New Directions in Social and Cultural History 9781472580801, 9781472580818, 9781474204835, 9781472580832

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New Directions in Social and Cultural History

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY Series Editors: Sasha Handley (University of Manchester, UK), Rohan McWilliam (Anglia Ruskin University, UK) and Lucy Noakes (University of Essex, UK) The New Directions in Social and Cultural History series brings together the leading research in social and cultural history, one of the most exciting and current areas for history teaching and research, contributing innovative new perspectives to a range of historical events and issues. Books in the series engage with developments in the field since the post-​cultural turn, showing how new theoretical approaches have impacted on research within both history and other related disciplines. Each volume will cover both theoretical and methodological developments on the particular topic, as well as combine this with an analysis of primary source materials.

Forthcoming from Bloomsbury: Debating New Approaches to History, edited by Marek Tamm and Peter Burke (2018) History in Practice (3rd edition), by Ludmilla Jordanova (2018) Writing History: Theory and Practice (3rd edition), edited by Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (2018)

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New Directions in Social and Cultural History Edited By

SASHA HANDLEY, ROHAN MCWILLIAM AND LUCY NOAKES

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam, Lucy Noakes and Contributors, 2018 Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam and Lucy Noakes have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​4725-​8080-​1 PB: 978-​1-​4725-​8081-​8 ePDF: 978-​1-​4725-​8083-​2 eBook: 978-​1-​4725-​8082-​5 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: New Directions in Social and Cultural History Series design by Liron Eilenberg Cover image: A young lady seen in Regent Street, London, 1941. Appealing for binoculars for the use of the Forces. (© Planet News Archive/​SSPL/​Getty Images) Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

List of figures  vii Acknowledgements  viii Notes on contributors  ix Foreword, Frank Mort  xiii Preface, Pamela Cox  xvi

Introduction: Towards new social and cultural histories  1 Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam and Lucy Noakes

PART ONE  Histories of the human 

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1 Subjectivity, the self and historical practice  21 Penny Summerfield 2 The history of emotions  45 Rob Boddice 3 The body and the senses  65 Judith A. Allen

PART TWO  The material turn 

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4 A return to materialism? Putting social history back into place  87 Katrina Navickas 5 Markets and culture  109 Donna Loftus 6 Visual and material cultures  129 Jennifer Tucker

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7 Public histories  151 Paul Ashton and Meg Foster

PART THREE  Challenges and provocations 

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8 Animal-​human histories  173 Hilda Kean 9 New directions in transnational history: Thinking and living transnationally  191 Durba Ghosh 10 Environmental history  213 John Morgan 11 Spatial history  233 Nicola Whyte Afterword: Digital history  253 Seth Denbo Index  267

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6.1 The ‘Golden Record’, launched on Voyager 1 and 2, 1977  130 6.2 ‘Sites and Modalities for Interpreting Visual Materials’, in Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials  134 6.3 Edward Stanford, ‘Stanford’s Library Map of London and Its Suburbs’, 1862  137 6.4 ‘The Metropolitan Railway’, Illustrated London News, 7 April 1860, p. 337  138 6.5 Phoebus Levin, ‘The Dancing Platform at Cremorne Gardens’, 1864. Oil on canvas  138

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

New Directions in Social and Cultural History represents an attempt to probe how the historical discipline is changing in the early twenty-​first century. It is an initiative of the Social History Society and inaugurates the publication of a new book series of the same name. We seek to provide readers with a series of insights into the intellectual ambition and creativity of history writing at the present time. We are first of all extremely grateful to our contributors, who have been a pleasure to work with. Our aim was to draw in scholars who are generating new approaches from which others will learn. Their articles survey the state of recent methodological and theoretical interventions in their respective fields and suggest future directions that this work might take. Our thanks go the Social History Society and to the team at Bloomsbury, who made this series possible. The editors are also grateful to the following who have provided direct help, guidance or inspiration: Joanna Bourke, Kelly Boyd, Malcolm Chase, Beatriz Lopez, Linda Persson, Paul Warde, Andrew Wood and Keith Wrightson. Sasha Handley Rohan McWilliam Lucy Noakes

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CONTRIBUTORS

Judith A. Allen, educated at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, was Australia’s first chair of women’s studies at Griffith University. She joined Indiana University in 1993 to found its interdisciplinary Department of Gender Studies. Her research undertakes histories of feminist theory and politics, the history of sex research and histories of interpersonal crimes and of reproduction and sexualities. Author of Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women since 1880 (1990), Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism, 1880–​1925 (1994) and The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Histories/​ Sexualities/​ Progressivism (2009), she co-​edited London Low Life: Street Culture, Social Reform and the Victorian Underworld (2010). She is co-​author of The Kinsey Institute: the First Seventy Years (2017) and has two monographs in preparation: ‘“Black Market in Misery”: Criminal Abortion and British Sexual Cultures, 1780–​ 1980’ and ‘Kinsey and the Feminine: The Making of the Second Kinsey Report’. She is associate editor of the Journal of American History and senior research fellow of the Kinsey Institute. Paul Ashton was professor of public history at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) until 2015. He is currently adjunct professor at Macquarie University, the University of Canberra and UTS. He is co-​editor and co-​ founder of the journal Public History Review and is chair of the board of the digital Dictionary of Sydney. His numerous publications include Once Upon a Time: Australian Writers on Using the Past (2016). Rob Boddice works at the Department of History and Cultural Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. An historian of science, medicine and the emotions, he is the author of The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution and Victorian Civilization (2016), Pain: A Very Short Introduction (2017), and the editor of Pain and Emotion in Modern History (2014). His forthcoming books include The History of Emotions (2017). Boddice is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Pamela Cox is professor of sociology and social history at the University of Essex. She was elected chair of the Social History Society in 2016. Her teaching and research cover questions of social policy, crime, gender and

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the life course. She recently presented two BBC series on women’s work, Servants (2012) and Shopgirls (2014). Seth Denbo is director of scholarly communication and digital initiatives at the American Historical Association. He has a PhD from the University of Warwick on the cultural history of eighteenth-​century Britain. Over the past ten years, he has participated in the development of innovative digital tools and methods for historical scholarship. Drawing on his experience as a teacher and researcher, he played a key role in several international projects that expanded capacity for digital scholarship in the humanities. Meg Foster is a PhD candidate in history at the University of New South Wales investigating the ‘other’ bushrangers (those who were not white men) in Australian history and memory. After receiving first-​class honours from the University of Sydney in 2013, Meg worked as a researcher with the Australian Centre of Public History at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, and was the inaugural winner of the Deen De Bortoli Award in Applied History for her article ‘Online and Plugged In?: Public History and Historians in the Digital Age’, featured in the Public History Review (2014). As well as earning her PhD, Meg has worked as an historical consultant for television production companies and has a particular interest in making connections between history and the contemporary world. Durba Ghosh is associate professor of history and is affiliated with Asian studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University. She teaches and researches modern South Asian history and focuses on the history of colonial governance and law, gender, sexuality and (increasingly) the tensions between security and democracy. She is the author of Gentlemanly Terrorists:  Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–​1947 (2017), Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (2006) and with Dane Kennedy, the co-​editor of Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (2006) as well as over a dozen chapters and articles in edited volumes and journals such as American Historical Review, Gender and History, Modern Asian Studies and South Asia. Sasha Handley is senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of Manchester. Her chief interests lie in histories of supernatural belief, material culture and daily life in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century England. Sasha has published widely on these themes, and her monographs include Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-​ Century England (2007) and Sleep in Early Modern England (2016). She leads the research group ‘Embodied Emotions’ at the University of the Manchester, and in 2016 she co-​curated the exhibition ‘Magic, Witches and

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Devils in the Early Modern World’ at Manchester’s John Rylands Library with Dr Jenny Spinks. Hilda Kean is visiting professor of history at the University of Greenwich and a senior honorary research fellow at University College London. A cultural historian, she has researched and published extensively on public history and on animal-​human history. Her numerous books include Animal Rights: Social and Political Change in Britain since 1800 (1998/​2000); London Stories: Personal Lives, Public Histories (2004) and The Public History Reader (edited with Paul Martin, 2013). Her latest book is The Great Cat and Dog Massacre: The Real Story of World War Two’s Unknown Tragedy (2017). She is editing the Routledge Companion to Animal-​Human History with Philip Howell. Donna Loftus is senior lecturer in history at the Open University with an interest in Victorian work and business, in particular the gaps between political and economic theory and everyday life. She has published work on the organization of industry, the social investigation of work and the life writing of businessmen. She is currently writing a book on capital and labour in Victorian England. Rohan McWilliam is professor of modern British history at Anglia Ruskin University and a former president of the British Association of Victorian Studies. He is the author of The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (2007) and has co-​edited (with Kelly Boyd) The Victorian Studies Reader (2007) and with Jonathan Davis, Labour and the Left in the 1980s (forthcoming). He has written articles on melodrama, popular politics, Elsa Lanchester and Jonathan Miller. He is currently at work on a history of the West End of London since 1800. John Morgan is an environmental and social historian. He is a lecturer in early modern history at the University of Manchester, and is interested in the history of water, flooding, the state and pigeons. He has previously published on the cultural histories of fires and flooding in early modern England, the Elizabethan religious settlement and attempts to identify and police ‘counterfeit Egyptians’ in the sixteenth century. Frank Mort is professor of cultural histories at the University of Manchester. His books include Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (2010), Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-​Moral Politics in England since 1830 (2nd ed., 2000) and Cultures of Consumption: Commerce, Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-​Century Britain (1996). He is currently working on a study of the British monarchy and democracy from 1910 to 1939. Katrina Navickas is reader in history at the University of Hertfordshire. She is author of Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–​1848

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(2015) and Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–​1815 (2009). Her research focuses on the history of protest and political movements in early nineteenth-​century England, social and cultural geographies of protest, and digital mapping. Lucy Noakes is professor in history at the University of Essex. Her publications include War and the British (1998), Women in the British Army (2006) and (edited with Juliette Pattinson) British Cultural Memory and the Second World War (2013). Her research focuses on twentieth-​century Britain, with a particular interest in war, gender, nationhood and cultural memory. She is currently working on a history of death, grief and bereavement in Second World War Britain. Penny Summerfield is professor emerita in modern history at the University of Manchester. Much of her work has been in the fields of gender history and oral history, focused on Britain in the Second World War. Books include Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (1998) and Contesting Home Defence:  Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (2007). Her current book-​length project is entitled ‘Life Histories: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice’. Jennifer Tucker is associate professor of modern history and science in society at Wesleyan University and senior research fellow at the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University in Leicester. She specializes in the study of Victorian science, technology and visual culture. Her first book, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science, explored the history of debates over photographic evidence in nineteenth-​century science and popular culture. She is currently completing a book-​length study about the significance of the Tichborne trial as a landmark in Victorian art and visual culture. She currently serves on the editorial boards of History and Technology and Radical History Review and is co-​editor of the ‘Photography and History’ book series published by Bloomsbury Academic Press. Nicola Whyte is a landscape and early modern social historian at the University of Exeter. She is particularly interested in developing interdisciplinary approaches to the meanings of landscape, place and dwelling in Britain since the sixteenth century. She has published on early modern landscapes, agriculture, common rights, custom, oral memory, gender, everyday knowledges, conflict and environmental change. Her first book Inhabiting the Landscape: Place Custom and Memory 1500–​1800 was published in 2009, and its themes were further developed in the article ‘Senses of Place, Senses of Time: Landscape History from a British Perspective’ (2015). She is currently working on a monograph exploring the concept of dwelling for early modern studies.

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FOREWORD Frank Mort

Where is social and cultural history now and where is it heading? The imperial ambitions of earlier generations of social historians to write a new version of l’histoire totale are long gone, but what has replaced it? New Directions in Social and Cultural History addresses this key question in three distinctive ways: providing an overview of the state of play of the field, outlining future possibilities which draw extensively on the contributors’ own research and situating major changes to history writing in the context of the politico-​intellectual movements that have changed the discipline over the past half century. The outcome is carefully reflective, intellectually exciting and politically engaged in equal measure. All of the authors position themselves inside the long-​term democratizing tendencies of the project for social history that was initially associated with class-​based ‘histories from below’ and with excavating the experience of ‘ordinary people’ in the world of the everyday. All of them too acknowledge the profound shifts in that project as understandings of the subaltern and the ordinary were challenged and pluralized by the complex impact of the new social movements from the late 1960s onwards. The upshot, as the editors emphasize in their introduction, has been a large-​scale questioning of many of the foundational building blocs of the social history movement: the meaning of experience, understandings of human agency, the explanatory power of causation and the very nature of historical evidence itself. What is refreshing to read here is that the authors do not tread over ground that has been extensively covered in the exchanges about the relationship between social and cultural history in recent years. What is acknowledged as a baseline throughout the essays is that the emergence and development of social history is inevitably a story of the porous boundaries between history writing and other adjacent disciplines, and that all contributors are in the process of productively working across interdisciplinary boundaries. Moreover, the writers in this collection move across the frontier between social and cultural history, taking the two terms as a linked couplet which are not mutually exclusive but critically engaged. Contributors take seriously developments that have been grouped together as the ‘turns’

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to culture, language, subjectivity and space over the past thirty years. They acknowledge that historians who have adopted these intellectual approaches have generated an extremely impressive body of research and writing on subjects as diverse as early modern everyday life, eighteenth-​century feminism, Victorian languages of class and the cultures of the modern city, to name but a few. But what is noteworthy about many of the essays is that their authors aim to integrate and extend a broad-​based conceptual repertoire derived from cultural history with other agendas, some of them new, others involving the re-​examination of established paradigms and practices in the light of shifting present-​day challenges. So, there is a revival of concern with the materiality of social and cultural life, a fresh emphasis on the nature of human agency conceived not as purely rational or ideational but as corporeal, on the physical environment and landscape as socio-​natural phenomena and on emotionality and the senses as embodied rather than only made meaningful through representation. These are large-​scale historical issues, quite as big as those that transformed social history in the culture wars of the 1980s, and it is no criticism of the writers to say that their responses are often posed interrogatively: as a series of pointers for further work rather than as fully developed approaches. Readers are asked variously to think about the following questions:  how can the physical, visceral human body be accessed and made knowable for historians? How might neuroscience contribute to an understanding of the history of the emotions? Do relationships between animals and humans have the capacity to reshape the project for cultural history? What methods are available to historians who take personal testimony seriously but in ways that recognize that the techniques for representing the self are not transparent and that the psychological dynamics of subjectivity provide a productive focus rather than being seen as off limits? The editors of the volume stress that ‘the richness of social and cultural history . . . lies in its variety’. But, to play devil’s advocate momentarily, is this a formulation too closely identified with a politico-​intellectual agenda that is now under challenge from the global forces of popular protest and radical conservatism? What is so often at the heart of criticisms of contemporary social and cultural history is an attack precisely on the pluralism and the relativism of its project and the deliberate disavowal of intellectual certainties. The parody from traditionalists is that this is history that has ‘lost the plot’, which is unable to provide any connecting narrative thread between the disparate elements. Such a caricature of ‘smorgasbord’ history also laments the loss of the discipline’s longue durée time arc. Social history, as an intellectual adjunct of the larger idea of ‘the social’, was formed in the maelstrom of resurgent social democratic politics that reshaped Europe and North America in the aftermath of the Second World War. It released afresh the historical subject of democracy onto a world stage. Given social history’s genealogy, it is right and commendable that the authors in this collection do not shy away from politics. Collectively, they

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insist that more rather than less nuanced political engagement is a key to the revitalization of a discipline that has always emphasized its capacity to produce socially useful knowledge. In the essays, this insistence takes appropriately varied forms. These include a thoughtful critique of the excesses of genres of cultural history that reduce social life exclusively to market-​driven meanings, at the expense of structures and struggles. There is also strong emphasis here on forms of public and local history that deliver much greater self-​reflectiveness about the relationship between the producers and users of the past. All of this along with –​whisper it not too loud –​a return to social class and labour as necessary elements in any future project for social history, especially in societies in the grip of global capital and the associated rhetoric of neo-​liberalism. Equally, there are some salutary remarks about the need to combine micro-​with macro forms of historical analysis in order to deliver more than discrete case studies. In their responses to the challenges posed by present-​day politics, all contributors implicitly foreground historical knowledge in its varied forms  –​ professional, popular, local, public –​as a mutual good that is not reducible to the goods of the competitive marketplace. The common core here, as I read it across the essays, is the value of democratic and pluralistic forms of knowledge which are updated for contemporary times. Historians have always had a particular purchase on this type of social engagement, with their distinctive challenge to universalisms, their stress on the contingency of outcomes and on the diversity of social experience in getting to the present. The contributors to this volume provide evidence that intellectual pluralism has been one of social and cultural history’s positive attributes over the past quarter of a century. The challenge, for those of us who subscribe to this agenda, is to insist on history’s importance in the much-​needed revival of radical social politics on a wider stage.

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PREFACE Pamela Cox Chair of the Social History Society

This collection was curated as part of a series of events marking the fortieth anniversary of the Social History Society. Founded in 1976, the Society helped establish new research questions and new modes of enquiry that focused not just on politics and power but also on people. It was shaped by wider cultural changes that transformed the production and sharing of knowledge at that time, drawing its influences from the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, the expansion of higher education and critical engagements with conflict theories of social and economic change. It looked to understand the macro-level patterns and processes structuring that change as well as how this change was experienced at the micro-level by different constituencies. Social history is an approach that transcends specialization within any particular period or place. Empathy is central to that approach. To try to see the world from others’ perspective –​however unpalatable –​and to walk in their shoes is to try to understand what shaped their worlds and what mattered to them and why. To experience empathy is to experience an expansive, cosmopolitan and sceptical disposition. Some might say it is social history’s creed. This volume is a testament to the road travelled by social and cultural historians over the last forty years. Over that time, their work has opened up space for the writing of many hidden histories: of women, empire, sexuality, consumer cultures and more. Many of the chapters presented here are rooted in these questions. In 1976, this kind of historical enquiry was rare or non-​existent. Social history’s contribution since then has been a powerful and enduring one. This collection is published in momentous times –​in the wake of Brexit in Britain and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. Finding ways to mobilize critical and empathetic historical enquiry that helps ‘build bridges not walls’ across diverse communities has never been more vital.

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Introduction Towards new social and cultural histories Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam and Lucy Noakes

Introduction: Why social and cultural history? Pierre Nora, writing about the history of France and the ways in which this past shaped French national identity, located moments of rupture as points at which history becomes particularly important and visible. As societies change, Nora argued, we become more and more attached to a constructed ‘memory’ of the past, a memory which gives us a sense of stability and continuity. For Nora, it was the shift from peasant life to an industrialized world, with all the upheavals and alienations that accompanied this, that lay at the heart of the modern desire for a shared past that could underpin contemporary identity.1 Today, the search for a historically situated identity, seen, for example, in the politics of the Tea Party movement in the United States, the United Kingdom Independence Party in Britain and the Front National in France, is often part of a conservative and defensive response to the changing economic, political, social and cultural patterns of a world increasingly shaped by transnational and global, rather than national, forces. The forms of identity politics evident in each of these cases can be understood as part of a wider set of memory wars that have marked the modern

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world, evident, for example, in challenges to the absence of the Algerian War in French historical memory, in the rethinking of the Second World War that has taken place in much of Eastern Europe since 1989, and in campaigns for the physical and memorial recovery of the victims of Francoist Spain.2 Donald Trump won the 2016 US presidential election promising to make the United States great again, relying on a reading of the recent past as one of failure. In all of these cases, and in others, history is no longer just the stuff of history textbooks, of academic articles and of lecture halls and classrooms. Instead, it is a visible, living presence, able to command high passions among those who seek to make their version of the past a part of the dominant political narrative. With the stakes being so high, and the wider presence of history seen in the proliferation of popular history books and television series and films, and in the large numbers of students who choose to study history in school and university, a consideration of what historians do, of how we approach the multiple pasts and create histories out of them, seems apposite. One thing is certain: many of the old certainties –​both of historiographical practice and of the historical profession more generally  –​have broken down. Indeed, it is no longer always possible to say with any real sense of certainty where history ends and other disciplines begin. We have seen the challenge of social history to political and economic histories, and then of cultural history to what had become established practices within social history. Now these are again being challenged by a wave of novel approaches and innovative historical writing by scholars concerned with both new ways of writing history and new historical subjects.3 History may be written about the past, but it is written in the present, and historians are products of their own times, cultures and societies as much as the historical actors of whom we write. Thus, today’s historian is not just someone who reports on the past, who tells the rest of the world what happened and when, but is someone with ideas and perspectives, searching to uncover new ways of seeing and understanding the past. The ideas of the time, the forces that shape the historian, are thus reflected in the histories that we write. The work of historians of women, of gender, of sexuality and of ‘race’ that provided such a challenge to established historical practice in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were themselves products of Western societies in states of flux and revolt.4 A consideration of gender, race and sexuality as historical forces and lived identities is now interwoven into most worthwhile history, as these categories have taken their place alongside (and at times in place of) social class as key areas of historical investigation over the past fifty years. However, while these retain their relevance and importance in a world where misogyny is highly visible and where racism and homophobia remain potent social forces, recent shifts and changes within both the societies in which we live and within the academic practice of history have produced a new wave of historical practice.

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Some of the most exciting of these new directions in social and cultural history are discussed in this volume. In this introductory essay, our aim is both to outline why we see these particular ‘new directions’ as central to the wider concerns of social and cultural history and to historicize them, to show why and how they emerged and their relationship both to existing historiography and to the wider world in which they are produced and read. What is distinctive about the present time is the way the formulation ‘social and cultural history’ is used by historians. These two forms of enquiry are held to have a dynamic relationship to one another. It is this dynamic that we explore in this book. To better understand the differences and similarities between social and cultural history, the interests that pull them together and the tensions which pull them apart, we need to better understand their roots and to trace their separate and intertwined histories. It is to this history of social and cultural history that this introduction now turns.

Building historical disciplines This is a tale of two kinds of history. There have always been affinities between social and cultural history, and the distinction between the two has never been clear-​cut. How did these disciplines emerge and what was at stake in bringing them together? Why do these labels matter? We examine here the building of the mindset that created this connection in historical work. To be a historian today is to accept that popular culture and the world view of ordinary people matter often as much as the speeches of government ministers, but so, too, do the larger structures and forces that shape everyday life. Historians are people of ideas –​ideas about the most effective ways of reconstructing the past. This book argues history has never had more intellectual ambition than at the present time. Following the argument of Nora with which we began, social history, as we know it today, was the result of the political ruptures of the nineteenth century. Liberalism, democracy and nationalism in Europe challenged the fossilized remnants of the ancien régime which had had its day. The coming of the market economy and the disruptive forces caused by population increase, industrialization and urbanization created a mindset that viewed change as an inevitable part of the human condition. Things could never be the same again. Darwinian evolution merely confirmed this perspective. Paradoxically, this new perspective generated a greater interest in the past. As winds of change swept through the West, there emerged a fascination with the ways of life that were disappearing: the world of rural tradition. Novelists, folklorists and antiquarians felt the need to record this world before it was gone. Suddenly, it was important to understand popular song, dance and storytelling, including fairy tales, as everyday life expressed the spirit of the people. We can find the roots of both social and cultural history in what might strike us today as the unstructured, even sentimental,

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accounts of the manners and traditions of the common people. To the modern eye, this study of folklore (which can be found as early as the seventeenth and the eighteenth century in Europe) may seem anecdotal and unsystematic, lacking any attempt to probe how societies function. Modern social historians defined themselves against the unstructured and impressionistic accounts of social mores and customs that were ubiquitous before 1914 with their reliance on anecdote, although there is now a rigorous attempt to think about folklore and its possibilities.5 The nineteenth century also saw the development of the larger study of history through the work of the German historian Leopold von Ranke, who promoted its footnote-​hungry focus on politics and diplomacy. Driven as it was by the rise of nationalism, the nineteenth century called for epic works of history that depicted the souls of nations as a whole. Thus Jules Michelet’s epic, multivolume Histoire de France (1833–​67) celebrated the French people and charted the distinctiveness of different regions. But social history had its roots in an even more profound development. This was the coming of the idea of the ‘social’ itself. Surely people have always thought in social terms? They have but not in quite the way they did once information became more available. The press, institutions and government reports (such as the census in the nineteenth century) allowed people to be data driven, to think about their society with greater exactitude. The ‘social’ emerged in different ways, but we can view it coming into being through the gathering of statistics and the creation of states with systematic tax-​gathering capabilities. We find it in the development of nineteenth-​ century social science:  the attempt to uncover factual information about the economy and social structure and to develop models for understanding the nature of social change. Karl Marx and the German sociologist Max Weber were part of this development. The sociological mentality has proved a major building block of the modern world and has shaped the way history has been written. Social historians, for example, are distinguished by their concern to measure trends and to talk in precise terms about how societies work. In the mindset of the social historian, society is a machine; to be a social historian is, as it were, to poke one’s head under the car bonnet to see how things fit together. Social history originally emerged as a subset of economic history (itself an offshoot of economics). Economic history provided the new subdiscipline with its methodology (for example, accumulating data about population, wages and prices). Social historians explain change through the existence of social and economic forces that are, to some extent, invisible and yet which shape everyday life. The story of social history is a tale of how it became uncomfortable with narrow economic determinism. Surely, there is more to a way of life than work, commerce and the provision of food, clothing and shelter (essential as those things always are)? Religion, geography, status, art, family and romantic love are also important: in short, social historians began to ask larger questions about culture.

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The word ‘Culture’ (and hence ‘cultural history’) has a complex genealogy, emerging out of the word ‘agriculture’, which describes the process of turning the produce of nature into things that are useful and beautiful. It was linked to words such as ‘civilization’ from the mid-​eighteenth century onwards.6 One of the foundation texts of cultural history is usually held to be the Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Burkhardt established the view that the Renaissance was the moment when the Middle Ages came to an end and the modern world began. His book was also formative in creating the discipline of art history as well as the kind of history that sought to recreate the spirit of an age. Cultural history in this formulation tended to confine itself to ‘high culture’ (the world of the elite), but it became clear that the subdiscipline’s focus on the images and symbols that sustain a society could be employed to understand society at large. Cultural history was driven by large forces: globalization, imperialism and the need to understand other cultures and ways of life. Thus the distinctions between social and cultural history have never been clear-​cut. At the beginning of the twentieth century, we can see links being forged between economic, social and cultural explanations in Weber’s brilliant collection of essays The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). Weber was a sociologist, but we might retrospectively view him as rehearsing some of the approaches that characterize the methods of social and cultural history. His is the book that gives us the term ‘Protestant work ethic’. Weber argued that the individualism of some early forms of Protestantism was a significant factor in the emergence of market capitalism during the early modern period. Calvinism, in particular, encouraged the view that profit and business success might be signs of divine favour. It also venerated hard work (as opposed to simple religious worship) as a sign of grace, hence the protestant work ethic. Historians were beginning to show that there were deeper forces that shaped events, not always immediately visible at the time. This ability to discern deeper patterns below the surface allowed historians to make a wider contribution to intellectual life, although social historians often felt like outsiders within a discipline that venerated political and military history. Social history really made its breakthrough in interwar Europe, challenging the way that history was taught in schools and universities where the focus was on political and constitutional history. What most people learned and studied was the story of elites. Social historians wanted to recapture the lives of the people who were invisible to history at that time. They argued that history should not be merely a story of kings and queens with a few statesmen and generals thrown in. One of their key insights was the understanding that people in different global locations and different parts of society see the world in different ways. This kind of impulse (as we will see) was also shared with anthropology, another discipline which developed in the nineteenth century.

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Early social history was thus distinguished by its willingness to borrow from other disciplines. This was evident in the French historians who founded the journal Annales in 1929. Quite simply, the Annales school (as it is usually known) launched a revolution in historical practice, extending the reach of history. No individual or group was considered unworthy of historical study, be they rich or poor. For the first time it began to be possible to investigate the people who apparently had no history:  slaves, peasants and the labouring classes. The Annales approach generated an omnivorous methodology, soaking up insights from geography, sociology, psychology and literature like a sponge. It expanded the possibilities for what might count as evidence and broadened how we saw the past. In particular, it promoted the importance of the longue durée as an historical lens, examining long-​term patterns of change so as to map the key forces of change. It disliked the narrow focus on ‘events’ that then characterized political history. Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society (1939–​40) examined the ties that bound medieval Europe together. He explored the way the medieval economy and the feudal system worked. The ambition of his book can be shown in the way it even compared Europe at that time with medieval Japan. Bloch demonstrated how the feudal mind was different from what came before and what came after. For this reason, the Annales school became associated with the history of mentalities. Also key to the intellectual boldness of the Annales school was Fernand Braudel. After the Second World War, the publication of his The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II (1949) displayed the potential sweep of the new social history, taking in forces such as climate, trade, shipping and demography. Braudel looked beyond the nation state and, in his subsequent works, started to think further about world systems, anticipating the transnational and global histories of today. There were structural factors that also account for the emergence of the field. Social history owed its prominence to the expansion of universities across the West after 1945. Social democracy (broadly speaking, the governing philosophy of many Western countries from 1945 to 1980) sparked networks of historical investigation. The emergence of welfare states drove a desire to think about how societies had functioned in the past. Despite the Cold War, which heavily shaped intellectual life in the post-​war world, Marxism found a home in the academy. By foregrounding the economy, class and social stratification, it offered a deep way of understanding the dynamics of how societies functioned. The work of the Communist Party Historians Group in Britain (whose members included Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, E.  P. Thompson and Rodney Hilton) reshaped the way history was written around the world, generating what came to be known as ‘history from below’. They proved that it was possible to write a history of the working class and other subaltern groups. The stock response from the establishment had previously been that workers effectively had no history because they left no sources behind and their experience was not important.

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This argument was demolished. Not only did they uncover new sources but they also insisted that workers had ‘agency’ (a key concept) and the ability to shape their lives through constructing institutions such as trade unions and developing new political ideas. Class became the great theme; there were even investigations of class struggle in ancient Greece.7 Social history was driven as much by non-​Marxists, but their perspectives were often not very different. This kind of social history was defined by its recovery of the histories of peasantries and the working classes. There was, however, no good reason why social history simply had to be concerned with subaltern groups. Since the 1980s there has been greater interest in writing social histories of the middle class and even of the aristocracy.8 Suddenly, a new historical world was possible. The history of science and social history began to speak to each other. Scientific discoveries were not only about breakthroughs in human thought; they also created new ways of living. A study of clocks could make the histories of time and the impact of time discipline on society possible.9 Railways were not just a change in transport but also offered new forms of communication and transformed time and space. A medical report could be the gateway to thinking about the history of patients and of attitudes to disease. A popular song or an icon like Robin Hood could help recreate a way of life, and so too could records of crime and disorder. Subdisciplines within social history began to proliferate: labour history, urban history, medical history, the history of crime and of popular culture.10 The first indications of the movement towards social history after 1945 came in the form of a greater interest in local history. Provincial archives in the post-​war period were raided, demonstrating, as Michelet had seen, that localities had very different characteristics. Social historians sought to explain why this was. There was an understanding that social change needed to be grounded in the economic base. Any good social historian needed to have a working understanding of economics and economic theory. Just as early social history looked to economic history, it also followed the lead of the Annales school in its encounter with anthropology. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) unpacked the world view of ordinary people in early modern England before and after the Reformation. This involved discovering a mentality and way of life that contrasted with modern secular society:  religion, magic and their associated rituals were part of everyday life. To understand this, he drew on the anthropology of E. E. Evans-​Pritchard who had studied the lives and witch customs of the Azande in the upper Nile in the 1930s. There were thus similarities between the approach of social historians and ethnographers who wanted to describe and explain different ways of life. The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz had a strong influence over historians with his belief in ‘thick description’, which takes texts, historical moments or rituals and explains them by placing them within the social relations of a culture.11 This fed into the increasing use by historians from the 1970s

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onwards of ‘microhistory’: taking an episode from the past (especially one that did not make sense to modern eyes) and explaining it through a layered reading of the social context.12 The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, in The Cheese and the Worms (1976), reconstructed the world of a sixteenth-​ century miller named Menocchio who was brought before the Inquisition for heresy. His testimony provided Ginzburg with a way of reconstructing his cosmology. Ginzburg found Menocchio through his own words but also through the books we know that he read. His explanation of the world as resembling the churning of cheese (in which living worms start to appear) made sense though the detective work of the historian. The advances of new social movements in the post-​war period transformed the historical agenda. The challenge of the civil rights movement in the United States encouraged a new approach to the history of race and slavery in particular. Black and white historians challenged the frankly racist assumptions of a previous generation of historians of slavery and began to write history from the perspective of the slaves themselves.13 Slavery was understood as a relationship. Slave and master had to negotiate with each other in order to make the system work. The end of empires generated a concern for the histories of the colonized.14 Race and the legacies of imperialism became increasingly important as they made sense of some of the tensions of post-​war society. Another by-​product of democracy was the emergence of oral history. If the history of ordinary people was important, should they not be allowed to tell it themselves and in their own voice? People’s memories were the antidote to the problem that so much popular experience was not written down. Studs Terkel interviewed Americans about their experiences in the 1930s, which generated his book Hard Times (1970). The democratic sensibility produced by these interviews appeared to vindicate Terkel’s liberal political views. Finally, the democratizing tendencies of social history were evident in the emergence of women’s history in the 1970s and 1980s. For all the acts of historical recovery that were being made in the post-​war period, it was evident that much of this was about the lives of men. Women were largely invisible in the writing of history at that time, partly because so many sources were written by men, and the historical profession (despite the work of pioneers such as the medievalist Eileen Power) was heavily male dominated. The emergence of the women’s movement in the 1960s shook the establishment by showing that women had a history as well. Female historians raided the archives to uncover new sources about women while taking conventional sources such as parliamentary records and showing that they contained hitherto undiscovered material about the lives of women. Women’s history hugely expanded the scope of historical research, introducing new ideas about the importance of separate spheres (the division of social life into the public and the private), the role of motherhood and the complexities of women’s relationship to the workplace. By the 1980s, the

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ambition of social history was essentially to produce a synthesis that paid attention to class, race and gender in explaining the past. It was in the 1980s, however, that the orthodoxies of social history and its methods were challenged. We cannot understand the current ferment within historical inquiry and the move towards cultural history without explaining the tumult of the decade and its aftermath. This was the age of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan:  an historical moment when the social democratic project ran out of steam and was replaced by market-​ driven, neo-​liberal regimes in much of the West. The communist world collapsed, and Marxism was challenged even within the academy. Its focus on economic production and on class seemed reductive to many. The links between the economic base and social reality were more complex in the view of many historians. The French historian François Furet challenged the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution, which had stressed its social and economic causes.15 Furet argued that social historians who looked at the Revolution, failed to think deeply about the political process itself. The relationship between social structure and the nature of political and cultural forms was too imprecise in the work that was then being written. For him, the revolution was less an example of class conflict and more a conflict over democracy. He developed a political rather than a social interpretation of the Revolution. In the 1980s there emerged a strong sense that social historians had failed to think deeply about politics and the complexities of power and political discourse.16 There was an even deeper assault on the methods of social history that emerged through the impact of postmodernism in intellectual life. This term has a number of distinct meanings. In this context, it stands for the belief that modernity (the application of technology to all aspects of life) had generated ‘master narratives’, such as class, with its stable set of identities. The mark of the postmodern condition, however, was to treat these master narratives with suspicion. No one is simply defined by a class or gender: the human personality is too various. This has always been true. Employing the writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault, historians viewed identity not as something that was fixed but as the product of language and forms of knowledge that were produced at particular times. The 1980s therefore saw the coming of the ‘linguistic turn’. At its most extreme, this held that language is not the product of an exterior reality but actually shapes the reality that we all experience. All we have are the texts of the past. Historians, in this view, deploy the fiction that they are reconstructing a previous reality when they are themselves the prisoners of particular kinds of writing. Their approaches are much closer to the techniques of the novelist than they let on. For example, social historians had made much of Thompson’s emphasis on the category of ‘experience’. Yet ‘experience’ is not as straightforward a category as many seem to think. Joan Wallach Scott argued that the category is not fixed in nature but is discursively produced by historians. In

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claiming to be recreating past experience, historians fail to reflect on their own ideological assumptions. Too often, she argues, invocations of ‘experience’ merely make the past subservient to present-​day concerns. It disguises the way people in the past really were different from us today. The historian needs to make clear what s/​he is doing when purporting to write about ‘experience’ in the past. All historical categories are ‘contextual, contested and contingent’.17 Similarly, Scott (a leading women’s historian) critiqued the way women’s history was being written.18 It was not enough in her view to simply discover the lives of women in the past and then add them to the historical record. This merely reproduced traditional methods of history without challenging them. Rather, she argued that it is important to see gender as an integral part of any social system. The changing understandings of what constituted masculinity and femininity at any one time determined the character of society. These roles were not fixed in nature but subject to change, and it was the task of the new field of gender history to explore this. It is in the context of this challenge to the traditional methods of social history that a gradual shift towards cultural history has taken place. The ‘cultural turn’ taken by social historians was the product of the years after the intellectual tumult of the 1980s. It also reflected the growth of cultural studies as an academic discipline. From the late 1980s, there was much talk about a ‘new cultural history’ which occupied the commanding heights of the discipline.19 These new cultural historians reworked older themes and emphasized transgression, the carnivalesque in popular culture, self-​ fashioning, the male gaze, orientalism, forms of discipline and deviance, the invention of sexual and medical categories, governmentality, expertise, popular memory, religious practices, cultural capital, the colonial as the ‘other’ and the promotion of politeness as a form of social distinction. Above all, the new cultural history venerated the study of ‘representations’: the variety of images, stories and texts that sustain a way of life. Here was the terrain where the historian met the literary critic and the art historian. Significantly, this new cultural history employed words such as ‘invention’, ‘narrative’, ‘construction’, ‘performance’, ‘theatricality’, ‘decoding’, ‘borderlands’, ‘matrix’ and ‘encounter’. It rejected essentialist notions of human nature and viewed all aspects of society as open to remaking and refashioning. There was a marked shift away from economic history and from collective categories such as class. As Penny Summerfield discusses in her chapter in this volume, historians turned towards histories of selfhood and subjectivity, imaginatively interrogating the means by which historical actors constructed their sense of self in relation to both discourse and the psyche. In a post-​industrial world (at least in the West), class as a unitary category of analysis seemed wanting: identity was more complex and various. The internet promised to change social life and political possibilities, remaking not only our access to the past but also how we think about social structures. Ours is the age of what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid

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modernity’.20 This describes the twenty-​first-​century world which is shaped by uncertainty and resists system making, dealing with the world through fragmentary experiences and adapting to different circumstances (a world in which people change jobs rapidly rather than pursue a career for life, a world struggling to cope with rapid movements of capital and people as well as automation). Historians became less concerned about engaging with sociology and anthropology and more with literature and history of art, which seemed to fit the temper of the times. Significantly, literature and art history went through their own revolution at the same time. The approach was less on analysing the role of the Fool in King Lear or on connoisseurship than on decoding texts and images, searching for the political content below. The new historicism in literature sought to unpack the ideological framework of fiction, creating moments where historians and literary specialists could have a conversation with each other. Cultural history has been increasingly concerned with exploring the complexities of personal identity in the past and the forms of representation that exist in any society. Sources are seen much more as texts to be deconstructed or decoded rather than as straightforward products of an historical moment. The cultural historian has to be sensitive to the representational codes which shape the creation of the documents of the past. Typical of this new kind of social/​cultural history is the greater interest in life writing (autobiographies), in diaries and in letters. We look at these sources to detect the complex forms of identity that are at work. No doubt they show the influence of class, race and gender, but we now see that these categories do not exhaust the meanings of any document. Reductionist readings are out. Significantly, there has been less emphasis on the production of goods and more on consumerism, an example of how historians find themselves reacting to the political agenda of their own times and one which is traced in this volume by Donna Loftus. Historians thus reflect the world in which they live, while the books they write shape how people might see the world in which they live. If our age has a theme, it is that we do not recognize the subfields of history as distinct. Rather, we cherish the interconnectedness of different fields, respecting the distinct methods of each area but also refusing to see them as hermetically sealed off from one another.

Where are we today? The development of social and cultural history described so far in this book was heavily shaped by early encounters between historians and neighbouring scholarly disciplines. The kind of social and cultural history that is being produced today reveals the emergence of new partners in the quest to uncover fresh insights about the lives and experiences of men, women and children in the past. These partners have helped frame theoretical

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approaches to familiar questions as well as opened the door to new sources and new methods of historical analysis. Social and cultural historians today are most heavily preoccupied with questions of historical identity. This concern was flagged in the manifesto of the Social History Society’s own journal, Cultural and Social History, which launched in 2004 with the avowed intent of revealing ‘the constellation of cultural forces that confer meaning on the lives of historical actors’ to better understand the experiences and identities of people in the past.21 Peter Mandler used the journal’s inaugural issue to discuss the ‘problem’ of historical methodologies in cultural history and to issue a call for adventurous forays into the theories and methodologies of different disciplines whose insights could be used by historians, irrespective of the period or place of their research.22 This book demonstrates that Mandler’s call for historians to abandon their theoretical conservatism has certainly been heeded. The most notable development is the emerging behemoth otherwise known as the history of emotions. The velocity at which this field of historical research is evolving reveals some of the most innovative partnerships between social and cultural historians, historians of science and medicine, and those researchers broadly working in the field of life sciences. Historians working in this area are interested in historicizing modes of emotional expression, whether articulated in verbal, textual, material or bodily form. Particular categories of emotional experience, as well as the people expressing them, are now being examined with topics stretching from anger and ecstasy, to love, shame and disgust.23 Emotions have, it seems, gone global, with centres of excellence for their historical and biological study stretching across Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States. Making sense of emotions –​how they come about and how their expression shapes individual, community and national identities  –​is central to this highly interdisciplinary movement of scholarship, whose momentum and reach has been compared by some to the emergence of gender history. Emotions, it is clear, are everywhere.24 One of the most intriguing dialogues to which this field of study has given birth is that between historians, biologists and neuroscientists, discussed in this volume by Rob Boddice. This conversation was triggered, in part, by the isolation of individual body parts in histories of emotion, which have tried to uncover how they function as well as the ways in which they mould human behaviour and expression. The key question that is constantly debated, albeit in many complex forms, is, to what extent are emotional experiences, expressions and performances in past and present driven by the body’s internal biology and/​or by its cultural and material environments? This question has spawned fresh enquiries and approaches, leading historians to engage in new ways with images and reports of early modern witchcraft and supernatural phenomena. The work of Laura Kounine, Michael Ostling, Jenny Spinks and Charles Zika, for example, reconstructs the emotional, rhetorical and visual strategies employed by sixteenth-​and

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seventeenth-​century European writers and artists to stir fear, anxiety and wonder from their viewers.25 Historians have, in turn, furnished valuable points of comparison, and indeed intellectual challenges, for those working in the life sciences. Chronobiologists and neuroscientists engaged in the study of human sleep and sleep disorders have been called to put their conclusions and methodologies into critical perspective by the recent work of historian A.  Roger Ekirch, whose research uncovered evidence that many pre-​industrial communities in Europe and early America were fond of sleeping in two separate phases during the night, which they called their ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’. Clinical investigations of human sleep patterns, which focus on the body’s circadian rhythms and brain functions, are founded on the basis that humans sleep, and always have slept, in a single consolidated cycle of sleep each night. Historians, biologists and neuroscientists alike have struggled to agree on the degree to which seemingly ‘natural’ patterns of human sleep are subtly shaped by sleep’s cultural value in different periods and places, and by its distinctive material environments, technologies, and temporal rhythms.26 These debates, though lacking a clear resolution, show the importance of social and cultural historians in challenging the ‘norms’ of modernity and the seemingly neutral space of the sleep laboratory. Historians have gone so far as to suggest that different historical cultures and environments may well have played a role in determining brain chemistry; the question for them is not ‘if’, but how far, this is the case. The post-​Foucauldian reassertion of embodied experience and bodily agency, tackled in this volume by Judith Allen, has extended to an ever more critical engagement with the materiality of historical experience. Preverbal or nonverbal modes of expression and feeling are guiding priorities in the haptic histories of material culture specialists and design historians who locate human histories not just within or upon the individual body but also in the dynamic relationship between bodies and things. These ‘things’ have a life, and indeed a history of their own, that is semi-​independent of the human beings that made, used or interacted with them at some point in their lives. The most cutting-​edge social and cultural histories today situate historical actors in dynamic relation to objects and materials, the built environment, natural landscapes and in relation to fellow human beings and even animals. Work in this volume by Hilda Kean, John Morgan, Jennifer Tucker and Nicola Whyte explores a handful of these themes: animal-​human relations, the lived landscape, visual and material culture and environments. These histories have been built on the foundations provided by Fernand Braudel and the Annales school in acknowledging the importance of different timescapes, landscapes and indeed seascapes when mapping out the lives of long-​dead ancestors. Thanks to the work of Colin Jones, we can now rethink French political culture in the late eighteenth century through the events of a single day in the Revolutionary year 9 Thermidor Year II, or 27 July 1794, which saw the overthrow of Maximilien Robespierre.

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The cityscape of Paris, its people, their mealtimes and the weather proved just as important in shaping the fateful events of that day as did the Paris Commune and the National Guard.27 As well as taking a ‘temporal’ turn, social and cultural historians have arguably taken a ‘sensory’ turn, paying ever closer attention to the importance of what historical actors saw, heard, smelled, tasted and touched, and how those sensory encounters shaped their behaviour and perception.28 The components that make up human ‘experience’, and the intricacies of the environments people in the past inhabited remain the staple diet of social and cultural historians today, even if their taste buds have diversified in recent years.

What does the future hold? What, then, are we to make of these recent developments? We should perhaps be celebrating the quality and originality of our contributions to scholarly debates, public knowledge and contemporary culture rather than dwelling on the so-​called epistemological ‘crisis’ in our discipline. The latter has been highlighted most controversially by the authors of The History Manifesto, Jo Guldi and David Armitage, who sought to illustrate the pitfalls of small-​scale history. Responses to the Manifesto have rightly pointed to the fact that theoretical and methodological breakthroughs in the historical discipline bear no relation whatsoever to the size of the time period being examined or to the number of individuals under investigation.29 The richness of social and cultural history, in particular, lies in its variety and in its acknowledgement that no individual scholar, or group of scholars, has the capacity to unravel the mysteries of human behaviour. It is precisely in those moments of dialogue with our intellectual partners that we gain new insights and become more aware of the strengths and limitations of our own discipline and, indeed, of other bodies of scholarship. Social and cultural historians have, as Peter Mandler requested, built a bridge between the arts, humanities and sciences. It is a bridge that transports questions, debates and evidence in both directions and that will allow for the future development of innovative scholarship. Two of the new directions that historical scholarship is taking are discussed in this volume: public history and transnational history. In her discussion of the transnational currents so evident in much contemporary historical research, Durba Ghosh persuasively argues for a history which is decentred from its Western roots, sensitive to the movements of peoples, cultures and ideas around the globe. Arguably, public history, as discussed here by Paul Ashton and Meg Foster, has already been attuned to these movements, as historians working with members of the public and heritage professionals unpack the narratives and assumptions that have underpinned many national histories, drawing on new methodologies and new historical spaces to do so. Some of the current strands identified by the authors of

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this volume, however, reinterrogate older methodologies and approaches: Katrina Navickas’s discussion of the ‘return to materialism’ skilfully demonstrates the continued relevance of history to the present, and the re-​emergence of historical studies of class and economic structures as a response to the global economic crisis since 2008. Significantly, economic and business historians are beginning to talk in more theoretically ambitious terms about their work. The next decade may be marked by a distinct material turn in social and cultural history.30 Historians as skilled practitioners have much to offer, both to the men and women of the past and to the world in which we live. This is certainly the view of Pedro Ramos Pinto and Bertrand Taithe, whose recent edited volume, The Impact of History, addresses the question of why historians still matter at a time when history has been heavily commoditized and when its very production has been extended across many different publics that may only be loosely connected to academia.31 Their view, and ours, is that the historian’s value is marked out by their unrivalled drive and ability to understand the past in critical perspective, and not simply to uncover it. For social and cultural historians, these skills are strengthened rather than threatened by interdisciplinary collaborations. The present volume shows that historians continue to be at the forefront of innovative interdisciplinary research, whether it is enacted through the analysis of ‘big data’ or through microstudies of a specific person, time, place, object or emotion. Seth Denbo’s article on digital history suggests a future for the discipline which will include 3D visualization in order to interpret the past. The essays in this volume are excellent tools for thinking about the current state of play in the field of social and cultural history. Our authors reveal how the legacies and experiences of the past continue to shape contemporary culture, and how social and cultural histories continue to revitalize conversations about what it means to be human. Rather than rendering history the servant of the present, social and cultural historians reveal the qualities, preoccupations and experiences that are shared across time and space, alongside an understanding of those qualities that make us distinct.

NOTES 1 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989): pp. 7–​25. 2 On these, see Jo McCormack, Collective Memory: France and the Algerian War 1954–​1962 (Plymouth: Lexington Press, 2007); Martin Evans, ‘Memories, Monuments, Histories: The Re-​Thinking of the Second World War Since 1989’, National Identities 8 (2010): pp. 317–​48; Michael Richards, After the Civil War: Making Memory and Re-​Making Spain since 1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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3 Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 4 Key examples of these texts might include Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden From History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It (London: Pluto Press, 1975); Hall Carpenter Archive Lesbian Oral History Group, Inventing Ourselves: Lesbian Life Stories (London: Routledge, 1987); Jewish Women in London Group, Generations of Memories: Voices of Jewish Women (London: Women’s Press, 1989). 5 See, for example, Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–​1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Alexandra Walsham, ‘Recording Superstition in Early Modern Britain: The Origins of Folklore’, Past and Present 199 (2008): pp. 178–​206. 6 Raymond Williams, Keywords (1976; London: Flamingo, 1983), pp. 87–​93; Michel Espagne, ‘Bildung’, in Barbara Cassin (ed.), Dictionary of Untranslateables: A Philosophical Lexicon (2004; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 111–​19. On cultural history, see Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History? (London: Polity, 2008 [2004]). 7 G. E. M. De Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (London: Duckworth, 1981). 8 Pamela Pilbeam, The Middle Classes in Europe, 1789–​1914 (London: Lyceum, 1990); Hannah Greig, The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 9 E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present 38 (1967), pp. 56–​97. 10 See, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (London: Duckworth, 1975); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978). 11 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 12 Sara Maza, ‘Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European History’, American Historical Review 101 (1996): pp. 1493–​515. 13 John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: Knopf, 1947); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1976). 14 For example, Terence Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–​97: A Study in African Resistance (London: Heinemann, 1967). 15 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 16 Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, ‘Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?’, Social History 5 (1980): pp. 249–​71; Tony Judt, ‘A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians’, History Workshop Journal 7 (1979): pp. 66–​94. 17 Joan Wallach Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): pp. 773–​97, here p. 777 and 796. 18 Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review 91 (1986): pp. 1053–​75.

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19 Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 20 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Polity, 2000); see also Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (London: Yale University Press, 2006). 21 ‘Editorial’, Cultural and Social History 1 (2004): p. 1. 22 Peter Mandler, ‘The Problem with Cultural History’, Cultural and Social History 1 (2004): pp. 94–​117. 23 Alana Harris and Timothy Willem Jones (eds), Love and Romance in Britain, 1918–​1970 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Claire Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Julie-​Marie Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 24 See, for example, Thomas Dixon, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 25 Laura Kounine and Michael Ostling (eds), Emotions in the History of Witchcraft (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Jennifer Spinks, ‘Signs that Speak: Reporting the 1556 Comet across French and German Borders’, in Jennifer Spinks and Dagmar Eichberger (eds), Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe: An Album Amicorum for Charles Zika (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 212–​39; Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-​Century Europe (London: Routledge, 2007). 26 Sasha Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 27 Colin Jones, ‘The Overthrow of Maximilien Robespierre and the “Indifference” of the People’, American Historical Review 119 (2014): pp. 689–​713. 28 Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 29 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler, ‘The History Manifesto: A Critique’, American Historical Review 120 (2015): pp. 530–​42 (see also the reply by Guldi and Armitage on pp. 543–​54). 30 Kenneth Lipartito, ‘Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism’, American Historical Review 121 (2016): pp. 101–​39. 31 Pedro Ramos Pinto and Bertrand Taithe (eds), The Impact of History? Histories at the Beginning of the Twenty-​First Century (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015).

Key texts Bonnell, V. E., and L. Hunt (eds). Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Burke, P. What Is Cultural History? 2004; London: Polity, 2008.

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Cook, J. W., L. B. Glickman, M. O’Malley. (eds). The Cultural Turn in US History: Past, Present and Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Eley, G. A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Guldi, J., and D. Armitage. The History Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Hunt, L. (ed.). The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Mandler, P. ‘The Problem with Cultural History’, Cultural and Social History 1 (2004): pp. 94–​117. Maza, S. ‘Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European History’, American Historical Review 101 (1996): pp. 1493–​1515. Ramos Pinto, P., and B. Taithe. (eds), The Impact of History? Histories at the Beginning of the Twenty-​First Century. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015. Sewell, W. H. Jr. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

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PART ONE

Histories of the human While the human world has long been at the centre of social and other forms of history, the cultural turn of the late twentieth century widened both historians’ categories of analysis and methodologies for exploring what it was to be human in the past. Largely absent from the Rankean history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘the people’ were returned to historical study first through the work of the Annales School and then by labour historians who strove to reconstruct and analyse the world of the labouring poor, often utilizing a Marxist framework to understand social class. This focus on social class and on economic forces as determining factors in human history, which shaped so much social history research in the twentieth century, was itself challenged and destabilized both by a new interest in the wider processes of identity formation and by a questioning of the very category of experience. Drawing on methodological approaches from outside of the discipline of history, and engaging with the theoretical and philosophical challenges that post-​structuralism offered to established historical practice, historians working within the cultural turn produced work that questioned the centrality of social class and economic forces to human history. Within this body of work the term ‘subjectivity’ began to appear with more and more regularity, the

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study of selfhood providing a means by which historians could explore the multiple ways that people understood and articulated their lives. Experience was no longer something that could be simply ‘read off’ historical documents. Instead, texts became sources through which the processes by which we as humans constantly make and remake ourselves, constructing a sense of who we are in relation to external forces, could be made visible. To be human was no longer to be simply the subject of external, often economic forces. Instead, and to paraphrase E. P. Thompson, the individual was present at their own making. As the chapters in this section demonstrate, work on human identity and experience continues to develop in new and exciting directions. Penny Summerfield’s chapter on selfhood and subjectivity traces some of the ways in which this body of work has developed in the years since the cultural turn, exploring innovative work that imagines and reconstructs gendered, classed and racialized identities through both the close reading of a range of texts and the application of theoretical insights offered by work in cultural memory and psychoanalysis. Rob Boddice highlights the diversity of the field that is emotional history, boldly arguing the case for a historical engagement with the work of neuroscientists and geneticists, alongside anthropology, psychology and philosophy. Emotions, Boddice contends, are made in the relationship between the world and in the body, and recent developments in the sciences offer historians vital tools through which to comprehend them. The body is also the focus of Judith Allen’s final chapter in this section. Allen traces the ways in which historians have approached both the body and the senses and, like Boddice, argues for a closer engagement between historians and those working in other, cognate disciplines. Feminist theory in particular, she argues, offers a means of furthering historical research on the body and the senses. Histories of the human continue to offer us challenging, yet rich and rewarding, directions to follow, which promise to illuminate not only human history but also our relationship with the wider material and non-​human world.

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CHAPTER ONE

Subjectivity, the self and historical practice Penny Summerfield

Introduction In 1961 E. H. Carr criticized what he called ‘the Bad King John theory of history’.1 By this he meant ‘the view that what matters in history is the character and behaviour of individuals’, specifically those of ‘great men’.2 He insisted, instead, that the motors of history were social forces, groups and classes within their material worlds. Writing in the context of the advent of mass democracy in Britain, the United States and most of Europe, Carr furthered the development of types of economic and social history that challenged historical causation premised on the individual. In so doing he promoted the identification of the underlying causes of change using a range of sources, including, particularly, quantifiable evidence. Since then there has been a backlash. Richard Evans wrote in 1997, ‘One of the very great drawbacks of generalizing social-​science history, with its reliance on averages and statistics was its virtual elimination of the individual human being in favour of anonymous groups and trends.’3 The response since the 1970s has been a rising tide of historical writing with individual selfhoods and subjectivities at its heart. This shift has occurred within the context of the development of aggressive individualism across the globe, characterized by the undermining of collectivities such as trade unions, deregulation within economies and the privatization of welfare states. It might be understood as a manifestation of these underlying trends. Yet historians who apply their scholarly attention to the personal have not drawn on the neo-​liberal agenda; on the contrary,

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they have chosen to focus on individual subjectivities in the name of humanizing and democratizing history.4 This chapter explores the intellectual currents that have not only returned the individual to history but also identified selfhood and the personal as topics worthy of historical study in their own right. This has not happened without historians questioning the reliability and representativeness of ‘subjective’ sources, while at the same time seeking to use them. Simultaneously, new intellectual directions in history have offered ways of approaching the self and selfhood that interrogate the concept of unreliability, historicize inconsistency and celebrate the subjective. This chapter, using case studies drawn from the modern period, asks how subjectivity has been understood and analysed by historians, and explores the sources and methods they have used to mediate between unique selves in the past and the general processes with which history is concerned.5

Quantitative and qualitative histories The individual who returned to history in the 1980s and in subsequent decades was not the same as the one Carr dismissed in the early 1960s. The focus on social forces advocated by Carr and developed by the new social history of the 1960s meant that political events were now seen in the context of the activities and material conditions of the mass of the people, establishing the value of ‘history from below’.6 This involved the recovery of hitherto neglected social groups. On the one hand it prioritized quantifiable evidence such as demographic and economic data on births, deaths, marriages, wages and incomes. On the other, it stimulated the use of all sorts of autobiographical expressions as well as the development of methodologies such as oral history that elicited personal accounts of life histories. The focus has been less on monarchs and great men than on ‘ordinary people’, members of the social groups brought to prominence by ‘history from below’, behind whose individual voices the historian could perceive the experience of the mass.7 In short, the returning individual has not been regarded by social and cultural historians in isolation but as part of a community; the single voice is heard speaking both for itself and for a collectivity. Personal testimony, personal narratives, life stories, life histories, ego documents –​the subjective sources indicated by such terms have been vital to the development of histories focused on the self and selfhood. They embrace letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, oral histories and also such personally composed items as scrapbooks, photograph albums, songs, films and even patchwork.8 The term ‘personal testimony’ is widely used to describe such sources in the United Kingdom, but that terminology has been contested. Some scholars argue that the distinctions that have provoked debate are largely a matter of disciplinary tradition and preference, while in practice

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there is considerable slippage and overlap.9 However, different choices originated in differences of approach which need to be clarified. ‘Testimony’ is associated, particularly in the United States, with witness accounts of atrocities, notably the Holocaust, or Shoah.10 To differentiate other types of subjective, autobiographical stories from such ‘testimony’, with its connotations of eyewitness accounts with legal force, some scholars have preferred terms such as ‘personal narratives’.11 Anthropologists debated the merits of various ways of describing the spoken autobiographical account in the 1990s. Some argued that the defining characteristics of the ‘life history’ (in anthropology) were that it was chronological, structured by life stages and factual. Looking for a term that would, instead, acknowledge the creative and interpretative character of autobiographical practices, including the possibility of fabrication, some urged the use of ‘life story’ over ‘life history’. They argued that ‘story’ was preferable, because it ‘does not connote that the narration is true, that the events narrated necessarily happened, or that it matters whether they did or did not’.12 Historians vary in their acceptance of how much these things matter. For some, the accuracy and veracity of narratives is important, and the possibility of fabrication renders personal narratives problematic. Others accept the idea behind the anthropologists’ view on the grounds that personal accounts of a life inevitably deviate from strict historical accuracy, because in seeking to give meaning to the personal past, narrators necessarily interpret it, and the task of the historian is to engage with the interpretations as well as with the ‘facts’ in the account.13 Some also embrace the idea that the sense of self, that is, the subjectivity, constructed through this process is not static and stable but shifts according not only to context but also with every new reflection on the meaning of the past in the life in question and with every reiteration of the account.14 It is not the case that there has been a linear progression from a stage at which historians doubted the value of personal testimony to a present in which all accept it. A divide still yawns between historians who enthusiastically regard personal narratives as creative representations of the remembered self and those interested in them as potentially quantifiable sources of facts but wary of their inherent subjectivity. David Vincent, the earliest British historian to write a history based entirely on working-​class autobiographies, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, defends the value of the autobiography in terms that robustly reject a quantitative approach. In autobiographies, he argues, facts are incidental to the main value of the accounts, which lies in the autobiographer’s ‘capacity to grasp imaginatively the complexity of the life-​long interaction between the self and the outside world’.15 In autobiography ‘it is precisely the element of subjectivity which is of the greatest value’, and there is no point applying quantitative methods:  even with a collection of 142 autobiographies, ‘no truths either in general or in particular, can be deduced by adding up their contents and dividing the total number’.16

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In contrast, Jane Humphries, an economic historian who uses working-​ class memoirs as her main source for an analysis of child labour in the industrial revolution, determinedly quantifies and averages.17 She disputes Vincent’s assertion that autobiographies are not a reliable source of facts, claiming that defects such as chronological inaccuracies, ideological refraction, fictitious additions, omissions, selectivity, failures of memory and ‘plagiarism’ of secondary material such as newspaper articles, can be minimized statistically.18 ‘Each memoir is responsible for one observation only in a data set of many hundreds of cases. Averaging dilutes mistakes that remained undetected in individual observations.’19 Humphries’s work depends on convincing a sceptical community of economic historians of the validity of her source for calculating the prevalence of child labour. She needs to uphold the reliability of memoirs as sources of data and to contradict Vincent’s dismissal of the possibility of using them for quantitative purposes. She agrees with Vincent that memoirs tell us ‘how working men and women made sense of their lives and responded to the world about them’.20 According to Humphries, however, this key characteristic gives rise to ‘mistakes’ that must be corrected.21 To an economic historian subjectivity is a defect in need of compensation. These polarized positions lurk within recent historiography. In one of them subjectivity is the most valuable aspect of personal testimony, at the heart of the relationship between past selves and past societies that the historian must strive to understand, while in the other it is an inevitable but problematic dimension, making autobiography, for all its usefulness, ‘a potentially hazardous and time consuming source’.22 Both Bread, Knowledge and Freedom and Childhood and Child Labour are distinguished monographs, well respected in their fields. Their dates of publication, Vincent’s in 1981 and Humphries’s in 2010, alert us to several features of historical practice in the last forty years:  the sustained (and growing) popularity of personal testimony as a historical source; the wide variation in the research objectives for which, and methodologies by which, it has been deployed; and the absence of a simple trajectory across time in the course of which historians have ever more firmly embraced subjectivity.23 Four intellectual developments have aided historians’ study of the self and subjectivity and stimulated their uses of personal narratives:  post-​ structuralism, postcolonialism, feminism and psychoanalysis. These strands of thinking overlap and bleed into each other, and not all historical work that invokes past selves and uses personal testimony identifies firmly with one or other of them. But it is possible to illustrate how they have informed historical practice through a focus on a selection of historical works that draw on a variety of genres of personal testimony. In the examples used here, these genres include diaries, letters, oral history and memoir. Among the concepts variously deployed in these historians’ methodologies are narrative, technologies of the self, the ‘other’, subjective composure, intersubjectivity and the unconscious. Before taking the discussion further, however, the lasting influence of post-​structuralism or ‘the cultural turn’ needs consideration.

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The cultural turn The cultural turn of the 1980s made an enormous impact on historians’ perceptions of the individual in the past. It challenged ideas that were deeply entrenched in social and economic history, about the structuring of society by social class and the determination of the course of human history by economic forces and the state. Post-​structuralism or postmodernism worked in two contrary directions at the same time with regard to subjectivity.24 On the one hand, it offered new ways of thinking about the self. On the other, it suggested that pursuit of the living, breathing historical subject was a waste of time. Michel Foucault’s critique of the idea that power operates in social and political structures such as the class hierarchy and the state opened up the possibility of understanding power in terms of knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’, that is, the ideas and assumptions that circulate as discourses, and condition the scope of thought and understanding possible for individuals in any historical context. In this way of thinking, subjectivity or a sense of self is an effect of discursive practices. The self is both the subject of these sources of power and regulation, and it is subject to them: powerful ideas about the self circulate in public discourse; individual subjects constitute themselves in dialogue with discourse; and it is not possible to escape these discursive effects. In his historical writing, Foucault sought to show how this worked. In Discipline and Punish:  The Birth of the Prison (1975/​77), for example, he argues that, over the course of the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Western ideas about selfhood changed in the context of changing theories of human behaviour and the body politic associated with the Enlightenment. Physical punishment of the body was superseded by mechanisms of surveillance and discipline.25 Punishment regimes were designed to control not only people’s use of time and space but also their thinking, such that individuals effectively reformed themselves from within. Through the generalization of these processes via institutions such as the law, medicine, the family and education, entire populations became governable. Foucault coined the term ‘governmentality’ to describe this process, a concept further theorized by Nikolas Rose.26 The individual self, according to Foucault, was not autonomous and integrated, as Enlightenment thought proposed, but was constructed culturally and ‘interpellated’ by the discourses circulating in these various institutional contexts. As Regenia Gagnier puts it, ‘This post-​structural conception of subjectivity claims that the I, the apparent seat of consciousness, is not the integral center of thought but a contradictory, discursive category constituted by ideological discourse itself.’27 For numerous historians, the cultural turn suggested that it made more sense to study the institutions and discourses that interpellate the subject than to research the individual and his or her consciousness.28 Others

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dismissed the contribution of Foucault on the grounds that it denied experience and neglected human agency: ‘Postmodernists have demoted the self from a quest to an illusion’, writes James Hinton.29 Post-​structuralist theory seemed to ignore the ways in which subjects mediate discourses in their everyday lives; it overlooked their ability to see themselves as differentiated from institutions; and it dismissed the capacity of individuals to constitute themselves in response to, or in defiance of, discourse.30 Some theorists, including, for example, Michel de Certeau and Roger Chartier, accept many of the insights of post-​structuralism while insisting on the relative autonomy of human thought and action.31 Similarly, the feminist historian Kathleen Canning argues that it is possible both to accept the idea that subjects are socially and culturally embedded, and to consider them to possess the agency required to mediate and transform their circumstances and the meanings with which they are endowed.32 In itself, then, the cultural turn did not lead directly to the embrace of selfhood by historians. Nevertheless, it made important contributions to historical practice in relation to self and subjectivity, not least by suggesting that subjectivity has a history, since it has been constituted in different ways at different points in the past, as institutions and their ideological practices have changed over time. In addition, post-​structuralism prompted historians to become more self-​conscious about their practice. As Evans explains, Foucault raised the issues of ‘the possibility or impossibility of attaining objective knowledge, the elusive and relative nature of truth, the difficulties involved in distinguishing between fact and fiction’.33 These challenges encouraged historians to reflect on whether it is ever possible wholly to know the past, to regard every historical source as a context-​dependent interpretation and to consider their own subjective relationships to the histories they study and the sense they make of them. Post-​structuralism also stimulated thought about how historians acquire knowledge of the past. It encouraged historians to interrogate the provenance and availability of the sources they use and the kinds of history those sources make it possible to write.34 Regarding the archive critically, as a culturally constructed rather than a neutral space, opens the possibility that its contents can be creatively expanded, and underlines the insight that, in any case, archival sources mean nothing until they are interpreted. In the decades since the 1970s, archivists have diversified the materials they acquire and altered the emphasis of their own publicity concerning what they offer the multiple publics interested in the past. Archives such as county record offices increasingly embrace the collection not only of official documents and the papers of political leaders and social dignitaries, but also the letters, diaries, memoirs, films, photographs, graffiti, everyday objects and reminiscences of ‘ordinary people’, including those apparently outside mainstream political processes.35 In creating its ‘People’s War’ website, an online archive of Second World War memories, for example, the BBC in 2003 explicitly sought a wide range of ‘ “subjective interpretations that described ‘what it

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was like’, not what happened”,’ differentiating the endeavour from its own reputation for ‘objective’ reporting.36 This history of archival reorientation meshes with the shift in historical practice towards the use of personal testimony for the study of historical subjectivities.

