by Dr. Antoine Acker (University of Zurich) Between August 2019 and July 2020, a forest area roughly the size of Belgium was destroyed in the Brazilian Amazon. According to climatologists, the Amazon’s transformation into a savanna is one of the main tipping point towards hothouse earth, the most extreme global warming scenario. Tropical rainforests are not only endangered carbon sinks, but their burning is also a major source of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, making a place like the Amazon decisive in the current epoch which geologists named the Anthropocene. The latter, marked by the anthropic transformation in the earth system, invites historians to reassess the human past in the light of its impact on the planet’s ecology. Although GHG particles disregard national borders when they spread in the atmosphere, the rise in their emissions over time is the product of institutions, systems and patterns, which humans have constructed. For example, in my book about the history of the Volkswagen Company in the Amazon, I studied the tight articulation between global capitalism and Brazilian state-led development in setting in motion the first wave of massive tropical deforestation in the region in the early 1970s. But Brazil also matters in the history […]

This post is the first 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 Mat Beebee (University of Exeter) Within popular discourse, the nineties for Britain was the decade when many aspects of twenty-first century life became commonplace: the rise of the internet, the cementing of a ‘neoliberal’ political economy, the birth of globalisation, and the ‘new’ politics of spin. It is then perhaps easy to see the nineties as a fulcrum on which transitions into a ‘new era’ rest. Yet as the decade comes more clearly under the focus of historians, we should be careful about accepting the epochal nature of this change on the one hand and buying into ‘the myths we live by’ on the other. Approaching the nineties on these terms will set […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present is delighted to announce the publication of it’s 15th Supplementary issue Mothering’s Many Labours edited by Prof. Sarah Knott (University of Indiana) and Prof. Emma Griffin (University of East Anglia). The supplement questions and explores:  “What is the history of maternal labour: the range of mothering figures, the variety of activities, the social and economic importance? With the significant exception of Black women’s history, the history of mothering work has been relatively overlooked. Maternity has more typically been associated with emotion: a result of the long western history of ‘motherlove’ and of the influence of attachment theory, with its focus on the bonds of the mother–baby dyad. Mothering’s Many Labours addresses the topic by borrowing concepts and questions from feminist theory, sociology and economics and from an archive of feminist activism. Set aside the presumptive mother–baby dyad, and what emerges are many forms of dispersed mothering. Othermothering — the term originates with Black theorist Patricia Hill Collins — involved kin and community, while delegated mothering entailed commodified or coerced service of some kind. Maternal labour may long have been dismissed as unchanging or mundane, but the contributions here underline its […]

Received from the IHR Women’s History Seminar  On Friday 15th January (17:15-19:00 London time) the Womens’ History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, London will be hosting – virtually via Zoom – a roundtable and launch celebration event for “Mothering’s Many Labours” Past & Present’s fifteenth annual supplement. The supplement has been edited by Prof. Emma Griffin (University of East Anglia) and Prof. Sarah Knott (University of Indiana). Full details of the event and how to register can be found below: Could any historical topic be more prescient, in pandemic times, than that of maternal labour? Mothering’s Many Labours (published by Past & Present) conceived and researched before COVID-19, explores the history of maternal labour: the range of mothering figures, the variety of activities, the social and economic importance. Maternity has typically been associated with emotion: a result of the long western history of “motherlove” and of attachment theory, with its focus on the bonds of the mother-baby dyad. Mothering’s Many Labours addresses the topic by borrowing concepts and questions from feminist theory, sociology and economics and from an archive of feminist activism. Undertaken by scholars of a variety of generations, the volume gathers an invigorated feminist history attentive […]

by the Past & Present editorial team In late 2020 Past & Present published the Capitalism in Global History virtual issue. Edited by Dr. Andrew Edwards (Brasenose College, Oxford), Dr. Peter Hill (Northumbria University) and Juan I. Neves-Sarriegui (Wolfson College, Oxford). They describe the purpose of the virtual issue in their introduction as: “Through a selection of articles from the Past and Present archive, from 1954 to 2010, we suggest a set of overlapping ways of thinking through, and questioning, assumptions that have defined the history of capitalism on one hand, and global history on the other.” Capitalism in Global History Blog Post Series The Capitalism in Global History virtual issue grew, in part, out of discussions facilitated and enabled by the Political Economy and Culture in Global History reading group. In the run up to the publication of the virtual issue participants in the reading group wrote a series of blog posts covering a wide ranging and disperate array of topics, which reflected on how their thinking about matters of political economy, culture and global history had been shaped by participating in the group’s discusisons. The full list of these can be read below, their publication was co-ordinated by […]

