by Farida Makar (St. Anthony’s College, Oxford) In November 2017, Guardian columnist and art critic Johnathan Jones wrote a strident critique of the “Surrealism in Egypt: Art et Liberté” exhibition which had just opened at the Tate Liverpool. “There are lots of mildly diverting paintings of nudes, skeletons and strange desert plants” Jones writes, “yet there is no great artist in this show and no evidence the Egyptian wing of surrealism added anything essential to an international movement that was already waning by the 40s.” Jones’ main contention with the exhibition was the ‘inauthenticity’ of the Egyptian ‘wing’ of surrealism coupled with a reproach for having adopted surrealism ‘after the fact’ or when it was already out of fashion in Paris: “Why should we look at second-rate imitations of a modern French style when we could be contemplating a majestically beautiful minbar carved in Cairo in the 15th century?” The piece was met with contestation – most notably by Cairo-based artist and art historian Mehri Khalil, whose response in Jadaliyya, “Can the Subaltern Finally Speak?” brought forward some of the biases, generalizations and inaccuracies in Jones’ review: “Gazing at a minbar fits in the exoticism of Egypt—bringing to mind examples […]

by Dr. Andrew Edwards (Brasenose College, Oxford) Historians share a set of assumptions about time. Introducing Logics of History, William Sewell wrote that historians, “assume that time is heterogeneous. We assume that what entities exist in the social world, how they operate, and what they mean change fundamentally over time.” Our “working assumption,” Sewell continued, “is that every important form of social relations is potentially subject to change: not only ideas, institutions, and identities, but tools, forms of shelter, sex, gods, climate, diseases, cultivated plants, and languages.” This belief in change, Sewell argued, is what distinguishes historians from other social scientists, “whose entire mode of operation is to discover and apply general causal laws, laws implicitly or explicitly assumed to be independent of time and place.”1 Economic history has long been an exception to this rule. As Patrick O’Brien and Kent Deng have observed in a series of recent articles, from the 1950s on economic history – particularly the global comparative mode O’Brien pioneered – has been dominated by what Deng and O’Brien call the “Kuznetsian” paradigm. Inspired, and sometimes trained, by the pioneer of national statistics, Simon Kuznets, these historians engaged in vast, painstaking statistical projects. They aimed to […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Responding to the Covid-19 crisis, Prof. Sujit Sivasundaram (Gonville and Caius, Cambridge) has written the aticle “The Human, the Animal and the Prehistory of COVID-19” for us. Thanks to our publishers Oxford University Press Academic it is un-paywalled and freely accessible to read. Alongside reading Prof. Sivasundaram’s scholarship you might also be interested in reading this media rich, interactive summary of the key points, accessible via the University of Cambridge website.

Received from the organisers Dr. David Geiringer (Queen Mary, London) and Dr. Helen McCarthy (St. John’s, Cambridge) Between January and March 2021 Dr. David Geiringer (QMUL) and Dr. Helen McCarthy (Cambridge) are hosting a series of worhshops to discuss and explore how historians can approach writing histories of Britain in the 1990s. The workshops consist of an initial “provocation” by an invited speaker, followed by further reflections from a selected panel, and then wider discussion. They are especially keen to involve postgraduate student and other early career historians in the events.   PGR Blogger Awards They are keen to document and reflect upon the events in the series as they happen, so as to encourage ongoing wider discussion. As such they are looking to commission 6 postgraduate students (anyone currently registered on a PGR degree, MA or PhD, in the UK or elsewhere) to produce a blog post on one of the virtual workshops in the series. They will be paid £100 for their contribution, using funds made avalible by the Past & Present Society. For further details and to apply for this commission please download the advert here. Workshop Series Overview Historians of Britain have only recently started doing serious, […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Our publisher Oxford University Press (OUP) have compiled a list of some of the most popular and salient history journal articles they have published this year. We are delighted that two articles-both open access-one from our February 2020 issue (No. 246), and the other from our May 2020 issue (No. 247) have been selected to form part of their “Best of History 2020” collection. They are: “Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas”, by Dr.  Tyler D Parry (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) and Dr. Charlton W Yingling (University of Louisville) and “Irish Cursing and the Art of Magic, 1750–2018”, by Dr. Thomas Waters (Imperial College London) Congradulations to all three authors on their work being recognised and celebrated in this way.      

