Received from Dr. Henry Miller (Northumbria)

Event Overview

This one-day interdisciplinary conference to be held on Friday 7 March 2025 at Northumbria University in Newcastle seeks to bring together early modern and modern historians, as well as scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, to consider the historical and contemporary roles of oaths and oath-taking in Britain and Ireland, and beyond. The keynote lecture will be delivered by Prof. Ted Vallance (Roehampton). Supported by Northumbria University and the Social History Society in addition to the Past and Present Society. The organisers are: Dr. James McConnel and Dr. Henry Miller.

Call for Papers – Oaths and Oath-taking in Historical Perspective: Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire, 1700 to the present

by the Past & Present editorial team

Edited by Prof. Renaud Morieux (Pembroke, University of Cambridge) and Jeppe Mulich (City, University of London) 2024’s Past & Present supplement “Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World” is the seventeenth that the journal has published.

It can be accessed here via the website of the journal’s publisher Oxford University Press.

From “Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World’s” the Back Matter

“This Supplement is premised on the notion that oceans were governed and not lawless spaces. Although this idea is now widely shared, the scholarship still tends to focus, on the one hand, on governance and regulatory frameworks, and on the other, on forms of resistance. The concept of `ordering’ enables historians to bypass this dichotomy. The structural changes that took place between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, with respect to state formation, empires, global trade and migrations, were inherently the product of inter-imperial and interpolitical dynamics, processes that happened at sea and not just on land. A focus on the water margins and the polyglot peoples inhabiting them shows how much these changes were shaped from below and from the peripheries. The contributors give centre stage to the plurality of actors, both within and outside the state, who contributed to the process of oceanic ordering. To understand how authority and power were projected across ocean spaces, the articles analyse patterns of political rivalry and collaboration, dissent and negotiation, violence and treatymaking. They track sojourners, privateers, fugitives and officials as they formulated individual or collective visions of order in seas rife with contestation. They chart oceanic ordering from the treacherous reefs of the Mediterranean to the verdant islands of the Caribbean, from quilombos in coastal Brazil to penal settlements in the Indian Ocean, and from makeshift prize courts in seaside colonial taverns to the bustling docks of London.”

Front cover of Renaud Morieux and Jeppe Mulich (eds.) Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World” the 2024 Past & Present Supplement, published by OUP (2024)

Dr. Dan Haines (University College London)

For Jean Kingdon-Ward, the night of 15 August 1950 should have been ordinary. She and her husband Francis, a well known British botanist, were travelling in the borderlands between northeast India and Tibet, looking for plants. All seemed calm.

Suddenly, a huge earthquake shook the ground underneath their tent.

Jean wrote in her memoir, ‘I felt the camp bed on which I was lying give a sharp jolt . . . The realization of what was happening was instantaneous, and with a shout of “Earthquake!” I was out of bed’. Despite feeling many earthquakes during her years in the region, this was the first time she experienced ‘the uttermost depths of human fear’.

‘Incredibly’, she went on, ‘after an interval that can only be measured in terms of eternity, we found ourselves back in the more familiar dimensions of space and time’.

Frank also wrote about the experience. ‘I find it very difficult to recollect my emotions during the four or five minutes the shock lasted’, he wrote in the scientific journal Nature, ‘but the first feeling of bewilderment — an incredulous astonishment that these solid-looking hills were in the grip of a force which shook them as a terrier shakes a rat — soon gave place to stark terror’.

Map of the route that the Kingdon-Ward’s took on their botany trip following the course of the Lohit River. Map by Dan Haines, all rights reserved (2024)

In both accounts, the shock – which still ranks in the world’s top ten largest instrumentally-recorded earthquakes – made the landscape behave strangely, induced intense fear, and disrupted their sense of the normal passage of time.

When historians write about earthquakes, we usually focus on the aftermath and tell stories about the politics of relief distribution or arguments about reconstruction. Survivor testimony, like Jean and Francis’s, usually just features as an opening vignette to set the scene.

I wanted to take their experiences more seriously, and find out what it means for how we understand the way that disasters impact on people’s lives. The beginnings of a surprising answer comes from psychology research on emotions, specifically awe.

