AbstractThis article explores nationalism and consumption in British-mandate Palestine using a history-from-below approach. It focuses on Arab and Jewish peddlers who regularly crossed national, cultural, and geographic borders in order to conduct petty trade with customers. Colonial and nationalist actors worked hard to curb the ubiquitous presence of such peddlers for various reasons. First, British

Halfway up the exit stairs of a Kyoto subway station lies the entrance to a small nightclub called, appropriately enough, Metro. It’s been there for several decades, serving a cosmopolitan mix of people drawn from the art schools and universities in the immediate neighbourhood and non-mainstream music scenes from across the wider Kansai region of western Japan. Once a month it also hosts the region’s

This article uses the strange and marvellous as a heuristic device to study the relationship between emotions, media and politics in early modern Venice. In particular, it examines how printed news about the marvels of the Levant mediated Venice’s encounters with its colonial subjects and imperial rivals, and analyses the role of wonder and imagination in the creation of an imperial community of feelings

This article offers new perspectives on the commemorative events organized around the UK in 2007 to mark the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807). Drawing from the resources contained in Remembering 1807, a digital archive of information about nearly 350 events and exhibitions held in 2007, it offers a closer look at the variety, diversity and creativity of projects organized

In this article, I discuss humiliation parades as described by eleventh-century Byzantine historians, focusing on the role of mules and donkeys in them. More specifically, I examine how the presence of these equids could change the meaning of a scene in the works of Michael Attaleiates, John Skylitzes, and Michael Psellos. I argue that, as the social and religious connotations of mules and donkeys

First established in New York in 1880, the Irish Ladies’ Land League soon had branches across Ireland, the USA, Britain, Canada and Australasia and represented an unprecedented advance in Irish women’s political activism. In Dundee, Scotland the organization found a particularly receptive environment due to the distinctive gender balance of the Irish community there, with working-class women a large

GraysonRichard S., Dublin’s Great Wars: the First World War, the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution,Cambridge University Press, 2018.

This article introduces an experiment in collaborative historical practice. It describes how six historians visited the East Devon village of Branscombe, with the aim of creatively engaging with the present and past of the village. This was a collaborative and collective act of what we term here ‘creative dislocation’. By dislocating from our usual routines, subjects, places, methods, and styles, and

Focusing upon the achievement of the abolition of British slavery in 1833 has obscured significant continuities between slavery, apprenticeship, and the post-emancipation period, particularly in the new Anglophone settler colonies. During the decade leading up to abolition, domestic unrest intensified the tension between the elite abolitionist movement’s humanitarian concern for Caribbean slaves, and

This article explores the participation of immigrants, or people born outside the kingdom, in urban politics in later medieval England. It demonstrates that the nationality of these newcomers was of only secondary importance. What mattered most was whether immigrants’ economic and political interests aligned with those of the civic political elites. If they did not, aliens’ nationality could be mobilized

This article argues that Pacific Islander labour in Australia was not analogous to earlier Atlantic world slavery and can better be understood as its ‘illegitimate offspring’. Through case studies that connect the Caribbean to Australia, it reveals how the idea of Pacific Islander labour was forged in an environment where the abolitionist battle had been won, but where the interconnected and changing

Analysing a comprehensive shift in the governance of the British Empire in the mid 1830s, this article introduces the context for the following three articles in the Feature, ‘Legacies of Slave Ownership’. This shift included the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, upon which these articles concentrate, but also the restructuring of the East India Company. A reformed British parliament introduced

E. R. J. Owen – known to his family, friends and colleagues as Roger – died on 23 December 2018 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of eighty-three. Over the course of a long and distinguished career Roger produced pioneering scholarly work of lasting importance on many different dimensions of the economic, political and social history of the modern Middle East, a field in whose intellectual

Roger was a romantic. When I first knew him, in the late 1950s, he would talk intensely about how we are born alone, we die alone, and we must learn to be alone.

