(Jean-Pierre Durand, Nicolas Hatzfeld (Auth.) ) Liv

i
New Directions
in Social and
Cultural History
ii
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)
iii
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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v
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 19
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 85
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
vi
vi CONTENTS
7 Public histories 151

Paul Ashton and Meg Foster
PART THREE Challenges and provocations 171
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
vii
FIGURES
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
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
New Directions in Social and Cultural History represents an attempt to

probe how the historical discipline is changing in the early twenty-first cen-
tury. 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
ix
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 interdisci-
plinary 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/ Progressivism (2009),
Sexualities/
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 sen-
ior 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 emo-
tions, 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
x
x CONTRIBUTORS
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 innova-
tive 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 com-
panies 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 his-
tory 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, mate-
rial 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
xi
CONTRIBUTORS xi
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 pol-
itical 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 (forth-
coming). 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
xii
xii CONTRIBUTORS
(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 publica-

tions 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 his-
tory 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 sci-
ence 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 envir-
onmental change. Her first book Inhabiting the Landscape: Place Custom and
Memory 1500–1800 was published in 2009, and its themes were further devel-
oped in the article ‘Senses of Place, Senses of Time: Landscape History from a
British Perspective’ (2015). She is currently working on a monograph explor-
ing the concept of dwelling for early modern studies.
xiii
FOREWORD
Frank Mort
Where is social and cultural history now and where is it heading? The impe-
rial 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 excit-
ing 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 edi-
tors 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 con-
tributors 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 cou-
plet which are not mutually exclusive but critically engaged. Contributors
take seriously developments that have been grouped together as the ‘turns’
xiv
xiv FOREWORD
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 femi-
nism, 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 reper-
toire 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 meth-
ods 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 contem-
porary 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
xv
FOREWORD xv
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 appro-
priately 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 his-
tory, 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 con-
tributors 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.
xvi
newgenprepdf
PREFACE
Pamela Cox
Chair of the Social History Society
This collection was curated as part of a series of events marking the forti-
eth 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 strug-
gles of the 1960s, the expansion of higher education and critical engage-
ments 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 mat-
tered to them and why. To experience empathy is to experience an expan-
sive, 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, sexu-
ality, 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.
1
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 under-
stood as part of a wider set of memory wars that have marked the modern
2
2 SASHA HANDLEY, ROHAN MCWILLIAM AND LUCY NOAKES
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 prac-
tice 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 innova-
tive 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 prod-
ucts 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 his-
torical practice.
3
INTRODUCTION 3
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 every-
day 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 com-
ing 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 his-
tory in what might strike us today as the unstructured, even sentimental,
4
accounts of the manners and traditions of the common people. To the mod-
ern eye, this study of folklore (which can be found as early as the seventeenth
and the eighteenth century in Europe) may seem anecdotal and unsystem-
atic, 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 gov-
ernment reports (such as the census in the nineteenth century) allowed peo-
ple 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 system-
atic 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.
5
INTRODUCTION 5
The word ‘Culture’ (and hence ‘cultural history’) has a complex geneal-
ogy, 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 under-
stand society at large. Cultural history was driven by large forces: globaliza-
tion, 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 col-
lection of essays The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904).
Weber was a sociologist, but we might retrospectively view him as rehears-
ing some of the approaches that characterize the methods of social and cul-
tural 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 dis-
cern deeper patterns below the surface allowed historians to make a wider
contribution to intellectual life, although social historians often felt like out-
siders within a discipline that venerated political and military history.
Social history really made its breakthrough in interwar Europe, challeng-
ing 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 under-
standing that people in different global locations and different parts of soci-
ety 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.
6
Early social history was thus distinguished by its willingness to bor-

row 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, examin-
ing 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 his-
tory. 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 dem-
onstrated 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 subse-
quent 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 gov-
erning 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.
7
INTRODUCTION 7
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 his-
tories 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 prolifer-
ate: 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 associ-
ated 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
8
onwards of ‘microhistory’: taking an episode from the past (especially one

