by the Past & Present editorial team

Past and Present was pleased to learn that Dr. Damilola Adebayo (York University) was awarded two prizes at July’s Joint ICOHTEC-SHOT 2024 annual meeting at Viña del Mar, Chile.

The prize was awarded for his Open Access article “Electricity, Agency and Class in Lagos Colony, C.1860S–1914” which was published in Past & Present No. 262 (February 2024).

Dr. Adebayo was awarded the International Commitee for the History of Technology’s (ICOHTEC) Maurice Daumas Prize.

The Maurice Daumas Prize is awarded annually by ICOHTEC:

“…to the author of the best article submitted which deals with the history of technology in any period of the past or in any part of the world and which was published in a journal or edited volume in last two consequent years.”

Dr. Adebayo was also awarded the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize.

The Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize is:

“…awarded annually to the best paper in the history of electrotechnology – power, electronics, telecommunications, and computer science.”

Our congradulations to Dr. Adebayo on his research being recognised with these two prestigious awards.

by Dr. Nathan Cardon (University of Birmingham) and Dr. Paul Lawrie (York University)

On Thursday, 25 April 2024, thanks to the generosity of the Past and Present Society, historians gathered at the University of Birmingham for a one-day workshop to discuss how we might translate new historical work on the intersections of race, technology, and temporality to a wider audience with science and technology museums as sites of intervention.

In recent years, the extension of racial exclusion to new technologies has made headlines around the world. It is clear that new technologies rather than disrupting racial biases have continued them: whether that it is in face- and voice recognition software, generative AI replicating racist stereotypes to new technologies of surveillance and social media’s metastasizing the networks and discourse of white supremacy. As sociologist Ruha Benjamin has made clear, current forms of online technology and software not only reproduce anti-Black racism but are products of it, leading her to claim we live in a period of a ‘New Jim Code’.1

What is striking about many of these conversations is the lack of historical questions. Historians seem to be absent from a seat at the table thus exacerbating notions of technology as an inevitable phenomenon untethered to historical inequities.2 When in fact historians could point to the ways that ‘technology’ has long excluded and erased the contributions of people of colour to technological change as well as the ways in which technologies of the past maintained and perpetuated race-based exploitation and violence.3 In recent years scholars have called out the systemic and epistemic racism that has shaped the history of technology: pointing directly to how the whiteness of the field has twisted historical enquiry. These scholars point not only to the need for inclusion in our histories of technology—centring people of colour as technological actors—but also to question the very concept of ‘technology’ as a useful category of analysis. Is ‘technology,’ as a concept, too embedded in histories of racism, empire, and patriarchy to be of any use, they ask? Is ‘technology’ simply a synonym for racial capitalism? Should we return to a more expansive terminology such as material culture: ‘the everyday practices that shaped past lives’.4 Whatever we may think of this, for the most part, these conversations have occurred within the subfield of ‘the history of technology’. There is a need, then, to translate these new methods and insights to a broader audience both within the field of history but also to the public. And this is where our workshop comes in.

Apart from our representative from the museum world—Dr Felicity McWilliams, curator of Science and Industry at Birmingham Museums Trust—none of the workshop’s participants had doctoral training in the history of technology but all now find themselves working on historical questions related to the field. The workshop’s co-lead, Dr Nathan Cardon, had come to the history of technology through a midcareer project on U.S. empire and cycling. The workshop’s other co-lead, Dr Paul Lawrie, associate professor of history at York University Canada, framed the day with an extended paper on Black temporality and clockmaking in the long-nineteenth century that served as provocation to ground our discussions around the lived experience of technological and temporal production. Likewise, Dr McWilliams gave an important brief on how technology was collected and curated in the past, the popular views on the purpose of the science museum, and how personal stories and identities become tied up into industrial artefacts and exhibits. As a result, the workshop was framed as a space where we could learn from and talk to each other about encountering and mobilising knowledge around the intersection of race, technology, and temporality.

As part of the workshop each participant gave a ‘lightning presentation’ of how their research intersected with its main themes followed by collegial discussions on how we might expand these insights to a wider audience. 

