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 […]

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 […]