The years 1925-32 saw a racialized and sectarian campaign driven by Scottish Conservatives, demanding the repatriation of Irish paupers and the imposition of immigration restrictions on anyone entering Britain from Ireland without employment. Despite powerful support their demands were rejected by the Cabinet because they clashed with the imperatives of imperial subjecthood. This episode brings into focus the relationship between citizenship, rights and belonging in Britain and independent Ireland. Tracing demands for interwar immigration restriction, and their political failure, we reveal the local and national, imperial and international scales of concern shaping policy and practice on migration and citizenship.
Abstract This paper explores the possibilities of internationalist solidarity in late colonial India through the interplay of global theory and local practice in the political work of Philip Spratt, Ben Bradley, and Lester Hutchinson in India during the 1928 General Strike in Bombay. Their activities illuminate attempts to organize a unified movement across the dividing lines of empire and race. Challenging the perception of communism in India as a failed project, I examine the fragments of possibility in its history, analysing India as a site of world revolutionary import where ideas of decolonization, solidarity, and revolution were forged and lived.
Abstract In the 1970s a female police officer went undercover in the feminist movement in Britain. Across two years, she shared plans, conversations, and ephemera with Special Branch, while uncovering nothing that threatened state security. Yet her time in the movement is important to historians; she inadvertently created a rich archive of the feminist movement. For feminist historians, though, the use of this archive, made available by the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI, 2015–ongoing), raises issues around consent. This article considers these issues and uses the material exposed by the UCPI to explore the Women’s Liberation Movement’s perceived threat to social order.
Focusing on the Anglo-Caribbean and the Cape Colony, this article examines how 'going to law' became a common practice in the early nineteenth century as enslaved men and women sought to engage the new rights and resources made available by the process of 'ameliorating' slavery. These interactions shaped the character of colonial governance in a multitude of ways, from altering the approaches of officials to prompting public debates over rights, justice, paternalism, and morality. The role of the state in colonial labour systems was thus reciprocally constructed by the rulers and the ruled, albeit from vastly asymmetrical positions of authority.
This article reconsiders Indian post office scribes' linchpin position in the colonial administration. Working outwards from the interviews conducted in 1850 by the Commission for Post Office Enquiry in India, it argues that scribal authority was implemented in contradictory ways: government officials relied on local postal scribes' expertise to advance colonizer agendas, whereas local scribes used their authority to create their own postal procedures and defy government directives. Indian post office scribes were central to a production of colonial authority that negotiated between the colonizer government, the post office bureaucracy, and the interests of the Indian public.
This article uses a case study of Bristol Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) to interrogate the bureaucratic, administrative and material logistics that sustained the Bristol Women's Liberation Group across the 1970s. In particular, the study argues that negotiations over resources (both human and material) played a substantial role in shaping the nature and meaning of feminist projects. The article demonstrates that feminist activism did not run on ideological commitment alone but was the result of women making direct contributions to the cause in the form of time, energy, skills, space, and money.
In 1898, three brothers dispatched 8,000 blackmail letters threatening recipients with life imprisonment for their purchase of abortifacient pills advertised in newspapers as 'Lady Montrose's Tabules'. The brothers were themselves behind Montrose, a lucrative mail-order pill scam that had amassed 12,000 customers in three years. Through a comprehensive review of Assize records, this article contextualizes the Montrose trial in the preceding century of prosecution, finding very few defendants were women charged with procuring their own abortions. For the Court, abortion remained a low priority, and the goal of prosecution constant: protecting women from, not punishing them for, criminal abortions.
Toward the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries, Hamburg saw an influx of people of non-European descent, among them free and enslaved domestic labourers and sailors from the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Most stayed in the region only for a limited time. This article traces the patterns of their mobility and interactions with local authorities, arguing that Hamburg functioned as a kind of oceanic borderland: the city's proximity to the sea facilitated mobility, but authorities also used maritime borders to control and restrict mobility, transporting those deemed dangerous or burdensome.
This article offers a new reading of state authority in early modern England by using a performance-centric method to break down what constituted the 'performance' of an arrest. It draws upon insights and questions drawn from practice-as-research workshops to highlight heretofore unseen challenges for carrying out an arrest, arguing that state authority was far more fragile than has been recognized. This fragility, moreover, was a contemporary concern for both local and national authorities. The article thus provides both a challenge to established narratives of pacified state formation in early modern England, and a methodological provocation for historians to use PAR.
