Seminars

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito cites the Ellenborough Act of 1803, the first statutory prohibition of abortion in the Anglo-American common law system, and endorses one interpretation of the bill as an effort to protect fetal rights. However, the reasons behind Lord Ellenborough’s decision to criminalize abortion have been unclear to historians, especially given the common law’s historical indifference to abortion and the absence of general outcry over the practice at the time the bill was passed. This article argues the Act has origins in Ellenborough’s overlooked professional history as counsel for the Society of West India Planters and Merchants in their opposition to various abolitionist bills before Parliament between 1792 and 1799. The article incorporates data collected from the first comprehensive review of nineteenth-century abortion trials held in English and Welsh assize courts, whose statistics on domestic, birth-related prosecutions illustrate abortion was not a crime the criminal justice system was interested in punishing. Instead, using Ellenborough’s personal and professional papers, the piece argues the 1803 statute should be interpreted through Ellenborough’s sustained commitment to the protection of private property rights and the defense of the institution of slavery.

"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]