by Dr. Banjamin Thomas White (University of Glasgow) The news from Syria has been nothing but bad for several years now, but things have been particularly desperate in the last few days—since Turkish forces, with a green light from the American president, invaded the region of northern Syria that had been under autonomous Kurdish rule, as Rojava. (You can read an overview of the situation and what is at stake in this Guardian article: “What is the situation in north-eastern Syria?”) Although I mainly work on refugee history these days, earlier in my career I was a Syria specialist, and I spent a lot of time researching the history of the area that Turkey has just invaded. The demarcation of the Syrian-Turkish border in the 1920s and 30s was crucial to the constitution of state sovereignty on either side of it. Turkey and Syria were newly established states, though they were quite different: Turkey was ruled by a nationalist government that had successfully fought off multiple invasions, while Syria was only nominally independent under French colonial ‘supervision’. What I was really interested in, though, was how these interconnected processes shaped the political identities of the people living in what became […]

by Dr. Joseph Harley (University of Derby) On 12 September 2019, the University of Derby welcomed speakers and delegates for a conference on domestic work during the long eighteenth century. The event was sold out and papers discussed a wide range of themes, such as brewing, dairying, spinning, knitting and fuel use. Our most detailed understanding of domestic production still comes from the study of the middling sort and elite, and much less research has been conducted on the domestic activities of poorer people. The conference sought to address this issue by bringing in a range of researchers who work on a wide range of topics. Through this, we were able to look at the home in a more holistic manner and develop a more comprehensive understanding of the relative importance of different types of domestic production and work in poor British households. The event was very well received by delegates and received much praise. It was publicised on Twitter and used the hashtag #DomesticWorkDerby. Tweets from the conference have been assembled here. O’Connell: Estimates of 13.5 million pairs of stockings per annum required in 1619 (3 new pairs each). #domesticworkderby — Louise Falcini (@louisefalcini) September 12, 2019 The first […]

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 […]

by the Past & Present editorial team

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).

by the Past & Present editorial team

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 […]