by Dr. Erik Bengtsson (Lund University) In March 2016, I gave a short course at the University of Sao Paulo on ”The Origins and Development of Swedish Egalitarianism”. Having worked on Swedish historical income and wealth inequality for some years, I was giving a course on Swedish history, and I thought this was a topic that could be of interest. Because, when presenting results on Swedish income or wealth distribution for an international audience, there is a more or less fixed set of assumptions/ideas about Swedish history and society than one must address to make the discussion intelligible (or interesting?) for non-Swedes. They are, roughly: “Everyone is [was] a Social Democrat there”. “It was always a society of free farmers, without feudalism”. “Lutheranism created Social Democracy”. “Farmers created Social Democracy”. What these different formulations have in common is the idea that Sweden was somehow always different, more egalitarian, meaning any 20th century achievements in terms of egalitarianism and social cohesion is “just” a continuation of a much older history. These assumptions are not often formulated directly and developed (but Bo Stråth explicitly uses the concept of a Sonderweg to analyse the Swedish case, and Eva Österberg and her students argue […]

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by Prof. Ian McBride (Hertford College, Oxford) Many critics regard Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) as the most brilliant piece of satirical writing in the English language. It is certainly the most notorious. Twice as many people search for it on Wikipedia as for Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) or Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). It has shaped the fiction of Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells and Evelyn Waugh. Both Hunter S. Thompson (‘Fear and Loathing in America’) and Philip Roth (‘On Our Gang’) recalled Swift’s tract when they condemned American military action in Vietnam. Margaret Atwood framed The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) with an epigraph from it. The title of the pamphlet and the shock tactics it employs are repeatedly invoked by denouncers of the global inequalities that underpin our prosperity in the West. Even for those with twenty-first century sensibilities, A Modest Proposal makes very uncomfortable reading. Its genius is not simply the perverse simplicity of its central message, that the only way for the indigent Irish to escape poverty is by fattening up their babies and selling them to the butcher. What really keeps us queasy is the sustained […]

by the Past & Present editorial team We were pleased to see that Jacobin magazine has run an extensive interview with Erik Bengtsson (Lund University). The interview focuses upon the ideas about the emergence of social democracy in Sweden, and Swedish social democracy’s essentially political character; that Bengtsson explores in “The Swedish Sonderweg in Question: Democratization and Inequality in Comparative Perspective, c.1750–1920” which was published in Past & Present #244 (open access).

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by Dr David Coast (Bath Spa University) Want to liven up your conversation? Try adding some sixteenth-century proverbs to your repertoire: Has something gone wrong? Say ‘the Bishop hath blessed it’. Overcooked a pudding? Say ‘The Bishop hath put his foot in the pot’. Someone getting above themselves? Call them a ‘pontifical fellow’. Have a friend who wants to oppress the common people? Tut tut. Wag your finger at them and say ‘cut not the bough that thou standest upon’. That’ll learn ‘em. These sayings were recorded by the renegade evangelical priest and Bible translator William Tyndale in his Obedience of a Christen Man (1528). The reason Tyndale included them in his book was to show that before the Henrician reformation even got going, there was already a popular groundswell of hostility to the clergy. Although the bishops tried to dupe and mislead the people, popular proverbs seemed to suggest that ordinary subjects were naturally suspicious of the clergy and perhaps even sympathised with Lutheran ideas like justification by faith alone. The people, in other words, were on Tyndale’s side – which was all very convenient. Tyndale was in good company. The German reformer Andreas Karlstadt idealised simple peasants so […]

by Prof. Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius, Cambridge) My Past & Present article ‘Good Reading for the Million’ began with Margaret Mead. While writing a book about her attempts to bring anthropology to bear on international relations in the Second World War and the Cold War, I was curious to find out more about her impact on public opinion through the direct influence of her books. I had had a longstanding interest in the growth of the audience for serious non-fiction books, including academic books; I’d written a column on the subject for a Christmas round-up in The Times newspaper in 1993, a short book of my own on the market for history books, and an essay for History Today in 2009 for which I interviewed the pioneers of popular series like the Fontana Modern Masters, Oxford’s Past Masters and the more recent Very Short Introductions. But I was still taken aback by the scale of Mead’s audience when her books went into paperback – I estimated that she had sold a million paperbacks by 1960. I knew that Mead was an unusual academic who angled her books (from the very beginning, with Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928) […]

by Prof. Alison Smith (University of Toronto) As I spent time reading files and writing about Ivanovo, one of the things I wondered about is how exactly the spate of manumissions that first created this odd part-serf/part-industrial society happened. My full investigation into this has now been published in Past & Present (#244) as “A Microhistory of the Global Empire of Cotton: Ivanovo, The ‘Russian Manchester’”. Obviously it happened when a group of serfs gained their manumission, but that’s not actually a simple thing. Manumission was not in general an unknown part of serf life, and a number of accounts of Ivanovo note that the Ivanovo serf E. I. Grachev had received his freedom back in 1802. But that had been a single instance of manumission, and since then Ivanovo had been developing into a major textile center without additional cases over the next two decades. Then, suddenly, in the middle of the 1820s, something changed, as a dozen or so serfs gained their freedom over the course of just a couple of years. The short time period in which this number of serfs gained their freedom is still a clear sign of some specific event. Part of the answer […]

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by Joshua Ravenhill (University of York) On the 28th-29th June 2019, the Centre of Medieval Studies at the University of York held a stand-alone conference entitled ‘Belonging in Late Medieval Cities’ at the University of York’s King’s Manor campus. This sold-out event brought together Early Career Researchers and more established academics from the UK, Europe, North America, and Russia. I was also delighted that historians working outside of a university context attended the conference. Delegates contributed to an engaging discussion concerning the study of belonging in late medieval cities. In the late medieval city, there were various groups in which individuals could be included in or excluded from. These ranged from neighbourhoods, long-distance social networks, parishes, fraternities, craft guilds, and the citizenry, to name a few. Ideas of belonging and non-belonging can be conceptualised, and applied, in various ways. The key aims of the conference were the exploration of how ideas of belonging could be utilised in the study of late medieval urban centres and to identify which sources could be used in this study. Well #medievaltwitter, we’re all set and ready to get started on #Belonging2019! If any of you #twitterstorians couldn’t make it, don’t worry! We’ll be live-tweeting […]