Subjectivity, language and narrative Many historians have been influenced by the cultural turn, but relatively few have explicitly followed the avenues it opened for exploring past selves through personal testimony. One of these few is Patrick Joyce, in his investigation of the creation of the idea of the democratic subject in mid-​ nineteenth-​century England.37 Joyce’s argument is pitched against historical analyses of nineteenth-​century social and political change based on the structuralist idea of social class. Language, imagination and narrative are central to Joyce’s post-​structural approach. Class, asserts Joyce, is not a reality outside its imagined existence. Even more controversially, poverty is likewise not an external reality to Joyce but an experience that has to be imagined and named for it to exist. Joyce is thus ‘looking at subjectivities, at the subject as a self and as an imagined collectivity’.38 Narratives, the ‘social imaginary’, give social subjects meaning and are the means by which contemporaries live the social relations of their day. The constitution of subjectivity by narrative implies, to Joyce, that identity is decentred and unstable, and that the distinction between representation and the real is blurred. He writes, ‘I am concerned with an imaginary that is not the image of something else, but without which there cannot be something else.’39 What sort of analysis does this formulation produce? The section of Democratic Subjects on Edwin Waugh constitutes a case study. Joyce presents the details of Waugh’s life, drawn from a range of sources, as factual and uncontentious. Waugh was the son of a Rochdale shoemaker who died early in his life. His mother took over her late husband’s shoe shop, but the family was relegated temporarily to a cellar dwelling and a diet of nettles. Nevertheless, Waugh’s mother fostered education, autodidacticism and the aspiration to independence in her son.40 Religion, specifically Methodism, suffused his thought and feeling. He became an apprentice printer, later a clerk and eventually a dialect poet well known for his publications. In 1847 Edwin married an illiterate woman, Mary Ann, whom Joyce describes as ‘one of the labouring people of Rochdale’.41 Joyce’s discussion of Waugh’s diary demonstrates the influence of the cultural turn. He refuses to see Waugh simply as a product of his social background, that is, as ‘working-​class’, and rejects an approach that would trace the way Waugh’s writings reflect his class position. Drawing on the Foucauldian idea of governmentality, Joyce writes of the diary that Waugh kept from 1847 to 1850 not as a reflection of his life but rather as a tool with

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which he actively shaped his subjectivity. The diary, writes Joyce, was a technique for managing the self, one of a number of ‘technologies of communication’ available in the period, involved in ‘making the self visible to the self’.42 In his diary Waugh adopts the confessional mode, common in other diaries of the time.43 However, states Joyce, Waugh does not write a spiritual narrative per se but rather combines confession with an account of himself as a social being. Joyce shows how Waugh draws on newspapers and on contemporary thinkers to construct himself as an Enlightenment Man, a believer in education and discipline in pursuit of God and the moral life. This is not a matter of calm reflection but of torment. Waugh grieves in his diary about his own sin and describes his struggles to secure dignity and freedom by being released from the material needs of the flesh. He longs for a bourgeois existence but one without bourgeois exploitation, of which he was a radical critic.44 At the same time, Waugh engages in romantic adulation of an imagined world of rural cottage industry, hard manual labour and self sufficiency, which he also wove into his dialect poetry.45 Through the diary’s agonized narratives, Waugh constructs himself not as ‘working-​ class’, argues Joyce, but as a ‘democratic subject’ and a member of what Waugh imagines as the ‘one house’ of humanity. This ‘one house’ was, however, a male one. Joyce explains that women were placed, discursively, outside the quest for knowledge and freedom, which were masculine prerogatives. Waugh ignored his wife in his diary, except insofar as she impeded his project of self-​development by departing from the stereotype of the servile and submissive woman through her slatternly habits and disruptive behaviour.46 Waugh, in other words, constructed his own rational and god-​fearing masculinity by differentiating it from what he saw as Mary Ann’s aberrant femininity.

Technologies of the self The meaning of considering the diary a ‘technology of the self’ gradually becomes clear. The diary as a material object was, itself, part of Waugh’s spiritual project. Joyce explains that Waugh pasted into its pages newspaper cuttings about the use of a diary as well as about the nature of the life that the diary was to build, examples of the sort of ‘plagiarism’ that Humphries identifies as one of the problems of autobiographical sources. Joyce recuperates such practices as indicators of the engagement of Waugh the diarist, with the public, discursive constitution of subjects such as he. At times Waugh addresses the diary directly, writing, for example, that he wished he were as ‘spotless’ as its pages.47 Joyce explains, ‘The diary is Waugh’s laboratory of the self, its confessional nature the ideal way to try out new personae as he scuttled between self as author, and self as audience.’48 Diary writing was a ‘technology’ that enabled Waugh to play out, release, spectate and savour his sorrows, which constituted the medium of his emerging selfhood.

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Joyce uses the diary to ‘explore the inner world’ of Waugh, which he periodically suggests was different from the outer world. Thus, Waugh’s diary is a narrative of suffering and, at times, despair, yet, Joyce remarks, in the years it covers (1847–​50), Waugh actually ‘went about life with some gusto’.49 The self of Waugh, then, is knowable to Joyce not only through the pages of the diary. That self is both the construct of the narrative of Waugh’s diary, and it is discernable to the historian from other sources.50 Joyce does not discuss these materials (apart from Waugh’s dialect poetry) as sources of the self, in the way that he considers the diary, but we have to assume that they, too, construct Waugh. It would be inconsistent for a post-​structuralist to suggest that any source provides a direct route to ‘the real’. All sources are texts which compose the subject, and only in the reading of texts is meaning released. Joyce’s argument is that social class was one of many competing identities that were available to those articulating themselves and the world in the mid-​nineteenth century, and that it was not the idea of class alone, or predominantly, that shaped democracy or defined the democratic subject. Rather, the numerous social narratives emanating from popular culture, and particularly from religion, offered ways of thinking about the self and the social and the connections between them that fed the ‘democratic imaginary’. This conclusion, presented as a challenge to the prevailing historiography, perhaps had less effect than was intended. Few historians regarded class as the sole determinant of the rise of democracy, and the idea that class was one of many competing identities was already apparent to some, notably historians working on women and gender. Joyce’s more important contribution is to ways of thinking about the self and subjectivity in relation to the social. Democratic Subjects exemplifies how a historian may use the concept of ‘technologies of the self’ to describe the practice of producing personal narratives like diaries; it offers an application of the idea that such practices were means not only of self-​construction but also of self-​regulation; and it explores historically the interaction of social and personal narratives in the creation of subjectivities. These aspects of his work constitute a methodology that has been taken up by historians working in other fields, with other materials.51

The self and the ‘other’ An important dimension of post-​structuralist thinking that chimed with ideas developing in both postcolonial studies and women’s and gender history, is Jacques Derrida’s insight that seemingly opposite entities in fact constitute each other. In the cultural imaginary through which we construct our social worlds, masculinity, for example, is present within femininity and vice versa. Likewise, wealth and poverty, respectability and unrespectability,

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black and white are not mutually exclusive, but each is a necessary part of the way the other is understood. The ‘other’ is implicated in the self. More generally, the self and the social constitute one another, and so a history of the self is also a history of the social, just as a history of the social is also a history of the self.52 In the hands of postcolonial scholars the idea of ‘the other’ has been given a particular critical edge.53 Antoinette Burton, for example, in At the Heart of the Empire, investigates the ways in which colonial subjects experienced their construction as ‘other’, that is, as exotic, oriental and fundamentally different, through their interactions with imperial ideologies and colonial stereotypes in late Victorian Britain.54 To do so, she uses the letters and a memoir of three Indian individuals who travelled to Britain in the 1880s and 1890s, to explore ‘how subjects of history are simultaneously made and make themselves’ in the imperial context.55 Committed to the idea of agency she also draws out the responses of these individuals to the process of othering in Britain, and their own engagement with it, in all sorts of everyday encounters. Thus she is able to delineate the reiterative and inter-​relational processes of subjectivity. As she puts it, the construction of cultural identities in the Empire ‘established some south Asians as “Indian” and in the process, worked to consolidate Britons as “British”.’56 Cornelia Sorabji, one of the three Indian travellers, went from Poona, in the Bombay Presidency, to Oxford University in 1889 with funds raised by the philanthropic Hobhouse family. She initially intended to study medicine, but, under pressure from her sponsors, switched to literature with a view to a career in education, before finally settling on law. Using Sorabji’s letters to her parents, Burton explores Sorabji’s ‘othering’ by white Britons, her own self-​ differentiation from some of those she met in Britain and the contradictory ways in which she drew on colonial ideology in composing a sense of self. In Burton’s account, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) was particularly active in constructing Sorabji as ‘the Indian woman’ of colonial fantasy. The CMS demanded her time, presence and eloquence as an Indian, a Christian and a woman, to publicize its missionary activities and support its fundraising activities.57 Sorabji’s letters home indicate her awareness of this exploitation: ‘ “they are under obligation to me, for the happy fact that I am Indian is an advertisement in itself”.’58 The letters also record Sorabji’s resentment of the racist slights inflicted by CMS members, such as the allegation that all Indian women were ‘impure’.59 Sorabji was by no means the passive recipient of such imperialist constructions, although she tempered her responses in the knowledge that her parents depended on CMS beneficence for their own reform work in India. Burton quotes from a letter in which Sorabji relates an encounter with a patronizing CMS member who told her she was studying the wrong subject. Sorabji decided to ‘ “amuse” ’ herself by impressing the woman’s ignorance upon her, pointing out that, since she had never been to India, she could know nothing of the relative importance of the subjects in question (law and medicine) for women in

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Sorabji’s home country. ‘ “It was such fun,” Cornelia reported to her parents mischievously.’60 Sorabji may have been the resistant object of racist stereotyping, but Burton shows that she also actively engaged in her own processes of ‘othering’. In her letters, she differentiates herself from ‘Hottentots’ (Africans), with whom she is confused on the streets, and from other Indian women.61 She ‘others’ white British women of whom she disapproves for reasons of religion or respectability.62 Burton sees Sorabji’s self-​differentiation as in part a response to her own self-​consciousness in the imperial capital, stoked by such incidents as being told by a ‘ “proselytizing old [English] lady” ’ that she ‘ “looked so very heathen” ’.63 Detailing the appearance of white women whom she regarded as inferior, as well as other brown-​skinned women, (and some men, in both cases), is indicative, argues Burton, of the ways ‘colonials in Britain understood and made use of taxonomies of colonial-​racial difference’.64 Burton also brings out the contradictions in the relationship of a colonial subject with imperial discourses. Sorabji’s letter home describing her experience of the final examination in civil law at Oxford in 1892 is a case in point. One of the objects of colonial reform was the Hindu practice of sati, in which a widow had to self-​immolate on her deceased husband’s funeral pyre, to secure her own purity and the honour of her family. Sorabji was critical of such extreme rituals of self-​sacrifice. Yet she wrote to her parents that she followed the examination clerk to her place in the hall ‘ “in the wake of the ancient Father to the funeral pyre” ’.65 Burton comments that ‘even though she was not a Hindu woman but a Parsi Christian, and even though she had invested so much time and energy in differentiating herself from “the Hindu woman” . . . when she faced the judgment of the Oxford examination system, Sorabji laid claim to the same powerful image that shaped much contemporary opinion of Indian women’.66 Burton suggests that, in spite of the agency that Sorabji exercised, ultimately she felt ‘manoeuvred’ into the ‘close and terrible space’ of the examination ‘by a set of systems –​ Oxford, philanthropy, imperial culture –​that demanded submission, with consent, of the female colonial subject’.67 Although Burton does not consider letter writing explicitly as a ‘technology of the self’, we can see Sorabji’s letters as sites on which she, in a similar way to Waugh in his diary, composed herself in relation to available cultural identities.68 Burton argues that audiences for correspondence structure letter-​writing habits as well as self-​representations. Sorabji, in dialogue with her parents’ values, tested her own respectability and moral worth. The letters were a site on which she ‘performed’ for her parents, explaining her choices, describing her interactions with friends and strangers and seeking to justify her faith in herself and her parents’ faith in her. Burton regards the collection of letters as constituting an ‘ethnography’ of late-​Victorian Britain, contingent on geographical location and expressive of the observer’s social and emotional interpretations of her unfamiliar surroundings.69

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Burton does not explicitly adopt a psychoanalytic approach, yet she is sensitive to the psychic dynamics of Sorabji’s constructions of herself. Thus, in relation to the interchange with the objectionable CMS woman concerning her choice of degree subject, Burton suggests that Sorabji was alert to potential criticism due to anxiety about her own capabilities and indecision about how best to offer service in India. Sorabji’s letters also express other strong emotions, notably jealousy and rivalry with contemporary Indian women in Britain. Burton explains this in terms of the importance for Sorabji of her celebrity status as the only Indian woman at Oxford to be studying law (at a time when it was unusual for any woman to take a higher degree, especially in law, which women were not allowed to practice in Britain, and at Oxford, where degrees were not conferred upon women until 1920). Burton does not see these stances or Sorabji’s hostility to supporters of women’s suffrage and Indian nationalism in explicitly psychological terms. Rather, she explains them in relation to Sorabji’s precarious position as a colonial ‘other’ for whom both personal success and commitment to the maintenance of the social order underpinned the viability of her sojourn in England.70

Discourse and subjectivity The ways in which ‘othering’ and the relationship between the individual subject and public discourses work to constitute subjectivity, have been the concerns not only of postcolonial but also of feminist history. A major insight of feminist theory is that women are presented, in public discourses across cultures, with models of behaviour, thought and appearance that not only differentiate feminine from masculine identities but also are unattainable and contradictory. Within these complex cultural cross-​currents, women struggle to take up and act upon discourses that constitute them as female.71 The potential of this approach is enormous: it has opened up the history of masculinity as a subject of study; it underpins gender history; and it has become an important component of social and cultural history.72 My book Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives (1998) constitutes a case study of this kind of feminist history. Its subtitle is indicative: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War. The argument is that two powerful narratives of femininity circulated in Britain between 1939 and 1945. One constructed an active wartime woman who was prepared to sacrifice her own (assumed) preferences for war service out of a patriotic desire to serve as well as a sense of solidarity. Coexisting with this discourse was one that emphasized traditional femininity, in which maintaining homes in the straitened circumstances of war and stoically coping with rationing and shortages were all-​important. Committed to examining not only discursive constructions but also narratives of experience, the book

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explores the pull of these two public narratives on the memory stories composed by women who had lived through the war.73 In the oral history interviews conducted for the project, some women spoke of their keenness to leave home and take on work a woman could regard as making a contribution to the war effort, as close to the front line as they could get.74 Members of this group composed relatively ‘heroic’ narratives of defying both parental preferences that they should stay at home, and official expectations that, even in the auxiliary services, they would do conventionally feminine types of work. Their goal was meaningful participation in the war effort, in the terms set out in contemporary discourse. They wanted to be ‘one of the boys’, at the same time as casting aspersions on the masculinity of those ‘boys’, that is, of men working behind the lines rather than at the front, whom they assumed to be in some way impaired (disregarding the system of ‘reserved occupations’). Such ‘othering’ worked to construct the superiority of wartime women workers, for all that it was contradicted by material factors such as unequal pay and prospects.75 Many women who remembered wartime roles that were for them exceptional, also recalled feeling transformed by their experiences.76 This was the case even though the new kinds of futures to which they aspired were rarely available through paid work. There was, in general, little continuity between wartime and post-​war work for these women, meaning that most returned to ‘feminine’ occupations after the war, sometimes the same ones they had left for war work. Nevertheless the idea that they had acquired a new sense of self, forged by wartime experiences, pervaded these women’s narratives. In contrast, an alternative pattern of reminiscence emphasized the desire to resist the wartime shake-​up of gender identities and destinies. Women who composed ‘stoic’ narratives of ‘just getting on with’ their wartime tasks, spoke of wanting to stay with parents, to keep as close to home as possible, to avoid ‘men’s work’ or to do it on sufferance and only ‘for the duration’.77 They emphasized conventional femininity in everyday life so as to differentiate themselves from ‘the boys’ and to earn male consideration. Ethel Singleton, for example, insisted on doing her job as a welder not in overalls but in a frock, over which she wore her leather welding apron: ‘ “I wanted to be treated like a woman, and I think that’s why we got respect from the men” ’.78 The future aspired to by this group was domestic and maternal: if paid work had to be combined with home life (as for increasing numbers of women in post-​war Britain it did), the concerns of family would take precedence. As in the case of imperial ideology, there were contradictions for those whose sense of self depended upon wartime and post-​war discourses of femininity. Interviewees whose personal narratives were attached to, and supported, the discourse of active wartime femininity were frequently torn about the demands of conventional femininity, and particularly about the choices they made after the war. Ann Tomlinson, for example, told an epic story of battling against stereotypical understandings of the kind of war

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work a middle-​class woman should do. She rejected a secretarial posting in the Women’s Royal Naval Service and insisted on training as an aircraft mechanic in the Fleet Air Arm.79 She found the language she needed for the composition of a narrative that gave her satisfaction within cultural representations of the patriotic woman war worker. When she came to the post-​war period, however, she gradually became less assured, switching uncomfortably between discourses. Having narrated her struggles to acquire qualifications in the same terms as her fight for wartime training and employment, she used the psychological theory of maternal deprivation to frame the subsequent story of leaving university to have children and become a full-​time mother in the 1950s.80 Composing an account of embarking on a career in 1959, ten years after the birth of the first child, was more difficult. She drew on the languages of companionate marriage, popular psychology and affluent aspiration to explain and justify her choices.81 But this part of her life history was no longer a fluent narrative of heroic endeavour. Tomlinson was wrestling with the confusing discursive repertoire available for the narration of her life in the late 1950s, an era in which full-​time mothering was prized, yet which simultaneously generated a bundle of pressures, desires and opportunities that prompted wives and mothers to enter paid employment.

Subjective and intersubjective composure Why one woman couched her account of war work in the language of the first cultural imaginary, while another drew on the second, is not easy for the historian to explain.82 One possibility is to use the concept of ‘composure’, developed by cultural historians to describe the relationship between the personal and the public in reminiscence.83 It implies a twofold process. On the one hand, narrators compose stories about themselves drawing selectively on public models that they can expect their audiences to recognize. On the other, the narrator seeks personal composure, or psychic equilibrium, in the telling, which is never assured but which depends on many factors, including the narrator’s state of mind, conditioned, for example, by how secure they feel about the value of their life, the memories that the interchange with an interviewer or other audience stimulates, and the extent of encouragement and affirmation they receive from that audience. The version they tell is in part conscious strategy (equivalent to Waugh’s determination to shape himself as ‘Enlightenment Man’ in his diary, and Sorabji’s selective deployment of the identity of the ‘Indian woman’ in her letters), and in part the result of unconscious, psychic needs. The up-​close-​and-​personal qualities of oral history interviews are not always conducive to ‘composure’, but can result in narratives indicative of the ‘discomposure’ of the subject. This is sometimes traceable to the contradictions of discourse in the mind of the narrator, as in the case of

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Tomlinson’s discomfort in telling about her life in the 1950s. Sometimes the intersubjective relationship between the teller and their audience stimulates discomposure. Two women who had done skilled work in wartime, as an aircraft fitter and a wireless telegraphist respectively, spoke of being silenced by unsympathetic and ignorant audiences.84 Other women spoke of their habitual silence on the subject of their involvement in wartime organizations not well known for women’s membership, such as the Home Guard, on the grounds that no one would know what they were talking about.85 Audience incomprehension can be explained in part by cultural factors. The wider context for these personal experiences was, at the time of their telling, relatively unknown in public discourse, and personal accounts of such experiences attracted little scholarly attention. The increase in interest, towards the end of the twentieth century, is itself indicative of the mutation of generalized stories about the past over time. As public discourse twists and turns, endowing features such as gender exceptionality with greater or lesser emphasis, experiences become more or less possible to talk about.86

Psychoanalysis and the self The idea of ‘composure’ has been widely used by historians seeking to capture the processes by which subjectivity is constituted, and reconstituted, in personal narratives. A historian committed to the application to history of both gender theory and psychoanalytical techniques, however, criticizes those who have employed the concept, with its psychological implications, without engaging more deeply with the psychic processes at work. Michael Roper’s complaint is that historians have overemphasized the power of public languages and neglected the workings of the unconscious.87 In his work on the memoirs of Lyndall Urwick, a junior officer in the First World War and later a pioneer of management science, Roper informs his use of the concept of composure with insights drawn from psychoanalytic theory. He seeks to understand the origins and meanings of Urwick’s numerous different versions of his wartime experiences, told in letters home as well as in no fewer than six memoirs composed between 1955 and the 1970s. The crux of Roper’s discussion concerns Urwick’s various accounts of his withdrawal from the front line at Aisne in September 1914, which meant survival in the face of virtually certain death in the imminent offensive. In a letter to his mother in September 1914 Urwick wrote that, suffering from acute enteritis, he had crawled away from the front to the nearest field hospital on the eve of battle. In a 1955 memoir he referred only briefly to his enteritis and focused on his subsequent experiences as a staff officer behind the lines. In a 1970s memoir, in contrast, he returned to the subject of his withdrawal from the front, and now attributed it to the orders of his company commander, who instructed a stretcher bearer to take him to a medical officer.

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Roper explains the different versions in part in relation to public discourse. Thus he sees changes in the public narrative concerning military masculinity from the First World War to the 1970s as an important part of the ‘enabling context’ of memory.88 He charts the shift from celebration of the bravery and endurance of the ‘soldier hero’ during and immediately after the War, to pity for those involved in trench warfare and to scepticism about the value of militarism itself in the 1970s. He argues, however, that discourse alone cannot explain Urwick’s different versions of the past. He insists that ‘the psychic needs of the past and the present’ at different points in Urwick’s life course drove the formation of memory in his unconscious.89 Roper explains Urwick’s earliest account in his letters home in Freudian terms, as an unconscious appeal ‘to his mother’s memory of the sick infant’.90 He uses two psychoanalytic concepts, ‘splitting’ and ‘screen memory’, to elucidate the ‘psychic needs’ that explain the differences in the later memoirs. Splitting refers to the process of division between the ego, the seat of fear and desire for self-​preservation, and the superego, the locus of a sense of duty, loyalty and obligation. Urwick’s 1955 account was composed at a point in his life when he was seeking public recognition for his work as a management expert. Roper suggests that, in this context, his memories of fear and self-​propelled flight were unconsciously subordinated; hence, the very brief references to his illness. Instead he stressed his work as a staff officer, seeking to rehabilitate that figure as a force for good and as the source of the responsible social administration that was at the heart of his own management philosophy. Urwick’s 1970s memoir, in contrast, was written at a time when he was disappointed about his lack of public recognition and when the value of military endeavour was questioned in public discourse. Roper argues that Urwick now drew on a view of the First World War as an occasion for collective endeavour, stressing active service and the solidarity of the regimental soldier in the face of incompetent leadership. This focus, however, stimulated self-​doubt about his own bravery and comradeship in leaving the front because of his sickness. The tension between the dishonourable humiliation of his escape and his understanding of duty provoked a ‘screen memory’, overlaying and concealing from his consciousness the memory inscribed in the letter of 1914. He now recalled not crawling away of his own volition but being ordered to go by higher authority, one of war’s many victims. Roper concludes that Urwick’s obsessive memoir writing was indicative of ‘the continued capacity of his feelings to haunt’ over a period of sixty years, and that his efforts were an attempt ‘to forget the events of the Aisne by re-​remembering them’.91 Relatively few historians who work on subjectivity and the self make explicit use of psychoanalytical concepts to elucidate the meanings within personal narratives.92 In part the cautious uptake is the result of historians’ preference for more empirically grounded methodologies and wariness of a theory that purports to hold good for anyone in any period and context.

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It is also the result of an absence of source material. Roper’s methodology depends on the unusual availability of repeated accounts of the same experiences composed at different points in one person’s life. A rather different approach is to regard diaries and memoirs as psychological accounts that chart emotional conditions and relationships that are vital for understanding how narrators within specific historical contexts came to be the way they were. Carolyn Steedman’s work exemplifies this approach:  the argument of many of her publications is that historical interpretations that overlook the gendered psychological evidence of personal testimony offer misleading accounts.93

Conclusion Subjectivity has, over the past four decades, been rehabilitated by historians. Where it was once a cause of suspicion, almost a dirty word, it has become for many a legitimate matter for historical enquiry and an important route to understanding the past. This development has profoundly changed the purpose and direction of much historical practice. Notably, it has led historians to seek out, as invaluable sources, a wide range of forms of personal narrative. It has recuperated the individual for history, on the understanding that every individual is a social being, whose life, however exceptional, however unique, is indicative of the vast social processes stretching over time that we call ‘history’. While the description in the preceding paragraph is true for social and cultural history, the use of personal testimony as a primary source for quantitative purposes keeps alive anxieties about bias, accuracy, reliability and validity, rooted in the need to generalize on the basis of addition and averaging. Wariness about the features of a personal narrative that may render it an inexact account of the past, only parts of which can be regarded as ‘data’, marks a divide in historical practice. It is matched, on the other side, by an embrace of the creative and the imaginative in such an account, for the access they give the historian to the processes by which a subject constitutes him or herself in relation to the social world and its public discourses, at any point in the past. The theoretical perspectives that flourished following the cultural turn of the 1980s aided and stimulated the establishment of the self and subjectivity within historical enquiry. Post-​structuralism emphasized the constitution of the subject through public narratives that ‘interpellated’ individuals within regimes of knowledge. Internalized, adapted and sometimes resisted by the subject, those discourses were also the sources and sites of agency, as both postcolonial and feminist theory insisted. Being ‘othered,’ as a differentiated and inferior being, was a major dynamic in the creation not only of the colonial but also of the feminine, subject. But ‘othering,’ as historians have shown, can work in multiple ways: those affected by it have dealt it in their

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turn. It needs to be understood, historically, as a dynamic of the construction of hierarchies and as part of the circulation of power. The selective take-​up of public discourse by individuals narrating their experience could be conducive to ‘composure’, that is, to a comfortable sense of self. But the relationship between the individual and public discourse is not without contradictions. The very identity that a subject sought to reject could become the one to which they attached themselves at moments of acute stress. The way of seeing the self at one point in life could be in marked contrast to the view of the self at another. Such tensions give rise to inconsistencies in life narratives and to ‘discomposure’ in recalling and narrating the personal past. Identities are part of the cultural context in which people live their lives: the relationship between this context and individual subjectivity is always difficult for historians to get at. Psychoanalysis provides concepts that some historians have found useful, but its universalizing characteristics have provoked suspicion, and the empirical conditions can be problematic: are the sources sufficient and appropriate for such an analysis? If many historians who embrace subjectivity nevertheless draw away from psychoanalysis, others are ready to regard personal testimonies as psychological narratives, whose meaning is rooted in the emotional relationships depicted, and whose seeming inaccuracies need to be understood for what they communicate about the life inscribed. A major aspect of the ‘new direction’ in history to which historians who engage with subjectivity and the self have contributed, is the commitment not to reject inconsistencies, inaccuracies and fictions in personal narratives as ‘distortions’ but to analyse them for the light they throw on the social and cultural historical contexts in which they are embedded.

NOTES I would like to thank Sarah Easterby-​Smith, James Hinton, Sujit Sivasundaram, Roger Woods and the three editors of this volume for suggesting readings and making helpful comments on this chapter. The end result is, of course, my own responsibility. 1 E. H. Carr, What Is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 45. 2 Ibid., p. 45. 3 Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta Books, 1997), p. 189. 4 Simultaneously, there has been much debate about the extent of individual autonomy in the modern world. See, as starting points, Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-​Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991); Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990).

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5 Early modern examples are indicated in footnotes, but, as a modernist, I discuss in depth work that relates to the later period. 6 Many of its earliest practitioners were Marxists, for example, Christopher Hill, George Rudé, Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, who were linked to the journal Past and Present, founded with the subtitle Journal of Scientific History in Britain in 1952, and to the Annales school of economic and social history in France. See Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005), pp. 26–​40. 7 Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-​Representation in Britain, 1832–​1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 36–​7. 8 On patchwork as personal narrative, see Bernice Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese 1941–​1945: A Patchwork of Internment (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005); Sue Prichard (ed.), Quilts 1700–​ 2010: Hidden Histories, Untold Stories (London: V&A Publishing, 2010); Jolande Withuis, ‘Patchwork Politics in the Netherlands, 1946–​50: Women, Gender and the World War II Trauma’ Women’s History Review 3 (1994): pp. 293–​313. 9 Stuart Blackburn and David Arnold (eds), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography and Life History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 9. In much historical work ‘life story’, ‘life history’, ‘personal narrative’ and ‘personal testimony’ are used interchangeably. 10 See, among others, Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). 11 As in Personal Narratives Group (eds), Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 12 James L. Peacock and Dorothy C. Holland, ‘The Narrated Self: Life Stories in Process’, Ethos 21 (1993): pp. 367–​83, here p. 368. 13 Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 29–​30. 14 Social psychologists have insisted that the ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story’. See Jerome Brunner, ‘The “Remembered” Self’, in U. Neisser and R. Fivush (eds), The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-​Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 41–​54, here p. 53. 15 David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-​ century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 6. 16 Ibid., pp. 4 and 10. 17 Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 18 Ibid., pp. 5 and 17–​19. 19 Ibid., p. 20. 20 Ibid., p. 6. 21 Ibid., pp. 16 and 17.

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22 Ibid., p. 5. 23 An example of the quantitative use of personal testimony from the early modern period is Alexandra Shepard’s Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Shepard demonstrates increasing social polarization from 1550–​ 1750 through statistical analysis of over 13,500 church court depositions, which she also reads qualitatively to elucidate gendered and classed processes of domination and subordination. 24 Historians use the terms interchangeably, even though it has been argued that they do not refer to exactly the same set of theories. See Callum Brown, Postmodernism for Historians (Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education, 2005), p. 75. 25 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Alan Lane, 1977). For the development of these ideas, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). 26 Michel Foucault, ‘On Governmentality’, Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979): pp. 5–​22; Rose, Governing the Soul, especially part 4, ‘Managing Our Selves’. 27 Gagnier, Subjectivities, p. 10. 28 See, for example, Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (London: Macmillan, 1988); Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, American Historical Review 91 (1986): pp. 1053–​75; Joan W. Scott, ‘Experience’, in J. Butler and J. W. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 22–​40. 29 James Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-​Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 18. 30 Joan Hoff, ‘Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis’, Women’s History Review, 3 (1994), pp. 149–​68; June Purvis, ‘From Women Worthies to Post-​ structuralism? Debate and Controversy in Women’s History in Britain’, in J. Purvis (ed.), Women’s History, Britain 1850–​1945 (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1–​22. 31 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). 32 Kathleen Canning, ‘Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (1994): pp. 373–​4. 33 Evans, In Defence of History, p. 9. 34 For example, Carolyn Steedman, Dust: the Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 35 There is still, at the time of writing, no single depository in the United Kingdom for the personal narratives of ordinary people, although

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there is a library devoted to the collection of diaries. See [accessed 18 January 2017]. 36 Lucy Noakes, ‘War on the Web: The BBC’s “People’s War” Website and Memories of Fear in Wartime in 21st-​century Britain’, in Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson (eds), British Cultural Memory and the Second World War (London: Continuum 2014), p. 51. 37 Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-​ century England (Cambridge, 1994). Joyce’s belligerent presentation of his thesis, and the ripples it caused, do not reduce the usefulness of his book as an example of a historian’s engagement with post-​structuralism, personal testimony and the history of the self. 38 Ibid., p. 1. 39 Ibid., p. 4. 40 Ibid., pp. 31–​3. 41 Ibid., p. 37. 42 Ibid., p. 19. Other ‘technologies of communication’ were print culture, literacy, private reading and speaking. 43 See Vincent, Bread Knowledge and Freedom, pp. 14–​19. Whereas Vincent refers to ‘working-​class’ autobiography, Joyce uses the term ‘popular autobiography’ to avoid concepts he regards as structuralist. Joyce, Democratic Subjects, p. 51. 44 Joyce, Democratic Subjects, p. 42. 45 Ibid., pp. 58–​9. 46 Ibid., pp. 51–​2 47 Ibid., p. 43. 48 Ibid., p. 80. ‘The diary is a text intervening in the world . . . the means of the struggle to fend off doubt and realise ambition, to create a persona that will manage the manifold struggles of Edwin Waugh’, p. 42, see also p. 61. 49 Ibid., p. 45. 50 These include Waugh’s dialect poetry and biographical and autobiographical material published in the 1890s as well as obituaries that appeared in Manchester newspapers on Waugh’s death in 1890. 51 See, for example, Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 52 Joyce, Democratic Subjects, p. 14; Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 53 The foundational text is Eduard Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). See also, inter alia, Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-​ha and Cornel West (eds), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 71–​87.

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54 Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-​Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 3. 55 Ibid., p. 15. 56 Ibid., p. 10. 57 Ibid., p. 122. 58 Ibid., p. 126. 59 Ibid., p. 138. 60 Ibid., p. 141. 61 Ibid., pp. 133–​4 and 117–​18. 62 Ibid., p. 136. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., p. 134. 65 Ibid., p. 147. 66 Ibid., p. 148. 67 Ibid. 68 Burton argues that identities, generated by the narratives of history and culture, are claimed and enacted, and can be multiple, contradictory, partial and strategic. Ibid., pp. 18 and 20. See also Bill Schwarz, The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 69 Burton, Heart of the Empire, p. 3. 70 Many other studies of race and empire engage with subjectivity. A starting point is Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 71 See, for example, Bronwyn Davies, ‘Women’s Subjectivity and Feminist Stories’, in C. Ellis and M. G. Flaherty (eds), Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience (London: Sage, 1992), pp. 53–​76. There are many examples of work drawing on such insights that address earlier periods, including Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-​century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) and Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (London: Cornell University Press, 2009). 72 See Karen Harvey, ‘What Have Historians Done with Masculinity? Reflections on Five Centuries of British History, c. 1500–​1950’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): pp. 274–​80. 73 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 13–​16. 74 Ibid., p. 91. 75 Ibid., pp. 116–​49, particularly 121–​3, 136 and 126–​8. 76 Ibid., pp. 261–​5. 77 Ibid., pp. 59–​62 and 92–​7. 78 Ibid., p. 142.

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79 Ibid., pp. 85–​6. 80 Penny Summerfield, ‘Dis/​composing the Subject: Intersubjectivities in Oral History’, in T. Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield (eds), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 98. 81 Ibid., pp. 98–​9. 82 There is also the challenge of explaining why a single narrator, at different points in time, draws on seemingly contradictory discourses in telling aspects of her life story. An example is María Roldan’s two stories of buying a house in Daniel James, Doña María’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 224–​7. 83 For a summary of the concept of composure and examples of historians who have used it, see Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 66–​70. 84 Penny Summerfield, ‘Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews’, Cultural and Social History 1 (2004): pp. 74–​5. 85 Penny Summerfield, ‘Oral History as a Research Method’, in Gabriele Griffin (ed.) Research Methods for English Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 57–​8. 86 Similar observations have been made in studies of the memory of rape and sexual abuse, and of the Holocaust. 87 Michael Roper, ‘Re-​remembering the Soldier Hero: The Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War’, History Workshop Journal 50 (2000): p. 184. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., p. 183. 90 Ibid., p. 194. Roper develops the theme of soldiers’ attachment to home and mother as a vital psychological resource for coping with life on the Western Front in The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 91 Ibid., p. 192. 92 For work on the early modern period that draws on Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalytic theory, see Lyndal Roper’s Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994) and Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 93 See Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986) and her many later publications.

Key texts Bruner, J. ‘The “Remembered” Self’, in U. Neisser and R. Fivush (eds), The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-​Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 41–​54.

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Burton, A. At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-​Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Canning, K. ‘Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (1994): pp. 368–​404. Eley, G. A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005. Evans, R. J. In Defence of History. London: Granta Books, 1997. Gagnier, R. Subjectivities: A History of Self-​Representation in Britain, 1832–​1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Joyce, P. Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-​Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Roper, M. ‘Re-​remembering the Soldier Hero: The Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War’, History Workshop Journal 50 (2000): pp. 181–​204. Summerfield, P. Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.

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CHAPTER TWO

The history of emotions Rob Boddice

Introduction The history of emotions promises to unlock new historical narratives that tell us how emotions are made, how they change over time and how they make history. Historians of emotions are engaged in the development and application of new tools in order to uncover previously unexplored histories of how the past was experienced: what it felt like to be there. They ask how those feelings were connected to particular institutions, rituals and bodily practices, pointing to novel possibilities for histories of the contextually situated body and mind. As such, the history of emotions is actively engaged with other disciplines –​anthropology, psychology and neuroscience in particular  –​and is at the centre of innovative developments of a biocultural understanding of the human. This chapter argues for the enduring value of some of the early insights, often overlooked, of the discipline of psychology and their applicability to a challenging historiographical future that is fully engaged with the social neurosciences.

Origins and developments We can find the roots of the history of emotions in the emergence of psychology as a professional discipline in the nineteenth century. Expressions of historicism were also based on a reading of Charles Darwin’s key works insofar as Darwin understood that natural selection was augmented in civilized societies by artificial selection and the shaping influence of public

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opinion. Human experience, under certain conditions, could be altered, prescribed, directed. For example, the experiences of piety and religious devotion, with their attendant expressions, were ascribed by Darwin to the power of the church and its eminent leaders to influence and direct a mixture of fear and reverence to a specific object.1 Instincts, in the Darwinian scheme, were not transcendent but acquired. There are clear signs in Darwin’s corpus of a programme for the history of emotions, but this, as well as all of the psychological impetus that followed, was largely forgotten by the twentieth-​century rise of neo-​Darwinists, hard-​line geneticists, behaviourists and, more recently, biological determinists.2 Neuroscience, however, is increasingly intertwined with cultural and social studies today, which suggests the value of returning to some of the original statements of emotional historicism from within psychology. Though quickly consigned to obscurity in their own time, they can be reinvigorated to set a new and viable agenda for historians of emotions. The rapidity with which the historicism of the early psychologists was forgotten in the twentieth century is exemplified by the mid-​century work of Lucien Febvre, often considered to be a founding father of the history of emotions.3 Febvre had a deep antagonism for psychological essentialism, for it could have no bearing on the past (nor, presumably, on the future), and only spoke about the mentalité of the present moment, for a certain group of people (white men). Febvre understood that emotions not only took place in social context but also that they were formed and institutionalized in social context. When the psychologists of the late 1930s talked of emotions, decisions and reasoning, according to Febvre’s assessment of psychological memoirs and treatises, they represented only the emotions, decisions and reasoning of the 1930s. Febvre saw that neither the psychology of his contemporaries nor the psychology of his ancestors was fit for a global application of psychological analysis. Mentalités were too intertwined with the peculiarities of space, place and time to ever be fitted into a general scheme. The historian could not, therefore, make much use of psychological theory to understand the past. If there were to be a history of the emotions, it would have to come from historical reconstruction of past emotions as they were, not as we understand emotions in the present.4 Had Febvre looked deeply into some of the nineteenth-​century psychology texts that shaped the discipline, he would have found more encouragement. Alexander Bain published Emotions and the Will in 1859, the same year as Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared. He carved out the scientific study of emotions and grounded them in a complex entanglement of physiology and mental activity. But bodies and brains, for Bain, were situated and bound by the societies in which they existed. Natural ‘emotional currents’ were subject to change through the ‘power of education’.5 Bain is very clear that, even in such cases where an individual has not fully internalized the moral sentiments of a society, society itself corrects for the deficiency

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through ‘sanctions, or punishments’, meaning that emotional expressions and experiences are constantly being modified by social change.6 Bain anticipated recent scholarship in describing the difficulty with which an individual strives to match her expressions to her feelings when faced with ‘foreign influence’. Bain specifically mentions the way that encounters with emotional cultures that we do not readily understand can ‘stimulate efforts in pursuit’ of the emotion in question. The distance between emotional worlds can seem unbridgeable: ‘we are far removed in natural constitution, in habits, and associations from another mind’. Yet, and this is crucial for the history-​of-​emotions endeavour, we ‘still desire to possess ourselves of the emotions belonging to that mind, as when a historian deals with the hero of a past age’. How do we do this? Bain supplies the answer:  via a ‘laborious constructive process’.7 Human emotions were thus explained as a packaging together of natural or biological forces with social or cultural influences. When Bain talked of ‘construction’, it was with a rich understanding of what we might now call ‘worlded biology’. Evolved emotions could be compounded into new forms according to circumstances, subject to external influences and to ‘effort’: ‘To acquire a new degree of intensity of any emotion . . . is a very high effort, and demands iteration and time’. This has the effect of ‘fixing’ a ‘state of mind that has been worked up with labour’. For Bain, this is a process of associational transference: shifting a set of feelings associated with a known object to a new object and modifying the feelings accordingly. This, he asserts, is what historians do, dealing with ‘extinct modes of feeling’. The past cannot be comprehended without understanding the associations of past actors.8 We do not need to retain Bain’s strain of associationism to see the validity of the general point. Emotions in other times and places will be alien to emotions here and now, but we can reconstruct what they must have been like from their expression and their context. The American psychologist William James took this a stage further. Whereas Bain felt it necessary to concede that there were some fundamental or elemental emotional states that formed the infinite variety of compounds, James saw no need of a biological limitation of basic emotions. His classical formulation was that emotions follow reflex actions (I see a snake, I run, I am afraid because I am running), rather than behaviour being precipitated by emotion (I see a snake, I am afraid and therefore I run).9 Actions only gained meaning from an interpretation of context, which generally came after changes in blood pressure, glucose secretion, jolts of adrenalin and so on, which happened automatically.10 James knew that there was ‘nothing sacramental or eternally fixed in reflex action’. Reflexes were contextual, could be trained and depended on experience and associations. A new reflex act could account for the ‘genesis of an emotion’, and since reflexes were theoretically infinite, so were emotions. Instead of searching for ‘real’ or ‘typical’ emotions, he thought we should only ask ‘how any given “expression” . . . may have

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come to exist’.11 As with Bain, James concluded that this was a question for physiologists on the one hand, and for historians on the other. The pioneers of the discipline of psychology in the first generation of Darwinism had a clear understanding that construction was an essential part of individual and social existence, in a clear relationship with the biological constraints of being human. It is often forgotten by those who wish to claim the great age of, and universality in, human emotions that biological change, in given conditions, can happen with great rapidity.12 Darwin began his great work, On the Origin of Species, with a tale of fancy pigeons. His point was to show how rapidly artificial selection could change the nature of a thing. It was a way of accelerating what ‘nature’ does by itself over a long period. The pigeon was an analogue for the human; fancy breeding was an analogue for civilization. Civilization was, in effect, an ad hoc and somewhat chaotic fancy-​pigeon breeding programme: a process of domestication. Change could happen quickly. It was this realization that sparked the imaginations of the early eugenicists.13 If Febvre was not aware of the centrality of history in the formation of the discipline of psychology, he was also probably not aware of the sociopsychological historicism of Norbert Elias, whose masterwork was published in German in 1939 as Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Since its translation into English in 1982, The Civilizing Process has assumed a contested place among historians of emotion. Elias’s central thesis was that the monopolization of violence in the instruments of the state led to ever more tightly controlled emotions across society. But even if it contains elements that some would wish to discard –​the emphasis on the rise of the nation state as a basic criterion for becoming civilized; the overtly Freudian garb; the sharp division between emotion and reason; the portrayal of the unbridled emotions of medieval actors as childlike –​the whole thing should not therefore be thrown out.14 Elias’s notion of a dynamic relationship between, in his words, ‘sociogenesis’ and ‘psychogenesis’ does in fact fit a model of biocultural emotional change put forward by neurohistorians (see below) that would have pleased Febvre. The structure of his argument might usefully be retained. Social situations write human brains, just the same as human brains (collectively) make social situations. In Elias’s words, ‘The human person is an extraordinarily malleable and variable being.’15 Elias was already convinced that expressions on the face were inscribed over a life course, just as learning to read, write, reason and control the emotions materially altered the stuff of the brain. We can reject Elias’s central thesis and still make use of the notion of emotional norms being prescribed by individuals or institutions with authority, and the fact that these prescriptions directly effect the experience of living in an ‘emotional regime’, which we all do. It seems to have been unwitting, but the spark of an idea provided by the early psychologists, by Darwin and by Elias is more or less the agenda that has been picked up by many emotions historians, even if these are

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associations to which they would not care to subscribe.16 What is most encouraging about this agenda is the notion that all emotional experiences and expressions, even those in our own midst, require contextual and associational decryption. The challenge of ‘how does one get at how emotions were felt or experienced in the past?’ is also a challenge for emotions in the present. To ask how emotions come to be lost is, implicitly, to ask how they come to be made.17 If we feel able and confident to answer the latter for the present, then we should be able to tackle it in the past, even if that challenge is an order of magnitude more difficult.

Theoretical landscape Work within the history of emotions has rapidly expanded since the turn of the twenty-​first century. The trend perhaps reflects a political preoccupation with the measurability of emotions in society, combined with all too stark reminders of fear, grief, anger and hatred that, according to Jan Plamper, crystallized around 11 September 2001.18 An array of theoretical approaches and analytical tools specific to the needs of historians has been developed. Some of these tools will be of enduring use, others less so, but at this still formative stage there is no orthodoxy among historians about what constitutes best practice. Competition for primacy is being framed by a variety of cross-​disciplinary affiliations and by methodological concerns relating to the study of different historical periods. William Reddy put forward the notion of an ‘emotional regime’ to explain how emotional experience is bounded by the prescriptions and proscriptions of power blocs.19 In a specific case study, this was linked to the collapse of ancien régime France and the emergence of the modern nation state, but Reddy has since posited that any powerful entity could act as a ‘regime’.20 Regimes might exist within regimes  –​I  have called this the nesting-​doll model of emotional economies  –​requiring individuals to ‘navigate’ (another Reddy coinage) between them.21 Incommensurability among regimes might lead to crisis and, ultimately, to regime change. Barbara Rosenwein has objected that the tie to the nation state makes the model work only for modernists, while at the same time pushing a model of ‘emotional communities’ that explains how certain groups –​families, schools, churches, and so on –​feel and, in particular, express their feelings in similar ways.22 But this begs the question of authority, and there seems to be no reason why an emotional community, including an early modern or medieval one, is not also a part of an emotional regime. Conformity and transgression come from somewhere. It will presumably be a major component of future work in the history of emotions to analyse how the power behind emotional prescription works.23 Exemplary works focusing on a variety of periods and places already point in this direction, from the contextually prescribed and deliberate anger of the Athenians before the rebellious Mytelenians, to the early modern English ‘improvisation’ of expressions of melancholy

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to satisfy competing medical and theistic notions of disease and virtuous suffering respectively.24 More recent interventions have examined the ways in which emotional regimes collide at the ‘emotional frontier’, looking at the key question of how the emotional world of children is shaped in spaces and places, and among rival authorities, where emotional prescription is contested.25 The concept is useful for any number of situations, between school and home, teacher and parent, public and private, colonial and native authority, and so on. Research has also shown that we should not view regimes as deterministic. Children and adults caught on the frontier between rival authorities develop competences in navigating between the two as well as, through their own agency, finding novel forms of emotional experience that express the frustrations of being torn. In the crucible of competition for emotional control comes the capacity for emotional regime change. To begin to study any of this, a theory of how biocultural emotions work is required, along the lines set out by Bain et al. but long forgotten. One answer was provided from within the field of anthropology by Reddy, steering a course between the universalism of cognitive psychology and the extreme constructivism of some of his colleagues.26 More recently, the new and extremely promising emphasis on construction within ‘affective science’ has been described by Reddy as providing, in the most positive fashion, a ‘hunting license for historians of emotion’.27 An ‘emotive’, as put forward by Reddy, is a dynamic process of feeling and expression. Cultural prescription impacts what can be expressed –​a set of ‘feeling rules’ –​which in turn influences what a feeling feels like, but feelings themselves do not necessarily lend themselves to a delimited set of expressions in the first place.28 The closer the fit between feeling and feeling rule, the more ‘successful’ the emotive. This involves a certain amount of ‘effort’ but not conscious effort. Reddy departs from Bain, who would have placed a greater emphasis on ‘the will’. Where what is felt does not accord with an available expression, the emotive ‘fails’, leading to any number of consequences. If enough people are experiencing the same emotive failure, they may seek an ‘emotional refuge’ away from the oversight of the ‘regime’, which may in turn break out to form a new emotional regime itself. Reddy’s account of the transition in emotional economy in France, from ancien régime through revolution to empire is the exemplary case study.29 On an individual level, emotive failure might result in ‘crisis’, where the subject does not know how to feel. I have documented some cases of this coming as a shock wave of new knowledge or experience. Adherents of a monotheistic religion who are persuaded by a theory of evolution, for example, do not simply give up believing in God. What to think and what to feel become long-​standing struggles, often tied to unavoidable social situations: work, private life, religious worship and so on.30 These theoretical insights have, in turn, raised new questions about the meaning and import of emotional expressions. Between the humanities and cognitive sciences there is a rift over the politics of expression, with

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the former investigating bodily practices of expression that are culturally situated (part of a habitus) and the latter concentrating on facial clues that indicate the presence of a set of basic emotions, common to all humans. With the increasing weight of evidence concerning both microevolutions among humans and neuroplasticity (see below), it is difficult to imagine that the universalists will have much traction with historians, who in any case are motivated to discover change over time. But that still presents us with the problem of how to talk about the physical signs of emotions in context and what they mean. Since Peter and Carol Stearns first mooted ‘emotionology’ as a way of analysing what has perhaps become better known as context-​bound ‘emotional style’, there have been a variety of approaches to expression, from theories of performativity to emotional practice and displays of epistemic virtue.31 Each, whether implicitly or explicitly, connects to an overarching notion of how and why ranges of expression are limited and specific to times and places. Anything that marks what is allowed and what is prohibited speaks to a moral order, and this has been expressed as a ‘moral economy’, an ‘emotional economy’ or a ‘politics of emotion’.32 The question of morality has the potential to open up new vistas in history-​of-​ emotions work. Morality might be subject to rationalization and abstraction, but in order to have any power or effect it must be internalized to the point that an individual senses the boundaries of good conduct. There is already a large and growing corpus of work in the history of the senses, not, of course, limited to the contemporary standard of five.33 A closer connection between the historians of emotions and the historians of the senses lies ahead, with the moral sense offering a particularly rich vein of research material on common ground. The future of the history of emotions is beset with a problem of intentions and a politics of orthodoxy. Both these factors are already proving to be highly influential in what we do as historians of emotion. Should historians be scrutinizing the ‘nature’ of emotions themselves in order to produce, for example, histories of love, anger, fear and so on? Or should they be using the history of emotions as a theoretical and methodological guide –​a lens –​ for re-​examining and reinterpreting existing narratives of social, cultural and political history?34 While these two approaches are obviously connected in certain respects, the latter approach is adjudged by proponents of the former to be too diffuse, seeing emotions everywhere, and risking the whole project in the inevitable essentialization of certain emotions at certain times for the sake of an argument that does not have emotions themselves at its end. Similarly, proponents of the lens approach might regard the singular emotion focus as of questionable relevance. To what end do historians want to historicize emotions themselves? Surely the import of history is not only to get at what historical actors felt but also what they did because of, or in the name of, how they felt. The likely course for the history of emotions is a middle way between the two, where histories of single emotions serve narratives that further our

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understanding of changing cultural practices, social institutions and political regimes, and where the lens approach takes a necessarily critical approach to emotion terms and their context. In both cases, what seems most important is the fundamental grasp of historicism in dealing with emotions, in the same way that historians have become accustomed to approaching race, ethnicity, gender, class and identity. There are already examples of this compromise approach, which have the effect of projecting the contribution of the history of emotions beyond its own borders, revising historiographical traditions and assumptions per se.35 We cannot go on working in linguistic bubbles. In general, continental European scholarship is aware of the work being done in English, but those working in English can hardly boast the same awareness of works in other languages. Moreover, the Germans are not especially au fait with the French and vice versa. We have to find a way to communicate with one another, and the rewards of putting the, by now vast, literature in other European languages into English are manifest36 There are, of course, massive problems of translation, but those are problems to embrace, not to ignore.

The challenge of the neurosciences At the centre of a tacit dispute about what we are doing when we are doing the history of emotions is, perhaps inevitably, the word ‘emotion’. I would argue strongly that use of the word ‘emotion’ has to come packaged with a great deal of historicist caution. It is, essentially, a modern coinage in English. Direct borrowings of the word in other languages, especially French and German, reflect an extremely recent spike in usage in English, with its umbilical ties to both a specific neuroscientific usage and an empty rhetorical category of common usage intact. There is a temptation to follow some neuroscientists in their quest to tell us exactly what emotions are: a universal definition that we can use to talk about historical actors from whatever period. The problem with this is that neuroscience is not generally heading in this direction. The more we know about the brain, the more we know that the brain is in the world, plastic and writable. Whatever form and function we get by virtue of our genes is nonetheless malleable. We might be bound by evolution but with a wide bandwidth for cultural variation.37 Whatever neuroscientists can tell us about fear, pain or love in the present is still only good for those people represented by the contemporary experimental subject: a cocktail of genetic, chemical and cultural factors that situate a person in her particular time and place. Two large contributory factors to how we feel and how we express how we feel, therefore, are what we are expected to feel (cultural prescription) and our own conceptual understanding of how our emotions work. Concepts, definitions and cultural scripts are not merely the rhetorical gloss of history –​variable descriptions of universal processes –​but informative and generative influences on historical practices,

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including practices of emotion. We should take seriously the notion that a classical understanding of ‘passions’, a post-​Cartesian understanding of ‘passions’, an Enlightenment concept of les sentiments, a protopsychological German notion of Gefühle, an early evolutionary understanding of ‘emotions’ and a contemporary neuroscientific explanation of emotional ‘wiring’ are substantially different, and not simply semantically so. Moreover we should take seriously the notion that this substantial difference in understanding had a significant impact on the way passions, sentiments, Gefühle and emotions were experienced. It is already problematic when talking about emotions that historians and psychologists of various stamps mean something different by this label. Historians tend to assume that emotions give meaning to situations, are inseparable from rational and conscious processes in the brain and have their meanings formed by the world outside the human body. Many psychologists (and many philosophers of emotion too) would posit that emotions happen, like reflexes, and are inseparable from irrational and unconscious processes in the brain. They are difficult to distinguish from affects (another word that carries different weights in different disciplines). The schism in semantics is linked to research ends: historians and anthropologists want to know what emotions mean (have meant); psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers want to know what emotions do and how they work. There are, therefore, no master concepts for emotions history, just as there is no master concept for the history of sexuality, or gender, or race.38 As historians it is our role to analyse the concepts and categories of historical actors in context and to demonstrate how this affected both practice and experience. Taken to its logical conclusion, this subsumes (or will subsume) the work of psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers under the historical project. The situated definitions, knowledge and practices of these disciplines can only be analysed from a distance, which historians can provide only if we give up the temptation to join the quest for a master concept of emotions. If we fail to do this, the risk of catastrophic anachronism is all too obvious. To take a case in point, we could do worse than to examine recent multidisciplinary research on empathy. By one definition, empathy is a means for experiencing the emotions of others, but others consider it an emotional quality in and of itself. For neuroscientists, empathy is part of our wiring  –​what makes us human  –​as well as a marker for adjudging the degree of sophistication in animal brains. Empathy is marked by unconscious gesture mimicry –​yawning is the most obvious that transcends species  –​and is supposed to be vital in gluing together communities and societies. For psychologists of another stamp, empathy is the sign of a functioning emotional balance that keeps us from doing heinous things to each other. Its importance is signified by those people said to lack the capacity for empathy  –​psychopaths and sociopaths  –​who act without compunction because they are unable to process how those around them might feel. These behavioural psychologists refer back to the neuroscientists to point

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out where the wiring has gone wrong in these individuals, while at the same time harvesting a range of questionnaires and experiments to work out who is suffering (or rather, not suffering at all) from empathy failure.39 The ‘mechanism’ or ‘circuitry’ of empathy has been identified in the existence of so-​called ‘mirror neurons’, which ‘fire’ in my brain upon witnessing your emotions (or rather, your expressions) just as if I  had expressed the same emotion myself. This cognitive transfer allows us to share an experience. When you are in pain, I  can ‘feel’ it too and, out of sympathy for your plight, I will come to your aid if I can. Neurological function has been matched to observed sociological practice in such a way as to mutually explain both.40 If this were as far as we were to go with the contemporary explanation of empathy, we might well think it were universally applicable. Here, by virtue of what we can see on an fMRI scanner, is a basic biological quality of humans that can be projected backwards in order to open up new possibilities for the history of emotions. Yet this is neither conceptually nor technically viable. On a technical note, it has been pointed out that for the neurological ‘mirror’ to work, the human who owns it has to understand, probably on a subconscious level, precisely what is being reflected. Expressions, verbal and gestural, have to be meaningful to the witness for the mirror neuron to ‘fire’, for how can my brain go through the process of emulating an activity as if I had done it myself if my brain does not know what it is looking at?41 The observations of both historians and anthropologists have given us ample evidence that emotional expressions are not universal across time and place, and in fact are deeply embedded in what Clifford Geertz famously called ‘webs of significance’ that have to be learnt.42 The deep inscription of cultural scripts allow us to understand what is happening around us, as if by nature. Therefore it is quite easy to imagine an individual with a perfectly ‘normal’ brain being unable to empathize with others when out of time –​ the problem of the historian and her sources –​or place –​the problem of the anthropologist and the culture in which she is embedded. In addition, neuroscientists have shown that the brain is plastic. Neurological pathways are ‘written’ through experience. Brains are ‘in the world’, as Mary Douglas might have put it. There is no universal human brain to which to refer, only human brains culturally inscribed. Genetics and evolution will get us so far, but brain plasticity refers us always to context. Our overwhelming knowledge of social change is a key indicator of parallel neurological changes. A primary starting point for historians of emotion is, therefore, not the uniformity of the human brain but rather its very lack of uniformity. As Daniel Lord Smail puts it, ‘culture can be wired in the human body. Since cultures change, human psychologies, in principle, can differ greatly from one era to the next.’43 This problem of neurological function is compounded by the problem of projecting emotional concepts back in time. ‘Empathy’ is a neologism of early-​twentieth-​century coinage.44 While we might well look for cultural

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evidence of what we understand as empathy in the interpersonal dynamics of historical actors from before this time, what we shall find is not evidence of ‘empathy’, for ‘empathy’ did not exist. This is not merely a rehearsal of the old problem of whether one can have a thing without having the word for it. It is rather that the place that came to be occupied by empathy as an interpretative device for interpersonal behaviour was, prior to its coinage, occupied by something else. Across a number of European languages this was ‘sympathy’, which came replete with its own enormous range of meanings and theories.45 It can hardly be the role of emotions historians to call out past actors for being ‘wrong’ about how emotions worked or how they influenced social relations. Rather, we should be looking at the things done in the conviction that working concepts were correct. This was sometimes a matter of belief –​the conscious redrawing of the lines of sympathy in the last third of the nineteenth century are a case in point –​but more often the conviction was subconscious. People act as if their explanations of nature are true. Concepts –​emotion words are implicitly conceptual –​have practical and tangible effects.46 A narrow neuroscientific usage of empathy in our own times is sufficient proof of this, for it instrumentalizes a concept and applies it as if it were uniformly understood. Febvre’s original complaint about psychology’s universal categories holds good. In fact, the short history of empathy –​as laid out comprehensively by Susan Lanzoni –​demonstrates its own polyvalent conceptual ambiguity. It has been applied and, most importantly, experienced, as a central component of aesthetic theory in which the viewer of art projects her feelings into a painting; as an historical exercise in which the historian projects herself into the past worlds of others; as a stimulus to compassion via the reception of emotional suffering that others have projected; and as a basic mechanism of social interaction between humans and other humans and between humans and other animals, in which actions and emotions are reflected. Empathy has been, in short order, inbound, outbound and a wholly internal process.47 What we think it is directly affects how we experience it. Whenever the neurosciences arrive, categorically, at what is, historians are well placed to answer them with ‘for now’. It is much more fruitful and hopeful to engage with neuroscience on the level indicated above, insofar as it deals with how brains work in context. Neuroscientists have the great advantage over historians in being able to work on living brains. Their research findings are productions of situated knowledge: what we know about emotions from contemporary neuroscientists holds good for the social, cultural and technological environments in which that knowledge is made. Nevertheless, where neuroscientific research demonstrates how brains act and react, the ways in which new neural pathways are formed in the crucible of habitual social interaction, we are given a clue to understanding the likely impact of social life on historical brains. If a major evolutionary advantage of humans is neuroplasticity, or the capacity for biological structures to adapt in the world, then any claims to this or that emotion or capacity of emotional awareness being ‘hardwired’ must be

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treated with circumspection. Fortunately for historians, we are not so interested in the nature and function of the brain so much as we are interested in the worlds in which brains exist. Social neuroscience intersects with history only insofar as it confirms that social and cultural change over time is related to and intertwined with biological change over time. Experience –​of which emotions are a key part –​can be approached diachronically in a meaningful and substantial way. Social and cultural life cannot be reduced to an ever-​ shifting mise en scène, before which the universal Homo sapiens performs. Neuroscientific research leads us to a biocultural understanding of humans in the world: a constant dynamic process of making and being made. This observation shares much in common with the projects laid out in the name of ‘deep history’ and ‘neurohistory’ as well as phenomenology.48 So far, the history of emotions has not really engaged with these projects that have sprung up in parallel with it. Neurohistorians have made overtures in the direction of the history of emotions –​in fact they would posit a centrality for their work in the history of emotions  –​but historians of emotion in general (with some notable exceptions) have not yet met them halfway. The reasons, perhaps, have to do with the ways in which historians of emotion have tended to concentrate on single emotions or on tightly delimited historical cases. Deep history in particular takes a more longue-​ durée approach (necessarily including ‘prehistory’), engaging with both neuroplasticity and genetics research to try to understand biocultural change over epochal time. But Daniel Lord Smail hinted at more tightly focused possibilities, and Lynn Hunt took up the suggestion at the very beginning of the deep-​history agenda. She proposed to use knowledge of the plastic brain to explain the sudden advent of a universal notion of human rights in the French Revolution, emerging out of new possibilities for sympathy that came on the back of the rise of the novel. This ought to have tipped the wink to emotions historians. Hunt was (still is) searching for a history of what it was like to be there, or how it felt to have gone through such an experience. The reading is inferred from the sources, rather than written in them, and depends on a background understanding of biocultural phenomena, or what happens to the brain when confronted with change. The premise is simple enough:  human brains did not evolve functionally to create a rich culture, but a rich culture has been created as a consequence of human brain evolution; this cultural fabric in turn feeds back onto the further development of the brain. Synapse creation is far from complete at birth, leaving the formation of the particular brain, within the genetic boundaries of being human, to the influence of the endless variety of experiences that culture throws up. Such a feedback loop can be seen over ‘deep’ time and over the short haul. It is the basis of learning, of habit formation, and is the rationale behind repetitive action when trying to become accomplished at a practice (from playing basketball to writing to performing surgery). The introduction of something new in our lives, if we confront it, demands that our brains come to terms with it in order to accommodate

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it. When touchscreen tablets were introduced, the first users had to adjust to the practice of navigating the system. The new practice comes with new experiential feelings of what it is like to do this: from frustration and infuriation to joy and a sense of liberation. Our bodies and minds are bound up in the everyday practice of dealing with technological innovation, performing new movements in new contexts and making new possibilities, including new chemical and synaptic possibilities. And to the same extent, old technology becomes mysterious to those who have never had to use it. Western teenagers have no intuitive sense of how to use a Walkman with a cassette tape. Their bewilderment at the apparent backwardness of their parents’ and grandparents’ technological upbringing is, essentially, a vernacular statement of the need for a history of the emotions that includes how brains react –​are continually made –​to things in the world. All of this can be put into a context of continuing human genome variation, where reductive claims that humans have been essentially the same animal for the past 10,000 years are summarily dismissed. Microevolutionary changes are constantly occurring. Darwin, with his pigeons, knew that changes could be set in a remarkably short time. Smail has argued that there is clear evidence for substantial change to the human genome since the time of the Romans, and indeed it is hard to imagine that radically different selection pressures in different environments over time would not have effected change. We do not have to evolve an extra leg, wings or gills to have evolved. To adhere to a notion of rigid human fixity from within an evolutionary-​biology account of the species would be a remarkably short-​sighted conceit.49 We might reasonably assume that anybody could walk a teenager through life before the internet, roller skating to school under the spell of a Walkman, with a stash of C90 tapes in hand. It can be recalled, relived, unpacked, so that a youngster might gain an understanding of how that felt (if not a small taste of the feeling itself). If we can conceive of doing that, then the history of emotions ought to be able to construct past experiences in any given context, given a sufficient body of sources, actively read with this in mind. The agenda is not so far from that of Bain: assemble the objects of an alien culture; place them in a political and social context; reconstruct the bodily practices and relational processes that this particular world necessitated; infer from the foregoing what it must have felt like to be there and then. The feeling itself may not be recoverable, but an understanding of it in the abstract should be. Some, doubtless, would object to the heavy emphasis on inference in the work of professional historians, but there are obvious limits to the historical imagination here. For the intertwining of neurohistory and the history of emotions behoves not less empirical research but more; not a reliance on presentist psychological categories but on their rejection. Whole new worlds of evidence open up to historians to be read, with particular emphasis on the material objects, spaces, places and architectures with which and in which historical actors have acted. Inferences about experiential feelings have to be

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situated in deep knowledge of a given historical context, encompassing everyday practice; familial life; spiritual and cosmological beliefs; social, political and racial assumptions; institutions and rituals (especially relating to the life cycle). The end point of neurohistory and the history of emotions is not a history of the human brain but a history of what it means (has meant) to be human. That aim has underwritten historiography throughout the discipline of history’s history. If it is to remain a core goal of doing history, then the history of emotions has to be at the centre of it, and in turn this means it must meet the challenge of the neurosciences. If we reach out to biology in this respect, we must also reach out in others. The relation of genetics to social, cultural and psychological studies  –​ something historians of emotion have yet to broach –​is becoming ever more useful, as new discoveries in epigenetics reveal that biological changes in the phenotype (changes to the biological entity over the course of a life) can, in interesting ways, be bequeathed to subsequent generations. To be clear, these are not changes at the level of DNA but changes to the protein packaging of genetic material, which might affect how genes are ‘turned on’ or ‘off’, both in the course of an individual’s development and through inheritance.50 People who have lived through extreme conditions –​famine, warfare, extreme poverty –​are likely to pass material to offspring that will impact the body’s physiological stress reaction to certain stimuli.51 This must necessarily have an impact on emotional experience and the ways in which worldly associations are formed and interpreted. In broad strokes we might say that we are our DNA, but we are also the lives of our ancestors as well as the products of our own biocultural formation.52 Historians might once have rejected the apparent biological determinism of genetics, but as genetics itself becomes more complex in its connections with psychology and physiology so might historians of emotions reappraise how to deal with historical actors as meaningful sacks of genetic material. Genetics too, are in the world, and are part and parcel of what makes social and cultural life, and what effects social and cultural life have. There is massive potential for historians to tackle the history of stress (physiological and emotional) and the history of pain, for example, embedding epigenetics and neuroplasticity in an account of cultural and bodily experience.53 Some beginnings have already been made, based on the idea that pain has been (affectively) experienced differently in different times and places, using the results of neuroscientific experiments precisely to argue that emotional experience is socially and culturally contingent. As more new studies appear, so the possibilities seem to expand.

NOTES 1 On Darwin’s emotional historicism, see Daniel M. Gross, ‘Defending the Humanities with Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man

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and Animals (1872)’, Critical Inquiry 37 (2010): pp. 34–​59 and Rob Boddice, The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution and Victorian Civilization (Urbana-​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016). For Darwin’s take on religious emotions, see Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872), p. 221. 2 For the repurposing of Darwin as a universalist, see Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, ‘Constants across Cultures in the Face and Emotion’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17 (1971): pp. 124–​9; Ekman also wrote the introduction to a recent edition of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), which he heavily annotated. See the discussion in Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 147–​72. 3 Lucien Febvre ‘La Sensibilité et l’Histoire: Comment Reconstituer la Vie Affective d’Autrefois?’, Annales d’Histoire Sociale 3, no. 1/​2 (Jan.–​June, 1941): pp. 5–​20. 4 Lucien Febvre, ‘Une Vue d’Ensemble: Histoire et Psychologie’ [1938], Combats pour l’Histoire (1952; Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), p. 213. 5 Alexander Bain, Emotions and the Will (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859), p. 14. 6 Ibid., pp. 14–​15, here p. 61. 7 Ibid., pp. 220–​1. 8 Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, 4th edn (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), pp. 619–​22. 9 William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols (1890; London: MacMillan, 1910), vol. 2, pp. 449–​50. 10 This was the general thrust of physiological investigation of the emotions in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. See Otniel Dror, ‘The Affect of Experiment: The Turn to Emotions in Anglo-​American Physiology, 1900–​1940’, Isis 90 (1999): pp. 205–​37 and Otniel Dror, ‘The Scientific Image of Emotion: Experience and Technologies of Inscription’, Configurations 7 (1999): pp. 355–​401. 11 James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, p. 454. 12 See, for example, Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (San Diego: Harcourt, 1999), p. 54. 13 Boddice, Science of Sympathy, esp. chaps. 2 and 6. 14 Similar criticisms have been levelled at Johan Huizinga’s earlier text, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 15 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 402. 16 Barbara Rosenwein is critical of Elias and his use by modernists. See Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Her main complaint is that, aside from Elias,

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ROB BODDICE no work transcends traditional periodization; hence, her Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–​1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), see esp. 11–​12. Others have emphasized the usefulness of civilization as an emotional and moral quality: Margrit Pernau et al., Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

17 Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011). 18 Plamper, History of Emotions, pp. 297–​8. 19 William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 124–​7. 20 Jan Plamper, ‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory 49 (2010): p. 243. 21 Boddice, Science of Sympathy, p. 16. 22 B. H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review 107 (2002): p. 842. 23 See Joanna Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History’, History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): p. 124. 24 David Konstan, Pity Transformed (London: Duckworth, 2001), pp. 80–​3; Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 25 Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander and Stephanie Olsen, ‘Emotions and the Global Politics of Childhood’, in Stephanie Olsen (ed.), Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 22–​6. 26 William Reddy, ‘Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions’, Current Anthropology 38 (1997): pp. 327–​51. 27 See Lisa Feldman Barrett, James A. Russell and Joseph E. LeDoux (eds), The Psychological Construction of Emotion (New York: Guilford Press, 2015); William Reddy, https://​twitter.com/​WilliamMReddy/​status/​ 628542762284154880 [accessed 4 August 2015]. 28 There are parallel sociological perspectives: A. R. Hochschild, ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology 85 (1979): pp. 551–​75. 29 This summarizes the key interventions in Reddy, Navigation of Feeling. 30 Rob Boddice, ‘The Affective Turn: Historicizing the Emotions’, in Cristian Tileagă and Jovan Byford (eds), Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 158–​63; Boddice, Science of Sympathy, chap. 4. 31 P. N. Stearns and C. Z. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review 90 (1985): pp. 813–​36; Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (2012): pp. 193–​220; Benno

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Gammerl, Emotional Styles –​Concepts and Challenges, special issue of Rethinking History 16 (2012); Lorrain Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), pp. 40–​1; Dolores Martín Moruno and Beatriz Pichel (eds), Emotional Bodies: Studies on the Historical Performativity of Emotions (Urbana-​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming). 32 Lorraine Daston, ‘The Moral Economy of Science’, Osiris 2nd series, 10 (1995): pp. 2–​24 here pp. 4–​5; Paul White, ‘Introduction to “Focus: the Emotional Economy of Science”’, Isis 100 (2009): pp. 792–​7; Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety’. 33 David Howes and Constance Classen, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (New York: Routledge, 2013); Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). 34 For an impetus in the former direction, see Ute Frevert and Tania Singer, ‘Empathie und ihre Blockaden: Über soziale Emotionen’, in Tobias Bonhoeffer and Peter Gruss (eds), Zukunft Gehirn: Neue Erkenntnisse, Neue Herausforderungen (Munich: Beck, 2011), pp. 121–​46; for the latter, see Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, Robert Phiddian (eds), Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-​ century Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2015). 35 See William Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–​1200 CE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 36 Special note might be taken, for example, of the work of Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, especially Sensible Moyen Âge: Une Histoire des Émotions dans l’Occident Medieval (Paris: Seuil, 2015) and (edited with Laurence Moulinier-​ Brogi) La Chair des Émotions: Pratiques et Représentations Corporelles de l’Affectivité au Moyen Âge, special issue of Médiévales 61 (2011). 37 Richard Turner and C. Whitehead, ‘How Collective Representations Can Change the Structure of the Brain’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (2008): pp. 43–​57; Barbara Rosenwein, ‘The Uses of Biology: A Response to J. Carter Wood’s “The Limits of Culture”’, Cultural and Social History 4 (2007): pp. 553–​8. 38 Cf. Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 39 For an overview of the research, see Allan Young, ‘Empathy, Evolution, and Human Nature’, in Jean Decety (ed.), Empathy: From Bench to Bedside (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), pp. 21–​37. 40 G. Rizzolatti and C. Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Geoff MacDonald and Lauri A. Jensen-​Campbell (eds), Social Pain: Neuropsychological and Health Implications of Loss and Exclusion (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2011).