Psychologists describe awe as an emotional response to two triggers. The first is a sense of vastness, something much bigger than the individual who senses it. We might colloquially call this ‘wonder’.

The second is the problem of accommodation. Vastness is difficult to comprehend in one’s accustomed way of thinking, so the mind has to work extra hard to comprehend the experience.

Both the Kingdon-Wards spoke of the vastness of the earthquake in terms of its jarring sounds, sights and sense of movement. The disorientation they felt showed how much difficulty they had in accommodating what was happening

There’s more: some research links awe to a slowed-down perception of time. We already saw that the earthquake seemed to last forever to Jean. Francis, too, wrote in National Geographic that ‘The initial shock had lasted only four or five minutes. It had seemed an eternity.’

But for the Kingdon-Wards, the experience of the earthquake wasn’t over once the worst shaking ended. It stuck with them during their eight-week walk back down the Lohit Valley to the Indian plains.

During that time, the earthquake continued to shape their emotions and time-sense. In a detailed private diary, now in Kew Gardens Archive, Frank wrote constantly and touchingly of his worries for Jean. She suffered from depression, sleep-loss and bodily weakness that had no obvious physical cause. Aftershocks, which happened daily, always alarmed her.

Frank, for his part, was deeply afraid of heights, and the earthquake had destroyed bridges and caused landslips everywhere. The party had to inch along narrow pathways and clamber across loose rocks, all over steep cliffs and sheer drops.

View of the Lohit Valley from high ground, by Rajbhowmick, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As soon as the couple reached the Indian plains, though, their writings changed dramatically in tone. Frank’s diary suddenly began recording entertaining minutiae, like an encounter with a friend’s pet porcupine. Jean’s memoir, published soon events, described taking a flight back over the Lohit Valley as ‘thrilling and wonderful’. Fear and anxiety seemed long gone.

Emotions, then, were closely aligned to their sense of place. The memory of the earthquake haunted them for the rest of their lives, but it was the landscape of the ruined valley, and the sensation of aftershocks, that had made those emotions overwhelming.

What does this mean for how we understand historical disaster experience?

The way that the Kingdon-Wards wrote about time, emotions and senses was reflected in many other examples of earthquake survivor narratives. Some of these come from accounts of 1950 by Indian members of the Assam Rifles, a paramilitary group that patrolled the frontier. There were also many examples from South Asia from around the same period, some of which I explore in the book I am currently writing about the 1935 earthquake in Quetta (in what is now western Pakistan).

I’ve heard anecdotally from colleagues in Turkey that narratives of slowed-down time also circulated after the terrible earthquake there in February 2023. Soldiers who survived artillery bombardment during the First World War also described that experience in similar terms.

So, the sense of time can define histories of exceptional moments, highlighting what makes them different from the everyday course of life. Really understanding how it felt to people to live through disasters, and how and why those experiences stuck with them afterwards, is an important part of recovering the past.

Researching earthquakes has changed how I think about doing history. When I started, my project was supposed to be all about state power and anti-colonial politics after large shocks.

But the archives kept throwing people’s experiences at me. As well as affecting me deeply (one particular passage in a memoir forced me to hide tears in the British Library reading room), this made me realise that emotions are not just good for colourful vignettes. They shape what individuals pay attention to, what they value, and how they relate to others.

In my article for Past & Present, I explored the emotions of an earthquake without much regard to politics. In the book, if I get it right, I will synthesise the emotional and sensory history of earthquake experience with the story of the political contest between colonialists and nationalists. Newspaper columns and bureaucratic letters dealt in emotions, too.

I will leave you with a pleasant thought from Frank Kingdon-Ward’s diary. One of the last entries was from 6 November 1950. ‘A perfect day, almost cloudless blue sky’, he wrote. ‘The mountains seem far away’. For him, the earthquake was safely in the past. For us, his experience makes fascinating reading.

by Dr. Sarah Moxey (Open University)

Over the last decade or so contemporary Scottish politics has been a dominant topic on the news agenda, however, Scottish political history has not received the same spotlight. The Histories of Scottish Politics in the Age of Union c.1700-1945 conference, held at Durham University in July with the support of the Past and Present Society, put Scottish political history firmly into the limelight.