that did not make sense to modern eyes) and explaining it through a lay-
ered 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 trans-
formed 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 rac-
ist 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 impe-
rialism 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 sen-
sibility 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 domi-
nated. The emergence of the women’s movement in the 1960s shook the
establishment by showing that women had a history as well. Female histo-
rians raided the archives to uncover new sources about women while tak-
ing 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, intro-
ducing 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
9
INTRODUCTION 9
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 col-
lapsed, 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 writ-
ten. 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 inter-
pretation of the Revolution. In the 1980s there emerged a strong sense that
social historians had failed to think deeply about politics and the complexi-
ties 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 gen-
erated ‘master narratives’, such as class, with its stable set of identities. The
mark of the postmodern condition, however, was to treat these master nar-
ratives 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 lan-
guage 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 real-
ity 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 cat-
egory is not fixed in nature but is discursively produced by historians. In
10
claiming to be recreating past experience, historians fail to reflect on their

own ideological assumptions. Too often, she argues, invocations of ‘experi-
ence’ 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 his-
tory without challenging them. Rather, she argued that it is important to
see gender as an integral part of any social system. The changing under-
standings 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, pop-
ular 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 collec-
tive categories such as class. As Penny Summerfield discusses in her chapter
in this volume, historians turned towards histories of selfhood and sub-
jectivity, 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 struc-
tures. Ours is the age of what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid
11
INTRODUCTION 11
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 soci-
ology 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 com-
plexities 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 decon-
structed 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 inter-
est 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 produc-
tion 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 his-
tory 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 neighbour-
ing 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
12
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 bet-
ter understand the experiences and identities of people in the past.21 Peter
Mandler used the journal’s inaugural issue to discuss the ‘problem’ of his-
torical 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 his-
torical 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 express-
ing 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 emo-
tions –how they come about and how their expression shapes individual,
community and national identities –is central to this highly interdiscipli-
nary movement of scholarship, whose momentum and reach has been com-
pared 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, dis-
cussed 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 environ-
ments? This question has spawned fresh enquiries and approaches, leading
historians to engage in new ways with images and reports of early mod-
ern 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
13
INTRODUCTION 13
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 method-
ologies into critical perspective by the recent work of historian A. Roger
Ekirch, whose research uncovered evidence that many pre-industrial com-
munities in Europe and early America were fond of sleeping in two sepa-
rate 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 his-
torical actors in dynamic relation to objects and materials, the built envir-
onment, 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 rela-
tions, 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 dif-
ferent 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.
14
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 ‘experi-
ence’, 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 pit-
falls of small-scale history. Responses to the Manifesto have rightly pointed
to the fact that theoretical and methodological breakthroughs in the his-
torical 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 dis-
cussed in this volume: public history and transnational history. In her dis-
cussion 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
15
INTRODUCTION 15
this volume, however, reinterrogate older methodologies and approaches:

Katrina Navickas’s discussion of the ‘return to materialism’ skilfully dem-
onstrates the continued relevance of history to the present, and the re-emer-
gence 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 interdiscipli-
nary 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 cur-
rent 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).
16
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.
17
INTRODUCTION 17
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.
18
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.
19
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 histo-
rians’ categories of analysis and methodologies for exploring what it was to
be human in the past. Largely absent from the Rankean history of the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘the people’ were returned to historical
study first through the work of the Annales School and then by labour histo-
rians 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 his-
tory, 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 work-
ing 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
20
20 Histories of the human
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 docu-
ments. 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 pre-
sent 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 particu-
lar, 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.
21
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 char-
acter 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 chal-
lenged historical causation premised on the individual. In so doing he pro-
moted 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 draw-
backs 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,
22
22 PENNY SUMMERFIELD
they have chosen to focus on individual subjectivities in the name of human-

izing 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 ‘sub-
jective’ 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 prior-
itized 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 develop-
ment 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 doc-
uments –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 per-
sonally 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 con-
tested. Some scholars argue that the distinctions that have provoked debate
are largely a matter of disciplinary tradition and preference, while in practice
23
SUBJECTIVITY, THE SELF AND HISTORICAL PRACTICE 23
there is considerable slippage and overlap.9 However, different choices origi-

nated 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 schol-
ars have preferred terms such as ‘personal narratives’.11 Anthropologists
debated the merits of various ways of describing the spoken autobiographi-
cal 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, acknowl-
edge 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 possibil-
ity 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 seek-
ing 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 enthusiasti-
cally regard personal narratives as creative representations of the remem-
bered 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 quan-
titative 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
24
In contrast, Jane Humphries, an economic historian who uses working-