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41 B. M. Hood, The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 63–​70; Allan Young, ‘Mirror Neurons and the Rationality Problem’, in Shigero Watanabe, Ludwig Huber, Allan Young and Aaron P. Blaisdell (eds), Rational Animals, Irrational Humans (Tokyo: Science University Press, 2009), pp. 55–​69; Allan Young, ‘Empathic Cruelty and the Origins of the Social Brain’, in Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby (eds), Critical Neuroscience: Between Lifeworld and Laboratory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 159–​76. 42 For a thorough survey of the anthropological literature, see Plamper, History of Emotions, pp. 75–​146; Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5. 43 Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), p. 131. 44 C. Burdett, ‘Is Empathy the End of Sentimentality?’, Journal of Victorian Culture 16 (2011): pp. 259–​74. 45 Michael Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Ildiko Csengei, Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2012); David Lemmings, Heather Kerr, Robert Phiddian (eds), Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-​century Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2015). 46 This observation is the take-​home message of a number of works in the history of emotions that have word or concept histories at their core: Ute Frevert, Christian Bailey, Pascal Eitler, Bruno Gammerl, Bettina Hitzer, Margrit Pernau, Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt and Nina Verheyen (eds.) Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling, 1700–​2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) (originally Gefühlswissen: Eine Lexikalische Spurensuche in der Moderne (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2011). The difficulties involved in translating such a work about words is itself testament to the substantial quality of those words); Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Cf. Anna Wierzbicka, ‘Human Emotions: Universal or Culture-​Specific?’, American Anthropologist 88 (1986): pp. 584–​94. 47 Susan Lanzoni, Robert Brain and Allan Young (eds), The Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art, and History, special issue of Science in Context 25 (2012), esp. Lanzoni, ‘Introduction’, pp. 287–​300. See also Aleida Assmann and Ines Detmers (eds), Empathy and Its Limits (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2016), esp. Jay Winter, ‘From Sympathy to Empathy: Trajectories of Rights in the Twentieth Century’, pp. 100–​14. 48 Smail, On Deep History, pp. 112–​56; Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, ‘History from Within? Contextualizing the New Neurohistory and Seeking Its Methods’, History of Psychology, 15 (2012): pp. 84–​99; Lynn Hunt, ‘The Experience of Revolution’, French Historical Studies 32 (2009): pp. 671–​8.

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49 Smail, On Deep History, pp. 147–​8. 50 For the former, see Nathalie Véron and Antoine H. F. M. Peters, ‘Tet Proteins in the Limelight’, Nature 473 (2011): pp. 293–​4; for the latter, see Peter Cheung and Priscilla Lau, ‘Epigenetic Regulation by Histone Methylation and Histone Variants’, Molecular Endocrinology 19 (2005): pp. 563–​83. 51 Rainer K. Silbereisen and Xinyin Chen (eds), Social Change and Human Development: Concepts and Results (London: Sage, 2010); Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioural, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 52 See Smail, On Deep History, pp. 74–​111. 53 Rob Boddice, Pain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press); Rob Boddice (ed), Pain and Emotion in Modern History (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2014); Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Javier Moscoso, Pain: A Cultural History (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2012).

Key texts Boddice, R. The History of Emotions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Damien Boquet, D., and P. Nagy . Sensible Moyen Âge: Une Histoire des Émotions dans l’Occident Medieval. Paris: Seuil, 2015. Dixon, T. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Elias, N. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Febvre, L. ‘La Sensibilité et l’Histoire: Comment Reconstituer la Vie Affective d’Autrefois?’, Annales d’Histoire Sociale 3, no. 1/​2 (Jan.–​June, 1941): pp. 5–​20. Feldman Barrett, L., J. A. Russell and J. E. LeDoux (eds). The Psychological Construction of Emotion. New York: Guilford Press, 2015. Frevert, U. Emotions in History: Lost and Found. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011. Plamper, P. The History of Emotions: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Reddy, W. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Rosenwein, B. Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–​1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Smail, D. M. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008.

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CHAPTER THREE

The body and the senses Judith A. Allen

Has the history of the body run its course, or are there topics that remain under-​explored? . . . Does ‘experience’ still matter, or are discourses the central concern? What relationship does the history of the body have to other recent historiographical trends, such as the history of emotions and the history of the senses? . . . These questions point to a fundamental problem: is there, or should there be, a history of the body?1

Introduction This Call for Papers captures the uneven state of current historical ruminations on ‘the body’ and ‘the senses’. How have historians gone about historicizing the body?2 The corporeal turn of the 1980s and 1990s (the scrutiny of embodiment within arts, humanities, social and some behavioural sciences) allowed historians to illuminate corporeality itself in stark terms.3 This chapter analyses historians’ approaches, first to the body, and second to the senses, before, third, outlining the difficulties in applying these approaches to a modern corporeal practice –​induced criminal abortion in modern Britain –​as an example of the body practices and meanings with which historians grapple. We begin with a broad survey of the nature of historians’ contributions to understanding the body, or bodies, in the past. Various origin stories can explain the late-​twentieth-​century concern with embodiment; its advent

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was not ‘in a fit of absence of mind’.4 Yet, despite thirty years of ever more prolific body history, this work often shows scant acquaintance with any founding theory or conceptual genealogy. We need to ask how the history of the body intersects with other academic fields concerned with the body. Histories of corporeality have become disconnected from theoretical and philosophical critiques within the humanities devoted to the body as the body. Daunting difficulties constrain efforts to uncover embodiedness in history. We argue that corporeal feminist insights constitute reconnective tissue to the era in which histories of the body emerged and can shape its future.5 Historical explorations of the senses anchor the second part of the chapter. Do historians of the senses possess different objectives from historians of the body or corporeality? If not, then, what is their relationship? Problems of evidence preclude direct access to the body in history. Instead, historians seem shackled to representations of the body, as mediated by observers, auditors and recorders. Histories of the senses provide an avenue of access to aspects of the elusive body, its adventures in time and place. Does attention to sensory cognition –​particularly sight and sound, as textually recorded –​merely reinstate the very problem that corporeal history sought to overcome? Historians’ conceit that they portray sensory experience provokes withering critiques in other disciplines –​though most historians are completely unaware of this and carry on regardless. A rather meagre theoretical toolbox, then, serves the history of the body. A study of induced abortion reveals unsolved challenges for histories of the body and the senses. How central are the body, and the senses, to abortion history? How is abortion’s corporeal evidence constructed? Which dimensions of abortion can evidence never illuminate? How was abortion, as a bodily episode, different in 1780 than it was a century later, or beyond? My in-​progress study of the history of British criminal abortion narrates abortion methods and critical complications which often led to fatalities. Of necessity, such research confronts historical embodiment: the raw reality of the body. At the same time, the evidence compels us to theorize otherwise elusive body practices and conditions. Criminal abortion exemplifies the problems, requiring analysis, for devising feasible objectives for histories of the body and the senses. This chapter is about posing the difficult questions that historians have to confront today.

Advent/​invent/​sutures The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others but also to touch and to violence. The body can be an instrument of all these as well, or the site where ‘doing’ and ‘being done to’ become equivocal. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite

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ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension; constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. JUDITH BUTLER, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 21. The body is no historiographical perennial. The founders of the historical discipline bypassed embodiment or corporeal lived existence. Like other academics, historians did not bother with ‘the bodily, the tactile, and the haptic . . . associated with the irrational’.6 To be clear:  the body did not concern the likes of Leopold von Ranke, Lewis Namier, Frederick Jackson Turner, Dorothy Marshall, Hippolyte Taine, Margaret Cole, Lord Acton, Richard Hofstadter, Ivy Pinchbeck or editors of the Cambridge History of the British Empire (1929–​61). Nor did corporeality shadow the pages of historians such as Fernand Braudel, C. Van Woodward, Eugene Genovese, Eric Hobsbawm, A. J. P. Taylor or E. P. Thompson. The body is not one of Raymond Williams’s classic 1966 Keywords. In neither its founding nor successor genres did history embrace the body. This changed abruptly in the 1970s and 1980s. If, suddenly, the body was everywhere, what were the origins of this genre of historical writing? Inspired by 1970s social movements, redress of ‘the decorporealization’ of academic knowledge began. Roger Cooter portrays history as ‘philosophically and methodologically assaulted by the “postmodern” literary turn in Western intellectual life that elevated the body to a privileged site’.7 The 2004 update of Williams’s New Keywords significantly provided an essay on the body. In a stock-​taking penned by historian and philosopher of science Maureen McNeil, half of the allocated words describe a formidable miscellany of topics:  from tattoos to eating disorders, self-​cutting to cosmetic surgery, animal materiality and reproductive engineering. These posed the body as an object of empirical, behavioural, medical, representational and conceptual exploration. The essay’s other half confronts the mind-​body problem –​René Descartes’s famous dictum, cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’) –​which took longstanding Christian disparagement of mortal bodies into more rigorous territory. Outcome: the negative consequences of privileging cogito (or the mind). Dubbed by philosopher, Maxine Sheets-​ Johnstone, as ‘the 350 year wound’, it disparaged the body.8 McNeil’s New Keywords entry critiqued the dichotomies that emerged from Descartes’s formulation, especially the privileging of the first term (cogito) as dominant, the second as submissive or relational. Similar dichotomies included, as the pre-​eminent term, male/​rationality/​cognition/​white/​ civilized/​human, and as the submissive term, female/​irrationality/​sensuality/​ black/​primitive/​animal.9 Feminist theorists, like Lisa Blackman, rebuke this form of Cartesianism. Most analysts argue that the historical turn to the body emerged from both feminist theory and gender politics; many assign feminist theory as the point of origin. Certainly, feminist theory provided the corporeal turn with its core

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concerns. The ramifications of Cartesian dualism were founding targets.10 Privileging cognition over brute body muted the latter in civilized discourse.11 Gendered associations pervading this mind/​body polarity soon featured in critical armouries, mirroring the powerful associated dichotomies of male/​ female and rational/​irrational. The mind/​body split disparaged the feminine, the animal and the fleshly manifestations of human existence. It underwrote sex oppression and, as well, all the subordinated categories of persons manoeuvred into the second term of these dichotomies, characterized as ‘the marginal’, the ‘inessential’, the oppressed and, always, the ‘otherized’.12 The body escalated in prominence by the 1990s. It became the subject of multidisciplinary attention across the arts, humanities and social sciences. For instance, in 1987, philosopher Elizabeth A. Grosz and I edited a special issue on ‘Feminism and the Body’ for Australian Feminist Studies.It was a moment when feminists contested the fatal ‘phallologocentrism’ of Western thought.13 This category, promulgated by Helen Cixous and Catherine Clement, in an exchange with Jacques Derrida, characterized Western culture as irredeemably determinate or logocentric and, simultaneously, masculinist, patriarchal and phallocentric. The two characterizations merged into phallologocentrism.14 Historians stood to make powerful applications of these insights. With bodies registering, necessarily, as sexed bodies, historians of gender and sexuality developed insights into topics such as hysteria, anorexia nervosa, wartime rape, the Pill, impotence, birth control, athletics and bodybuilding, beauty and fashion, transsexualism, witchcraft and more.15 Historians probed historical genealogies of sex itself, and the conditions for the emergence of the concepts of gender and sexuality. Parallels between feminization and racialization illuminated widely disparate historical projects, from genealogies of Jim Crow segregation in the American South to the postcolonial probing of British imperial constructions of the effeminate Brahmin.16 For historians of ‘Anglo-​zone’ settler societies since the seventeenth century, such dichotomized feminization of indigenes proved fundamental to settler colonialism, while, for narrators of United States imperialism in Central America, Cuba or the Philippines, it permitted diverse rationalizations of hostile takeover.17 Soon, other origin stories for the corporeal turn emerged. Accounts of the history of the body emerged either ignoring the founding derivation from feminist theory or else giving it –​as if on a buffet among other dishes –​ no special weighting. Some commentators date the somatic turn to Michel Foucault and from the mid-​1970s. Interestingly, Cooter contends that the proliferation of historians’ contributions veered off ‘body history’ in favour of ‘the historicized body’, with turn of the millennium bookshelves groaning under the weight of the following: The body ‘at risk’, ‘at work’, ‘at war’; ‘in question’, ‘in theory’, ‘in language’, ‘in shock’, ‘in pain’. The historicized body ‘of the artisan’, ‘the

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disabled’, ‘the mad’, ‘the Jew’, ‘the erotic’, ‘the beautiful’, and ‘the saintly’, were among the many now to be ‘explored’, ‘contested’, ‘expressed’, ‘invaded’, ‘imagined’, ‘emblazoned’, ‘engendered’, ‘experienced’, ‘dissembled’, ‘dismembered’, and ‘reconstructed’ –​to draw only from some of the titles of Anglophone monographs.18 Foucault’s non-​essentialist approach to the body exiled conventional understandings of both biology and experience, alienating many medical and social historians. Alternatively, cultural historians embraced Foucault’s discursive historicized and disciplined bodies.19 The relentless gender blindness of Foucault’s texts, however, made them difficult to reconcile with feminist critiques of Cartesianism, despite many feminist theorists’ admiration for his influential corpus. Historiographically, then, the body is ruled by the law of uneven development. It includes works of great sophistication, plumbing epistemological paradoxes engaged with critical theory scholars at one end of the continuum.20 At the opposite end of the spectrum are miscellaneous descriptions of bodily actions, functions, markings or meanings, in some historical context or another. Placed in anthologized collections containing ‘the body’ somewhere in the title, they have little or nothing to say about corporeality as a Western intellectual problem. Indeed, in such work, one senses that historians have heard that the body is au courant –​that the body is ‘trending’ –​ yet little emerges beyond self-​contained descriptions of work on football, tattoos, cosmetic surgery and diphtheria. Even if interesting enough, these texts remain innocent of the theoretical ferment targeting the body and the senses in the first place. Stitched into the genre, sutured onto a surface, such offerings reside some distance from any deeper origins. Prodigious output of this kind continues apace.21 Historians concerned with discourse and representation often turn to corporeality. For instance, Richard Wightman Fox’s recent book, Lincoln’s Body, addresses Abraham Lincoln’s ‘body politic’: free white and slave black bodies reunited through his martyred, assaulted body and its relics; his railroad-​ rolling corpse starring at not one but two funerals; and the multilayered cultural processes of both built and filmic memorialization.22 Even though likely to be influential, its focus on the body, as ‘the body’, is only cursory. Though he examines protagonists’ reverent forms of Lincoln representation, breaking new ground in approaches to meaning, memorialization and grieving, his efforts add nothing to ruminations upon corporeality as a problem for historians or for the humanities. These are not his concerns. Heterogeneity and mission incoherence prevent historians leading in the analysis of corporeality. Partly, this follows detachment from the 1980s/​ 1990s political and theoretical critiques of the body, most especially the sexed body. Philosophers, literary theorists, jurists, theologians and other predominantly text-​centred scholars dominated the literature of carnality, embodiment and fleshly existence, rendering historians quite marginal by

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the millennium.23 In a 1999 international anthology on the subject, collecting around sixty influential chapters, the only historian contributor was historian and philosopher of science Ludmilla Jordanova.24 Instead, the core contributors were philosophers, critical race theorists, writers and literary critics, and psychologists –​the likes of Elizabeth Grosz, Elizabeth V.  Spelman, Jeannette Winterson, Judith Butler, Trinh T.  Minh-​Ha, Susan Bordo, Evelyn Hammonds, Luce Irigaray, Moira Gatens and Lynne Segal.25 This was no inexplicable bias against history and historians. Rather, it signalled the limits of history’s capacity to contribute to the problem of the body, at least as framed up to that point. Corporeal feminist Grosz denounces the continued pitting of biology against constructivism. From the outset, this feminism of embodiment centred upon the body and desire, enlarging the grasp of sexual difference in refiguring the body from the periphery to the centre of analysis. It became the very stuff of subjectivity. In refusing representations of the body as an ahistorical, biologically given cultural object, corporeal feminist theorists highlighted the lived body, jettisoning as misleading a sex/​gender distinction, posing sex as essentialist, on the one hand, and gender, on the other, as constructionist. To adequately investigate the body entailed a serious address of biological existence, which Grosz sees as ‘carefully bracketed out of most feminist research’. Should feminism continue an adherence to ‘constructionism, a project I [Grosz] no longer believe is viable, it is nonetheless bound to rethink biological questions’.26 By this, Grosz did not mean that the discipline of biology, as currently constituted, stands as authoritative. Rather, biological discourses ‘have not yet had adequate feminist intervention, have not yet been strongly enough disturbed by the questioning of feminist theory’. In part, she attributed this to feminist fear of yet more essentialism, so often the rationale for sex subordination, even though, in her view, ‘biology is one of the few disciplines able to adequately contest essentialism’.27 Is history another such discipline? Could it contest body essentialism, precisely by historicizing and exposing the contingent nonfixity of the lived body, the sexed body, the racialized body, the aging body, among others? What is history’s relation to histories of the senses, in pursuit of bodies past?

Sensing/​seeing darkly The challenge . . . is that the texts don’t ever speak for themselves; the whispers are heard only through a process of translation, and the very words –​spoken or written –​carry different meanings with each of their iterations. The dead don’t come back to life as they were, but as we represent them.28 The unevenness of body history –​its intellectual and methodological patchiness –​needs analysis.29 As noted above, much historical work purporting

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to address the body and corporeality, in various iterations, shows no grasp of the critical genealogies of this focus, or ‘turn’, nor any aim to advance it in some way.30 Those deploying typical methods, sources and criteria of historical significance confront potent challenges when seeking to construct accounts of bodily phenomena, episodes and existence.31 Such mixed difficulties press hardest upon social historians. Committed to constructing representative accounts of the experiences of the majority of people in the past, instead of overrepresented literate elites, social historians sought to narrate the lived and embodied existences of individuals, groups, subcultures, communities and regions. As such, they confronted history’s evidentiary limits.32 Moreover, cultural historians would contend that the very objective of revealing historical protagonists’ true ‘experience’ is, itself, a key problem. Such an objective must contend with robust critiques, penned since the 1990s, from critics, both outside and inside the discipline. None, perhaps, have been as devastating as Joan Wallach Scott’s. Her generative 1992 essay ‘The Evidence of Experience’ soundly dispatched any simple mission to depict the bodily experience of the majority of historical populaces as well as any faith that evidence, ever, speaks for itself. She disdained the naivety of historians who imagined that their efforts could access directly and convey ‘how it was’, for historical actors. Instead, hers was a warning about the inaccessibility of any pure understanding of past experience. All that historians ever access is the representation of dimensions of existence, living in discourse. The very aspiration to depict, faithfully and accurately, the nature of unmediated historical experience was wrong-​ headed and impossible.33 In a retrospective on this key essay, she recalled that her intervention arose from my growing impatience with my fellow social historians who assumed that experience was transparent, that there was a direct relationship between, say, economic circumstances and political action, that there was no need to ask what counted as experience –​we could know what that was from a sociological description of the conditions of life of groups and individuals. Alternatively, she insisted that nothing was ‘self-​evident’ about ‘experience’. Indeed, she urged forceful questioning as to the ways that historians typically established ‘meaning’ and, specifically, the ways that ‘some things and not others came to be included in the term’. Historians could not legitimately take ‘experience’ as known or given.34 Manifestly, historians are peculiarly dependent on written evidence and surviving traces of material culture. They explore accounts, narratives, memoirs, correspondence, official interventions, organizational archives and records (for example, of hospitals, unions, mortuaries, schools, armed forces, criminal courts).35 Reports from ‘the senses’  –​via the sight, smell, touch, auditing, and speech of others –​always mediate and constitute the

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facts of any historical matter, the grounding evidence. Whatever the origin story informing histories of the body, evidence looms as a key methodological issue. Recorded descriptions and meanings given to the senses dominate primary sources upon which historical narratives depend. We do not have direct access to the body in the past. Historians are dependent on the complex ways that seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting were recorded. Such traces ground the enterprise. Indeed, historians encounter the body at a greater remove than other areas of academic knowledge. The historian’s brief is to study transformation over time, usually within various temporal and regional or national boundaries, through the interrogation of present material or documentary traces of the past.36 A central objective is to place such transformations into appropriate contexts. Thus, the embodiment, which historians have most impressively narrated, becomes accessible through the work of the senses. It is sight, sound, smell, touch and taste that ground perception and sensation, and it is these which are, in turn, recorded in documentary, graphic or material traces of the past. These recordings form primary source evidence, anchor historical accounts of the body and corporeal life. Such sources then, mediate, between the body and historians’ cognizance of it.37 Put differently, historians cannot access bodies or bodily remains. Commentators contrast this problem with, for instance, medical specialists, forensic scientists, physical archaeologists, or even ethnographers and practitioners in other fields.38 Some regretfully note this inescapable mediation between bodily experiences and their sensation, as registered in primary sources. Increasingly, though, historians of the body take this as given, without concern. Ivan Crozier notes that historians ‘cannot access past bodies directly’. Instead, bodies are represented, ‘written sources being the most common form of historical material’. Historians then supply skilled appraisal and ingenuity to counteract the indirect character of available evidence.39 It is paramount to grasp, too, the genealogy of the senses. The earliest usages of ‘the senses’ offered by the Oxford English Dictionary are sixteenth-​century quotations: a noun, referencing the faculty of perception or sensation, each connected with a bodily organ, ‘by which man and other animals perceive external objects and changes in the condition of their own bodies’. And, relatedly, ‘Usually reckoned as five –​sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. Also called outward or external sense . . . Earlier called the five wits’. Notably, references consistently rate sensation and perception –​the work of the senses –​as both outward and external to the body itself. The senses rate below cognition, while cognition gives the senses substance, dignifies them or translates their products into proxies for corporeality itself. In contrast with the doubts about prospects for the history of the body in the 2015 Call for Papers, historians of the senses are ebullient and optimistic. Mark Smith worries only that ‘in the rush to see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the past’, overlooked has been the need for ‘careful engagement with the conceptual

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and empirical insights of related work’; this leads to undertheorization, a field ‘more empirically fleshed out than intellectually considered’.40 Interestingly, historians of the senses maintain that the Cartesian mind/​ body split finds an echo in their work. A dichotomy prevails. The intellectually superior senses, associated with the arts, communication, learning and sight and hearing, are characterized as masculine, objective, civilized, even bulwarks of rationality. By contrast, smell, taste and touch are equated with animality, humanity’s lower nature, its Homo sapiens or mammalian existence, by foregrounding flagrant sensuality, vice, excess, immorality connoting woman, sex and flesh. Classed as ‘the lower senses’, historians now aim to reinstate denigrated fleshly senses.41 This sensory dependence underwrites corporeality’s challenge for history. Typical disciplinary tenets, methods, sources and criteria of historical significance in the investigation of change over time, confront vexing dilemmas in quests to historicize embodiedness. Social and cultural history yields different possibilities for bodies in history. The senses hold an easier place in cultural than in social histories of embodiment and corporeal existence, underlying the distinctions between the offerings of these two historical genres.42 Induced abortion, a particular body practice and corporeal sensation, exemplifies dilemmas facing historians of the body and the senses.

‘Poorly’/​sinking/​insensible I saw her about 1 o’clock . . . She was then very weak, delirious, sweating profusely, said to have shiverings, swollen and tender in the bowels, slightly jaundiced, and her symptoms generally indicated blood poisoning. I saw her again about 11 that night . . . Her condition then was comatose, sinking –​hopeless –​I did not see her again alive.43 Can historians make unique contributions to understandings of the body, and the senses, perhaps illuminating other disciplinary theories of embodiment and of corporeal subjectivity? Induced abortion, affecting hundreds of thousands of women, men and children, enlists few historian narrators. An often teleological British and United States historiography narrates the path to its medical legalization in the 1960s and 1970s, emphasizing regulation, pressure group politics, professional advocates (and their enemies).44 Yet the bodies at issue remain mute, abortion’s remarkable corporeal historicity elusive. For historical actors, though, abortion’s sheer embodiedness impinged on their lives, with profound consequences for all involved. Voices range from the abortion recipient’s accounts, to those of witnesses or participants, often when women passed beyond sensibility or life itself. What might such evidence contribute to histories of the body and the senses? My in-​progress history of criminal abortion and British sexual culture since 1780 traverses uncertainties that beset historicizing corporeality. Evidence on abortion

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methods and the recorded perceptions of carers and intimates of miscarrying women show both the possibilities, and the limitations, of historicizing abortion’s corporeal dimensions. In 1853, Cheshire clog maker, Joseph Pyr, aged forty-​ two, fled to Australia. Thereby, he evaded prosecution for inducing the miscarriage of his two-​ month’s pregnant girlfriend, twenty-​ three-​ year-​ old factory worker MaryAnn Lockwood. He paid three sovereigns for the notorious ‘Dr Goulden’ of Stockport to ‘get shot of it’.45 Neither critical illness nor death ensued. Lockwood’s co-​workers, though, gossiped: rather than abortifacients, Goulden used an instrument, unfamiliar to these women. Police demanded an account: He told me to lie down on my left side upon the carpet on the floor . . . He used something. He placed it up in my body. I did not see it. I felt it. It did not pain me much. He was not above a minute –​when he had done there was a little blood . . . he said that it would be four days or might be a week before it would come away from me and that I must wrap it in a rag and place it behind the fire and it would go to dust. Four days later it began:  ‘I was taken poorly on Wednesday morning . . . I  kept continuing worse until Thursday night’. Then, in her bedroom, ‘it came away from me’. A fellow boarder mopped the bloody floor, emptied the chamber pot and burned the miscarried material –​the size of a hand.46 For late Georgian, Regency and early Victorian Britons, miscarriage was familiar. Proving deliberate interference, however, was difficult. In the few indictments, prosecutors enlisted the hitherto pregnant woman in Crown testimony. Though labelled ‘the prosecutrix’, just like women victimized by sexual assaults, juries perceived her as co-​conspirator rather than victim. The first trial (1808), under the new 1803 British criminal abortion law, ended in acquittal.47 Though hanging could await those convicted of inducing miscarriage of any woman ‘quick with child’, the first and only execution was in 1834:  a twenty-​two-​year-​old Stockport cotton journeyman, James Mason.48 Hence, death penalty repealers targeted abortion. The 1837 deletion of the quickening provision made attempts to induce miscarriage at any gestational stage a non-​capital felony. Further, the 1861 Offenses against the Person Act jettisoned the abortion prosecutrix. Pregnant women then became, potentially, chief defendants:  their crime either auto-​abortion or soliciting others to induce miscarriage. Supplying abortion drugs or instruments became a misdemeanour conviction with up to three years imprisonment. These changes diverted attention from sexual life –​abortion less as a practice between illicit lovers than a body service provided by another. By the 1890s it was an illicit racket with competing providers.49 Such reconfigurations shaped cultural representations of induced abortion. The dying or gravely ill in the Regency era had motive to describe events, directly. Conversely, their late-​Victorian counterparts stood in the same legal

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peril as abortion providers. Dying depositions still provided clues to women’s own perceptions, such testimony judged as likely to be true. ‘Sinking’ women described symptoms, treatments obtained and, if failing, the bodily emergencies, like shock. Such events led to detection, sometimes hospitalization, followed by police or magistrates recording a woman’s dying testimony. Invaluable here are women’s own accounts of these excruciating obstetrical events, narrating the course of a protracted, painful succumbing –​septicaemia, peritonitis, pyaemia, cellulitis or gas gangrene of the uterus.50 Beyond women’s own words, carers testified as to abortion’s corporeality, often traumatized by what they had seen. Fearful accounts convey the sounds, sights and smells of the sickroom. Fever, moaning, weeping, delirium, hysteria, vomiting, recriminations, haemorrhages, cramping, convulsions, spasms, trembling, shaking, dehydration, discharges, the dreadful and unmistakable stenches  –​first through the bedroom, soon throughout the abode  –​accompanied irreversible blood poisoning and uterine infections. Carers’ accounts transported readers, and auditors, to those dank rooms and congested bedsides, amid purulent chamber pots and bloodied and soiled linens as well as fruitless efforts to fortify the ailing patient with beef tea, gruel or a shot of brandy. Exhausted and fevered, suffering women could not take, or else retain, nourishment. Their strained retching compounded scenes of chaos and despair.51 Abortion time. Witnesses narrated the glacial yet immutable passing of time in the jaws of these mortal obstetrical complications. Amid vast differences wrought by class, ethnic, cultural and regional characteristics, accounts converged in depictions of the female body in postabortion crisis. False hopes of recovery commonly pepper sunny accounts of a good day, with reduced symptoms, following two or three bad days. The woman arose, dressed, helped with housework and even did some sewing  –​so reported relatives, landladies or co-​workers. Then, a bad night unfolded gradually, haltingly, until, by morning, all was worse than ever before. The duration seemed interminable, both dramatic and yet imperceptible in pace, tedious and yet  all-​absorbing for intimates, seemingly as ensnared in the crisis as the woman herself. Carers argued about treatment. ‘She would not have a doctor’, a frequent refrain. The abortion provider commanded loyalty, the afflicted woman accepting only their care. On it continued, five days, eight days, until the end. If a doctor gained access, he might secure the patient’s removal to hospital –​perhaps too late.52 Evidence such as this recalls Scott’s reminder: it does not speak for itself. Turning away from such horror narratives, some historians insist that abortion could only have been rare, too dangerous to be other than the resort of the desperate. Hence it was not a factor in reducing average completed family sizes from five or more living offspring in the 1870s to an average of just over two by the 1930s, across Western cultures. Indeed, some British historians prefer to explain the British chapter of this Western decline as the outcome of abstinence and coitus interruptus, in the unique erotic sacrifices of

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considerate British husbands! Alternatively, criminal cases disclose women’s previous, often multiple and complication-​free, induced miscarriages. This counteracts official evidence hewing towards the ‘botched’ abortion. More plausibly, the end-​cycle theory of ovulation (not superseded by mid-​cycle until 1923) and the lack of systematic contraception suggest that women’s long nineteenth-​century sexual and reproductive histories included abortion along an evolving birth control methods continuum.53 In 1894, twenty-​seven-​year-​old Soho waitress Alice Birmingham was four month’s pregnant by her partner, an Italian restaurant manager. A  friend referred her to her midwife, Jane White. After pills failed, White used a wire-​ in-​catheter. Ill afterwards, Birmingham received care from a neighbour, registered nurse Hannah Nelson. Pregnant again four months later, Birmingham returned to White, taking Nelson with her. Seeing her equipment, Nelson praised White’s skilled instrumental operations. In autumn 1898, Nelson met Birmingham, again pregnant and about to return to White.54 Though this fourth miscarriage with White ‘came off’, soon the patient became ill. Instrumental miscarriage involved inserting a sharp object through the dilated cervix to rupture the placental sac to induce early labour. Birmingham’s mother summoned nearby Oxford Street clinician Dr William Naughton. As standard postnatal care, he prescribed the obstetrical drug ergot to induce contractions, expel remaining uterine material and control haemorrhage. No better, Birmingham summoned White, who stayed for a long time, administering expulsive prescription drugs; antiseptic syringes to uterus, cervix and vagina; and analgesic chloroform water. First Birmingham rallied. Then she again began to ‘sink’. The friend who had originally recommended White, now sent along a West End doctor, who saw her after a prior miscarriage. Dr Isaiah Jones attended Birmingham for several days, later testifying that hers was the typical miscarriage of an overworked wife: the outcome of one in three pregnancies.55 Both doctors Naughton and Jones managed abortion complications. They deployed placental expulsion, asepsis, haemorrhage control, analgesia and fever reduction, and then prevailing best practices. Perhaps they were known specialists. Or else, many doctors became expert, responding to demand. Oversupply of doctors, too, optimized accessible private care. Daily home visits, day and night, provided watchful monitoring and scrupulous care, perhaps informing patients’ and providers’ risk assessments. Doctors could consult specialists, hospitalize patients and, in extremis, certify deaths, thus permitting burial without autopsy. Such services enhanced the viability of induced abortion practices.56 Birmingham’s death shocked Dr Jones. He certified her death, stipulating, ‘Miscarriage at 2 mths. Pelvic Cellulitis and Peritonitis. Cardiac Failure’. Buried at North London’s Kensal Green cemetery, only happenstance altered matters. Birmingham’s nurse neighbour, Hannah Nelson, recalling the three previous miscarriages, saw the funeral announcement and informed New Scotland Yard. Thirteen days after burial, exhumation and postmortem

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revealed a quarter-​inch uterine wall puncture caused death from peritonitis. A search of White’s home led to confiscation of instruments, drugs, patient details and correspondence.57 Birmingham’s purse contained pills traced to White’s local chemist, Benjamin Wilkinson. For decades, he had supplied widely used abortifacients as well as compounded White’s own prescriptions:  six dozen batches a month. No records documented this restricted drug supply: he knew her; she was a professional midwife.58 In fact, despite working over thirty years as a Dalston midwife, she had no formal training or certification whatsoever. The bodies constituting criminal abortion remain elusive. Beyond eyewitness testimony and official reports, drawings and photographs of the perforated uterus, crime scene photos or morgue cadavers can represent, by inference or suggestion, some of the bodily events and sensations involved. We must, we can only, imagine. And narrate. Such limitations, obviously, are not confined to the case of induced criminal abortion, a corporeal practice of increasing familiarity. Rather, abortion can dramatize challenges facing embodied historicity. It is not a counsel of despair. Rather, it is a call for clarity and methodological candour.

Conclusion Both the richness and the historicity of abortion evidence return us to our opening questions. What possibilities and prospects face histories of the body? What are the best practices for the senses in such histories? By now, readers will realize that closure is unlikely. Ruminations here plainly offer no grand blueprint nor a promising path for historicizing corporealities, emerging into focus since the 1970s. Indeed, this chapter shows that it is much easier to pose questions about the body and the senses than to answer them. It remains unclear whether historians have established approaches to the body resonant with other disciplines. Interrogation and deductions needed for effective use of corporeal evidence (for example, related to criminal abortion) might well have broader salience for other areas and practices concerned with corporeality. That is to say, on the topic of the body, it is especially crucial to theorize evidential ontology, the very conditions for the existence of evidence at all. Histories of illicit sexual lives feature protagonists motivated to conceal. With so much passing undetected, a working hypothesis for historical investigation might be this:  nothing automatically led to the creation of evidence. For some corporeal practices or domains, then, creation of evidence becomes the matter warranting historical interrogation. Indeed, the contingency of detection, at all, needs to inflect any theorizing of the existence of evidence. Such theorizing must probe corporeal characteristics and conditions evidenced, with acute attention to dynamics and transitions, which rapidly recast meanings. It is easy to miss era-​specific nuances, using

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presentist understandings towards body practices in the past –​abortion a practice at particular risk here. Perhaps historians have not, or cannot, satisfactorily historicize the body. Does this mean there is no point, or limited purchase, in examining the elusive corporeal evidence about practices like abortion? Its narratives illuminate important issues, signalling episodes derived from sea changes in sexual culture. One of the most decisive changes was the twentieth-​century consensus that parenthood should be both chosen and planned –​a consensus with deep earlier roots. The body conceiving, bearing, birthing, and nurturing, acquired fierce stakes in choosing. This consensus emerged in contexts specific and historical, not eternal and inherent. In pursuit of unanswered questions, benefits accrue from (re)acquaintance with critiques inspiring recorporealization over three decades ago. Mutual methodological reassessment is warranted, moreover, between historical and other kinds of scrutiny. Induced abortion in the lives of Mary Ann Lockwood in 1853, Alice Birmingham in 1894–​98 and thousands of others largely passed under the historical radar. Its corporeal and sensory dimensions eluded historical gaze, unless accidents or happenstance led to limited scrutiny. Legal status inflected information and evidence. A Regency-​era woman, positioned as victim of a ruthless employer or coercive cad, was more likely to describe abortion than was a late-​Victorian woman cast as co-​conspirator. Ways forward? Prospects today differ from the 1980s and 1990s, when the body and the senses were vanguard for their impassioned historians. The decades since present different animating contexts. We contemplate international theocratic wars, ethnic carnage, environmental devastation, transregional misogyny, nutritional catastrophes, intransigent racism and epidemiological cataclysms. If theoretical reassessment and political reconnection pointed beyond current descriptive, banal or just innocently superficial work –​now too often sufficing as the history of the body and the senses  –​great benefits could accrue. There is, though, no purchase in just resummoning the insights of earlier decades. No magic bullet solution awaits these dilemmas. The problems cast now inhabit a moment different from that inspiring earlier corporeal feminist approaches. Historiographical severance from corporeal feminist interrogations might inform evaluation of current historians of the body and the senses’ approaches, though, making decisions involved and choices embraced accountable. If, from such genealogies and scrutiny, alternative frameworks emerge, then corporeal history could be set for an exciting renaissance.

NOTES 1 ‘Call for Papers’, History of the Body Symposium, Institute for Historical Research, 2015.

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2 Joanna Bourke, ‘Pain: Metaphor, Body, and Culture in Anglo-​American Societies between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Rethinking History 18 (2014): pp. 475–​98. 3 See Carolyn Walker Bynum, ‘Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective’, Critical Inquiry 22 (Autumn 1995): pp. 1–​33; Kathleen Canning, ‘The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History’, Gender and History 11 (1999): pp. 499–​513; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 4 John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1883/​1971), p. 12. 5 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), especially pp. vii–​ix and 16–​19. 6 Lisa Downing, ‘Afterword: On “Compulsory Sexuality”, Sexualization, and History’, in Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher (eds), The Routledge History of Sex and the Body (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 531. 7 Roger Cooter, ‘The Turn of the Body: History and the Politics of the Corporeal’, Arbor 185 (May–​June 2010): p. 394. 8 Maxine Sheets-​Johnstone, The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009), p. 2. 9 Maureen McNeil, ‘Body’, in Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, Meaghan Morris (eds), New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: John Wiley, 2013), pp. 15–​17. 10 Lisa Blackman, The Body: Key Concepts (Oxford: Berg, 2008), pp. 83–​96. 11 Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ & ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 38–​47. 12 Nancy Jay, ‘Gender and Dichotomy’, Feminist Studies 7 (1981): pp. 38–​56. 13 Judith A. Allen and Elizabeth Grosz (eds), ‘Feminism and the Body’, Special issue of Australian Feminist Studies 2 (1987). 14 Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 65. 15 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Wiley 2000); Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (New York: Penguin Random House, 2000). 16 Adiah Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”’, History of Science 42 (2004), pp. 233–​57; Jennifer L. Morgan, ‘“Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder”: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–​1770’, William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): pp. 167–​92; Mririlini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 17 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen

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JUDITH A. ALLEN Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), pp. 3–​48; Amy M. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

18 Cooter, ‘Turn of the Body’, p. 394. 19 Cooter lists it but privileges Foucault in steering the somatic turn: ‘through discursive practices operative in and upon the physical body . . . modern power came to be constituted and exercised’. See Cooter, ‘Turn of the Body’, pp. 395–​ 6 and 396. 20 For instance, Laqueur’s contested thesis of the literal historicity of modern constructions of sex dimorphism: Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) and Thomas Laqueur, ‘The Rise of Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Historical Context and Historiographical Implications’ Signs 37 (2012): pp. 802–​13; Helen King, The One-​Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Roy Porter, ‘History of the Body Reconsidered’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 236. 21 Janet Browne, ‘I Could Have Retched All Night: Charles Darwin and His Body’, in Lorna Schiebinger (ed.), Feminism and the Body (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 317–​54; Anne M. Little, ‘Cloistered Bodies: Convents in the Anglo-​American Imagination in the British Conquest of Canada’, Eighteenth-​Century Studies 39 (2006): pp. 187–​200. 22 Richard Wightman Fox, Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015). 23 Irene Costera Meije and Baukje Prins, ‘How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview with Judith Butler,’ Signs 23 (Winter 1998): pp. 275–​86. 24 Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Natural Facts: A Historical Perspective on Science and Sexuality’, in Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (eds), Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 157–​68. 25 Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (eds), Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999). 26 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. xi and 17–​18. 27 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘The Untimeliness of Feminist Theory’, NORA –​Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 18 (2010): p. 50. 28 Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p.145. 29 Victoria Hesford and Lisa Diedrich, ‘On “The Authority of Experience” and its Reverberations: An Interview with Joan W. Scott’, Feminist Theory 15 (2014): p. 199. 30 Cooter, ‘The Turn of the Body’, pp. 393–​405. 31 Judith A. Allen, ‘Evidence and Silence: Feminism and the Limits of History’ in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Grosz (eds), Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), pp. 173–​89.

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32 Peter N. Stearns, ‘Social History and History: A Progress Report’, Journal of Social History 19 (1985): pp. 319–​34. 33 Joan W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): pp. 773–​97. 34 Hesford and Diedrich, ‘On “The Authority of Experience” ’, p. 199. 35 Julie Doyle, ‘The Spectre of the Scalpel: The Historical Role of Surgery and Anatomy in Conceptions of Embodiment’, Body & Society 14 (2008): pp. 9–​30. 36 G. R. Elton, The Practice of History (London: Fontana 1967), p. 9. 37 Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (2012): pp. 93–​220. 38 Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), pp. xvi–​xvii; David Howes, ‘Can These Dry Bones Live? An Anthropological Approach to the History of the Senses’, Journal of American History 95 (2008): pp. 442–​51. 39 Ivan Crozier, introduction to Ivan Crozier (ed.), A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Modern Age (London: Bloomsbury 2014), p. 3. 40 Sidney W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Trucing Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Sander L. Gilman, ‘Touch, Sexuality, and Disease’, in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds), Medicine and the Five Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 198–​225. On this subfield’s atheoretical proclivities, see Mark Smith, ‘Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History’, Journal of Social History 40 (2007): p. 841. 41 Mintz, Tasting Food, pp. 843–​44. 42 Mary Lindemann, ‘The Body’, in Peter N. Stearns (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social History (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 21; Peter Bailey, ‘Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Historian Listens to Noise’, Body and Society 6 (1996): pp. 49–​66. 43 Dr John Settle [Deposition] (21 August 1885), ‘Murder: James Scott’, Records of Justices of Assize, Gaol Delivery, Oyer and Terminer, and Nisi Prius –​ Assizes: Northern Circuit: Criminal Depositions and Case Papers [ASSI], 53/​7, 8, The National Archives of the United Kingdom [TNA]. 44 Barbara Brooks, Abortion in England, 1900–​1967 (London: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 51–​78 and 151; Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning, and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 92–​113; Michael D. Kandiah and Gillian Staerck (eds), The Abortion Act 1967 (London: Institute for Contemporary British History, 2002), pp. 1–​62. 45 Once a secular crime (after 1803), most abortion trials had male defendants, but as impregnators rather than third-​party providers. Until surgical uterine evacuations (curettage) from the later 1870s, laws defined the crime as a person’s efforts (before 1861, not the pregnant woman) to induce miscarriage. Treated as an intimate’s crime against a woman, defendants poisoned, kicked

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JUDITH A. ALLEN or beat them into miscarriages to conceal illicit liaisons or evade child support under the Poor Laws. Less familiar was exposure of commercial providers, like Goulden. See Shelley Gavigan, ‘The Criminal Sanction as It Relates to Human Reproduction: The Genesis of the Statutory Prohibition of Abortion’, Journal of Legal History 5 (1984): pp. 20–​41.

46 ‘Offences; Medical; Rewards? –​A letter from D. Harrison and E. Sidebottom, Justices of the Peace, concerning the case of Mary Ann Lockwood. (1853?)’ 17 pp. The National Archives of the United Kingdom [TNA], Home Office 45/​ 4792. 47 ‘Trial of Pizzey & Codd for Procuring Abortion’, Edinburgh Medical & Surgical Journal (1810): pp. 246–​8; and see ‘Suffolk Assizes’, Bury St. Edmund’s Post, 17 August 1808. 48 ‘Abridged Law and Assize Intelligence’, Observer, 14 April 1834, p. 2. In 1834, enraged over a child support order, witnesses saw Cheshire cotton journeyman James Mason assault and, with his hands, induce his seven months pregnant girlfriend’s miscarriage, ‘A Dreadful Case of Depravity’, Observer, 13 April 1834, p. 2. 49 Tim Hitchcock and Robert E. Shoemaker, ‘Unlawful Abortion’, in Clive Emsley, Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker (eds), Crime and Justice –​Crimes Tried at the Old Bailey [accessed 4 July 2013), p. 7. Offences against the Person Act, 1861, 24 & 25 Vict. c. 100, section 58. 50 Leslie J. Reagan, ‘“About to Meet Her Maker”: Women, Doctors, Dying Declarations, and the State’s Investigation of Abortion, Chicago, 1867–​1940’, Journal of American History 77 (1991): pp. 1240–​64. 51 ‘Death caused by Illegal Abortion: Mary Kew, 1888’, ASSI [North and South Wales Circuit, South Wales Division: Criminal Depositions], 72/​4, TNA; ‘Defendant: Whitmarsh, John Lloyd. Charge: Murder. Session: September 1898’, Central Criminal Court: Depositions [CRIM] 1/​53/​3, TNA. 52 “Death resulting from illegal abortion: Andrew Francis Baynton and John Morgan Hopkins (1884)’, ASSI 72/​3, TNA. 53 Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain 1860–​1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 401–​58. For mid-​ cycle ovulation, see Kyusaku Ogino, MD. ‘Studies of Human Corpora Lutea’, Hokuetsu Medical Journal 38 (1923): p. 92; and for its exegesis, Carl G. Hartman, Time of Ovulation in Women (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1936). 54 ‘Defendant: WHITE, Jane. Charge: Murder. Session: February 1899’, CRIM 1/​ 54/​9, 2, and 95–​107, TNA. 55 ‘Defendant: WHITE, Jane’, pp. 54, 83, 55, 19–​20, 21, 121–​49, 103–​16 and 24–​25. 56 W. Tyler-​Smith, ‘A Lecture on the Induction of Premature Labour’, Lancet 60 (2 October 1852): pp. 297–​99; Humphry Sandwith, ‘On the Indications for Manual Interference and Other Agencies in the Treatment of Abortions’, British Medical Journal 2 (13 July 1867): pp. 22–​3; George E. Wherry, ‘Criminal Abortion: A Foetus of Three Months Cut Up While in the

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Uterus: Peritonitis: Recovery’, British Medical Journal 1 (4 June 1881): pp. 880–​1. See also Roy Church, ‘The British Market for Medicine in the late Nineteenth Century: The Innovative Impact of S M Burroughs & Co.’, Medical History 49 (2005): pp. 284–​5. 57 Four Crown witnesses recounted prior abortions, some wholly with drugs, or by White, without complications. Lack of pregnancy tests elongated attempts with drugs. Providers rarely risked anaesthesia, hence instruments’ reputation for pain: ‘Defendant: WHITE, Jane’, pp. 103–​7, 110–​22, 127 and 151–​4. 58 ‘Defendant: WHITE, Jane’, pp. 16 and 110–​22.

Key texts Canning, K. ‘The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History’. Gender and History 11(1999): pp. 499–​513. Duden, B. The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-​ Century Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Grosz, E. A. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Harvey, K. ‘The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth-​Century England’. Gender and History 14 (2002): pp. 202–​23. Jay, N. ‘Gender and Dichotomy’. Feminist Studies 7 (1981): pp. 38–​56. King, H. The One-​Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Laqueur, T. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Lennon, K. ‘Biology and the Metaphysics of Sex Difference’. In S. Gonzalez-​Arnal, G. Jagger and K. Canning (eds), Embodied Selves. London: Palgrave, 2012, pp. 29–​46. Scott, J. W. ‘The Evidence of Experience’. Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): pp. 773–​97. Young, I. M. On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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The material turn As the introduction showed, the shift among social historians towards cultural history in the 1980s and 1990s involved a divorce from the kind of economic history that had fostered social history in the first place. Much of this was provoked by a dissatisfaction with the cruder forms of Marxism. Instead, there was a concentration on categories other than class (particularly gender and race) that shape human existence. Labour history went into decline as well as anything that smacked of economic reductionism. Historians increasingly bought into models derived from literature and from art history. Cultural historians stressed the agency of representation: showing that the images, symbols and forms of language that surround us shape consciousness and need to be deconstructed and explored. This section suggests a shift may be taking place. There is increasing talk of a ‘material turn’ among social historians and an appetite for exploring economic forces in new ways. This material turn does not disavow cultural history but, as we will see, builds upon it. Katrina Navickas employs spatial geography to argue that class and economic structures can be thought about in dynamic new ways. Donna Loftus, in her work on markets, argues for a cultural history of capitalism itself. The act of looking and of relating to objects and things involves deconstructing the visual conventions of a culture. No image, we learn, ever simply speaks for itself. Jennifer Tucker’s article demonstrates that we need more sophisticated explorations of visual culture. Images construct reality for historical participants just as much as spoken languages do. The toolbox

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of the historian increasingly requires attention to how images work and what is at stake in them. Yet even here, Tucker also detects evidence of a material turn as she considers the way in which images are turned into ‘socially meaningful objects’. At the same time, social and cultural history is no longer simply the concern of university-​based scholars. Social and cultural historians are as likely to be found in museums and in public organizations. As Paul Ashton and Meg Foster show, public historians play an important role not only in the dissemination of scholarship but also in its democratization. We are seeing new forms of collaboration between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ historians (a distinction that, they show, is becoming meaningless). Some forms of public history challenge the protocols of scholarship –​a development that can be troubling but which requires an imaginative response. Social and cultural history is too important to be just left to academics.

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A return to materialism? Putting social history back into place* Katrina Navickas

Introduction Social history is the study of societies and the structures that compose them. In the first decades of the twenty-​first century, these societies and structures have been shaken by global economic crisis, riven by increasing inequality and challenged by political revolutions, protest movements and wider debates about the power of economic elites within society.1 Questions of class and materialism –​that is, the large socio-​economic structures of power that shape society  –​are integral to these debates. It is the duty of social historians to understand how economic and political systems shape social structures and relations. Class and economic structures are however often distant and in the background rather than the foreground of historical analysis, at least in Western Anglophone social history. Outside of the specific discipline of global studies, social historians often concentrate on small and targeted case studies of small groups, objects, localities or events. This focus on the specific runs the risk of losing sight of the bigger picture. Moreover, the development of cultural history within and alongside social history, particularly its emphasis on representations and identities, has shifted historians’ attention away from larger socio-​economic structures shaping cultures and identities. This chapter surveys how and why this shift away from the ‘big structures’ has occurred in social history. It does not argue that social and cultural history are diametrically opposed. Nor does it suggest that historians

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should be backwardly revisionist. We should not return to older ways of understanding society such as Marxist interpretations known as historical materialism, which presented a rigid and overly theoretical economic structure that determined relations between classes and the development of social change. Rather, this chapter points to new directions for where social and cultural history can go to produce a more holistic and indeed grounded way of examining society. In particular, it calls for historians to learn from the discipline of labour geography, which offers new methods of understanding class, including an emphasis on social conflicts shaped by particular places and by local and global connections between societies.

The traditional historiographical narrative Historians have gradually shifted away from explaining society and social change through the material forces of economics, political power and class. This shift is not a new story. In 1979, the early modern historian Lawrence Stone argued that historical research was returning to narrative. His now classic essay for Past & Present charted how in the 1960s and 1970s, historians had rejected the social scientific and economic explanations that dominated historical analysis, and had begun to prioritize the idea that ‘the culture of the group, and even the will of the individual, are potentially at least as important causal agents of change as the impersonal forces of material output and demographic growth’.2 They increasingly looked beyond large quantitative records of economic production and population change towards the more qualitative records and stories of individuals and specific groups. A person was no longer subsumed into a statistical table, reduced to the status of a number among many. Rather, by looking at their culture, their words, their objects, an individual was given agency, that is, the power to change their own history. This emphasis on culture, texts and objects and the consequent agency of individuals was and remains a significant development in social history. Traditionally, studies of history writing ascribe the shift to the following factors: first, the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to Marxist historians losing their influence. Their explanations of class struggle and stages of development no longer seemed to fit the new, post-​communist global world. Similarly, trade unions lost their prominence in politics and society from the 1980s onwards, their power diminished by capitalist individualist economics and right-​wing politics. Traditional labour history, with its roots in trade unionism, Fabian and Marxist politics, therefore also no longer seemed relevant or even necessary.3 Stone’s article came in the middle of this stage. A second stage occurred as industrial and manufacturing industries entered major decline in the West during the 1980s. Heavy statistical economic histories of industrial production and commerce became outdated. Instead,

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socio-​economic historians began to emphasize the history of consumption, particularly in its cultural contexts. Studies of what people bought and consumed offered new insights into everyday (or moreover luxury) lives rather than the more traditional emphasis on calculating how much they produced or sold.4 The material became an object in histories of objects, consumerism and display, rather than the historical materialism of economic structures in Marxist theory. This emphasis on consumer goods naturally highlighted the middle classes as a topic of study, notably in eighteenth-​century England and the British Empire, in ways that previous histories of class identity had ignored. Studies highlighted the global and imperial channels of exchange, with the research questions centring on orientalism or cultural appropriation, and how much of this influence trickled down to the lower classes. Class was an identity shaped by culture and the display of material goods.5 The third major development in social history, as predicted in Stone’s article, was the emergence of post-​structuralism and postmodern approaches to methodology and sources. Post-​structuralism promised a way of writing history without being bounded by structures  –​the economic, political or chronological frameworks upon which historians hang their explanations of change. Its methods and approaches to history sought to challenge the old Marxist and Whiggish narratives of stages and progress that, its proponents argued, were overly determinist. Post-​ structuralist histories emphasized that nothing is inevitable; individuals had agency and could change their own destinies, particularly through culture and words. It also importantly drew attention to the historian’s own perspectives and relationship with the narratives and texts that they studied as primary sources. Historians could never know the real ‘truth’ of history as their interpretation could never be objective. Their own life experience and perspectives always influenced their interpretations.6 Initially, post-​structuralist history sought to understand political identities in new ways. Proponents of what became known as the ‘linguistic turn’ argued that words were a channel that allowed people to challenge existing power structures and develop their own power or agency.7 From the 1990s onwards, historians ‘turned’ in various ways, focusing on what words, images, objects, buildings and emotions represented about individuals and groups, particularly in relation to their identity. Representation is a key feature. Within the framework of representation, class is individualized; it is relegated to one part of an individual identity. Cultural history has focused on individual and group identities outside political or economic structures. Where cultural historians consider class, they see it as a collective identity, but often class is equated to another form of symbolism or representative experience. They argue that agency is individual rather than collective through class.8 Economic and social structures are underplayed. The emphasis upon representations contained in language, culture, media and physical objects remains a major feature of the study of historical societies.9 Gender, postcolonial and labour histories have enriched and revised

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their approaches through the framework of representations and identities. In doing so, however, class has increasingly been squeezed out. Though arising from and alongside Marxism in the 1970s, feminist history increasingly displaced class with gender as a framework of analysis of the oppressed and/​or active against dominant elites. As cultural history took hold from the late 1980s, gender history lost some of its political agenda to forcibly highlight the lack of women and gay people in mainstream history. Rather, it broadened into histories of identities, including masculinity as well as femininity as areas of study.10 Labour historians similarly moved away from class as a defining framework of their discipline. Daniel Walkowitz notes that the problem with traditional labour history was that it ‘focused on industrial working-​class communities and predominantly on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where their struggles were most evident and heroic’.11 Cultural history helped alter this blinkered focus from the 1990s, and also in response to the declining power and prominence of trade unions in national economies and political parties, labour historians diversified. They began to investigate how labour history is as much about identities as well as class relations. They shifted to examining other types of identity shared by working peoples, especially gender and race.12 In the new labour histories, patriarchies and imperialist hierarchies became the powers against which subalterns rallied or were suppressed, though class remained a determinant of who formed those hierarchies.13 Nor was this trend confined to Western Anglophone historiography. Kevin M.  Jones has shown how, despite the often different ethnic, political and religious contexts to Western history, Middle Eastern history also followed similar trajectories. Whereas labour history thrived in the 1970s and 1980s, from the 1990s, ‘the centre of gravity in the social history of the Middle East has shifted from the factory to the mosque’. The dominance of political Islam and the major political instability of the region caused practical and economic problems for archival research. Other factors paralleled those in the West, though to a more extreme extent. The regimes’ clamp down on organized labour eroded the collective identity of the working class, and consequently the concept of class had less meaning and interest for new generations of historians. Middle Eastern studies also had a similar ‘cultural turn’ as Western history, with the same result of refocusing away from class to the history of identities in culture, particularly of the middle classes.14 Ethnicity and (inter)nationality rather than class have become the dominant reference for studies of communities and migration.15 The multitude of new approaches and the ever-​increasing complexity of identities and representations offered by cultural history have enriched our understanding of society. Historians are now much more sensitive to contextualization of sources and to understanding how historic actors were shaped by multiple influences, including of culture and texts as well as economic and political conditions. There are, however, broader consequences of this change of focus. As Jürgen Kocka has pointed out, ‘Historians have

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become less interested in establishing the causes and conditions, and more interested in (re)constructing the meanings of past phenomena, i.e. the meanings a phenomenon of the past had for contemporaries as well as the meanings it has or may have for present historians and their audiences.’16 Kocka convincingly argues that ‘explanation has become less self-​evident’ in historical accounts, whereas understanding gained centre-​stage’.17 This shift from explanation to understanding is evident in the resurgence of ‘history from below’, outside the original Marxist parameters encouraged by the History Workshop group in the 1960s. History from below seeks to understand the impact of political and economic forces and structures upon unrepresented or powerless groups in society. It seeks to find ‘truth’ about individuals’ lives in their archival records rather than in abstract theories, and it argues that class formation is a historically specific rather than general or global process. This emphasis on placing individuals within their specific historical context paralleled a strand of Marxism known as ‘voluntarism’, which suggests that individuals can voluntarily change some of their situation rather than their actions and identities being predetermined by economic conditions.18 Discussing materialism and structure is therefore no longer an automatic part of historical explanation, or at least is done without direct analysis of its causes or processes. Even if historians ‘of below’ ignore historical materialism completely, they run the risk of ignoring the factors from ‘above’ that shape why particular groups of people are ‘below’. In 2003, Peter Stearns complained of the fragmentation of social history, consisting of ‘a variety of subtopics rather than a general vision of the past’. Topics such as family, crime, protest and slavery are studied separately without understanding the interrelations between them.19 By 2007, Geoff Eley and Keith Nield asked ‘what’s left of the social?’ in social history (a repeated cry, as they reflected back on their previous articles questioning the future of the field back in 1980 and again in 1995). They lamented the ‘future of class’ as an analytical term, whereby ‘historians of the working class became far more hesitant about connecting their particular social histories to the broader patterns of national political history or larger scale questions of societal stability and change’.20 Stone’s predictions about the direction of history writing in the 1980s had indeed come to fruition.

A divide between social and cultural history, or a straw man? So where does social history stand as a discipline and methodology in the first decades of the twenty-​first century? Critics periodically bemoan ‘the state of social history’ and propose how the discipline can be ‘saved’.21 First, there is an acceptance of the congruence of social with cultural history. Notably,

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Selina Todd has taken issue with the traditional chronology of the shift from social to cultural history, as outlined above. She argues that the two fields are not distinctly opposed, and that many historians continued to analyse class and gender as analytic categories throughout the period of debate.22 Patrick Joyce has similarly argued that critics of cultural history have misunderstood its purpose and range and compounded the idea that culture is merely about discourse and symbolic meanings (semiotics).23 Tellingly, the journal of the Social History Society is titled Cultural and Social History, reflecting the zeitgeist of its foundation in 2004 and encouraging studies that emphasize the interactions of the cultural with the social.24 Interdisciplinarity has always been an easy word to bat around when calling for new approaches. From the integrative ‘total history’ approach of the Annales school in France from the 1930s to the History Workshop group from the 1970s, social historians have always stressed the necessity of learning from anthropology, economics, ethnography, sociology and other disciplines.25 History Workshop also attempted (if not always democratically) a genuinely integrative interdisciplinary way of working as well as writing social history with a contemporary purpose. In the 1980s, this purpose included a strident Marxist and later feminist critique of unequal power relations both in history and the contemporary, aimed at engaging the general public as well as academic scholars.26 Perhaps more ‘standard’ political history, which had stood apart from Marxist-​influenced histories from below, has begun to rethink its purpose and approach. In 2015, the Modern British Studies group at the University of Birmingham offered a spirited defence of the uses of history.27 Their 2015 conference ‘Rethinking Modern British Studies’ emphasized that working across disciplines is the key to revitalizing social history and integrating politics and economics with the rich vein of social histories of twentieth-​century Britain emerging today. Its model is ostensibly explicitly apolitical and enables collaboration through the online medium of blogging, which History Workshop Online has also taken on as a main means of encouraging ‘history from below’.28 Echoing the original aims of History Workshop, Staughton Lynd proclaims that history from below should ‘challenge mainstream versions of the past’, notably by regarding historical actors as ‘colleagues’ in writing history rather than just ‘sources of facts’.29 Joyce calls for a stronger analytical framework for ‘the social’ as well as the cultural in history.30 The history of popular protest in Britain has also been in revival and suggests new ways of thinking about social structures. Carl Griffin, Adrian Randall and others have revised our understanding of a range of English social protest, including early modern riots against enclosure of common land, eighteenth-​century riots over the price of food and the Swing riots that swept across agricultural southern England in the early 1830s.31 They have reinterpreted the role of poverty and economic conditions as well as culture in shaping social relations and fomenting protest. They emphasize how protest was not a simple reaction to economic distress but came at

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the fracturing of class relations. In this, they reflect upon E. P. Thompson’s model of the ‘moral economy’ of social protest, which still plays a large part in the explanations of conflict between local elites and lower classes in these histories, a complex interplay of deference and resistance during periods of economic depression.32 Importantly many of these studies are based on ‘deep’ studies of the longer histories and social structures of regions. The region offers a useful medium to explore comparisons between ‘microhistories’ of individual settlements and wider trends in the national economy.33 As discussed below, much of this new work has been influenced by the methods of cultural and labour geography, which seek to connect the economic and social structures making up place as essential features in popular protest movements and collective action by labour and political groups. European studies are also rethinking the meaning of social protest. For example, the work of Pedro Ramos Pinto has highlighted the role of democratic resistance movements to the fascist state in twentieth-​century Portugal.34 Much of this literature is inspired by earlier postcolonial and peasant studies of non-​ Western societies, although, as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have pointed out, Western histories tend to be ‘from the lower middle up’ and disregard the wageless as incapable of agency or even consciousness.35 Another major influence has been the sociological and anthropological models of James C. Scott. Scott studied peasants and workers in South East Asia in part to understand their behaviour where more overt methods of protest and organized resistance were not possible. He uncovered how subaltern or oppressed people used strategies that he termed ‘weapons of the weak’ and ‘hidden transcripts’. Rather than organizing in Western forms of collective action, resistance was enacted through individual actions such as foot-​dragging and gossip, disguised from employers and authorities. Scott’s model has shaped the approaches and writings of historians of peasant resistance in early modern Europe to race relations in America and South Africa. There has been criticism, however, that Scott’s portrayal of subaltern people as living in a permanent state of resistance to economic elites in fact ignores the power of religious elites in Islamic states or indeed presumes that individual agency can have a significant effect against major economic structures.36 Much of ‘history from below’ in British history focuses on poverty and the poor. Previous histories of poverty relied either on descriptive narrative in the mode of the original Victorian social investigators or on economic analysis that often deindividualized paupers by reducing them to simply numbers and costs listed in a line of a statistical table. Since the 1990s, however, social historians have attempted to reconstruct the experiences of the poor as individuals as well as groups. New studies illustrate how the poor in eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century Britain used letters and direct appeals to negotiate with the providers of charity and relief for their survival.37 Nearly all of these studies use the term ‘pauper agency’ to describe this process of negotiation and choice of rhetoric. But it is sometimes unclear in this

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scholarship what ‘agency’ actually meant over and above an individual cleverly manipulating welfare providers for the benefit of themselves and their families.38 Perhaps indeed this was all that such evidence shows: indeed, we cannot presume that collective needs took precedence over individual needs in situations of subsistence and survival, or that the poor were or should have been connected in collective resistance. But some of the studies of poverty and the poor often tend to sidestep the issue of larger class and economic structures that shaped the paupers’ ‘economy of makeshifts’ whereby they attempted to gain small pots of income from a wide range of sources.39 However, the history of poverty cannot solely examine the language of pauper letters to understand why the poor were poor. Also, as Selina Todd has noted, the pendulum swing towards emphasizing the individual agency of the poor has perhaps ventured too far from the role of collective action and organizations. Historians risk assuming that personal testimonies such as letters are more ‘authentic’ than the more traditional foci of labour history such as trade union records or political petitions.40 American activist Lynd, moreover, rallies that history from below should ‘not be mere description of hitherto invisible poor and oppressed people’, not least because much current history from below in the United States, by ‘slightly altering’ the master narrative, simply revalidates it in a form that still ignores class struggle and separates the ‘the poor’ into just another category within the story.41

Solutions? A Thompsonian approach to materialism and cultures of class Should we go back to the tried and tested modes of discussing class? The ‘rise and fall’ of labour history is much lamented by old labour historians.42 But is there any point trying to turn the clock back? It is unlikely that most historians will engage with the traditional Marxist models of class struggle and historical materialism and apply them retrospectively to their own studies.43 We cannot go back to old models that were based solely on the importance of white male labour and an assumption of determinist progression towards class conflict and revolution.44 Materialism ironically has little material depth to it. The solution proposed by many of the litany of historiographical reviews of social history today is to return to the work of Thompson.45 The canonical cultural English Marxist of the 1960s and 1970s, Thompson offered a foot in both camps of traditional materialist social history and newer cultural approaches. Thompson defined class as a process rather than an objective category, created as much from ‘below’ by the experience and narratives of workers as much as by the economic structures oppressing them. He integrated culture into the Marxist model of class formation, while retaining a grip on the material and structure that later scholars left behind. Both class

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and capitalist economics were produced not by abstract forces imposed from above and without but by specific histories, values and passions. These features were created by and mediated through people’s own experience of everyday life.46 Thompson’s work was situated in a very specific English and nineteenth-​century context, and a product of its times (the revised edition of his most well-​known work, The Making of the English Working Class, was published in the revolutionary year of 1968). But it nevertheless inspired and continued to inspire similar studies of the working classes across the globe and of different time periods. His model was never so restrictive as to preclude adaptations to include people other than white English men as actors in the formation of class.47 Eley and Nield were more positive about the state of social history in Britain than in the United States, in part because they were reassured that the ‘discursive tendencies’ of cultural history were moderated by the continued influence of Thompson. Experience and the moral economy continue to be influential models. Selina Todd explicitly uses Thompson’s concept of ‘experience’ as a central organizing framework for understanding the meaning of class in twentieth-​ century Britain.48 In this model, class is relative to social groups’ positions in social relations in particular economic circumstances and therefore situated in particular points in time. Class is therefore relative and changing over time, not just in relation to other classes but also dependent on groups’ experience of previous economic circumstances, a desire for autonomy or stability during periods of economic distress, and economic and political policies of the government. Thompson thus found class formation occurring during a period of flux and uncertainty in the first stages of industrialization and its consequent socio-​economic upheavals caused by the development of free market capitalism in Britain. Todd thus argues strongly against the claim that class in Britain was destroyed by Thatcherism in the 1980s, because that presumption assumes that one static class ‘beat’ another class. In areas where and times when the working classes bought into Conservative aspiration, ‘social and economic circumstances shape class relations, limit horizons and circumscribe actions’.49 Thompson’s moral economy has remained influential outside British history, and has been applied to studies of contemporary trade unions and working-​class bargaining in Sweden and Sri Lanka among other countries.50 Admittedly, this chapter is in effect another contribution to the debate about the future of social history. And perhaps inevitably, therefore, I argue for renewed emphasis on the material or structure –​if not materialism and structuralism –​in history. New materialism understands class as a process shaped by ‘lived experience’ rather than a fixed economic category. Society is and was made up of contested spaces in which elites determine dominant meanings and access to power. Class is not a monolithic and all-​encompassing social structure that determines historical change on its own: it is intersected by other forces and groupings, not least race, gender, religion and nation. New materialism thereby examines the structural forces shaping

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class and social relations such as economic and political dominance of elite groups, but it does not assign a determinist ‘script’ for those relations or struggle to be followed according to abstract laws of capital. Nor are classes strictly stratified.51 It includes insights offered by the legacy of postmodern approaches but grounds them in an appreciation of structures and human experience. New materialism also always leads back to the archive: it finds materiality in empirical research as well as theory, in documents and primary sources. It unpicks the materiality as well as forces of materialism in the ‘lived experience’ of workers and indeed the other classes. It emphasizes that agency can take multiple forms, and that the outcomes of agency are conflicting or contested and not always progressive.52 But as well as coming back yet again to a Thompsonian way of examining class and its significance, and a renewed emphasis on archival depth, new materialism draws in particular from recent developments in labour geography.53 Labour geography offers new approaches to labour relations and the production of class. Materiality and materialism are at the core of thinking about geographies of production and class. Again as with history, economic geography experienced a shift from a Marxist ‘geography of labour’ towards a more multifaceted and cultural ‘labour geography’. Labour geographers use space and place as frameworks to explain how both local and global societies are fragmented by differentials of class, gender, race and concentrations of political and economic power. Economists have always taken the ‘long view’, but recent debates about the economic power of the ‘1 percent’ have pointed attention again to the relevance of examining social and economic change together over longer chronologies. In the 1980s and 1990s, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre and other Marxist geographers emphasized how capital(ists) constructed economic and social landscapes that formed an essential part of how elites enforced political power.54 The work of Harvey and others showed how capital(ism) spread unevenly across the world and over time. However, their methods and evidence relied too much on focusing on capitalist firms and elites, while workers played an overly abstract and passive role in the process. Andrew Herod therefore called strongly for ‘a much more active conceptualization of workers as engaged in the uneven development of capitalism’.55 Since then, labour geography has investigated contested, and even conflicting, forms of class formation and popular agency. Indeed, by 2012, Neil McCoe’s review of the state of the field showed that notions of worker agency became ‘the central leitmotif of labour geography’. Moreover, he argued that perhaps labour geographers have gone too far with emphasizing labour agency above all other factors and suggested that ‘an unpacking of the notion of agency needs to be combined with reconnecting agency to the wider societal structures in which it is embedded’.56 This again appears as a recurrent warning to both geographers and social historians. Just as cultural representations cannot be fully situated without understanding the social, political and economic forces and structures that produced them, so the actions of workers

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collectively or individually cannot be appreciated in isolation, without a grounding in the material forces that enabled or restricted their opportunities to act. More recent labour geography investigates how labour markets operate on many different geographic levels, which are often based in local places but connected by national or international institutions and structures.57 David Featherstone and Andrew Cumbers in particular have rethought Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘militant particularism’. Williams studied labour relations in the Cowley motorworks in Oxford in the 1960s and found that ‘local’ conflicts between capital and labour were embedded in place, specific to the location and organization of the institution. Harvey interpreted Williams’s concept of ‘militant particularism’ to mean that collective action that is bound in a specific place cannot achieve wider class consciousness until it moves away from fighting particular grievances towards uniting with other groups under more abstract political ideologies.58 Featherstone and Cumbers argued against this limited view of the connection between class and place. In paying close attention to the global nature of capital and finance, they show how labour collective action can be enmeshed in a ‘much broader and multi-​scalar set of political and economic relationships’.59 Workers connected their local dispute against a particular employer to a global struggle against capital because of the changing economics of the industry across the world, where employers were choosing to distribute capital and production in different regions of the world. Labour geographers are therefore more versed with the ‘precariat’ and are collating the methods, sources and approaches that future labour historians should be adopting to understand the history of the twenty-​first century.60 Labour geography offers an alternative to the largely white, Western and male labour histories. It demonstrates that labour had and has many and varied forms, including marginal migrant and domestic work. Social conflict involves different combinations or contestations of class, race, gender and religion, which shape action, outcomes and consequences. Geographers, sociologists and historians have of course long recognized these complex interrelations, but we should go further and understand intersections within each category: classes divided within themselves, and understanding different groupings that do not fall into the traditional labour history categories of activist (often white male and skilled) workers. Class and geographies of resistance can be exclusionary rather than collective, a feature ignored or indeed ‘often silenced by an older generation of labour historians who tended to treat the forms of whiteness articulated through labour organising as a given’.61 Increasingly, therefore, migrant and casual labour in the globalized economy is a major theme. It demonstrates how agency is shaped not only by class identity but also by intersections of gender and race in new contexts of the ‘precariat’. Studies of unorganized migrant workers stress the role of different forms of individual agency, including how people used everyday coping

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strategies to improve their material conditions. Such efforts took precedence over collective resistance and direct challenges to capitalist social relations.62 Ruth Pearson, Sundari Anitha and Linda McDowell’s research on the Gate Gourmet strike in London in 2005 explained the intersection between local agency and global forces, gender and race. The striking catering workers were predominantly female migrants from South East Asia. They shifted from apparent compliance to an un-​unionized system to create their own strategies of militant collective action in a way that could not be predicted by traditional studies of skilled organized labour. Examining the organization of marginal and deskilled groups such as the catering workers requires ‘an intersectional analysis that goes beyond the management of the labour process and takes into account a holistic understanding of their experience’, and thereby questions the traditional Marxist conceptions of agency.63 Andrew Cumbers’s study of the strike similarly shows the potential of labour geography to revitalize labour history with its contemporary appreciation of the impact of the globalization of capital and restructuring away from place-​ based production. Like Thompson’s nineteenth-​ century English artisans before them, even twenty-​first-​century marginalized and increasingly globalized workers were able to build on earlier radical histories of struggle: the Gate Gourmet strikers ‘drew on histories of multi-​ethnic struggle in shaping articulations of labour, ethnicity and gender’.64 The multiple spatialities of labour relations are clearly evident in international and multiple connections of class and resistance.65 Studies of slavery, temporary workers and the ‘precariat’ similarly point to the importance of intersectionality in understanding the complex nature of modern economic structures.66 In response to the mobile nature of labour in the global capitalist economic system, other work in historical and labour geography similarly emphasizes ‘translocal’ interpretations of social movements and class.67 Yet this need not be confined to the contemporary economic situation, but can be applied to historic situations. Featherstone’s studies of the international connections of seamen involved in port strikes in London in 1768, and the anti-​slavery connections of the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s demonstrate ‘why past struggles matter to resistance to neoliberal globalisation’.68 Similarly, James Yeoman’s study of Spanish anarchist communities in Wales in the early twentieth century consciously employs concepts drawn from current sociological, geographical and economic scholarship on the relationship between poverty, class and place. He cites for example Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s proposals for how to tackle global poverty in the twenty-​first century which point to the significance of place-​based grass-​ roots movements connecting the local to the global.69 Future historians of the late twentieth century will need to consider materialism and labour relations within this mobile and unstable –​and arguably increasingly unequal –​ economic system. Historical materialism should be revitalized to take into account social and cultural historical approaches and new forms of economic institutions.

