present times, looks very unfamiliar indeed. by David Dahlborn (St. John’s College, University of Cambridge) Do we historians, by privileging digital technology with its own theories and interpretations, risk replicating technologically deterministic narratives of ‘digital revolution’ in the 1990s and beyond? What makes digital technology special to the extent that it deserves its own history, alongside political history or cultural history? How is it fundamentally different from analogue technology, to the extent that it is considered epoch-making? Having considered the many thoughtful contributions at last week’s workshop, I think Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s remarkable essay ‘The Californian Ideology’ from 1996 still holds up. I recommend it to contemporary historians, not least as some of the most lucid comments at […]

This post is the fourth in a series of six blogs which will document and critically engage with a workshop series hosted by Dr. David Geiringer (QMUL) and Dr. Helen McCarthy (Cambridge) under the title ‘Rethinking Britain in the 1990s: Towards a new research agenda’. Running between January and March 2021, the series brings together contemporary historians from a range of career stages to map existing work and stimulate new thinking on a decade which, from the perspective of our present times, looks very unfamiliar indeed. by Christopher Day (University of Westminster) Britain’s global relationships in the 1990s encompassed a huge array of events and themes: the legacy of the Cold War, the deepening and widening of European integration, military conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East, the expansion of the global human rights regime, public debate concerning immigration and asylum seekers, and ‘liberal interventionism’. It was appropriate, then, that this workshop furnished us with various lenses through which to grapple with these many potential narratives. Historians of Britain, Europe and the Commonwealth demonstrated how, in a decade bookended by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ‘War on Terror’, Britain searched for a world role that could […]

by the Past & Present editorial team February 2021 saw the publication of the 250th issue of Past & Present. To mark this occasion, the journal’s editors Prof. Matthew Hilton (Queen Mary, University of London) and Prof. Alexandra Walsham (Jesus College, University of Cambridge) followed in the practice established by their predecessors Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm in the 100th issue – published in August 1983 – and wrote a reflective Introduction to the issue. In it they set-out the journal’s place and purpose within the field of historical studies, survey the changing landscape including areas (such as a racial diversity, justice and inclusion) where historical studies must improve, and highlight and comment upon other initatives undertaken by the Society such as funding conferences and postdoctoral fellows. The introduction begins: “…Past and Present was founded as a generalist journal, covering all periods of history, from the ancient to the contemporary, and with an intention to cover all parts of the world. Our 250th issue does not quite fulfil that ambition, though the articles do stretch from the thirteenth century to the late twentieth and the geographical coverage reaches beyond Europe to Mongolia and south-east Asia. Articles, then as […]

This post is the third in a series of six blogs which will document and critically engage with a workshop series hosted by Dr. David Geiringer (QMUL) and Dr. Helen McCarthy (Cambridge) under the title ‘Rethinking Britain in the 1990s: Towards a new research agenda’. Running between January and March 2021, the series brings together contemporary historians from a range of career stages to map existing work and stimulate new thinking on a decade which, from the perspective of our present times, looks very unfamiliar indeed. by Jessica White (University of Manchester) Ask someone to recall a cultural history of Britain in the nineties, and, depending on who you are talking to, they would probably reference Harry Potter, Live & Kicking, Oasis or Tracey Emin. Or, they might choose to talk about Goosebumps, SMTV, Blur or Damien Hirst. To an even greater degree than on previous panels, the personal infused the third, ‘cultural narratives’, session of the Rethinking Britain in the Nineties series, so much so that it came to resemble, in Kennetta Hammond Perry’s words, ‘a witness seminar’. And yet in his provocation paper, Sam Wetherell searched for a theme that could neatly tie together the various strands and […]