Seminars

"Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction? Extinction, Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept – and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable. Yet Vanished shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion. Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished weaves together pioneering original research and breath-taking storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future. » [Penguin Books]

Between around 1580 and 1730 a range of comestibles known for their psychotropic and potentially addictive qualities became, for the first time, prominent features of English diets. As part of this ‘psychoactive revolution’, fermented alcohols (primarily hopped beer, wines, and to some extent cider) went through an unprecedented process of commercialisation; distilled alcohols (primarily wine, grain, and sugar distillates) switched from restricted medicinal drinks to staples of popular consumption; sugar cane, tobacco, and cocoa became valuable as both cash crops and refined (manufactured) products; opium and opiates became a bulwark of popular medicine; and coffee and tea entered middle class diets. While the book Phil Withington is researching provides a fully joined up account of this process, this more modest paper does two things. It takes a quantitative snapshot of the scale and shape of this revolution around 1698, when national customs ledgers began to be collated; and it thinks about how this psychoactive revolution shaped – and was shaped by – some of the broader geohistorical processes in which early modern England was implicated.

It is generally understood that cricket was of major historical importance in the anglophone Caribbean, that it was a form of cultural imperialism within the British Empire, and that the rise of West Indies cricket to pre-eminence on the international stage from the 1950s marked a high point of Caribbean unity and anti-colonial resistance. This book extends our understanding of this history, specifically by showing that the frameworks within which cricket, the Caribbean, and England have been analysed have obscured the post-World War II Windrush experience and the role played by cricket in terms of enabling Windrush settlement in England. The book argues that from the 1920s onwards, cricket was the most significant way in which black West Indians were represented to white audiences in metropolitan Britain. During World War II, a surprising and under-recognized amount of cricket was played on the domestic ‘home front’, part of a propaganda effort promoting the imperial unity, within which black cricketers played a prominent role. Up to this point, black West Indian cricketers fitted into an overarching conception of the empire as ‘multiracial’, in which different ‘races’ belonged in different places. The radical departure marked by the Windrush generation was their claim to permanent residence in England itself, their fight for the full rights of citizenship, and hence the transformation of the ‘racial’ underpinning of what it means to be British. This book explains not just the cultural importance of cricket to the Windrush generation but its social effects, how it bolstered the capacity of immigrants to build new lives, and hence, through cricket, how West Indians remade postwar England.

This draft chapter, commissioned for the Oxford Handbook on Law and Authoritarianism, addresses the challenge of writing about authoritarianism and empire. Because the term authoritarianism is seldom used in the period Lisa studies - and is often understood primarily as “not democracy” or “anti-democratic” - she reframed the project. Drawing on rich postcolonial scholarship that approaches authoritarianism as a mode of governance, she examines the particular propensity of more or less representative colonial legislatures to construct and enforce what might be characterised as highly authoritarian regimes in the interests of security, labour extraction, or dispossession (e.g., Jamaican slavery, Cape “free” labour, and Australian Indigenous protection). These case studies are well known to scholars of the British Empire, yet she argues that placing them within this conceptual framework opens up a productive, if uncomfortable, line of inquiry. She hopes you find this approach valuable.

"Few cities in the world are as famous as Liverpool, the home of the modern world's most celebrated rock group and of a legendary football team. The city is equally notorious for its poverty, its ethnic and racial divides and, above all, its decline. For Liverpool was once a major port, growing rich on slavery, on trade with the Americas and the British Empire's outposts in Africa and Asia. In the 1980s, it was described as 'obsolete'. Yet the city fights on. This is the epic history of Liverpool since the Second World War. It is a story of vast docklands shrinking and eventually vanishing when corporations discovered they could shift goods in containers and dispense with human workers, of industries like car manufacturing mushrooming and disappearing, of huge new suburbs being built and neglected. It is a moving and horrifying narrative of casual racism – Chinese sailors deported en masse in the aftermath of the war, systematic discrimination against the city's Black population – and of resistance, culminating in the Toxteth riots in 1981. It is the story of a city fighting against a descent into obsolescence. Liverpool also becomes a prism through which recent British history is brought into a new focus. It is the fascinating history of a single, iconic city. But it is also a warning of what the future may hold for many more communities." [Bloomsbury Publishing]