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Historical materialism is not merely about economics but also encompasses the law. Marc Steinberg’s latest book, England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor and the Industrial Revolution, has reinterpreted how local elites and employers used the law to control workers in mid-​nineteenth-​century Britain.70 Again, his first reference point is Thompson and his consideration of the law as a material structure, but he then models his analysis of labour relations within historical materialism. He emphasizes the ‘embeddedness’ of social relations within ‘state policies and legal systems that critically contour capitalist dynamics’. His interpretation of the relationship between ruler and ruled, and employers and workers, is situated firmly within space and place. This is his original contribution to the model of understanding social control, and is reflective of the new thinking championed by labour geographers. As a counterweight to historians’ usual emphasis on the nation state in relation to historical institutions, Steinberg posits the importance of the region and locality in shaping labour control regimes. Path dependence is also an important part of the model –​using John L Campbell’s definition, Steinberg defines path dependence as ‘a process whereby contingent events or decisions result in the establishment of institutions that persist over long periods of time and constrain the range of actors’ future options’.71 Again because production is always rooted in specific geographies, the choices available to both enforcers and receivers of the law are therefore spatially uneven and place dependent. Understanding the embeddedness of economic structures in place therefore is the key to explaining how labour regimes are particular and long lasting in their localities.72 Yet these regimes were challenged by workers either at points of crisis or gradually in ‘geographies of resistance’. The law was thus not immutable, but as Thompson originally mooted, a terrain of struggle over ‘actual practice’.73 Economic historians have returned to examining financial structures in the wake of global crises. This development has perhaps been represented most publicly by the economist Thomas Piketty and his huge bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-​First Century. The book struck a chord because it was published during a major period of global economic instability and during a series of occupations by antiglobalization movements in America and Europe, which were in turn inspired by new social and political movements in the Middle East. Capital in the Twenty-​First Century appears to have become an essential reference point for the debate. Its central theme concerns the increasing inequality of income, caused by interest on the inherited wealth of the rich. Significantly, Piketty foregrounded his book as a historical study, placing it consciously in the tradition of nineteenth-​ century economic theorists such as Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo and Karl Marx, and later ‘more data-​intensive and historical approaches pioneered by Kuznets and Atkinson’.74 In collating and analysing historical data on economic distribution patterns since the industrial revolution –​and thereby building upon the trend for analysis of ‘big data’ –​Piketty aimed to ‘put the study of distribution and of the long run back at the centre of

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economic, social and political thinking’.75 Notably, he cited the Annales school of ‘total’ history as an influence in his attempt to ‘renew a long tradition of research by historians and sociologists on the long run evolution of wages, prices and wealth’.76 Historical and national specificity and reactions to war and political revolution as central factors shape whether or not different institutions and societies choose to adopt particular policies to combat inequality.77 In essence, as Deirdre McCloskey has pointed out, there is essentially nothing new about pointing out how the rich are getting richer because of their inherited advantages. Piketty’s pessimism about the future of capitalism and class relations is part of a long narrative stretching back, as he admits, to Malthus and Marx.78 But Piketty has at least provided a focus for new debates and a contemporary evaluation of inequality of distribution rather than class. American historians are developing a new history of capitalism, which promises to engage with the debates raised by Piketty’s book. Sven Beckert warns that ‘if this newly demarcated subfield is to have any interpretative or political vitality, it must draw in and develop the strengths of social and labour history’.79 Kenneth Ripartito’s review of recent literature in American Historical Review is more confident, however, noting how this new history encompasses social and cultural history’s foregrounding of agency and personal choice in market decision-​making and rethinking the place of slavery and its legacies in the economy to present a ‘mosaic of economic forms and fluid institutions that constitute a capitalist system’.80 Focusing especially on the ‘material’ of the market –​money, natural resources, people –​he argues for a new materialism that ‘avoids the trap of both structuralism and linguistic determinism, seeing instead the social (and thus the economic) as formed through assemblages composed of relationships among heterogeneous collections of subjects and objects’.81 Capitalism and its history are material and cultural, shaped by the militant particularism of place and the multiple agencies of workers as well as by the dominant forces of employees, financial institutions and the state.

Conclusion So where do social and cultural historians go next in the twenty-​first century? We should look to labour geographies and new materialism to remind ourselves about the fundamentals of what history writing is and what it is for. We should ground their explanations of both existence and change of social factors with reference to the following: ll

ll

the ‘state’ and the political frameworks governing laws, policing and the economy capital and the economic systems built on capital, and their materiality

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ll

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labour in all its various forms, from the organized to the unskilled, casual, domestic and migrant identities of class, but also intersected by gender, age and race.

Examining cultural representations in primary sources is important, but they are not the sole explanations for change. Nor should historians be taken in by ‘big data; big chronology’ studies, especially those that serve to deindividualize and anonymize the actions of individuals as well as underplay the historical specificity of social and political structures at particular periods of time. New materialism in particular highlights the continued importance of issues of class in social and cultural history. It takes into account new rethinkings about capitalism and its revived relevance in the twenty-​first-​ century context of debates about global economic inequalities. It argues that class is shaped by material forces; its expression through collective action is bounded in places but also can be connected nationally and globally. It shows that people’s agency takes multiple forms, often conflicting and not always progressive. Social history is at its foundations about people, and how people interrelate in larger social structures shaped by place, time and the material forces of the economy and the state.

NOTES * Thanks to Geoff Eley for shaping my ideas on this question and providing me with multiple avenues of new writing to explore. 1 ‘Richest 1% to Own More Than Rest of World, Oxfam Says’, BBC News, 15 January 2015, www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​business-​30875633 [accessed 18 January 2017]. 2 Lawrence Stone, ‘The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History’, Past and Present 85 (1979): pp. 3–​24, cited in Georg Iggers, Historiography: From Specific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), p. 97. 3 John McIlroy, ‘Waving or Drowning? British Labour History in Troubled Waters’, Labour History 53 (2012): pp. 91–​119. 4 Jonathan White, ‘A World of Goods: the Consumption Turn and Eighteenth-​ Century British History’, Cultural and Social History 3 (2006): pp. 93–​ 104; Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-​Century England (London: Europa Publications, 1982); Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–​1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 5 See calls for more attention on the consumers rather than the semiotics of the goods consumed: Frank Trentmann, ‘Beyond Consumerism: Historical Perspectives

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on Consumerism’, Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004): pp. 373–​401; Sara Pennell, ‘Historiographical Review: Consumption and Consumerism in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal 42 (1999): pp. 549–​64. 6 Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 7 Although the author would not claim to be a postmodernist, the keystone work remains Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–​1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 8 See Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (London: Polity Press, 1993). 9 Jonathan Barry and Henry French (eds), Identity and Agency in England, 1500–​1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); John Host, Victorian Labour History: Experience, Identity and the Politics of Representation (London: Routledge, 1998). 10 Kathleen Canning, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 8–​9; Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review 91 (1986): pp. 1053–​75. 11 Daniel J. Walkowitz, ‘The Cultural Turn and a New Social History: Folk-​Dance and the Renovation of Class in Social History’, Journal of Social History 39 (2006): p. 781. 12 Laura Tabili, ‘Dislodging the Center/​Complicating the Dialectic: What Gender and Race Have Done to the Study of Labor’, International Labor and Working-​Class History 63 (2003): pp. 14–​20; for a feminist rethinking of the work of E. P. Thompson, see Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983); Catherine Hall, ‘The Tale of Samuel and Jemima: Gender and Working-​Class Culture in Nineteenth-​Century England’, in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds), E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), chap. 3. 13 Katrina Navickas, ‘What Happened to Class? New Histories of Labour and Collective Action’, Social History 36 (2011): pp. 192–​204; Tabili, ‘Dislodging the Center/​Complicating the Dialectic’. 14 Kevin M. Jones, ‘Unmaking the Middle Eastern Working Classes: Labour and the Politics of Historiography’, Social History 40 (2015): p. 147. 15 Ibid., p. 148. 16 Jürgen Kocka, ‘Losses, Gains and Opportunities: Social History Today’, Journal of Social History 37 (2003): p. 24. 17 Ibid. 18 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, ‘The Many-​Headed Hydra: Reflections on History from Below’, in Marcel Linden and Karl Heinz Roth (eds), Beyond Marx: Theorising the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-​First Century (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 25.

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19 Peter N. Stearns, ‘Social History: Present and Future’, Journal of Social History 37 (2003): p. 13. 20 Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 9–​10; Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, ‘Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?’ Social History 5 (1980): pp. 249–​72; Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, ‘Starting Over: The Present, the Post-​Modern and the Moment of Social History’, Social History 20 (1995): pp. 355–​64. 21 See for instance the special issue of Journal of Social History 37 (2003); Patrick Joyce, ‘What Is the Social in Social History?’ Past and Present 206 (2010): pp. 213–​48; Miguel A. Cabrera, Postsocial History: An Introduction (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2004); Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Review Essay: Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural Turn?’ American Historical Review 107 (2002): pp. 1476–​99; Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 22 Selina Todd, ‘Class, Experience and Britain’s Twentieth Century’, Social History 39 (2014): p. 490; citing, for example, Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-​Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–​1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992); Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–​1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michael Savage, The Dynamics of Working-​Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston, 1880–​1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Elizabeth Roberts, Women and Work, 1840–​1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 23 Joyce, ‘What Is the Social in Social History?’ pp. 222–​3. 24 See the debate in the first few issues: for example, Peter Mandler, ‘The Problem with Cultural History’, Cultural and Social History 1 (2004): pp. 94–​117; Colin Jones, ‘Peter Mandler’s “Problem with Cultural History”, or, Is Playtime Over?’, Cultural and Social History 1 (2004): pp. 209–​15. The word order of the title was also a deliberate way of distinguishing the journal from the long-​established Social History, which as well as hosting much of the debate in the late 1980s and early 1990s about post-​structuralism and the ‘linguistic turn’, nevertheless has continued to encourage materialist approaches to social history. 25 Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–​ 2014, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015). 26 Raphael Samuel, ‘On the Methods of History Workshop: A Reply’, History Workshop Journal 9 (1980): pp. 162–​76; Thomas Lindenberger and Michael Wildt, ‘Radical Plurality: History Workshops as a Practical Critique of Knowledge’, History Workshop Journal 33 (1992): pp. 73–​99. 27 Modern British Studies, University of Birmingham, Working Paper no. 2, January 2015, ; full collection at [accessed 18 January 2017]. 28 [accessed 18 January 2017].

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29 Staughton Lynd, Doing History from the Bottom Up: On E. P. Thompson, Howard Zinn and Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), p. xi. 30 Joyce, ‘What Is the Social in Social History?’ pp. 218 and 222–​3. 31 Carl Griffin, The Rural War: Captain Swing and Rural Protest (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Carl Griffin, Protest, Politics and Work in Rural England, 1700–​1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2014); Briony McDonagh, ‘Making and Breaking Property: Negotiating Enclosure and Common Rights in Sixteenth-​Century England’, History Workshop Journal 76 (2013): pp. 32–​56; Peter Jones, ‘Swing, Speenhamland and Rural Social Relations: The “Moral Economy” of the English Crowd in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History 32 (2007): pp. 271–​90; Adrian Randall, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 32 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50 (1971): pp. 76–​136. 33 Keith Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–​1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 17. 34 Pedro Ramos Pinto, Lisbon Rising: Urban Social Movements in the Portuguese Revolution, 1974–​1975 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 35 Stephanie Cronin (ed.), Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge: Abingdon, 2008); Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.) Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (Verso: London, 2000); Linebaugh and Rediker, ‘The Many-​Headed Hydra’, p. 26. 36 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); See for example, Fran Lisa Buntman, Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 250; Kenneth W. Goings and Gerland L. Smith, ‘Unhidden Transcripts: Memphis and African American Agency, 1862–​1920’, Journal of Urban History 21 (1995), pp. 372–​94; Iain Robertson, Landscapes of Protest in the Scottish Highlands after 1914 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 37 Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe (eds), Chronicling Poverty: the Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–​1840 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997); Andreas Gestrich, Elizabeth Hurren and Steven King (eds), Poverty and Sickness in Modern Europe: Narratives of the Sick Poor, 1780–​1938 (London: Continuum, 2012). 38 Jonathan Healey, The First Century of Welfare: Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire, 1620–​1730 (Martlesham: Boydell and Brewer, 2014). 39 Steven King and Alannah Tomkins (eds), The Poor in England, 1700–​1850: An Economy of Makeshifts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 40 Todd, ‘Class, Experience and Britain’s Twentieth Century’, p. 496. 41 Lynd, Doing History from the Bottom Up, p. xi.

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42 Neville Kirk, ‘Taking Stock: Labor History During the Past Fifty Years’, International Labor and Working-​Class History 82 (2012): pp. 156–​73; Geoff Eley and Kevin Nield, ‘Farewell to the Working Class?’, International Labor and Working-​Class History 57 (2000): pp. 1–​30. 43 Marxist historical materialists continue to publish in a lively book series, Studies in Historical Materialism, by Brill, but this is certainly segregated from other fields, and admittedly most labour and social historians fail to read or take account of it in their own work. See Jaims Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Michael Zmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution: Five Centuries of Transition from Agrarian to Industrial Capitalism in England (Leiden: Brill, 2013). See also Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 44 David Featherstone and Paul Griffin, ‘Spatial Relations, Histories from Below and the Makings of Agency: Reflections on The Making of the English Working Class at 50’, Progress in Human Geography, online only, 40 (April 2015): pp. 375–​393. 45 See also Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds), E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). 46 Eley and Nield, Future of Class in History, p. 9; ‘Review Essay’, pp. 1480–​1. 47 See the recent re-​evaluation of Thompson’s influence: Rudi Batzell, Sven Beckert, Andrew Gordon and Gabriel Winant, ‘E. P. Thompson, Politics and History: Writing Social History Fifty Years after The Making of the English Working Class’, Journal of Social History 48 (2015): pp. 753–​8, which cites among many, Richard Sandbrook and Robin Cohen (eds), The Development of an African Working Class: Studies in Class Formation and Action (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–​1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Rajnarayan Chandravarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–​1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 48 Todd, ‘Class’. 49 Ibid., pp. 504–​5. 50 Stefan Svallfors, The Moral Economy of Class (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); S. Janaka Biyanwila, The Labour Movement in the Global South: Trade Unions in Sri Lanka (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). 51 Featherstone and Griffin, ‘Spatial Relations’, p. 4. 52 Ibid., p. 14 53 Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). 54 Ibid.; David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982); David Harvey, ‘The Geo-​Politics of Capitalism’, in Derek Gregory and John Urry (eds), Social Relations and Spatial Structures (New York: St.

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55 Andrew Herod, ‘From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor’s Spatial Fix and the Geography of Capitalism’, Antipode 29 (1997): p. 2. 56 Neil McCoe, ‘Geographies of Production III: Making Space for Labour’, Progress in Human Geography 37 (2012): p. 272, also citing E. Siemiatycki, ‘Forced to Conceded: Permanent Restructuring and Labour’s Place in the North American Auto Industry’, Antipode 44 (2012): pp. 453–​73. 57 McCoe, ‘Geographies of Production’, p. 272. 58 David Harvey, ‘Militant Particularism and Global Ambition: The Conceptual Politics of Place, Space and Environment in the Work of Raymond Williams’, Social Text 42 (1995): p. 80; Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, 1989), p. 115. 59 Andrew Cumbers et al., ‘Intervening in Globalisation: the Spatial Possibilities and Institutional Barriers to Labour’s Collective Agency’, Journal of Economic Geography 16 (2016): pp. 93–​108. 60 McCoe, ‘Geographies of Production’, p. 277; David Christoffer Lier, The Practice of Neoliberalism: Responses to Public Sector Restructuring Across the Labour-​Community Divide in Cape Town (Oslo: Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, Report, 12, 2009). 61 Featherstone and Griffin, ‘Spatial Relations’, p. 13; Jonathan Hyslop, ‘The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself White: White Labourism in Britain, Australia and South Africa Before the First World War’, Journal of Historical Sociology 12 (1999): pp. 398–​421. 62 McCoe, ‘Geographies of Production’, pp. 272–​3, citing Cindi Katz, Growing Up Global: Economic Reconstruction and Children: Everyday Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Ben Rogaly, ‘Spaces of Work and Everyday Life: Labour Geographies and the Agency of Temporary Migrant Workers’, Geography Compass 4 (2009): pp. 1975–​87; L. Waite, ‘A Place and a Space for a Critical Geography of Precarity?’ Geography Compass 3 (2009): pp. 412–​33; Linda McDowell, ‘Thinking Through Work: Complex Inequalities, Constructions of Difference and Transnational Migrants’, Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): pp. 491–​507. 63 Featherstone and Griffin, ‘Spatial Relations’, p. 13; Ruth Pearson, Sundari Anitha and Linda McDowell, ‘Striking Issues: From Labour Process to Industrial Dispute at Grunwick and Gate Gourmet’, Industrial Relations Journal 41 (2010): pp. 408–​28; Linda McDowell, Sundari Anitha, and Ruth Pearson, ‘Striking Similarities: Representing South Asian Women’s Industrial Action in Britain’, Gender, Place and Culture 19 (2012): pp. 133–​52. 64 Cumbers et al., ‘Intervening in Globalisation’, p. 10. 65 See for example, Rachel Silvey, ‘Review: Spaces of Protest: Gendered Migration, Social Networks and Labour Activism in West Java, Indonesia’, Political Geography 22 (2003): pp. 129–​55. 66 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-​Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

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(Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Erin Hatton, The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); Marcel van der Linden, ‘San Precario: A New Inspiration for Labor Historians’, Labor: Studies in Working-​Class History of the Americas 11 (2014): pp. 9–​21. 67 Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta, Translocal Geographies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 68 David Featherstone, ‘Towards the Relational Construction of Militant Particularisms: or Why the Geographies of Past Struggles Matter for Resistance to Neoliberal Globalisation’, Antipode 37 (2005): pp. 252–​3 and 263; David Featherstone, Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-​Global Networks (Chichester: Blackwell, 2008). 69 James Yeoman, University of Sheffield, paper at the International Conference of Historical Geographers, Royal Geographical Society, July 2015; Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2011). 70 Marc Steinberg, England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor and the Industrial Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 29–​30. 71 John L. Campbell, Institutional Change and Globalization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 65. 72 Steinberg, England’s Great Transformation, pp. 31–​2, citing Andrew Herod, Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (New York: Guilford Press, 2001); Andrew Jones, ‘Local Labour Control Regimes: Uneven Development and the Social Regulation of Production’, Regional Studies 30 (1996): p. 328. 73 Steinberg, England’s Great Transformation, p. 166; E. P. Thompson, ‘The Crime of Anonymity’, in Douglas Hay et al. (eds), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-​Century England (New York: Pantheon, 1975), p. 261. 74 Thomas Piketty, ‘Capital in the Twenty-​First Century: a Multidimensional Approach to the History of Capital and Social Classes’, British Journal of Sociology 65 (2014): p. 736. 75 Ibid., p. 737. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid.; Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, ‘Inequality in the Long-​Run’, Science 344 (2014): pp. 842–​3. 78 Deidre McCloskey, ‘Measured, Unmeasured, Mismeasured, and Unjustified Pessimism: A Review Essay of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-​ First Century’, Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economics, www. deirdremccloskey.org/​docs/​pdf/​PikettyReviewEssay.pdf [accessed 29 September 2015]. 79 Sven Beckert et al., ‘Interchange: The History of Capitalism’, Journal of American History 101 (2014): pp. 503–​36; Batzell, Beckert, Gordon and Winart, ‘E. P. Thompson, Politics and History’, p. 754.

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80 Kenneth Lipartito, ‘Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism’, American Historical Review 121 (2016): p. 113, citing studies such as Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith (eds), Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-​Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Stuart Banner, American Property: A History of How, Why and What We Own (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Jürgen Kocka, ‘Writing the History of Capitalism’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 47 (2010): pp. 7–​24; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 81 Lipartito, ‘Reassembling the Economic’, p. 135. See also Frank Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices and Politics’, Journal of British Studies 48 (2009): pp. 804–​13.

Key texts Bonnell, V. E., and L. Hunt (eds). Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Featherstone, D. Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-​ Global Networks. Chichester: Blackwell, 2008. Kaye, H. J., and K. McClelland (eds). E. P. Thompson, Critical Perspectives. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. McCoe, N. ‘Geographies of Production III: Making Space for Labour’, Progress in Human Geography 37 (2012), 389–​402.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Markets and culture Donna Loftus

Introduction We live in increasingly complicated economic times characterized by the proliferation of global markets that are managed by multinational corporations and fuelled by mass consumption and debt. In the late twentieth century, the humanities and social sciences adopted methods to better understand this increasingly complex market culture. Economists worked with mathematicians to produce models for calculating flows of commodities and capital. From a different perspective, as this chapter outlines, historians have explored the roots of market culture and the history of consumption and finance while literary theorists and social scientists have examined questions of value and currency, of market knowledge and financial literacy. These combined studies have revealed the multiple intricacies of markets and explored how they work at the level of the individual, the region, the nation and the globe through networks of business, commodities and credit. In fact, given this scholarship, the financial crisis of 2008 should have come as no surprise: some of the most perceptive work on markets and culture has studied the history of banking failures, bubbles and busts.1 Across the humanities a plethora of studies has shown that, despite being presented as mathematical and theoretical, markets are material and cultural. They involve emotions as well as calculated judgments and, while perceived as abstracted systems in economic models, they are deeply embedded in personal relationships and social life.2 The cultural turn has been central to the development of these new understandings of markets. By focusing on the ‘constructedness’ of life and on

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how people ‘think, feel and act’, cultural and social histories have challenged older ideas of markets as subject to natural laws.3 Instead, markets are studied as systems and attitudes that are produced and reproduced in social and cultural life. These cultural approaches are well suited to describing capitalist markets, composed as they are of ever-​expanding networks and flows of commodities, people, ideas, money and things. The range of meanings that cultural histories open up through sophisticated readings of texts and signs provides an agile framework for describing this ever-​adapting economy. At the same time, recognition of the social embeddedness of markets has highlighted the multiple engagements people have with markets as workers, shoppers, savers and investors. The result is a range of histories that are rich and deep, contextual and contingent, able to read the meanings of markets from a vast number of perspectives and from a number of different kinds of sources, an approach which allows for the multiple possibilities of exchange. These histories have, however, produced a paradox: the scope of studies and the range of perspectives reveal markets to be man-​made and embedded in social life and, at the same time, amorphous and inescapable. As Paul Johnson puts it, ‘the ubiquity of market exchange makes the subject almost boundless’ and the fact this exchange is so apparently normal makes it ‘strangely elusive’.4 According to Frederic Jameson, this problem is compounded by the methodologies of the cultural turn and, in particular, postmodern theories that have destabilized ‘the dimension of language, reference and expression’.5 The cultural turn’s denial of a pre-​existing social entity together with new understandings of power as decentred and negotiated have shifted the focus of enquiry away from tangible aspects of the economy such as production and class to meaning and identity taken up in studies of consumption and finance. In recent years, a material turn has considered technologies of transfer and governance such as roads and pipes, bureaucracies and communications, which gives further emphasis to mentalities, movement and velocity. In a corresponding shift, economics has had to adapt to ‘invisible entities’ and ‘untheorizeable singularities’ like derivatives and futures.6 As a result economics and history use increasingly specialized languages to describe complex processes, languages which frustrate cross-​ disciplinary dialogue and make markets evanescent. This chapter considers whether the cultural turn has unwittingly facilitated ‘virtualism’, a process through which history has been made to conform to neo-​liberal market culture by replacing the categories that privilege power struggles, production and stratification with those that foreground consumption, globalization and individualism.7 So long as history is involved in explaining the past to the present it will be shaped by current concerns. The challenge for historians of markets, as William Sewell has argued, is to understand their own ‘epistemological and political entanglements in world capitalism’s recent social history’.8 The chapter addresses this challenge with a historiographical sketch of markets and culture. A brief review of social

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and economic history in the twentieth century is necessary in understanding the significance of the cultural turn. This is followed by an examination of the cultural turn and an account of recent directions. Anticipating future political entanglements, the chapter ends by considering whether new directions in histories of markets will be driven by new imperatives, ones that are shaped by the need to explain entrenched inequality, poverty and stagnation.

From economics to markets In a now well-​known essay, written on the cusp of the cultural turn, David Cannadine took up the claim made by the Italian historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce that all history is contemporary history.9 Through a detailed historiographical study of the industrial revolution Cannadine demonstrated that historians’ approaches were shaped by current ‘interests and anxieties’. Early histories written between the 1880s and 1920s, undertaken in the context of political debates about inequality and the social costs of industrialization, emphasized how workers were forced from the land into conditions of wage slavery and produced accounts of ‘rapacious landlords and conscienceless capitalists’ driven by doctrinaire forms of laissez-​ faireism.10 Fear of decline in the interwar period focused minds on cyclical fluctuations, investment and unemployment. Concerns about growth in the post-​war era raised questions about ‘triggers’ and enquiries into entrepreneurialism and technological development. Over the twentieth century, these debates fostered a dialogue between social and economic historians which grew to include political and imperial historians. The combination of approaches produced dynamic analyses in which historians debated the rate of growth, the nature of growth and the costs and benefits to society. Cannadine’s analysis demonstrated how a dialogue between social and economic (and political and imperial) historians produced big questions about change that drew on qualitative and quantitative evidence. This produced works of detail and synthesis that took up the question of modernity in studies of industrialization, manufacturing, class and politics. Similar trends were evident in the United States. The social and economic histories written in the mid-​twentieth century emphasized the move from merchant capitalism and agrarian capitalism to industrial capitalism and considered industrial organization, business leadership, trade unions and governance. As in the United Kingdom, historical narratives were framed by questions of transition and attempted explanations of causes and consequences.11 Theories were tested against ‘real phenomena’ such as wages, prices and investments, its categories of analysis were labour, industry and production and, in the context of the Cold War, class politics, people and the role of the state were central concerns.12 Histories of class and cotton mills seemed increasingly out of place in the 1980s, and the familiar categories of analysis seemed increasingly irrelevant

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with the decline of manufacturing, the rise of the consumer society and the expansion of the service sector. Post-​war studies of affluent workers, together with the rise of Thatcherism, severed easy associations between production, politics and class. From within social history, Patrick Joyce reminded historians that production was only one part of life and could not, as such, constitute a primary driver of consciousness and identity.13 Race and gender complicated histories of class, putting greater emphasis on extra-​economic aspects of self and social life. In the context of deindustrialization at home and the rise of identity politics, the explanatory power of Marxist analysis and other metanarratives were challenged and society was no longer accepted as a pre-​existing entity to be discovered and described. Writing in History Workshop Journal in the late 1990s Raphael Samuel noted that the labour process ‘has all but disappeared from our pages, while issues of representation and the politics of identity –​body politics in particular –​have increasingly come to the fore’.14 As he noted, the move corresponded with a shift away from the history of the nineteenth century, the period associated with Karl Marx, modernity and manufacturing. The new social and cultural history came together most forcibly in studies of consumption which transformed the field of economic and social history in the 1980s and 1990s.15 Grand narratives of transformation driven by economic histories of the industrial revolution were challenged. Instead, a new emphasis on continuities, combined and uneven development brought households, artisans and pre-industrial production into the foreground. Jan de Vries argued that an ‘industrious revolution’ was triggered by a desire for goods at the level of the household, which fuelled the self-​exploitation that drove growth in the pre-​industrial era.16 The influence of sociologists such as Walter Benjamin could be seen in studies showing how consumption reshaped landscapes and cities and transformed the urban experience with arcades and department stores.17 Women were liberated from histories of work and domesticity and thrust into the limelight as shoppers and flâneuse.18 Drawing on developments in cultural studies, historians explored the meaning of clothes and objects in fashioning the self and defining social groups. They brought psychology, emotions and feelings into the field not least through studies of desire, sensibility and advertising.19 These developments in social and cultural theory and economic history converged to present consumption rather than production as the driver of modernity. Histories of consumption fitted with the political imperatives of the late twentieth century. They provided new ways of imagining localities, the nation and the globe as a network of producers and consumers, albeit with what Jon Stobart and others have called social and geographical variation in ‘consumption regimes’.20 It provided a way of linking the everyday and the extraordinary, through accounts of provisioning and of display, or sustenance and spectacle, and of linking the local and global through international trade and the market for foreign goods. As Matthew Hilton

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has demonstrated, consumption was a political as well as a cultural phenomenon, a ‘third force’ able to free politics from the ‘stranglehold of selfinterested actions of employers and trade unions’.21 Sugar boycotts and co-​operative retail were examples of social and political movements built around consumption. With the cultural turn, consumption had the power to transform the self and social life and to reconfigure history and politics. Developments in the history of consumption corresponded with a convergence of interest in theories and methods adapted from anthropology, literary studies and cultural studies as new frameworks for analysis were sought. Rather than the ‘real phenomena’ of earlier social and economic histories, focus shifted to the signs and signifiers and the meanings made by people themselves in relation to things.22 The result was a ‘tidal wave of scholarship’ which used interdisciplinary methods to investigate culture and economy.23 This work went beyond consumption to produce an increasingly sophisticated understanding of markets as economic systems defined by specific social and cultural contexts, embedded in systems of meaning and connected by a multitude of financial, familial and associational networks.

The cultural turn and the rise of markets Understanding markets as embedded in existing practices meant challenging the argument that free-​market ideologies were imposed on the people through the ‘rapacious landlords and conscienceless capitalists’ of earlier social history.24 Writing in the 1980s, William Reddy distinguished between a market society, which he argued was a mirage, and a market culture, ‘the social order that emerged when the language of this mirage insinuated its assumptions into the everyday practice of European society’. The distinction was important because it acknowledged the possibility of a ‘disjuncture between perceptions and reality’.25 In France from the 1780s the language of the market permeated accounts of economic life. But, as Reddy argued, this did not make it real. Behind the words were struggles over meaning and practice through which French textile workers sought to preserve older traditions and values. As subsequent studies of work and society confirmed, ‘Custom and market formed a relationship  –​sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory.’26 Within this framework, negotiating the market and subverting its excesses replaced class struggle as the focus for social and economic history. Since the 1980s historians have presented numerous studies that demonstrate how people resisted marketization. Studies of wages and wage forms in particular have emphasized deep continuities in custom and practice. Wage labour expanded in early modern Europe but it did not replace other kinds of payment or exchanges for work.27 Customary wage forms and customary norms persisted in a number of trades in many regions and were often mapped onto new kinds of work. Wages were always a mixture of ‘cultural

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and economic baggage’, and attitudes to skills and aptitude were so deeply ingrained that they created value systems that resisted market forces.28 The gendering of wages in particular demonstrated that market logics were illusory. As Pam Sharpe showed, for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the wages of female agricultural workers in England stuck at 6d. a day regardless of price movements and the supply of labour.29 Studies of credit and debt have also emphasized how the embeddedness of markets in everyday life ensured deep continuities over time. Networks of credit depended on sociability as a mechanism for assessing trustworthiness and to build reciprocity into exchange. Craig Muldrew demonstrated that the ‘economy of obligation’ sustained social and cultural bonds in early modern England.30 James Carrier argued that consumer relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were more like a gift exchange: unable to calculate risk objectively, shopkeepers entered into a mutually beneficial ‘personal relationship of trust’.31 Any assumptions that the move to modern capitalist markets transposed local networks and personal forms of knowledge with rationalist modes of financial accounting were trounced in Margot Finn’s study of personal credit in eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century England.32 As Finn demonstrated, credit and debt continued to constitute a medley of obligations, legal requirements, customs, beliefs and practices. The law, rather than override this confusion, ‘repeatedly drew attention instead to the embedded nature of the individual’s economic activities’.33 These networks of trust could extend beyond the local to provide national even international systems of support. As Penelope Ismay’s study of friendly societies has shown, despite the emergence of a ‘society of strangers’ in the nineteenth century, friendly societies continued to provide support on the basis of trust and character, communicated through networks of acquaintances, rather than actuary science.34 Anthropological and cultural approaches to markets and culture such as these have transformed social and economic history. They have helped reconfigure the market as a habitus, produced through ideas and practices, customs and traditions. However, they are less adept at explaining how ideas such as the free market became hegemonic regardless of resistance and despite custom. It is here that literary analysis has been instrumental in showing how markets were products of knowledge.

Knowledge, finance and financialization The influence of Michel Foucault and the new historicism in the 1990s converged with an interest in the intellectual history of political economy to inform interdisciplinary approaches to markets.35 Political economy was presented as a narrative full of ‘tropes and tales’ and other imaginative literary devices intended to bring markets to life rather than provide a scientific description of the natural world.36 In turn, novels were explored for

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the way they normalized markets by incorporating descriptions of money and finance into stories. Traditional sources for economic history, such as account books and ledgers, wills and share certificates were opened up to textual analysis, and attention turned to the way they made the market and the economic actors that inhabited them. The literary turn in history reshaped understandings of the relationship between social forces and economic phenomena. Mary Poovey explored how new forms of knowledge associated with liberal modernity attempted to distinguish economic laws from moral considerations.37 Numbers and statistics were crucial to this task, often intended to replace subjective judgement with measurable facts though, despite the ideal of objectivity, quantification was rarely able to override personal experience or belief.38 In practice, as numerous historians have argued, there was little realistic chance of separating social, moral and economic reasoning in everyday life and, as Donald Winch has shown, even political economists like John Stuart Mill recognized this.39 However, as Poovey argued, languages of liberal modernity were intended to produce economic and social worlds, not simply to describe them. Cultures of bookkeeping and financial reporting that developed from at least the sixteenth century onwards made markets seem economically coherent and made finance and virtual property in stocks and shares appear tangible and real.40 These forms of writing aligned economics with science and, when combined with developments in publishing and accountancy, exercised a subtle philosophical shift which made the individual responsible for their own financial knowledge and their own economic well-​being. A burgeoning scholarship on the making of markets prompted a revival of interest in the financial revolution of the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century identified by Peter Dickson in 1967.41 Dickson’s history probed the rise of public credit and the building of institutions to facilitate it including the Bank of England, the National Debt and an expanded civil service. The financial revolution, it was argued, made the expansion of British interests possible by accessing the wealth of the middle classes through stocks and shares and using it to fund warfare and global trade. Since Dickson’s study, new directions in history and literature have probed the cultural work involved in forging this financial revolution and the production of a new language and epistemology intended to describe the workings of this new financial system to the middle class.42 Detailed studies of accounts and accountancy, banks and banking, statements and share registers showed how by the nineteenth century ‘befuddled Victorians gradually learned about the workings of their financial system through literature and financial journalism’.43 These studies have transformed social history by uncovering new collectivities and new historical actors. Share registers reveal a ‘nation of shareholders’ of which female investors and working-​ class savers were key constituents.44 Studies of investors and investment demonstrate how individuals learnt about markets and took up financial

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opportunities to secure their personal interests and the welfare of the family.45 Timothy Alborn has shown how a network of financial institutions, insurance companies, banks and building societies emerged in nineteenth-​ century Britain to cater to new constituencies, absorbing the capital of ‘the working man who paid a penny a week into his burial club as well as the aristocratic spinster who converted her inheritance into a comfortable living wage with help from a trust company’.46 The significance of women as investors has emerged as an important area of study highlighting the impact of gender on financial strategies.47 By tracing investments connections can be made between everyday family life and the public world of finance and politics. Histories of finance have served to challenge any easy distinction between market rationality in financial decision-​making and the emotional life of family and community. Histories of bubbles and crashes have further emphasized the emotional aspects of markets and the ‘animal spirits’ that motivate investors.48 Contemporaries were aware that numbers could lie and that people could cheat the figures to mislead. The similarities between gambling, speculation and investment were common tropes in Victorian writing, appearing in sermons, novels and newspapers and in the evidence given in the criminal courts that investigated bankruptcy. Contemporaries struggled to draw the line between fair enterprise, legitimate commerce and illegitimate gambling as stock exchanges and bucket shops flourished in the late nineteenth century.49 James Taylor’s study of joint-​stock enterprise and company fraud in the nineteenth century demonstrates how difficult it was for the Victorian public to distinguish the criminal fraudster from the over-​optimistic entrepreneur.50 There was great uncertainty about who was responsible for policing the market, but the process of working it out in courts, newspapers and official enquiries helped give concrete form to virtual property and financial markets. Since the cultural turn, historians have shown how the production and circulation of knowledge about markets and the growth of consumption fuelled the expansion of local and global trade and produced an imagined society ‘penetrated . . . by a system of financial relationships’.51 However this picture is not without problems. The turn away from economic transformation and social structures towards networks and flows, everyday exchanges, custom and resistance allows markets to permeate social life without making any lasting impression, a trend that, as Sewell has argued, shares ‘a certain logic with the processes of deregulation and ever-​rising economic flexibility characteristic of contemporary capitalism’.52 As a result, the structuring effects of markets over time are easy to overlook.53 If, as Benedetto Croce argued, all history is about the present, there is now a need to ask questions about the causes of the entrenched inequalities of the twenty-​first century. The historical imperative is best illustrated by the impact of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-​First Century.54 Piketty’s detailed empirical enquiry into the distribution of wealth over the

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previous two centuries demonstrates how social and political forces have shaped and continue to shape the distribution of wealth. As private returns on property and land outstrip the rate of growth entrepreneurs become rentiers and mobility is thwarted as inheritance becomes the primary way that capital is circulated.55 The result is a return to levels of inequality of the early twentieth century and the conclusion that the more equal years of 1918 to 1970 were the product of the levelling effects of war and social welfare policies. However, the real significance of Piketty’s study is to be found in its method.56 His study shows the importance of understanding both long-​term developments and specific historical contexts in tracing the social and political forces that shape the movement of capital over time. His work is a challenge to orthodox economists who have come to rely on mathematical models to explain the distribution of resources, but it is also a challenge to social and cultural historians, reminding them that the causes and consequences of inequality and the history of wealth distribution require explanation.

New directions and digital tools New directions are adapting the sources and methods of economic and cultural history to take up questions about the distribution of power and resources. Two trends in particular are noticeable. Firstly, there are studies which make use of digital technologies to trace the movement of capital over time and space. Benefiting from the practice of accounting for one’s money and one’s self that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, projects have produced data sets using bills, share registers and life-​writing to trace interactions between people and markets. This combination of micro-​ and macrohistories is used to explore the impact of industrialization and globalization on individuals and social groups at one time and over time. The second trend adapts the cultural turn to produce new approaches to old questions of power and materiality by looking at how ideas about markets are shaped into capitalism’s infrastructure. Both approaches demonstrate how markets and cultures are embodied or internalized by individuals and, as a result, how they are able to transform social and political life. The relationship between money, markets and power is most clearly illustrated in the history of slavery. Studies have shown the physical and representational scars left by slavery in racist ideologies, dislocation and in the contrasting economies of slave-​owning and ex-​slave communities.57 More recently, attention has turned to the legacy for slave owners. The Legacies of British Slave Ownership project has produced a searchable database of slave ownership from the claims for compensation made after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833.58 Studies of the data reveal that slave ownership went deep into the British Isles and included businessmen and financiers, landed families and London gentry as well as widows

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and clergymen. Half the compensation awarded to slave owners stayed in Britain, some of it used to build country houses and some to invest in business.59 By linking money to people and places, the project suggests there is more to be learned about the way power and money circulate over time and space and within groups to create social classes and political elites. The importance of geography and the movement of capital to social formations are further demonstrated in projects that have tracked the ownership and transfer of shares over time. One study, drawing on interdisciplinary expertise from geography, history and accountancy, has analysed the records of 38,000 individual shareholders in England and Wales between 1870 and 1935 to explore the changing social composition of shareholders and the relationship between location, investment and risk. By the late nineteenth century a growing proportion of the British population had stocks and shares and, as financial information and literacy improved, the geography of shareholding changed.60 There was a slow drift of investment away from local to global companies via the city of London and a general tendency for companies to have shareholders that were more geographically dispersed. Together with related studies that delve deeper into individual share portfolios and the inheritance strategies of middle-​class families, the framework is provided for a better understanding of how wealth moves between and across families and businesses in the British Isles and overseas.61 From a different perspective, Jane Humphries has also combined macro-​ and microhistory in her study of Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution.62 As discussed by Penny Summerfield in the present volume, Humphries used more than 600 autobiographies by working men to examine how meanings of work changed over a life course and the economic impact of child labour on household finances, regional labour markets and industrial development. As Humphries shows, reading a large number of sources can reveal patterns and flows which fit with economic arguments made by historians such as Katrina Honeyman.63 For example, the sons of tradesmen and service workers started work later than the sons of domestic outworkers and casual labourers throughout the nineteenth century. In other sectors the impact of deskilling can be seen. The sons of artisans experienced a decline in the age at which they started work in the classic period of industrialization, from 1791 to 1820, confirming the impact of competition on trade and on the lives of working people. These directions show the benefits of combining macro-​and microanalysis, using large data sets as a framework for investigating individual case studies. This produces accounts of everyday life that also show the deep structures that shape history. These studies also indicate that some of the questions that occupied previous generations of social and economic historians before the cultural turn still demand consideration. The Legacies of British Slave Ownership project speaks directly to the Eric Williams thesis and debates about the links between slavery, the slave trade and the industrial revolution in the British Isles.64 Detailed investigations of shareholding

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and inheritance raise questions about the nature of wealth, property and inheritance and should revive debates about investment and British industry and, in particular, whether a preference for overseas shares in the early twentieth century starved local firms of capital.65 Finally, Humphries’s detailed study of child labour renews questions about standards of living, the causes of the industrial revolution and the consequences for working people. These studies also suggest that the organization of the economy shapes the formation of social groups, be they composed of slave owners, working families or the ‘nation of shareholders’. Though there can be no return to the kind of social history practiced before the cultural turn, there are questions still to answer about the way work and wealth structure social and political life over generations.66

An environmental turn in the material turn We return again to the vexing paradox at the heart of history after the cultural turn. New directions show the structuring effects of wealth on society as the analytical tools for assessing them have been shorn of power. As Sewell has said, ‘during the very period when historians have gleefully cast aside the notion of structural determination, the shape of our own social world has been fundamentally transformed by changes in the structures of world capitalism’.67 The challenge for historians is to find approaches to the social and the economic that retain the subtleties and sophistication of the cultural turn, the recognition that power is not a thing or society a pre-​existing entity, and one that recognizes the proliferating uncertainties of markets and the multiple possibilities for people to shape their own life while, at the same time, accounting for the structuring effects of capital on people and places. There are possibilities to be found in the material turn. The material turn in economic and social history has focused primarily on the processes involved in ordering and structuring capital; facilitating the movement of money, people and goods; and, in so doing, transforming landscapes and mentalities. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis charted the flow of commodities between Chicago and its ‘rural hinterland’ in the late nineteenth century through the railway infrastructure put in place to move goods such as grain, meat and wood. As he noted, railways did not just master time and geography. The masses of capital needed to build them required new business forms to ensure that moving things made a profit. Railways were, Cronon argued, the ‘chief device for introducing a new capitalist logic to the geography of the Great West’.68 Other studies explore the way ideas are made material and how material things create mentalities. For example, Miles Ogborn’s study of the East India Company has examined how writing practices worked out the logic of mercantile capitalism and devised systems for trading cloth and other goods from the Indian subcontinent.69 This study of writing shows how abstract ideas about markets are made real through

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processes of description, ordering and through the production of regulations which are imprinted on the landscape in roads, railways, warehouses and factories. The material turn, then, reminds historians that markets are fundamentally about people, the environment and access to resources. In turn, this relationship demands adaptive political economies, ones than can describe what Emma Rothschild refers to as the interplay between political, economic, cultural and biological forces.70 Rothschild has traced such interplay in twentieth-​century debates between conservationists and free market libertarians on sustainability which, as she shows, hinged on the way natural resources are incorporated into economic models. Positions in the debate depended on how value was attributed to natural resources, whether exchange value at a given time was taken as the norm, or whether other factors were taken into account such as future use and the health, happiness and well-​being of communities. Rothschild noted how the conservationists, in their defence of nature as a resource for the future, made it part of a debate about markets and value: resistance to the marketization of nature nevertheless put nature in a market framework. The environmental turn within the material turn shows that political economies are not scientific and static. They have over time been adapted to incorporate new commodities and develop systems of accounting for nature and natural resources, processes which demand a dialogue, even a struggle, with extra-​economic ways of viewing the world. Harriet Ritvo traced one such struggle in the history of the first environmental movement, organized to resist Manchester City Council’s plan to buy Thirlmere Lake in the 1870s, convert it to a dam and pipe the water to the labouring population of Manchester.71 The ensuing battle pitted those wanting to preserve nature against those wanting to preserve the productivity of Manchester’s cotton industry. Those who wanted to protect Thirlmere described the lakes as a resource that belonged to the present and future nation and as an ecosystem in which preservation of a part was essential to the preservation of the whole. Those who supported the dam emphasized national prosperity and the need for clean water to ensure the productivity and civility of the working class. The dam was built and the first water from Thirlmere was pumped into Manchester in 1895, but the debate has carried on in different contexts. As Ritvo argues, ‘Increasing human population, heightened individual expectations, and national economies based on constant growth make it unlikely that these pressures will become less intense any time soon.’72 These debates about markets and the environment demonstrate the diversity of political economies and the multiple ways that people sustain, produce and exchange. They show that economics can be rediscovered as a complex mixture of deductive and inductive reasoning that describes and prescribes a series of transactions and that moves constantly between morality, ethics and scientific reasoning in response to current concerns. It suggests

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that historians of markets and culture need to work with a broader political economy, one that can incorporate the environment and politics and account for competing value systems.

A return to work? The cultural turn and the material turn have transformed histories of markets and culture by opening up the interaction between ideas, things, practices, people and policies to analysis. There is, however, a big part of the picture missing:  unemployment, underemployment and work. The turn from production and labour fits with the increasingly amorphous nature of work in later capitalism. The shift in manufacturing from textiles and coal to chemicals, electrical engineering and information technologies and the growing importance of the capital goods, financial and service sectors have changed the nature of work. In a corresponding move, business forms have emerged in which ownership of companies is globally dispersed and work subcontracted in complex chains of production. These shifts obscure the difference between production and consumption and make work and workers difficult to find in the archive. It is no surprise that histories of capitalism have shifted the focus from manufacturing, trade unions and workers to mortgages, shares, stocks and investments. Nevertheless these same approaches, with a slight shift in emphasis, can offer a way into histories that link production, consumption and finance. Putting work back into histories of markets and culture shows how different values compete and how different kinds of modernity exist in different parts of economies. David Harvey has argued for the need to trace the link between ‘concrete labors occurring in particular places and time’ and the ‘measured value of that labor arrived at through processes of exchange, commodification, monetization, and, of course, the circulation and accumulation of capital’.73 Following commodity chains re-​establishes the links between finance and workers and can show how the organization of credit, savings and investment shapes work and how stockbrokers and bankers end up in command and control of labour in far-​flung places. Such analysis shows how modern forms of business and finance perpetuate pre-​industrial forms of labour in sweatshops. There is nothing new in this combination of forces. For example, slavery was the antithesis of modern economic organization: it negated modern concepts of contract and, in the Southern states of the United States, directed investment away from industrial and agricultural modernization. However, at the same time, slave economies fostered new kinds of capitalist modernity, such as the creation of mortgages and credit systems to facilitate the exchange of land, slaves and commodities. By integrating histories of labour, finance and consumption, the coexistence of competing logics of freedom and choice, constraints and limitations can be better understood.

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Studying the link between production and consumption is a well-​ established technique in social and economic history. De Vries’s concept of industrious production has transformed our understanding of economies with the desire for goods seen as providing the dynamics for industrial development  –​a ‘virtuous circle of spending and earning’.74 But, as Humphries and others have noted, there is something odd in this. Histories of consumption point to a desire for goods as a driver of industry resulting in the democratization of luxury. But the historical picture of mass consumption presented does not fit with evidence of household poverty and low living standards.75 However, approaches to production and consumption which focus on the organization of markets, reveal how improved prosperity and entrenched poverty are co-​determined. For example, as Giorgio Riello has shown, small producers in eighteenth-​century London were able to access enough credit from friends and associates to set up production at home or in small workshops.76 Their limited overheads and closeness to the world of consumption meant they were well positioned to respond quickly to changes in fashion. At the same time, low set-​up costs and cheap credit meant the world of manufacturing was highly competitive and fast-​moving, subject to subcontracting, undercutting and instability. This pre-​industrial system of production provided work for a mass of workers in London for over a century and was able to compete with modern factory-​based production to provide consumer goods to a growing market, but it also produced poverty wages and sweated labour.77 These apparent conundrums are the product of economic systems built on credit and consumption in social worlds that preach work, thrift, parsimony and saving. Even if Samuel Smiles’s moral certitude on the need for economic rectitude was exceptional in the nineteenth century, as Margot Finn claims, the poor law enshrined the principle of living within one’s means and saving for the future as an economy built on consumption was emerging.78 The rise of mass consumer society in the twentieth century, together with a service economy built on spending and dependent on credit, corresponded with uncertain attitudes to debt to the extent that furniture bought on hire purchase was delivered in plain vans so as not to shame the family.79 Such contradictions hint at the tensions between economic rationalities, cultural values and social systems that were acutely observed by Charles Booth in his enquiries into London’s manufacturing economy in the late nineteenth century. Booth struggled to understand why impoverished workers made useless objects and ornaments at home to hawk in the street and, more importantly, why equally poor workers bought them.80 He realized such a system created poverty through ‘Janus faced cheapness’, but, at the same time, he was aware that in a world of limited choices, such a market created work, kept money circulating and produced a modicum of pleasure. Integrated histories of work, consumption and finance show how these contradictions are not the unforeseen consequences of capitalism but its ‘very foundation’.81

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Conclusion It would be remiss to finish a chapter on markets and culture without saying something about class. As is clear, consumption and finance obscure and complicate class, but they do not entirely eradicate it. As one study of recent US history argues, class exists as a ghost, part of a political and cultural consciousness, said not to exist but evident in health and education systems, made concrete in access to resources, skills and work.82 Or, as Jameson has argued, class is now ‘a kind of parallax’ the ‘absent center of a multiple set of incompatible approaches’.83 Clearly, languages of social and economic differentiation need updating to accommodate developments in histories of markets and cultures. By broadening concepts of production to incorporate the reproduction of life through education, skills, work and stability, class can be considered as a set of allegiances and experiences that people share at different stages. Class, then, is structuring and adaptive, complicated by gender and race, by different desires and interests, but no less real for it. As the material turn shows, the process of labelling is part of the process of taking control and establishing order. Social and cultural historians then need to adapt methods, approaches and labels to explain and describe capital and its social formations over time. Markets can then be seen as systems in permanent flux that, at the same time, produce regularities, habits and sedimentations, some of which become entrenched and ossified over time producing both mobility and wealth, stagnation and poverty. Perhaps, as Jameson claims, it requires us to see markets as riddles to be solved rather than networks and flows to be described.84

NOTES 1 See the British Academy roundtable discussion on the crash of 2008, http://​ www.britac.ac.uk/​global-​financial-​crisis-​why-​didnt-​anybody-​notice [accessed 18 January 2017]. 2 Business history has been particularly good at making this point; see Aeron Hunt, Personal Business: Character and Commerce in Victorian Literature and Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014); Andrew Popp, Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012); Timothy Alborn, Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800–​1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 3 Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke, introduction to Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke (eds), Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (London: Sage, 2002), p. 1. 4 Paul Johnson, Making the Market: Victorian Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 22.

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5 Frederic Jameson, Representing Capital (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 4–​5. 6 Ibid., p. 4. 7 Daniel Miller ‘The Unintended Political Economy’, in du Gay and Pryke (eds), Cultural Economy, pp. 175–​83. 8 William Sewell Jr, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 53. 9 Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1941); David Cannadine, ‘The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880–​1980,’ Past and Present 103 (1984): pp. 131–​72. 10 Cannadine, ‘The Present and the Past’, pp. 135, 171. 11 For an overview of US history writing, see Jeffrey Sklansky, ‘Labor, Money, and the Financial Turn in the History of Capitalism’, Labor: Studies in Working-​ Class History of the Americas 11 (2014): pp. 23–​46. 12 See John Saville, ‘A Comment on Professor Rostow’s British Economy in the Nineteenth Century’, Past and Present 6 (1954): pp. 66–​84, here p. 67. 13 Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, c.1848–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 90. 14 Raphael Samuel, ‘Reading the Signs’, History Workshop Journal 83 (1991): pp. 88–​109, here p. 97. 15 For a recent overview, see Frank Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics’, Journal of British Studies 48 (2009): pp. 283–​307. 16 Jan de Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, Journal of Economic History 53 (1994): pp. 249–​70. 17 See Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain (eds), Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–​1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). 18 See Mica Nava, ‘Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store’, in Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (eds), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London: Routledge, 1996); Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women and the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal 36 (1993): pp. 383–​414. 19 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–​1914 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press 1990). 20 Jon Stobart, Andrew Hann and Victoria Morgan, Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, 1680–​1830 (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 9. 21 Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-​Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 4–​14. 22 Sewell, Logics of History, p. 42.

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23 Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, introduction to Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee (eds), The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 2. 24 Cannadine, ‘The Present and the Past’, p. 145. 25 William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–​1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 1–​2. 26 Joyce, Visions of the People, p. 90. 27 See, for example, Craig Muldrew and Steven King, ‘Cash, Wages and the Economy of Makeshifts in England, 1650–​1800’, in Peter Scholliers and Leonard Schwarz (eds), Experiencing Wages: Social and Cultural Aspects of Wage Forms in Europe since 1500 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), pp. 155–​79. 28 Peter Scholliers and Leonard Schwarz, ‘The Wage in Europe since the Sixteenth Century’, in Scholliers and Schwarz (eds), Experiencing Wages, p. 10; Johnson, Making the Market, p. 90. 29 Pam Sharpe, ‘The Female Labour Market in English Agriculture in the Industrial Revolution: Expansion or Contraction?,’ Agricultural History Review 47 (1999): pp. 11–​81. There is a vast literature of the gendering of pay in the nineteenth century; for an overview, see Pam Sharpe (ed.), Women’s Work: The English Experience 1650–​1914 (London: Bloomsbury, 1999). 30 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 1998). 31 James Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995), p. 93. 32 Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 33 Ibid., p. 2. 34 Penelope Ismay, ‘Between Providence and Risk: Odd Fellows, Benevolence and the Social Limits of Actuarial Science, 1820s–​1880s,’ Past and Present 226 (2015): pp. 115–​47. On the ‘society of strangers’, see James Vernon, Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 35 See, for example, Osteen and Woodmansee (eds), New Economic Criticism. 36 Deirdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 37 Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–​1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 38 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2007); Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 39 Donald Winch, Wealth and Life: Essays in the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1848–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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40 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact. Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 41 Peter Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–​1756 (London: MacMillan, 1967). 42 Colin Nicolson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-​Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 43 Cannon Schmitt, Nancy Henry and Anjali Arondekar, ‘Introduction: Victorian Investments’, Victorian Studies 45 (2002): pp. 7–​16, here p. 8. 44 See Janette Rutterford et al., ‘Who Comprised the Nation of Shareholders? Gender and Investment in Great Britain, c. 1870–​1935’, Economic History Review 64 (2011): pp. 157–​87. 45 David Green et al. (eds), Men, Women and Money: Perspectives on Gender, Wealth and Investment, 1850–​1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 46 Timothy Alborn, ‘The First Fund Managers: Life Insurance Bonuses in Victorian Britain,’ Victorian Studies 45 (2002): pp. 65–​92, here p. 65. 47 Anne Laurence, Josephine Maltby and Janette Rutterford, Women and Their Money 1700–​1950: Essays on Women and Finance (London: Routledge, 2009). 48 The term was originally used by John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936; New Delhi: Atlantic, 2008), pp. 144–​5. 49 David Itzkowitz, ‘Fair Enterprise or Extravagant Speculation: Investment, Speculation and Gambling in Victorian England,’ Victorian Studies 45 (2002): pp. 121–​47. 50 James Taylor, Boardroom Scandal: The Criminalization of Company Fraud in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 51 Mary Poovey. ‘Writing about Finance in Victorian England: Disclosure and Secrecy in the Culture of Investment,’ Victorian Studies 45 (2002): pp. 17–​41. 52 Sewell, Logics of History, p. 72. 53 Per H. Hansen, ‘From Finance Capitalism to Financialization: A Cultural and Narrative Perspective on 150 years of Financial History,’ Enterprise & Society 15 (2014): pp. 605–​42; Sklansky, ‘Labor’, p. 43. 54 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-​First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). 55 Ibid., p. 571. 56 See Jane Humphries, ‘Capital in the Twenty-​first Century,’ Feminist Economics 21 (2014), pp. 164–​73.

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57 See Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman (eds), British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 58 See ‘Legacies of British Slave-​ownership’, https://​www.ucl.ac.uk/​lbs/​ [accessed 28 October 2016]. 59 Catherine Hall et al., Legacies of British Slave-​Ownership, Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 60 Rutterford et al., ‘Who Comprised the Nation of Shareholders?’ p. 180. 61 History of Wealth Project, https://​historyofwealth.org/​ [accessed 28/​10/​2016]. 62 Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 63 Katrina Honeyman, Child Workers in England, 1780–​1820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 64 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). 65 John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: James Nisbett, 1902); Peter Cain and A. Hopkins, ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas II: New Imperialism, 1850–​1945,’ Economic History Review 40 (1987): pp. 1–​27. 66 Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 13–​14. 67 Sewell, Logics of History, pp. 49, 51 and 76. 68 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991) p. 84. See also Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor. Germany and Britain, 1640–​1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 69 Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 70 Emma Rothschild, ‘Maintaining (Environmental) Capital Intact,’ Modern Intellectual History 8 (2011): pp. 193–​212. 71 Harriet Ritvo, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 72 Harriet Ritvo, ‘Fighting for Thirlmere –​The Roots of Environmentalism,’ Science 300 (2003), pp. 1510–​11. 73 David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 16. 74 Sara Horrell, Jane Humphries and Ken Sneath, ‘Consumption Conundrums Unravelled’, Economic History Review 68 (2015): pp. 830–​57. 75 Horrell, Humphries and Sneath, ‘Consumption Conundrums Unravelled’, p. 831.

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76 Giorgio Riello, ‘Boundless Competition: Subcontracting and the London Economy in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Enterprise & Society 13 (2012): pp. 504–​37. 77 Donna Loftus, ‘Investigating Work in Late Nineteenth-​century London,’ History Workshop Journal 71 (2011): pp. 173–​93. 78 Finn, Character of Credit, p. 321. 79 Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty First (London: Penguin, 2016), pp. 405–40. 80 Loftus, ‘Investigating Work’, p. 188. 81 Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) p. 8; see also, Sklansky, ‘Labor’, p. 42. 82 Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works: Power and Social Movement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) pp. 30–​7. 83 Jameson, Representing Capital, p. 7. 84 Ibid., p. 3.

Key texts Alborn, T. Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800–​1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Finn, M. The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–​1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Green, G., G. Maltby, A. Owens and J. Rutterford (eds). Men, Women and Money: Perspectives on Gender, Wealth and Investment, 1850–​1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Hall, C., K. McClelland, N. Draper, K. Donington and R. Lang. Legacies of British Slave-​Ownership, Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Hilton, M. Consumerism in Twentieth-​Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jameson, F. Representing Capital. London: Verso, 2011. Johnson, P. Making the Market: Victorian Origins of Corporate Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Lipartito, K. ‘Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism’, American Historical Review 121 (2016): pp. 101–​39. Piketty, T. Capital in the Twenty-​First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Taylor, J. Creating Capitalism: Joint-​Stock Enterprise in British Politics and Culture 1800–​1870. London: Boydell and Brewer, 2006. Trentmann, F. Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty First. London: Penguin, 2016, pp. 405–40.

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CHAPTER SIX

Visual and material cultures Jennifer Tucker

I had monuments made of bronze, lapis lazuli alabaster . . . and white limestone . . . and inscriptions of baked clay . . . I deposited them in the foundations and left them for future times. ESARHADDON,

king of Assyria, c. seventh century BCE1

Introduction When the astrophysicist Carl Sagan and his colleagues were invited to assemble the ‘Golden Record’, a collection of sounds, diagrams and images, for the Voyager II mission in 1977, they reached for inspiration to Esarhaddon, king of Assyria from 681 to 669 BCE, best known for rebuilding Babylon. Esarhaddon wrote his own praises into the bricks and stones of the city for posterity. Likewise, Sagan and his team sought to assemble as accurate a representation of the evolution of the human and natural environment on earth as possible in a collection of 118 images. The ‘Golden Record’ was launched into interstellar space to ‘appeal to and expand the human spirit, and to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence a welcome expectation of mankind’2 (Figure 6.1). Visual materials excite viewers’ imagination about the past and also raise the question of how these materials will be viewed in the future. In assembling an archive, whether for a research project or for an institution, the question remains: why do we select this image and what message is being sent to those in the future who might study it?3 Most of the vast sea of

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F I G U R E  6 .1   The ‘Golden Record’, launched on Voyager 1 and 2, 1977. Courtesy of NASA/​JPL-​Caltech. images produced during the course of human history have been lost or forgotten. A small number has been excavated from obscurity and woven into historical accounts as documents of the past: the earliest surviving illuminated scriptures, early modern Japanese picture scrolls, sixteenth-​century Aztec historical codices, history paintings, photo histories of war and industrial progress, 1950s Biblical epic films, passport photos, illustrated magazines and newspapers, and twentieth-​century advertisements and political posters. All of these and other objects, separated from each other by time and space, share a common history that links people and images.4 Recent years have seen an explosion of work in visual studies –​some of it within social and cultural history, and much of it in cognate disciplines such as art history, history of science, visual sociology and visual anthropology.5 While visual studies is often thought of as belonging to art history, in reality the field is conceptually, philosophically, methodologically and theoretically diverse. The field involves the study of the relationship of images and the world –​and of images in relation to other images. It encompasses the whole range of visuality in the contemporary world, from high art and pop culture, from advertising to the presentation of visual data in fields such as science and law.6 This chapter considers both what historians might learn from visual culture, and what students of visual culture might learn from the diversity of historians’ approaches. The first section traces some of the key ideas associated with the rise of visual studies as an interdisciplinary field of study

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since the 1970s. By tracing the theoretical foundations of visual studies and considering new critical frames of analysis in recent research, it stresses the need for more historical research using visual methods. The second section maps some of the different methods and approaches that social and cultural historians use to interpret images and their associated practices. The last section samples some of the new research directions in visual and material studies and asks, How are visual economies and our understanding of the world changing? What are some of the challenges facing social and cultural historians in the future?

Visual studies The past 100 years saw the rise of an increasingly diverse range of analytical methods that may be used to approach visual and material objects in history, offering historians many new ways of thinking about the expanding role of images in people’s daily lives and historical imagination.7 The 1960s and 1970s were especially formative in constituting the value of the study of art in social history and that of photography for cultural history.8 The Marxist literary critic and art historian John Berger redefined the study of art in terms that related to everyday life and contemporary political values with his book Ways of Seeing. The book project began in 1972 as a BBC four-​part television series that offered a counterview to the traditional vision of art history presented in an earlier BBC series, Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969). Berger argued against the linear sequencing favoured by historians of art and photography and instead explored the hidden ideologies in visual images.9 ‘The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled’, he stated, adding, ‘The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.’10 The inherent interdisciplinarity of visual studies was evident from the start.11 In 1972, the publication of art historian Michael Baxandall’s influential Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-​Century Italy introduced the notion of ‘the period eye’, the idea that people within a culture share experiences and ways of thinking that influence how they perceive images, and what visual practices are attractive at any particular time.12 Other writings expanded the debate over what some critics began to call the ‘visual grammar’ or the ‘ethics of seeing’. Susan Sontag, in On Photography, published in 1977 (the same year that the journal History of Photography first appeared), examined the myriad ‘problems, aesthetic and moral, posed by the omnipresence of photographed images’.13 The idea of an ‘anthology of images’ –​ of the rapid proliferation of images that claimed attention –​resonated in a society that was experiencing the proliferation of images through the expansion of television and advertising, and coincided with the growth of picture libraries that were making image-​based material accessible to historians as never before.