Dr La Shonda Mims spoke to how lighting and new technologies of surveillance aimed at Black southerners in Atlanta’s public parks, quite literally illuminated southern Queer spaces. Dr John Munro addressed the intersectional politics of automobility or as he labelled it, ‘the intersectionality of intersections’. Dr Gerald Chikozho Mazarire reframed Zimbabwe’s technological history towards the everyday in the form of local gun and gun-powder manufacturing, varieties of fishing nets, and his new work on animal traps that used ‘motion sensor’ technologies. All these ‘other’ technologies challenged white colonialists’ emphasis on mineral extraction and questions the need for modifiers such as ‘vernacular’ when referring to these technologies in academic discourse. Dr Deniz Sözen spoke to how museum collections are using 3D mapping technology in the politics of decolonization.

Dr Kate Smith asked us to consider how the production, sale, and development of diverse Midlands-made products such as locks, lighthouse lenses, currency, hosiery, and ceramic tiles, depended on imperial circuits of exchange. Dr Tom Ellis addressed the ways in which space became a new frontier in the history of colonialism and the ways in which some Black Americans rejected this politics. Dr Shahmima Akhtar presented on Irish identity at the moment technology became a ‘keyword’, while also using it as analytic to understand a broader technological landscape of Irishness from thatched roof cottages to the Shannon River dam. Dr Leslie James of Queen Mary University London spoke on her research that frames temporality, travel, and space in the newspaper cultures of the Caribbean and West Africa.

Our current moment is not the first time that technologies of industry, mobility, and temporality transformed the lived experience of race that created possibilities for promise and peril. The last four-hundred years has witnessed transformations that fundamentally changed the way humans engaged with and understood reality, space, and time. Transformations that abetted and informed the explosive growth of global capitalism with its commodification of people of colour writ large. During this period, people of colour created, made, adopted, adapted, and co-produced revolutions in technology that transformed ideas around time, space, and belonging. Understanding and sharing their stories can help us to better understand this moment when technology seems to outpace human vision and threatens to embed anti-Black racism in new knowledge systems.

Taken as a whole, the various interventions of this disparate group of scholars began a conversation on the racial legacies embedded in histories of technology and reconsidered its very utility as a category of historical analysis for a wider museum going public.

In addition to the Past and Present Society the workshop was supported by the Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures, Centre for Material Cultural and Materialities, and the Centre for the Study of North America.

Footnotes

¹ Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019).

² Chandra Bhimull, Gabrielle Hecht, Edward Jones-Imhotep, Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Lisa Nakamura, and Asif Siddiqi, “Systemic and Epistemic Racism in the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 63, no. 4 (2022): 935-952.

³ Rayvon Fouché, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud: African Americans, American Artifactual Culture, and Black Vernacular Technological Creativity,” American Quarterly 58, no. 3 (Sept. 2006): 639-661; Lisa Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Manufacture,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (Dec. 2014): 919-941; Leo Marx, “‘Technology’: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept,” Social Research 64, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 965-988; and Nina Lerman, “Categories of Difference, Categories of Power: Bringing Gender and Race to the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 4 (Oct. 2010): 893-918.

⁴ Mikael Härd, Microhistories of Technology: Making the World (Springer Nature, 2023).

by Dr. Matilda Greig (National Army Museum, London)

Humanitarianism and the military should no longer be seen as parallel but separate subjects, and our understanding of both ‘military humanitarianism’ and its chronology need to significantly expand. Rather than seeing it as post-Cold War phenomenon, could we trace the roots of military–humanitarian interaction back to the early nineteenth century, or beyond? This was the central provocation behind the call for contributions for an edited volume, issued in early 2023 by Margot Tudor and Brian Drohan, which was tested on 15th and 16th January 2024 in discussions at a workshop at City, University of London, where contributors to the volume shared the findings from their first drafts. Present to ponder over these questions was a room full of international historians, political scientists, representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, myself as an over-eager literary historian, and the most superior conference pastries I’ve ever encountered.