The name of Thomas M & uuml;ntzer is relatively well-known, but the names and lives of several of his contacts are not. Among these was Hans Zeiss, the tax-collector in the town of Allstedt where M & uuml;ntzer was preacher for eighteen months. Caught between his responsibilities as the local representative of the princes of Saxony and his enthusiasm for M & uuml;ntzer's radical theology, as tensions grew between M & uuml;ntzer and the local and regional nobility, Zeiss found himself obliged to procrastinate. And as discontent erupted into open rebellion, he - like many others - had to choose between his livelihood and the radical German Reformation.
Sleep loss was a vital health concern for early modern people, and inducing sleep was essential to healthcare practices. This article traces how English householders sought to procure sleep. Examining the botanical materials, methods and knowledge underpinning soporific recipes in manuscript and printed collections c.1500-1750, we identify olfactory manipulation as the principal strategy in homemade sleep therapies. Scent-based remedies were developed domestically through material experimentation, drawing on the expanding range of soporifics resulting from global trade and colonialism. These experiments are an important facet of the 'material Renaissance', which became embedded in the gendered labour regimens of household life.
Both right-wing forces and gender-critical feminists currently frame cis and trans women's needs as fundamentally different and conflicting. Violence against women is a particular flashpoint: trans women are construed as a threat to women's spaces, including refuges. In this article I use the history of Tiresias House, a refuge established in Sydney, Australia in 1983, to demonstrate women's shared experiences of violence across the spectrum of cis and trans, to highlight shared histories of solidarity against male violence by feminists and trans women, and to explore what is at stake when we use history to answer contemporary political questions.
The artist Bernard Canavan was at Ruskin from 1971-73. Since 1982 (issue 13) he has designed the covers of History Workshop Journal, usually drawing on images from the journal contents, creating an extraordinary archive of nearly ninety artist-designed covers across more than four decades. Here he reflects on his childhood in Ireland and his life in Oxford and London in the 1960s and 1970s, accompanied by his selection of cover designs.
This piece evokes the first contacts of the author with individuals and groups that practiced oral history in the years around the 1970s. Those contacts gave rise to a network of scientific and friendly exchanges that lasted for decades, although the net included many oral historians that have now disappeared. Thus the origin of the notions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity is explored. A series of oral history conferences are remembered, which originally took place in Europe and the United States, while later on they extended to cover a global web.
This article uses the lens of ‘turbulence’ to give a new perspective on the German Peasants’ War of 1524–6. It suggests that the term Aufruhr (commotion/turbulence) shaped contemporary perceptions, arguing that the peasants’ patterns of movement – spirals, circles, unpredictable shifts – were central to the revolt’s spread and power. Drawing on engineering and art, it highlights how motion itself mixed the members of the armed bands, challenged lordship, and unsettled authorities. The war’s turbulence was also echoed in art, especially Lucas Cranach’s hunting scenes, reasserting noble order. Turbulence, it argues, was not just metaphor, but a force that shaped history.
This article introduces the Swedish 'Dig Where You Stand' movement of the 1970s and 1980s as an workers' and community history movement, and then explores Sven Lindqvist's 1978 book Grav dar du star: Hur man utforskar ett job (recently translated for the first time in English as Dig Where You Stand: How to Research a Job) which acted as a handbook for historical research for the movement. The article then establishes how Lindqvist and the Dig movement were connected to and influenced similar movements in the UK and internationally such as History Workshop and the oral history movement, and how the ethos of 'Dig Where You Stand' remains an inspiration to this day.
This article considers the politics and possibilities of writing labour history in a context where 'the working class' has been so effectively co-opted and interpellated by the populist right. What might working-class and labour history tell us about the uses of class in the twenty-first century? How might we think anew about that historiographical tradition in light of right-wing mobilizations of 'the working class'? What sort of working class history might we want to create in and for a populist age?
What can anthropogenic interventions - set in a wetland backwater of England, long before the industrial era - tell us about the Anthropocene? How might contested interactions with earth, sediment, and water four hundred years ago lead us to reconsider not only when the Anthropocene began, but why and how humans have exerted geological agency in the past? In this article I shift the scale, location, and action of the story to examine a 'small' Anthropocene in early modern England, bringing into focus the human interests and values that gave rise to contested environmental politics and produced geophysical environments in wetlands past.