When the British government abolished slavery in the Caribbean and compensated the slave-owners, some of the beneficiaries and/or their children and grandchildren went to Australia to make a new life and if possible a new fortune. This essay traces the history of one such family, the Shiells of Montserrat, alongside two other contemporaneous histories – that of Yorkshire radical and convict, John Burkinshaw

AbstractIn the summer of 1981 a series of riots broke out across England. Here we look at the contemporary photojournalism of the Moss Side, Manchester, riots in the local newspaper, the Manchester Evening News, in order to better understand the riots and media representation of riots more generally. We begin by exploring the contradictory nature of photography (and news photography in particular)

AbstractIn this article we reflect upon the many advantages of collaborations between academic historians and artists, as a method for presenting our work, communicating with different audiences and, most importantly, beginning conversations which cause us to think about our research in new and creative ways. We argue that collaboration allows us to rethink the boundaries of expertise, it opens up

AbstractOn the back of the Royal Historical Society’s 2018 report on race and ethnicity, as well as ongoing discussions about ‘decolonizing the syllabus’, this is a conversation piece titled, ‘Decolonizing History: Enquiry and Practice’. While ‘decolonization’ has been a key framework for historical research, it has assumed increasingly varied and nebulous meanings in teaching, where calls for ‘decolonizing’

AbstractThis essay traces the movements of a library from New York to Lahore in the wake of the First World War and then to Shimla and Chandigarh following the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. It explores how this collection of books, assembled by the anti-colonial nationalist Lajpat Rai (1865–1928), intersected with and informed key moments of political struggle in twentieth-century urban

AbstractCan dogs be racist? Posing this question may seem odd and at worst, unhelpfully provocative at a time when the discourse of ‘colour-blindness’ is so pervasive. Yet the idea of ‘racist dogs’ remains salient within the post-settler societies of eastern and southern Africa, where dogs have been an integral if overlooked tool of colonial practices of racialization. This article traces the colonial

GreenFrancis and KynastonDavid, Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem, Bloomsbury, London, 2019; pp. viii+308; ISBN 9781526601261.

PasseriniLuisa, Conversations on Visual Memory, European University Institute, Florence, 2018. Available from Cadmus, European University Institute Research Repository, at: http://hdl.handle.net/1814/60164.

TrentmannFrank, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First, New York: HarperCollins, 2016.

Thatcher UlrichLaurel, Anne CarterSarah, GaskellIvan, SchechnerSara, and van GerbigSamantha, Tangible Things: Making History through Objects, OUP USA, New York, 2015.Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: the Creation and Destruction of Value – New Edition, intro. Joshua O. Reno, Pluto Press, London, 2017.

Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, ‘Metadata, Surveillance and the Tudor State’, History Workshop Journal 87, 23 January 2019, pp. 27–51, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dby033.

RedikerMarcus, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: the Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist, Beacon Press, Boston, 2017; 212 pp.

AbstractThis article explores the practice of neonaticide – the killing of an infant at the moment of birth – in Manchester during the first decades of the industrial revolution. Using a set of previously unexamined pre-trial witness statements, the author makes the case that newborn-killing was practised by working-class women in the town as a known and even accepted form of birth control. There is

AbstractThis short article evaluates the changing and conflictive discourse and practice around homosexuality over the twentieth century in Spain and Portugal. The Iberian states were under dictatorship at the time of the Stonewall riots in 1969. Despite the repressive legislation introduced in both countries, it is possible to discern resistance against the law and against a general climate of social

AbstractThe philosopher meditating alone in his study is a cliché of western culture. But behind the hackneyed image lies a long history of controversy. Was solitude the ‘palace of learning’ that many learned people, religious and secular, perceived it, or a debilitating state of solipsistic misery and intellectual degeneracy, as its enemies described it? In the mid eighteenth century the debate became

AbstractThe Netherlands and Denmark housed Europe’s first two postwar homophile organizations, and by the 1960s, activists were already debating anti-homosexual laws in national media (in the Netherlands) demonstrating publicly; thus Stonewall was not the origin of activism in either of these countries. Yet the events in New York City 1969 had two lasting influences in these countries: first, Stonewall

AbstractThe mandate to think of Stonewall as a global historical event within South Asia necessitates a difficult act of translation. Was my goal as a historian of sexuality and South Asia to decentre the primacy of Stonewall with local historical events of import? Or was it more epistemological, to address instead the question of why historical causality and memorialization works differently within

AbstractThe first experimental trials of smallpox inoculation were conducted on a group of prisoners in London’s Newgate Prison in 1721. These inmates were long believed to have been facing execution, but archival material reveals that they had in fact received pardons conditional on penal transportation to the Americas. This article rereads the design, progress, and reception of the experiment, reorienting

This article provides the first rigorous survey of coverage in the twentieth-century British press of what we now call ‘child sexual abuse’. It argues that abuse was always visible, but its place on the press agenda changed significantly. After 1918, coverage was mainly restricted to brief, euphemistic reports of court proceedings. During the 1950s and 1960s, reporting became more explicit, but abuse

