Edited by Hannah Murphy

The histories of medicine, transatlantic slavery, and race cannot, and should not, be viewed separately. Between 1440 and 1888 more than twelve million African people were forcibly trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean, enslaved in plantations, cities, and homes across the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe. As emerging discourses on anatomy, physiology, and disease claimed new authority over explanations for human difference, the same period gave rise to medicalized concepts of ‘race’.

Bringing these developments into a single analytical frame, this Supplement offers a wide-ranging set of case studies spanning Italy, Spain, the Canary Islands, the British and French Caribbeans, Britain, North America, Ethiopia, and the kingdoms and territories of the west coast of Africa. Ranging from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the contributions draw on diverse archival materials, including inquisitorial trials, port inspections, medical case histories and treatises on disease, missionary correspondence, travel narratives, legal records, newspaper accounts, and first-person testimonies. Foregrounding a broad cast of historical actors – physicians and surgeons, colonial practitioners, metropolitan intellectuals, enslaved women and indigenous healers – the volume traces professional practices, experiences of disease, and the lives of patients, from Canarian nobles to enslaved galley workers. In addressing medical practices within structures of slavery, genealogies of race-medicine, and how the politics of health and healing were themselves racialized, the articles here collectively demonstrate that a critical approach to the role of medicine offers a fresh narrative perspective to the histories of slavery, and a new understanding of the problems of race.

Ordering the Ocean, Ordering the World (2024 Supplement)

Edited by Renaud Morieux and Jeppe Mulich

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.

2025 was a “fallow” year for the Past & Present Supplement series

Beyond Truth: Fiction and Disinformation in Early Modern Europe
(2022 Supplement)

Edited by Emma Claussen and Luca Zenobi

Fake news and fabrications have always both intrigued and alarmed. Over and above this ubiquity, at particular historical junctures, awareness — and wariness — of fakery have reached such prominence in public consciousness as to turn it into a cultural phenomenon in its own right. This was the case in the early modern period when, similarly to today, a combination of new technologies and new audiences (with the rise of novels and newspapers and the exponential expansion of the reading public) brought about various crises of communication as well as opportunities for some of the people who lived through them. The telling of tall tales loomed large, both in terms of sheer quantity and in the level of concern raised about them, sparking new ways of thinking about truth and the literary and critical skills required to identify it.

Drawing on a series of papers first presented at a conference in 2018, this Supplement examines fiction, disinformation and the intersections between the two in early modern Europe. The volume brings together literary and historical approaches to these topics, going beyond the novel and the newspaper to look for intersections across a variety of genres: from short stories and legal arguments to biographies and medical reports. Its authors conduct close readings of falsehoods and fictional writings, considering choices of both style and content in light of issues such as creativity, veracity and authenticity. In addition, they highlight how such falsehoods and fictions reveal the agency of readers and writers in reimagining the world around them, by reinforcing existing balances and belief systems or bringing forth new ones. In this sense, the volume is fundamentally a contribution of method, one which showcases a range of interdisciplinary investigations; but it is also a contribution to our understanding of the ideas and exchanges that shaped people’s views and experience of early modern life.

2023 was a “fallow” year for the Past & Present Supplement series

Journal

We welcome new submissions for the journal in all areas. More information for authors, and detailed submission guidelines, can be found here. The online submission website is here and queries can be directed to the editorial office.

Viewpoint articles: with great success Past & Present recently re-introduced Viewpoint articles to the journal and we particularly invite submissions of Viewpoints. These should seek to provoke or advance debate, to open up new questions, to define the state or direction of a particular field, to shape trends in historiography at a more general level — always in a way that is comprehensible to non-specialists. They might be relatively specific/substantive with respective to area and period or more theoretical. Viewpoint articles would generally have a less formal character than journal articles. The scholarly apparatus of research articles need not be applied so rigorously: polemic could have a place, there might be less need for careful nuance or qualification, or for comprehensiveness of coverage, footnoting could be light, and style could be more individual. These pieces could be flexible in form. Two people (or more) might wish to collaborate on an exchange of views. (We think the difference between such exchanges and our Debates would be that they would not focus on one article). We are flexible in relation to length, but our preference is for Viewpoint pieces which are shorter than articles so that they stand apart.

Please note that we are now practising double-blind reviewing. Submitted texts should therefore be rendered anonymous (you may, if you wish, also submit a separate title page giving author details and acknowledgements).

We hope to reach decisions on most submissions well within four months (and certainly no longer than six), and we will contact you if the refereeing process takes longer than this. We also offer advance access publication, which allows for swift online publication in advance of the print issue.

Open Access Policy

We know that many authors will want to make their work freely available online and we would like to support this. Authors may deposit the ‘accepted manuscript’ version* of their articles in institutional and centrally organized repositories, with an embargo period of 24 months from publication. UK authors should note that articles published in Past & Present are therefore eligible for the post-2014 REF. Further details about self-archiving can be found here. We also offer authors the option of paying an APC (article processing charge) to publish their work freely online immediately on publication.

However, we wish to emphasise that no author is obliged to pay any charge in order to publish in P&P. All our decisions about publication will be taken regardless of whether an author chooses to pay an APC or not. The quality of the work is the only criterion for publication.

* The ‘accepted manuscript’ version of an article is the final draft author manuscript, including modifications based on referees’ suggestions but before it has undergone copy-editing and proof correction.

Supplements

We welcome detailed proposals for possible future Supplements. Please contact the editorial office in the first instance.

Book Series

We also welcome proposals for possible publication in the book series. Please contact the editorial office in the first instance.