by Prof. Catherine Fletcher (Manchester Metropolitan University) Asked to draw up a list of important early modern technologies, few historians would ignore guns and gunpowder. Yet the detail of firearms’ impact on sixteenth-century Europe is less well-known than it might be. This is all the more surprising given the parallels between the debates of the sixteenth century about how to handle this problematic new technology, and those of today. Writers of the period knew that while handguns might be in demand for self-defence, in reality they were a poor defensive weapon. Local authorities realised that concealed carry was a challenge to social order. Political thinkers argued that gun proliferation required an international solution. Aspects of which I explore in my article “Firearms and the State in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Gun Proliferation and Gun Control” in Past & Present No. 260 (August 2023). From the earliest days of gunpowder technology there was deep ambivalence in Europe about its use. Firearms were the devil’s work (one manuscript illumination of the Resurrection shows demons firing at the risen Christ); they were unmanly and ungallant, and in more lethal ways than previous technologies. On the other hand, they were becoming a vital military technology, and […]

from the Royal Historical Society The Royal Historical Society is delighted to award Masters’ Scholarships to the following six students. Each student is now beginning a Masters’ degree in History for the academic year 2023-24: Roqibat Adebimpe, to study at the University of Sheffield Matthew Dickinson, to study at the University of Manchester Baryana Ivanova, to study of the University of Cambridge Nawajesh Khan, to study at Cardiff University Marielle Masolo, to study at the University of Oxford Charlotte Willis, to study at Cardiff University The Masters’ Scholarship programme provides financial support to students from groups currently underrepresented in academic History. Each Scholarship is worth £5000. The scheme, established in 2022, seeks to actively address underrepresentation and encourage Black and Asian students to consider academic research in History. By supporting Masters’ students the programme focuses on a key early stage in the academic training of future researchers. With these Scholarships, the Society seeks to support students who are without the financial means to study for a Masters’ in History. By doing so, we hope to improve the educational experience of early career historians engaged in a further degree. The Society is very grateful to the Thriplow Charitable Trust and the Past & Present Society who each […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present’s latest virtual issue “Languages of History, Histories of Language” edited by Dr. John Gallagher (University of Leeds) and Dr. Purba Hossain (Christ’s College, Cambridge) has been published. It stems from an online Past and Present Society sponsored round table on ‘New Histories of Language’ – held in the summer of 2021 – which was convened by Dr. Gallagher and Dr. Hossain. The virtual issue comprises ten articles published in Past & Present over the decades which focus on language as a means of exploring and understanding the past, as well as an introductory historiographical essay “Languages of History, Histories of Language” by Dr. Gallagher and Dr. Hossain which contextualises and comments upon the articles they have selected. All of the articles from the journal’s back issues are currently free to read. “Languages of History, Histories of Language” may be read here.

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was pleased to learn that Dr. Joshua Ehrlich (Unversity of Macau) has been awarded the 2023 Urban History Association Arnold Hirsch Award for Best Article in a Scholarly Journal. The prize (also awarded this year to Dr. Todd M. Michney) was awarded for Dr. Ehrlich’s article in Past & Present No. 257 (November 2022) “The Meanings of a Port City Boundary: Calcutta’s Maratha Ditch, c.1700–1950” The prize committee’s citation reads: “Ehrlich’s article provides a rich and nuanced examination of the history of Calcutta’s Maratha Ditch and paints a vivid picture of how physical boundaries play a profound role in shaping socio-political landscapes by encapsulating a city’s historical, political, and social evolution. Ehrlich shows how the ditch’s history directly relates to shifts in British colonial ambitions, negotiations with regional powers, and the emergence of Calcutta as a global metropolis. The ditch’s physical form, from a defensive structure to a boulevard, represents not only changing urban planning but also local political and societal dynamics. Through meticulous research, Ehrlich demonstrates that the history of the ditch represents a complex interplay between sovereignty, territorial expansion, and symbolic meaning-making, dispelling the notion of port cities […]

by Dr. Samuel Agbamu (University of Reading) The post below originally appeared on the blog of the University of Reading Classics Department, published on 14/07/2023. It is reproduced with the permission of the author. Rome is a city steeped in the history of empire. Few tourists will fail to visit any number of the imposing remains of the Rome of the Caesars, be it the Colosseum, Pantheon, or the Forum. Yet the imperial history of Rome did not end with the putative fall of the Western Roman Empire, whenever we might date that, nor with Charles V’s sack of Rome in 1527, nor even with the incorporation of Rome into the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. Of the major European imperial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Italy stands out as perhaps the least discussed, either inside or outside Italy, and one of the least understood. Because of its easy association with the Fascist regime, which held power from 1922 to 1943, and the invasion of Ethiopia launched by Mussolini in 1935, the legacy of modern Italian imperialism is frequently subsumed into the question of Fascism. Yet Italy pursued an imperial agenda almost at the same time as being […]