This article presents the first historical account of the spectacular growth of British leisure centres throughout the 1970s. The first section explains why the concept of leisure became so prominent, and emphasizes the extent of the boom in construction of centres. The second section offers a tour of a pioneering leisure centre in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire. The third provides a history of a firm

This paper examines the explosion of activism around housing in Ireland in the late Sixties. At a time of political commemoration around the anniversaries of the 1916 Rising, and the establishment of the first revolutionary independent parliament (Dail) in 1919, a group of activists calling themselves the Dublin Housing Action Committee sought to disrupt political consensus and ask serious questions

Dibben was a small farmer and, according to Castleman’s private notebook, his conduct had been ‘commendable all these years’. Dibben’s trespass proved to be a rallying call for the people of Handley. During the next four months, more than five hundred ‘lugs’ of new fencing were destroyed and over thirty people arrested for their participation in what came to be known as ‘Dibben’s cause’. Trespass,

Doing historical research on the smaller islands of the Caribbean has always been something of a challenge. Aside from the British government’s determination to ‘migrate’ files that might cause it embarrassment, until recently official buildings offered little protection from the ravages of natural disasters. On Dominica, for example, much local documentation was destroyed in Hurricane David in 1976

This article uses a charity appeal made on behalf of one old white man in South Africa in 1912 as an entry into considering the importance of age for social histories of empire – and for settler colonialism in particular. John Lee, aged eighty-five when he made his appeal, demanded the restitution of a piece of land he claimed to have been given by an African king and, to gain public sympathy, had

This article examines how the digital is politicizing medium within historical studies. Through a critical evaluation of Mass Observation Online (MOO: the online portal for the Mass Observation Archive), the paper traces how OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has established a new hierarchy in a key archive of British social memory, centred around the typewriter, whose products are much easier to

This article, part of History Workshop Journal's 'Historic Passions' series is an analysis of an unpublished manuscript that the author's grandfather wrote on the history of the Labrador Fishery in light of the author's own life in 1990s Newfoundland, during the early years of the cod moratorium.

When the Cornish recusant gentleman Francis Tregian the Younger entered the Fleet debtors’ prison during the early seventeenth century, he being ‘desirous of more ease than ordinary’ persuaded the warden to let him lodge in ‘one of the fairest chambers in the Fleet and to have three other rooms next adjoining to the same for the sole use of himself and his retinue’. For five years he lived in there

This article charts the meanings of hair in scenes of Habsburg-Ottoman cultural exchange. In particular, it examines the links between medicinal knowledge about hair and the ways in which enslaved Habsburg as well as Ottoman subjects addressed their bodies whilst living in either the Ottoman or the Habsburg domains. Connecting the early modern body with the trade in early modern bodies, this article

Titanic Quarter is situated on former shipbuilding land on the eastern banks of Belfast’s River Lagan, birthplace to hundreds of ships including the illfated Titanic. Titanic Quarter looks like a typical waterfront redevelopment project. Stainless steel and glass – the identikit symbols of civic modernity – dominate the urban landscape. (Fig. 1) For many visitors Titanic Quarter is synonymous with

On the night of 24 August 1699, Jane Blair used a ‘false key’ to burgle her former master, Thomas Tooley, in the London parish of St Swithin’s. She took silk clothes, a few bits of crockery and some money, then made her escape. In the street shortly afterwards, she was stopped by a constable, who knew nothing of the robbery ‘but he mistrusting her, searched her, and found the false Key about her, and

On 13 January 1830 the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (AHSI) held its fourth annual vegetable exhibition in the Calcutta Town Hall. Eminent European and Bengali members watched as the wife of Governor-General Bentinck placed silver medals around the necks of Bengali malis (gardeners) who had presented the best specimens of cauliflowers, cabbages, turnips, and other ‘European’ vegetables

On 5 June 2013 the Guardian newspaper published an exclusive article, based on information leaked to them by Edward Snowden, that revealed a largescale effort by the United States National Security Agency to collect domestic email and telephone metadata from the US telecommunications company Verizon. In the following days it would emerge that this was part of a more widespread and systematic programme

This article explores the needs of young people leaving residential care and the provision of aftercare support in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Young people's discharge, aftercare and post-institutional experiences occupy a peripheral position in scholarship on institutional care. This essay broadens interpretations of aftercare, which have been presented as inadequate inspections

