Abstract In the era of decolonization, politicians and activists in newly independent states had to confront local histories, languages, and cultural practices to define who could contribute to post-independence nation and state-building. Looking inwards, rather than outwards, opened new spaces of contestation, as different groups and organizations asserted competing political projects. This article centres Pakistan’s National Awami Party to examine debates that informed the rise of post-independence politics. It reflects on what constitutes ‘progressive’ politics, the Pakistani state’s efforts to de-radicalize opposition groups, and the need to address inbuilt colonial-era prejudices as a means of writing new histories of decolonization.
Abstract While clearing out her mother’s personal possessions after her death, a Canadian woman discovered a parcel of letters hidden in the jewellery drawer, which seemed to indicate her mother’s love affair with another woman. This article considers the possibility of lesbian desire hidden in plain sight within the post-war nuclear family as a case study opening up broader questions of the ethics of historical practice. As the ‘imaginative turn’ in history prompts scholars to adopt methodologies which speculate on, or imagine, their subjects’ intimate experiences and emotions, this article explores whether and how those stories can ethically be told.
Abstract This article interrogates British anarchist responses to Mohandas Gandhi during the 1940s, a pivotal period marked by the reemergence of British anarchism and the intensification of Indian independence efforts. It argues that while anarchists supported Indian self-liberation, they were deeply divided over Gandhi. For some, he was an inspiration for nonviolent tactics; for others, he represented the flaws of nationalist-led independence, auguring poorly for genuine freedom for ordinary Indians. This study critically challenges prevailing scholarship that posits a natural affinity between Gandhism and anarchism. Drawing on unexplored primary material, it demonstrates that British anarchists never reached consensus on Gandhi’s ideas or his significance.
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.
This essay recalls London friendships with History Workshop members over 50 years. It also assesses HWJ’s impact on radical, feminist, and public history in the United States.
In its nearly 50 years of existence, the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) has played an influential role in the development of social history and public history in South Africa. This article provides an overview of the collective’s contributions to the production of new, counter-hegemonic histories from the mid-1970s, when popular resistance against apartheid gained momentum, to the early years of the transition to democracy and the more recent period of deepening structural crises. It has negotiated these historical periods while attempting to maintain a commitment to researching and writing histories of and with subaltern groups.
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 Gräv där du står: 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.
