Over the past decades, the study of historical cryptology in Europe has evolved from a marginal, largely individual pursuit into a consolidated field of research with dedicated conferences, collaborative projects, and institutional research groups. This article offers a critical overview of this maturation, tracing how methodological innovation, digital infrastructure, and interdisciplinary cooperation have reshaped the investigation of encrypted historical sources. Particular attention is devoted to the growing shift from technical decipherment towards the social history of secrecy: the contextual analysis of who used ciphers, in what circumstances, and with which communicative and political aims. By situating contemporary research on secrecy as a social practice within these broader developments, the article highlights both current achievements and unresolved challenges. Finally, it reflects on emerging directions, including the integration of large-scale data analysis, comparative secrecy studies, and closer dialogue with the history of science and communication.
While the trans-Atlantic slave trade has been thoroughly documented in a database of slaving voyages freely available to the public, few comparable resources focus on the traffic across the Indian Ocean and Asia exist. This article seeks to change that picture by discussing the preliminary findings of a research project aimed at expanding the geographic coverage of SlaveVoyages, the premier database of slaving voyages available to the public. Since it was launched on the Internet in 2008, SlaveVoyages has become the destination for anyone interested in the history of the trans-Atlantic trade. In 2018-2019, a new version of the website provided users with information on trade within the Americas. More recently, thanks to a grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, this database will be further enlarged to include the traffic within the Indian Ocean and maritime Asia. This important expansion will not only allow users to place the history of slavery and the slave trade in a global perspective but also gain a deeper understanding of the shape and scale of the trade in that particular region of the world.
Women have played a critical role in Botswana's development since precolonial times. However, patriarchal socio-political systems have limited their contributions to the country's rapid economic growth in the post-colony. This paper discusses women's contributions in areas such as public office, missionary service, education, politics, women's rights, community service, media, beauty pageantry, athletics, and entrepreneurship. It also highlights the achievements of individual pioneers, advocates for women's rights, and government agencies. The paper addresses the structural barriers women face due to patriarchal systems and aligns with Ellen Hillbom's characterization of Botswana as a "development-oriented gate-keeping state."
Diversity in money leaps at historians of early modern societies, whether they analyse account books, legal documents, travelogues and diaries, or try to make sense of a sum casually mentioned in a source from the period. The plurality of money objects contrasts with the homogeneous, singular currencies imposed by nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries. Surveying classic and recent scholarship, this article encourages historians to look beyond the apparent chaos and examine the underlying logics of plural currency systems. Following this approach requires exploring the monetary thinking of experts and ordinary users alike, and a close reading of historical accounts and other textual traces of economic life. It also requires an understanding of how money objects were made and scrutinised by contemporaries who worried about their worth, which can be obtained from the technical literature of the time and numismatic research. It appears that many early modern people were skilled in evaluating goods and services, turned metals, shells, paper, and cloth into money, and used several currencies at once. This fact makes money a culturally and socially rich topic for historians and a vantage point for studying economic life more broadly.
Art embodies material and symbolic value; it is a source of intellectual and cultural nourishment, a marker of social status, a symbol of national dignity, private or public property. Yet, art is also a commodity-one that has shaped and been shaped by a long and complex history: that of the art market. This article examines the twentieth-century art trade as a crucial area for historical inquiry, offers a review of existing scholarship in the field, and addresses the issue of its historicisation. It engages with contributions from external disciplines (economics, sociology, anthropology, art history) and various sub-fields within history (political, cultural, and social histories) that have contributed to the study of commercial and cultural dynamics and the evolution of art markets. To make sense of this interdisciplinary field, this paper proposes a framework based on the notion that art is the crucible of property and capital. This lens provides a valuable perspective to contextualise the trade in the history of twentieth-century Europe and to use the market as a source to understand developments in European cultural, social, and economic history.
The growth of the field of ethnohistory on Argentina's southern frontier has revolutionized Argentine historiography, challenging historians to rethink time-worn subjects as they considered Indigenous peoples' experiences. This article contends that historians should prioritize decolonizing the field through putting Indigenous peoples' experiences and ways of thinking at the center of their analyses rather than the government and settler frameworks that are most available in source material. Expanding the range of geographic and temporal frameworks that are deployed in historical studies will also help refocus attention on the events that were most important for these people. “Indigenizing” the study of Argentina's Indigenous people is a worthy goal and a necessary step toward understanding the Indigenous world of tierra adentro on its own terms.
The field of medieval Middle East history has seen a renewed attention to the use of documentary sources in recent years. These sources have long seen some neglect, and their interpretation has suffered from a stubborn narrative of paucity that has tended to relegate them to the fringe of this history. With the impact of other scholarly trends in the historical field at large, such as the “archival turn” and an emphasis on materiality, they are now being revisited with new and creative approaches. This article outlines this “documentary turn” in the medieval history of Egypt and Syria, focusing on three scholarly approaches which may have special potential and import for the field: the rejuvenation of history “from below,” the foregrounding of the lives of documents themselves, and the discovery of “new” document corpora.