by Dr. Vanessa Ogle (University of California, Berkeley) Tax avoidance, illegal tax evasion, and the system of offshore tax havens that often enables such practices make the news almost weekly. Recently, the British Virgin Islands, one of several tax havens that is simultaneously a British Dependent Territory, announced it would finally give in to pressure and established a public registry of companies. Tax and money laundering authorities will thus be able to pry open the secretive ownership arrangements behind anonymous shell companies. While the recent revelations about Donald Trump’s decade-long tax avoidance appear to suggest that he did not use offshore tax havens, his extremely aggressive tactics are an example of using domestic loopholes in the law to artificially reduce his tax burden. In the past, Trump has openly bragged about being “smart” for paying little taxes and gaming the system. Paired with the shameless practices detailed in the NYTimes investigation, such behavior and demonstrative rejection of the social contract of taxation resonates with what I described as “low white tax morale” in an article in the current issue (“‘Funk Money’: The End of Empires, The Expansion of Tax Havens, and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event” in Past […]

by Dr. Tom Cutterham (University of Birmingham) Propagandists of the American Revolution insisted from the start that events unfolding on the eastern edge of North America had global significance. Twenty-first century historiography has found plenty of ways to repeat the claim. Historians have traced the revolution’s political impact around the world, through its example to other revolutionaries, its effect on how the British empire was governed, the migrations of ideas and people that it triggered, and the ongoing conflicts it brought about or shaped.1 Global perspectives also shape new studies of colonial society that seek to reconstruct, in patchwork, a “vast early America” that stretches well beyond the thirteen rebel colonies. Plenty of good work still falls comfortably within a framework of national teleology centred on the United States. But that frame is no longer hegemonic. Conversations about the American Revolution are now almost as likely to be held together by continental, oceanic, or global points of reference. The revolution is well on the way to being globalized.2 If the American Revolution has been highly amenable to global approaches, though, it has been largely absent so far from the “new history of capitalism.” Historians of “slavery’s capitalism” have effectively overturned […]

Received from Dr. Peter Hill (Northumbria University) Introduction A series of online workshops are being held alongside the publication of the Past & Present virtual issue “Capitalism in Global History”, edited by Dr. Andrew David Edwards, Dr. Peter Hill, and Dr. Juan Neves-Sarriegui, and associated blog posts. The worshops are jointly organised by researchers situated at the University of Oxford and Northumbria University who are involved with the Global History of Capitalism Project (Oxford) and the North East Transnational and World History Research Centre (NETWoRC) Workshop Schedule Tuesday 10th November – Prof. Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University): Capitalism in Global History, editors’ introduction by Dr. Andrew David Edwards, Dr. Peter Hill, and Dr. Juan Neves-Sarriegui   Thursday 26 November – Prof. Maxine Berg (University of Warwick): Capitalism in Global History, articles from the virtual issue and elsewhere   Tuesday 8 December – Prof. Joanna Innes (University of Oxford): Political Economy and Culture in Global History, series of blog posts   Readings and links to join will be precirculated in advance of each meeting. There are limited spaces available: to register interest please email Peter Hill, p.hill@northumbria.ac.uk

by Dr. Matthew Laube (Birkbeck College, University of London) In ‘“The Harmony of One Choir”? Music and Social Unity in Reformation Heidelberg’, published in Past & Present No. 248, I explored the ways in which music differentiated and reinforced the identities of urban subgroups in Reformation Heidelberg. I examined differences in the social and acoustic profiles of the city’s parish churches, as well as student cultures of song which helped university communities to stand out from the urban fabric and cultivate trans-national and cross-confessional cultures of studenthood. There were a number of perspectives on this question – of how Heidelbergers stood out from, and blended into, urban society – which did not make the final cut in the published article. Although alluded to in the conclusion, I did not look at the ways in which sound helped to reinforce membership in professional networks, such as fishermen or professional musicians. Nor was I able to discuss other forms of difference in the city, for instance, difference of skin colour. As a result, my article did not discuss a little-known but well-documented African German musician named Dietrich Mohr, who lived and worked in Heidelberg during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. […]

by Dr. Erin M.B. O’Halloran (University of Toronto) There is a tweet making the rounds on the internet, accusing historians of inventing 2020 to sell more History. While we might protest our innocence, it is certainly true that History with a capital ‘H’ is experiencing a grim moment in the spotlight. A cascade of genuinely global crises have defined the past six months, from the pandemic and ensuing collapse of the real economy, to racial and social justice uprisings on multiple continents (met, in many cases, by violent state repression). Intermittent clashes between Chinese and Indian forces continue, raising the risk of war between nuclear powers; wildfires and other climate-linked natural disasters have ravaged the American West Coast, South America, Australia, and Africa. The August 4 explosion in Beirut, too, served as a violent metaphor for government corruption and a criminal disregard for human life—today as bitterly resonant in the Anglo West as the Global South. More ‘interesting’ times would be difficult, and painful, to imagine. My doctorate, which I completed last year, was in Global and Imperial History, an interlocking set of subfields which came to prominence in the UK in the final decades of the twentieth century. Since […]