by Dr. Benjamin Thomas White, University of Glasgow This post originally appeared on the Refuge History blog and is reposted here with permission  Six years ago, popular demonstrations began against the Assad regime in Syria. Their brutal repression by the regime plunged the country into civil war, and since then Syria has become the world’s largest producer of refugees—almost five million at the latest count. But for most of its modern history, Syria didn’t produce refugees: it hosted them, in large numbers. There has barely been a decade in the last hundred and fifty years without a significant flow of refugees into what is now Syria, from the Balkan Muslim refugees of the late nineteenth century to the Iraqis who crowded into Damascus after the 2003 US invasion. In a recently published article, I explore what this meant for the country in the 1920s and 30s: the period when the modern state of Syria emerged, nominally independent but dominated by France under a mandate from the League of Nations. In these years, the arrival and settlement of refugees helped to define modern Syria: its territory, its responsibilities as a state, and its national identity. The area that became ‘Syria’ had been […]

by Dr. Neil Murphy, Northumbria University In my article “Violence, Colonization and Henry VIII’s conquest of France, 1544-46” (open access), published in the November 2016 issue (233) of Past & Present, I examined the character of English warfare in France in the 1540s. Whereas many historians see the harsh military strategy the English used in sixteenth-century Ireland as being unique (even in European terms), this article sought to show that Henry VIII’s armies pursued a policy of mass violence in France which was designed to inflict the maximum amount of damage on the native population of the Boulonnais, which was the region the Tudor monarch targeted for conquest. While historians have explained the apparently distinctive use of severe military methods in Ireland by drawing on the traditional narrative of the emergence of English (later British) Empire, which is widely believed to have started with the establishment of colonies in the midlands of Ireland during the mid-sixteenth century, it became clear while researching this article that many of the hallmarks of imperial rule had already been implemented in northern France in the 1540s. The research I began while working on the Past & Present article raised a number of important themes, which I […]

By Dr. Nathan Cardon and Dr. Simon Jackson, University of Birmingham The genesis for Everyday Empires can be found, as is often case, in the quotidian interstices of academic life – in its linoleum-floored, poster-bedraggled corridors, as much as in the formal arenas of conference panel, seminar room or library carrel. As historians of French colonial empire, and U.S. empire respectively, we were co-teaching an MA course in Contemporary History at the University of Birmingham. Working through a syllabus that juxtaposed the work of Susan Pedersen and Joel Dinerstein with that of April Merleaux or Keith Watenpaugh, we lingered after class sessions, digesting our students’ comments and trying to parse the overlaps, gaps and tensions between the fields in play. It was clear that we were both interested in the ways empires elaborated their hierarchical “rule of difference” and in how that imperial rule was experienced on the ground level through everyday things – such as racing bicycles, or the spare parts for Fordson tractors – and through the global circuits (ideological, commodity, and military) that supported them. At the same time, it was also clear that while we were concerned with “trans-imperial” perspectives our work was very much rooted […]

By Dr. Courtney Campbell, University of Birmingham I write this blog post five years to the day from arriving in Fortaleza, Brazil to carry out research. The research from that trip would lead to my article Four Fishermen, Orson Welles, and the Making of the Brazilian Northeast about fishermen who protested their labour conditions by travelling sixty-one days by sail-raft from the city of Fortaleza to Rio de Janeiro and the movie that Orson Welles attempted to make about them (published in Past and Present’s February 2017 issue). I was in the Northeast in 2012 to carry out research on regionalism in the Brazilian Northeast, with a particular interest in how discourse about the region formed during international events. I had lived in Recife, the capital city of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, from 2003 to 2008. My personal connection with Recife melded with the already Recife-centric regionalist movement, making it all too comfortable to repeat the same narrative that assumed that Recife represented the entire region. I aimed, with my trip to Fortaleza (as well as to Natal, João Pessoa, São Luiz, and Salvador), to find stories of northeastern regional identity on the margins of an already marginalised region. […]