In March 1995, ITV broadcast Band of Gold, a six-part series dramatizing the lives of street-based prostitutes working Lumb Lane, a notorious beat in Manningham, Bradford. It became the serial of the year, attracting 15 million weekly viewers. Kay Mellor, a Leeds feminist writer and creator of the dramatic series, wrote Band of Gold with two political objectives in mind: to humanize street prostitutes and open a debate on ways to mitigate this “bleak dangerous world.” In the real Lamb Lane, the series produced the opposite effect. It became embroiled in local ethnic conflicts over the policing of prostitutes, provoking a six-week “tarts out” vigilante campaign, conducted from April to late May 1995, that mobilized hundreds of young male British Pakistanis. This essay explores how Band of Gold impinged on the local scene, exposing and disturbing the interlocking relations of street-based prostitutes, police, and male protesters.

Historians of television have depicted the 1970s as a moment of decline for localized forms of entertainment, but television did not kill radio so much as transform its listenership. Furthermore, both television and radio cultivated a British appetite for theatre. This paper complicates the declension narrative of local media by examining a case study of a doubly local phenomenon: a London radio program devoted to local amateur theatricals. Examining the 23 surviving recordings of BBC Radio London’s The Play’s the Thing, this paper argues that the program succeeded because it wove together three independently meaningful strands of British life: the role of theatre in British culture; the ongoing importance of community connection via associational life; and the value placed on “the ordinary,” imagined as both the local and the amateur. Ren Pepitone is a historian of modern Britain and its empire, focusing on gender, professional culture, and performance. Their first book, Brotherhood of Barristers (Cambridge, 2024), explores how affective masculinity shaped the British legal profession, resisting liberal reforms through social rituals and notions of gentlemanly respectability. Their new project, Amateur Actors, examines the politics of amateur theatre in twentieth-century Britain, investigating its role in shaping citizenship and political identity across diverse social and political groups.

Toby Harper is a historian of modern Britain and the British Empire. His most recent work examines the social, political and cultural history of the modern British honours system. His current research focuses on the history of freshwater fish and angling in the British Empire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring topics such as the acclimatisation of fish, beliefs about fish behaviour, the expansion of recreational angling, and the interaction between angling culture and practice. Part of a broader project titled The Settler Fishes of the British Empire: Freshwater Fishing and Colonialism, 1850s-1990s, the chapter being shared examines late nineteenth-century British traveler and official narratives about fishes overseas, connecting these accounts to the introduction of fish (especially trout) across the empire. A note at the top of the document provides details about how this chapter fits into the larger project. Toby is particularly interested in feedback on the structure and broader themes, so your engagement and insights will be greatly appreciated.

« The environment concept has shaped humanity's relationship to the natural world and has drawn attention to the effects of human actions on our natural surroundings. But when did we learn that we live in an environment? While scholars have often located the emergence of the environment concept in twentieth-century ecological and political thought, Novel Environments: Science, Description, and Victorian Fiction reconstructs a longer—and a specifically literary—history. It was in the descriptive worldmaking of the Victorian novel that the environment was first transformed from an abstraction into a vivid object of imagination and feeling. Engaging the scientific theories of their contemporaries, Mary Russell Mitford, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Louis Stevenson turned to detailed description—from gardens and landscapes to weather and atmospheres-to model interactions between life and its surroundings. Far from merely furnishing static background, the descriptive apparatus of the Victorian novel imagined the nonhuman environment as dynamically involved with human action, feeling, and development. In making this argument, Novel Environments recovers the scientific vocabulary the Victorians used to name the surroundings of living organisms. The word "environment" dominates our own way of speaking about the nonhuman world, but nineteenth-century scientific writers and novelists availed themselves of a richer conceptual lexicon, which included "environment" along with less familiar concepts such as "milieu," "medium," and "circumstance." Jayne Hildebrand traces the development of Victorian environmental thought from the earliest theorization of physical surroundings as a dynamic influence in the life sciences, through the idea of a singular "medium" in mid-century organicism, to the conception of the planet as an environmental system at the fin-de-siècle. By showing how novelistic description helped to produce the modern environment concept, Hildebrand sheds new light on the relationship between Victorian literature and the life sciences, and reveals how literary form has shaped the ecological ideas through which we apprehend the nonhuman world. »