Spread over two days, this conference featured the very best in research and innovation in the field of Scottish political history. The timeframe of the conference showed how much politics has been democratised over the centuries, from Laura Stewart’s paper on the Scottish Constitution, showing the declining influence of the church in politics; to the role of the aristocracy through political networks and clan politics, as explored by Brendan Tam, Edwin Sheffield and Tom Pye; and the breakthrough of the working classes into Scottish politics, including through the Chartists and cooperative communities, as discussed by Dominic Barron-Carter, Sonny Angus and Dave Steele. All these papers highlighted the vast changes in political engagement within Scottish society and Scottish politics over three centuries.

This was also seen in the opening panel on courtroom politics. Kajsa Varjonen’s examination of how the prosecution of malt tax rioters was politicised was a fascinating insight into political tensions during the early days of the Union. Valerie Wallace’s exploration of the politics of subjecthood expanded upon this idea and Emma McLeod then offered a comparative study of Scottish sedition trials. Finally, Rachel Bennett and Lauren Darwin’s joint paper explored the more favourable treatment received by Scots charged with blasphemy. These impressive papers demonstrated that the distinctiveness of Scots law really shaped political relations during the early years of the union.

A stand-out panel on women in politics revealed their changing roles between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Natalee Garrett illuminated the role played by the Duchess of Gordon in fostering a sense of Scottishness in Georgian London through the use of society events, while Hannah Speed analysed the longer-term impact of the women’s suffrage movement on the individuals involved. Lisa Berry-Waite’s discussion of Scotland’s first female MP, the Duchess of Atholl, and Katie McCrossan’s paper on politics of the women’s co-operative movement showed the progress made by women from the role of political hostess to entering frontline politics. The breadth of research material here showed that art, fashion and memoir can be valuable sources to the political historian.

The first afternoon ended with Ewen Cameron’s keynote, ‘Where did the nineteenth century go?’ In a wide-ranging speech, he addressed the issue of trends in the field as well as noting that the digitisation of sources has opened new avenues for research. Cameron concluded that Scottish political history is ‘more in the centre of gravity of Scottish history than it has been, but it should not be forgotten that it remains a crucial century for understanding subsequent history.’ Katie McCrossan’s thoughtful response suggested that Scottish politics and political history has often suffered from increasing centralisation, but added that the conference had revealed that the political history of Scotland was indeed ‘more complex and vibrant than we realised’.

Ewen Cameron gives the Keynote at the “Histories of Scottish Politics in the Age of Union c. 1700-1945” Conference, Durham University Summer 2024, photograph by Naomi Lloyd-Jones, all rights reserved (2024)

Katie’s words certainly carried over into day two of the conference, where the panels continued to feature discussion of ideas of complexity and vibrancy. My own panel on twentieth-century politics posed questions on underexplored aspects of political history, from Jim Tomlinson’s consideration of whether there was a distinctive ‘Scottish economy’, to my paper asking why the period of the Second World War in Scottish politics has been so overlooked, and Mathew Nicolson’s thoroughly researched paper on island politics in Orkney and Shetland and the Liberal revival there.

An enjoyable mid-morning panel on constituency politics showed the political flexibility and opportunities for political advancement created by the union. Gary Hutchison considered the Scottish Conservatives moving south in the period 1832-68, while Kyle Thompson noted the opposite problems of English Liberal carpetbaggers searching for safer seats at the turn of the twentieth century. Martin Spychal explored Scottish county politics, noting problems with registers and fictitious voters, and shared the progress of the History of Parliament project, a valuable resource to conference attendees.

The spaces and places panel generated much discussion and admiration for the topics covered by the speakers, Thomas Archambaud, Petra Johana Poncarová and Oli Betts. From Scots in India, to Gaelic magazines and the politics of railway construction, the reaction from these papers spilled over to the lunch break, drawing appreciation for the variety of topics coming under the umbrella of Scottish political history. One of the final panels featured new avenues of exploration, including David Torrance’s insight into how devolved government in Northern Ireland acted as a model for those wishing the same for Scotland, and Stuart Neave’s innovative paper on how scientific terminology entered discussions around federalism and interpretations of the constitution. This panel showed the originality which continues to emerge in the field of Scottish political history.