by Isaiah Silvers (University of Durham) In the question-and-answer period of an afternoon panel on ‘Politics of association’ at the Organise! Organise! Organise! conference, presenters Francis Boorman, Dan Weinbren, and Graeme Morton were asked about the relationship between associational cultures and nineteenth-century democratisation in Britain. Boorman elegantly summarised an impasse between two common historiographical positions: that habits and methods of democracy were seeded in nineteenth-century voluntary associations and slowly filtered into popular politics; or alternatively that associational culture was a sphere in which the unenfranchised pursued their own democratic practices in response to their exclusion from the political realm. Underlying both positions is the assumption that voluntary associations had an inherent affinity with political democracy due to their participatory structures. Dan Weinbren’s paper on friendly societies and the performance of democratic politics argued most forcefully in favour of this affinity. By his reading, these societies’ rituals, dramatic performances, and group governance expressed a common notion of democracy based on ‘independent brotherhood,’ which familiarised those unable to vote with both democratic mythmaking and democratic process. Yet several papers at the Organise! conference prompted a potential challenge to the assumption of an underlying link between associational cultures and democratic politics. In her […]

by Dr Becca Grose and Dr Alex Traves (University of York) Kinship is often treated as a social phenomenon that binds people together permanently through the creation of mutual ties, obligations, and emotions between individuals. Over the last decades, work on family and kinship in the early Middle Ages has addressed the basis of this claim through considering two key issues: i) how new types of kinship ties emerged in the early Middle Ages; ii) how far early medieval kinship was derived from spiritual or blood ties. However, what has been studied much less thoroughly is the way in which kinship can also be used to separate as much as bring together. Kinship ties were not always as permanent as might be inferred, and it was exploring these moments of separation, or potential separation, that this two-day workshop (held 1st-2nd June 2023 at King’s Manor, University of York) focused on. The workshop brought together scholars based in the UK, France, Switzerland, Denmark, and the USA, thanks to the generosity of the Past & Present Society, the Department of History, University of York, and the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York. It aimed to identify moments where kinship might be […]

by Dr. Mark Hailwood (University of Bristol) Those of us historians intent on exploring the world of ordinary women and men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conduct a lot of our research by looking at surviving examples of what such people read–for instance, cheap printed broadside ballads–or of what they wrote–take, say, Joseph Bufton’s notebooks. These materials are fascinating and undoubtedly useful, but regular readers of this blog might understandably find themselves wondering about the validity of this approach, and asking themselves a simple but important question: to what extent could the lower classes of England actually read and write in the seventeenth century? It’s a fair question, and has important implications. Matters which I explore in “Rethinking Literacy in Rural England, 1550–1700” Past & Present No. 260 August 2023 (Open Access). Does this material really provide a window into the minds of the most humble people in Tudor and Stuart society, or were reading and writing skills the preserve of the more affluent, or at least the middling, classes of society? After all, in 1691 the puritan writer Richard Baxter had described his lower-class neighbours as ‘the rabble that cannot read’. Was this fair? Back in the 1970s the social historian David […]

by the Past & Present editorial team The Royal Historical Society now invites applications for its programme of Masters’ Scholarships for the academic year 2023-24. This scheme provides financial support to students from groups currently underrepresented in academic History. Scholarships are worth £5000 each and are awarded to students who will begin a Masters’ degree in History (full or part-time) at a UK university from the start of the academic year, 2023-24. Six Scholarships will be awarded for 2023-24. This year’s Scholarships are generously supported by the Past & Present Society and The Thriplow Charitable Trust, to which the Royal Historical Society is extremely grateful. The programme, established in 2022, seeks to actively address underrepresentation and encourage Black and Asian students to consider academic research in History. By supporting Masters’ students the programme focuses on a key early stage in the academic training of future researchers. With these Scholarships, the Society seeks to support students who are without the financial means to study for a Masters’ in History. By doing so, we hope to improve the educational experience of early career historians engaged in a further degree. There are no conditions on what the award may be spent and may be used to […]

by Prof. Nicole Elizabeth Barnes (Duke University) Our planet is dying. It turns out the fossil fuels hidden beneath its crust were properly placed there, tucked away in the darkness. We cannot put them back any easier than we can reverse climate change, but we can, and must, seek every possible solution to our current predicament. This means every form of knowledge, past and present, is a resource to mine with as much diligence as we mine coal and drill for oil. The history of farming in China is one such resource, as I show in my open access article “The Many Values of Nightsoil in Wartime China” Past & Present No. 259 (May 2023). The problems can seem insurmountable. Agroindustry and rampant application of chemical fertilizers have so depleted our soils that, according to some reputable entities such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO) we have just sixty harvests left. Chemical fertilizers cause harm from their inception. Phosphate mining damages habitat, pollutes waterways, and creates a radioactive byproduct, phosphogypsum. Chemical fertilizers emit methane pollution into the atmosphere during production and after application. They also pollute waterways with excess nutrients in a process known as eutrophication. […]