Every year, millions of Australians choose to read popular history and watch historical documentaries. Despite the apparent political, social, economic and personal significance of history, we have very little reliable information about what Australians think and believe about history. What do Australians think that history is? What do they think it is for? How have they learnt about the past and how do they decide what historical knowledge is trustworthy? What role do they believe history should play in the life of the nation? In this article, we present the findings from the Deakin Contemporary History Survey (DCHS), a large-scale, nationally representative programme. This survey, with repeated cross-sectional waves conducted in 2021, 2023 and 2024, aimed to explore Australians' perceptions of history, its role in national life and their beliefs about historical knowledge and its credibility. We begin by placing these surveys within the context of similar research undertaken in Australia and elsewhere, outlining the methodology and scope of our approach. The three surveys reveal some widely shared attitudes towards history among Australians as well as areas of significant disagreement. They point particularly to generational shifts in understanding the nature of history and its relationship to national identity. Based on these results, we also identify some directions that will be fruitful for further and more in-depth investigation.
Untranslatability is not a separate field of study in history; rather, it is a conceptual lens that captures the concerns of certain strands of scholarship which have tended to somewhat problematize connections, translations, and mediation across imperial and colonial divides. Usually, such histories have taken stock of the problematic relation shared by "universals" and "particulars," and in doing so, have sought to engage with vernacular categories and histories following the "linguistic turn" in history. South Asian postcolonial histories since the 1950s have taken stock of these issues of untranslatability with treatments of such issues reaching their zenith through the post-structuralist, Saidian, and Subaltern schools of historiography. This article surveys certain works in South Asian history and argues that untranslatability must be employed as a lens to understand the relationship that cultural translation shares with power. In examining these debates, this article revisits these concerns through a series of other concepts that have marked the historiography of the problem in recent times, namely continuity, conciliation, and commensurability, before reconsidering whether untranslatability can still serve as a meaningful historiographical tool, and how it has begun to figure as one in newer works.
Islamic legal studies generally classify the administration of criminal justice during the formative and classical periods as a departure from traditional Islamic law. During this time, rulers, military-judicial authorities, and other officials largely oversaw the criminal courts, rather than the judges and jurists, who were considered the paramount actors of Islamic law. A primary challenge confronting any study of this topic is the scarcity of surviving criminal records, coupled with embellished narratives and concerns regarding the historical relevance of the jurisprudential material. Consequently, recent research, in the last few decades, has begun to investigate alternative sources on this administration of criminal justice: Egyptian papyri, administrative manuals and investiture diplomas, naw & amacr;zil (legal responses and rulings for new cases), Cairo Geniza, and criminal reports found in historical chronicles. This essay explores this rich historiography, focusing on these novel approaches to these texts, and aims to propose new methodological pathways for future research in this field.
In Australia, and elsewhere, the concept of 'truth-telling', that is, hearing the 'truth' about difficult and divisive pasts from the victims, is promoted as a way to transcend them and to develop a 'shared' historical understanding from which the nation can move forward. The 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, directed towards forging a better relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, included truth-telling as one of its three recommended reforms. In July 2025, the Yoorrook Justice Commission, which claimed to be the state of Victoria's, and Australia's, first truth-telling inquiry, handed down its final report, Truth be Told. Drawing First Peoples' experiences into an official record, it hoped to foster 'a shared understanding' among Victorians about their past. Such has been the emphasis on hearing the truth of Aboriginal perspectives that the expression 'truth-listening' has entered the lexicon. Despite its popularity, the notion of truth-telling has several difficult realities to face. Not least among them is the fact that there are competing beliefs about what constitutes 'historical truth' and there are competing perspectives about the past. In the heated controversy following the release of Bringing Them Home, the 1997 report of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's (HREOC) inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, these difficulties were laid bare. This article considers some of the trouble with truth-telling via a discussion of one site in which this controversy flared, an oral history project born out of Bringing Them Home's recommendations.
This article addresses the photograph as a historical source to explore unmapped territories in the histories of medicine and photography in 19th- and early twentieth-century Egypt. It examines the criteria that govern the selection of photographs in scientific and medical publications. Specifically, it asks: what functions did photographs serve in medical publications? Through a juxtaposition of colonial doctors' selection of photographs with that of Arabic scientific periodicals, this article examines some similarities and distinctions between the local and colonial use of medical photographs. On the one hand, similarities show that medical photography in Egypt developed along broader global practices in photography and modern medicine. On the other hand, distinctions offer new insights into the practice of modern medicine in a colonial context. While colonial doctors used these photographs as images of pathology, not only of a disease but also of a people, some local medical practitioners used them as pictures of health and competence.