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The concept of art as an institution permitted scholars like Baxandall to integrate social, cultural and visual analysis in a way that showed not only how visual art was socially constructed but also how it played an active role in the construction of social orders on a variety of levels, from the interaction order to larger social structures. British sociologist Stuart Hall defined culture as ‘not so much a set of things –​novels and paintings or TV programmes or comics –​as a process, a set of practices’14 –​through which individuals and groups came to make sense of those things.15 Hall criticized historians and others for the relative neglect of visual artefacts as historical sources and challenged the privileging of linguistic models in the study of representation. Drawing on the work of art historian John Tagg and others, he argued that it made ‘no sense’ to speak of the ‘meaning of photography’ without also considering ‘the ways in which the meanings and uses of photography are regulated by the formats and institutions of production, distribution and consumption (be they magazines or newspapers, the advertising and publicity industries, camera manufacturers –​or other socially organized relations such as the family)’.16 The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in Photography: A Middle-​Brow Art (first published in French in 1965), asked why people took to photography and other forms of art, arguing that social practices of making, and viewing art, were powerfully shaped, if not dictated, by social identities, even though the everyday practice of photography may seem to be spontaneous and highly personal.17 The sociologist Howard S. Becker, in his book Art Worlds (1982), treated art as a form of labour (‘the work some people do’), while Janet Wolff’s book, The Social Production of Art (1981), became a leading text in cultural studies.18 New developments in post-​ structuralist and postmodern theory and other fields in the 1980s shifted the framing of visual studies away from ‘ideology’ and towards the study of identities and their formation, with particular regard to labour, gender, sexuality and ethnicity and their associated epistemologies and practices.19 W.  J. T.  Mitchell’s writings attend to patterns in the way that people talked about images, reflecting their changing values.20 In 1988, Hayden White coined the term ‘historiophoty’ to describe the ways in which the ‘representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse’ intersected and overlapped; to think about how to think about history was also to think about images.21 Vision itself was shown to have an epistemological history.22 Jonathan Crary returned to Michel Foucault’s idea in Discipline and Punish of the opposition of surveillance and spectacle, and was interested in ‘the new forms by which vision itself became a kind of discipline or mode of work’.23 Crary proposed in 1990 that the ‘standardization of visual imagery in the nineteenth century must be seen not simply as part of new forms of mechanized reproduction but in relation to a broader process of normalization and subjection of the observer’.24 This mode of analysis has been effective at examining the powerful discourses that produce the objects and subject positions associated with

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various institutions. It is part of a wider study that focuses on how images are articulated within sites of institutional power (such as prisons, schools, hospitals, asylums, and mass media), as well as are agents of bourgeois norms (some historians put family portraits in this category).25 Efforts around this time to historicize vision and visuality became seen as crucial to the transformation of modern society and its periodizations.26 In 1993, historian Martin Jay coined the term ‘ocularcentrism’ to denote the centrality of vision to the construction of social life in contemporary Western societies.27 Some critics pointed to changes in the meaning of the visual as important markers in the shifts in historical periods, from ‘premodernity’ to ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’.28 It has been argued, for example, both that ‘a culture that became “more literate” also became more visual as word and image generated’ spectacular realities, and that intellectual experience between the 1430s and the 1670s was marked not by ocular hegemony but by intense visual crisis, given that the act of looking was perceived by viewers as almost never straightforward and rarely to be trusted.29 Given the diverse range of analytical methods used to approach the study of images, many of the scholarly disputes about visual culture today are not about the content of particular objects; rather, they may be better understood as disputes over which sites and modalities of images are most important to study how and why, that is, over where, precisely, to place the emphasis: ‘how an image is made, what it looks like and how it is seen are the four crucial ways in which an image becomes culturally meaningful’.30 As Gillian Rose perceptively suggests in Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Research with Visual Materials, the large body of work exploring the meanings of visual images suggests that there are at least four sites at which their meanings are made: ‘the site of production, which is where an image is made; the site of the image itself, which is its visual content; and the site where the image encounters its spectators or users’, or its ‘audiencing’31 (Figure 6.2). These sites and modalities are in practice often hard to differentiate from each other; nevertheless, they help us grasp the complexity and richness of meaning in visual images and discourses around them. A visual history that incorporates the ‘site of production’ as a site of analysis, for example, may consider how the technologies used in the making of an image helped shape its form, meaning and effect.32 It might extend to the examination of the social production of images in the broadest sense, such as research on why producers of images might have made them, how social identities were constituted and why technological or economic circumstances were important.33 Researchers interested in finding out how the meaning of images was made historically at the ‘site of the image’ might focus, furthermore, on issues of compositionality (such as the organization of looks in a painting or photograph) or on the effects of images such as how people experience them in sensory, embodied and experiential ways. What is being shown, what are the components of the image and how and why are they arranged, and what do they signify? What knowledge is included in (and excluded by) the

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F I G U R E 6 .2   ‘Sites and Modalities for Interpreting Visual Materials’, in Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 4th edition (London: Sage Publications, 2016), p. 25, reproduced with permission of Gillian Rose and Sage Publications. representation? Does the image or set of images belong to a particular genre (is it a documentary, landscape, portrait, news illustration)? The recovery of images as historical sources may be advanced by considering how meanings of images were renegotiated, rejected (or accepted) by viewers: how actively did audiences engage with the image, is there evidence about how it was discussed and circulated, and did those audiences differ from each other, for example, in terms of class, gender, race or sexuality?34 Finally, a fourth site or ‘route’, that of circulation, gives a framework for introducing debates about the patterns and power relations that structure the flows of visual information across a variety of media and their platforms. By asking how they structure certain forms of agency while mitigating against others, this framework offers a fruitful mode of enquiry for historians working on all

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time periods, in particular those working on contemporary history and with digital visual culture and platforms.35 By highlighting a variety of different frameworks and debates about the visual across multiple disciplines, Rose’s Visual Methodologies both offers up a range of new tools for visual analysis and reminds us about the extraordinary richness and wide scope of visual studies as a field and the applicability of different theories. For example, Roland Barthes, author of Camera Lucida (1980), contributed to the invention of a new critical vocabulary for describing the impact of photographic images on people’s thoughts and emotions. As a semiologist, he analysed the site of the image brilliantly, yet his framework is less strong on the social practices that do things with images (where Becker and ethnography are more effective). Different research questions will call for different frameworks and approaches.

Visual history In an interview in the first issue of the Journal of Visual Culture, published in 2002, the historian Martin Jay described October’s ‘Visual Culture Questionnaire’ of 1996 as a ‘watershed’ moment, in which advocates of visual culture extended its scope beyond the concerns of art history.36 Yet interest in the visual among social and cultural historians had, by this time, already taken hold. For practicing historians, what has the rise in visual studies meant for historical methods and even for the question of history itself? How have historians worked with images? With the rise of social and cultural history in the 1970s many historians came to understand social processes and identities as deeply engaged with visual and material practices. ‘Living history’ was on the rise –​and the ‘pictorial turn’ coincided with an upsurge of interest in local history –​with local libraries and archives being a rich source of untapped images.37 The British Marxist social historian Raphael Samuel recalled his ‘shock’ at seeing his first nineteenth-​ century photograph at a seminar on alternative history in Oxford in 1965: Somebody brought in some mug-​shots of nineteenth-​century convicts which Keith Thomas had come upon by chance in the Bedfordshire County Records Office. The faces which stared out at us were startlingly modern, with nothing except for the captions –​and the criminal record –​ to indicate that they belonged to the nineteenth century rather than our own.38 Historians began experimenting with new frameworks of analysis, developing them in dialogue with anthropological studies of culture and society and debating the meaning of images that had previously been ‘hidden from history’. Explaining the pull of visual sources for social historians, Samuel proposed that

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for new-​wave social history as a whole, the discovery of photography was overdetermined and it is not surprising that it was so widely and so immediately taken up. It corresponded to the search for ‘human’ documents –​one of the watchwords of ‘living history’, then as now. It also seemed to answer to our insatiable appetite for ‘immediacy’, allowing us to become literally, as well as metaphorically, eyewitnesses to the historical event. It also promised a new intimacy between historians and their subject matter, allowing us if not to eavesdrop on the past (a role soon to be assigned to oral testimony) at least to see it, in everyday terms, ‘as it was’.39 Photography was ‘particularly attractive’, he recalled, to ‘those of us who wanted to . . . give greater salience to what was called (not without a trace of condescension) ‘ordinary’ people and ‘everyday’ life.40 Yet, as art historians pointed out, ‘realism’ itself was a historical and aesthetic construct: no more a mere mirror of reality than any other style.41 Furthermore, neither the new ‘living histories’ (history theme parks, heritage houses, historical films) nor visual sources were necessarily warmly received by academic historians, many of whom had previously ignored or neglected the analysis of images as sources.42 In the past two decades, historians’ approach to visual sources has been productively eclectic, yet two related but distinct approaches to visual materials among social and cultural historians are discernible. One method may be described as an intertextual discursive approach, which pays careful attention to the images themselves, and questions of power as articulated through visual images. Historians using this method frequently identify key themes (words or images, and iconographies), and then look for relations between textual and visual statements.43 This involves not only looking at what is shown but also at what is not seen or said; reading for detail; uncovering locations of production and reception; and identifying complexities and contradictions.44 They may begin with a set of images and then widen the range of archives and sites, asking how and why particular words or images are given specific meanings, whether there are meaningful clusters of words and images, and what objects such clusters produce.45 Why do certain images and their discourses become more dominant than others? What claims to truth does an image –​or set of images or image practices –​make, and how, and are there pivotal moments when there is dissent or controversy?46 Historians may also ask how and why images became collected in the first place (in scrapbooks, albums, picture libraries, private and public archives and museum collections) and what these paradigmatic shifts tell us about the question of history itself.47 In this approach, historians tend to employ a hybridized discourse, in order to distinguish the different material histories of production, distribution and reception that are characteristic of image making. In The Artist as Anthropologist (1989), for example, art historian Mary Cowling suggested that to understand the meaning of Victorian realist painting (and figures of

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the ‘crowd’, in particular), it was necessary to pay close attention to how Victorian audiences assumed that paintings needed to be read. In Myths of Sexuality, meanwhile, Lynda Nead revealed the discursive construction of the Victorian prostitute through a study of recurring images, showing how the prostitute’s outsider status was signified visually, in the way she dressed and in how she looked at men.48 Her focus on institutional location is crucial: How do institutions mobilize specific forms of visuality –​different ways of seeing the world? How are social relations produced (and how are they reproduced) by different forms of visuality? Against totalizing accounts of historical processes which took modernity as a given, Nead suggested that London in the nineteenth century is better seen as part of a ‘highly concentrated discourse on the modern’, linked (like the great Assyrian capital of Babylon, with which it was compared) to splendour but also to degeneracy.49 Drawing on a variety of different forms of images –​news illustrations, paintings, photographs, watercolours, maps, advertisements and banned obscene publications, among others –​she showed how these worked to create a modern visual discourse of the rapidly changing city of London (Figures 3–​5).

F I G U R E  6 .3   Edward Stanford, ‘Stanford’s Library Map of London and Its Suburbs’, 1862. Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art.

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F I G U R E  6 .4   ‘The Metropolitan Railway’, Illustrated London News, 7 April 1860, p. 337. Courtesy of Special Collections, Wesleyan University.

F I G U R E  6 .5   Phoebus Levin, ‘The Dancing Platform at Cremorne Gardens’, 1864. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Museum of London. A second site of historical scholarship on the visual among social and cultural historians has been the study of ‘spectacle’, exhibition, and material display. Donna Haraway’s work, for example, considered reconstructions of the past, mediated by new visual technologies (holography, visual exhibits,

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magazine articles), and suggested that images had played an important role as historical agents:  ‘imaginary history is the stuff out of which experience becomes possible’.50 Several historians have argued against the Eurocentrism of many accounts of the visual.51 Exploring the display and classification of material culture from Africa in local and national museums, Annie E. Coombes showed that visual culture had been powerfully deployed as part of a colonial strategy to promote anthropology as both ‘popular’ and ‘scientific’.52 Following the trail of visual objects has altered the way that historians who work on visual sources think about the possibilities and scope of visual studies. Scholarship on art and empire is especially notable, for example, in defining ‘art’ very broadly to include the full range of print-​making techniques, graphic journalism, book illustration, satire, maps, the work of amateur artists, photography and film.53 The intensive historical investigation of a single event, a community or an individual characteristic of microhistorical approaches opened up new possibilities for the use of visual sources.54 Characterized by studies of the interactions of elite and popular culture, and an interest in the relations between micro-​and macrolevels of history, microhistorical studies showed that people made sense of the world in different ways, and that these forms, or representations, structured the way people behave –​and that images are also arguments.55 Images did not merely reflect society in some obvious or straightforward way but also may be excavated and contextualized to shed new light on historical processes as well as to show how different societies engaged images –​how they used them and put them to work.56 Historians have identified a ‘material’ turn in visual studies, in which a primary focus becomes the way in which ‘material and presentational forms and the uses to which they are put are central’ to the function of images as socially meaningful objects.57 On this account, visual representations are not merely pictures of things but also are part of a dynamic and fluid historical dialogue.58 These methods are also rewarding for historians interested in the study of regions and time periods outside the West and, more generally, the global forces of commerce, cross-​cultural encounter, migration and identity.

What’s next? Visual history, present and future New work is now being done on affect and multisensory approaches, including the role of emotion and sound in the reception and production of the meaning of photographs. As the pervasiveness of photographs and their circulation within our society has increased dramatically, historians have searched for new ways of understanding the changing visual economy in historical terms.59 Studies of social and political activism, for example, are extending earlier work on the visual culture of social movements into new areas of enquiry by asking both how does a focus on activism serve the

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wider scholarly project of visual culture studies and, conversely, how does a focus on visual culture advance or narrow the historical study of activism?60 In an age when societies around the world are wrestling with what it means to see, as if directly, violence and suffering on a previously unheard-​of scale, the problem of ‘witnessing’ has attracted strong interest from historians and others who are interested in the issue of human rights. Researchers studying photographic images of human suffering, for example, are urged to think more rigorously about issues of governance, political rights, modern citizenship and the ‘claims’ of the photographed subject.61 At the same time that historians use visual sources in their research, they must also (as with any primary source) try to pick out the traces of less visible discourses that were not already dominant at the time. These questions also, of course, extend to digital archives. Digitized versions of objects are not the same as the physical objects:  much is also transformed and lost (size, colour, texture, dust and weight).62 Media and technology studies, which interpret the role of technology and hybrid media, offer important insights for historians. Fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan famously argued that the acquisition of visual skills was a necessary part of civic life. Today, the term ‘convergence’ –​understood as ‘a paradigm shift –​ a move from medium-​specific content towards content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communications systems’ –​is used to denote a broader condition of contemporary visual culture, replacing an older notion of media spectatorship.63 For historians, the term ‘remediation’ may also be useful in describing the way in which digital technologies draw on the generic conventions of other media while also creating their own genres as well.64 Public history, facilitated by digital platforms, is attracting new interest and practitioners among both professional and amateur historians. Recent research breaks new ground in exploring the relationship between memory and photography, for example, offering fresh insights into the social and material practices through which photographs are used and shared in communicating the past.65 Building on and extending the traditions of scholars who pioneered new work on public memory and museums, oral histories are being used, alongside other visual sources, such as photo albums and archives, to reconstruct otherwise forgotten private and public narratives about the past.66 Moving images are also part of both ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ historical memory (in Samuel’s terms). Rather than seeing ‘history on film’ and ‘history on the page’ as squaring off against each other, historian Robert Rosenstone has suggested that historians should consider ‘what sort of historical world does each film construct and how does it construct that world? How can we make judgments about that construction? How and what does that historical construction mean to us?’ Only after that, he suggests, can we consider how it relates to written history.67 Environmental histories have also started to take seriously the impact of visual imagery and visual practices (including photography, digital image

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production, film and new media) in modern society  –​focusing both on images of nature and on the nature of images. Popular imagery has been central to environmentalism as a political movement but has been left unanalysed in most environmental histories, which often focus heavily on political struggles, legislative reforms and scientific writings. By contrast, new work in this field puts media images at the centre of its analysis. As Finis Dunaway puts it, ‘Media images do not simply illustrate environmental politics, but also shape the bounds of public debate by naturalizing particular meanings of environmentalism.’68 Analysis of scientific images necessarily takes into account the ways of looking in art, popular media and advertising because scientific looking does not occur in isolation from these other contexts. As new works by historians are yielding fresh understanding of the interplay between photography and scientific authority, social processes and the institutions that created scientific imagery, the field of science and technology studies (STS) –​which has had a long history of engagement with critical visual studies  –​offers new methods and approaches.69 Promising new areas are opening up in the analysis of scientific vision and materiality, for example, building on an earlier body of work about maps and charts, extending to historical changes in the visualization of quantitative information itself.70 As important as these topical areas are, however, perhaps most important to new directions will likely be the incorporation of new critical visual methodologies into histories of all kinds. As I  have suggested in this essay, historians have many valuable tools and techniques that can be usefully applied to the study of visual sources and their significance not only as sources but also to the question of history itself. Moving forward, perhaps it is not merely the expansion of new topics alone but also by incorporation of new analytical methods and research on images that have been previously ‘hidden from history’ that will be important for furthering visual methods in historical analysis.

Conclusion To return to the time capsule idea with which this essay began, ‘Photographic technology belongs to the physiognomy of historical thought’, wrote Eduardo Cadava in his prescient work, Words of Light, an idea that recalls Samuel’s reminder that ‘the art of memory, as it was practiced in the ancient world, was a pictorial art, focusing on images as well as words.’71 The subject of visual and material methods is a vast topic, and this essay can only span some of the leading developments. This chapter has aimed to a sketch a few of the tools and methods that have been advanced in visual research in recent years, yet its larger ambition is to encourage more work in this field. Learning new methods from other disciplines, such as

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art history, is important and often vital. Yet, as this chapter has suggested, historians also have developed useful approaches and methods to contribute to advancing the cutting edge of interdisciplinary research on visual sources. In fact, social and cultural historians are particularly well positioned to address questions being raised in contemporary visual and material culture studies: how and why did people in the past turn to picturing ‘events’ that might count as important for the recording of history? How or in what contexts were images regarded as particular forms of speech? How and why are images used to create and contest worlds, and how do these uses reflect changing historical conditions? What stories about the past are not being told, because images (their presence or absence) are overlooked or ignored? While past research offers exciting tools for writing and thinking critically about the uses of visual and material sources in history, social and cultural historians must also bring their own methods and approaches to current conversations about the visual and material world their own methods and approaches, shaped by research into materials they come across in a wide variety of contexts –​from artefacts in public archives and collections to private scrapbooks, family and corporate photographs, industrial films and beyond. Social and cultural history is a site of important work in visual studies, just as new approaches and methods in visual studies have been an important resource for historians, both in the past and in charting future new directions in historical scholarship.

NOTES 1 Carl Sagan, Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), p. 1. 2 Ibid., p. 11. Trevor Paglen, ‘Friends of Space: How Are You All? Have You Eaten Yet? Or, Why Talk to Aliens Even if We Can’t’, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 32 (2013): pp. 8–​19. See also William R. Macauley, ‘Inscribing Scientific Knowledge: Interstellar Communication, NASA’s Pioneer Plaque, and Contact with Cultures of the Imagination, 1971–​1972’, in C. Alexander and T. Geppert (eds), Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 285–​305. 3 Whether ‘archive’ refers to a collection of data or an institution (or something else), it is always worth asking, what are the consequences of certain kinds of classification practices for the production of meaning for objects within it? See Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 3rd rev. edn (London: Sage, 2013), pp. 200–​1. 4 Key historiographical texts include Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and

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Historical Imagination, 1885–​1918 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Ludmilla Jordanova, The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jason Hill and Vanessa Schwartz (eds), Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015); Julia Adeney Thomas, ‘The Evidence of Sight’, History and Theory 48 (2009), theme issue: Photography and Historical Interpretation, Jennifer Tucker (ed.) (2009), pp. 151–​68. 5 Richard Howells and Joaquim Negreiros, Visual Culture, 2nd rev. edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011); Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), An Introduction to Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1999); Nicholas Mirzoeff, Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002); Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Liz Wells (ed.), Photography: A Critical Introduction, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2004); Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Matthew Rampley, Exploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concepts, Contexts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005); Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannine Przyblyski (eds), The Nineteenth-​Century Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2004); Amelia Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2010). 6 The term ‘visual culture’ is often used to refer to the sheer variety of ways in which the visual is part of social life in different in periods and across different regions of the world. It is also proving increasingly helpful in this field to consider also the ways in which images and their associated practices (and the things people say about them) have social lives. See Bruno Latour, ‘Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together’, Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 3 (2012): pp. 207–​60. 7 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, reprinted in Illuminations (1936; New York: Shocken Books, 1985); Vanessa Schwartz, ‘Walter Benjamin for Historians’, American Historical Review 106 (2001): pp. 1721–​43. On Jennings, see Keith Robins, Into the Image: Culture and Politics in the Field of Vision (London: Routledge, 1996); and Jennifer Tucker ed. ‘Photography and Historical Interpretation’, History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (2009), among many others. 8 Nineteenth-​century realism itself had an aesthetic history and belonged to ‘both the history and the problems of style in European art’. Linda Nochlin, Realism (1971; London: Penguin, 1991), p. 7. 9 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1973). 10 Ibid., pp. 7–​8. 11 As Schwartz and Przyblyski point out, ‘a history of visual culture is unthinkable without a willingness to transgress disciplinary boundaries’. Schwartz and Przyblyski, The Nineteenth-​Century Visual Studies Reader, p. 4. 12 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-​Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

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13 Susan Sontag suggested that even if they were not considered great works of art, photographs ‘alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing’. Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977; New York: Anchor Reprints, 1990), p. 3. 14 Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997) offered a clear discussion of the debates about culture, representation and power. 15 Ibid., pp. 3–​4. 16 Ibid., p. 3. 17 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-​Brow Art (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. v. 18 Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. ix; Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art, (1981), 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1993). 19 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 1993); Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity, and Histories of Art (New York: Routledge, 1988); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London; Routledge, 1989). 20 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 105. See also W. J. T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 21 Hayden White, ‘Historiography and Historiophoty,’ American Historical Review 93 (1988): pp. 1193–​9, here p. 1193; Jordanova, Look of the Past. 22 In visual studies, ‘vision’ refers to the physiological capacity of the human eye, whereas ‘visuality’ generally refers to how vision is constructed in various ways: how people see (or are made to see). On the historical epistemologies of vision, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Tom Gunning, ‘In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film’, Modernism/​Modernity 4 (1997): pp. 1–​30. 23 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 18. 24 Ibid., p. 17. 25 This approach may be found, for example, in John Tagg, Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Alan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’ October 19 (1986), pp. 3–​64; Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-​First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). As a mode of analysis it seeks to examine the powerful discourses that produce the objects and subject positions associated with various institutions.

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26 Jean Baudrillard introduced the term ‘simulacrum’, referring to the near impossibility of distinguishing between the real and the unreal in postmodern historical conditions. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981). 27 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-​Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 28 David Harvey defined postmodernity in terms of the importance of visual images; see Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, p. 63. See also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1975); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1967); Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-​de-​Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Important works outside the Western context include, among others, Sujit Parayil, ‘Family Photographs: Visual Mediation of the Social’, Critical Quarterly 56 (2014): pp. 1–​20; Laikwan Pang, The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds), The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999); Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 29 Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, p. 3; Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and, for a historical overview of recent historical writings about images, Alexander Mark, ‘Knowing Images’, Renaissance Quarterly 69 (2016): pp. 100–​13. 30 Rose, Visual Methodologies, p. 19. 31 Rose argues that each of these sites has corresponding ‘modalities’: ‘technological,’ ‘compositional’, and ‘social’. ‘Social modalities’ may include technological considerations (relevant to how an image is made but also to how it travels and is used or displayed); ‘compositional’ factors are defined as the material qualities of an image or visual object, and ‘social’ ones refer to the ‘range of economic, social and political relations, institutions and practices that surround an image and through which it is seen and used’. Rose, Visual Methodologies, p. 19; italics in original. 32 Study of technological effects must trace out, however, differences between expectations about a given technology versus what that technology is actually used to do. 33 For two excellent explorations of how social and political identities are mobilized in the making of images, see Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 34 Rose, Visual Methodologies, esp. pp. 30–​40. 35 Discussed in the fourth edition of Rose, Visual Methodologies.

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36 For Jay, this included ‘all manifestations of optical experience, all variants of visual practice’, not just the ‘rhetoric of images’. Martin Jay, ‘Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn’, Journal of Visual Culture 1 (2002): p. 42; Martin Jay and Teresa Brennan (eds), Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight (London: Routledge, 1996). 37 One type of discursive analysis sees archives as part of a larger data set; another is interested in their effects on the meanings that they produce. Rose, Visual Methodologies, p. 20. 38 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, vol. 1 (New York: Verso Books, 1996), pp. 315–​80, here p. 315). 39 Ibid., pp. 319–​20. 40 Ibid., pp. 320–​1. 41 T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Nochlin, Realism. 42 Heritage, Samuel declared, stood falsely ‘accused of trivializing the past, playing with history, focusing on unworthy objects’ such as pictures. Theatres of Memory, p. 265. Samuel’s critique of academic history was linked to a broader critique of the lack of visual training by historians: ‘Our whole training predisposes us to give a privileged place to the written word, to hold the visual (and the verbal) in comparatively low esteem, and to regard imagery as a kind of trap . . . If we use graphics at all it will be for purposes of illustrations, seldom as primary texts, and it may be indicative of this that, as with material artefacts, we do not even have footnote conventions for referencing them’. Theatres of Memory, pp. 268–​9. 43 The art historian Erwin Panofsky defined iconography as the study of the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form alone. The subject refers to the need for understanding the compendia of symbols and signs with which contemporary artists and patrons might have been familiar. Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955). 44 Rose, Visual Methodologies, p. 220. 45 Ibid., p. 199. 46 For examples of this work, see (among others) Steve Edwards, Photography: A Very Short Introduction (London: Reaktion, 2006); Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2013); Seth Koven, The Match Girl and the Heiress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 47 See Catherine Clark, ‘Capturing the Moment, Picturing History: Photographs of the Liberation of Paris’, American Historical Review 121 (2016): pp. 824–​60. 48 Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 49 Nead notes that Babylon was a ‘paradoxical image’ for the nineteenth century, for it not only represented the ‘most magnificent imperial city of the ancient

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world’ but also conjured up images of the mystical Babylon of the Apocalypse’. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-​ Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 3. 50 Haraway, Primate Visions, p. 188. 51 Annie E. Coombes used the term ‘spectacle of empire’ to describe the complex ways in which museums, albeit unwittingly, often served as ‘a repository for contradictory desires and identities’. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 2. 52 Ibid., p. 3. Anne McClintock’s book Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995) explored how ‘the imperial topos’ entered ‘the domain of the commodity’, p. 214. 53 Art historians have suggested that ‘culture and, in particular, the visual image’ played ‘a formative as well as a reflective role in the course of empire’ and that the study of ‘empire belongs at the centre, rather than in the margins, of the history of British art’. Timothy Barringer, Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham (eds), Art and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 3–​4. 54 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory, Two or Three Things That I Know about It’, Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): pp. 10–​34. 55 Joan Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-​century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 24. 56 Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-​Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Kusukawa demonstrates how illustrations were integral to the emergence of a new type of visual argument for the scientific study of nature. 57 Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (eds), Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 2. 58 Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion Books, 2013). See also Lynn Hunt, ‘Capturing the Moment: Images and Eyewitnessing in History’, Journal of Visual Culture 9 (2013): pp. 1–​13; Catherine E. Clark, ‘Capturing the Moment’; Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographic Uncertainties: Between Evidence and Reassurance’, History and Anthropology 25 (2014): pp. 171–​88; Jennifer Tucker (ed.), History and Theory, 48 (2009), themed issue: Photography and Historical Interpretation. 59 Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (eds), Feeling Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Jane Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016). 60 Krista A. Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) and her book An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); David Campbell, ‘The

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JENNIFER TUCKER Iconography of Famine’, in Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser (eds), Picturing Atrocity: Reading Photographs in Crisis, (London: Reaktion Books, 2011); Shannon Jackson, ‘Visual Activism across Visual Cultures’, Journal of Visual Culture 15 (2015): pp. 173–​6; Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare.

61 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Cambridge, MA: Zone, 2008); and, for other precursors of this position, see also Jennifer Tucker, ‘Review (History/​Methods)’, American Historical Review 116 (2011): pp. 141–​2. 62 Rose, Visual Methodologies. 63 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 205; Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, updated edn (New York: New York University Press, 2008), p. 254; Nicholas Gane and David Beer, New Media: The Key Concepts (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008). 64 Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); John Fiske, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 65 Edwards, Camera as Historian; Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830–​1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Billie Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–​ 1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 66 Olga Shevchenko (ed.), Double Exposure: Memory and Photography (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2014); Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 67 Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age,’ in Marcia Landy (ed.), The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 50–​66, here p. 52; David Herlihy, ‘Am I A Camera? Other Reflections on Films and History’, American Historical Review 93 (1988), pp. 1186–​92; Vanessa R. Schwartz, ‘History and Film’, in James Donald and Michael Renov (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), pp. 199–​215. 68 Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder, Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 1. 69 On the importance of Daston and Galison’s Objectivity for historical studies, for example, Jennifer Tucker, ‘Photography and the Making of Modern Science’, in Gil Pasternak, ed., The Handbook of Photographic Studies (forthcoming, London: Bloomsbury, 2017); on popular culture, see, James A. Secord, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Constance A. Clark, God –​ or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Jennifer Tucker, ‘“To Obtain More General Attention

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for the Objects of Science”: The Depiction of Popular Science in Victorian Illustrated News’, Historia Scientiarum: International Journal of the History of Science Society of Japan 25 (2016): pp. 190–​215; Tucker, ‘Science Institutions in Modern British Visual Culture: The British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831–​1940’, Historia Scientiarum 23 (2014): pp. 191–​213. 70 Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (London: Yale University Press, 2000); Jeremy Black, Visions of the World: A History of Maps (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2003); Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Aarhus, Denmark: Graphics Press, 2001); Tufte, Beautiful Evidence; Janet Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 71 Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. xviii; Samuel, Theatres of Memory, p. viii.

Key texts Black, J. Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Burke, P. Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Clark, S. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Daston, L., and P. Galison . Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Edwards, E. The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–​1918. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Hill, J., and V. R. Schwartz (eds). Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015. Jordanova, L. The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Mitman, G., and K. Wilder. Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Rose, G. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. 3rd rev. edn London: Sage, 2013. Tufte, E. R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2001.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Public histories Paul Ashton and Meg Foster

Introduction In May 2000, Nancy Villa Bryk, curator at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, addressed the American Association of Museums. Her paper, provocatively titled ‘Reports of Our Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated’, sought to get to the heart of the curator’s supposedly ‘diminished role’ in public institutions. Some commentators believed that major change occurring in museum practices was challenging the traditional role of the curator in large history museums. Others, including Bryk, predicted the demise of the curator as an effective participant in these museums unless they engaged with new skills, knowledges, technologies and consumer expectations. This demanded that they took ‘seriously the idea that programmes must be built with visitor needs in mind’. If curators addressed these issues, then Bryk imagined them occupying a back seat in the future rather than a coffin.1 Public historians have faced similar challenges to their authority, with a few currently predicting dire consequences for the field.2 Profound changes have taken place in the production, distribution and consumption of history since the public history movement’s inception in the 1970s. New social movements for rights and freedoms contributed to the expansion of the field, broadly defined here as ‘the practice of historical work in a wide range of forums and sites which involves negotiation of different understandings about the nature of the past and its meanings’.3 From around 1990, historians such as Michael Frisch were calling for a ‘shared authority’. Their idea was that professional historians should not simply provide the public with

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history but also should work together with nonprofessionals, exchanging ‘ideas so that the expertise of one would meet the needs, desires and cultural knowledge of the other’.4 But the democratization of public history was not fuelled by these factors alone. The expansion of secondary and tertiary education also had a large role to play. The rise in use of personal computers saw the development of desktop publishing and production across various media, while the internet later gave access to historical sources that were previously, by and large, only available to well-​resourced individuals.5 New players in the creation of history were to come not only from the swelling army of non-​academic individuals and groups making their own histories  –​from family historians to influential film-​makers such as Ken Burns  –​but from emerging professional fields including heritage and cultural tourism.6 Academically trained public historians had to confront challenges to their authority brought about by these changes. While these were the first challenges to historical authority that were experienced in many countries, the situation was different in the United States. Here, the first of these threats came from the academy. Public historians were viewed by some academics as ‘blue collar’ history workers. Their history was described as ‘applied’ in some of the early university programme titles, but this term was soon used as a pejorative by some academics. The post-​Second World War period had seen ‘the self-​segregation of historians in academic employment and the narrowing of audiences to academics’. This was due in part to increasing specialization, which resulted in the ‘marginalization of professional historians from American society’.7 In these circumstances, many academic historians looked, as some continue to do, upon public historians as envoys for the discipline of history itself.8 While somewhat rocky at first, the relationship between public and academic history has matured. Public history on one level is at least as old as the nation state. Over centuries the state has and continues to invest heavily in and fund national public histories and global identities, though this resourcing also underwrote the rise of academic history.9 The term ‘public history’ was used in print as early as 1794.10 The modern public history movement emerged as part of a new phase of professionalization in the second half of the twentieth century which saw a raft of cultural practices, including the production of history, shift from being predominantly undertaken by amateurs to being dominated by academics and other credentialed experts.11 This gendered process, some have argued, was neither inevitable nor benign.12 Web 2.0, however, is changing things, with its emphasis on user-​generated content and information sharing and the rise of social media. For a number of practitioners, in particular those who were also environmental, social and urban activists,13 public history from the 1970s was, on the one hand, a reaction to the rarefication of academic history. On the other, it was a product of the convergence of academic and popular history in the context of the new social history in the 1980s and the various, ongoing rights movements.14 Despite these different understandings, most

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public historians were still academically educated. In the United States, for example, holding a doctorate was and continues to be the norm. Since the beginning of the field in the 1970s, public historians’ training has predominantly been provided through master’s or doctoral programmes based in universities. These courses were specifically designed to create career paths for students who had completed higher degrees at a time when academic employment in history was beginning to diminish.15 It is not surprising, then, that in the United States public history defined itself primarily in relation to academic history. Similarly, in countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, where the field emerged in the 1980s, a ‘lot of attention was . . . focused on the legitimacy of public history’.16 The situation was different in Britain. There, public history  –​a term not generally in use in the United Kingdom until the 2000s  –​grew out of a radical tradition and the fields of community, labour, local and oral history. It is telling, for example, that the first public history programme in Britain, an MA at Ruskin College in Oxford co-​founded by Raphael Samuel, which commenced in 1996, was the successor to work inspired by the History Workshop Movement.17 Co-​ founded by Samuel in the late 1960s, the movement, as Bill Schwarz has observed, ‘countered the intellectual and political conservatism of the dominant historical profession, setting up an alternative means for producing historical knowledge which had roots deep in the subordinate groups of British society’.18 Here, history was thought of as ‘an activity rather than a profession’, undertaken by a broad spectrum of people using a vast array of materials.19 Rather than historians and their publics, this posited a ‘people and their pasts’ approach. Such a position was oppositional to a dominant North American notion at the time of ‘the [public] historian as a disinterested expert at the service of the public interest [whatever that might be] putting his or her skills in historical analysis to work as one of a team of professional advisors or consultants’.20 Public history’s reception by the British academy, however, has in general been more in accord with the North American experience. An academic conference held at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2001 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research, took the theme ‘What Is History Now?’ One contributor noted that most of the ‘recent explosive growth in history . . . has been in popular taste and demand, to which professional historians have contributed little and responded hardly at all’. But ultimately academic historians were held up as having ‘a certain obligation of guidance, even of leadership’.21 Another contributor, however, conceded ‘the necessity for historians to engage in and with what has been called, with some imprecision admittedly, ‘public history’’.22 The absence of a chapter on public history in the collection reflected its then-​embryonic condition in Britain.23 The Historical Association in Britain, for example, did not establish a public history committee until 2009.24

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Public history took other forms in different countries. Cliomedia, a company specializing in new media, which undertook commissioned histories, began in Italy in the 1980s. Peppino Orteleva of Cliomedia was employed as a consultant by the University of Technology Sydney, in Australia, to advise on the establishment of a master’s in public history programme which began in 1988. The Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies was conducting public history work, among other things, around memory and postcolonialism in Indonesia and the ‘Dutch’ Caribbean. Some folklorists in countries including Finland and Sweden identified with public history.25 And centres dedicated to memorialization, such as the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, mushroomed over the world. Public history was also blended into progressive museum, archival and heritage programmes and practices. These are areas in which many public historians work. And a broad range of tertiary courses were developed in numerous universities such as the University of Amsterdam, the Freie Universität Berlin, Monash University in Australia and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. These facilitated the movement of public historians into cultural institutions, government agencies, consultancies and teaching –​ ‘a highly public form of historical work and one which some freelancers engage in’.26 Public history engagements have also been conditioned by place.27 From the 1990s, ‘sites of conscience’ came into being across the world after decades of local, national and international repression, conflict and struggles, providing new contexts for public history. In 1996, five years after the demise of the Soviet Union, the Memorial Centre for the History of Political Repression  –​also known as Perm-​36  –​opened within the walls of the former labour camp near Perm, Russia. The District Six Museum was a similar project that was established in 1994 in Cape Town, South Africa. It was founded in the year that saw the demise of apartheid and the rise of democratic South Africa, and it engages with memories of the removal in 1966 of 60,000 black people when the area was demarcated as ‘white’. As well as this local story, the District Six Museum also addresses issues surrounding forced removals more generally. Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and many others were held as political prisoners is now a UN World Cultural Heritage Site, and commenced operating as a museum and national monument in 1997. In Argentina, the Memoria Abierta was established by a consortium of human rights activists in 1999 to promote knowledge and understanding of state terrorism. Forgotten and stolen generations in Australia –​involving the official removal or institutionalization of around 500,000 children  –​led to federal Senate enquiries (2001 and 2004) and the recognition of a few sites of conscience.28 The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996–​2000) was a quasi-​judicial restorative justice body created after the end of apartheid. As Sean Field has written of these and other similar tribunals, ‘oral and public historians have pragmatic contributions to make to regenerative forms of memory work’.29

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Plantation sites from the antebellum South, which look at slavery in the United States, have proliferated from the 1990s. Many of these are run by the huge US National Park Service, which employs more than 180 historians. The service had been employing historians from the 1920s, and this, according to Denise Meringolo, has ‘had a profound effect on the evolution of the field [of public history]’ in America.30 Graeme Davison has argued that the early use of the term public history was in part an attempt to unite these diverse and widespread activities and provide them with a sense of ‘professional dignity’.31 But instead it fuelled a seemingly endless debate over the definition of public history.32 Ludmilla Jordanova, however, has rightly observed that ‘whatever the complexities of “public”, public history is a useful label, in that it draws attention to phenomena relevant to the discipline of history, but too rarely discussed in undergraduate courses’.33

Recent developments in public history Critics of public history have in the past defined and continue to define the field in the negative: it is ‘not-​university history’. Others have also wrong-​ headedly insisted that the process of ‘buying’ a ‘history’ necessarily entails a ‘selling out’.34 Grim visions of public history’s past, present and future have been contested by some practitioners. They point out that the maintenance of ‘critical distance is not a problem unique to commissioned [or public] history’.35 Knowledge production in all fields is affected by funding agendas and ideological fashions. And as Sheila Fitzpatrick has noted, ‘there is no view from nowhere’.36 Engagement, too, with stakeholders can often provide fresh or more nuanced historical insights or help refine research questions. Traditional academic approaches to history have also been criticized by indigenous and ethnic communities as well as postcolonial scholars for silencing or paying scant attention to groups of people who have been marginalized in Western history.37 Historians working in Native Title claims in Australia or New Zealand or with indigenous groups in Canada or the United States are well aware of the many protocols and practices involved in working on indigenous histories. As Meg Foster has written, public historians are in a good position to work in these fluid environments since they ‘have always had to respond to the changing needs of the public –​ although, since the 1970s, the idea of what and who constitutes “the public” has changed markedly’.38 Public historians in Western countries, many of whom were also academics, have also gone to significant lengths to investigate contemporary historical sensibilities and the cultural and social contexts that have reshaped history and its uses in the present. As Iain McCalman has argued, ‘measuring and explaining such changes is centrally the stuff of history’.39 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen surveyed 1,500 Americans in the mid-​1990s about their

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relationships with and uses of the past.40 Following this an Australian team undertook a similar national survey, Australians and the Past.41 They were followed by a Canadian collective, which produced Canadians and Their Pasts in 2013.42 The results of these major surveys have fed into numerous historical practices from the teaching of history in schools to history in museums. And they have provided strong evidence to suggest that ‘history professionals need to work harder at listening to and respecting the many ways popular history-​makers traverse the terrain of the past that is so present for all of us’.43 The word ‘past’ in this statement is important; it is often used interchangeably with history. The ‘past’ is fragmentary and heavily reliant on individual and collective remembrance; history –​with a capital H –​is an academic discipline that is contingent, creative and personal. The status of public historians as the producers and ‘laypeople’ as the audience of history has been shifting for some time. And in the future, ‘knowledge, power, and productive capability will be more dispersed than at any time in our history’.44 Jeremy Black has argued that the critical ‘issue for educators and professional historians is how best to engage in, and with, this world’.45 Pamela Cox has also noted the opportunity this affords academically trained historians to ‘rebuild their role as enlightened skeptics in the knowledge economy’.46 Questions of audience, authority, reach and participation remain multifaceted. But technological developments have accelerated this trend. As Jorma Kalela has so succinctly put it, ‘the hopelessness of academic gatekeeping efforts regarding the study of the past is starkly illustrated by web 2.0’.47 The public history movement has just entered its fifth decade. When it started, public history was defined primarily vis-​à-​vis academic standards and practices, and it was guided by a largely academic leadership from a relatively well-​resourced, traditional university sector. Times have moved on. Apart from the challenges of the digital world, university history departments have shrunk, and their relevance has been questioned in a global environment that has seen academic capitalism propel many universities into the last phase of corporatization.48 The new environment has forced many in the academy in humanities, social sciences and the arts to think more about the reach, impact and social benefit of their work rather than talking primarily to themselves or disseminating their work to limited or specialist audiences. Engaged, community-​based rather than aloof scholarship has been a significant factor in the recent rise in public history programmes in Britain, such as the master’s programme at the University of York, which has a significant placement module. Engaged scholarship and the triple bottom line –​an accounting framework which includes social and economic as well as financial factors to enhance ‘brand’ and business value –​is already affecting the relationship between public and academic history and communities outside the academy. They will continue to do so into the future. The field is also going though a period of quite rapid internationalization, though there are still large obstacles preventing an holistic approach –​if this is possible –​to the public past.

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An International Seminar on Public History was run jointly by the Department of History in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Indonesia and the Australian Centre for Public History at the University Technology Sydney at FIB-​UI Campus, Depok, Indonesia, in September 2012. But public history’s future in Indonesia ‘is likely to be a turbid negotiation between state-​sanctioned or sponsored accounts of the past and more democratic forms of history’.49 While a fifty-​year-​old law allowing the government to ban books considered ‘able to disrupt public order’ was lifted in 2010, official archives are generally inaccessible, and there is a lingering fear of challenging official histories in the wake of the collapse of the repressive New Social Order regime in 1999. China has also recently seen the development of public history programmes and projects. But there, too, ‘civic dialogues are still at peril’.50 In India, a centre for public history was established in 2011 at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, while public history is being taught in the Department of History and Ethnography at Mizoram University. Hopefully the future will see the emergence of new international partnerships, projects and transnational perspectives on public history. This, among other things, is being facilitated by the International Federation for Public History, which was established in 2010.51

Future directions in public history Self-​reflexive practice In journal articles, blogs, conferences, emails and newsletters, public historians are voicing concerns about their relevance in a rapidly changing world.52 Once-​distinct boundaries between the ‘expert’ historian and the ‘lay’ public are shown to be permeable by popular and community histories. The Web has accelerated this trend, as ordinary people gain access to historical sources, create their own histories and are able to reach millions of people from all over the world like never before.53 However, the proliferation of Web 2.0 and digital technologies is not alone in complicating the historian’s role in the public realm. On an institutional level, the discipline and funding bodies also have a lot to answer for. Since the 1970s, public historians have sought to professionalize and gain legitimacy from their academic peers. This remains one of the fundamental drives of public history, but it has been matched by increasing specialization and a need to collaborate with different fields. Today, public historians are less likely to be employed as ‘the authority’ in a particular project, than to be one of many voices. They are increasingly part of a larger team that may include such diverse participants as artists, community stakeholders, educational experts, publicity managers –​the list goes on.

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As we have seen, this contemporary push to share historical authority is not a new one. What has changed is the scope and acceptance that this approach to history has achieved. In increasing numbers, historians are identifying with this role. It is becoming a matter of course for these practitioners to describe themselves as ‘mediators’ between academics and the wider public and distributers of ‘tools’ to help non-​experts access the past.54 Kalela clearly articulates this modern view when he writes, ‘Rather than just transmitting knowledge, our main contribution is to encourage and support non-​professional people to engage with history –​and to be available when needed.’55 Instead of lecturing to ‘the public’, professional historians increasingly see themselves in conversation with ordinary people. As Cathy Stanton has observed, ‘Public historians may bring disciplined knowledge and analytic savvy to the table, but they cannot claim special access to Higher Truths.’56 The old definition of public history as merely ‘the practice of history by academically trained historians working . . . outside the universities’ seems well and truly outdated.57 Despite its prevalence, it is important to recognize that not all historians identify with this trend or have welcomed its arrival. Some practitioners have watched this shift with dread and see its continuation as a death knell for public history and historians. American historian James Gardner is one such proponent of this view. According to Gardner, historians put themselves in a dangerous position if they place ‘radical trust’ in the public. He warns that ‘there is no half way in radical trust. If we [the professional historians] mediate or if we filter out unedited, uncensored opinion, then we are breaching that trust.’58 For Gardner, if this trend proceeds unchecked there will be no place for historians in the production of history. In the public’s hands, he predicts that history will ‘signify the rearrangement of facts for present purposes, and become devoid of true, historical meaning’.59 This bleak view of public historians’ future does not reflect advances in the field. Historians are not content to ‘sit back’ and allow themselves to fade into insignificance. On the contrary, they are increasingly confronting their relevance and facing their own ‘mortality’ head-​on. As previously suggested, professionals are coming together to discuss the pressures on their position and practice. Through conventional mediums such as journal articles and conferences, historians are mapping the shifting contours of the field, discussing the impact of different mediums of communication, community as well as institutional impulses on the history that they write.60 More than simply analysing their profession, public historians recognize that their work is not the only way that the public access the past. They are competing with a myriad of different amateur studies that pull in mass audiences. While concerns are voiced about historical accuracy, meaning and manipulation in these non-​professional works, public historians do not fail to appreciate the way that they are shaping public historical consciousness.61 Instead of branding these representations as ‘bad history’ and proceeding to ignore these studies of the past, many historians are seeking to engage with

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them. In an article featured in The Public Historian, for example, Benjamin Filene analyses ‘ “Outsider” History-​Makers and What They Teach Us [the public historians]’. In this piece, Filene argues that instead of dismissing popular histories, public historians should look to these representations to learn how to engage the public; how to not only disseminate knowledge but also speak with their audience and captivate public attention.62 One way that public historians are striving to put these lessons into practice is by engaging in publicly accessible forums, particularly those on the Web. While it is widely recognized that ordinary people are harnessing online platforms to broadcast their interpretations of the past, few scholars have recognized that public historians have also made their foray into the digital realm.63 Although online mediums are not able to meet the standards of lengthy peer review and compete with journals for academic rigour, they do provide other, distinct opportunities. Instant uploads to the Web allow historians to respond to advances in the field as they occur. Moreover, as Stanton notes, digital platforms also provide ‘a great opportunity for us [public historians] to share ideas across distances without anyone having to buy a plane ticket  –​[it’s] the kind of flexible forum that cyberspace is uniquely able to provide’.64 H-​Public, the international community page for public history, is a prime example of how historians are using the opportunities offered by the digital world. In 2007, the US National Council on Public History (NCPH) released a new, official definition of public history. It was said to be ‘a movement, methodology, and approach that promotes the collaborative study and practice of history; its practitioners embrace a mission to make their special insights accessible and useful to the public’.65 Instead of uncritically accepting this understanding, H-​Public launched an online, international discussion. Over several months, public historians engaged in a lively debate over the parameters of their profession. Each contribution built on the ones before, as professionals weighed the applicability of a certain definition with their own, unique experiences.66 In this virtual space, historians air their concerns, workshop ideas, and engage in conversations with colleagues from around the world. Online mediums allow historians to step back, survey their field and voice ‘the view from where they sit’.67 But historians are not only using these forums to speak among themselves. They are also using them to work with the public to shape the past. Websites, apps and blogs that encourage general participation are increasingly becoming sites of dialogue between ‘amateur’ and professional historians. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of historypin. Launched in 2011, this website harnesses Google Maps to allow its users to ‘pin’ historical images, sounds, documents and videos to their position in the landscape. Anyone from around the world with access to a computer is able to upload artefacts, comment on pins and explore the history of particular areas and times. Although the site was originally created with local communities and ‘citizen’ historians in mind, public historians are now an inescapable presence in this

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virtual forum. These practitioners not only post sources from their institutional or personal collections. They are also in a dialogue with ‘laypeople’ that ranges from provoking discussion –​through their pins –​to replying to individual comments. One of the site’s key aims is to ‘reduce social isolation’, and it seems to be achieving this by enabling a more conversational approach to the past. According to historypin, historians in ‘2,000 libraries, archives and museums have . . . shared over 380,000 materials and memories, which are explored by hundreds of thousands of users’.68 This collaborative approach to history online has also translated into the ‘real world’. Public historians and historypin have run thousands of local projects using the site as well as workshops to teach people how to get the most out of this unique web page. One of the largest and most successful of these workshops was held in Reading, United Kingdom, in 2012. This initiative saw local volunteers learn how to promote their community’s history by using the historypin site. The Reading Museum was the main local partner involved in the project, and its public historians participated in pinning Reading’s history as well as helping the community gain the skills to create history for themselves.69 As this example suggests, it is not impossible for public historians to be participants and experts in popular histories.70 Even when engaging with more open, democratic forums, historians are not rendered obsolete. They can still play an active role in shaping the past. Although public historians study the past, they are both aware of and concerned about what is yet to come. Whether by seeking out fresh ideas and engaging in burgeoning trends, or trying to predict new directions for their discipline, these professionals are working to secure their place in the future. As this section has illustrated, public historians are currently the most self-​reflexive that they have been in the profession’s history. New technologies, new levels of public engagement, new concepts of ‘audience’ and ‘expert’ have all turned the historian’s gaze inward. And this movement shows no sign of slowing down.

Diversification of the field For all of this self-​reflection, there are still questions that public historians ask themselves but that remain largely unanswered. Some of the most pressing of these involve defining who ‘public historians’ are and who practices ‘public history’. Answers to these questions were once deemed to be obvious. When the modern public history movement began in the 1970s, it was considered a professional, scholarly enterprise. In the United States one its founders, Robert Kelley, famously declared public history to be ‘the employment of historians and historical method outside of academia’.71 The public historian was the authority on the past, the person equipped by years of professional training to bring the lessons of the past to bear on the present. In the

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United Kingdom, as we have seen, public history was born from a set of different impulses. It emerged as part of the movement to access ‘history from below’ and to recover marginalized voices from the past. Although public history can simultaneously be part of radical history movements ‘critical of elitist, over-​professionalized history’ and be a ‘tool of the establishment’, the fact remains that it largely revolved around specially trained historians who went out to recover and disseminate the past.72 Since its inception, ideas about public historians’ purpose and the history that they create have changed significantly. In Routledge’s 2013 collection The Public History Reader, for instance, editors Hilda Kean and Paul Martin define public history as ‘a process by which the past is constructed into history and a practice which has the capacity for involving people as well as nations and communities in the creation of their own histories’.73 Although this is only one interpretation in the contested terrain of defining public history, it remains an important statement. Routledge is one of the largest and most well-​respected international publishers of academic material. This status, combined with the text’s title –​The Public History Reader (emphasis author’s own) –​and the academic credentials of its editors, ensures that this definition carries a great deal of authority. One of the most striking things about this statement is that it makes no explicit mention of ‘public historians’. While the collection addresses this absence by having almost all of its chapters written by professionals, this definition is still significant. The Reader’s authors illustrate there is still a place for the insights, skills and expertise of public historians, while its content and definition recognize that public history is also something larger. Historians are one of many types of ‘people’ who can be involved in the public past. Not only professionals with historical training but also their collaborators, the curators, educational experts and technology specialists who work with the public and the past, may identify with the term ‘public historian’. And as previously discussed, ‘laypeople’ with no academic training are also creating their own publicly accessible histories. With global connectivity through travel and the Web, public history is not even bound to individuals or regional communities. As Kean and Martin observe, public history and its practitioners can also involve nations.74 In 1994, Samuel remarked that if history included a broad range of practices rather than just an academic hierarchy, then ‘the number of its practitioners would be legion’.75 The bounds of what we term ‘public history’ and who we describe as ‘public historians’ are shifting and expanding like never before. The legion appears to be standing up to be counted.

Conclusion A more inclusive understanding of public history does not devalue the work of professionally trained historians. Many public historians are still

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employed because of their professional status. For example, the largest employer of public historians in New Zealand is its national government. These men and women serve as ‘expert witnesses’ in Native Title cases investigated by the Waitangi tribunal. The courtroom is a space used by indigenous claimants, lawyers and judges, yet it is also a forum where historians are called upon in their professional capacity. Their credentials allow them to put historical evidence before the tribunal, while their presentation of history informs the outcome of land rights claims. As this case suggests, historians are still consulted for their ‘expert opinion’, and in this context their status is recognized by the law.76 Some ‘amateur’ historians also recognize that they can learn from their professional counterparts. Studies reported by the Pew Centre for Arts and Heritage in the United States suggest that the public do not want professionals to completely ‘let go’ and give them absolute freedom to create their own histories. People responded the most positively when they were asked to work within parameters set by an historian.77 Practitioners are even encouraged by community leaders, organizations and institutions to be involved in popular histories. They are responsible for facilitating historical enquiry as well as connecting local and personal pasts to their historical context. This helps prevent a parochial public past, but it is not without its difficulties. Kalela is one of many historians who have experienced first-​hand the tension that can arise between public stakeholders’ interpretation of the past and that of the historian. Instead of viewing these different approaches as a hindrance, Kalela suggests something different. In his view, disagreement pushes historians and amateur history-​makers to question their assumptions and look more critically at how they approach the past. Although it can be frustrating for both parties to have their views challenged, this tension can also encourage more thorough and insightful histories.78 Even as it breeds dissent, engagement between professional and popular history-​makers can also enhance the historian’s credibility. In the 1990s, historians’ authority came under fire. In what was termed the ‘culture wars’ in America and the ‘history wars’ in Australia, historians were accused of manipulating history to support their current politics rather than to reveal ‘what actually happened’.79 One of the things that these wars illustrated was how alienated the ‘public’ felt from professional history. Many historians have since argued that public discourse was so quick to condemn them because many people did not understand what historians actually did. One way to rebuild public trust in practitioners is to involve ‘laypeople’ in their histories. This does not mean giving up expertise, ‘but the assumption that the . . . [professional] . . . has the last word on historical interpretation’.80 Studies on historical consciousness have clearly shown that ‘ordinary’ people are more likely to believe history if they feel that they have some type of involvement or control.81 Public engagement provides this connection, fostering trust in public historians and their approach to the past.

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Although the blurred boundaries of ‘public history’ have not rendered historians obsolete, they do pose questions about the usefulness of the term. Not only is public history being pushed to include many more people, tasks and ideas under its ambit but also professionals are struggling with the term. As public history blogs and online forums suggest, there are a number of practitioners who feel uncomfortable about defining public history or seeing themselves as ‘public historians’. There is confusion over any definition’s limits, scope and meaning.82 Even the NCPH, the organization dedicated to promoting public history in the United States, cannot agree on an exact meaning. Instead, they argue that the most apt description could be the simplest; that public historians know public history when they see it.83 With these definitional issues, it is possible that ‘public history’ as a unifying concept or particular identity will go out of vogue. If the term carries too many meanings and is too inclusive, then it has little significance or power. In 2004, for example, New Zealand historian Jim McAloon already confessed that he felt ‘an abiding scepticism about the utility of the term public history’, writing that ‘its very breadth –​commissioned history, heritage, museum exhibitions, archival management and even the design of stamps  –​risks telling us nothing.’ In his view, ‘conflating these with history is . . . unhelpful’.84 It may be that ‘public history’ is no longer named, and instead becomes an invisible, yet ever-​present, feature of institutions and everyday life. Public history involves ‘practices that communicate and engage with history in public areas’.85 It is a ‘mode of making sense of the world and one’s place in it’.86 No matter what name it goes by in the future, public history is ‘a basic social practice’ and will therefore always exist.87 Although the future is impossible to predict, there is little doubt that public history has a future, as people continue to shape the present by referencing the past. Public historians’ role may shift and change, but their skills and insights about the past remain significant. Despite the issues affecting public history, the diagnosis is not terminal. Reports of public historians’ death have been greatly exaggerated.

NOTES 1 Nancy Villa Bryk, ‘ “Reports of Our Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”: Reconsidering the Curator’, Museum News, March–​April (2001), pp. 39–​41, 67 and 69; here pp. 71 and 39. 2 James B. Gardner, ‘Contested Terrain: History, Museums, and the Public’, The Public Historian 26 (2004): pp. 11–​21. 3 Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, ‘Connecting with History: Australians and Their Pasts’, in Paul Ashton and Hilda Kean (eds), Public History and Heritage Today: People and Their Pasts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 24.

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4 Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990); Meg Foster, ‘Online and Plugged In? Public History and Historians in the Digital Age’, Public History Review 21 (2014): p. 5. See also Greg Denning, ‘Some Beaches Are Never Closed: Foundation and Future Reflections on the History Institute of Victoria’, Rostrum 19 (2001): p. 29. 5 Anna Clark and Paul Ashton (eds), Australian History Now (Sydney: New South, 2013), pp. 17–​18. 6 Burns’s series The Civil War broke all viewing records for a PBS series but was attacked by academic historians. See Robert Toplin (ed.), Ken Burns’ The Civil War: Historians Respond (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Earlier, Robert Hughes’s best-​selling history of the convict era in Australian was attacked by Australian academic historians; see Marian Aveling review in Australian Historical Studies 23 (1988): p. 127. 7 Introduction to James B. Gardner and Peter S. LaPaglia (eds), Public History: Essays from the Field (Malabar: Krieger Publishing Company, 1999), p. 3; see also Patricia Mooney-​Melvin, ‘Profession Historians and the Challenge of Redefinition’, in Gardner and LaPaglia, pp. 5–​21. 8 Janelle Warren-​Findlay, ‘Rethinking Heritage Theory and Practice: The US Experience’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 19 (2013): p. 380. 9 David Christian, ‘History and Global Identity’, in Stuart Macintyre (ed.), The Historian’s Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), p. 149. 10 William Paley, The Evidence of Christianity (1794), in Edmund Paley, The Works of William Paley, D.D. (London: Longman, 1839), p. 292. 11 See, for example, Ian Tyrrell, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–​1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 12 Donald A. Wright, The Professionalization of History in English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 13 Examples include the Massachusetts History Workshop (1978) and the Power of Place Project (1984). See, for example, Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 14 See, for example, Andrew Hurley, Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010) p. 35ff. 15 Available online: ncph.org/​cms/​education/​graduate.../​guide-​to-​public-​history-​ programs/​[accessed 12 September 2015]. 16 Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past (Sydney: Halstead Press, 2010), p. 126. 17 Available online: http://​ncph.org/​cms/​wp-​content/​uploads/​Ruskin-​College-​ Oxford-​GUIDE-​2013-​Oct-​23.pdf [accessed 19 August 2015]. 18 Bill Schwarz, ‘History on the Move: Reflections on History Workshop’, Radical History Review 57 (1993): pp. 203–​20. Radical History Review has a section devoted to public history. 19 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), p. 17.

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20 Graeme Davison, ‘Public History’, in Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (eds), Oxford Companion to Australian History (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 538. 21 Felipe Fernandez-​Armesto, ‘Epilogue: What Is History Now?’, in David Cannadine (ed.), What Is History Now? (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 158 and 160. 22 Paul Cartledge, What Is Social History Now?’, in Cannadine (ed.), What Is History Now? p. 29. 23 For a survey of the field in Britain, see Holger Hoock, ‘Introduction’, The Public Historian 32 (2010): pp. 7–​22. 24 Available online: http://​www.history.org.uk/​resources/​public_​resources_​75.html [accessed 16 September 2015]. 25 See, for example, online: http://​www.aka.fi/​en/​about-​us/​administration-​office/​ culture-​and-​society-​research-​unit/​ [accessed 18 September 2015]. 26 Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, ‘Streetwise: Public History in New South Wales’, Public History Review 5–​6 (1996–​97): p. 10. 27 Nicolas Barreyre, Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck and Cecile Vidal (eds), Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), p. ix. 28 See Paul Ashton and Jacqueline Z. Wilson, ‘Sites of Conscience: Remembering Disappearance, Execution, Imprisonment, Murder, Slavery and Torture’, in Paul Ashton and Jacqueline Z. Wilson (eds), Silent System: Forgotten Australians and the Institutionalisation of Women and Children (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014), pp. 59–​60. 29 Sean Field, ‘Imagining Communities: Memory, Loss, and Resilience in Post-​ Apartheid Capetown’, in Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes (eds), Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), p. 117. 30 Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments and National Parks: Towards a New Genealogy of Public History (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), p. xiv. 31 Graeme Davison, ‘Paradigms of Public History’, in John Ricard and Peter Spearritt (eds), Packing the Past? Public Histories, special issue of Australian Historical Studies, 2 (1991): p. 9. 32 For one overview of this, see Hilda Kean and Paul Ashton, introduction to Ashton and Kean (eds), Public History and Heritage Today, pp. 9–​11. 33 Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000), p. 141. 34 Paul Ashton and Chris Keating, ‘Commissioned History’, in Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 141. 35 Ibid., p. 141. 36 Sheila Fitzpartick referencing Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (1989), in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Writing Memoirs, Writing History, J. M. Ward Memorial Lecture, University of Sydney, 27 March 2014. 37 Ashton and Hamilton, History at the Crossroads, p. 11.

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38 Meg Foster, ‘Online and Plugged In? Public History and Historians in the Digital Age’, Public History Review 21 (2014): p. 6. 39 Iain McCalman, Historical Re-​enactments: Should We Take Them Seriously?, The Annual History Lecture, History Council of NSW, Sydney, 2007. Available online: http://​historycouncilnsw.org.au/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2013/​01/​2007-​ AHL-​Mccalman1.pdf [accessed 14 May 2014]. 40 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 41 Paula Hamilton and Paul Ashton (eds), Australians and the Past, special issue of Australian Cultural History 22 (2003). 42 Margaret Conrad et al., Canadians and Their Pasts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 43 Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, p. 189. 44 Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams as quoted in J. Gordon Daines III and Cory L. Nimer, ‘Introduction’, The Interactive Archivist, 18 May 2009. Available online: http://​interactivearchivist.archivists.org/​#footnote13 [accessed 12 June 2014]. 45 Jeremy Black, Contesting History: Narratives of Public History (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 214. 46 Pamela Cox, ‘The Future Uses of History’, History Workshop Journal 75 (2013): pp. 125–​45. 47 Jorma Kalela, ‘History Making: The Historian as Consultant’, Public History Review 20 (2013): p. 30. 48 See, for example, Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Market, State and Higher Education (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009). 49 Paul Ashton, Kresno Brahmantyo and Jaya Keaney, ‘Renewing the New Order? Public History in Indonesia’, Public History Review 19 (2012): p. 101. 50 Li Na, ‘Public History in China: Is it Possible?’, Public History Review 21 (2014): p. 20. 51 See http://​ifph.hypotheses.org [accessed 13 January 2016]. 52 See, for example, Cathy Stanton, ‘What Is Public History? Redux’, NCPH Public History News 27 (September 2007), p. 1; Public History Commons, history@work blog, 2014. Available online:http://​publichistorycommons.org/​ [accessed 20 September 2015] via H-​Net, ‘FORUM: What Is Public History?’ H-​Net Public Discussion Log May-​July 2007) via: http://​h-​net.msu.edu/​cgi-​bin/​ logbrowse.pl?trx=lm&list=H-​Public [accessed 12 September 2015]; History Workshop Journal, History Workshop Online; Radical History in a Digital Age, 2015 via http://​www.historyworkshop.org.uk/​ [accessed 20 September 2015]; Unofficial Histories Conference, Bishopsgate Institute, London (19 May 2012); Unofficial Histories Conference, Manchester, UK (15–​16 June 2013). 53 Foster, ‘Online and Plugged In’, pp. 1–​19. 54 See, for example, Public History Commons, history@work; H-​Net, ‘FORUM: What Is Public History?’; John Petersen, ‘Though This Be

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Madness: Heritage Methods for Working in Culturally Diverse Communities,’ Public History Review 17 (2010): pp. 34–​51. 55 Jorma Kalela, ‘Making History: The Historian and the Uses of the Past,’ in Hilda Kean and Paul Martin (eds), The Public History Reader (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), p. 108. 56 Cathy Stanton, ‘What’s in a Name?’ H-​Net Public Discussion Log (21 May 2007). Available online: http://​h-​net.msu.edu/​cgi-​bin/​logbrowse. pl?trx=vx&list=H-​Public&month=0705&week=c&msg=HAUuHywQGvciGX BxeGKPgw&user=&pw [accessed 4 September 2015]. 57 Graeme Davison, ‘Public History,’ in Graeme Davison, Stuart Macintyre and John Hirst (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 532. 58 James B. Gardner, ‘Trust, Risk and Public History: A View from the United States’, Public History Review 17 (2010): p. 53. 59 Ibid., p. 53; Foster, ‘Online and Plugged In?’, p. 5. 60 See, for example, Ruth Finnegan (ed.), Participating in the Knowledge Society: Researchers beyond the University Walls (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); also Pedro Ramos Pinto and Bertrand Taithe (eds), The Impact of History? Histories at the Beginning of the Twenty-​First Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). 61 See, for example, Tyler Priest, Sound-​bite History Reconsidered’, history@ work Blog (17 March 2014) via http://​publichistorycommons.org/​sound-​-​-​ bite-​-​-​history-​-​-​reconsidered/​ [accessed 8 April 2014]; Jason Steinhauer, ‘@ HistoryinPics Brings History To the Public. So What’s the Problem? Part 1,’ History@Work Blog, 18 February 2014 via http://​publichistorycommons. org/​historyinpics-​-​-​part-​-​-​1/​ [accessed 8 April 2014]; Jason Steinhauer, ‘@ HistoryinPics Brings History To the Public. So What’s the Problem? Part 2‘, History@Work Blog, 19 February 2014 via http://​publichistorycommons.org/​ historyinpics-​-​-​part-​-​2/​ [accessed 8 April 2014]. 62 Benjamin Filene, ‘Passionate Histories: “Outsider” History-​Makers and What They Teach Us’, The Public Historian 34 (2012): pp. 11–​33. 63 Studies that have investigated this trend include Foster, ‘Online and Plugged In?’; Roy Rosenzweig and Daniel Cohen, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Paston the Web, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, via http://​chnm.gmu.edu/​digitalhistory/​ [accessed online 20 May 2014]. 64 Cathy Stanton, ‘What Is Public History?’ H-​Net Public Discussion Log (21 May 2007) via http://​h-​net.msu.edu/​cgi-​bin/​logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-​Publ ic&month=0705&week=c&msg=DOqeSOTJcf7PcgTckO6UTg&user=&pw= [accessed 4 September 2015]. 65 Ibid., p. 1. 66 H-​Net, ‘FORUM: What Is Public History?’ H-​Net Public Discussion Log May-​ July 2007) via http://​h-​net.msu.edu/​cgi-​bin/​logbrowse.pl?trx=lm&list=H-​Public [accessed 12 September 2015].

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67 Cathy Stanton, ‘All the News That Fits: The View from Where I Sit,’ history@ work Blog (12 February 2014) via http://​publichistorycommons.org/​all-​the-​ news-​that-​fits/​?utm_​source=twitterfeed&utm_​medium=twitter [accessed 8 April 2014]. 68 We Are What We Do, ‘Historypin: A 90 Second Introduction,’ Historypin, 2014 via http://​www.historypin.com/​about-​-​-​us/​ [accessed 16 April 2014]; We Are What We Do, Historypin, 2014 via http://​www.historypin.com [accessed 16 April 2014]. Shiftdesign, Historypin, 2015 via http://​www.shiftdesign.org. uk/​products/​historypin/​#sthash.Zq2MrDOb.dpuf [accessed 20 September 2015]. 69 Natasha Armstrong (and ‘We Are What We Do’), Pinning Reading’s History: Evaluation Report, March 2012, p. 4 via http://​wawwdresources. s3.amazonaws.com/​Reading_​Evaluation%20Report_​Small.pdf [accessed 16 April 2014]. 70 For a similar project, see also The Dictionary of Sydney. Lisa Murray and Emma Grahame, ‘Sydney’s Past History’s Future: The Dictionary of Sydney’, Public History Review 17 (2010): p. 89. The Dictionary of Sydney, The Dictionary of Sydney: Sydney’s History Online and Connected, 2014 via http://​ home.dictionaryofsydney.org [accessed 12 June 2014]. 71 Robert Kelley, ‘Public History; Its Origins, Nature and Prospects’, The Public Historian 1 (1978): p. 16. 72 Jordanova, History in Practice, p. 141. 73 Hilda Kean and Paul Martin, introduction to Hilda Kean and Paul Martin (eds), The Public History Reader (London: Routledge, 2013), p. xiii. 74 Hilda Kean and Paul Martin (eds), The Public History Reader (Routledge: London, 2013). 75 Raphael Samuel, ‘Theatres of Memory,’ in Kean and Martin, The Public History Reader, p. 11. 76 See, for example, Ashton and Hamilton, ‘At Home with the Past’, p. 17; Michael Belgrave, ‘Something Borrowed, Something New: History and the Waitangi Tribunal’, in Kean and Martin (eds), The Public History Reader, pp. 311–​22; Philip M. Katz, ‘Public History Employers –​What Do They Want? A Report on the Survey’. American Historical Association on Graduate Education and the Task Force on Public History, September 2003, available at: https://​www.historians.org/​publications-​and-​directories/​perspectives-​on-​ history/​september-​2003/​public-​history-​employers-​what-​do-​they-​want-​a-​report-​ on-​the-​survey [accessed 5 January 2017]. 77 Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene and Laura Koloski (eds), Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-​Generated World (Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011). 78 Kalela, ‘Making History’, pp. 104–​28. 79 Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clarke, The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003); Edward Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt (eds), History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996).

