Seminars

The book examines the history of poverty through the objects ‘owned’ by the poor and those crafted, repurposed or simply encountered by them, offering critical new insights into the experience of being impoverished. This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars who draw on a wide array of ‘objects of poverty’ from those that survive today, ranging from dolls to whistles to textile samples, to those that have long since gone and now only exist in visual and written sources. The contributors trace the importance of materiality in eighteenth-century and modern life, covering objects connected to sustenance, home, the makeshift, childhood, animals, money, workhouses, and injury and death. In its 23 chapters, along with some 77 illustrations, the book provides a detailed exploration of the history of poverty in Britain. Each of the chapters are based on original research and make a new contribution to the literature. This book will be fascinating reading for history enthusiasts to students to established academics across multiple disciplines. [Bloomsbury Publishing]

This paper explores the hidden nature of maritime sexual crimes, as well as the ways in which they were concealed in and from the archives and subsequently neglected historiographically. Recently, Elaine Murphy has begun the important work of excavating evidence of sexual violence at sea, on British naval and merchant vessels, with the goal of assessing different forms of seafarers’ vulnerability to abuse. She presents her evidence as archival “traces,” fragments that must be arduously recovered if we hope to generalise from a limited record. Here, I add new evidence, including many cases from the century after 1750, where her study concludes. Following Sowande’ Mustakeem, I also examine practices of hiding, and the cultural work that hiding and hiddenness performed – and continue to perform. The fragmentary nature of this archive – much of our evidence reduced to no more than traces – is itself the product of such practices. Refusal to discipline, police, and prosecute sexual misconduct contributed to its absence from the archive, while clerical practices further obscured what evidence does survive. In some cases, historical actors actively and deliberately concealed evidence of criminality, as in the examples of seventeenth-century naval diarists Edward Barlow and Samuel Pepys. Both admitted to assaulting women in their diaries, yet also worked to obscure those admissions, with considerable success. At the same time, the navy did prosecute hundreds of such cases, generating a substantial archive of child and adolescent sexual abuse that has been known to specialists since the 1970s. Yet neither academic historians nor the Anglo-American public have fully confronted the brutal history this archive documents – one of normalized, widely known, and broadly tolerated sexual abuse aboard naval ships. It, too, continues to hide in plain sight.

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]