How might creative practices surrounding oral history contribute to public engagement and to historical research itself? These questions are considered here through a reflective account of the making of the audio drama Positive in Prison: HIV Stories from a Dublin Jail. Positive in Prison is based on oral histories of HIV/AIDS in the Republic of Ireland, gathered in 2016–17 as part of the Wellcome

Claude McKay (1889–1948) is mainly remembered as a writer and primarily as a leading figure of the black political and cultural awakening known as the Harlem Renaissance. A distinguished and prolific poet and novelist, he was the author of what one contemporary called the ‘Negro Marseillaise’, the militant sonnet ‘If We Must Die’, which urged African Americans to fight back against Fig. 1. Claude McKay

This catalogue entry describes a linen bed-sheet that has lain in the Museum of London’s dress and textile collection since its purchase in 1934. It appears, at first glance, to be a very ordinary sort of household object, perhaps only noteworthy because of its noble creator and its age. Most bed-sheets of its era have perished with years of heavy use and vigorous laundering; it is thus a rare survival

Asians were once the majority populations in Northern Australian towns like Broome and Darwin, as Julia Martinez and Adrian Vickers show in their award-winning book The Pearl Frontier. Traces of this remain today in the multiracial populations of these towns and in the rich histories of families formed from the late nineteenth century onwards across the racial divide of Asians and Aborigines. In this

In the early twentieth century a large network of organisations, co-ordinated by the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, campaigned for changes to the law on sexual offences. In particular, they sought to strengthen age of consent law for the protection of young girls. Their efforts resulted in the introduction of a Criminal Law Amendment Bill in 1921; it would have raised the age of consent

The summer of 2017 saw an unexpected, and certainly unprecedented festival of queer Britain: a series across all BBC outlets called ‘Gay Britannia’, embracing drama, documentaries, stories, art and music; an ambitious Channel 4 series entitled ‘50 Shades of Gay’ covering a similar range, though a little quirkier; plays on West End and other stages; celebratory lunches, teas, dinners and receptions

The morning of Tuesday, 2 December 1834 dawned bright and sunny in the hills over the peaceful Alpine town of Gap. Taking a walk through the countryside, the retired French officer Jean-Stanislas Vivien was struck by the memory of a similarly beautiful morning twenty-nine years earlier, when crisp winter sunshine had shone on the famous battlefield of Austerlitz. Comparing what he remembered as a day

Marilyn B. Young, an influential historian of U.S. foreign policy, a feminist and a prominent public critic of America’s endless wars in the twentieth and twenty-first century, died in New York City on 19 February Brilliant, charismatic and witty, Marilyn was a beloved colleague and friend, a devoted teacher, and an inspiring model of a politically engaged intellectual. Irvine, California, January

Between 1890 and the 1930s, thousands of ayahs and amahs were recorded on passenger lists for ship arrivals into Britain from South and East Asian ports. Described as ‘a very useful class of people who wait on ladies and take charge of children during the sea voyage’, ayahs either accompanied their permanent employers during trips to Britain or were hired exclusively for the journey. Despite a growing

music recorded at the beginning of the twentieth century. Denning offers a convincing description of the transformative power of recording and the mass circulation of recorded music, and sheds light on the conditions out of which the vernacular music of the 1920s emerged. By combining history with musicology and cultural studies, Noise Uprising forces us to consider how music and sound can be used

Over the course of the 1970s, feminists in Britain and elsewhere in the West raised questions about the nature of work and criticized the gendered division of labour. They argued that the undervaluing of women’s work lay at the heart of troubled relations between men and women and viewed the transformation of this work as a necessary condition for the formation of new types of intimacy. By the late

W.B. Yeats’s question ‘Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?’ from ‘The Man and the Echo’ (1938), speculatitively postions his play, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), as the driving force behind the Easter Rising of 1916. While theatre was a powerful factor in creating the cultural-politial climate which gave birth to the Rising, Yeats’s question disingenously gives his play an exclusive

This article asks how to listen for meaning in women’s life stories when those stories are relayed to us by men. On 1 February 1951 Kent Geiger, a US graduate student, aged twenty-eight, sat down to interview ‘Olga Ivanova’, a forty-four-year-old Russian seamstress and displaced person who had left the USSR in 1943. Over two days, four sessions and eleven hours of interviewing, the pair spoke about