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80 Adair, Filene and Koloski (eds), Letting Go?, p. 13. 81 Ashton and Hamilton, ‘At Home with the Past’, pp. 5–​30. 82 See, for example, NCPH, Guide to Public History Programs, 2014 via http://​ncph.org/​cms/​education/​graduate-​and-​undergraduate/​guide-​to-​ public-​history-​programs/​ [accessed 20 March 2014]; Katz, ‘Public History Employers –​What Do They Want?’; John Dichtl and Robert Townsend, ‘A Picture of Public History: Preliminary Results from the 2008 Survey of Public History Professionals’, Perspectives on History (September 2009) via https://​www.historians.org/​publications-​and-​directories/​perspectives-​ on-​history/​september-​2009/​a-​picture-​of-​public-​history [accessed 2 March 2015]; Public History Commons, history@work; H-​Net, ‘FORUM: What Is Public History?’. 83 National Council on Public History, ‘What Is Public History?’ 2015 via http://​ ncph.org/​cms/​what-​is-​public-​history/​ [accessed 12 September 2015]. 84 J. McAloon, review of Bronwyn Dalley and Jock Phillips (eds), Going Public: The Changing Face of New Zealand History, Public History Review 11 (2004): p. 184. 85 Ashton and Hamilton, History at the Crossroads, p. 121. 86 Kalela, ‘Making History’, p. 109. 87 Ibid., p. 120.

Key texts Adair, B., B. Filene and L. Koloski (eds). Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-​Generated World. Philadelphia: The Pew Centre for Arts & Heritage, 2011. Ashton, P., and H. Kean (eds). Public History and Heritage Today: People and their Pasts Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Black, J. Contesting History: Narratives of Public History. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. de Groot, J. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009. Foster, M. ‘Online and Plugged In?: Public History and Historians in the Digital Age’. Public History Review 21 (2014): pp.1–​19. Gardner, J., and P. Hamilton (eds). The Oxford Handbook of International Public History New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Hamilton, P., and L. Shopes (eds). Oral History and Public Memories Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. Jordanova, L. History in Practice London: Hodder Arnold, 2000. Kalela, J. Making History: The Historian and Uses of the Past Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Kean, H., and P. Martin (eds). The Public History Reader Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013. Rosenzweig, R., and D. Thelen. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

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Samuel, R. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso, 1994. Walkowitz, D. J., and L. M. Knauer (eds). Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2009.

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PART THREE

Challenges and provocations What should be the central focus of social and cultural histories? The first section of this volume placed human beings, in all their wondrous variety, at the heart of historical enquiries. This third and final section reveals what lies beyond simply ‘human’ histories by examining the multiplicity of interlinked forces that shape, and are shaped by, people’s activities in the world. The lives of men, women and children are here uncovered by an exploration of their relationships with non-​human agents:  with animals; with space, time and landscape; and with a wide variety of historical environments. In Hilda Kean’s chapter on animal-​human histories, she examines the impact that animal studies have had on the work of social and cultural historians in recent decades. Kean sketches the vital role that animals are known to have played within well-​established historical processes, from industrialization and the growth of the railways, to the global exchange of commodities and even disease. The insights of biologists and anthrozoologists have been central to these accounts of both historians and curators eager to explain and display the intimate entanglements that tie together animals, humans, emotions and environments. Entanglements between nature and culture are just as pivotal to the chapters by John Morgan and Nicola Whyte. Morgan reveals the debt that

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environmental historians owe to research in the physical sciences, which has catalogued intensive human interventions into seemingly ‘natural’ environments. Morgan also makes a strong plea for the production of ‘socially situated environmental histories’, especially within the premodern world, which have the potential to uncover an array of environmental inequalities based on power, wealth, gender and race hierarchies. Environmental historians, he argues, can and should play a role in resisting the ‘totalizing’ discourses of climate change and in explaining the formation of new global political alliances among environmentally ‘marginalized’ communities. Nicola Whyte’s reflections on the ‘spatial turn’ draw on insights from cultural geography and landscape archaeology to consider the concept and practice of ‘dwelling’ in a particular historical landscape –​something that involved the dynamic interaction of bodies, space and time. Whyte considers the potential of this new spatial discourse to challenge dominant historical paradigms and to shed new light on marginalized histories. Each of the authors in this section issues a challenge to the reader:  to contest conventional historical categories and narratives by incorporating non-​human, fluid forces within our historical enquiries. These chapters also support the editors’ view that productive encounters with new disciplinary partners (and, by consequence, with fresh subjects, sources, and methods) are essential to the future success and innovation of social and cultural histories.

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Animal-​human histories Hilda Kean

Introduction: The existence of animals in the past It has been argued that ‘the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human’.1 It is certainly the case that materially  –​as well as symbolically and spiritually –​cultures and nations worldwide have embraced non-​ human animals in daily, religious and commemorative life. However, a turn towards histories that privileged animals as the focus of history –​or even as agents in the making of histories –​was absent from the new developments in social and cultural history-​making in the 1960s and 1970s. This period saw, for example, groundbreaking work subjecting new topics and people to historical scrutiny by highlighting actions that had been overlooked or written out of standard histories. In his The Making of the English Working-​ Class, E. P. Thompson had sought to ‘rescue’ his subjects ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’.2 Similarly, Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History: Three Hundred Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight against It of 1973 was innovative because the author made a neglected subject matter valid within the discourse of history. But works on animals as serious objects of historical study did not develop alongside books on class and gender at that time. As recently as 1974, as animal historian Erica Fudge has discussed, a spoof article appeared in the Journal of Social History entitled ‘Household Pets and Urban Alienation’ criticizing the new subjects of that time: It seems brash to suggest that pets become the next ‘fad’ subject in social history but, after running through various ethnic groups (and now

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women), historians may need a new toy . . . Left-​handers, another large group long subject to intense social discrimination merit attention, but again their collective consciousness has lagged. So why not pets? Here, clearly, would be the ultimate history of the inarticulate.3 Although clearly satirical and inevitably saying more about the author’s hostility to women and ethnic minorities rather than companion animals, the lack of coverage was well observed. There has been a striking absence in scholarly discussion on the role of companion animals in, for example, the changing nature and composition of the family or women’s lives, even in the period after this satirical offering. No wonder animal studies scholar Jonathan Burt can state, without fear of rebuttal, ‘We have not to date been particularly well served by the history of animals in the twentieth century.’4 Materially, non-​ human animals have contributed in various ways to industrial and thus economic growth. For centuries animals, such as donkeys, were used to operate machines such as treadmills to raise water from wells and rivers.5 The subsequent role of horses and donkeys included carrying and transporting goods, such as coal in underground mines.6 The railway network in the nineteenth century, far from making horses redundant, was reliant for expansion on the increased use of animals:  ‘Without carriages and carts the railways would have been like stranded whales, giants unable to use their strength . . . All the railway companies kept their own establishments of horses’.7 The very growth of modernity and the shape and layout of cities have been influenced by an animal presence. Still extant are the mews in large towns where horses were formerly stabled near the grand houses that they serviced. In a different vein, the physical presence of rats would lead to changes in the development of sewers or the building of roads over polluted rivers.8 Parts of cities would gain –​or lose –​status because of the type of animal presence. Thus the stinking trade in tanneries, curing the skins of dead animals, was specifically placed in London, for example, outside the city on the south and unfashionable side of the River Thames. Similarly, the exclusion of live animals from Smithfield Market on the City borders helped promote the concept of London as a civilized metropolis.9 By way of contrast, the London Zoo was created in Regent’s Park in a fashionable part of the metropolis near a diorama –​here animals could be observed in more refined fashion.10 For centuries particular animals have been welcomed into our homes as companions. Thus anthrozoologist John Bradshaw suggests that dogs have been domesticated for between 15,000 and 25,000 years.11 Internationally royalty have possessed live animals, particularly ones deemed to be fierce such as lions, to demonstrate their own power –​and employed them symbolically as heraldic icons.12 From at least the nineteenth century in Britain animals were kept by the royal family as close domestic companions. The dogs who lived with Victoria and Albert were frequently painted by Edwin

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Henry Landseer and records of the daily existence of Islay, one of the Queen’s favourite terriers, are to be found in the recently released online diaries.13 The role of animals in histories –​as opposed to events in the past –​has been widely neglected.14 Thus, to take the example above of animals and royalty, the part played by animals in constructing the British royal family positively, for example, has been strangely neglected, although popular photographic collections make clear the importance of the physical presence of dogs as companions within the nineteenth-​and the twentieth-​century British/​German royal family. The sales early in the twentieth century of Where’s Master?  –​some 100,000 copies in a few weeks  –​the tome purportedly penned by Caesar, the dog living with Edward VII who preceded his funeral cortege, marching behind the late king’s horse, probably says as much about the British nation’s interest in dogs as in royalty: ‘I’m marching in front of the kings. I’ve no history, I’ve no pedigree. I’m not high-​ born. But I loved him and I was faithful to him’.15 As images in the Royal Photograph Collection also suggest, dogs were not mere appendages for posed photographs but played an active part in the daily life of successive royal households.16 Military and economic historians have included animals within their broad subject areas, but academic works on war have tended to focus on the front lines of military activity, manoeuvres and strategies.17 (It has tended to be left to popular or public historians to write about the role of individual animals in war.)18 Within an economic history of industrialization the role of horses has been discussed. In a key inaugural lecture over forty years ago Professor F.  M. L.  Thompson expanded on the hard work conducted by horses: ‘So hard for so long, historically, that of course horsepower naturally became the measure of the strength of the steam engines and internal combustion engines.’19 More recently Clay McShane and Joel Tarr have characterized horses in American cities with a similar approach as ‘four-​ legged workers’.20 Such historical work has been important in acknowledging the existence of animals but for the most part has been concerned with adding in animals to extant human-​focused histories. Thus Keith Thomas’s Man [sic] and the Natural World:  Changing Attitudes in England 1500–​ 1800 was an important work for creating awareness of the wide range of materials that do exist about animals.21 However, the emphasis was within the existing frameworks of social history and focused on the behaviours and attitudes of human beings towards animals. Thus John MacKenzie, an important historian of imperialism as an integral part of popular culture in nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Britain, published a volume entitled The Empire of Nature that argued that ‘hunting remains important to those who continue to exercise global power.’22 This human emphasis was also present in a key article on the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in nineteenth-​century England by Brian Harrison.23 Quite rightly the campaigning work of the animal charity was acknowledged as important –​and as an aspect of British radical traditions. But it was not –​nor was

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intended to be –​an article that attempted to look at what it meant to be an animal in the nineteenth century, whether helped by the RSPCA or not!

The growth and impact of animal studies upon historical work However, in the last twenty years or so there has been a huge growth in what has been variously called animal studies, animal-​human studies or critical animal studies. While there are differences in these perspectives, suffice it to say that all currents try to emphasize in different ways the role of animals in society, and all such discourses embrace interdisciplinarity. Two key books from this more recent period have been Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate:  The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age and Kathleen Kete’s The Beast in the Boudoir.24 As a way of exploring nineteenth-​century culture in England and France (specifically Paris) respectively Ritvo and Kete have been influential in creating what has been termed ‘holistic history’ in which ‘the presentation of the animal is offered as a way of rethinking culture’.25 Thus Ritvo has explored the ways in which the promulgation of a coherent and hierarchical interpretation of the animal kingdom in discourse about animals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided people with a ‘shared set of assumptions, values, and associations that simultaneously confirmed human ascendancy and supported the established social order’.26 Such work has developed both from the historian’s conventional skills of archival research but also from the incorporation of ideas outside mainstream historical thinking. In particular, those working in this interdisciplinary field draw on philosophical thinking. The work of the late eighteenth-​and early nineteenth-​ century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, better known for his writing on the panopticon structure of prisons or the promotion of workhouses, has been important. In a short article his critique of the French philosopher René Descartes –​who essentially saw animals as machines and very different beings to humans, saying ‘they act naturally and mechanically like a clock which tells the time’27  –​ emphasized instead the similarities between them. The issue was not, he argued, whether animals could speak but whether they could feel: ‘The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they can suffer?’28 Here the philosopher was attempting to show the common features that characterized different species, particularly suffering. Instead of promoting the value of speech to separate humans from animals, by emphasizing feeling he promoted a commonality across species. This approach has encouraged scholars to see similarities between animals and humans and to question common-​sense assumptions of human superiority simply based on an animal’s lack of human language. More recently the work of French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari has been appropriated in similar ways

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to explore a blurring between human and animal, often summarized as ‘becoming-​animal’. Their argument emphasizes fluidity and questions the very boundaries that are perceived to exist between ‘animal’ and ‘human’.29 The final example of a philosopher whose work is important for the writing of animal-​human history is Jacques Derrida. Cultural historians more usually refer to his work on the nature of archives and the historian’s role30 than to his essay ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ that starts with a daily encounter between the philosopher and his pet cat staring at him while the philosopher is naked in the bathroom. In summary, unlike some earlier philosophers who saw animals as symbols, he is acknowledging the existence of a real animal with her own status and behaviour, especially the animals with whom we live. Erica Fudge has summarized his position as ‘thinking about and with them transforms what it might be that thought is understood to be capable of’.31 While philosophers working within animal studies will inevitably pay close attention to such writers., it is also the case, given the emphasis on interdisciplinarity, that historians working on animal-​human history are more likely also to use such concepts outside the conventional boundaries of history than if they were working more straightforwardly as, say, empirical historians. When historians committed to writing a particular sort of history about animals use such writers, it is both because of the broader context for their work and because it helps them to think through approaches to writing such history. While initially it might appear esoteric, it is not dissimilar to approaches adopted, for example, by feminist historians who have often applied social scientific, psychoanalytic or philosophical concepts current within the broader field of women’s studies/​gender studies to historical writing in that field.32 However, while some historians working with an animal studies approach will appropriate concepts outside the historical mainstream into their work, some animal studies scholars, while believing that the role of animals in society is important and certainly worth analysis, argue that it is not possible even to contemplate trying to write histories that privilege animals. Cary Wolfe, in particular, has been dismissive of this possibility: So even though –​to return to our historian ­example –​your concept of the discipline’s external relations to its larger environment is post humanist in taking seriously the existence of nonhuman subjects and the consequent compulsion to make the discipline respond to the question of nonhuman animals foisted on it by changes in the discipline’s environment, your internal disciplinarity may remain humanist through and through.33 In other words, according to Wolfe, the very structure of the discipline of history overrides the intentions of the historian to write about animals in a way that makes them the focus of history. Such an approach tends both to ignore the extant material about animals’ past lives and also to downplay the fact that history is not a static discipline but an evolving area of study

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that embraces many aspects of other disciplines in the way that the past is summoned up –​and imagined. While so far I  have discussed developments within history that have appropriated concepts from other disciplines, what has also started to emerge is historical writing in disciplines outside history that have brought new approaches to the subject content. In addition to work in anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, politics and sociology, a key area developing historical thinking on animals has been the geographic field.34 The exploration of ideas of space and place has opened up thinking about how space was defined in the past and the ways in which animal-​human space intersected. While attention is paid, inevitably, to written materials, such work often uses maps or the built environment as a source of ideas.35

Introducing debates and issues in the creation of animal-​human history: the examples of experience, agency and representation In a short chapter it is not possible to cover all the debates with which historians in this field engage; however, to get a sense of some of the key ideas I intend to focus on three issues. The first issue is the nature of experience. Many social and cultural historians accept that part of their role is to imagine what it was like to be alive at a particular time in the past.36 However, whether it is indeed possible or not to do this and whether the aim is to bring the past into the present or somehow to translocate a reader to the past, is still a matter for debate within mainstream history.37 This debate is present in a slightly different way within animal-​human history. The focus here is upon the ability (or not) of a human to imagine what it is (or was) like to be an animal. Some historians who write about animals do not even attempt this. In a recent book, Animal Companions, historian Ingrid Tague has argued that ‘we do not have access to animal experiences even to the extent that we have access to the experiences of the poor and illiterate, who also left no written records. We can only explain animal behaviour with reference to our own, human thoughts and feelings.’38 Like others who hold this view, Tague draws on the approach of philosopher Thomas Nagel. He argued that it was impossible for a human to imagine what it was like to be an animal, specifically, in his example, a bat. As he put it, ‘there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine’, and even if we could, we could not know ‘what it is like for a bat to be a bat’. Choosing a bat, rather than, say, a cat, dog or horse was deliberate:  although many people like bats and try to save their environment, they are unlikely to share their homes or leisure time with such animals. Unsurprisingly, his position has been challenged. Radical theologian Andrew Linzey, who uses history in his work, has countered Nagel, saying

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that we do not need to know precisely how a bat thinks or feels or ‘mentally encounters the world’ to ‘know basic things about how it can be harmed’. Linzey has argued that humans can know things about a bat’s consciousness and concludes, quite reasonably some might argue, ‘We can know these things at least as reasonably as we know them in the case of most humans’. Linzey intimates that understanding human experience is impossible. This may well be the case. Nevertheless, this is a task that historians routinely undertake in relation to human history, while many of us realize the impossibility of this task.39 Putting it another way, the ongoing concern historians have about the nature of experience is also present within animal-​human history with the additional layer of another species.40 A second issue of concern is whether or not animals possess agency. Although agency was a feature of earlier working-​class and women’s history, it is a more recent addition to animal-​human history. The extent to which this is deemed important to argue for (rather than being accepted as fairly obvious) tends to vary between different historical cultures. Some have argued that animals do not possess the ability to directly transform human structures, so they cannot be considered as historical agents.41 By way of contrast, in a strongly worded article Jason Hribal, for example, has explored the ways in which non-​human animals have acted as historical agents:  ‘Donkeys have ignored commands. Mules have dragged their hooves. Oxen have refused to work. Horses have broken equipment’.42 As Susan Pearson and Mary Weismantel have also suggested, animals do exert an influence on society by their individual presence within social geographies. These authors too draw analogies with the recognition of human agency: ‘Because of [animals’] often degraded and subjugated status, their ability to effect change has often been sharply curtailed; however, the same is self-​evidently true of human actors in many circumstances.’43 The third area of concern is representation. Fudge argues that as access to animals in the past is through humans, ‘then we never look at the animals, only ever at the representation of the animals by humans’. The difficulty then can be, she continues, that animals themselves disappear, abandoned in favour of the ‘purely textual’.44 Taking this argument further, Jonathan Burt has argued that if animals are just treated as icons and symbols, that, ‘paradoxically, places the animal outside history’.45 Other scholars look at the issue differently. Thus by careful detailed reference to animal welfare campaigners’ visual material of the nineteenth century, Keri Cronin argues that representation of speaking animals ‘allowed readers and activists to recognize animal agency, but also existed as a site in which to imagine further articulation of nonhuman agency and voice’.46 This is clearly different to suggesting that animals are defined as merely symbols (say, of fidelity in the case of a dog) or bald human projections (‘I know my cat understands every word I say’) rather than as beings in their own right. If animals can only be symbols rather than autonomous beings, it is apparently not that important whether histories are written attempting to

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show animals as agents and the protagonists of a narrative. Accordingly, they end up being representations of human sentiments rather than beings in their own right.47 In such discussion the materials for writing history are problematized as they emanate from humans. Therefore art historian Diana Donald has convincingly argued there is a need for studies that ‘take representations of animals as what they purport to be, and analyse them for what they truly contain: evidence of human convictions and emotions about other species. Fragmented, obscure, deeply conflicting as this evidence may be, it offers the only possibility of recovering a key aspect of history which has, as yet, hardly begin to be understood.’48 As Etienne Benson has suggested, ‘human-​authored texts can still provide valuable insights into the past that are not reducible to the human perspective’.49 Much of this debate tends to focus on the nature of materials rather than the intentions of the historian. Those researchers who have tended to declare unproblematically that it is impossible to write animal-​focused histories appear, unsurprisingly, also to be those who did not seek to attempt to do this. However, material becomes an issue not necessarily because of the material itself but because of the intentions of the historian. If a historian is simply ‘writing –​in’ animals to existing frameworks of history, this is, of course, a logical approach. However, if a historian is attempting more than this, for example, by seeking to disrupt accepted ways of looking at aspects of the past by highlighting animal-​human relations, this question needs to be explored more fully.

New directions for animal-​human history Using science –​and science using history Historical work on animals that has developed since ‘the animal turn’ has often privileged research that focuses on distinctive aspects of animals’ lives, such as vivisection50 or zoos, because of the absence of previous attention to such subjects.51 However, despite such work, Jonathan Burt, for example, has shown his frustration with work in animal studies per se, arguing for the need to ‘emancipate the animal’ from the ‘concept of the human methodologically’. Instead, ‘we need to bring the animal center stage’.52 However, this is not quite the same as subjecting ‘already known’ and conventional historical topics such as war to an animal lens. To date research that has revisited ‘human-​focused narratives’ from an animal ‘perspective’ has been less evident. Unsurprisingly with the decline of ‘grand narrative’ history we are not seeing histories on the lines of the role of non-​human animals in the making of twentieth-​century history. But if we were to subject certain key accepted moments to a different approach, what might this look like?

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A good example might be an analysis of the Second World War on the British home front not as a so-​called people’s war but as a war experienced by animals and humans alike –​and together. As I have argued elsewhere, people’s unwarranted killing of their own pets in the first week of war  –​ against the advice of the government, veterinary surgeons and animal charities –​created a rupture in any elision between what it meant to be an animal and a human. It also meant, needless to say, that some 400,000 companion animals died without good cause.53 By the inclusion of such information in a discussion of the much mythologized Second World War as a good war, which needs to be still commemorated and remembered, the existing narrative of the war is challenged. If we draw on material from other disciplines, particularly those related to science, we might be able to explore more deeply the subsequent animal-​human relationship during the war that, in many instances, became a close one both physically –​through the common sharing of shelters and food –​and emotionally. ‘To look at human-​animal relationships at a micro level, one-​to-​one, means focusing less on impacts of one on the other and more on how both animals and humans contribute to their engagement, producing something more than the sum of their parts.’54 For example, one of the Mass Observation diarists, Nella Last, wrote frequently about her cat, Mr Murphy, and her dog, Sol, during the war. To me [Sol] is more than an animal: he has kindness, understanding and intelligence and not only knows all that is said but often reads my mind to an uncanny degree. He knows when I am sad and dim and lies with his head on my foot, or follows me closely as if to say, ‘I cannot help you, but please understand I love you and will stand by.’55 Unlike her human partner, who seemed unable to understand his wife, the dog could apparently do this.56 Instead of dismissing this as simply a product of an imaginative human mind we might consider other possibilities. As biologist and anthrozoologist John Bradshaw has argued, dogs are very sensitive to ‘what goes on within relationships –​not just those in which they are directly involved, but also those they observe between people’.57 Bradshaw goes further by suggesting ‘the most basic emotions are so rooted in mammalian physiology and the more primitive parts of the mammalian brain that it is reasonable to assume that they are fundamentally the same whether experienced by a dog or by a human’.58 In recent years, such scientific work by those interested in the emotional lives of non-​human animals in society has increased. Thus Lynda Birke and Joanna Hockenhull demonstrate that ‘coordinating behaviour with another entails an emotional component, which both reflects and produces the relationship, and so does interspecies coordination, even if their behaviour is not identical’.59 Conventionally, in terms of methodology scientists emphasize empiricism, and thus the findings of earlier researchers are ignored unless the same evidence, certain animal behaviour, for example, can be personally observed. This can mean that

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findings are divorced from external cultural contexts and the effect of different historical times. However, in the example of the animal-​human relationship during the war, a historian would also look at the context provided by the war itself. Aerial bombardment, the rationing of certain foods and changes in accommodation/​living arrangements were contexts that helped create particular relationships, including the emotional relationships I have summarized here.60 In such an example it is not the case of the animal-​ human historian giving up on the writing of history but rather using other concepts to develop such work. However, it is not simply social and cultural historians who are interested in writing new animal histories. In the past veterinary history has tended to be a neglected subgenre of history  –​and of national awareness. However veterinary historians are starting to undertake research that addresses this neglect.61 Abigail Woods, for example, has analysed the impetus given to the transformation of dairy farming by circumstances of the Second World War.62 She has argued that existing accounts tend to see the changes in the field as a political affair while ignoring actual practices between farmers and cows. In her analysis of the intensification in breeding and milk production Woods demonstrates the growing role of veterinary expertise. By 1949, at the International Veterinary Congress in London the main theme of the discussion was the contribution of vets to the world food supply.63 I am not suggesting that Woods is writing about animal experience or agency, for instance, but the fact that she is inserting the dairy industry into a history of war can help open up such thinking to other scholars. For example, the post-​war period is widely seen in Britain as a time of the establishment and growth of the welfare state. This included provision in schools for meals of a nationally determined calorific value and free school milk, initially in both primary and secondary schools. This aspect of the nation’s past is usually discussed within social or political or educational history. However, it is not seen as only being possible because of the changed and increasingly intensive treatment of female cows. Therefore, to write a comprehensive account of that time would necessitate the acknowledgement of animals within this process.

Public history and heritage: memorialization and commemoration of animals Outside the sometimes academic constructs of cultural history a third area of development is in the broad field of public history. While dead animals have often been mere objects in natural history collections in museums, increasingly there have been attempts to make animals a part of broader social histories in museums. Thus the Australian National War Memorial in Canberra created a popular touring exhibition entitled ‘A is for Animals’ that acknowledged the role of animals alongside people in military conflict from the Boer War to Vietnam.64 From 2011 to 2013 the National Army

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Museum in London used the popularity of the play and then film War Horse to mount an exhibition entitled War Horse:  Fact or Fiction? There were displays that focused on individual horses, rather than, say, the generic role of cavalry horses. The focus on the individual and not merely the group also helped create a sense of empathy and identification missing from conventional military history. The majority of the material was, inevitably, drawn from human constructed sources, such as paintings but an artwork by Laura Antebi of a large horse made of wire stumbling upon barbed wire evoked far more than the textual explanation of the suffering caused to horses through such entrapment. The exhibition attempted throughout to privilege horses rather than to speak of the work of soldiers with them. Near the end of the exhibition was a large horizontal display cabinet consisting of rows of small white outline horses inviting visitors to remember the role of horses in war.65 The exhibition challenged the visitor to look at warfare generally and the First World War in particular in different ways to the norm. More recently the exhibition Spirited:  Australia’s Horse Story at the National Museum of Australia in 2014–​15 tackled the difficult task of trying to show the role of horses as active protagonists in the development of the nation –​ with a focus upon horses rather than people’s perception of them per se.66 Artworks played around with different ideas of power –​an outline metallic human figure being forced to be the focus of a larger metallic horse’s gaze –​ or huge moving images of wild horses unrestrained by humans. There carriages were not seen as vehicles with absent operators, but models of horses were included to demonstrate the effect of the weight upon their bodies.67 It is perhaps worth noting that it is within the comparatively new areas of public history and heritage that we are starting to see such developments in animal-​focused history. Perhaps the emphasis routinely placed by public history upon the processes of history-​making (rather than subject content per se) means that practitioners can grasp more enthusiastically the opportunities for making new animal-​human histories.68 Certainly histories being created within the broad framework of animal studies are starting to demonstrate more explicitly the part played by animals in broader society. In some instances the historiography underpinning such thinking does not only help illuminate thinking about the animal-​human relationship as such but also the very nature of history itself. Irrespective of an individual historian’s particular interest (or not) in non-​human animal histories, this topic is one that deserves to be taken on board by the wider historical community.

NOTES 1 Graham Harvey, Animism, p. xi, as quoted in Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), p. 18.

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2 Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working-​Class, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 12. 3 Charles Phineas (pseud.), ‘Household Pets and Urban Alienation’, Journal of Social History 7 (1974): p. 339, as quoted in Erica Fudge, ‘A Left-​handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals’, in Nigel Rothfels (ed.), Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 3–​18, here p. 4. 4 Jonathan Burt, ‘Invisible Histories: Primate Bodies and the Rise of Posthumanism in the Twentieth Century’, in Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini (eds), Animal Encounters, (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 159–​72, here p. 159. 5 Hugo Brenner and J. Kenneth Major, Water Raising by Animal Power. Offprint from Industrial Archaeology 9 (May 1972), unnumbered pages. 6 In the Durham coalfield, for example, some 22,000 pit ponies were employed in 1913. More shockingly, they were still being employed at Ellington colliery, the last surviving pit, in 1994. http://​www.beamish.org.uk/​new-​pit-​pony-​ stables-​under-​construction/​ [accessed 31 August 2015]. The last surviving pony from Ellington, Tony, died at the age of forty in 2011, having spent his last years at the Newcastle Dog and Cat Shelter. His companion from Ellington, Pike, had died in 1995. http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​england-​tyne-​14220240 [accessed 31 August 2015]. 7 F. M. L. Thompson, Victorian England: The Horse-​Drawn Society, Inaugural lecture, Bedford College (University of London, Bedford College, 1970), p. 13. The extension of railways increased the need for local carters and carriers. Hilda Kean, London Stories (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2004), pp. 75–​6. 8 The Farringdon Road in London enclosing the Fleet River is a good example. See Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon (New Haven, CT, and New York: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 53–​4. 9 Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), pp. 58–​64. 10 See Hilda Kean, ‘Traces and Representations: Animal Pasts in London’s Present’, The London Journal 36 (2011): pp. 54–​71. 11 John Bradshaw, In Defence of Dogs (London: Allen Lane, 2011), p. 32. 12 Daniel Hahn, The Tower Menagerie: The Amazing True Story of the Royal Collection of Wild Beasts (London: Simon and Schuster, 2004). 13 Diana Donald, Picturing Animals in Britain 1750–​1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Queen Victoria’s Journals, http://​www. queenvictoriasjournals.org/​quick/​executeSearch.do;jsessionid=A01A83F76B28 839EDE8CEC5162AE08BC [accessed 7 January 2015]. 14 For further discussion of the relationship between the past and history, see Hilda Kean, ‘Challenges for Historians Writing Animal-​Human History: What Is Really Enough?’ Anthrozoos 25 (August 2012): pp. 57–​72. 15 John Edward Hodder-​Williams, Where’s Master? By Caesar, the King’s Dog (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 53. See Caesar’s photo in Sophie Gordon, Noble Hounds and Dear Companions (London: Royal Collections Enterprises Ltd, 2007), p. 66.

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16 See Gordon, Noble Hounds; Katherine MacDonogh, Reigning Cats and Dogs: A History of Pets at Court since the Renaissance (London: Fourth Estate, 1999); Libby Hall, These Were Our Dogs (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). 17 See, for example, Gervase Phillips, ‘Writing Horses into American Civil War History,’ War in History 20 (2013): pp. 160–​81 and ‘ “Who Shall Say That the Days of Cavalry Are Over?” The Revival of the Mounted Arm in Europe, 1853–​1914,’ War in History 18 (2011), pp. 5–​32; John Singleton, ‘Britain’s Military Use of Horses 1914–​1918’, Past and Present 139 (1993): pp. 178–​203. 18 See, for example, Angus Whitson and Andrew Orr, Sea Dog Bamse: World War 11 Canine Hero (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009); Gail Parker, ‘The Dickin Medal and the PDSA Animal Cemetery’, After the Battle 140 (2008): pp. 46–​55; Peter Cochrane, Simpson and the Donkey: The Making of a Legend (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1992). 19 Thompson, Victorian England, p. 3. 20 Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, ‘The Horse in the Nineteenth Century American City’, in Dorothee Brantz (ed.), Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans and the Study of History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), pp. 227–​45, here p. 227. They have been recently criticized by innovative historian Sandra Swart for defining a horse as a living machine rather than as an animal possessing agency. Swart, Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2010), p. 200. 21 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–​1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983). 22 John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 309. 23 Brian Harrison, ‘Animals and the State in Nineteenth Century England’, English Historical Review 88 (1973), pp. 786–​820. 24 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in Victorian England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-​Century Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles. University of California Press, 1994). 25 Fudge, ‘A Left-​handed Blow’, p. 9. 26 Ritvo, Animal Estate, p. 42. 27 René Descartes, Descartes: Philosophical Letters, trans. and ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), as reprinted in Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald (eds), The Animals Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2007), p. 60. 28 Bentham, The Principles of Moral and Legislation ch 18, section 1, as quoted in Kean, Animal Rights, p. 22. 29 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987), as reprinted in Kalof and Fitzgerald, Animals Reader, pp. 37–​50.

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30 See, in particular, Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Steedman has explored what historians do when they go to ‘the archive’, the commonplace location of paper-​based materials that conventional historians use. It is, she says, to ‘do with longing and appropriation . . . a place where a whole world, a social order, may be imagined [emphasis added] by the recurrence of a names in a register, through a scrap of paper, or some other little piece of flotsam’ (p. 81). 31 Fudge, Pets (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), p. 87. An excellent and highly readable introduction to debates around the history of philosophy and animals is Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher and the Wolf (London: Granta Books, 2008). 32 For example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution (1984; London: Virago, 1996). 33 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 123–​4. 34 Key geographical works include Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (eds), Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-​Animal Relations (London: Routledge, 2000); Philip Howell, ‘A Place for the Animal Dead: Pets, Pet Cemeteries and Animal Ethics in Late Victorian Britain’, Ethics, Place and Environment 5 (2002): pp. 5–​22. 35 Philip Howell, At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015); Peter Atkins (ed.), Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 36 See Steedman, Dust. 37 See in particular the writing of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin such as ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 247–​9 or his The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 38 Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-​ Century Britain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), p. 9. 39 Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review 83 (1974): pp. 435–​50; Andrew Linzey, Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology and Popular Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 50. 40 See Kean, ‘Challenges for Historians’, pp. 57–​72. Using the example of the writing of the explorer of southern Australia, Matthew Flinders, about his cat Trim, I suggest that there are valid traces to be found of the animal’s life in this human’s writing. 41 Brantz, Beastly Natures, p. 3. 42 Jason Hribal, ‘Animals, Agency and Class: Writing the History of Animals from Below’, Human Ecology Review 14 (2007): p. 103.

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43 Susan J. Pearson and Mary Weismantel, ‘Does “the Animal” Exist? Towards a Theory of Social Life with Animals’, in Brantz (ed.), Beastly Natures, p. 27. 44 Fudge, ‘A Left-​handed Blow’, p. 6. 45 Jonathan Burt, ‘The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom: The Role of Light and Electricity in Animal Representation’, Society and Animals 9 (2001): pp. 203–​28, here pp. 203–​4. 46 Keri J. Cronin, ‘“Can’t You Talk?” Voice and Visual Culture in Early Animal Welfare Campaigns’, Early Popular Visual Culture 9 (2011): pp. 203–​23. Similarly Mangum argues that in some circumstances during the nineteenth century, ‘the animals wrote back’. Teresa Mangum, ‘Narrative Dominion or the Animals Write Back? Animal Genres in Literature and the Arts’, in Kathleen Kete (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire (Oxford: Berg 2007), pp. 153–​73, here p. 173. 47 See Tague, Animal Companions, for a good example of this approach. 48 Donald, Picturing Animals in Britain 1750–​1850, p. vi. 49 Etienne Benson, ‘Animal Writes: Historiography, Disciplinarity, and the Animal Trace’, in Linda Kalof and Georgina F. Montgomery (eds), Making Animal Meaning (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), pp. 3–​16, here p. 5. Sandra Swart has chosen to look outside the archive to material culture to access horses’ experience. She has argued that the fact that human instruments of control of horses such as whips or reins were needed, indicates the animals’ own resistance. Further, although humans may not be able to see like a horse, Swart has noted that ‘many [people] have tried to think like a horse, which was essential in the process of domesticating and training them’. Swart, Riding High, pp. 202 and 217. 50 See, for example, Hilda Kean, ‘The Smooth Cool Men of Science: The Feminist and Socialist Response to Vivisection’, History Workshop Journal 40 (1995): pp. 16–​38; Jed Mayer, ‘Representing the Experimental Animal: Competing Voices in Victorian Culture’, in Sarah E. Macfarland and Ryan Hediger (eds), Animals and Agency (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 181–​206; Chien-​Hui Li, ‘Mobilizing Christianity in the Anti-​vivisection Movement in Victorian Britain’, Journal of Animal Ethics 2 (2012): pp. 141–​61; Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003). 51 Extensive work on zoos includes Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008); Freddy S. Litten, ‘Starving the Elephants: The Slaughter of Animals in Wartime Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo’, The Asia-​Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 38 (2009); Andrew Flack, The Natures of the Beasts: An Animal History of Bristol Zoo since 1835 (PhD diss., University of Bristol, 2014). 52 Jonathan Burt, ‘Review of Cary Wolfe Zoontologies and Animal Rites’, Society and Animals 13 (2005): pp. 167–​70, here p. 168. 53 Hilda Kean, ‘The Dog and Cat Massacre of September 1939 and the People’s War’, European Review of History –​Revue Europenne d’Histoire 22 (2015): pp. 741–​56.

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54 Lynda Birke and Joanna Hockenhull, ‘Journeys Together: Horses and Humans in Partnership,’ Society and Animals 23 (2015): pp. 81–​100, here p. 83. 55 Mass Observation collected a range of material, including diaries, in Britain between 1937 and the 1950s. The Archive is housed in The Keep, Brighton, United Kingdom. 56 Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming (eds), Nella Last’s War (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1981), pp. 216–​7. This also covers the indented quote above. 57 Bradshaw, In Defence of Dogs, p. 207. Philosophers too have started to explore animal emotions. Thus Mark Rowlands has argued that animals ‘can’ be moral subjects (p. 33) and that ‘certain animals arguably show themselves to be concerned with the welfare or fortunes of others’ (p. 8). Can Animals Be Moral? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 58 Bradshaw, In Defence of Dogs, p. 223. For further exploration, see Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007), p. 19. 59 Birke and Hockenhull, ‘Journeys Together,’ p. 96. 60 This is explored further in Hilda Kean, Animals on the British Home Front 1939–​1945: The Cat and Dog Massacre and the Subsequent Animal-​Human Relationship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 61 The broader area of the history of science has also started to acknowledge the importance of the animal-​human relationship in such developments –​ rather than the skills of scientists per se. See, for example, Robert G. W. Kirk, ‘In Dogs We Trust? Intersubjectivity, Response-​able Relations, and the Making of Mine Detector Dogs’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 50 (2014): pp. 1–​3; Neil Pemberton and Michael Warboys, Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–​2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 62 Abigail Woods, ‘The Farm as Clinic: Veterinary Expertise and the Transformation of Dairy Farming, 1930–​1950,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38 (2007): pp. 462–​87. 63 Ibid., p. 482. 64 See catalogue, Australian War Memorial, A is for Animals: An A to Z of Animals in War, (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2009). Animals in subsequent wars have also been acknowledged in the new Animals in War memorial erected in the grounds in 2009. See Hilda Kean, ‘Animals and War Memorials: Different Approaches to Commemorating the Human-​Animal Relationship’, in Ryan Hediger (ed.), Animals and War (Leiden: Brill 2013), pp. 237–​62, here pp. 257–​9. 65 For a fuller account, see Kean, ‘Challenges’, pp. 66–​7. See also Denise Pakeman, ‘Fact and Fiction: Reinterpreting Animals in a National Museum’, Society and Animals 21 (2013): pp. 591–​3. 66 National Museum of Australia –​Spirited: Australia’s Horse Story http://​www. nma.gov.au/​exhibitions/​spirited [accessed 10 September 2015]. 67 Within the heritage industry, which has always commemorated animals even if this is not widely noted, individual –​often named –​animals have

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been remembered even if this is to create interest in an otherwise apparently boring human. Thus Hodge, the cat who lived with the creator of the English dictionary, Dr Samuel Johnson, has ostensibly been ‘remembered’ since 1997 in sculpted form outside his house near London’s Fleet Street, but his individual statue, of course, is only there because of the connection to a famous person. See Kean, ‘Traces’, for further examples. 68 See chapter by Paul Ashton and Meg Foster in this volume. See too Ashton and Kean (eds), Public History and Heritage.

Key texts Bekoff, M. The Emotional Lives of Animals. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007. Donald, D. Picturing Animals in Britain 1750–​1850. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Fudge, E. Pets. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. Howell, P. At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Kean, H. Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Kete, K. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-​Century Paris. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Philo, C., and C. Wilbert (eds). Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-​Animal Relations. London: Routledge, 2000. Ritvo, H. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in Victorian England, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Rowlands, M. The Philosopher and the Wolf. London: Granta Books, 2008. Steedman, C. Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Swart, S. Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2010. Thomas, K. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–​ 1800. London: Allen Lane, 1983.

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CHAPTER NINE

New directions in transnational history: Thinking and living transnationally Durba Ghosh

Introduction The idea of transnational history has been an important and innovative approach for historians for nearly a generation, building and expanding from other approaches, such as world, global, imperial and international history. In some quarters, particularly early American, Atlantic, African American and British imperial history, the methods associated with transnational history were used by previous generations before the term ‘transnational’ became an academic exhortation.1 Newer kinds of social and cultural history, feminist, diasporic, environmental and oceanic history, in particular, have been transnational from their inception as historians in these subfields grappled with broadly universal social and political structures, such as patriarchy, the climate and geography.2 These discussions add vibrancy to questions that continue to drive historical innovation: How do we define transnational history? Which subfields of history lend themselves to transnational methods? How do we do transnational history? This chapter draws selectively from debates in particular subfields and argues for a transnational method that puts people into a transnational framework.3 By making a case for the value of studying transnational lives, this chapter

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shows that across many centuries people have lived beyond the nation that they identified as home. As the movement of peoples, goods and ideas across national boundaries accelerates in our globalizing world, thinking transnationally has become central in reshaping the study of history. The nation state is no longer a central unit of historical analysis, as it was in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, when national histories provided narratives for the founding of many states and governments.4 Yet there continue to be tensions as the nation state contends with global and international forces. As the economist Joseph Stiglitz argued in Globalization and Its Discontents, policy differences between international institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank) and national governments have left nations unable to enact positive economic reforms for their citizens, leaving many workers impoverished even as national economies have improved.5 By analysing the figure of the discontent as individuals who have not benefited from globalization, Stiglitz opened the door for why we might want to think in transnational terms, both thinking with and against the nation, as we try to understand the lives and experiences of human and non-​ human actors who have moved across national boundaries. At the heart of discussions about transnational history and its value is thinking about large processes –​global economy, slavery, migration and empire –​and their interaction with microhistorical developments, such as changing norms of sexuality, emotion and kinship. Drawing from the essays in this volume, thinking about markets and the environment as explored in this volume by Donna Loftus and John Morgan respectively, is just as central to thinking about the transnational. Simultaneously, Rob Boddice’s essay on the history of emotions and Penny Summerfield’s on subjectivity are crucial to how big changes affected people and personhood. A transnational approach, as I have sketched it out here, puts a primacy on aligning political and economic history with social and cultural history into a single frame, and argues for thinking and living transnationally as part of our shared history.

Defining transnational history Over a decade ago, the editors of the American Historical Review (AHR) convened a panel of historians to consider the distinctive contributions and innovations offered by transnational historians.6 The contributors, one from the United Kingdom, another from South Africa and four based in the United States, show the widespread appeal of transnational history in various academic sites. One of these scholars works on the British empire, another on Latin America and three on the United States. They all agreed that transnational history emerged as a critique of histories that were bound to state-​centred narratives and national imaginaries. From there, the conversation ranged from a discussion about how transnational history related to

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other terms such as world, global history, or international history, whether the term is anachronistic for the eras before nations existed and how much transnational history can and should rely on cultural studies’ approaches. The panel’s participants, who work on a range of periods and different parts of the world, agreed to define the term transnational in a methodologically expansive way. The late Chris Bayly, who was a British imperial historian and who wrote a well-​received book about world history, began the conversation by differentiating transnational history from world or global history. He observed that world history had its own genealogy, built on a world systems approach that categorized some nations as cores and others as peripheries and presumed that the non-​Western world was a backward version of Europe, writ large.7 Thinking transnationally avoided the language of progression and modernization that marked scholarship on world history and promoted thinking about alternatives and possibilities that went beyond the West/​non-​ West dichotomy.8 Bayly noted that global history was preferred by those who argue that we should historicize the idea of globalization and see it as a historical process in which the relationships between different parts of the world entered into engagements that were, at times, mutually beneficial and at other times destructive.9 These distinctions between world, global and transnational history depended on understanding the changing nature of power and, in particular, the ways in which history writing has depended on a hierarchy of which countries or regions are considered ‘advanced’. Eschewing the terms of comparative history, which pitted nations against one another along indices of progress and so-​called backwardness, Isabel Hofmeyr, who has worked on the intellectual and literary connections between India and South Africa, argued that transnational history could break away from ‘an over-​reliance on a “grand narrative” of domination and resistance . . . A transnational historical practice centered around circulation potentially offers a route for making visible a wider range of political possibilities.’10 Others agreed that it is no longer possible to think of modernity as having been shaped by Europe and pressed onto Asian, African and Latin American regions of the world. As an example of an innovative transnational approach, Bayly noted that ‘Malay sultanates looked to the Ottoman empire for legitimacy’ and argued that thinking of the Malay peninsula as only a British colony would miss this important form of engagement across the West and non-​West divide.11 Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence was another important example; he challenged a long-​dominant narrative that England’s industrial progress was unique in world history when he showed how constraints on the availability of energy, rather than a closed market economy, had shaped China’s economic growth.12 There were several cautionary moments that highlighted fault lines among participants in the forum. Bayly voiced some initial concern about a term that threatened to be anachronistic –​he asked whether transnational was

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appropriate to describe the world before 1800 when there were few nations. Scholars of the early modern period, such as Sanjay Subrahmanyam, have urged the idea of ‘connected histories’, to think through historical links and parallels in the early modern period that predate the making of modern nations.13 The idea of connected histories for the early modern period has propelled the move towards ‘entangled histories’, which has generated conversations about how and whether entanglement forms another kind of transnational thinking.14 As I show below, scholars working on early modern Atlantic history have destabilized the idea of nation and sovereignty. Other scholars of the early modern period have evoked the idea of the ‘transimperial’ to explain historical connections between different imperial regimes at different sites.15 In contrast to Bayly’s concern that the term transnational was inaccurate in reference to the early modern period, others, such as Wendy Kozol and Patricia Seed, felt that it was important for historians to embrace contemporary categories of historical analysis, such as race, sexuality and gender, ideas that would have rarely been used in the premodern or early modern periods but that were salient to intercultural relations. In response, Matthew Connelly, who identified as a diplomatic historian who has turned to international and transnational history, cautioned that a transnational method should avoid the faddishness that some methods of analysis, such as postcolonial or cultural studies, had suffered from.16 In turn, the editor asked the AHR panelists, ‘Does your own practice of transnational history imply a distancing from cultural studies or even subaltern studies?’ to which Hofmeyr, Kozol and Seed responded unequivocally that they could not imagine a transnational history without cultural studies. From their perspective, which was based in feminist, gender and racial analysis, a cultural studies approach, as it had been pioneered by such figures as Edward Said, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, had been successful at following the evolution and durability of cultural discourses as they moved across different sites and domains.17 Hofmeyr, Kozol and Seed argued that deconstructing meanings and analysing representations were important to those doing cultural analysis with a transnational dimension.18 Sven Beckert, in contrast, voiced a different aspiration for transnational history and its subaltern inclinations, which was that ‘we should certainly study culture and ideas, but we will never understand them properly without also studying such issues as investment patterns, elite networks and institutions.’19 While all the participants of the forum agreed that transnational history destabilizes the centrality of the nation, Kozol, a specialist in visual studies, feminism and American culture, worried that transnational history was a vehicle for reinstating the dominance of particular national historiographies, enabling countries, such as the United States, with a large amount of historical scholarship, to override those with less historical scholarship.20 She asked, ‘What constitutes the object of historical inquiry once you challenge

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the stability of the border to define the nation? Where, for instance, does “American history” stop and Asian or African history begin?’21 The imbalance between different historiographies –​particularly as they are represented in the Anglo-​American academy  –​has been an issue of concern, especially for those writing from the so-​called historical or historiographical margins. Ann Curthoys, a historian of Australia, reflected in reference to British history, which is often considered an imperial parent for Australian studies, ‘Are the critiques of national history strongest in those national intellectual cultures where “the nation” has been relatively secure . . . ? Is the rejection of “nation” a luxury, mainly for those intellectuals who inhabit powerful or at least populous nations?’22 Historians of smaller nations have voiced their anxieties about having their scholarship recolonized by those who were located in geopolitically powerful nations. Allan Greer, a historian of early North America who is based in Canada, noted that calls to expand the pre-​1800 history of the United States to the North American continent ‘were no doubt intended to be read as an appeal to a more cosmopolitan view of the past, one in harmony with an international consciousness of the contemporary world, but they might also be read as a manifesto for a national historical enterprise with expansionist ambitions’.23 These concerns show how transnational history risks turning into imperial history, particularly when scholars in dominant specialities end up proclaiming themselves as (re)discoverers of the world and the transnational. Yet, as some scholars worried about the impact of transnational history on smaller historiographies, others have defended national histories, arguing that a transnational method cannot fully capture the exceptionalism of particular historiographies. Below, I return to the case of pre-​1800 US history and, briefly, French history. In spite of the call to look beyond national histories, hanging over these conversations was a whiff of nationalist prejudice, a sense that even as transnational historical methods enable more complex conversations about the nature of historical development, we are often reduced to cultural stereotypes that reinstate political and social hierarchies. When Beckert wrote, ‘Modernity rests just as much on African slaves, Indian peasants, Chinese traders and Arab mathematicians as on Lancashire mill workers, Scottish philosophers, German chemists, and American political theorists’, he invoked a set of unconscious and conventional binaries (the predominantly labouring classes of the subaltern global south against the primarily elite and educated groups of the global north) that structure how we may relate one area of the world with another.24 Scholars of the early modern Americas, who focus on the period before the founding of the United States or any Latin American nation, have been especially active in studying transnational and intercontinental relationships. In particular, scholars have drawn attention to the diversity of populations who inhabited the spaces that Europeans think of as the ‘new world’, and they have considered the ways that these emergent nation states

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were multiracial, polyglot and multi-​ethnic.25 While the current boundaries of Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil and the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean may seem self-​evident, historical scholarship on the changing boundaries and populations of New France, New Spain, New England or New Amsterdam demonstrates that working from within a national historiography is limited. In bypassing the teleology that links the founding of the thirteen colonies along the eastern seaboard of the North Atlantic to the current configurations of the continental United States, scholars have expanded definitions of Atlantic history, taking it in a transnational direction that includes British, French, Spanish, mestizo and creole, as well as African, Indian and indigenous subjects. Historians are now starting to make sense of the links between French-​speaking subjects of Quebec (to take just one example) and their creole counterparts in Louisiana, or (to take another example) between Dutch merchants in the Caribbean and their New York counterparts.26 In spite of the vibrancy of transnational approaches in US history over the past generation, Gordon S. Wood, emeritus professor of early national American history at Brown University, used the occasion of a review of a book by Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes and Art:  Nine Essays on History, to decry the transnational expansion of early American history under the flag of Atlantic history. Wood argued against a growing emphasis on people who had had little impact on the history of the founding of the United States. In particular, he attacked the study of those who had inhabited or moved through the territories of the United States, over the study of those who had been instrumental in the evolution of US politics. In a critique of the journal William and Mary Quarterly, which has been widely quoted, he argued, Under the influence of the burgeoning subject of Atlantic history, which Bailyn’s International Seminar on the Atlantic World greatly encouraged, the boundaries of the colonial period of America have become mushy and indistinct. The William and Mary Quarterly, the principal journal in early American history, now publishes articles on mestizos in 16th-​century colonial Peru, patriarchal rule in post-​revolutionary Montreal, the early life of Toussaint Louverture, and slaves in 16th-​century Castile. The journal no longer concentrates exclusively on the origins of the United States. Without some kind of historical GPS, it is in danger of losing its way.27 The academic blogosphere went wild in response to what seemed a narrow view of the founding of a broadly conceived ‘Americas’ and the limits placed on who might be counted as ‘American’. Karin Wulf, director of the Omuhundro Institute, established the hashtag #VastEarlyAmerica to track alternative ways of writing early American history, and nearly a year later, Josh Piker, the editor of the William and Mary Quarterly, responded that the journal was going to carry on thinking of the Americas in expansive and multilingual terms and would aim to be inclusive in its study of who can be defined as American.28

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Wood’s outrage addressed the growing emphasis on transnational lives within Atlantic history. Once a field that explained the interactions between (white) Anglo-​American officials and politicians in the eighteenth century and the emergence of the American Revolution, Atlantic history is now increasingly about hemispheric interactions between South and North America, as well as between Africa, the Caribbean and European nations such as the Netherlands and France. As different definitions of Atlantic history have proliferated, from Black Atlantic to Spanish Atlantic to French Atlantic, national historiographies that were once conceived by the boundaries of sovereign states with putatively homogenous populations have been reframed as the grounds on which a steady traffic of slaves, priests, smugglers, merchants, bankers and letter writers, circulated.29 Even in the decade since the publication of the AHR forum, it is no longer possible to speak simply of ‘African slaves’, as Beckert did in 2006. Recent research demonstrates that hundreds of slaves of Asian origins were bought and sold through the Spanish port of Manila, brought to the Americas and eventually became ‘indios’, or indigenous.30 Scepticism about the merits of transnational history has not been limited to US history. In fact, resistance to the idea seems to be strongest among historians of regions of the world with well-​established historiographical traditions in which nationalist myths are being challenged. In a careful and detailed analysis of what he calls the ‘global turn’ in the history of the French revolution, David Bell notes that there are many calls to situate France among larger transnational currents, but that none can adequately explain the ‘chiliastic fervor’ of the French Revolution, particularly in the dramatic changes that occurred in France between 1789 and 1793.31 While he is appreciative of the scholarship by people such as Laurent Dubois, Jeremy Popkin, Lynn Hunt and others who have expanded the study of the French Revolution to include slaves and creole planters who lived in overseas territories, he stands by the unique moment in which the French Revolution occurred in Paris proper: ‘Much of our attention as historians is drawn, quite correctly, to the way certain places, at certain times, witness extraordinarily intense outbursts of creative energy and innovation: political, religious, artistic, economic.’32 While he avoids the vexed language of exceptionalism, Bell, like many scholars, emphasizes the value of nation-​ based analysis in an era of transnational thinking.

Which subfields of history lend themselves to transnational methods? While some historiographies have been the sites of debates within transnational history, others have provided hospitable, if uneven, sites for the elaboration of ways of doing transnational history. The premises behind

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transnational history took off in subfields of history in which scholars had long been thinking beyond national boundaries. In particular, subfields of history that considered the movement of people, human bodies in a range of situations from freedom to slavery, carrying things, goods and ideas with them transformed the ways that we understand national or cultural adjectives such as ‘British’, ‘Chinese’ and mixed-​race. Imperial histories, histories of diasporas and histories of gender and sexuality have been important sites for the innovation and elaboration of a transnational method.33 In all three of these subspecialities, the study of individuals and how they experienced the disjunctures and intimacies brought about by transnational mobility has offered productive ways of concretizing how we might do transnational history, even as we acknowledge its limits. Imperial histories, or histories of a nation state or peoples colonizing a territory, embraced transnational history in part because it enabled a conversation that decentred the empire and analysed the mobility of people, ideas and practices that circulated between imperial sites, including between a range of colonies.34 In scholarship of the last two decades, historians of Britain’s empire have pressed for thinking about ‘webs’, ‘networks’ and the ‘transcolonial’, in order to examine the exchanges that occurred as a result of imperial encounters.35 Although historians of modern Britain have long debated the relationship between imperial history and what is called ‘domestic’ British history, historians of empire have collectively argued that a transnational method destabilizes the centrality of nation and empire and links different peoples, goods and ideas across geographical sites. Antoinette Burton, along with her collaborator Tony Ballantyne, has called for histories that attempt to move beyond imperial history to consider the ways that people and ideas have travelled along imperial circuits and exceeded them. Through a series of important edited volumes and essays, starting from Bodies in Contact to a co-​authored essay, they argue for the idea of ‘imperial globality’ and make the case for thinking of colonialism as laying the foundations for transnational encounters.36 This expansion of British imperial history towards a transnational frame has created new possibilities, particularly as scholars began to examine the relationships that developed between Asia, Africa, America and the Pacific. Among the many historical moments in which imperial history has lent itself to transnational analysis, the study of the eighteenth-​century British Empire, which initially focused on the relationship between Britain and the thirteen colonies, has broadened in scope to consider how events such as the 1776 American Declaration of Independence affected what happened in Britain’s other colonies on the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean.37 The abolition of slave traffic in the British Empire reduced the number of Africans who were forcibly taken from the west coast of Africa to the Americas, yet slave emancipation coincided with a rise of indentured servitude and the transportation of convict labour in the Caribbean, South Africa and islands such as Fiji and Mauritius.38 When South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the Malay

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peninsula were eventually added to the British Empire in the early to mid-​ nineteenth century, the putatively universal language of free markets, rule of law and humanitarian rights was put to a severe challenge, particularly as engagements with indigenous populations at each of these sites challenged British imperial norms.39 In the twentieth century, the explosion of anti-​ imperial and anti-​racist movements drew together students, utopian intellectuals, radicals and militants to reconsider their place in a British imperial world. These movements include pan-​Asianism, pan-​Africanism and pan-​ Islamism, and led to the intellectual foundations of Negritude and, after the end of the Second World War, Bandung.40 While some British imperial historians are thinking transnationally, they have been restricted to considering historical questions that occurred between British colonies, which has perhaps overly contained the scope of historical study. Diaspora scholars, in contrast, whose main subject of enquiry has focused on the movement of peoples, often those considered stateless or with ties of ‘flexible citizenship’, have embraced transnational approaches more comprehensively.41 Among historians of Asia, the growth in studies about overseas Chinese has given new momentum to transnational questions, particularly as scholars have turned toward examining the role of a Chinese diaspora across Asia and, increasingly, in places as far-​flung as Peru, California and New Zealand.42 Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini have described the ‘wildness’ of Chinese transnationalism, which they argue is characterized by moments in which the ‘Chinese have eluded, taken tactical advantage of, temporized before, redefined, and overcome the disciplining of modern regimes of colonial empires, postcolonial nation-​states, and international capitalism’.43 Mobile and flexible transnational currents that have been sustained by the movement of capital and culture on the backs of diaspora subjects have shown how nation-​based methods are inadequate to deal with historical developments that date from the precolonial and premodern periods to the present. At the heart of these projects of Asian transnationalism is a concern with thinking about how ‘Asia’ writ large can be understood as having unique cultural forms and, at times, sharing economic practices that distinguish Asia from the so-​called West. While some scholars have focused on the discrete nature of a thing called Chinese ‘culture’, others have focused on the ways that Chinese migrants had to cope with prejudice and discrimination when they settled in areas far from mainland China, particularly once China became a communist state and was seen to be engaged in the Cold War.44 The long-​established existence of Chinese communities outside mainland China, in places as far-​flung as New  York, Vancouver, San Francisco and Sydney as well as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei and Hong Kong suggests how subjects of one of the most closely regulated imperial nations engaged in transnational relationships that exceeded national boundaries. The work of British imperial historians and scholars of the Chinese diaspora and Asian transnationalism may seem quite distant (both geographically

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and historiographically), but scholars in these fields share a concern with the question of ‘family’, which can be defined as kin and institutional networks that developed trust and social ties. Integral to the history of family are concerns about gender and sexuality, which I address in further detail below. In studies of the Chinese diaspora, some scholars have pointed to guanxi, relations that enabled members of an extended diaspora to forge relationships that provided conditions for long-​term capital and cultural exchange, while others have focused attention on the ways that patrilineal lines were maintained both in mainland China and abroad, particularly when one son spent long amounts of time travelling to distant places.45 As Adam McKeown observes, ‘As long as the migrant and his wife continued to share the same kitchen as his brothers and parents, the migrant continued to be a part of the family, no matter how long he had been away.’ Through a capacious definition of ‘home’, McKeown shows that Chinese men often married when they were abroad, in order to become better integrated in places such as Lima or Mexico City or Hawaii where they travelled for business. These interracial relationships tied local women of Peruvian, Mexican or Hawaiian descent to a Chinese transnational network, one that brought some of these women to places such as Hong Kong and Shanghai to meet their husbands and extended families.46 Transnational histories of Chinese families, particularly business families whose commercial interests dovetailed with kinship ties such as birth, adoption and marriage, have further pressed against the national boundaries of China, as a range of historical monographs has shown how familial and financial obligations enabled different conceptions of community and selfhood.47 Using a prosopographical approach that blends the microhistory of individuals, families and their households together with a study of the political economy of late eighteenth-​ century Britain, Emma Rothschild has narrated the story of a Scottish family, the Johnstones, and eleven siblings who travelled from Scotland to India, the West Indies and the southern United States. The siblings were engaged with important domestic events in Britain –​several were members of Parliament, one trained with Adam Smith –​as well as imperial events such as slavery and war. While one brother was a slave owner, another was an important figure in abolishing the traffic in slavery. Yet another brought a slave girl from India to Britain, where she was accused of infanticide. Rothschild’s careful reconstruction of one Scottish family’s activities, through letters, official and unofficial documents and debates about the political economy of empire, shows how a microhistorical approach can be brought together with big ideas and concepts about the putatively free nature of labour and markets that undergirded the enlightenment.48 These transnational histories of families contest the idea of family (and ‘nation’) as monocultural and territorialized to particular place or region. The Lius of Shanghai lived in Cambridge (Massachusetts and England), in Tokyo, San Francisco, Hong Kong and other parts of the Asian diaspora;

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the Johnstones of Westerhall lived in Paris, Jamaica, Florida, Calcutta and London. These kinds of histories of transnational individuals and their families have shown the ways that commercial and emotional networks enabled the circulation of people, goods and ideas in unexpected directions. The study of families and diasporas, whether they were Chinese, Jewish, Armenian, Indian or African has provided transnational history with various methods and categories of analysis that have humanized what we mean by transnational. Scholars of the Jewish and Hadrami diasporas have shown how marriage and commerce were interlinked, enabling transnational and transimperial groups to form ties that spanned a range of territories from South East Asia all the way west to Europe and North America.49 Historians have come to better understand what held communities together across geographical regions and specify how some diaspora groups were able to sustain commercial and kin networks over long periods of time. While imperial history and diaspora history have expanded into transnational history, histories of gender and sexuality have long depended on transnational conversations across historiographies, drawing from comparisons, methods and structures of intimacy that reach across territorial boundaries. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine family histories such as the Lius or the Johnstones without thinking about gender and sexuality, particularly as each member of the family forged intimate relationships. As Margot Canaday noted in a forum on transnational sexualities, directions in the emergent history of sexuality had paralleled many of the transnational turns, taking on the ‘micropolitics of the international encounter’, and ‘global patterns of regulation’.50 From central texts such as Joan Scott’s 1986 essay on gender as a category of analysis, to Ann Stoler’s work on colonial societies and the making of the ‘respectable’ middle classes, feminist historians have grappled with the persistence of practices enabling male dominance and normative sexualities in their various iterations across nations and continents.51 Feminist concerns about norms of patriarchy and narratives of kinship and attachment have been crucial to shaping the emergent study of transnational lives, particularly as private concerns about sexuality became matters of moral and ethical concern. As scholars of gender have turned to thinking about sexuality and emotion, the idea of transnational living emerges as an important new direction for social and cultural history.52 Among the most vibrant and interesting fields of transnational history that intersect with the study of empires, diasporas, family and sexuality are studies of interracial families in which members of different nationalities, ethnicities, linguistic backgrounds and religious backgrounds lived in a single household and were tied either by marriage, birth or adoption to one another. Studies of interracial relationships in places as wide ranging as India, Ghana, Australia and the United States show that intimate contact across colour lines was a frequent occurrence that changed the nature of how we understand ‘British’, ‘Indian’, ‘Ghanian’, ‘Chinese’ and so on.53 In most cases,

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these relationships were strongly regulated by local communities and even forbidden so that having an Indian grandmother or Chinese uncle became family secrets that conformed to the ideal national subject as belonging to one racial category or another.54 In the regime of secrecy that structured familial relations, mixed-​race Chinese Americans could not be fully Chinese or fully American, nor could Indians who had been born of British fathers and native women. Because sexuality and intimacy were objects of community and state regulation, when men and women crossed racial boundaries to form families, they threatened the boundaries of the nation. As Dagmar Herzog has noted, histories of gender and sexuality should not conform to ‘a paradigm that assumed steady liberalization and the gradual overcoming of obstacles to sexual freedom’. Challenging a grand narrative of progress, Herzog noted that it would be a mistake to argue that individuals have progressed from sex that was constrained by social mores, such as pressure to marry within one’s community, to the prevalence of interracial marriage, or that the growing public recognition of gay and lesbian relationships means that societies are more accepting of nonnormative sexualities. Instead, Herzog argues that the politics of intimate practices are ‘syncopated’, unevenly engaged with local and global cultures of regulation, with moments of restraint and containment interspersed with liberation for alternative or nonnormative sex.55 Thus, a transnational history of sex and sexuality might enable scholars to rethink why and how monogamy has emerged as a global or universal goal, when historically, particularly in the ancient and early modern periods, temporary relationships, concubinage, polygamy or polyandry were more common.56 Imperial, diaspora and sexuality histories are only some of the subfields that have been receptive to transnational methods, at times generating ways of conducting research and posing questions that override the concerns of national histories. In my brief summary of these fields, they engage with questions of family, kinship, emotion and affect, subfields that are emergent as ways of thinking transnationally about the ways that humans have long lived.

How might we do transnational history? Given the range of examples of transnational history, readers may well be perplexed about how exactly we go about doing transnational history. If, as I have proposed, we think of a new direction for transnational history as a way to bring together microhistorical concerns about domesticity, emotion, sexuality, intimacy and family life with macrohistorical questions about economy, government and politics, what kinds of archives and sources might we use? Two recent innovations, digital history and DNA testing, offer some possibilities toward new directions and new ways of posing historical questions about transnationality.

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Lara Putnam notes that ‘the transnational turn is accelerating simultaneously with the digital turn . . . Digital search has become the unacknowledged handmaiden of transnational history.’57 Searching digitized texts that are accessible across the Worldwide Web has changed the nature of archival research from studying in brick-​and-​mortar buildings in specific national or local archives; instead, digital research has provided researchers with quick and ready access to thousands of documents while sitting at the computer. In addition to seeing a much wider landscape of historical events or developments, scholars can now access large amounts of material using specific search terms. As Putnam notes, Web-​based research and tools sensitive to internet searches can help historians track large historical processes and situate ‘the micro-​ level dynamics that drove them’.58 Yet, although some archives have digitized their contents to make them more available to researchers, others lack these facilities and require the face-​to-​face or tactile encounter that has long been central to careful historical research. Aside from platforms such as Google Books, or library databases such as ProQuest or J-​Stor, historians have noted the importance of widely available tools such as ancestry.com or the website sponsored by the Church of Latter-​Day Saints, familysearch.com, which enable those with access to a computer and broadband to research their backgrounds by drawing from census and church documents that have been digitized. While these websites privilege the paternal lineage as it is tracked through names, they are valuable tools that shake up some of the national, racial, ethnic affiliations with which many of us identify.59 While internet and digital sources produced by libraries and archives, as discussed in this volume by Seth Denbo, are one possible way of enabling more transnational research, other technologies such as DNA testing have enabled individuals to confirm the biological foundations of their familial, racial, ethnic and national backgrounds. Websites such as www.africandna. com and www.23andme.com use DNA testing to establish one’s ancestry, providing a biological and racialized account of our pasts (am I  Asian, African, European?). Indeed, DNA testing, combined with strong social history, has led to some of the most dramatic historical reveals of academic scholarship. When Annette Gordon-​Reed published The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family in 2008, she conclusively showed that Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and vocal abolitionist, had maintained a decades-​ long relationship with Sally Hemings, a slave whom he owned. They had several children together, and this union gave birth to several generations of African American Hemingses.60 While there had long been rumours of such a relationship, particularly among African Americans, Gordon-​Reed’s book was supported by DNA testing on a Hemings descendant that showed he was the descendant of a child of Hemings that she conceived with Jefferson. Combined with the evidence of Hemings’s pregnancies timed with Jefferson’s presence in Monticello and Paris, Gordon-​Reed persuaded a generation of

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US scholars that a key figure in writing the Declaration of Independence had a conjugal relationship with an African American woman. In framing slavery as a system that produced intimacy between whites and African Americans, as American laws segregated family members from one another on racial grounds, Gordon-​Reed’s work showed that the legacy of slavery is very much a part of the American DNA. In Britain, the legacies of empire run through many families, including the royals. Through the DNA testing of Prince William’s maternal relatives, royal watchers learned that Princes William and Harry had Indian ancestry: six generations ago, a male ancestor who had worked from the English East India Company had a daughter with his Indian housekeeper in Surat.61 For historians of empire, slavery and sexuality, these scientific discoveries were not surprising; they showed how centuries of transnational living had been interrupted by nation-​based thinking in which individuals began to primarily identify themselves as (white) Americans or Britons, without fully understanding the complexity of intimate encounters that took place under early modern forms of globalization. Genealogical research and DNA testing are only two possible ways to conduct transnational historical research. What these brief examples show are the ways that individuals’ lives have long been connected to global trends and developments that transcend national forms of affiliation and identification. We can no longer assume that globalization is a contemporary condition as research into families and their circulation through various places in the world shows that we have always been living in transnational ways.