by the Past & Present editorial team  Past & Present is delighted to hear that Dr. Diya Gupta (Insitute of Historical Research, London) has been awarded the Journal of War & Culture Studies 2020 Early Career Researcher Prize, for her article “Bodies in Hunger: Literary Representations of the Indian Home-Front During World War II”. Our congratulations to Dr. Gupta, the Journal of War & Culture Studies advise that their publisher Taylor & Francis are making her article free to read (un-paywalled), so as to allow more people to read and appreciate her award winning scholarship. Dr. Gupta is currently the Past & Present funded Race, Ethnicity and Equality in History post-doctoral research fellow based at the IHR, and working with the Royal Historical Society, to build upon and implement the recommendations of their 2018 report on race, ethnicity and equality in the UK historical profession.  

by Prof. Joanna Innes (Somerville College, Oxford) Some reading groups are like pilgrimages: the pilgrims set off together for an agreed destination, sharing experiences along the way. Others are more like inns at road junctions: travellers following different routes meet and converse. Of course, a pilgrimage may also stop off at an inn. The ‘Political Economy and Culture in Global History’ reading group has been more like an inn – though perhaps the group’s founders are a pilgrimage group, passing through. If the reading group is an inn at a road junction, these blog posts might be thought of as photos left by travellers on a bulletin board at the inn – recording what they’ve seen on their journey, which may not be a journey that’s been shared by other travellers. I’ve been asked to reflect on the set of blog posts as a group. How to review a bulletin board studded with these miscellaneous travellers’ photos? To find a way through this task, I’ve decided to approach it subjectively: to look at the posts with my own journey in mind, see which photos I recognise and can relate to, and which, though I don’t recognise them, look interesting, showing […]

by Prof. Katherine Paugh (Corpus Christi College, Oxford) This blog post was written spasmodically in the rare moments I could seize in the midst of a global pandemic that has exposed for many working mothers, myself included, the instability of a capitalist world system that has long relied on the extraction of coerced reproductive labour. My hope in this essay is to affirm the need for the new history of capitalism to historicize the emergence of capitalist modes of governing reproduction and to affirm the persistent interdependence of paid and unpaid reproductive labour in the evolution of capitalist world systems. There is a great deal more to say in advocating for this approach than can be contained in a short blog post, but my particular goal here is to explore how the thread of thinking about reproduction that runs through debates on the origins of capitalism that arise in the readings offered in this special issue and its introduction, as well as some of the readings featured in the session of the reading group that I concocted, have suggested interesting questions about the political economy of reproduction that remain under-explored. Certainly, demography has frequently been a matter for debate among […]

Juan Neves-Sarriegui (Wolfson College, Oxford) The Political Economy and Culture in Global History group has served to bring together, in a same room, a cluster of people from different disciplinary backgrounds who would not normally have the chance to engage in sustained discussion. This has been remarkable given current institutional divisions. My own training as a historian of Latin America conditioned the way I approached the readings we debated but, as the sessions unfolded, we were able to generate a common language to allow meaningful conversations about the global. One of the issues I was confronted with was the different historiographies of imperial history and anti-imperialism, which made me reconsider the Latin American literatures I knew. The importance of ‘culture’ – variously defined – was a crucial novelty that clashed with many of the assumptions I had about the role of the economy in the history of empires. This prompted an ongoing reflection on how to think about the intersection between culture and the economic – between agency and structure – and the implications this has for historiographies of imperialism and capitalism. The recent anti-racist movements denouncing the legacies of empire and exploitation represented by historical monuments – notably in […]

by Dr. Eoin Phillips (Ramon Llull University) In July 1772, Captain James Cook took command of a state-sponsored voyage of exploration to circumnavigate the globe. Of the thousands of objects taken on board and brought back on that ship, few have received the attention of the timekeeper he came to refer to as his ‘trusty friend’, his ‘never failing guide’. The reason Cook took a timekeeper was because of the ambition of the British naval and natural philosophical establishment to establish a means of accurately finding longitude at sea. Finding the longitude of a ship at sea in the eighteenth century was regarded as a problem for several European states including the British. One result was that in 1714 in England, an Act of Parliament was passed to establish a Board of Longitude to facilitate attempts to devise a solution for finding longitude at sea through a series of public awards. The dominant image of the relationship between those European voyages of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and techno-scientific hardware has tended to make the claim that timekeepers for use at sea – those instruments that came to be called ‘chronometers’ – were, from the beginning, ‘trusty friends’ and […]