The closing roundtable discussed the future of political history, beginning with Colin Kidd reflecting on his own experiences of the way Scottish political history has developed over his career. Conference organiser and roundtable host Naomi Lloyd-Jones agreed that explorations of the new political and the new British history are rarely seen together in the discipline. Valerie Wallace shared her perspective that looking beyond Scotland’s geographical boundaries for the wider influence of Scottish political history could be a fruitful direction for the field. Emma MacLeod asked valuable questions about how we define political history, as politics is comprised of power relationships – a definition can be applied widely. Malcolm Petrie commented how ‘uplifting and reassuring’ the conference had been in showing a strong future for the study of Scottish political history.

It was indeed a heartening note to end the conference on. While throughout the two days there had been much discussion of political arguments and debate, the atmosphere of the conference was the complete opposite. Instead, it had been that of supportive and friendly compatriotism, something which attendees frequently remarked upon. Conference organiser Naomi-Lloyd-Jones is to be heartily congratulated for creating such an outstanding event and fostering such a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere. It was an inspiring event to be a part of, which showed the future of Scottish political history is very bright indeed.

Past & Present was pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.

Past & Present logo, 2017 all rights reserved

by Prof. Pierre Asselin (San Diego State University)

As I sit here and reflect on the contemporary relevance of my Past & Present article “National liberation by other means: US visitor diplomacy in the Vietnam War” (August 2024) on US citizens who visited North Vietnam during the Vietnam War (1965-75), it strikes me how some world leaders learn from the past while others completely ignore or refuse to heed the lessons and other insights it offers.

The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War is a telling example.  Consciously or serendipitously, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has borrowed from the North Vietnamese wartime/revolutionary playbook to offset his army’s inferiority relative to Russia’s, and frustrate Moscow’s geo-strategic designs over his country, as of the time of this writing at least.  He has done so by undertaking an aggressive diplomatic campaign à la Ho Chi Minh to win foreign hearts and minds, and vital military aid along with that.  While Hanoi at the time managed to secure material, economic, political, and moral support from a broad range of state and non-state actors – including the socialist bloc, Third World governments, and progressive action groups in the West –, Kyiv has been most successful at winning over state leaders and publics in Europe and North America.

To meet the purposes of their diplomatic campaign, Zelenskyy and his government have weaponized actual and alleged war crimes perpetrated by enemy forces on home soil, just as authorities in Hanoi did during their war against the United States, as I relate in my article.  Most interestingly, Kyiv, like Hanoi before it, has also resorted to what I call “visitor diplomacy” – namely, warzone tours carefully crafted and curated to elicit maximal sympathy from visitors – with a view to showcasing the merits of its cause and exposing the immorality of political leaders and military commanders on the other side.

Ho-chi-Minh with children (date unknown), Musée Annam, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ukrainian authorities have even harnessed the power of famous people, including movie stars, just as the North Vietnamese did more than half-a-century ago.  At the height of its war against the United States, Hanoi rolled out the red carpet for Jane Fonda, Susan Sontag, and Joan Baez.  Since the onset of the Russian invasion in 2022, Zelenskyy has rubbed shoulders with Ben Stiller, Jessica Chastain, and Mark Strong, among other Hollywood celebrities.  Strong is in fact “ambassador” for United24, “the main venue for collecting charitable donations in support of Ukraine,” according to its official website.  United24 is fundamentally a front organization, a government-run organ created to facilitate the expeditious achievement of politico-military objectives.  Hanoi, too, created several such organizations during its war with the United States.