Conclusion Although this volume has divided the essays into distinct subfields:  the history of emotions, digital history, environmental history, subjectivities, materialism and so on, one could argue that all of these histories are now pressed to think transnationally. The transnational turn is necessary in a time when the continued existence of virulent forms of nationalism endures and the history of nation states is used to generate policies for the future. As Prasenjit Duara, one of the most well-​known practitioners of transnational history wrote over fifteen years ago, ‘For me, personally, this reevaluation is necessary to counter the growing trend of ultranationalist, intolerant groups in many parts of the world.’62 Duara’s argument against narrowly defined nation-​based scholarship is even more urgent in 2016 as Britain exits the European Union and the president of the United States proposes building a wall to keep Mexicans out of the United States. As a long-​standing series of conversations in journals, edited volumes, conference proceedings and monographs show, thinking and researching in methods of transnational history are crucial ways of comprehending the full range of what it means to live in a globalized world. Any approach that is

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exclusively nation-​minded is insufficiently inclusive of historical events, developments and peoples that have shaped modernity. Transnational living has long been a central feature of the way in which humans experience the world.

NOTES 1 Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘“But a Local Phase of a World Problem”: Black History’s Global Vision’, Journal of American History 86 (1999): pp. 1045–​77; Ian Tyrell, ‘Making Nations/​Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire’, Journal of American History 86 (1999): pp. 1015–​44. 2 Ferdinand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–​1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–​1900 (1986; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 3 See also Patricia Clavin, ‘Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in Global, Transnational, and International Contexts’, European History Quarterly, 40 (2010): pp. 624–​40; Pierre-​Yves Saunier, ‘Learning by Doing: Notes About the Making of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History’, Journal of Modern European History 6 (2008): pp. 159–​80. 4 Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nations and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). 5 Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). 6 Christopher A. Bayly et al., eds., ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006): pp. 1441–​64. 7 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–​1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). For a genealogy of world history, see William McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Andre Gunder Frank, The Development of Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966); William H. McNeill, ‘The Rise of the West Twenty-​five Years Later’, Journal of World History 1 (1990): pp. 1–​21. 8 Anna Tsing, ‘The Global Situation’, Cultural Anthropology, 15 (2000): pp. 327–​60, here pp. 328–​9. 9 William Gervase Clarence-​Smith, Kenneth Pomeranz and Peer Vries, ‘Editorial’, Journal of Global History 1 (2006): pp. 1–​2; Michael Geyer and C. Bright, ‘World History in a Global Age’, American Historical Review 100 (1995): pp. 1034–​60. 10 Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation’, p. 1450. 11 Ibid., p. 1452. 12 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Shami

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13 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes Toward a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997): pp. 735–​62. 14 Jorge Canizares-​Esguerra, ‘AHR Forum: Entangled Histories: Borderlands Histories in New Clothes’, American Historical Review 112 (2007): pp. 787–​ 99; Eliga Gould, ‘Entangled Atlantic Histories: A Response from the Anglo-​ American Periphery’, American Historical Review 112 (2007): pp. 1415–​22. 15 Ernesto Bassi, ‘Beyond Compartmentalized Atlantics: A Case for Embracing the Atlantic from Spanish-​American Shores’, History Compass 12 (2014): pp. 704–​16; Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-​Imperial Subjects Between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). 16 Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation’, p. 1447 and 1450; Richard Eaton, ‘(Re) imag(in)ing Otherness: A Postmortem for the Postmodern in India’, Journal of World History 11 (2000): pp. 57–​78; Richard Price, ‘One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture’, Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): pp. 602–​27. 17 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); see Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies’; Edward Said, ‘Traveling Theory Reconsidered’, in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader (1999; London: Routledge, 2007). 18 Micol Seigel, ‘Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn’, Radical History Review 91 (2005): pp. 62–​90, here pp. 62–​3. 19 Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation’, p. 1454. 20 Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Michael McGerr, ‘The Price of the New Transnational History’, American Historical Review 96 (1991): pp. 1056–​67; David Thelen, ‘The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History’, Journal of American History 86 (1999): pp. 965–​ 75; Ian Tyrell, ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’, American Historical Review 96 (1991): pp. 1031–​55. 21 Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation’, p. 1445; Mai Ngai, ‘Promises and Perils of Transnational History’, Perspectives on History (December 2012), https://​www. historians.org/​publications-​and-​directories/​perspectives-​on-​history/​december-​ 2012/​the-​future-​of-​the-​discipline/​promises-​and-​perils-​of-​transnational-​ history#Note2 [accessed 21 June 2016]. 22 Ann Curthoys, ‘We’ve Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already?’ in Antoinette Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 85. 23 Allan Greer, ‘National, Transnational, and Hypernational Historiographies: New France meets Early American History’, Canadian Historical Review 91 (2010): pp. 695–​724, here p. 699. 24 Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation’, p. 1460.

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25 For instance, Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hebard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Pekka Hamalainen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 26 Nathan Perl-​Rosenthal and Evan Haefeli, ‘Transnational Connections’, Early American Studies 10 (Spring 2012): pp. 227–​38. 27 Gordon Wood, ‘History in Context: The American vision of Bernard Bailyn’, first published Weekly Standard, 23 February 2015, http://​www. weeklystandard.com/​article/​history-​context/​850083 [accessed 1 February 2016]. 28 ‘Canons, Power, and Pushing Back’, The Tatooed Professor, http://​www. thetattooedprof.com/​archives/​301; Josh Piker, ‘Getting Lost’, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, http://​blog.oieahc. wm.edu/​getting-​lost/​; Historiann, http://​historiann.com/​2016/​01/​21/​ make-​america-​great-​again-​a-​smackdown-​on-​vastearlyamerica/​?utm_​ content=buffer6d95f&utm_​medium=social&utm_​source=twitter.com&utm_​ campaign=buffer [accessed 26 January 2016]. 29 Bassi, ‘Beyond Compartmentalized Atlantics’; Kate Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; pbk., 2010). 30 Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 31 David Bell, ‘Questioning the Global Turn: The Case for the French Revolution’ French Historical Studies 37 (2014): pp. 1–​24, here pp. 23–​4. 32 Ibid., p. 24. 33 Palgrave Macmillan, a publishing house based in the United Kingdom, has a transnational history series with over two dozen titles and counting. The Tepotzlan Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas and the University College London Centre for Transnational History are nearly a decade old. There are two other AHR forums, ‘AHR Forum: Transnational Sexualities’, American Historical Review 114 (2009): pp. 1250–​1353; ‘AHR Forum: Transnational Lives in the Twentieth Century’, American Historical Review, 118 (2013): pp. 45–​139. 34 Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, introduction to Decentring Empire: Britain and the Transcolonial World (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006); Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, Frank Trentmann (eds), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire, and Transnationalism, 1880–​1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Michael Dodson and Brian Hatcher (eds), Trans-​colonial Modernities in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2012); Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India and the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–​1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

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35 Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism and the British Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Jane Cary and Jane Lydon (eds), Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections, and Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2014); Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001); Gary Magee and Andrew S. Thompson (eds), Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 36 Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, ‘Empires and the Reach of the Global’, in Emily Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014). 37 Susan Bean, Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of Sail, 1784–​1860 (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2001); Peter J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, 1750–​1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 38 Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labour in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family: Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–​53 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997); Diana Paton and Pamela Scully (eds), Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–​1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McLelland (eds), Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 39 Tony Ballanytne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso Books, 2015). 40 Christopher Lee (ed.), Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Susan Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 41 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 42 Evelyn Hu-​Dehart, ‘Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century, Free Labor or Neo-​Slavery?’ Slavery and Abolition 14 (1993): pp. 67–​86;

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Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, and Hawaii, 1900–​1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Chinese Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997); Anthony Reid (ed.), The Chinese Diaspora in the Pacific: Lands, Peoples, and Histories of the Pacific, 1500–​1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Eric Tagliacozzo (ed.), Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 43 Ong and Nonini, Ungrounded Empires, pp. 19–​20. 44 Adam McKeown, ‘Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842–​1949’, Journal of Asian Studies 58 (1999): pp. 306–​37; Taomo Zhou, ‘Ambivalent Alliance: Chinese Policy towards Indonesia, 1960–​1965’, China Quarterly 221 (March 2015): pp. 208–​28. 45 Ong and Nonini, Ungrounded Empires, pp. 20–​23. 46 McKeown, ‘Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas’, pp. 317–​19. 47 Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh, The Lius of Shanghai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and China, 1882–​1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Haiming Liu, The Transnational History of a Chinese Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, and Reverse Migration (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 48 Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: an Eighteenth-​century History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 49 Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-​Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 50 ‘AHRForum: Transnational Sexualities’, American Historical Review 114 (December 2009): pp. 1250–​53; Margot Canaday, ‘Thinking Sex in the Transnational Turn: An Introduction’, American Historical Review 114 (2009): pp. 1251–​2. 51 Joan Scott, ‘Gender as a Useful Category of Analysis’, American Historical Review, 91 (1986): pp. 1053–​75; ‘AHR Forum: Revisiting “Gender as a Useful Category of Analysis” ’, American Historical Review 113 (2008): pp. 1344–​1430; Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 52 Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott (eds), Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–​Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 53 Joanne Meyerowitz, ‘Transnational Sex and US History’, American Historical Review 114 (2009): pp. 1273-​1286, here pp. 1278–​80; Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Carina Ray, Crossing the

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Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015); Emma Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–​1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 54 Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 55 Dagmar Herzog, ‘Syncopated Sex: Transforming European Sexual Cultures’, American Historical Review 114 (2009): pp. 1287–​1308, here p. 1295. 56 Matthew H. Sommer, Polyandry and Wife-​selling in Qing China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Barbara Watson Andaya, ‘From Temporary Wife to Prostitute: Sexuality and Economic Change in Early Modern Southeast Asia’, Journal of Women’s History 9 (1994): pp. 11–​34. 57 Lara Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the Text-​searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast’, American Historical Review 121 (April 2016): pp. 377–​402, here p. 377. 58 Ibid., p. 387. 59 Lisa A. Lindsay, ‘The Appeal of Transnational History’, Perspectives on History (2012), https://​www.historians.org/​publications-​and-​directories/​ perspectives-​on-​history/​december-​2012/​the-​future-​of-​the-​discipline/​the-​appeal-​ of-​transnational-​history [accessed 21 June 2016]. 60 Annette Gordon-​Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 61 Kounteya Sinhai, ‘DNA Test Reveals Prince William’s Indian Ancestry’, Times of India, 15 June 2013, http://​timesofindia.indiatimes.com/​world/​uk/​DNA-​test-​ reveals-​Prince-​Williams-​Indian-​ancestry/​articleshow/​20596666.cms [accessed 29 June 2016]. 62 Prasenjit Duara, ‘Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories’in Bender, (ed.) Rethinking American History, pp. 25–​46, here p. 43.

Key texts Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–​1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Bayly, C. A., S. Beckert, M. Connelly, I. Hofmeyr, W. Kozol and P. Seed. ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006): pp.1441–​64. Grewal, I., and C. Kaplan (eds). Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Lerner, G. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Ong, A. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

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Pomeranz, K. The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Rothschild, E. The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-​century History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Schneer, J. London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Subrahmanyam, S. ‘Connected Histories: Notes Toward a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): pp. 735–​62.

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Environmental history John Morgan

Introduction There is more to social and cultural history than people and ideas. The range of chapters in this volume –​particularly those on animals, material culture and space  –​shows the large variety of topics that can be integrated with the social and the cultural. Environmental history differs from other forms of historical enquiry as it pays as much critical attention to the non-​human world as it does to the human. Whereas other historical endeavours treat the natural world as a ‘passive backcloth against which human history is acted out’, environmental history seeks to show how humans and their surroundings both play an active role in shaping history.1 This chapter offers an overview of some of the most important recent developments in environmental history and points to some ways in which they might stimulate, provoke and invigorate social and cultural history in future. Exactly when, where and through whose genius environmental history came into being is contested among environmental historians. The division among scholars as to the origin of this comparatively young field is relatively straightforward. North American scholars typically date its inception to the 1960s and ’70s, and often cite the work of Roderick Nash, who in 1970 offered the first recognizable undergraduate course in environmental history  –​despite a lack of literature with which to furnish his students.2 From Nash’s first forays sprung a small cluster of historians, many of whom are still the leading lights of environmental history today –​William Cronon, Carolyn Merchant, Donald Worster and several others. It was this small band of scholars that would meet at American Historical Association

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conferences and go on through their writing and graduate supervision to sow the seeds of the field that we recognize today. Outside of North America, the story is much older and much less clear. Environmental historians have claimed a number of scholarly traditions to be their intellectual forbears. Foremost among these have been natural history, historical geography, and landscape history, the developments of which from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards have been credited with being environmental history, avant la lettre.3 European colonialism is central to the genesis of much of this literature: Western environmentalism emerged in part as a response to the visible impact of European dominance on colonial landscapes.4 That dominance was reinforced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Western natural histories and scientific studies that emphasized environmental degradation and the need for conservation and environmental protection directed by Europeans.5 Regardless of who got there first, environmental history began to flourish as a self-​conscious discipline after 1970. In its early years, environmental history drew a great deal of energy from the environmental movement, following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the first Earth Day in 1970. A more general ‘ecological turn’ occurred in public consciousness in the 1970s, as the ‘1950s syndrome’ (cheap energy, increasing production of raw materials, the rise of consumerism and decentralized pollution through cars and domestic appliances) was diagnosed with great public alarm as a significant environmental threat.6 Historians began to contemplate how and why industrial societies had contributed to changes taking place in global environments and how alternative futures might look.7 Environmental history grew fastest in the United States, where it continues to enjoy significant institutional backing in the form of dedicated chairs in environmental history and the American Society for Environmental History, with its well-​attended annual conference and high-​impact journal, Environmental History. Elsewhere, environmental history enjoys scholarly representation in societies in Latin America and the Caribbean, East Asia and Europe as well as in a number of specialist journals. This small diversity of origin stories is utterly eclipsed by the diversity of environmental historians’ methodologies and subjects. The sheer breadth of environmental history has seen it labelled as less a discipline and more an interdisciplinary project.8 Judging by the number of essays reviewing and reflecting on the field as a whole produced over the last forty years, environmental history seems to have been constantly at a crossroads. Two clear paths emerged in the 1990s as part of the general upheaval of the cultural turn in historiography: some, like Worster, advocated a more materially focused ‘agro-​ecological’ approach, in which culture was subordinate to environmental and productive practices, while others, like Cronon and Richard White, argued for the integration of culture, perception and representation in all environmental histories.9 Yet beyond this, scholars have been content to follow their noses in an enormous number of directions,

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often at great speed. A glance at the programme for the most recent World Congress of Environmental History in 2014 shows papers by ecologists, historical fluviomorphologists (those who study the historical changes in river channels), art historians and economists, and many more. This range of studies, stretching in one direction from big-​data reconstructions of past climatic phenomena to the textual study of perceptions of specific flora and fauna has led Harriet Ritvo to refer to environmental history as an ‘unevenly spreading blob’.10 Yet the field is spreading with considerable exuberance, much of which has come from methodological pluralism, and the field stands today like a child ‘whose hybrid vigour is greater than that of its disciplinary parents’.11 In response to the breadth of the scope of environmental historians’ enquiries, several scholars have attempted to schematize how environmental history is (or should be) conducted. Worster has proposed three levels of analysis that all environmental history should seek to cover: nature and its impact upon society, social and economic relationships arising from environmental adaptations and mental and intellectual interactions with nature.12 J.  Donald Hughes has defined the three themes of environmental history as environmental factors’ influence on human history, human caused environmental change, and environmental ideas.13 John McNeill also identifies three types of environmental history –​the physical, the cultural and intellectual, and the political.14 Carolyn Merchant delineates five ways of doing environmental history: by focusing on ‘biological interactions between humans and the natural world’, by considering the different distinct ‘levels’ of interactions between people and the natural world (material conditions, production, reproduction and representation), by studying environmental political movements, by focusing on ideas about nature and by analysing the way environmental change is narrated.15 No study would or could attempt to consider all of these levels together. What they show is that while significant sections of the field are concerned with social and cultural research, others remain relatively undisturbed by it. All of this disparate research does, however, coalesce around a central interest in the relationship between humans and the world around them. Whereas once environmental historians were content to speak of nature, they now speak more readily of environments. The study of ‘nature’ is still an important part of environmental history, and foundational texts in the field such as Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore look specifically at nature.16 Yet nature is not everything. Environments are distinct from nature in that they are produced through the actions of humans and are thus always plural and contextual.17 As Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde write, ‘nature needs no humans’ and has existed and will exist without them. Environments exist ‘only where humans live and where humans have entered into a self-​conscious relationship with their surroundings’.18 This relationship is vast and has been hidden or ignored by the categories of ‘man-​made’ and ‘natural’. As Raymond Williams observed, all environments

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are a product of our interaction with the world, both coal mines and slag heaps, fields and moors: ‘In this actual world there is then not much point in counterposing or restating the great abstractions of Man and Nature.’19 Societies are then involved in a constant process of ‘environment-​making’ through their relations with the world around them.20 Environmental historians therefore study ‘the entangled connections between the natural and the cultural’, uncovering the natural in the cultural and the cultural in the natural.21 Narrative in environmental history has to deal with this. We should not ‘begin with nature and add people’; rather, we must ‘begin and end with humanity sited on the land’.22 This way of understanding environments as entanglements of humans and their surroundings has significantly muddied what might appear to be the logical focus of environmental history –​humans and the natural world. However, as environmental historians increasingly demonstrate in their research, not all that is environmental is green. While identifiably ‘natural’ topics preoccupied earlier generations of scholars –​national parks, rivers, forests –​contemporary scholarship ranges across a variety of topics. Ellen Stroud has argued that we should look less at the natural world and instead ask questions with the ubiquitous aspects of nature we find in seemingly unnatural places. Thus a history of national parks should be less about the parks as self-​evidently natural sites and more about their constitutive non-​ human elements –​their dirt, plants and animals –​and how they inform the history of the national park. Such questions –​about the role and influence of dirt, plants and animals –​should also be asked of the urban sewer, the public housing project and the business deal struck on the golf course. Such perspectives afford us new environmental insights into seemingly familiar areas and expand the purview of environmental history beyond ‘pristine nature’.23 Such a deromanticization of the category of ‘natural-​ness’ can both help us see the natural in unfamiliar places as well as deconstruct received images of particular natural sites.24 Recent studies have urged us to consider how Man, not God, made the English countryside, and how we might find environmental history in the distinctly man-​made landscape features of the canal and the railway.25 We have also learned how seemingly riven and barren military sites can be havens for wildlife, how no man’s land can in fact be ‘Many Creatures’ Land’.26 As Worster argued, we can do environmental history in an almost unlimited number of places, from the high plains of the cattle rancher to the supermarket of the industrial worker, and as in one recent study, even inside the tax system.27 To understand this we are required to realize that ‘each of our activities, however mundane, is ecological’.28 The diversification of subject matter and the move towards studying the environments of things rather than environments as things has been driven by a blurring of the boundaries between the natural and the social. This has been in part due to the retheorization of the natural, and in part due to new epistemological uncertainties within the science of choice for much early environmental history: ecology. The ecology that proved so influential

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among environmental historians of the 1970s stressed the importance of ‘climax vegetation’ and ‘natural stability’.29 In these models nature, left to its own devices, found a sustainable equilibrium in its plant and animal communities, which without external interruption would continue ad infinitum. With this understanding of nature behind them, early environmental histories adopted what Cronon has termed a ‘declensionist’ tone.30 That is, they were pessimistic, contrasting varying degrees of ‘pristine nature’ with the effects of human intervention, which were almost universally deleterious: as soon as the social interacted with the natural, the natural declined. Yet, as historians adopted ecological perspectives, the same perspectives fell out of scientific favour. Ecology began to be conceptualized less as a fixed set of laws and more as a set of shifting contingencies.31 What environmental historians took to be a solid base on which to build their studies ‘turned out to be a swamp’.32 From the 1970s onwards, ecologists increasingly came to see populations of plants and animals as historically contingent, to the extent that ecology has been characterized as a ‘branch of history’ and as no more or less scientific than history.33 As one ecologist succinctly puts it, nature is ‘always changing’.34 Narratives of decline based on the premise that presocial nature is somehow harmonious are no longer tenable. Other sciences have come to preoccupy environmental historians. Geoff Eley remarked that the survival of history as a discipline will be achieved only by continual ‘cross-​border traffic’ between itself and other disciplines.35 Environmental historians have been some of the most open and adventurous traders across disciplinary boundaries, venturing most frequently into the physical sciences. While Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie praised the climate historian’s ability to ‘export invaluable information across his frontiers’, providing exact dating for the rough chronologies sketched by carbon dating, environmental historians today are net importers of scientific material.36 Recent assessments of the state of environmental history have praised and encouraged historians’ increasing engagement with the sciences.37 Environmental historians’ frequent use of data from the physical sciences makes them well placed to continue interdisciplinary conversations using ‘bio-​’ and ‘geo-​archives’.38 However, while some scholars embrace this new positivism as bringing greater political neutrality, others are keen to remind their colleagues that science does not provide a neutral window on the past and are critical of its claimed explanatory power.39

New directions for social and cultural history Environmental history appears to offer both opportunities as well as threats to social and cultural history. Depending on where in this enormous field one sows one’s intellectual seeds, the social and the cultural are either set antagonistically against environmental forces, which drive change and stasis, or society and culture are seen as co-​constructing environments with

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nature. In this section I point to some of the most fertile areas that social and cultural historians might choose to exploit as well as some adaptive strategies to be used in more hostile terrain. If environmental history is to become a new direction for social and cultural historians, they will find themselves confronted with the provocation that the social and the cultural are not everything. Environmental history fundamentally challenges social and cultural history by decentring the human in historical narratives. The most digestible form of this observation is that humans are not alone. We are but one influence, one species on a planet of millions, or in the more radical formations, no clear species at all, and just another unstable part of the socionatural world. Accepting that we are not special, that we work with plants, animals, weather and landscape, is relatively uncontroversial. Less palatable for social historians is the charge that earthly forces hold some deterministic sway over social phenomena. Some of the most influential works of environmental history have placed bacteria, climate and other species as the protagonists at the heart of their narratives, with human beings providing supporting roles. Alfred Crosby has done the most to promote the agency of these non-​human forces. His Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecological Imperialism (1986) identified the unintentional but devastating impact of the spread of Old World plants, animals and diseases across Europe’s colonies as one of the central impacts of colonialism –​humanity’s intentional and unintentional actions in the New World killed off more species in 400 years than evolution would in a million.40 Elsewhere, historians have focused on exogenous shocks as the drivers of change.41 More recently, Bruce Campbell has sought to place nature in general back as a central ‘historical protagonist in its own right’, a position supported in studies proposing a causal relationship between weather and famine, climate and plague, and climate change and war.42 The motive power granted to environmental phenomena by many of these historians is a far cry from the crude determinism for which it is sometimes mistaken. While early attempts to link climatic phenomena to historical change emphasized the impersonal forces of climate and global temperatures, these were met with considerable scepticism.43 The problematization of the environmental allows us to understand these proposed forces in new ways. Environmental historians can robustly demonstrate continuity or change in particular environmental conditions (and they do not always do this robustly).44 This can offer us one explanation among many as to why change or stasis occurred in society, yet social and cultural history can explain why specific forms of change or stasis occurred rather than just why change in general occurred. To gain a fully rounded view of the specificities of processes of change we should also recognize how societal and cultural phenomena are inextricably woven into their environments. Thus socioenvironmental history can best engage with the agency of the non-​human by placing it among the host of other agencies and contexts that come between cause and effect.

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Environmental historians have started to blend social history into recent studies of historical sustainability. Recognizing that the verb to sustain is transitive, environmental historians have begun to ask ‘who, or what, sustains who or what?’, and have enlisted the concept of the ‘socioenvironmental metabolism’ in their search for answers. Socioenvironmental metabolism refers to exchanges between material resources and people, in particular the ways in which ecologies and social organization interact.45 In this model, societies are more or less explicitly, ‘vitally concerned with the organization of flows of materials and energy between themselves and nature’.46 The social element of this metabolism is the way in which a society is organized to regulate these material and energy flows.47 Such flows can then be managed through two principle levers  –​altering the quantity of material and energy available and altering the ways in which it is distributed. We can thus say that a society is sustained by a given set of material and calorific inputs distributed by a specific set of social practices. A  concrete example of this would be communities subsisting on cereal farming, and the specific divisions of labour involved in the sowing, reaping and transformation of those cereal grains, and the mechanisms for their distribution. Both the resource endowment of a community and the management of that resource maintain the society. Exactly who or what is sustaining such an arrangement is to be found in the ways in which people and their environments are organized, which can have both positive and negative impacts on both people and the world around them. In relation to urban socioenvironmental metabolisms, geographer Erik Swyngedouw has argued that there is ‘no such thing as an unsustainable city in general, but rather there are a series of urban and environmental processes that negatively affect some social groups while benefiting others’, and therefore we must ask ‘who gains and who pays’?48 Socioenvironmental metabolisms ‘produce a series of both enabling and disabling social and environmental conditions’, and while ‘environmental (both social and physical) qualities may be enhanced in some places and for some people, these often lead to a deterioration of social and physical conditions and qualities elsewhere.’49 Thus, ‘processes of socio-​environmental change’ are ‘never socially or ecologically neutral.’50 All environmental struggles and stories should then be seen as struggles and stories about power, which at the level of the state can involve the disadvantaging or death of millions of people in extreme situations. As Douglas Weiner observes, ‘every figuration of the “environment”  –​by distributing different opportunities for environmental access and decision-​making power to different “types” and groups  –​potentially encodes exclusion, dispossession, or even genocide’.51 From this perspective, there are then many opportunities for social historians to make significant use of environmental history. Social historians’ ability to unpick the sedimentary layers of societies and recognize their fault lines along divisions of class, race, gender and age make them exceptionally well placed to engage in

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the analysis of socioenvironmental metabolisms and expose where and why benefits and burdens fall. This ability to disaggregate societies can benefit both social and environmental historians in a second way. Summing up the development of the field in 1990, Cronon pointed to environmental historians’ holism when analysing the relationship between societies and environments, thus failing to ‘probe below the level of the group’.52 Where environmental historians ‘lump’ together people into environmentally impactful groups, social historians ‘split’ these groups down into their constituent subjective elements.53 In recent years, environmental historians have moved beyond generalizations about groups and their relationships to the natural world to uncover the different relationships to nature that exist throughout different groups. For example, historians once portrayed the people of pre-​Columbian North America as ‘ecological Indians’, harmoniously cohabiting with nature. The myth of indigenous people living in a prelapsarian state, preserving a pristine nature that Europeans then desecrated, has been replaced with the acknowledgement that ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse peoples of pre-​Columbian North America had shaped their environments for centuries, bending nature to their will, and themselves being bent back by it.54 These peoples created, sustained and altered their environments in multiple ways, each of which was contingent on their own particular historical, climatological and geographical contexts. Yet, as Peter Coates has observed, such critical reappraisal has not extended to all past societies. Medieval and early modern societies have been idealized as harmoniously cohabiting with the natural world, sustained by ‘indigenous’ knowledge and communal access to resources which ‘operated smoothly for centuries before the indigenes were displaced or marginalized by outsiders armed with alien views and technology’.55 One early modern environmental history went so far as to suggest that before the demographic changes of the sixteenth century, the people of the Forest of Arden lived ‘in a balanced relationship with their environment’, in a state of ‘ecological equilibrium’.56 Social historians are well aware of tensions over resources in early modern communities and their cultural expression, yet these have not been adequately addressed from an environmental perspective. With some notable exceptions, there are relatively few works of early modern social and cultural environmental history compared with the number of studies of the modern era.57 Socially situated environmental histories of the early modern period are required to redress this balance and to rescue the commoner and the parish constable from the enormous condescension of ecology. If social history can add texture and nuance to the broad, systemic perspective of environmental history, then environmental history can provide fresh angles on traditional themes in social history. The study of wealth inequality and the development of capitalism has recently been reinvigorated by environmentally focused research. In a series of studies of storm flooding in the North Sea area in the late Middle Ages, Tim Soens has shown

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how uneven property distribution generated flood disasters due to failures in flood defence provision.58 Emanuela Guidoboni has also shown how the economic and demographic changes taking place in sixteenth-​century Italy contributed to increased flooding in the lower Po Plain through anthropogenic landscape change.59 Amartya Sen’s entitlement concept has proved useful for historians of flooding and famine to show how a variety of disasters were the result of ‘entitlement failures’ rather than the result of ‘exogenous’ factors.60 Elsewhere, wealth inequality has been shown to have been a crucial variable in the ability of settlements to withstand environmental and other crises across the pre-​industrial era.61 These histories have made as much use of traditional social history as they have of environmental history, drawing on classic debates in social history like the Brenner debate.62 Studies have used environmental shocks like large floods to test Brenner’s thesis about the accumulation and consolidation of landholding and the development of capitalism.63 My own research has highlighted the various ways in which social status and communal cultures could both mitigate and exacerbate the impact of fires and floods in the early modern period.64 In these examples, social-​historical analysis has been used to show some of the profound environmental impacts of seemingly social phenomena, and from the opposite perspective, how environmental shocks can intrude into classic narratives in social history. Class and race provide familiar themes around which social and environmental historians can converse. In The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege recounts the environmental consequences of US race legislation. Mapping the cold, wet and frequently dangerous journey of eight-​year-​old Linda Brown to school every morning, Fiege shows how race and racial policy structured the environment in which Brown grew up and made the colour line as much a physically lived and felt set of boundaries as a legal code. Opposition to the environmental inequalities faced by African American schoolchildren on their morning commute helped foster sustained action against the colour line, resulting in the famous case Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954.65 Sylvia Hood Washington traces the genesis of insidious ‘environmental racism’ in nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Chicago. She reveals how in the early twentieth century, white perceptions of African American migrants as unhealthy ‘nuisances’ led to their segregation and settlement in environmentally degraded urban spaces, entrenching endemic disease and perpetuating a cycle of marginalization.66 Scholars in the United States have thus led the way in exposing environmental inequality using a social and environmental approach, yet there remain significant opportunities to explore this in other contexts. To fully explore the implications of an attention to race in environmental history, we need to understand not only how race influenced the experience of environments but also how the construction of environments in general has been historically bound up with constructions of race. American scholars have demonstrated how nineteenth-​century conservationists ‘whitened’

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the wilderness they sought to save by omitting agential non-​white actors from their visions and descriptions of it.67 Likewise, Jane Carruthers has shown how South Africa’s celebrated first national park, Kruger National Park, was founded and operated on a basis of ‘white self-​interest, Afrikaner nationalism, ineffectual legislation, elitism, capitalism, and the exploitation of Africans’.68 Yet we need more studies of how environments in other national and international contexts were infused with ideas of race. Wilko Hardenberg and Marco Armiero have shown how in 1930s Italy, fascist ideals of race, nation and history were ‘steeped in nature’, despite the ‘natural’ in which they invested so much being almost entirely manufactured. Malarial wetlands and open mountainsides were not part of the fascist conception of Italian nature; however, drained lowland plains and regulated rural landscapes were. Idealized fascist nature had to be manufactured, often at the expense of existing landscapes, flora and fauna, revealing the interplay between identity, ideology and environment, and the impacts each might have on each other.69 Likewise, in 1930s north-​east England, a much smaller and utterly ineffective scheme to ‘reclaim’ and resettle moorland in Cleveland was driven by a fusion of ecologism and a belief that ‘pure-​bred Englishness resided in indigenous rural populations’ whose interests were best served by an oligarchy of the landed elite.70 Contemporary rural studies have shown how the English countryside is a racialized ‘white’ space, and how marginal groups are required to perform a particular kind of whiteness to be accepted within it.71 Social and cultural historians can reveal much longer histories of the relationships between race, class, identity and environment, beginning with the historical link between humoral understandings of environments and the subsequent humoral characterization of their inhabitants, stretching back to the writings of Hippocrates. Histories of class, and particularly labour, also have important and underexplored environmental dimensions. Work has been said to be ‘the single most important interface between society and nature’.72 In his study of the great organic machine the Columbia River, White noted that those that lived and worked with the river felt and knew it primarily through labour.73 An environmental approach brings with it new possibilities for affective histories of work. An environmental history of class is implicit in some of the earliest works of Marxist literature. Friedrich Engels was alive to the environmental inequalities inherent in the class system. He observed ‘the pestilential air and the poisoned water’ of working-​class districts in northern industrial towns and the greater exposure of working-​class homes to flooding along the rivers Irk and Medlock.74 In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake disproportionately affected the working-​class South of Market district, in which cheap, wood-​construction homes built on land hastily reclaimed after a previous earthquake were destroyed when the land beneath them began to shake like ‘jelly in a bowl’.75 In these and other examples, historians have then shown how social class is bound up with particular environmental experiences.76

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Yet environmental history can offer us a new perspective on histories of social class. Recent protests over the introduction of charges for water in Ireland demonstrate how concern over the provision of basic environmental needs can cause unexpected shifts in political opinion and association.77 For Ulrich Beck, modern environmental risks cut across class boundaries because, while ‘poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic’.78 But as Timothy Cooper and Sarah Bulmer have recently noted, the perception of certain risks is still mediated through everyday interactions with them, which are themselves bound up with social relations and the subjective experience of class identity.79 Likewise, studies of working-​class engagement with environmental movements have shown that environmental consciousness is prevalent across classes, yet those classes affect the ways in which people have historically engaged that consciousness.80 While environmental issues can reorient class relationships in certain circumstances, social history can provide a corrective to at times totalizing environmental discourses. Environmental approaches also have the capacity to reveal new connecting threads in historical narratives that reorient our focus and shed light on previously unseen commonalities and alliances. The ‘slow violence’ of climate change is driving new political movements among the world’s poor, who find themselves environmentally marginalized and on the myriad front lines of environmental change.81 Environmental historians are increasingly turning to global and glocal perspectives to study the far-​reaching and long-​ range flows of energy, power, resource and influence, and their passage through local case studies.82 Going even further, Jason W. Moore has proposed a world-​ecological approach to history in which our notion of scale is utterly disrupted. Moore seeks to show that the double internality of nature-​ in-​society and society-​in-​nature renders capitalism a ‘place’ in its own right, unable to be grasped at either the local or the global scale.83 Each of these environmental perspectives challenges a traditional focus on the community, the region or the nation. They show that when thinking with the environmental, we are forced to reconsider scale and should move beyond purely social or cultural human boundaries. Social, cultural, and environmental history have all drawn considerable inspiration and motivation from political movements contemporary to their growth in the second half of the twentieth century. In recent years these legacies have brought social and environmental historians together, in projects such as ‘Active History’, a Canadian website co-​founded by environmental historian Jim Clifford, designed to provide historical interventions into public life, and ‘Rescue!History’, a group of historians committed to researching ‘the human origins, impacts and consequences of anthropogenic climate change’.84 As these projects demonstrate, in a world dominated by the all-​pervasive threat of climate change, social and cultural history will, perhaps counter-​intuitively, become increasingly important. Predictions of the future impact of climate change on societies paint an almost universally bleak picture of conflict, forced migration, hazard and insecurity. Such

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predictions rely on climate as the ‘dominant predictor variable’ and, as Mike Hulme has argued, ‘reduce the future to climate change’, assuming complete stasis in social, cultural, economic and political life.85 Other possible futures still exist, with changing climatic parameters but with vastly different social outcomes predicated on action taken in the social sphere. Social and cultural historians are well placed to offer critiques of these antisocial narratives, and some have done so implicitly. Seth Garfield has shown how migration following droughts in Brazil in 1941–​43 was guided by social and familial networks, perceived economic incentives and gendered and generational expectations, rather than as the result of a simple environmental push factor.86 Responding to a large number of scholarly and popular perceptions of the relationship between pandemics and hatred, Samuel Cohn has shown, against scholarly orthodoxy, that there is no deterministic link between epidemics and hatred or violence. Instead, reactions to those afflicted were socially and culturally contingent, across both space and time.87 Social and cultural history has a crucial role to play in these stories. They show us that change as a result of environmental degradation is not determined. Things can be different –​we just need better stories to think with. If historians are to help shape a future that is not just ‘reduced to climate’, we need to keep grappling with a question posed by Marc Bloch in The Historian’s Craft: ‘Does the physical ever affect the social, unless its operations have been prepared, abetted, and given scope by other factors which themselves have already derived from man?’88

NOTES 1 Neil Roberts, The Holocene. An Environmental History, 3rd edn (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), p. 6. 2 Roderick Nash, ‘American Environmental History: A New Teaching Frontier’, Pacific Historical Review 41 (1972): pp. 362–​72. 3 Richard Grove, ‘Environmental History’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd edn (London: Polity, 2001). 4 Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–​1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Andrew C. Isenberg, ‘Historicizing Natural Environments: The Deep Roots of Environmental History’, in Sarah C. Maza and Lloyd S. Kramer (eds), A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 5 Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). 6 Christian Pfister, ‘The “1950s Syndrome” and the Transition from a Slow-​ Going to a Rapid Loss of Global Sustainability’, in Frank Uekoetter (ed.), The

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Turning Points of Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), pp. 92–​4. 7 Jens Ivo Engels, ‘Modern Environmentalism’, in Uekoetter (ed.), Turning Points of Environmental History, pp. 119–​20. 8 J. M. Powell, ‘Historical Geography and Environmental History: An Australian Interface’, Journal of Historical Geography 22 (1996): pp. 253–​73, here p. 259. 9 For an excellent summary of this debate, see Andrew C. Isenberg, ‘Introduction: A New Environmental History’, in Andrew C. Isenberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 7–​10. 10 Harriet Ritvo, ‘Discipline and Indiscipline’, Environmental History 10 (2005): pp. 75–​6, here p. 75. 11 Peter Coates, ‘In Praise of In-​and Ill-​Disciplinarity, Hybrid Vigor, and Porosity’, in Robert Emmett and Frank Zelko (eds), Minding the Gap: Working Across Disciplines in Environmental Studies (Munich: Rachel Carson Centre, 2014), pp. 47–​52, here p. 48. 12 Donald Worster, ‘Doing Environmental History’, in Donald Worster (ed.), The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 289–​307; Ian Whyte has echoed this model in his Dictionary of Environmental History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), p. 1. 13 J. Donald Hughes, What Is Environmental History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 3. 14 J. R. McNeill, ‘Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History’, History and Theory 42 (2003): pp. 5–​43, here p. 6. 15 Carolyn Merchant, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. xv–​xvii. 16 Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 17 Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin, ‘Making the Action Visible: Making Environments in Northern Landscapes’, in Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin (eds), Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), pp. 5–​6. 18 Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, ‘Making the Environment Historical –​An Introduction’, in Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde (eds), Nature’s End: History and the Environment (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 2–​3. 19 Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1980), p. 83. 20 Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015), pp. 45–​9. 21 Finn Arne Jørgensen et al., ‘Entangled Environments: Historians and Nature in the Nordic Countries’, Historisk tidsskrift 92 (2013): pp. 9–​34, here p. 10.

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22 Stephen J. Pyne, ‘The End of the World’, Environmental History 12 (2007) pp. 649–​53, here p. 651. 23 Ellen Stroud, ‘Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt through History’, History and Theory 42 (2003): pp. 75–​81. Ramachandra Guha has argued a similar point, Guha, ‘Movement Scholarship’, Environmental History 10 (2005): pp. 40–​1. 24 Andrew C. Isenberg, ‘Historicizing Natural Environments: The Deep Roots of Environmental History’, in Sarah C. Maza and Lloyd S. Kramer (eds), A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 383–​4. 25 Tom Williamson, An Environmental History of Wildlife in England 1650–​ 1950 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 87–​9, pp. 183–​93. 26 Marianna Dudley, An Environmental History of the UK Defence Estate, 1945 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2012); Peter Coates, ‘Borderland, No-​Man’s Land, Nature’s Wonderland: Troubled Humanity and Untroubled Earth’, Environment and History 20 (2014): pp. 499–​516. 27 Worster, ‘Doing Environmental History’, p. 301. Paul Sabin, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900–​1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 28 Paul Sabin, ‘Rooting around in Search of Causality’, Environmental History 10 (2005): pp. 83–​5, here p. 83. 29 Richard White, ‘Environmental History: Watching a Historical Field Mature’, Pacific Historical Review 70 (2001): pp. 103–​11, here p. 106. 30 William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’, Journal of American History 78 (1992): pp. 1347–​76. 31 Richard White, ‘Watching a Historical Field Mature’, p. 106. 32 Richard White, ‘Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning’, Journal of American History 76 (1990): pp. 1111–​16, here p. 1115. 33 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd edn (1977; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 421; Douglas R. Weiner, ‘A Death-​defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition of Environmental History’, Environmental History 10 (2005): pp. 404–​20, here p. 406. 34 Daniel B. Botkin, The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 8. 35 Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 192. 36 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 21. 37 Edmund Russell, ‘Science and Environmental History’, Environmental History 10 (2005): pp. 80–​2; McNeill, ‘Observations’, p. 34. 38 J. R. McNeill, ‘Drunks, Lampposts, and Environmental History’, Environmental History 10 (2005): pp. 64–​6, here p. 65; William M. Tsutsui, ‘Where the Grass Is Always Greener’, Environmental History 10 (2005): pp. 101–​2, here p. 102.

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39 McNeill, ‘Observations’, p. 34; David Demeritt, ‘Ecology, Objectivity and Critique in Writings on Nature and Human Societies’, Journal of Historical Geography 20 (1994): pp. 22–​37, here p. 33. Kristin Asdal, ‘The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-​Constructivist Challenge to Environmental History’, History and Theory 42 (2003): pp. 60–​74, here p. 65. 40 Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492: 30th Anniversary Edition (1972; Westport: Praeger, 2003), p. 219; Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–​1900, 2nd edn (1986; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For other works starring disease, see Alfred Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, 2nd rev. edn (1989; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Doubleday, 1976). 41 Mark Bailey, ‘“Per Impetum Maris”: Natural Disaster and Economic Decline in Eastern England, 1275–​1350’, in Bruce Campbell (ed.), Before the Black Death: Studies in the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 184. 42 Bruce M. S. Campbell, ‘Nature as Historical Protagonist: Environment and Society in Pre-​Industrial England’, Economic History Review 63 (2010): pp. 281–​314; Campbell, ‘Physical Shocks, Biological Hazards, and Human Impacts: The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century Revisited’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Economic and Biological Interactions in Pre-​Industrial Europe from the 13th to the 18th Centuries (Prato: Instituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “F. Datini”, 2010), pp. 13–​32; R. W. Hoyle, ‘Famine as Agricultural Catastrophe: The Crisis of 1622–​4 in East Lancashire’, Economic History Review 63 (2010): pp. 974–​1002; Boris V. Schmi et al., ‘Climate-​driven Introduction of the Black Death and Successive Plague Reintroductions into Europe’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112 (2015): pp. 3020–​5; Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 43 Gustaf Utterström posited a link between societal development and temperature change, which was refuted by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, among others. See Utterström, ‘Climatic Fluctuations and Population Problems in Early Modern History’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 3 (1955): pp. 3–​47, here p. 47; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 293. 44 Paul Warde, ‘Global Crisis or Global Coincidence?’, Past and Present 228 (2015): pp. 287–​301. 45 Helmut Haberl et al., ‘A Socio-​metabolic Transition towards Sustainability? Challenges for Another Great Transformation’, Sustainable Development 19 (2011): pp. 1–​14, here p. 4. 46 Marina Fischer-​Kowalski and Helmut Haberl, ‘Tons, Joules, and Money: Modes of Production and their Sustainability Problems’, Society & Natural Resources 10 (1997): pp. 61–​85, here p. 62. 47 Manuel González de Molina and Víctor M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism: A Socio-​Ecological Theory of Historical Change (London: Springer, 2014), p. 44.

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48 Erik Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 11. 49 Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water, p. 23. 50 Erik Swyngedouw, ‘The Political Economy and Political Ecology of the Hydro-​ Social Cycle’, Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education 142 (2009): pp. 56–​60, here p. 57. 51 Weiner, ‘A Death-​defying Attempt’, pp. 409–​16, here p. 416; Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2000). 52 William Cronon, ‘Modes Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History’, Journal of American History 76 (1990): pp. 1122–​31, here pp. 1128–​9. 53 Alan Taylor, ‘Unnatural Inequalities: Social and Environmental Histories’, Environmental History, 1 (1996): pp. 6–​19, here p. 7; Catherine Nash, ‘Environmental History, Philosophy and Difference’, Journal of Historical Geography, 26 (2000): pp. 23–​7, here p. 23. 54 James D. Rice, ‘Beyond “The Ecological Indian” and “Virgin Soil Epidemics”: New Perspectives on Native Americans and the Environment’, History Compass 12 (2014): pp. 745–​57; Gregory D. Smithers, ‘Beyond the “Ecological Indian”: Environmental Politics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Modern North America’, Environmental History 20 (2015): pp. 83–​111. 55 Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), p. 78. 56 Victor Skipp, Crisis and Development: An Ecological Case Study of the Forest of Arden, 1570–​1674 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 10. 57 Exceptions include Paul Warde, Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Karl Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 58 Tim Soens, ‘The Social Distribution of Land and Flood Risk along the North Sea Coast: Flanders, Holland and Romney Marsh Compared, c. 1200–​1750, in Bas van Bavel and Erik Thoen (eds), Rural Societies and Environments at Risk: Ecology, Property Rights and Social Organisation in Fragile Areas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); Soens, ‘Floods and Money: Funding Drainage and Flood Control in Coastal Flanders from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries’, Continuity and Change 26 (2011): pp. 333–​65; Soens, ‘Threatened by the Sea, Condemned by Man? Flood Risk and Environmental Inequalities along the North Sea Coast (1200–​1800 AD)’, in G. Massard-​Guilbaud and R. Rodger (eds), Environmental and Social Inequalities in the City: Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2011). 59 Emanuela Guidoboni, ‘Human Factors, Extreme Events and Floods in the Lower Po Plain (Northern Italy) in the 16th Century’, Environment and History 4 (1998): pp. 279–​308.

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60 Tim Soens, ‘Flood Security in the Medieval and Early Modern North Sea Area: A Question of Entitlement?’, Environment and History 19 (2013): pp. 209–​32; Phil Slavin, ‘Market Failure during the Great Famine in England and Wales (1315–​1317)’, Past and Present 222 (2013): pp. 9–​49; Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 61 Daniel R. Curtis, Coping with Crisis: The Resilience and Vulnerability of Pre-​ Industrial Settlements (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 270; Daniel R. Curtis, and Michele Campopiano, ‘Medieval Land Reclamation and the Creation of New Societies: Comparing Holland and the Po Valley, c.800–​c.1500’, Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014): pp. 93–​108, here p. 108. 62 T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-​industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 63 Piet van Cruyningen, ‘From Disaster to Sustainability: Floods, Changing Property Relations and Water Management in the South-​western Netherlands, c.1500–​1800’, Continuity and Change 29 (2014): pp. 241–​65; Daniel R. Curtis, ‘Danger and Displacement in the Dollard: The 1509 Flooding of the Dollard Sea (Groningen) and Its Impact on Long-​Term Inequality in the Distribution of Property’, Environment and History 22 (2016) pp. 103–​35. 64 John E. Morgan, ‘Understanding Flooding in Early Modern England’, Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015): pp. 37–​50; John E. Morgan, ‘The Representation and Experience of English Urban Fire Disasters, c.1580–​1640’, Historical Research 89 (2016): pp. 268–​93. 65 Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), pp. 318–​57. 66 Sylvia Hood Washington, Packing Them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865–​1954 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), pp. 129–​57. See Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–​1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 67 Kevin DeLuca and Anne Demo, ‘Imagining Nature and Erasing Class and Race: Carleton Watkins, John Muir, and the Construction of Wilderness’, Environmental History 6 (2001): pp. 541–​60; Carolyn Merchant, ‘Shades of Darkness: Race and Environmental History’, Environmental History 8 (2003): pp. 380–​94, here p. 385. 68 Jane Carruthers, The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1995) p. 4. 69 Marco Armiero and Wilko Graf Von Hardenberg, ‘Green Rhetoric in Blackshirts: Italian Fascism and the Environment’, Environment and History 19 (2013): pp. 283–​311. 70 Malcolm Chase, ‘Heartbreak Hill: Environment, Unemployment and “Back to the Land” in Inter-​War Cleveland’, Oral History 28 (2000): pp. 33–​42, here p. 35.

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71 Paul Cloke, ‘Rurality and Racialized Others: Out of Place in the Countryside?’, in Paul Cloke, Terry Marsden and Patrick Mooney (eds), The Handbook of Rural Studies (London: Sage, 2006); Sarah L. Holloway, ‘Burning Issues: Whiteness, Rurality and the Politics of Difference’, Geoforum 38 (2007): pp. 7–​20. 72 Stefania Barca, ‘Laboring the Earth: Transnational Reflections on the Environmental History of Work’, Environmental History 19 (2014): pp. 3–​27, here p. 22. 73 Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995) p. 4. 74 Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872; Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), pp. 63–​4 and 118–​21. 75 Andrea Rees Davies, Saving San Francisco: Relief and Recovery after the 1906 Disaster (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), pp. 16–​25. 76 Stephen Mosley, The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2001), p. 32; Mosley, ‘Coastal Cities and Environmental Change’, Environment and History 20 (2014): pp. 517–​33, here pp. 530–​3; Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Oxford: Picador, 1999), pp. 93–​148. 77 Daniel Finn, ‘Ireland’s Water Wars’, New Left Review 95 (2015): pp. 49–​63. 78 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992), pp. 35–​6. 79 Timothy Cooper and Sarah Bulmer, ‘Refuse and the “Risk Society”: The Political Ecology of Risk in Inter-​war Britain’, Social History of Medicine 26 (2013): pp. 246–​66, here p. 266. 80 Barca, ‘Laboring the Earth’; Ute Hasenöhrl, ‘Nature Conservation and the German Labour Movement: The Touristenverein Die Naturfreunde as a Bridge between Social and Environmental History’, in Geneviève Massard-​Guilbaud and Stephen Mosley (eds), Common Ground: Integrating the Social and Environmental in History (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp. 125–​48. 81 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 82 John McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 2000); Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Gabriella Corona, ‘What Is Global Environmental History? Conversation with Piero Bevilacqua, Guillermo Castro, Ranjan Chakrabarti, Kobus du Pisani, John R. McNeill, Donald Worster,’ Global Environment 2 (2008): pp. 229–​49, here pp. 234–​7. 83 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, pp. 21–​7. 84 Active History http://​activehistory.ca [accessed 20 May 2016]; Rescue!History: A Manifesto for the Humanities in the Age of Climate Change http://​www. rescue-​history.org.uk/​rescuehistory-​statement/​ [accessed 20 May 2016]; Mark

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Levene, ‘Historians for the Right to Work: We Demand a Continuing Supply of History’, History Workshop Journal 67 (2009): pp. 69–​81. 85 Mike Hulme, ‘Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism’, Osiris 26 (2011): pp. 245–​66, here p. 247. 86 Seth Garfield, ‘The Environment of Wartime Migration: Labor Transfers From the Brazilian Northeast to the Amazon during World War II’, Journal of Social History 43 (2010): pp. 989–​1019, here p. 1010. 87 Samuel Cohn, ‘Pandemics: Waves of Disease, Waves of Hate from the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S.’, Historical Research 85 (2012): pp. 535–​55. 88 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 21.

Key texts Blackbourn, D. The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany. New York: Norton, 2006. Carruthers, J. The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1995. Cronon, W. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Crosby, A. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–​ 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Davis, D. K. Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Davis, M. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998. Gadgil, M., and R. Guha. This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Glacken, C. J. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Grove, R. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–​1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Hoffmann, R. C. An Environmental History of Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Merchant, C. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Pyne, S. J. Fire: A Brief History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. Rachel Carson Centre, Environment and Society Portal, http://​www. environmentandsociety.org/​[accessed 27 May 2016]. Radkau, J. Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Worster, D. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1994.

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Spatial history Nicola Whyte

In 1615 Edmund Finch from Amble (Northumberland) gave evidence to the Exchequer courts, in a dispute over a tract of common grazing land called ‘Salt Goats’.1 He recalled how, in his boyhood, ‘old man’ Thomas Earsden, who died thirty years previously, aged seventy-​four, told him about the bounds of the township across the salt marsh.2 Edmund remembered standing on Beacon Hill with Thomas who, while gesturing to the location of the bounds on the land below, entreated him to remember ‘that which his fore elders had told him’. He described one marker stone on the north side, which was ‘sett and seated neare about full sea marke upon the clerke of the water Cockett’. Edmund knew its importance, for Thomas told him, ‘when I’m dead and rotten you may say of a truth that when St Cuthberts spring putt upp at the height you shall find the salt water and tide choke the said stone’. This was an unstable, constantly changing landscape, which had radically altered within Edmund’s own lifetime. Flooding caused by spring tides had caused the erosion or, as local inhabitants described it, ‘the wasting away’ of the ‘known’ and familiar landscape. For Edmund, the salt marsh was haunted by loss –​the loss of elderly neighbours and family and their knowledge, and the loss of the land itself. Other deponents recounted their experiences of how they came to know the bounds, with some reimagining the pathways created by the cattle of Amble as they moved to and from the commons; others spoke about the place where the fishermen laid out their nets on the banks of the River Cocket; and many had clear memories of learning the boundary stones when they were children. These fragmentary moments and memories recorded in the archives prompt a number of

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questions on the meanings of space in the past and what we as historians mean when we use the term. Space is no longer the sole concern of geographers, but has become a significant line of enquiry linking the humanities and social sciences. In recent years, historians have brought theoretical discourses on space to bear upon their understandings of a range of social, cultural, religious and political processes in the past.3 In early modern studies, the field I am most familiar with, the ‘spatial turn’ has been exciting and in many respects rewarding, leading scholars to fold an understanding of the physical and imaginary spaces in which people lived into their analyses of the dynamics of social, political and spiritual life.4 However, for all that this work purports to add to our understanding of the past, there remains much to be done to develop the direction of ‘spatial history’ as a critical cross-​disciplinary project. The question remains, what does space do for our understanding of the past? I want to argue for a spatial turn that can do a great deal more than provide a ‘new’ conceptual framework for historical analysis. The following discussion is an exploration of how an engagement with theories of space can provide a provocation to think differently about the project of history, and how, in turn, empirical research can inform the project of thinking spatially. Proponents of the ‘spatial turn’ have recently called for historians to map a clear agenda, with an agreed terminology and methodology, in order to build spatial history into a coherent field of study.5 Some have called for historians to arrive at a clearer account of the meaning of space or stop using the term altogether.6 But to my mind attempts to fix space as a category of analysis underplay its analytical potential in opening up and reconfiguring many of the pivotal questions around which historical investigations revolve. Following Henri Lefevbre’s exposition on the production of space, space is perhaps best understood as the philosophical rubric for understanding human relations.7 In his widely cited work, The Production of Space, published in 1974, Lefebvre explains that it is not enough to seek knowledge of space itself or to construct ‘models, typologies or prototypes of spaces’ but rather ‘to offer an exposition of the production of space’. In calling for a critique of established knowledge, and thus of space, Lefebvre sought to understand the moment that society might be transformed.8 His writing is purposefully challenging, open-​ended and constantly searching for the ‘mode of existence of social relations’.9 As such the book reads as an unfolding, constantly questioning set of propositions which stretch out across 400 or so pages to reveal the many-​sided character of that existence. Lefebvre was resistant to the idea that we can produce abstract models of space in any meaningful or workable sense. We must be careful, he writes, not to fall into the trap of fetishizing space as a thing ‘in itself’, but, rather, the aim must be to understand space as praxis.10 His work therefore is an attempt to represent in written form the complex, contingent and emergent layers of social space and their various constellations. In a typically eloquent passage he writes,

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The solution is not to be found in space as such –​as a thing or set of things, as facts or a sequence of facts, or as a medium or ‘environment’. To pursue any such line of investigation is to return to the thesis of a space that is neutral, that is prior or external to social practice and hence on those grounds mental or fetishized (objectified). Only an act can hold  –​and hold together  –​such fragments in a homogeneous totality. Only action can prevent dispersion, like a fist clenched around sand.11 For Lefebvre space is a multifaceted, fragmented, temporal and political process that refuses to conform to the quest for closure that characterizes much conventional historiography. ‘Space’ is therefore useful for historians to think with, for it draws into discussion deep questions concerning the spatialization of history and how we ourselves imagine the spaces and times of history.12 Within the broad reaches of the discipline, important spatial work has been undertaken by social, cultural and environmental historians. Inspiration can be taken from gender historians who have adopted the spatial turn to show the inadequacy of the public/​private, male/​female spheres.13 Their work contributes to a historiography, established without recourse to space, concerned with breaking down unhelpful and constraining categorizations that fall short of representing how women and men lived their lives in the past.14 But while the spatial turn has certainly contributed to the drive to do away with unhelpful and overly simplistic polarities, one of the consequences and limitations has been the production of a new set of artificial categories. Boundaries continue to be inserted in order to render ‘space’ a category of analysis. Thus religious space, work space, political space, social space, domestic space are dealt with separately, with a valid enough purpose perhaps, that is, to organize academic writing. But, as we shall see, in applying Lefebvre’s philosophy of space, we realize at once the interconnectivity and permeability of these ‘categories’. Multiple connections are produced through everyday practice, labour, sociability, worship and the political negotiations and power struggles within local societies.15 The places that become meaningful through human attachments and practices are not held as singular, isolated entities but are relational, viewed in the context of other places and other times. They are also contested, and open to different, often contradictory interpretations. In Doreen Massey’s words, ‘thinking space as actively and continually practised social relations precisely gives us the sources of the system’s inability to close itself’, and, crucially, ‘the accidental and happenstance elements intrinsic to the continuous formation of the spatial . . . provide one aspect of that openness which leaves room for politics’.16 More might be done therefore to fully realize the potency of space as a conceptual and methodological process. If we are to find common ground in the expanding literature, inspired by the spatial turn, it would appear that many spatial histories are linked by a concern to trouble the modernization paradigm, an imperative that is of course not unique to this field.17

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Narratives of industrialization, capitalism, secularization, state formation, the public and private spheres, for example, often provide momentum and purpose to writing history, for they portray an internal logic of change and progression. Historians are of course well aware of the inadequacies of periodization and teleology; historical assumptions and myths are constantly placed under scrutiny. Nevertheless, as Lynn Abrams points out, the implicit positioning of many historians often serves to reinforce the importance afforded to the concept of modernization.18 She makes the important point that, once absorbed within conventional accounts, historiographical discourse can have a powerful and lasting effect.19 As Massey argues, it is vital that we, as active producers of spatial and temporal imaginaries, ‘persistently question and strive to hold open discourses on the spatiality of power’.20 From this perspective the spatial turn foregrounds fundamental questions concerning the uneven and ambiguous course of historical change, while problematizing the designs of periodization, which bring clarity and closure to historical narratives but often have little to do with contemporary experiences. If we take seriously the possibilities of pursuing spatial history, the reproduction of abstract modes of organizing time are revealed to be inadequate, particularly as they fall short of explaining people’s experiences of entangled processes of change (and continuity) in their daily lives. The following discussion emphasizes the need to give space to alternative experiences and memories that refuse to be sewn into the broad, overarching narrative structures of history.21 Fragments of evidence –​moments gleaned from the archives  –​thus provide our cue for thinking spatially. Edmund Finch’s testimony, with which we began this chapter, relates a spatial ordering of the landscape that was continually in formation and drew into play memory, imagination, social processes and a deep sense of time, both ancestral and in the physical imprint of the past in the landscape. The meanings of landscape were given texture through human and non-​human actors, in this case the cattle and the sea. Archival material such as this suggests that spaces do not just exist as objects or categories for historians to come along and discover but rather that we need to be attuned to the processes –​temporal and social –​that created and recreated them. Furthermore, the oral testimonies of deponents in this case and in others reveal alternative understandings of the world than the conceived and constructed spaces of elites. What follows is an attempt to map an interdisciplinary approach by considering theories of landscape and place, alongside those of space, for the nuance and complexity they bring to our understanding of the past and for revealing the importance of aligning space with time. It is surprising that in many recent spatial histories questions of temporality appear to have become secondary to questions of space. My aim is to bring into closer alignment the spatial and temporal by connecting more closely with studies of lived experience, everyday life and dwelling. More broadly, I want to explore the potential of spatial history in feeding back into, and making a critical contribution to, recent work in cultural geography and landscape archaeology.

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The production of space Concepts of landscape, place and space are closely related and often used interchangeably, and some writers have struck a cautionary note, entreating historians to reach clear definitions and use more carefully the terms they employ. In particular, the tendency to employ space as the focus of study has been criticized when material environment, place and location provide clearer and more tangible realms of meaning. A ‘spatial triad’ has been suggested, one that views ‘location’ (a specific position or universally identifiable point), ‘place’ (a location with an accepted set of functions which are embedded in the social) and ‘space’ (for the relational situating of humans, environmental features, and the objects and places in people’s minds) as a workable methodological framework for historical research.22 Yet, if we take on board the theoretical impetus of the spatial turn, which invites us to think across conventional categorizations, such attempts to classify and compartmentalize are revealed to be inadequate. The constituents proposed here, rather than being held apart, might just as easily be collapsed together. Looked at in this way, locations are socially produced; places do not have accepted functions but are rather produced through multiple contingent and unpredictable social processes that might be disrupted in any given moment and, importantly, are viewed and experienced in relation to other times and other places, both real and imaginary. Massey’s ‘global’ sense of place is useful here, for foregrounding ideas of interconnectivity and flow across multiple scales.23 In her conceptualization, place is rendered open, outward facing, not bounded and closed, and constantly changing, rather than being fixed and rooted. Places are therefore practised and performed, made and remade everyday. Places are multivocal in the sense that multiple people participate in their production, and in turn they are polysemic, in that they have multiple meanings.24 Following this development, the practices that create and sustain places actively contribute to the ways people conceive of their identities in relationship to others and the material worlds in which they live.25 Landscape, environment, location and place are all socially produced, made and remade through uneven, ambiguous and contested processes. Lefebvre also identified a ‘spatial triad’:  representations of space (conceived and constructed by elites); representational space (lived space, thoughts, feelings, experiences); spatial practices (practices that structure everyday reality). But, for Lefebvre, the constituents of this tripartite model are not to be held apart as distinct categories; rather, each collapses into, and has the potential to change, the other. Space therefore is not a mere backdrop, an inert object, but animated, fluid, malleable and has the capacity to penetrate other spaces. These ‘inter-​penetrations’, to use Lefebvre’s term, both spatial and temporal, are folded together to create present space.26 Social space is underpinned by what came before; indeed, a social relationship cannot exist without this underpinning. While some scholars have

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recently suggested that we should attend to the possibility of absence in the writing of spatial histories, for Lefebvre, nothing is erased completely. There is no such thing as empty space:  ‘it cannot be a locus of absence’.27 But nor can we, perhaps rather frustratingly for those interested in materiality, define space solely in terms of memory, traces and relics. Lefebvre speaks of metamorphoses, transfers and substitutions. For this reason, he unravels linear expositions of the passage of time. He gives shape to a sociospatial transition  –​from absolute (premodern) to abstract (modern/​capitalist) space, yet refuses to subscribe to the linearity this implies. Instead, he asserts that abstract space cannot be dated: ‘we are not concerned here with events or institutions in any clearly defined sense’.28 In troubling elitist and linear conceptions of time, the reader is invited to think about how the past is continually folded into the present. Moreover, it is the folding together of multiple times and spaces that holds open the possibility for change. Historians are particularly well placed to reveal empirically the functions and processes of remembering, misremembering and forgetting, which had little to do with elite attempts to organize space and time. Space is therefore fundamentally an historical endeavour. It is worth noting that the symbiotic relationship between space and time has long been a strand of methodological enquiry within the broader reaches of the discipline of history. With its close associations with geography and archaeology, for over half a century landscape history has been concerned with spatial relationships in a range of contexts including the development of regional agrarian systems, settlement morphologies, urbanization and religious and architectural spaces.29 Traditionally, landscape historians have interpreted the landscape as a palimpsest, a text that has been reworked over time by successive generations of people, and have sought to identify moments of rupture and transformation in the spatial orderings of landscape and society. Taken together this work has been characterized by a commitment to understanding how human activities over the long term shape the physical environment and consequently the activities of future generations. Another branch of landscape studies is interested in developing alternative ways of understanding through the lens of theory. In the 1980s and ’90s, for example, cultural geographers interpreted the landscape as a way of seeing the world. Interested in breaking down the problematic nature/​culture binary, their influential work on eighteenth-​century designed landscapes showed how art, cartography, literature and the physical landscape itself can all be viewed as visual representations of culture and ideology.30 However, these two perspectives, the one empirical, the other theoretical, tend to split the discursive from the material worlds.31 In recent years, scholars have sought to bridge the gap through non-​representational theories of inhabitation and dwelling and an understanding of the everyday. As we shall see, these approaches have been particularly influential in combining spatiality and temporality as rooted in human experience and memory.32

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The importance of landscape as a constituent of the spatial turn lies in the possibility it holds for engaging place, practice, memory and identity in productive and meaningful ways. It is surprising how many histories are written without attention having been paid to the relationship between people and the material things, places and landscapes they deploy in their social relationships.33 How people related to one another through the places and landscapes they made and remade, modified and perhaps even destroyed, is fundamentally important to understanding the practices of everyday life and processes of change and continuity over time. This oversight may be in part a consequence of the dominant Western notion of landscape as exterior, objectified, distanced and dehumanized.34 This particular perspective draws from an aesthetic and cultural reading of landscape, emergent in the eighteenth century and characterized by measuring, surveying, mapping and quantifying land and resources. Landscape historians have been criticized for reinforcing this view themselves by focusing on spatial patterns, gathered from distribution maps, survey plans and aerial photographs, in order to produce an ‘empirical reality’ and thus their ‘object’ of study.35 Technologies of appropriation and control, such as map-​making, have the ability to distance and objectify, resulting in spatial homogeneity and stasis. As a cultural phenomenon landscape becomes a container of meanings devised by the few (mostly wealthy, white men), while the alternative landscapes of the majority are marginalized and hidden from view.36 The spaces of capitalism –​lived, conceived and perceived –​are fixed in neither time nor space; they are constantly in flux. Recent work by cultural geographers provides historians with a prompt to think differently about processes that are not relegated to the past but are of the present also. Enclosure, as a physical and conceptual restructuring of space, continues to be part of the very processes necessary for the maintenance of capitalism. Tensions arising over the practices and meanings of enclosure and commons work dialogically to reignite and sustain both over time, often in quite different, if not unexpected, contexts.37 Yet more might be done to draw out the temporal as well as spatial complexity of historical processes that refuse to be consigned to the past but are emergent in and through time.38 Using space as a concept to think with, can work therefore to disrupt conventional historical categorizations that situate the early modern past as a staging post in the story of modernity. To take another related example, the development of cartography has been discussed in terms of reflecting the encroachment and the [en]closure of capitalist space.39 Understood within this framework, the explosion of estate mapping in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would appear to convey the determination among landed elites to assert territorial proprietorship over land and people: maps provided a new spatial vision and means of ordering the world.40 But if we allow for the possibility that maps were made for a variety of purposes, unrelated to our modern expectations, alternative interpretations emerge.41 When viewed within the context of the time in which they were made, when notions of custom, right, prescription,

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practice and memory were recognized as being of vital importance in the spatial routines and organization of everyday life, among elite and plebeian alike, maps represent a spatial order that was deeply entangled with and underpinned by the past.42 Maps were often drawn with recourse to the knowledge and memories of local inhabitants, formed through their day-​ to-​day practices and experiences of dwelling. While maps have been interpreted as offering contemporaries a new technology for representing space as a definable entity, on closer inspection the evidence suggests that maps were made to represent an ordering of the physical world in acknowledgement of the power and authority invested in the physical traces of the past in the landscape.43 It is important to emphasize therefore that maps represent the interrelationship between space and time. Phenomenological methods interpret landscape not as an external fixed and static entity but as experienced and embodied.44 The phenomenological agenda aims to explain human experience as apprehended though the material world, bodily orientation and movement.45 Ingold, for example, rejects the distinction between ‘mind and matter’, ‘meaning and substance’, and, in a move that rejects the ‘cultural turn’, argues that to say reality is communicated through symbol and inscription, through text, image and representation, falls woefully short of finding an expression of what it means to live in the world. Ingold develops what he terms ‘the dwelling perspective’, which transcends mental/​ material, object/​ subject, inside/​ outside binaries. For Ingold, an ‘ontology of dwelling’ provides a far more adequate way of capturing the nature of human existence than does the alternative Western ontology which prioritizes the mind as being detached from the material world.46 Ingold’s writing is extremely potent for inviting a departure from representational ideas of landscape by foregrounding bodily immersion, experience, practice and performance. The everyday project of dwelling in the world, in which people engage as active participants in marking time and landscape, is particularly relevant for our purposes here.47 Closer engagement with theoretical developments taking place in other related disciplines can provide a useful way forward for historical studies, but greater attention also needs to be paid to developing a critical methodology that considers more fully the practice and contribution of historical research.48 There is significant scope to feed back into current debates among cultural geographers, for example, by bringing temporal depth to bear upon questions of landscape, place and space. Recent phenomenological writing has been criticized for being overly presentist in outlook and often devoid of an understanding of the power relations that shape the ways people experience a landscape or place.49 Ingold’s ‘taskscape’ has been criticized for being ahistorical, a nostalgic view of a harmonious, consensual and authentic past, and therefore apolitical.50 The phenomenological emphasis on the embodied experience of the individual, moreover, tends to contradict social histories interested in social entanglements, inequality, collectivized conflict and resistance. Feminist

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writers have cautioned against phenomenological methods that neglect the materiality of space, which has the capacity to constrain, control and order social relationships.51 As historians we need to be aware therefore of the intellectual currents that underpin these different trends, and when it comes to adopting theoretical frameworks work to critique and develop them through empirical research. While much inspiration can be drawn from phenomenology, more might be done to think about the contribution historians can make to the direction of such studies, by foregrounding the social, political and temporal. It is vital that historians engage with these debates and bring temporal depth to bear upon movement, practice and what it means to dwell.52 Work that pays close attention to revealing the textures and registers of situated practices, bodily experience and memory is not entirely new. of course. Cultural and social historians have long been interested in habit, custom, performance and ritual, and this builds upon and develops this work. It is worth returning to Lefebvre’s conceptualization of space here, for it shares some similarities with current phenomenological work but is also deeply concerned with social and political processes. Lefebvre emphasized the centrality of bodily experience and sought to understand how spaces are made and remade through the rhythms and practices of everyday life. In Lefebvre’s articulation of social space as formed and reformed through practice, imagination and experience, all of which are deeply and inextricably entangled in his work, space is rendered contingent and political.53 This brings us to a fuller consideration of what Lefebvre refers to as the interpenetration of spaces and times, which might be further developed in view of recent writing on landscape and memory. In Alfred Gell’s words, ‘a person and a person’s mind are not confined to particular spatio-​temporal coordinates but consist of a spread of biological events and memories of events, and a dispersed category of material objects, traces and leavings’.54 Following this important conceptualization, Hendon’s discussion of the ‘relational self’ and ‘distributed personhood’ is particularly useful. Other times, other places, are collapsed into the experience of the present moment, and are not bound to the lifespan of individuals. As in the case of Amble, court deposition evidence offers insight into how the imagined ‘traces and leavings’ of the dead were dispersed across the landscape –​words remembered and spoken, the sound of a staff knocking against a stone –​recalled by the living as they walked through the landscape. We might further explore the entanglement of space and time in everyday landscapes by taking on board the work of landscape archaeologists on the biographies of monuments and landmarks. As Paul Connerton argues, sites and places were reused and appropriated over time; they were incorporated within daily practices as well as more formal ritual events.55 The significance of such features was enhanced by reference to other places and other times. This indexical relationship, to use Andrew Jones’s term, is extremely helpful for thinking through the historical record and gaining insight into how people

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may have thought about the past in relation to their own lives, and the processes that shaped the landscapes in which they lived.56 The empirical evidence invites us to further develop our project of thinking spatially. Archival sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveal the strong, often highly charged, importance of knowing and communicating the history of landscapes from one generation to the next: whether a house, road, field or boundary mark, for example, was made within living memory or whether its origins lay in deep time.57 The relationship between material and social processes was crucial in providing rhythm to daily practices and customs. Everyday time was not comprehended as a linear transition, but transitions from one state to another were made possible from day to day, season to season, year to year, and over the life course of the individual. Contemporaries held a clear sense of the passing of time. The longevity of customs and practices and the way things should be done were described as having been in existence since time out of mind.58 Knowledge was passed on from one generation to the next in the form of oral memory and practice, and organized around the identification of the physical relics of the past in the landscape. Boundary features were identified through their physical appearance, with signs of weathering and decay providing tangible links to ‘ancient time’ and the activities of former inhabitants. People’s own experience, of childhood, family life, old age, was reflected in an understanding of the physical traces of the passage of time in the landscape.59 This contributed to the development of a deep sense of social time, articulated through the marking and claiming of physical features and places. Present space was thus inextricably underpinned by memory and practice. But these markings and claimings were not evenly experienced; the right and capacity to dwell were contingent and political, and worked to circumscribe and constrain. Old landmarks were vandalized, sometimes destroyed. Evidence for the destruction of what seem to us rather mundane features, and perhaps of little consequence in the broader narrative of history, provides a valuable insight into the social and political ramifications of small yet instrumental moments of rupture and change in the spatial ordering of everyday life. Thinking further through these possibilities, the recent work on the politics of the parish in early modern England, which has given narrative coherence to the process of state formation ‘from below’, might be further developed. To date, the result has been a compelling history of social inclusion/​exclusion articulated across the increasingly bounded and policed spaces of the early seventeenth-​century parish.60 Middling sorts of men, the ‘better sort’, assumed authority to govern the villages in which they lived, particularly the administration of poor relief. Parish space, as a conceptual ideal as much as physical terrain, was bounded by patriarchal values, which threaded together household, church and wider landscape. Historians have paid particular attention to how the performance of patriarchal governance was manifest in the ceremony of beating the bounds during Rogation Week. These were exclusive occasions, presided over by parish elites, and designed

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to promote social and spatial awareness of the jurisdictional space of the parish.61 There is an attractive spatial cohesiveness to this argument. We are invited to imagine the concretization of parish spaces, which formed a definable and known network of territories across the nation: a vital process in the extension of state power through the acquiescence of local authorities. However, questions arise over the ways in which contemporaries imagined the boundaries and spatial jurisdictions we ourselves imagine them to have inhabited. The neatness of the argument is troubled by the evidence for local and regional variation concerning the organization of administrative structures and also by the senses of belonging attached to other less obvious (to modern historians at least) landscapes and places.62 Furthermore, perambulations necessitated the recognition, at times misrecognition, of routeways and boundary features. The empirical material invites us to consider how the memory and meaning of spatial jurisdictions were as articulated often with little sense of unity, or even clarity, on questions of spatial homogeneity even among contemporaries themselves. The reliance on local memory, and identification of the physical imprint of the past in the landscape, reveals a more fragmented, contested and unstable spatial history than arguments that privilege territorial fixity. In Lefebvre’s words, ‘Socio-​political contradictions are realized spatially. The contradictions of space thus make the contradictions of social relations operative. In other words, spatial contradictions “express” conflicts between socio-​political interests and forces; it is only in space that such conflicts come effectively into play, and in doing so they become contradictions of space’.63 Parish boundaries emerge as one spatial constituent in a broader and more complex landscape of spatial and social configurations. The physical boundaries or, more specifically, the structures and landmarks identified (not always accurately) as demarcating parish jurisdictions, were not simply containers of action but also were made through dynamic social processes. Nor were they simply elite representations of spatial order but also were recognized and employed by men and women for diverse, often conflicting reasons and purposes. Notions of spatial homogeneity give way therefore to the complex and divergent interests and memories of households and social groups. The township of Amble, where we began this chapter, was a parcel of the Manor of Tynemouth and within the compass of the large parish of Warkworth, which included several other townships at this time. In the dispute over Salt Goats, many of the deponents described the boundary stones as being an integral part of their lived experience of the landscape, which they articulated through details of their involvement in being part of a community of practice, of shared knowledge and responsibility. William Taylor, of the neighbouring township of Hauxley, remembered being in the company of William Hall and his sons Nicholas and Edward while carrying bundles of fuel, when William stopped by a bounder stone and, knocking it with his staff, willed them all to remember that, if the bounds should ever be questioned, this was a mark stone. In Amble the case heard before the equity

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courts concerned access to common land and the continued sufficiency of the community of householders. Coastal flooding had widened the River Cocket, and apparently the cattle of Amble could not reach the common unless they swam across the river. Rather than necessarily tying this case, and the many others like it, into a transitional narrative charting the shift from a premodern to a modern spatial order, linked to the development of parish administration or the demise of custom, archival material such as this does something else. It is worth taking on its own terms as an insight into the workings of a community of practice situated in a landscape. The deponents suggest how people understood their lives in relation to the surrounding landscape, and a deep sense of social time. The social and cultural processes of work, movement, memory did not occur in space but rather continuously created space.

