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 […]

Dr. Samuel Dolbee (Yale University) Few archives I have worked in are more idyllic than the Archives of the League of Nations and United Nations Organization in Geneva (ALON-UNOG), nestled in a corner of the imposing edifice of white stone that now houses the United Nations. The squawks of peacocks wafted into windows and intermingled with the clicking of keyboards. In the distance, the silvery waves of Lake Geneva stretched toward the snow-capped peaks of the Alps, a majestic view of nature that, when it was built in the interwar period, was intended to signify the international institution’s transcendence of the parochial concerns of nationalism. This period of my research formed the basis for my article “The Desert at the End of Empire: An Environmental History of the Armenian Genocide” in Past & Present #247 (May 2020). On the desk in front of me there in the summer of 2014 were images decidedly different than what I saw through the window: the 1920s-era intake forms of Aleppo’s League of Nations-affiliated orphanage. Known as the Armenian Rescue Home, it was operated by the Danish missionary and humanitarian worker Karen Jeppe (written about by Keith Watenpaugh, among others). Jeppe’s organization, along with […]

by Dr. Sonia Tycko (The Rothermere American Institute and St Peter’s College, Oxford) Prison and detention center authorities around the world have begun to release some inmates in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic, at the urging of prisoners’ rights activists. These releases seem to vary from the unconditional release of convicts who were already near the ends of their sentences, to the temporary release on bail or license of prisoners on remand or mid-sentence. With advocacy efforts and media attention focused on the decisions about release, little has been reported about what awaits prisoners beyond the prison walls. Historically, captors have often let captives go from hazardous disease environments. Past jailors’ methods and prisoners’ reactions can remind us that the mere fact of release—while clearly a crucial public health measure today—is not, in itself, enough. Prisoners should not be expected to be indiscriminately grateful for release. How prisoners are freed matters, and disease plays a major role in their experience of freedom.1 I briefly mentioned the effects of disease in my recent article, “The Legality of Prisoner of War Labour in England, 1648–1655” (Past & Present #246), which explains that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, prisoners of war were […]

by the North American Conference on British Studies editorial team Introduction Jonathan Connolly is the recipient of the 2019 Walter D. Love Prize. Connolly’s winning article (for the best entry in British history) was “Indentured Labour Migration and the Meaning of Emancipation: Free Trade, Race, and Labour in British Public Debate, 1838-1860,” Past & Present 238 (February 2018). In August 2020, he will take up his new position as assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Interview How did you become interested in this topic? Early on in graduate school, I began reading about indenture in the South African context, where I was interested broadly in processes of imperial expansion. Like many I think, I was struck by how quickly the indenture system took shape, so soon after abolition. An interest in origins led me to the southern Caribbean and then in particular to Mauritius. As I read more, I became increasingly concerned not only with what indenture ‘was,’ but with how it was represented. Many of my interests and nascent commitments as a historian involved the political culture of imperial rule—attempts to understand and rationalize power. So my earliest question, the question […]