From the 1970s onwards Britain’s political and cultural imagination became increasingly dominated by promises that self-made business success was the pathway to a brighter future for both individuals and the nation. International franchises and direct sales companies like Wimpy, The Body Shop, and Avon sat at the forefront of these fairy tales of freedom. They promised economic independence and flexible working conditions suited specifically to those eager to escape structural disadvantage in a period of transition from an industrial economy based on waged labour to a service sector economy rooted in subcontracted flexible labour. What did life look like for people who chose (or were forced) to take the leap into self-employment? Amy Edwards is currently working on an article based on the project sketched out above. The article focuses on the role of space and affect in direct sales work in mid-twentieth century Britain, exploring the ways that companies like Avon Cosmetics contributed to a collapse of the boundaries between home, work, and self in the post-war period. This is a process that historians usually associate with neoliberal labour relations. The article touches on historiographies and categories of analysis that are new to he, so she is very grateful for feedback, and would like to thank you for reading and engaging with it.

This chapter examines proposed legislation from the early and mid-nineteenth century to argue that current scholarship misrepresents the process that led to what is known as the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Uncovering the decades-long process that led to that alteration in the law opens the door to emphasizing the ways in which politics, publicity, and understandings of the self are interconnected in relation to desire and self-understandings. Building on the work of Anna Clark, Harry Oosterhuis, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, and Seymour Drescher, this chapter argues that a robust public sphere, factional politics within a representative system of government, and understandings of the self based on the cultural texts of the time, provide an incisive analytical framework for interpreting same-sex desire within culture and politics. It is a framework that utilizes the Foucauldian understanding of subject formation, emphasizing that the core of that process is the concept of biopower (which first becomes significant in the late seventeenth century), and that Foucault made his arguments about the distinctiveness of the late nineteenth century fifty years ago, when academic investigations into the history of gender and sexuality were just beginning. Summarizing the argument of my current book project, this chapter outlines a framework for understanding how politics and queer understandings of the self are intertwined, and argues that aspects of Oscar Wilde’s life and career look different when seen as occupying a place in the middle of an ongoing historical process, rather than at the beginning of one.

"When, where, and who gets to touch and be touched, and who decides? What do we learn through touch? How does touch bring us closer together or push us apart? These are urgent contemporary questions, but they have their origins in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, when new urban encounters compelled intense discussion of what touch was, and why it mattered. In this vividly written book, Simeon Koole excavates the history of these concerns and reveals how they continue to shape ideas about “touch” in the present. Intimate Subjects takes us to the bustling railway stations, shady massage parlors, all-night coffee stalls, and other shared spaces where passengers, customers, vagrants, and others came into contact, leading to new understandings of touch. We travel in crammed subway cars, where strangers negotiated the boundaries of personal space. We visit tea shops where waitresses made difficult choices about autonomy and consent. We enter classrooms in which teachers wondered whether blind children could truly grasp the world and labs in which neurologists experimented on themselves and others to unlock the secrets of touch. We tiptoe through London’s ink-black fogs, in which disoriented travelers became newly conscious of their bodies and feared being accosted by criminals. Across myriad forgotten encounters such as these, Koole shows, touch remade what it meant to be embodied—as well as the meanings of disability, personal boundaries, and scientific knowledge. (…)"

"Why does Edward Long's History of Jamaica matter? Written in 1774, Long's History, that most 'civilised' of documents, attempted to define White and Black as essentially different and unequal. Long deployed natural history and social theory, carefully mapping the island, and drawing on poetry and engravings, in his efforts to establish a clear and fixed racialised hierarchy. His White family sat at the heart of Jamaican planter society and the West India trade in sugar, which provided the economic bedrock of this eighteenth-century system of racial capitalism. Catherine Hall tells the story behind the History of a slave-owning family that prospered across generations together with the destruction of such possibilities for enslaved people. She unpicks the many contradictions in Long's thinking, exposing the insidious myths and stereotypes that have poisoned social relations over generations and allowed reconfigured forms of racial difference and racial capitalism to live on in contemporary societies."

The excerpted chapter, "Speciated Crossings: Fishwives and the Limits of Sex and Species," brings together a social and economic history of women in the fishing industry, with an inquiry into scientific and popular discourses and understandings of sex, gender, and species. Women fish sellers are largely absent from histories of gendered labor and capitalism, yet they literally carried one of Britain’s most historically significant economies on their backs. They were at once a reminder of Britain’s long standing dependence on the economies of the sea and an indicator of the startling potential of an economy significantly controlled by women, particularly along the eastern coastline of Scotland and England. In a period obsessed with the confines of categorization, fishwives themselves, and contemporary representations of them, dangerously transgressed and crossed borders.