While Zelenskyy has demonstrated that History can teach us powerful and sometimes quite useful lessons, other leaders have proven Spanish philosopher George Santayana’s old adage true: “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”  As I mention in my article, the international community banned usage of cluster munitions in the aftermath of the Vietnam War because they not only constitute dreadful anti-personnel devices, but also harm innocent civilians, especially children, during and long after conflicts.  In their obvious desire to make the Russians bleed in Ukraine as they made the Soviets bleed in Afghanistan in the 1980s, US policymakers have been oblivious to all that and transferred cluster munitions deliverable by artillery and ballistic missiles to their Ukrainian allies.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, for his part, has chosen to ignore some of the more valuable lessons learned the hard way by Washington decision-makers in the 1960s who were convinced the big and mighty United States would easily prevail over a “damn little piss-ant country” – in the words of US President Lyndon Johnson – like North Vietnam.  Just as American authorities never tried very hard to shape the global narrative on the war in Vietnam, to explain and justify in sensible terms the reasons for their massive military intervention there, Putin and his government have not done enough to seriously engage the international community and present their side of the story in a manner palatable to foreign audiences, especially in the West.  To be sure, few outside Russia itself buy the official line that this is about “de-Nazifying” Ukraine.  Shaping and controlling the narrative of a war is as important as waging it, the Cold War and the American war in Vietnam in particular have shown us.  Zelenskyy, like Ho Chi Minh before him, gets that.  Putin, in the image of Presidents Johnson and Richard Nixon, does not.  The Ukrainian President has masterfully exploited his underdog status, just as Ho Chi Minh did.  Putin, on the other hand, has failed miserably at countering the (predominantly Western) line demonizing him as a bully, a thug, and an existential threat to world peace, much as Johnson and especially Nixon failed to do in the Vietnam War.

In more ways than one the Americans did worse for lesser reasons in Vietnam – to say nothing of Iraq and Afghanistan more recently – than the Russians have done to this point in Ukraine.  Similarly, Washington, abetted by West European governments, has lavishly aided militarily and unconditionally supported politically the Israeli government in its ongoing war against Hamas, a war that has produced untold collateral physical damage and human suffering across the entirety of the Gaza Strip.  Irrespective of who may be on the right and the wrong side of History in the latter conflict, to condemn as the West has Russia’s actions in Ukraine while it, the West, not only tolerates but actively supports those of Israel in Gaza evinces a double standard, even duplicity and hypocrisy.  Yet, Moscow has thus far proven unable to capitalize on that pretense.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy paid a visit to the wounded defenders of Ukraine undergoing treatment at a military hospital (March 2022), Author: President Of Ukraine from Flickr, author has placed in public domain, via Wikimedia:Commons

Once their war ended, in light of all the death and sorrow they had endured, Vietnamese would cynically claim that the big powers had been prepared to sustain hostilities in their country “to the last Vietnamese.”  By that rationale, Moscow and Beijing, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other, had proven generous with their military aid to North and South Vietnam, respectively, because the war served and advanced their own selfish, national interests.  The big powers had never actually cared about Vietnam and the Vietnamese, for if they had, then they would have done more to end their suffering by diplomatic or related means.

Similarly, today, one must wonder whether US/Western policy toward Ukraine is motivated and conditioned by genuine feelings of empathy and solidarity with its government and people, or simply and uniquely by the ambition of weakening and humiliating Russia, to the last Ukrainian, if necessary.  After all, a negotiated solution at this point seems sensible and even desirable, but merely calling for it is tantamount to national treason in both West Europe and North America.

But the question begs an answer: What will average Ukrainians themselves think when their ordeal finally ends?  Kyiv certainly has a chance to emerge triumphant from its war against Russia.  But at what cost?  For even in victory, many in North Vietnam felt they had lost.  After all, what is there to celebrate when the enemy has been vanquished but one’s family, home, and country have been completely and utterly destroyed?

It took the Vietnamese ten years and millions of lives lost and irretrievably shattered to achieve and complete their own “national liberation” as leaders in Hanoi envisioned it.  Today, those who lived through and experienced the war, including combat veterans, feel neither joy nor elation when reflecting on their defeat of the United States; instead, they feel pain, loss, heartache, even regret.  Sometimes, there are no winners in war.  This is arguably the most important – and tragic – lesson the “victory” of Vietnam’s national liberation struggle teaches us.  Leaders and allies on both sides of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict should pay heed.