Presentation at Military Humanitarianism: Reimagining the Nexus between Aid Operations and Armed Forces (City, University of London, 15-16 January 2024), photograph by Margot Tudor (2024), all rights reserved

Broadening the definition of military humanitarianism beyond simply military interventions motivated or justified by humanitarian ideals, the editors had challenged us also to think about the many points of connection between the armed forces and humanitarian organisations, and the influence of humanitarian ideals upon military identities and actions, including in peacetime and development work. What immediately became clear was the undeniable liminality between the two sides. Nearly every paper spoke of blurriness and porosity: military officials as preferred candidates for roles in humanitarian organisations, such as the ICRC and UNRRA; humanitarian aid wielded as part of an incomplete decolonisation process or for counterinsurgency motives, including in the UN’s current ‘Quick Impact Projects’; the use of humanitarian terminology by the armed forces, seen in Israel’s discourse of ‘safe zones’ and ‘humanitarian corridors’ during their attacks on Gaza.

Presentation at Military Humanitarianism: Reimagining the Nexus between Aid Operations and Armed Forces (City, University of London, 15-16 January 2024), photograph by Margot Tudor (2024), all rights reserved

Military actors, too, have often been motivated by humanitarian goals, or have become adept at creating elaborate narratives to protect this sense of humanitarian identity and an understanding of their mission as morally good, sometimes ignoring and erasing much evidence to the contrary, demonising the enemy, or differentiating themselves from their comrades’ behaviour in order to do so. This was evidenced particularly in the papers focusing on the early nineteenth century, with American officers managing to frame the violent capture of Seminole women in 1835-42 as an act of benevolent protection, and British ideas of single-handedly fighting slave-traders in West Africa neglecting to credit decades of resistance by anti-slavery-minded groups locally. As Jessica Reinisch pointed out during the workshop’s roundtable discussion, in fact, ‘doing humanitarianism’ perhaps always involves telling stories about one’s own moral position, often using very selective historical precedents. Examples of the efforts made by the armed forces to control the narrative framing around humanitarian work abounded in the workshop, with military institutions enlisting writers, artists, photographers and leading pop stars to support their storytelling in conflicts throughout time, across the world.

Panel at Military Humanitarianism: Reimagining the Nexus between Aid Operations and Armed Forces (City, University of London, 15-16 January 2024), photograph by Margot Tudor (2024), all rights reserved

The question of how far the scholar’s category of ‘military humanitarians’ would have been accepted by the actors themselves, however, was also underlined throughout the workshop, as was the importance of including more perspectives from those who experienced these humanitarian missions, and the possibility of extra-European origins for what is typically seen as a western European ideological development. Many of these methodological imperatives were drawn out during the roundtable discussion on the first day, with Elisabeth Leake highlighting the challenge that so many units of analysis pose to research. How we manage to look at the experiences of practitioners and recipients without assuming passivity on either side, while also considering organisations and systems as a whole, will be a key consideration for the authors as we move onto our second drafts.

by the Past & Present editorial team

Past & Present was pleased to learn that Dr. Jessica O’Leary (Australian Catholic University) has recently been awarded two prizes for her Open Access article “The Uprooting of Indigenous Women’s Horticultural Practices in Brazil, 1500–1650” which was published in Past & Present No. 262 (February 2024).

Dr. O’Leary was awarded the biennial Philippa Maddern ECR Publication Prize by the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS).

As ANZAMEMS explain:

“The Philippa Maddern ECR Publication Prize is awarded to an Early Career Researcher (ECR) for the best article-length scholarly work in any discipline/topic falling within the scope of medieval and early modern studies, published within the below date range.”

More recently Dr. O’Leary was awarded the Australian Women’s History Network’s Mary Bennett Prize.

This prize is awarded “to the best article or chapter bearing the hallmarks of advanced historical scholarship and contribution to the academic field of women’s history”. The award is only made in years when a piece of scholarship is deemed to have reached the levels of quality and significance required to obtain it. When awarded the prize consists of an award of two hundred Australian Dollars and a citation.

Dr. O’Leary’s citation reads:

“In this impressive ethnohistorical account of Indigenous women’s practices in 16th century Brazil, O’Leary shows how, following the arrival of Jesuit missionaries, women’s central role in Indigenous agricultural practices were expunged from public memory and the historical record.  Based largely on Spanish-language sources, this beautifully written and innovative article sets out to reinstate their story, in the process expanding our thinking about Indigenous women as resource holders and knowledge holders, and our understanding of Indigenous women as agents as well as the objects of colonisation.”

