By Dr. Peter Hill (Northumbria University) This post introduces a series of short pieces on the overarching theme of ‘Political Economy and Culture in Global History’, which will appear over the following weeks on the Past & Present blog. The pieces derive from a collective discussion project of the same name, convened by Peter Hill (Northumbria University), and Andrew Edwards and Juan Neves-Sarriegui (both at the University of Oxford). This project has run over the past two years, supported by the Past & Present Foundation and our respective institutions. It brought together a range of scholars broadly interested in asking ‘big questions’ in world history – mainly early-career historians, but with a leavening of more senior academics and of scholars working in other disciplines, including anthropology, geography, literature, and economics. The original stimulus for the project was a certain discontent with aspects of recent ‘global history’ – notably its apparent difficulties in dealing with questions of power and structure – as well as a reluctance to abandon the project entirely for smaller-scaled histories. We set out, instead, to revisit an earlier set of debates of the 1960s to the 1980s, about ‘transitions’ and ‘articulations’ between modes of production, dependency, and world-systems. […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Ahead of the publication of “The Human, the Animal and the Pre-History of Covid-19” Prof. Sujit Sivasundaram (Gonville and Caius, Cambridge) exploration of the historical roots of the current pandemic crisis Dr. Stefan Hanß (Manchester) had interviewed him about the background to his work. The interview is avaible via the University of Manchester website. The interview is introduced in the following terms: “Sujit Sivasundaram is Professor of World History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge. His work on the eighteenth-century Indian and Pacific Oceans is of breathtaking innovativeness and brings global history and the history of empires into a conversation with the history of science, environmental history, and the history of race and ethnicity. Most recently, Sujit Sivasundaram published a thought-provoking Past & Present article on the history of interspecies encounters between pangolins and humans, which also discusses the future of historical research in light of the current pandemic. In this interview, Sujit Sivasundaram took the time to respond to a few follow-up questions on the role of microscopic records in future research on interspecies histories. Early modern colonial encounters dynamised human-animal and animal-animal encounters. You co-edited a fascinating special […]

by Dr. Mark Hailwood (University of Bristol) This post first appeared on the ‘Women’s Work in Rural England, 1500-1700’ project website in February of 2016, and represents some early thoughts on the research that developed into Mark’s Past & Present article in #248 on ‘Time and Work in Rural England, 1500-1700’. It’s that time of year – the bleak midwinter – when the short daylight hours mean that many of us find ourselves both going to and coming home from work in the dark – or, rather, in the artificial glow of street- and head-lights. For us, then, the length of daylight hours does little to dictate the hours we work. But how, in the age before electric light and widespread street-lighting, did the length of daylight hours shape the working lives of our sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ancestors? We might reasonably expect that throughout the year their working hours were much more closely correlated with the hours of daylight than our own: that you worked when it was light, and slept or rested when it was dark. Having just reached 1000 entries in our work activities database (we are aiming for a total of 5000) I am currently extracting some […]

by the Past & Present editorial team In 2018 the Royal Historical Society released its groundbreaking report Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History which illustrated what many within the discipline had long suspected and feared, that historical studies was drastically failing to include and represent individuals, perspectives and parts of the past which are not racialised as white. The publication of the report prompted much discussion within historical studies and illustrated a desire for the development of concrete steps to change and diversify the discipline. To move this forward at a national level, in 2019 the Past & Present Society resolved to work with the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of Historical Research (University of London) to develop a two year postdoctoral fellowship in Race, Ethnicity & Equality in History. The purpose of the Fellowship is to lead, support and general catalyse upon the momentum generated by the 2018 report and assist with the Royal Historical Society’s efforts to diversify the discipline and achieve racial equality within the study of history in the United Kingdom. In 2019 when the post was initial created and advertised Dr. Shahmima Akhtar, who had recently completed a PhD at Birmingham, was appointed […]