By the Past & Present editorial team “Rough Music and Charivari: Letters Between Natalie Zemon Davis and Edward Thompson, 1970–1972” has now been published We are delighted to tell (and show you a snippet) of a historiographical feature we are running in the forthcoming issue (No. 235). In the spring of 1970 Natalie Zemon Davis posted E.P. Thompson a draft of the paper that became “The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France”. Enthused upon receipt of the paper, and sensing synergies with his own work on 18th Century England, Thompson wrote back and the pair continued to correspond for the next couple of years about their respective projects. Davis was recently kind enough to allow Past & Present to view and the reproduce the letters for our readers. We are sure that you will be as excited to read them as we were. For now though, here’s a snippet. In addition to showing the thought processes, concerns and working practices of two of the twentieth century’s most eminent historical scholars, it also provides a tantalising glimpse into what our co-editor Prof. Alexandra Walsham describes as “a vanishing republic of letters”, granting us a fascinating snapshot of […]

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by Richard Bell, Joe Harley and Charmian Mansell (conference organisers) Since the spatial turn, historians have conceptualised space not as a passive backdrop against which social interactions and everyday life took place, but as a social construct that shaped identity, societal development, human behaviour and experience. Historians of early modern Britain have long been concerned with questions of social order and control. Debates continue about the relationship between the coercive and participatory facets of governance and the capacity for social discipline. Yet while these subjects remain fertile areas of research, relatively little work has examined the interaction between space, authority and social control of the people on the margins of society. This one-day workshop aims to address these historiographical lacunae by considering the attempts of those in charge to order society within particular places, spaces and locales. It asks how marginal populations (i.e. the economic or socially vulnerable) were organised in spaces such as workhouses, taverns, households, prisons, asylums, hospitals, streets, marketplaces and churches. It seeks to explore how authorities attempted to exert social control and discipline within these spaces and how these efforts might be resisted. What were the extents and limits of negotiation, participation and defiance within the […]

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By Aashique Iqbal and Radha Kapuria (conference organisers) 2017 marks the 70th anniversary of perhaps the most important year of South Asia’s 20th century. The year saw the end of the British rule in India and the creation of the independent dominions of India and Pakistan. As was pointed out for another equally turbulent time, 1947 was a year in which “decades happened.” The passing of nearly two centuries of colonial rule was accompanied by mass violence, the movement of populations, the establishment of new institutions and the reconfiguration of South Asian polities oriented towards new centralising nationalisms. The Partition of British India between India and Pakistan has come to mark a watershed in histories of the period due to its immense scale, and its often tragic consequences for millions of people in both the newly independent states. 1947 was also significant for a bevy of other reasons such as the transformation of colonial subjects into citizens, the integration of the princely states, the consolidation of constituent assemblies, the militarisation of South Asia, and the entry onto the world stage of two states representing nearly a fourth of humanity, to name a few. Seven decades give us sufficient distance to […]

by Sarah-Jayne Ainsworth, Harry McCarthy, Josh Rhodes (conference organisers) Following the success of our inaugural conference last year, the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Exeter is pleased to announce our second annual postgraduate conference. This two-day conference will explore the varied aspects of life and death and their representations in art, literature, and culture between 1500 and 1800, and we welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers from postgraduate students in any humanities discipline. The conference will take place between 15-16th June at the University of Exeter’s Streatham campus. Suggested topics for papers include, but are not limited to: *Ideas of a good life in the early modern period *The economic lives of early modern families *Concepts of happiness, satisfaction, or enjoyment *Advice on how to ensure a good life or death *Class and society *Celebrations and memorials (in society, art, music, and drama) *Medical, scientific, and other advances which contributed to the quality of life *Work and labour *Valued relationships, beliefs, or objects *Gendered virtue, sociability, or affection *Stage representations of living, the life cycle, death, and dying Proposals should comprise a 200-word abstract and a brief biography. Please email proposals to cemsconference@exeter.ac.uk with the heading 2017 conference […]