Commodities and global trade are central to the history of Latin America. As scholars have pointed out, the cultivation, extraction, and shipping of commodities produced in the Americas have been vital in deepening our knowledge of the scale of its global entanglements. While crucial for understanding the region's political, economic and cultural past, this approach has inadvertently overlooked the equally vital role of consumption. This article aims to cast light on how the studies on the history of consumption-histories of what people bought, owned, ate, wore, and discarded-can provide greater insight into the region's cultural, political, and economic history from the 1820s until the mid-20th century. It prioritizes scholarship that recognizes Latin American consumers as active agents of historical change. The article also aims to show how the history of consumption can bridge various historiographical fields-including environmental history, the history of capitalism, labor history, and the history of race-to offer a richer and more comprehensive knowledge of Latin America's past.
The 21st century solidified the quintessential role of gender in the political and academic spheres. The contestations over the idea of gender as a valid analytical concept and the viability of feminist methodologies, approaches and analyses as legitimate scientific inquiry have essentially become a moot point. The discipline of gender studies in sub-Saharan Africa has evolved with active contestations around power, representation, sexuality, masculinity and knowledge production. This study examines the evolution and role of gender studies centres in making gender a legitimate business of the University of Ghana. The institutionalization of the concept of gender within the Ghanaian academe contributes to the theorisation of African women's experiences from multiple angles. It problematises the forces that shape women's differentiated lives, raising the bar on feminist scholarship on the African continent.
From their high point in the early 2000s, commodity histories seem to be in decline. If the publishing world has retreated, it is also the case that teaching with commodities has never been more rewarding. For the past few years, I have been experimenting with different variants of a class that aims to use recent scholarship on a half dozen commodities not to track their long trajectories across time but rather to help students work through one of the great questions of global history: the changing relationship between Europe and Asia across the period from roughly 1500–1900. Looking at everyday commodities provides a more concrete way to consider this question, revealing how Asian or European consumers who never ventured far from home participated in a global shift with enormous consequences. In this brief historiographical essay, I explore a selection of works examining six different commodities—silver, spices, deerskins, porcelain, tea and opium—that provide a clear sense of shifting relations between Europe and Asia across the early modern period.
This article seeks to map out possibilities for an intensive and wide-ranging study of Jewish litigation and legal agency within the English king's jurisdiction in the period c. 1190-1290. Despite a small number of studies of Jews and the king's law courts in England in recent years-including my own work on Jewish women litigants at the Exchequer of the Jews-this remains a neglected desideratum of medieval Anglo-Jewish history. Considering the potential of the records of all the king's law courts between 1190, from around which time the records begin to survive, and 1290, the year in which the Jews were expelled from England, this essay does two things. First, it reviews the developments, since 2015, in our understanding of Jews at law and in litigation in medieval England, as well as touching briefly upon the main cognate fields. Second, it provides a series of examples to demonstrate (just some of) the exciting new directions in the study of medieval English Jewry promised by the records of the king's law courts.
Animal history has flourished as a field of study and worked its way into Latin American scholarship. This essay traces relatively recent developments in the historiography to update areas of focus scholarship warranting further efforts. A brief overview of the field uses a key 2013 work as its launching point toward understanding animal history. It considers the geography of studies which have slowly turned from exclusively rural to more urban in focus. Specific areas of niche scholarship addressing insects, ecologies, conservation, and companion animals fuel a discussion of current trends. Related to this, new appraisals about the epistemology of nature and the authority of Latin Americans as agents in this formulation continue to challenge old assumptions. This leads to the consideration of subjectivity and indigenous worldviews that add enormously to the nuance of the field. The final part of the essay ponders some new ideas emerging on the topic and those that remain underserved. It concludes that further scholarship should account for postcolonial and post-structural approaches, and work toward highlighting the subject formation of animals in our history.
The extensive legal, social, religious, and political discussions surrounding marriage that were present in colonial New Zealand have meant that researchers of Aotearoa New Zealand's past have assumed that colonial couples were invariably married. Furthermore, there has been a prevailing assumption that the courts of law upheld and enforced marriages when couples appeared in court. Recent archival findings are compelling us to reconsider the degree to which colonial inhabitants adhered to conventional marriage practices and how the courts of law applied marriage law doctrinally. This article posits that court records, as a source of social and legal drama, are vital to uncovering not only the existence and extent of non-conforming couples in colonial spaces but also how 'lawless love' interplayed with colonial economic and legal practices that expose the pragmatic and flexible nature of the law in colonial settings. This suggests that a doctrinal approach to legal histories, which involves taking the law as it was written and assuming that people lived by it, is not an accurate measure of legal and social realities.
In the context of extant efforts in the decolonisation of African Studies, transnationalisation of feminist theorising, and the rise of intersectionality as an analytical tool in gender studies, I argue for the adoption of an 'African intersectionalities' framework towards achieving the decolonisation of African women's and gender studies. The article engages a critical review of feminist intersectionality theory and its trajectory, executes a decolonial reading to propose an African intersectionality specifically, and explores the emancipatory potentials for harnessing the interconnections of both literatures in the field of African women's and gender studies.