by the Past & Present editorial team In response to the ongoing Covid-19 public health emergency, Past & Present worked with Prof. Sujit Sivasundaram (Gonville and Caius, Cambridge) to produce a piece exploring the very roots of the crisis, by exploring humans’ millenia long relationship with the pangolin. In doing so, the article has much to say about our complex and often fraught relationship with the natural world, other species and each other. COVID-19 and the interspecies frontier How our long history with pangolins reveals the preconditions of both the pandemic and environmental crisis. “The origins of the COVID-19 pandemic go far beyond China and much further back than 2019. The long history of the current crisis lies in human interactions with animals, not least pangolins, in a variety of settings, including in Europe. This global, increasingly capitalised and geographically-evolving story is one historical context that has allowed the virus to jump across the species barrier. Zoonotic transfer occurs where relations between humans and animals have been unstable or where they are entering a new phase of contact. Such transfer is linked with the climate emergency because life on the planet is being radically changed by accelerating extinctions caused partly […]

by the Past & Present editorial team

Prof. Sheldon Garon (Princeton University) By the end of the Second World War, cities across Europe and East Asia lay in rubble—pulverized by ground combat but more spectacularly by unprecedented levels of aerial bombardment. The history of bombing is usually told episodically. German and Italian pilots indiscriminately bombed civilians in the Spanish Civil War; Japanese planes raided Chinese cities; Britain survived the Blitz thanks to Spitfires and valiant air-raid wardens; the Anglo-Americans incinerated Dresden; and U.S. leaders made the momentous decisions leading to the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My article, ‘On the Transnational Destruction of Cities’ (Past & Present #247), demonstrates that none of these episodes unfolded in isolation. The practices involved in bombing cities originated neither in one country nor from one ideology. During the 1930s, international peace groups denounced aerial attacks by Germans, Italians, and Japanese as ‘fascist’. Yet by 1944, the two greatest destroyers of cities were among its greatest democracies—Britain and America. Nor does imperialism or racism explain much. Historians often assert that Europeans and Americans bombed colonial subjects —and then the Japanese —with a savagery they would not have unleashed on Caucasians. In fact, white people evinced remarkably few qualms about bombing white civilians. […]

by Dr. John M. Collins (Eastern Washington University) My article, appearing in the May 2020 issue of Past & Present (#247), explores the “law of necessity” in seventeenth century England and is a complementary piece to my book on martial law in the early modern period.1 In this article, I show that narratives of necessity structured many aspects of English law and were vital for state building, both during the Personal Rule of Charles I, the English Civil War, and after. The Long Parliament, for example, invoked it to tax, impress, violate due process rights, break contracts, and to seize and destroy property. Many of these powers, in spite of the wars ending, remained. The modern state was built from emergencies. The article, alas, is more relevant than I (or probably you) would like. Then, like now, the fear of societal calamity, even collapse, allowed the government to take extraordinary powers to save the polity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the main threats were war and rebellion, with politicians analogizing them to natural disasters like fires. Now, it is the reverse. Politicians have frequently analogized the response to the pandemic to fighting a war. Like now, claims to necessity […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present is delighted to hear that Dr. Stephen Spencer who was a Past & Present Society funded Research Fellow at the Institute of History Research (London) between 2017 and 2019 has been shortlisted for the Royal History Society’s (RHS) 2020 Gladstone Prize. He has been shortlisted for his book Emotions in a Crusading Context 1095-1291 which developed from his PhD work and was completed whilst he was a Past & Present Fellow. The book has been published by Oxford University Press as part of their “Emotions in History” series. In the book Spencer provides: The first book-length study of the emotional rhetoric of crusading Explores the ways in which two emotions (fear and anger) and one affective display (weeping) were represented in Latin and Old French narratives of the crusades Identifies the various influences which shaped western chroniclers’ approaches to, and representations of, emotions in a crusading context Calls for greater sensitivity in using historical narratives to reconstruct crusaders’ lived emotions, beliefs, and ideologies Makes use of a broad range of comparative material to gauge the distinctiveness of these narratives: crusader letters, papal encyclicals, model sermons, chansons de geste, lyrics, and […]