Our congratulations to Dr. O’Leary on their scholarship in “The Uprooting of Indigenous Women’s Horticultural Practices in Brazil, 1500–1650” being recognised in this way.

Past & Present logo, 2017 all rights reserved

Received from Dr. Nathasja Roggo-van Luijn (Johannes Gutenberg- Universität Mainz)

Epistemology of Ancient Embryology Conference

Dates: 1st – 3rd July 2024

Location: Department of Classics, University of Cambridge/and online

Event website

Overview

This conference will explore the various epistemological practices and strategies used in ancient Graeco-Roman embryology. An embryo can turn into a fully-fledged human being, but it is unclear how exactly that happens, as the inner workings of a pregnant female body cannot directly be observed. What methods did ancient thinkers use to circumvent this problem and nevertheless say something about the formation of embryos? What strategies did they employ to come up with theories, corroborate general principles, adapt theories from predecessors, and communicate their own theories to their audiences?

Strategies which were employed include dissection, vivisection, empirical observation of the pregnant female body, studying miscarriages, talking to women and midwives, comparisons with artefacts or plants, inferences from the pregnancy of animals, and connecting it to cosmological views by principle of ‘microcosm-macrocosm’. The conference will focus on the Graeco-Roman world, inviting experts on a range of thinkers (the ‘Presocratics’, the Hippocratic Corpus, Aristotle, Hellenistic doctors, the Stoics, Galen, Middle- and Neoplatonism), but will also include a comparative panel on embryology in other ancient cultures, e.g., China, Babylonia, India, and Egypt. Bringing together experts on the use of a range of methods, thinkers, and traditions, this conference aims to give a coherent account of the various, and often overlapping, epistemological strategies and practices employed in ancient embryology.

Programme

Monday July 1st:

8.45-9.15 Coffee

9.15      Introduction

Session (1). Chair: Sophia Connell

9.30-10.30: Caterina Pello

‘From Parmenides to Democritus: Presocratic Embryological Arguments’

10.30-11.30: Nathasja Roggo-van Luijn

‘From Cucumbers to Wool: Analogies in Ancient Greek Embryology’

11.30    Break

Session (2). Chair: Nathasja Roggo-van Luijn

11.45-12.45: Cathie Speiser [online]

‘The Embryo in Ancient Egypt’

12.45-2.00        Lunch

Session (3). Chair: Chiara Blanco

2.00-3.00: George Kazantzidis [online]

‘Terpsis and Akribeia in Hippocratic Embryology: The story of the seven-day foetus’

3:00-4:00: George Karamanolis [online]

‘Early Christians on the Soul of the Embryo’

4.00-4.30 Break

Session (4). Chair: Lea Cantor

4.30-5.30: Lisa Raphals

‘On the Character of an Unborn Child: Three Excavated Texts on Embryology’

Tuesday July 2:

Session (5) Chair: Nathasja Roggo-van Luijn

9.30-10.30: Vishyna Knezevic

‘Philolaus’s Embryology’

10.30 break

Session (6) Chair: Chiara Martini

10.45-11.45: Aistė Čelkytė

‘The Neopythagoreans and the Mathematics of the Embryo’

11.45-12.45: Alesia Preite

‘The Embodiment of the Immortal Soul in the Timaeus: An Embryological Interpretation of Ti. 42e5-44c4’

12.45-2 Lunch

Session (7) Chair: Myrto Hatzimichali

2.00-3.00: Sophia Connell

‘The Use of Empirical Claims in Galen’s Embryology’

3.00-4.00: Anne Behnke Kinney [online]

‘Embryology in Ancient China’

4.00 Break

Session (8) Chair: Sophia Connell

4.30: Mariska Leunissen [online]

‘Old Wives’ Tales, Maternal Expertise, and Early Medicine in Aristotle’s

Embryology’

7.00 Conference Dinner

Wednesday July 3:

Session (9). Chair: James Warren

9.30-10.30: Chiara Blanco

‘Greek Medical and Biological Influences on Lucretius’ Embryology’

10.30 Break

11.00-12.00: Norah Woodcock

‘Eggs as External Wombs in Aristotle’s Theory of Generation’

Registration

In addition to the Past & Present Society this event is supported by the British Society for the History of Philosophy, the Mind Association, Birkbeck University of London, and the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge.

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