by Dr. Boyd van Dijk (University of Melbourne) It was an eye-opener, and it was puzzling. While exploring the history of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the most important rules ever formulated for armed conflict, I noticed an astonishing historical phenomenon that defied simple explanation. For most historians, it is a well-known fact that twentieth-century empires framed their colonial wars as ‘emergencies,’ or as ‘police actions,’ in an attempt to escape international scrutiny. Think of the twentieth-century colonial wars in Algeria, Kenya, and elsewhere. However, as I was going through imperial archival documents from France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, I was surprised to read that those same empires had invited the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to intervene in their colonial wars in Southeast Asia after 1945. What can account for this counterintuitive phenomenon?, I wondered. And what might be its historical significance in light of our broader understanding of we answer the question of empire and its relationship with global (legal) politics? The Indonesian Revolution In my Past & Present article, ‘Internationalising Colonial Wars: The Geneva Conventions in the Global South’, I begin my story of rewriting the genealogy of the legal internationalization of colonial war by looking […]

by Prof. James Vernon (University of California, Berkley) These are odd times to be reading and writing about Heathrow. The Age of COVID has reduced passenger numbers by a staggering 72% to levels not seen since the Oil Crisis in the mid-1970s. That crisis led the government to shelve plans for a third London airport for a decade. This year the planet has had some reprieve as COVID has compelled an airport still seeking to build a third runway and more terminals to operate on just one runway and three of its five terminals. It is workers in the aviation industry that are once again made to pay the costs as massive mutlinationals worry about collapsing profits and falling share prices. British Airways, whose recently retired CEO has made £33million in salary, bonuses and pension payments since 2011, plans to make 12,000 of its 42,000 workers redundant. It has already laid off half that number, many of them cabin crew. Heathrow, whose major shareholders include the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and Singapore as well as the UK Universities Superannuation Scheme, has 4,700 employees. The airport has proposed pay-cuts, early retirements and threatened section 188 notices that would allow them […]

This post is the second 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 Alfie Steer (Hertford College, University of Oxford) Compared to the crises of the 1970s and the turbulent clashes of the 1980s, popular memory of the 1990s has tended to see the politics of the era as boring: a period of consolidation for the neoliberal hegemony first established by Thatcher, or, as put by Peter Sloman, a kind of ‘phony war’ before the inevitable arrival of Tony Blair’s New Labour. But, just as wider historical reassessments are now seeking to challenge perceptions of the decade as a ‘holiday from history’, the second panel of the ‘Rethinking Britain in the Nineties’ series demonstrated how it was also far from a ‘holiday from politics’. In an […]

Received from Swansea University’s Conflict, Reconstruction and Memory (CRM) Research Group This online workshop taking place 28th and 29th June 2021, organised by Swansea University’s Conflict, Reconstruction and Memory (CRAM) research group, will explore debates surrounding the cultural and political uses of monuments, reflecting upon their role in the memorialisation and imagining of the past. We will take a broad view of ‘monuments’, considering artefacts such as war memorials, cenotaphs and public statuary as well as urban sites damaged through war, or locations hallowed through their connection to pivotal events in the past. Initially planned for summer 2020 but postponed due to COVID-19, the workshop draws inspiration from contemporary debates energised by movements such as ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, Decolonizing the University, and campaigns against Confederate monuments in the USA. The global Black Lives Matter protests the summer 2020, which led to the removal of controversial statues in nations around the world, mean that the workshop’s theme is more urgent than ever. These developments have prompted linked questions about the role of public memorials, which this workshop will address. What socio-political motives underpin cultural responses to monuments? How have monuments shaped how people understand the past? How do monuments interact with […]

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.