Conclusion Some writers have recently questioned the fluidity of once fixed and ‘known’ histories, which has arisen through the application of ‘space’. Beat Kümin wonders whether things have indeed gone too far, because ‘in order to function societies need a minimum of agreed upon rules, established modes of communication and (arguably) spatial demarcations’. Each constituent identified by Kümin might be usefully folded into our analyses of the past, yet there is another critical, and disrupting, dimension to be added to the mix. The conditions identified by Kümin are always being produced in any given moment, and therein lies the possibility for historical change. Following Lefebvre, the potency of space exists in the conditions of its reproduction, conditions that are contingent and political. Because we are dealing here with a myriad of ‘inter-​penetrating’ (to use Lefebvre’s term) spaces and times, the course of historical change is dependent on the material and political conditions of any given moment. One way in which historians have a valuable contribution to make is in interrogating the normative discourse of modernity, by unthreading the assumptions and taxonomies that are regularly deployed in historical research. Recent applications of the spatial turn bring into question a priori assumptions that frame social and cultural relationships. Binary spatial categorizations (such as male/​female, public/​private, commons/​enclosure, centre/​margins, modern/​premodern) have been shown to be inadequate, for they serve to conceal as much as they illuminate, yet historians continue to employ them as frameworks for research. Lefebvre devised a ‘spatial triad’ –​conceived, perceived and lived –​ in order to overcome the constraints of simple binaries, whereby ‘each instance internalises and takes on meaning through other instances’.64 It is a focus on the everyday that complicates overarching narrative structures and invites us to see modernity as not inevitable but as a multiple, unstable and fragmented process. It is the disrupting element of ‘space’ therefore that

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needs to be emphasized here, for space provides a provocation to rethink narrative frameworks and conventional categorizations, by taking account of the nonlinear, ambiguous and open-​ended character of historical change. Empirical research can shed light on the inconsistent and often entangled ways in which people articulated the meaning of the landscapes and places in which they lived in the past, just as they do today. One of the key insights gained from late sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century court records is the way in which witnesses gave highly personalized accounts relating their memories and experiences of places and landscapes, which often had little to do with elite representations of spatial order. Practices of everyday life, gathering fuel from the commons, tending to livestock, tilling the soil, scouring the mill leat, picking nuts and fruits from the hedgerows, walking to church and alehouse, meeting with neighbours, created connections between people and the material environments in which they lived in a complex amalgam of ways. These acts of dwelling operated across a series of interlinked spaces, which were not fixed containers of action but were rather overlapping, unstable and contested. Importantly, the documentary record, in this case oral testimonies of witnesses, gives temporal depth to recent discussions of the multivocal and polysemic meanings of landscape and place, particularly among cultural geographers. They uncover what was important and meaningful in the continuous creation of spatial ordering in everyday social and material worlds. People related their own life histories, often interwoven with memories of their forebears, with reference to the material evidence of the past in the landscape. This evidence gives insight into how people in the past created, reproduced and negotiated the conditions of their existence.65 In this patterning of the world, which drew its rhythm from the cycle of customs and repetition of daily practices, temporality was deeply entangled with space. The emphasis once placed upon spatial forms as objects of discovery, and interpretation within a chronological framework, might shift therefore to include a deeper understanding of the processes and meanings of inhabitation and dwelling. Rather than seeking to define moments of rupture and transformation, arranged in chronological sequence, researchers from across disciplines are now more concerned with the quotidian, routine, repetitive engagements of people with each other and the landscapes and places in which they lived. Experience, situated knowledge, embodied practices and memory have gained significant currency in the attempts to reach an understanding of what it means to dwell now and in the past. There is significant merit in pursuing such studies, particularly in engaging people today on the value and meaning of everyday landscapes: an undertaking that has significance in dealing with pressing issues of climate and environmental change, for example.66 Academic and popular histories that privilege social elites as the real historical actors in bringing about change, perpetuate a particular hegemonic narrative, which marginalizes alternative knowledge and practice.67 Mark Levene has recently urged historians

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to seriously consider the ethics of writing history and to make visible alternative histories which may lead to a more nuanced understanding of how we understand past and present actions, strategies and lives in relation to environmental and climate change. This necessitates a different approach focusing on the rich textures and multiplicity of lived experiences, the kind of ‘thick description’ social historians call for, the moments that do not easily tie up into the conventional narrative frameworks of historical research. Drawing on Lefebvre, the spatial turn can serve as a prompt to bring together research that reveals the fragmented, ambiguous, contradictory nature of everyday life. But it is an understanding of landscape and place that threads these strands together, and it is an appreciation of the critique offered by space that leads to an interrogation of the ways we choose to represent them.

NOTES 1 My thanks to the editors for inviting me to contribute to this collection and especially to my colleagues Sarah Bulmer and Tim Cooper for their enormously helpful discussions of earlier drafts of this piece. 2 The National Archives (TNA): PRO: E 134/​13Jas1/​Mich4. 3 Beat Kümin and Cornelie Usborne (eds), ‘At Home and in the Workplace: Domestic and Occupational Space in Western Europe from the Middle Ages’, Special issue of History and Theory 52 (2013); Ralph Kingston, ‘Mind over Matter?’, Cultural and Social History 7 (2010): pp. 111–​21; Katrina Navickas, ‘Why I Am Tired of Turning: a Theoretical Interlude’, History Working Papers Project (2013), http://​www.historyworkingpapers.org/​ ?page_​id=225. 4 Paul Stock (ed.), The Uses of Space in Early Modern History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Alex Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Beat Kümin (ed.), Political Space in Pre-​Industrial Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell 2007); Rab Houston, ‘People, Space and Law in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain and Ireland’, Past and Present 230 (2016): pp. 47–​89; Julie Sanders, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 5 Leif Jerram, ‘Space: A Useless Category for Historical Analysis’, History and Theory 52 (October 2013): pp. 400–​19; Beat Kümin, ‘The Uses of Space in Early Modern History –​An Afterward’, in Stock, Uses of Space in Early Modern History, pp. 227–​234. 6 Jerram, ‘Space: A Useless Category’. 7 Adam Smith, The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003);

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Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-​Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 8 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 404. 9 Ibid.; italics in original. 10 Ibid., p. 90. 11 Ibid., p. 320; italics in original. 12 See also Mike Crang, ‘Spaces in Theory, Spaces in History and Spatial Historiographies’ in Kümin, (ed.), Political Space in Pre-​Industrial Europe, pp. 249–​66. 13 ‘ “The Freedom of the Streets”: Women and Social Space 1560–​1640’, in Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner (eds), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 130–​52; Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–​1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 14 Amanda Vickery, ‘From Golden Age to Separate Spheres: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’ Historical Journal 36 (1993): pp. 383–​414; Merry Weisner, Women and Gender, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 15 Keith Wrightson’s work on the entangled patterning of social relations in the early modern period has been particularly influential; see for example his ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996); Wrightson, ‘Mutualities and Obligations: Changing Social Relationships in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy 139 (2005): pp. 1–​37. 16 Doreen Massey, ‘Entanglements of Power: Reflections’, in Ronan Paddison et al. (eds), Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/​Resistance (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 279–​86, here p. 282. 17 For example, the work on alehouses: James Brown, ‘Drinking Houses and the Politics of Surveillance in Pre-​Industrial Southampton’, in Kümin (ed.), Political Space in Pre-​Industrial Europe, pp. 62–​3; Mark Hailwood, ‘Alehouses, Popular Politics and Plebeian Agency in Early Modern England’, in Fiona Williamson (ed.), Locating Agency: Space, Power and Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), pp. 51–​76. 18 Lynn Abrams, ‘The Unseamed Picture: Conflicting Narratives of Women’, in Alex Shepard and Garthine Walker (eds), Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodization (Chichester: Willey & Sons, 2009), pp. 222–​ 41, also published in Gender & History 20 (2008): pp. 628–​43; Garthine Walker, ‘Modernization’, in G. Walker (ed.), Writing Early Modern History (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), pp. 25–​48; see also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 19 Abrams, ‘Unseamed Picture’, pp. 225–​6.

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20 Massey, ‘Entanglements’, p. 183; see also Doreen Massey, ‘Places and Their Pasts’, History Workshop Journal 39 (1995): pp. 182–​92; Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); and Massey, For Space (London: Sage Publications, 2005). 21 See Mark Levene’s discussion in ‘Climate Blues: or How Awareness of the Human End Might Re-​Instil Ethical Purpose to the Writing of History’, Environmental Humanities 2 (2013): pp. 153–​73. 22 Kümin, ‘The Uses of Space in Early Modern History –​An Afterword’, in Stock (ed.), Uses of Space, p. 231. 23 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, pp. 146–​156. 24 Hendon, Houses, p. 99. 25 Ibid., p. 99. 26 Merrifield, ‘Henri Lefebvre’, p. 171. 27 Bernard Capp, ‘Comment from a Historical Perspective’, in Kümin, Political Space in Pre-​Industrial Europe, pp. 233–​48. 28 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 290. 29 See, for example, Della Hooke (ed.), Landscape: The Richest Historical Record (Society for Landscape Studies, Supplementary Series 1, 2000). 30 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); Daniels and Cosgrove, The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 31 Richard Bradley, ‘Mental and Material Landscapes in Prehistoric Britain’, in Hooke (ed.), Landscape, The Richest Historical Record. 32 Julia Hendon’s work is particularly illuminating: Houses in a Landscape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 33 See also Matthew Johnson, ‘Living Space: The Interpretation of English Vernacular Houses’, in Stock (ed.) The Uses of Space, pp. 19–​42; Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place 1789–​1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Kingston, ‘Mind over Matter’. 34 Julian Thomas, ‘Archaeologies of Place and Landscape’, in Ian Hodder (ed.), Archaeological Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), pp. 165–​86, here p. 170; Christopher Tilly A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford: Berg, 1994). 35 Thomas, ‘Archaeologies’, p. 171. 36 Barbara Bender, introduction to B. Bender and M. Winer (eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place (Oxford: Berg, 2001), p. 14. 37 Michael J. Watts, ‘Enclosure: A Modern Spatiality of Nature’, in Paul Cloke, Envisaging Human Geographies (London: Arnold, 2004), pp. 48–​64; Alex Jeffrey, Colin McFarlane, and Alex Vasudevan, ‘Rethinking Enclosure: Space, Subjectivity and the Commons’, Antipode 44 (2012): pp. 1247–​67.

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38 See also the work on customary law: Christopher Rodgers et al., Contested Common Land: Environmental Governance Past and Present (London and Washington, DC: Earthscan, 2011), pp. 41, 47 and 192. 39 Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism, pp. 90–​2; Bernard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2001). 40 Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 171, 189–94; J. B. Harley, ‘Maps, Knowledge and Power’, in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 277–​312. 41 Mike Crang, ‘Spaces in Theory’; Denis Cosgrove, ‘Introduction: Mapping Meanings’, in Denis Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London: Reaktion, 1999), pp.1–​23. 42 Edward P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991); Andy Wood, ‘The Place of Custom in Plebeian Political Culture: England, 1550–​1800’, Social History 22 (1997): pp. 46–​60; Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Nicola Whyte, ‘Landscape, Memory and Custom: Parish Identities c. 1550–1700’, Social History 32:2 (2007): pp. 166–86. 43 Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape Place, Custom and Memory 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxbow, 2009). 44 For an excellent overview, see John Wylie, Landscape (London: Routledge, 2007), chap. 5. 45 Ibid., chap. 5; Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape. 46 Ingold, Perception of the Environment, p. 42; Wylie, Landscape, p. 158. 47 Mitch Rose, ‘Dwelling as Marking and Claiming’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012): pp. 757–​71. 48 For the development of these ideas, see Nicola Whyte, ‘Senses of Time, Senses of Place: Landscape History from a British Perspective,’ Landscape Research 40 (2015): pp. 925–​38. 49 David C. Harvey, ‘Landscape and Heritage: Trajectories and Consequences’, Landscape Research 40 (2015): pp. 911–​24; Whyte, ‘Senses of Time’; see also Joanna Brück, ‘Experiencing the Past? The Development of a Phenomenological Archaeology in British Prehistory’, Archaeological Dialogues 12 (2005): pp. 45–​72. 50 Barbara Bender, Stonehenge: Making Space (Oxford: Berg, 1998), p. 38; Barbara Bender, Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Oxford: Berg, 1993). 51 Brück, ‘Experiencing the Past?’ 52 Patricia Fumerton’s work in Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) is particularly suggestive.

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53 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 405. Lefebvre talks about a sphere of ‘rhythmic cells’ and their effects, which cannot or should not be reduced to discrete categories of abstract thought; rather, the whole of (social) space proceeds through the body. 54 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 222; discussed in Hendon, Houses, pp. 149–​50. 55 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 56 Andrew Jones, Memory and Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 57 Nicola Whyte, ‘An Archaeology of Natural Places’, Huntingtdon Library Quarterly, Special issue, 76 (2013): pp. 499–​517; and Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape. 58 Wood, ‘The Place of Custom’. 59 Whyte, ‘An Archaeology of Natural Places’. 60 Steve Hindle, ‘A Sense of Place? Becoming and Belonging in the Rural Parish 1550–​1650’, in Alex Shepard and Phil Withington (eds), Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Steve Hindle and Beat Kümin, ‘The Spatial Dynamics of Parish Politics: Topographies of Tension in English Communities c.1350–​ 1640’, in Kümin (ed.), Political Space in Pre-​Industrial Europe, pp. 151–​74. 61 Hindle, ‘A Sense of Place?’, p. 108. 62 Angus Winchester, ‘Dividing Lines in a Moorland Landscape: Territorial Boundaries in Upland England’, Landscapes 1 (2000): pp. 16–​34. 63 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 365; and quoted in Sharp et al., ‘Entanglements of Power’, p. 26. 64 Merrifield, ‘Lefebvre’, p. 175. 65 Hendon, Houses, p. 124. 66 Whyte, ‘Senses of Time; Senses of Place’. 67 Hendon, Houses, p. 99; see also Mark Levene ‘Climate Blues’; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.

Key texts Bender, B. Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Oxford: Berg, 1993. Ingold, T. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2009. Kümin, B. (ed.). Political Space in Pre-​Industrial Europe. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Kümin, B., and C. Usborne (eds). ‘At Home and in the Workplace: Domestic and Occupational Space in Western Europe from the Middle Ages’, Special issue of History and Theory 52 (2013).

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Lefebvre, H. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-​Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Massey, D. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Stock, P. (ed.). The Uses of Space in Early Modern History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Tilly, C. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg, 1994. Whyte, N. ‘Senses of Place, Senses of Time: Landscape History from a British Perspective’, Landscape Research 40 (2015): pp. 925–​38. Wylie, J. Landscape. London: Routledge, 2007.

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Afterword: Digital history Seth Denbo

In England, the fifth of November still commemorates the thwarted 1605 plot to blow up the House of Lords, assassinate King James I of England and VI of Scotland, and replace him with a Catholic monarch. While today it is mostly an excuse for bonfires and fireworks, the date has a long and significant history as a celebration of Protestant nationalism. Beginning with the Reformation, the divide between Catholics and Protestants shaped much of the political landscape and helped define English identity for hundreds of years.1 Consequently, the Fifth of November was a day for reflection on the monarchy and the divine providence that was thought to have preserved Protestant rule. Sermons, such as that given at St Paul’s Cathedral by the metaphysical poet John Donne on Gunpowder Day in 1622, were often preached on these topics.2 The text of Donne’s sermon has been digitized, and it is now instantly available to anyone with an internet connection.3 But the text is only part of the experience of hearing a sermon delivered. So reading allows us, 500 years removed from Donne’s time, only a limited understanding of how it was experienced by contemporaries. Using digital tools we can now explore the performative aspects and the experience of attending an open-​air sermon in seventeenth-​century London in new ways. The Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project, based at North Carolina State University (NCSU), uses several different media to build a remarkable audio-​visual model of the churchyard and the sermon itself.4 The model is a vehicle for exploring dimensions of the sermon that the text cannot illuminate. The development of the models that allowed the scholars to generate what they refer to as an ‘evidence-​based restoration’ required extensive syntheses of the cultural, social and architectural history of early

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modern London. The researchers modelled that day’s weather using historical data, consulted contemporary accounts of the number of spectators in the churchyard to estimate the size of the crowd and researched Donne’s oral presentation.5 A sermon given by one of the great writers and preachers of his time was much more than just a written text.6 It was a performance that educated, entertained, fostered community and espoused political positions. It was a social experience that occurred in a specific space and cultural context. In order to fully understand its impact we need to consider how contemporaries experienced it. The Virtual St Paul’s Cross Project does that in ways that make excellent use of the affordances of digital technologies for exploring the human condition. The project has created a visual and auditory model that allows users to view the churchyard, one of the most important public spaces of early modern London, in three dimensions, from a number of different angles. John N.  Wall and his colleagues at NCSU also worked with a Shakespearean actor to recreate the oral performance. A team of sound engineers modelled the acoustic properties of the churchyard, taking into account such considerations as the weather, the number of people attending and the construction materials of the surrounding buildings. Within the model, the viewer can choose one of several locations from which to listen; we find that the sermon sounds different in each of these spots. Sites in the churchyard were open to Londoners of differing social rank, so being able to experience these differences has implications for how we understand class and religion. While the project website provides documentation and explanation as well as access to the audio files, videos and still images, the model was primarily created to be experienced in an immersive digital theatre in the library at NCSU. This limits the number of people who can experience it, and it also raises questions about the extent to which the work can be compared to a more widely disseminated publication. On the positive side, experiencing it in the space for which it was designed is far more engrossing than one could hope to achieve on the Web alone. The Virtual St Paul’s Cross Project is cultural history in a new key. While inserting itself into a broader historical and historiographical context, the 3D model of the space in which the sermon was delivered arrests notions of experience through a kind of thick description.7 Using evidentiary traces of a churchyard that was destroyed in 1666, the meteorological conditions on the day of the sermon, unrecorded speech acts and estimates of the size of the crowd, the model gives the user a highly developed, multilayered account of the event. Technology makes possible a descriptive mode that transcends language, bringing visual and auditory elements to bear in the creation and presentation of knowledge about the past. But describing it as a ‘presentation’ makes this work sound more like observation and a kind of virtual performance –​of which the model undeniably has elements  –​than a research-​based analysis. This view of digital

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recreation obscures the interpretation that is central to the modelling of historical spaces in time. The work of building digital 3D visual models is a form of representation more than it is presentation, of interpretation more than description. By recreating the lived experience of attending the sermon, the scholars who built the model make assertions about architecture, environment, performance and even social relations. Modelling historic spaces is explication, which involves layers of interpretation of the physical properties and the social and cultural environment.8 Models of this kind ask the creators and the users alike to contemplate how we know what we know about the past. Digital tools give us additional means for exploring aspects of how people in past societies experienced their world. Yet creating models, like scholarly narrative, involves layers of inference and extrapolation. Early use of computational tools by historians was mostly performed by economic and social historians, who utilized emergent database and tabular data technologies to explore the past using quantitative methods.9 With the new technologies that are discussed in this afterword, it is also possible to see how digital approaches can now also be utilized for cultural inquiry. Digital scholarship can encourage historians and their audiences to look at aspects of history in ways that refigure our understanding of the past by giving us new tools for going beyond the text.10 Historians responsible for shifts described in this volume –​transnational histories, public history, spatial histories –​have been, to a greater or lesser extent, influenced by digital sources and methodologies. While the historical questions may be traditional, the approach is often novel and creative.11 Some of the most interesting works of digital history approach the past through methodologies and argumentation that depart from traditional disciplinary modes of inquiry. For these scholars and projects, the use of digital tools and media often stems from a substantial shift in the way they represent the past.12 Research projects that employ digital tools and computational methodologies to go beyond the text have multiple purposes and are addressed to a range of audiences. This does not make them any less scholarly. Those that move beyond the text are particularly compelling for the way they can arrest assumption, reinterpret cultural and social milieu, and give us new tools for comprehending past lived experience. Scholarly work in history that involves high-​level use of images and modelling has, at least until recently, been a relatively marginal practice among digital historians, and has not garnered the kind of attention that text-​based computational practices have attracted. Even in a field of varied communities of practice, computational methodologies that ‘read’ large-​scale corpora of texts have been at the core of the digital humanities. Methodologies drawn from computational linguistics have been adopted and adapted by scholars of literature, and to a lesser extent history, and applied to the canon of published sources.13 These approaches add a valuable set of tools for analysis of these texts, but are mostly limited by what has been digitized from microfilmed published sources. Because the companies that create the

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digitized materials do so with the aim of selling subscriptions, the parts of the cultural and social record that get digitized are those that will have a large enough audience to ensure that the enterprise is profitable.14 This leads to a reinvigoration of the canon and often privileges published works in English.15 As the historian Tim Hitchcock has argued, we need to move beyond ‘microfilmed cultures’ and thereby open up new ways of interpreting the past.16 Computational text analysis, while it has often absorbed a significant amount of the attention within and outside digital humanities communities, both positive and negative, often reinforces the primacy of text-​driven knowledge of the past.17 But the possibilities offered by thinking beyond the text are myriad. They provide social and cultural historians with the means for exploring questions that have long-​standing interest and currency in their field. All of the projects described in this chapter make a contribution to debates in their field, and many more not mentioned here do the same. This is a central point and key to my argument about the importance of embracing digital methodologies –​digital history must be evaluated based on the quality of the scholarship regardless of the medium used for its publication. While much digital history pushes the boundaries of disciplinary practice, the best examples are rooted in long-​established historical and historiographical questions.18 This is very much true of the Invisible Australians project, which looks at race and government policy in Australia during the twentieth century.19 The White Australia Policy was racist legislation that discriminated against non-​white minorities in Australia in the twentieth century.20 The registration of minorities and the documentation that was necessary for the government to carry out the policy have left a large archive of images of individuals and the documents through which their lives were recorded and regulated. Using automated face detection, the Invisible Australians project has created a visualization of what it terms ‘the real face of white Australia’. The interface is an arresting display of images from the National Archives of Australia that enables the user to explore the records of the White Australia Policy through the faces of the people whose lives were monitored and restricted because of their ethnicity. As the user scrolls, images unfurl in a long series, creating a gallery of faces that show some of many thousands of Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Afghans, Syrians and Malays who made up this population. The interface performs two parallel tasks. The policy existed to sustain white supremacy in Australia, but, in doing so, paradoxically, it created a vast archive that reinforced the multicultural nature of the nation. The images provide a visual representation of the diversity of Australian society that in themselves give an indication of the experience of living under this policy. It also functions as a research interface. Clicking on one of the images retrieved by the algorithm opens up the document from which the image was taken, and provides the user with a link to the original archival record in the digitized collections of the Australian National Archives. Rather than

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beginning with the text, as most interfaces that provide access to archival records would do, the site confronts the user with images of the faces and allows the user to move from the images to the textual information contained in the documentation. The arresting array approaches the past not from textual documents and interpretation of those texts but through imagery. In doing so, it confronts the user with the scale of the effects of the White Australia Policy. But while showing the many, it also pinpoints the individual, giving the user an insight into the ways in which the policy documented, surveilled and controlled.21 Invisible Australians approaches imagery and visualization in a manner very different from that of Virtual Paul’s Cross, but, like that project, it is grounded in the documents. Invisible Australians pulls straight from archives created by the racist policy, while the virtual reconstruction of the churchyard uses the text of the sermon and the extant information about the architecture and construction of London’s long-​destroyed cathedral. The archival and documentary foundations of both of these works of digital scholarship are at the heart of the historical enterprise. A different form of visualization drives the Mapping Occupation project, which employs an interactive map to present tabular data. This project provides a visual interface that delves into the history of the period of Reconstruction following the American Civil War at a local level.22 The history of race relations is, of course, a central problem in any work on the period of Reconstruction (1865–​77). In the years following the end of the war, the US Army occupied the South. Many freed slaves looked to the occupying US Army to defend their rights. But what did the occupation mean in practice for those it was supposed to protect, and how effective was it at defending their rights? Detailed information about the location of army posts, troop numbers and types of troops can be difficult to find. Even where we have this information, it can be problematic to interpret what it meant. Mapping Occupation attempts to tackle some of these discoveries and interpretive issues by providing a geographical interface that is focused on exploring these questions.23 The ArcGIS-​based map takes information from a data set that Gregory P. Downs created during the research for his book on military occupation of the South during and after the Civil War. The website displays it in a visualization that maps the locations in which troops were stationed and provides information about the number and types of those troops.24 The site provides multiple routes into the data to help the user understand the reach of the occupying armies and their ability to police and defend the rights of freed blacks in the southern states. It allows the user to view how occupation changed from May 1865 through December 1880 via an animated timeline. The interface also gives options that show how much access freed black people had to the army and how much area each outpost controlled. While in the wider discipline few historians think of their sources in terms of data, the act of creating historical data is central to the enterprise

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of digital history. Downs created the data set used here based on archival records of the Adjutant General’s Office held by the US National Archives. While creating a database from reports of troop numbers stationed at a given outpost is a fairly straightforward enterprise, extracting data from historical sources is in itself an act of interpretation.25 The analysis in this project requires a willingness and a facility for thinking about how to derive data from historical sources. Thinking about sources as data, and creating data from historical sources, opens up possibilities for understanding the past in new ways. Through turning historical documents into a data set that can be visualized, the Mapping Occupation project reorients our understanding of the army’s role and potentially changes our view of the political realities of post–​Civil War America. Maps are a powerful means for visualizing historical change, especially with the affordances of interfaces that allow for animated changes to the map. Maps and the associated geographical information systems (GIS) technologies can also be used as cultural and social historical research tools.26 The methodologies associated with investigating change in spatial contexts have become some of the most widely used digital tools. From maps of nineteenth-​century romantics exploring the Lake District to interactive spatial explorations of the seventeenth-​century European republic of letters, the interpretive power of space and place is emergent within digital history and the humanities.27 This explanatory capability is extremely well illustrated by the work of Geoff Cunfer. During the 1930s, the effects of the Great Depression were exacerbated by severe drought for many who farmed the plains of Oklahoma and northern Texas. This drought, and the ferocious dust storms it caused, led to the failure of many farms, destroying livelihoods and driving thousands of families to migrate away from the area. Historians had long held that overly intensive farming was at least partially to blame for the environmental, economic and social devastation.28 Using GIS to study the Dust Bowl, Cunfer was able to show that this accepted explanation for the cause of the devastating dust storms was inherently flawed.29 Through GIS he was able to map environmental conditions and show that the parts of the plains that were most ravaged by storms were not the areas that had the greatest concentration of agriculture, so farming practices could not be blamed. As with Mapping Occupation and Invisible Australians, Cunfer’s work focused on a long-​standing historical question. In one of the most significant examples of historical mapping and the use of GIS, Cunfer overturned a widely accepted historical narrative by approaching the history of the Dust Bowl through data and using digital methods. Because digital methodologies allow us to approach sources in ways that were often impossible before, historians using these methods often feel an imperative to explore the historiographical implications of interrogating sources in these ways. History, more than any other field in the humanities,

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draws scholars’ attention to questions of scale, a consideration that digital historians in particular are acutely alert to.30 The virtual model of a sermon and a churchyard on a particular day in the seventeenth century is at one end of the spectrum, drawing on an almost microscopic view of history. While the preacher and the topic make it part of a much larger historical and literary discourse, the model itself is microhistorical by its very nature. Mapping Occupation, for example, takes a longer time frame of fifteen years and looks at all of the US states that had seceded from the Union, but also allows a more temporally and geographically granular view. Each of these projects offers particular perspectives that lead the scholar to think about historical scale. Jo Guldi and David Armitage’s The History Manifesto, published in 2014, brought debates about scale and the wider impact of digital history to the fore of the discipline.31 The book posits the historical relationship between social and cultural history as a disjunction. Social history, Guldi and Armitage argue, focussed on large questions, long-​term spans of time, and made important interventions in contemporary society. The shift to cultural history narrowed the focus and interests of many historians and made them marginal in the eyes of the public and policymakers. This controversial book explicitly critiqued the methodologies that drove cultural history, arguing that historians had, over the past several decades, abandoned the longue durée–​focused analysis that had characterized historical scholarship earlier in the twentieth century. The cost of this shift to microhistories and to the short term, the authors argue, is a marginalization of history in public discourse. And the authors have called for a return to long-​term social history, larger questions and time scales in order to reinsert historical knowledge and expertise into public conversations and policy debates. While their argument goes beyond digital history, they argue that digital tools are vital for a return to historical scholarship that takes the long view. Digital means of exploring a given subject, they argue, is superior to ‘traditional research’, which is ‘limited by the sheer breadth of the nondigitised archive and the time necessary to sort through it’. For the authors, ‘digitally structured reading’ allows ‘realigning the archive to the intentions of history from below’.32 Digital approaches, for them, offer an opportunity to explore larger questions through big data. Read in one way, the realignment they call for is already occurring among all historians, regardless of whether they consider themselves digital or not. With the changing environment of academic life, work and scholarship in the first decades of the twenty-​first century, the ways in which most historians conduct their work is changing. This is true not just of those who are self-​identified digital humanists or digital historians but also of almost all scholars working today. Discovery, a central part of the historian’s craft, has undergone singular transformation in the past two decades.33 While good historical practice will always involve assiduous research, the instant and ubiquitous availability of

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vast digitized primary source collections has changed the window through which we view past cultures. Libraries, archives and their classificatory systems are research apparatuses that impose a particular order on discovery. But that order is embedded in the history of a region or nation. Digital searching can bring into effect an entirely different logic. What Lara Putnam has termed ‘digitized history’ is a fundamental shift in how historians find and use at least some of the primary source archive.34 Putnam is much more cautious about the realignment that Guldi and Armitage see as so beneficial. When finding and using primary sources meant travelling to an archive or library, often a time-​consuming and expensive process, there was a premium on studying more than one locale and making historical comparisons between them. Now that much research, using such resources as digitized newspapers, can be done remotely from the locale, different approaches are possible and even preferable because of the ease of searching across a number of databases. Keyword searching further removes the researcher from the source. Before the advent of digitized primary sources, it was necessary to understand the nature of a source, to know its structure and the system of how it was constructed. The ability to treat primary sources like granular content encourages a very different logic.35 While the possibilities offered by 3D visualization, a historical geographic information system (HGIS), big data, textual analysis and the other digitally driven methodologies (including some that are still in the future) tantalize, the much more widespread practice of using digital tools to find sources is a profoundly transforming scholarly practice: ‘That so many of us are now finding and finding out via digital search has significant consequences, regardless of whether we count, graph, or map anything at all’.36 The use of digital primary source databases changes both what is knowable and the relationship between the knowable things about the past. This change has happened without much discussion or theorization. Deep historiographical thinking on issues raised by mass digitization and keyword searching is long overdue. We now need a better understanding of what this transformation is, so that we do not mistake the things it makes visible for explanations of historical change. While ‘digitized history’ has transformed the conditions of discoverability, digital history offers the opportunity of making lived experience and historical processes visible. This visibility has interpretive value and communicative power. Data-​driven interactive visualizations, whether elaborate and multilayered 3D models, or space-​and time-​driven interactive maps that show change over time, provide new modes of seeing that enhance what we know and how we know it. Our discipline has been enriched in the past by embracing new types of sources, theoretical approaches and methodologies. Space, place, visual and auditory modes of exploration likewise can complement better-​established ways of narrating historical change. Scholarship is a conversation. It is an exchange of ideas between scholars and other scholars, educators and students, and with audiences outside the academy. This exchange has traditionally occurred in books and journals,

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but the means we now have for creating knowledge and communicating ideas have proliferated since the advent of digital scholarship and publishing. Ultimately, the research methodologies and the media used should be those best suited to the historical questions. While the approaches used by digital historians may be unfamiliar to many historians, there is no denying that they are highly creative and intellectually ambitious. While digital tools and methods may be vital for some projects, traditional means of publication may be preferable for others. We should not privilege one type of container for ideas over others for any other reason than the service of scholarship. To move forward and continue to have relevance in a changing world and to continue to refine our understanding of historical change, we must embrace these new methodologies, while simultaneously critiquing their conclusions and thoroughly theorizing their impact on how we see the past. The advance of social and cultural history occurred within the changes brought by industrialization and globalization, which gave rise to new ideas about society and how the past was understood and studied. Historians developed and expressed these ideas primarily by writing books. But we now find ourselves living through a moment of cultural and social change impelled, at least partly, by technological transformations in how we communicate. This shift appears to be at least as momentous as the invention of movable type. Whether we will adapt to a new historical moment in which digital culture exists alongside print culture remains to be seen.

NOTES 1 David Cressy, ‘The Protestant Calendar and the Vocabulary of Celebration in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies 29 (1990): pp. 31–​ 52; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–​1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political & Social History 1688–​1832 (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 163–​77; Kathleen Wilson, Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 44–​5. 2 John Donne was dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London from 1621 to his death in 1631. 3 John Donne, ‘A Sermon upon the Fifth of November 1622. Being the Anniversary Celebration of Our Deliverance from the Powder Treason’, John Donne Sermons, BYU Harold B. Lee Library Digital Collections, http://​ contentdm.lib.byu.edu/​cdm/​compoundobject/​collection/​JohnDonne/​id/​3177/​ rec/​1 [accessed 7 September 2016]. 4 Virtual St. Paul’s Cathedral Project: A Digital Re-​Creation of Worship and Preaching at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Early Modern London, https://​vpcp.chass. ncsu.edu/​[accessed 15 August 2015]. Please see the website for the list of contributors to this project.

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5 Some of the analysis of the Virtual Saint Paul’s Cross project comes from Seth Denbo, ‘Remember, Remember the Fifth of November: Modeling John Donne’s Gunpowder Day Sermon’, Perspectives on History 53 (2015): pp. 32–​3, American Historical Association, https://​www.historians.org/​publications-​and-​ directories/​perspectives-​on-​history/​february-​2015/​remember-​remember-​the-​ fifth-​of-​november. [accessed 5 September 2016]. 6 Rosamund Oates, ‘Sermons and Sermon-​Going in Early Modern England’, Reformation 17 (2012), pp. 199–​212. 7 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3–​33. 8 The ‘London Charter’ was developed to ensure ‘the methodological rigour of computer-​based visualisation as a means of researching and communicating cultural heritage’. A vital aspect of this is ‘intellectual transparency’ of the work involved in creating computer-​based 3D visual models. See ‘London Charter’, http://​www.londoncharter.org/​ [accessed 2 November 2016]. 9 Lawrence Stone, ‘The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History’, Past and Present, 85 (1979): pp. 3–​24. 10 I do not attempt a definition of ‘digital history’ or ‘digital scholarship’ in this chapter. Instead I allow the examples to speak for the kinds of work that use digital methodologies for research and presentation. The ‘Digital history’ Wikipedia entry has been written by experts in the field and offers an excellent definition, history of the field, and a useful bibliography, https://​en.wikipedia. org/​wiki/​Digital_​history [accessed 23 April 2015]. 11 For an interesting take on the question of novelty in digital history, see Scott Weingart, ‘ “Digital History” Can Never Be New’, The Scottbot Irregular, 2 May 2016, http://​scottbot.net/​digital-​history-​can-​never-​be-​new/​ [accessed 16 May 2016]. 12 ‘Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians’ Washington, DC (American Historical Association, 2015), https://​ www.historians.org/​teaching-​and-​learning/​digital-​history-​resources/​evaluation-​ of-​digital-​scholarship-​in-​history/​guidelines-​for-​the-​evaluation-​of-​digital-​ scholarship-​in-​history [accessed 2 January 2016]. 13 Sharon Block, ‘Doing More with Digitization’, Common-​Place 6 (2006), http://​ common-​place.org/​book/​doing-​more-​with-​digitization/​ [accessed 12 September 2016]. 14 Some of the main examples in English include Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Evans Early American Imprints and Burney Collection Newspapers. Some relevant discussions of these issues include Adrian Bingham, ‘The Digitization of Newspaper Archives: Opportunities and Challenges for Historians’, Twentieth Century British History 21 (2010): pp. 225–​31; Tim Hitchcock, ‘A Five Minute Rant for the Consortium of European Research Libraries’, Historyonics, 29 October 2012, http://​historyonics.blogspot.com/​2012/​10/​a-​five-​minute-​rant-​for-​consortium-​ of.html [accessed 23 December 2016]; Robert Alan Hatch, ‘Clio Electric: Primary Texts and Digital Research in Pre-​1750 History of Science’, Isis 98 (2007), pp. 150–​60.

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15 There are some important exceptions to this, such as Chronicling America, a vast collection of mostly regional nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century US newspapers that has been created in the public interest by the Library of Congress, http://​chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/​. Another example is the collection of projects developed around the Old Bailey Online, a landmark work of historical digitisaization that has formed the basis for a number of other projects that have created a vital set of resources for the study of the eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century English-​speaking world, https://​www. oldbaileyonline.org/​. 16 Tim Hitchcock, ‘The Digital Humanities in Three Dimensions’, Historyonics, 6 July 2016. http://​historyonics.blogspot.com/​2016/​07/​the-​digital-​humanities-​in-​ three.html [accessed 7 September 2016]. 17 Elijah Meeks and Scott Weingart, ‘The Digital Humanities Contribution to Topic Modeling’, Journal of Digital Humanities, 9 April 2013, http://​ journalofdigitalhumanities.org/​2-​1/​dh-​contribution-​to-​topic-​modeling/​ [accessed 16 April 2013]. This article is part of a special issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities on topic modelling, which is the most prominent method for analysis of large corpora of text. For some notable negative attention to digital textual analysis more broadly, see Stanley Fish, ‘Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation’, New York Times, 23 January 2012,http://​opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/​2012/​01/​23/​mind-​your-​ps-​and-​bs-​ the-​digital-​humanities-​and-​interpretation/​ [accessed 3 February 2012]. 18 Ayers and Thomas discuss the use of digital methodologies for addressing long-​ standing historical questions in their 2003 digital article: Ed Ayers and William G. Thomas III, ‘The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities’, American Historical Review 108 (2003): pp. 1299–​307. 19 ‘Invisible Australians: Living under the White Australia Policy’, http://​ invisibleaustralians.org/​[accessed 12 September 2016]. 20 Alan Fenna, ‘Putting the “Australian Settlement” in Perspective’, Labour History 102 (2012): pp. 99–​118. doi:10.5263/​labourhistory.102.0099. 21 This is a kind of visual equivalent to the idea of ‘scalable reading’ put forward by Martin Mueller. Mueller argues that digital textual interfaces should enable the user to move between distant and close reading. Martin Mueller, ‘Scalable Reading’, Scalable Reading, 29 May 2012. https://scalablereading. northwestern.edu/?page_id=22 [accessed 1 November 2012]. 22 The US Civil War has a highly developed digital historiography beginning with the work of Ed Ayers and his collaborators on the well-​known Valley of the Shadow project. ‘The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War’, http://​valley.lib.virginia.edu/​VoS/​choosepart.html [accessed 17 April 2016]. 23 Gregory P. Downs and Scott Nesbitt, ‘Mapping Occupation: Force, Freedom, and the Army in Reconstruction’, http://​mappingoccupation.org/​ [accessed 12 September 2016]. 24 Gregory P. Downs, ‘Mapping Occupation Troop Locations Dataset’, 2015. The data set can be downloaded at http://​mappingoccupation.org/​map/​static/​data. html.

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25 This is much more the case when the data is less uniform than records of troop numbers. Ben Schmidt discusses the issues and problems of creating data sets from historical records, ‘Reading Digital Sources: A Case Study in Ship’s Logs’, Sapping Attention, 15 November 2012,. http://​sappingattention.blogspot.com/​ 2012/​11/​reading-​digital-​sources-​case-​study-​in.html [accessed 4 April 2015]. This post also includes some excellent visualizations of nineteenth-​century whaling voyages. 26 Ian N. Gregory and Alistair Geddes (eds), Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 27 David Cooper and Ian N. Gregory, ‘Mapping the English Lake District: A Literary GIS’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36 (2011): pp. 89–​108; Mapping the Republic of Letters, http://​ republicofletters.stanford.edu/​. 28 William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’, Journal of American History 78 (1992): pp. 1347–​76. 29 Anne Kelly Knowles and Amy Hillier (eds), Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship, 1st edn (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2008). 30 This has been a central issue in the digital humanities since Franco Moretti described computational approaches to many texts as ‘distant reading’, an idea that has been much cited and debated since. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). 31 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 32 Guldi and Armitage, History Manifesto, p. 93. 33 Steven Lubar, ‘Scholarly Research and Writing in the Digital Age’, On Public Humanities, 22 July 2012, http://​stevenlubar.wordpress.com/​2012/​07/​22/​ scholarly-​research-​and-​writing-​in-​the-​digital-​age/​ [accessed 14 October 2012]. 34 Lara Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the Text-​Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast’, American Historical Review 121 (2016): pp. 377–​402; Bingham, ‘The Digitization of Newspaper Archives’. 35 Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the Text-​Searchable’; Simon Tanner, Trevor Muñoz and Pich Hemy Ros, ‘Measuring Mass Text Digitization Quality and Usefulness: Lessons Learned from Assessing the OCR Accuracy of the British Library’s 19th Century Online Newspaper Archive’, D-​Lib Magazine 15 (2009). doi:10.1045/​july2009-​munoz. 36 Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable’, p. 378. For a detailed exploration of how historians’ research practices have changed, see Jennifer Rutner and Roger C. Schonfeld, Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians (New York: Ithaka S+R, 2012) http://www.sr.ithaka.org/researchpublications/supporting-changing-research-practices-historians [accessed 23 May 2013].

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Key texts Bodenhamer, D. J., J. Corrigan and T. M. Harris. (eds.). The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Cohen, D. J., M. Frisch, P. Gallagher, S. Mintz, K. Sword, A. M. Taylor, W. G. Thomas III and W. J. Turkel. ‘Interchange: The Promise of Digital History’, Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (2008): pp. 452–​91. Cohen, D. J., and R. Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Dougherty, J., and K. Nawrotzki, K. (eds.). Writing History in the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. (An open draft is available at http://​ writinghistory.trincoll.edu/​) Gold, M. K., and L. F. Klein. (eds.). Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Graham, S., I. Milligan and S. Weingart. Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope. London: ICP, 2015. (An open draft is available at http://​www.themacroscope.org/​) Greengrass, M., and L. Hughes. (eds.). The Virtual Representation of the Past. Farnham: Ashgate, 2008. Moretti, F. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. Schreibman, S., R. Siemens and J. Unsworth. (eds.). A New Companion to Digital Humanities, 2nd edn. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2016. (The first edition is available online at http://​www.digitalhumanities.org/​companion/​). In addition to books and journals, a lot of the publishing in digital history takes place on the Web. Some of the most useful and interesting blogs that deal with digital history methodologies include the following: Hitchcock, T., Historyonics (http://​historyonics.blogspot.com/​). Schmidt, B., Sapping Attention (http://​sappingattention.blogspot.com/​). Weingart, S., The Scottbot Irregular (http://​scottbot.net/​).

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INDEX 3D visualization 15 3D visual models 255 Abrams, Lynn 236 aggressive individualism 21 Alborn, Timothy 116 Algerian War 2 American Declaration of Independence, 1776 198 American Historical Association 213–​14 American Historical Review (AHR) 192 American Society for Environmental History 214 Animal Companions (Tague) 178 animal-​human histories 13, 171 animals in war 175 breeding and milk production 182 debates and issues in 178–​80 in disciplines outside 177–​8 dogs as companions 174–​5 growth and impact of animal studies 176–​8 issue of agency 179 memorialization and commemoration of animals 182–​3 modernity and animal presence 174 nature of experience 178–​9 representation 179 role of horses and donkeys in transporting goods 174 Second World War, from animal perspective 181 animal studies scholars 177 Anitha, Sundari 98 Annales school 6–​7, 13, 92, 100 archival reorientation 27 archives 26 Armiero, Marco 222

Art Worlds (Becker) 132 Artist as Anthropologist, The (Cowling) 136 Asian transnationalism 199–​200 Australian National War Memorial 182 autobiographies 23–​4 defects of 24 backwardness 193 Bain, Alexander 46–​7, 57 Ballantyne, Tony 198 Bauman, Zygmunt 10 Bayly, Chris 193 Beck, Ulrich 223 Beckert, Sven 100, 194–​5 Bell, David 197 Benson, Etienne 180 Bentham, Jeremy 176 Berger, John 131 big data 15 Birke, Lynda 181 Black, Jeremy 156 Boddice, Rob 192 body and senses, history of 65–​6 in academic knowledge 72 analysis of corporeality 69–​70 bodily experiences and their sensation 70–​3 concepts of gender and sexuality 68 criminal abortion and British sexual culture 73–​7 cultural historians’ view 71–​2 feminist theorists’ views 67–​8, 70 historians’ contributions to understanding 66–​70 historicized body 68–​9 new keywords used 67 non-​essentialist approach 69 Booth, Charles 122 Bradshaw, John 174, 181

268

268

Index

Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (Vincent) 23–​4 British imperial history 198–​200 legacies of empire 204 Bryk, Nancy Villa 151 Bulmer, Sarah 223 Burt, Jonathan 174, 179 Burton, Antoinette 30–​2, 198 Calvinism 5 Camera Lucida (Barthes) 135 Campbell, Bruce 218 Campbell, John L. 99 Canaday, Margot 201 Cannadine, David 111 Canning, Kathleen 26 Capital in the Twenty-​First Century (Piketty) 99 Carr, E. H. 21–​2 Carrier, James 114 Carruthers, Jane 222 Chartier, Roger 26 Cheese and the Worms, The (Ginzburg) 8 Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Humphries) 24, 118 Chinese transnationalism 199 Church Missionary Society (CMS) 30 civil rights movement 8 Civilisation (Clark) 131 Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Burkhardt) 5 class and cotton mills, history of 111–​12 class conflict and revolution 89, 94, 97–​8 class struggle 7 Clifford, Jim 223 Cohn, Samuel 224 Columbian Exchange (Crosby) 218 Communist Party Historians Group 6 composure, concept of 34–​5 connected histories 194 Connelly, Matthew 194 Connerton, Paul 241 consumerism 11, 89 consumption, history of 112–​13 Cooper, Timothy 223 Cox, Pamela 156 Crary, Jonathan 132 criminal abortion, history of 73–​7

abortion’s corporeality 75 Alice Birmingham, case of 76–​7 conviction for inducing miscarriage 74 cultural representations of induced abortion 74–​5 instrumental miscarriage 76 managing complications 76 Croce, Benedetto 116 Cronin, Keri 179 Cronon, William 213, 220 Crosby, Alfred 218 Crozier, Ivan 72 Cultural and Social History 12, 92 cultural history 3, 5, 10, 254, 259 of capitalism 85, 95–​6, 100 class 89 congruence with social history 91–​2 foundation texts of 5 individual and group identities 89–​90 ‘other’, the 10 present times 11–​14 study of ‘representations’ 10 terminology 10 cultural turn of the 1980s 25–​7, 109–​ 11, 113, 119 Cumbers, Andrew 97 Cunfer, Geoff 258 Curthoys, Ann 195 Darwin, Charles 45–​6, 48, 57 Origin of Species 46 Davison, Graeme 155 de Certeau, Michel 26 Deleuze, Gilles 176 Democratic Subjects (Waugh) 27, 29 Department of History and Ethnography at Mizoram University 157 Derrida, Jacques 29, 68, 177 diary writing 27–​9 diasporas, histories of 198–​9 Chinese diaspora 200 Dickson, Peter 115 digital history 256, 259 digital tools and methods for 258–​61 Invisible Australians project 256–​7 Mapping Occupation project 257–​9 digital tools 253

269

Index digitized history 260 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 132 DNA testing 204 Donald, Diana 180 Donne, John 253 Douglas, Mary 54 Downs, Gregory P. 257 Dubois, Laurent 197 Earsden, Thomas 233 Ecological Imperialism (Crosby) 218 ecological turn 214 economic historians 24, 89, 99, 111, 118, 175 economic history 4, 7, 10, 114–​17 bubbles and crashes 116 cultures of bookkeeping and financial reporting 115 distribution of wealth 116–​17 East India Company, study of 119–​20 environmental movement, effect of 120 financial revolution 115 investments connections 116 joint-​stock enterprise and company fraud 116 knowledge associated with liberal modernity 115 link between production and consumption 122 London’s manufacturing economy 122 material turn in 119–​21 meanings of work and economic impact of child labour 118–​19 movement of capital to social formations 118 production and circulation of knowledge about markets 116 rise of mass consumer society 122 slave economies 121 social composition of shareholders 118 use of digital technologies 117–​19 wealth inequality and development of capitalism 220–​1 Eley, Geoff 91, 217

269

Elias, Norbert 48 emotional communities 49 emotional economy 50 emotional frontier 50 emotional refuge 50 emotions, history of 12, 20 biocultural emotional change 48 biocultural emotions 50 challenge of neurosciences 52–​8 emotional regime 49 empathy 53–​5 historical reconstruction of past emotions 46–​7 origins and developments 45–​9 reflex actions 47–​8 theoretical approaches and analytical tools 49–​52 understanding the associations of emotions in other times and places 47 Emotions and the Will (Bain) 46 empathy 53–​5 Empire of Nature, The (Mackenzie) 175 Engels, Friedrich 222 England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor and the Industrial Revolution (Steinberg) 99 environmental historians 218–​20 enquiries 215 methodologies and subjects 214 environmental histories 140–​1, 213 of climate change 223–​4 demographic changes 221 entanglements of humans and their surroundings, study of 216 environmental consequences of US race legislation, study of 221 environmental inequalities 221–​2 environmental racism 221–​2 of fascist ideals of race, nation and history 222 groups and their relationships to natural world, study of 220 influence on human history 215 of interface between society and nature 222 opportunities and threats to social and cultural history 217–​24

270

270

Index

processes of socio-​environmental change 218–​20 rural studies 222 of social class 222–​3 storm flooding 220–​1 in United States 214 Environmental History 214 Eurocentrism 139 European colonialism 214 Evans, Richard 21 Evans-​Pritchard, E. E. 7 Featherstone, David 97 Febvre, Lucien 46 female historians 8 femininity 10, 28–​9, 32–​3, 90 feminist history 32 Feudal Society (Bloch) 6 Finch, Edmund 233, 236 Finn, Margot 114, 122 Fitzpatrick, Sheila 155 flexible citizenship 199 Foster, Meg 155 Foucault, Michel 9, 25, 68, 114 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison 25 individual self 25 non-​essentialist approach to the body 69 Francoist Spain 2 Freie Universität Berlin 154 French national identity 1 French Revolution 9, 56, 197 friendly societies 114 Frisch, Michael 151 Front National, France 1 Fudge, Erica 173, 177 Furet, François 9 Gagnier, Regenia 25 Garfield, Seth 224 Gate Gourmet strike, 2005 98 Geertz, Clifford 7, 54 Gell, Alfred 241 gender and sexuality, histories of 198, 202 geographical information systems (GIS) technologies 258 Gilroy, Paul 194

globalization 5 Globalization and Its Discontents (Stiglitz) 192 ‘Golden Record’ 129–​30 Gordon-​Reed, Annette 203–​4 Great Divergence, The (Pomeranz) 193 Greer, Allan 195 Grosz, Elizabeth 70 Guattari, Félix 176 Guidoboni, Emanuela 221 Hall, Stuart 132, 194 Haraway, Donna 138 Hard Times (Terkel) 8 Hardenberg, Wilko 222 Harvey, David 96 Hemingses of Monticello, The: An American Family (Gordon-​Reed) 203 Herod, Andrew 96 Herzog, Dagmar 202 Hidden from History: Three Hundred Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight against It (Rowbotham) 173 Hill, Christopher 6 Hilton, Rodney 6 Hinton, James 26 Histoire de France (Michelet) 4 Historical Association in Britain 153 historical disciplines, building 3–​11 historical materialism 98–​9 history from below 6, 22 History Manifesto, The (Guldi and Armitage) 14, 259 History Workshop 92 historypin 159–​60 Hitchcock, Tim 256 Hobsbawm, Eric 6 Hockenhull, Joanna 181 Hofmeyr, Isabel 193 H-​Public 159 Hughes, J. Donald 215 Hulme, Mike 224 human history 19–​20 human sleep and sleep disorders, study of 13 Humphries, Jane 24, 118 Hunt, Lynn 56, 197

271

Index identity politics 1 imperial histories 198 imperialism 5 industrialization 3 Ingold, T. 240 International Federation for Public History 157 International Seminar on Public History 157 Invisible Australians project 256–​7 Ismay, Penelope 114 James, William 47 Jameson, Frederic 110 Jay, Martin 133, 135 Johnson, Paul 110 Jones, Andrew 241 Jones, Kevin M. 90 Jordanova, Ludmilla 155 Journal of Visual Culture 135 Joyce, Patrick 27–​9 Kalela, Jorma 156, 158, 162 Kean, Hilda 161 Kocka, Jürgen 90–​1 Kozol, Wendy 194 labour geography 96–​7 labour history 88, 90 materialism and labour relations 98–​9 migrant and casual labour 97–​8 resistance movements 93, 98 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy 217 landscape history 236, 238–​9, 242 Landseer, Edwin Henry 174–​5 Lanzoni, Susan 55 Last, Nella 181 Lefebvre, Henri 96 Legacies of British Slave Ownership project 118 letter writing 30–​2 Levene, Mark 245 life history 23 life story 23 Lincoln’s Body (Fox) 69 Linzey, Andrew 178–​9 lived landscape 13 living history 136

271

Lockwood, MaryAnn 74 Loftus, Donna 11, 192 London Corresponding Society 98 Lord Smail, Daniel 54 Lynd, Staughton 92 MacKenzie, John 175 Making of the English Working-​Class, The (Thompson) 173 Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–​1800 (Thomas) 175 Mandela, Nelson 154 Mandler, Peter 12 Mapping Occupation project 257–​9 market culture 13, 109–​10 cultural turn and rise of markets 113–​14 deindustrialization 112 industrial revolution 112 social embeddedness of markets 110 wages and wage forms 113–​14 Martin, Paul 161 Marx, Karl 4 Marxism 6, 9, 85, 90 masculinity 10, 28–​9, 32–​3, 36, 90 Mason, James 74 Massey, Doreen 235, 237 material turn 85–​6 McAloon, Jim 163 McCalman, Iain 155 McCloskey, Deirdre 100 McDowell, Linda 98 McKeown, Adam 200 McLuhan, Marshall 140 McNeill, John 215 McShane, Clay 175 Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II, The (Braudel) 6 memoir writing 35–​6 Merchant, Carolyn 213, 215 microhistory 8 militant particularism 97 Mill, John Stuart 115 Mitchell, W. J. T. 132 Monash University, Australia 154 monographs 24 Moore, Jason W. 223 moral economy 50

272

272

Index

Morgan, John 192 Muldrew, Craig 114 Myths of Sexuality (Nead) 137 Nagel, Thomas 178 Nash, Roderick 213 National Guard 14 national historiography 195–​6 national history 195 natural selection 45 Nature’s Metropolis (Cronon) 119 Netherlands Institute for War Documentation 154 neurohistory 56 neuroscientific explanation of emotions 52–​8 new historicism 11 new materialism 95–​6 New Social Order, 1999 157 Nield, Keith 91 Nonini, Donald 199 Nora, Pierre 1 North Carolina State University (NCSU) 253–​4 ocularcentrism 133 Ogborn, Miles 119 On Photography (Sontag) 131 Ong, Aihwa 199 oral history 8, 24, 33–​4 up-​close-​and-​personal qualities of 34 Orteleva, Peppino 154 ‘other’, the 29–​32 Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-​ Century Italy (Baxandall) 131 Paris 14 Paris Commune 14 parish spaces 242–​4 path dependence 99 Pearson, Ruth 98 personal narratives 23–​4 personal testimony 22–​4, 27 genres of 24 Pew Centre for Arts and Heritage 162 phallologocentrism 68 Photography: A Middle-​Brow Art (Bourdieu) 132 Piketty, Thomas 99–​100

Capital in the Twenty-​First Century 116 political economy 114–​15 political history 6 Poovey, Mary 115 Popkin, Jeremy 197 postmodernism 9 post-​structuralism 19, 24–​6, 37, 89 post-​structuralist history 89 subjectivity 25–​7 post-​structuralist theory 26 poverty, history of 93–​4 Power, Eileen 8 pre-​Columbian North America 220 preverbal or nonverbal modes of expression 13 Production of Space, The (Lefevbre) 234 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber) 5 Protestant rule 253 Protestant work ethic 5 Protestantism 5 psychoanalysis 35–​7 Public Historian, The (Filene) 159 public historians 151–​2, 160 in New Zealand 162 purpose of 161 status of 156 in Western countries 155 public history 14, 255 in Britain 153 in China 157 convergence of academic and 152–​3 demise of apartheid and rise of democratic South Africa 154 democratization of 151–​2 developments in 155–​7 engagements 154 forms in different countries 153–​4 in India 157 in Indonesia 157 levels of public engagement 160, 162 modern 152 movement 156 self-​reflexive practice 157–​60 social movements for rights and freedoms 151 Public History Reader, The 161

273

Index punishment regimes 25 Putnam, Lara 203 Pyr, Joseph 74 quantitative and qualitative histories 22–​4 autobiographies 23 life history 23 life story 23 monographs 24 personal narratives 23–​4 personal testimony 22–​4 working-​class autobiographies 23 working-​class memoirs 24 Reagan, Ronald 9 Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives (Summerfield) 32 Reddy, William 49, 113 Religion and the Decline of Magic (Thomas) 7 Republic of Nature, The (Fiege) 221 resistance movements 93, 98 Riello, Giorgio 122 Ripartito, Kenneth 100 Ritvo, Harriet 120, 215 River Cocket 233 Roper, Michael 35–​7 Rose, Nikolas 25 Rosenstone, Robert 140 Rosenwein, Barbara 49 Rosenzweig, Roy 155 Rothschild, Emma 120, 200 Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies 154 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) 175 Sagan, Carl 129 Said, Edward 194 Samuel, Raphael 135, 153 science and medicine, history of 12 emotions and emotional expressions 12 human sleep and sleep disorders 13 Scott, James C. 93 Scott, Joan Wallach 9–​10, 71, 201 screen memory 36

273

Seed, Patricia 194 self-​differentiation 31 selfhood 20 self and the ‘other’ 29–​32 Sen, Amartya 221 sermons 253–​4 Sewell, William 110 Sharpe, Pam 114 Silent Spring (Carson) 214 slavery 117–​18, 200, 204 abolition of 198 Smiles, Samuel 122 Smith, Adam 200 Smith, Mark 72 social class, structuralist idea of 27 social democracy 6 social historians 4–​5, 7, 9 social history 2–​3, 22, 259 Annales approach 6 category of ‘experience’ 9–​10 class struggle 7 congruence with cultural history 91–​2 democratizing tendencies of 8 early 6–​7 history of science and scientific discoveries 7 idea of 4 of middle class 7 nineteenth-​century social science 4 orthodoxies of 8–​9 present times 11–​14 of race and legacies of imperialism 8 of slavery 8 social movements 8 as a subset of economic history 4 of twentieth-​century Britain 92 social neuroscience 56 Social Production of Art, The (Wolff) 132 socioenvironmental history 218–​19 Soens, Tim 220 Sometimes and Art: Nine Essays on History (Bailyn) 196 Sorabji, Cornelia 30–​2 Sörlin, Sverker 215 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 154 spatial history 255

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Index

binary spatial categorizations 244 landscape history 236, 238–​9, 242 Lefebvre’s philosophy of space 234–​ 5, 237–​8, 241 materiality of space 241 meanings of space 234–​5 parish space 242–​4 production of space 237–​44 of public and private spheres 235–​6 representational space 237 social space 241 spaces of capitalism 239 spatial homogeneity 243 spatial practices 237 symbiotic relationship between space and time 238 spatial triad 237 spatial turn 172, 234–​7, 239, 244, 246 Spirited: Australia’s Horse Story 183 splitting 36 Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore 157 Stearns, Carol 50 Stearns, Peter 50 Steedman, Carolyn 37 Stoler, Ann 201 Stone, Lawrence 88 subaltern people 93 subjectivity 20, 27–​8 discursive constructions 32–​4 economic historian’s view 24 idea of the ‘other’ 29–​32 institutions and discourses, following cultural turn 25–​7 intersubjective relationship between teller and audience 35 post-​structural approach 25–​7 psychoanalytic concepts 35–​7 quantitative and qualitative histories 22–​4 subjective and intersubjective composure 34–​5 technology of the self 24, 28–​9 Waugh’s diary, case study 27–​9 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 194 Swyngedouw, Erik 219 Tagg, John 132 Tarr, Joel 175

taskscape 240 Taylor, William 243 Tea Party movement 1 technology of the self 24, 28–​9 Thatcher, Margaret 9 Thatcherism 95 Thelen, David 155 Thompson, E.P. 6, 67, 93 approach to materialism and cultures of class 94–​100 definition of class 94 Making of the English Working Class, The 95 model of ‘moral economy’ of social protest 93, 95 Thompson, F. M. L. 175 Todd, Selina 92, 94–​5 Tomlinson, Ann 33–​5 Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Glacken) 215 traditional historiographical narrative 88–​91 transimperial, idea of 194 transnational history 14, 191–​2, 255 approaches in US history 196–​7 definition 192–​7 distinctions between world, global and 193 of families and diasporas 198–​201 impact on smaller historiographies 195 of interracial families 201–​2 merits of 197 patriarchy and narratives of kinship 201 of sex and sexuality 202 sources of 203 subfields of 197–​202 transnational and intercontinental relationships 195–​6 ways of doing 197–​204 Trump, Donald 2 UN World Cultural Heritage Site 154 United Kingdom Independence Party 1 University of Amsterdam 154 University of Technology Sydney, Australia 154

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Index

275

University of the Western Cape, South Africa 154 urbanization 3 Urwick, Lyndall 35–​6 US National Council on Public History (NCPH) 159, 163 US National Park Service 155

visual studies 130–​1, 194 idea of an ‘anthology of images’ 131 ideologies in visual images 131–​2 interdisciplinarity of 131 sites and modalities of images 133–​4 voluntarism 91

veterinary historians 182 Vincent, David 23 Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project 253–​4 visual culture 13, 129–​31 theoretical foundations of visual studies 131–​5 visual history 135–​9 digitized versions of objects 140 forms of images 137–​8 hybridized discourse 136–​7 intertextual discursive approach 136 media images 141 present times and future 139–​41 scientific images, study of 141 scientific vision and materiality, study of 141 of social movements 139–​40 sources 136, 139 visual materials 129 Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Research with Visual Materials (Rose) 133, 135

Walkowitz, Daniel 90 War Horse: Fact or Fiction? 183 Warde, Paul 215 wartime femininity 33–​4 Waugh, Edwin 27–​9 Ways of Seeing (Berger) 131 Weber, Max 4 Weiner, Douglas 219 welfare states 6 West/​ non-​West dichotomy 193 Western Anglophone social history 87 Western environmentalism 214 White, Richard 214 William and Mary Quarterly 196 Williams, Raymond 215 Winch, Donald 115 Wolfe, Cary 177 women’s history 8, 10, 179 women’s movement 8 Wood, Gordon S. 196–​7 Woods, Abigail 182 working-​class memoirs 24 Worster, Donald 213

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