class memoirs as her main source for an analysis of child labour in the indus-
trial 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 sec-
ondary 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 scep-
tical community of economic historians of the validity of her source for cal-
culating 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 pos-
sibility 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 mono-
graphs, 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 histori-
cal 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, tech-
nologies 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.
25
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 eco-
nomic 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 sur-
veillance 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 gen-
eralization 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 fur-
ther 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 circulat-
ing 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 sub-
ject than to research the individual and his or her consciousness.28 Others
26
dismissed the contribution of Foucault on the grounds that it denied experi-

ence 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 differenti-
ated from institutions; and it dismissed the capacity of individuals to consti-
tute 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 suggest-
ing 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 chal-
lenges 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 his-
tories 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 prov-
enance 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 cul-
turally 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 dec-
ades 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 reminis-
cences 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
27
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 testi-
mony 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 histori-
cal 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 mean-
ing 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 pre-
sents 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
28
which he actively shaped his subjectivity. The diary, writes Joyce, was a tech-
nique for managing the self, one of a number of ‘technologies of communica-
tion’ 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 dia-
ries 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 adula-
tion 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 depart-
ing from the stereotype of the servile and submissive woman through her
slatternly habits and disruptive behaviour.46 Waugh, in other words, con-
structed 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 recu-
perates such practices as indicators of the engagement of Waugh the dia-
rist, 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 labora-
tory 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.
29
Joyce uses the diary to ‘explore the inner world’ of Waugh, which he peri-
odically 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 identi-
ties 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 historiogra-
phy, 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 contribu-
tion 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 methodol-
ogy 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 his-
tory, is Jacques Derrida’s insight that seemingly opposite entities in fact con-
stitute 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,
30
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 oth-
ering 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 particu-
larly active in constructing Sorabji as ‘the Indian woman’ of colonial fan-
tasy. 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 alle-
gation 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 benefi-
cence 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
31
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 ‘other-
ing’. 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 ‘coloni-
als 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 expe-
rience 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 exami-
nation 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 ‘tech-
nology 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 struc-
ture 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
32
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 concern-
ing her choice of degree subject, Burton suggests that Sorabji was alert to
potential criticism due to anxiety about her own capabilities and indeci-
sion 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 sup-
porters of women’s suffrage and Indian nationalism in explicitly psycho-
logical terms. Rather, she explains them in relation to Sorabji’s precarious
position as a colonial ‘other’ for whom both personal success and commit-
ment 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 unat-
tainable 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 his-
tory; 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 pre-
pared 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 main-
taining 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
33
explores the pull of these two public narratives on the memory stories com-
posed 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’ nar-
ratives 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 partici-
pation 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 excep-
tional, 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 differ-
entiate 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
34
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, switch-
ing 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 depriva-
tion 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, popu-
lar 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 reper-
toire 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 bun-
dle 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 selec-
tively on public models that they can expect their audiences to recognize.
On the other, the narrator seeks personal composure, or psychic equilib-
rium, 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 ver-
sion they tell is in part conscious strategy (equivalent to Waugh’s determi-
nation 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
35
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 organiza-
tions 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 cap-
ture 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 pub-
lic 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 psychoana-
lytic 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 offen-
sive. In a letter to his mother in September 1914 Urwick wrote that, suffer-
ing 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.
36
Roper explains the different versions in part in relation to public dis-

course. 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 elu-
cidate 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 regi-
mental 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 indic-
ative 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.
37
It is also the result of an absence of source material. Roper’s methodol-

ogy depends on the unusual availability of repeated accounts of the same
experiences composed at different points in one person’s life. A rather dif-
ferent approach is to regard diaries and memoirs as psychological accounts
that chart emotional conditions and relationships that are vital for under-
standing 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 histo-
rians to seek out, as invaluable sources, a wide range of forms of personal
narrative. It has recuperated the individual for history, on the understand-
ing 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 quan-
titative purposes keeps alive anxieties about bias, accuracy, reliability and
validity, rooted in the need to generalize on the basis of addition and averag-
ing. 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
38
turn. It needs to be understood, historically, as a dynamic of the construc-

tion 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 nar-
rating 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 pro-
voked suspicion, and the empirical conditions can be problematic: are the
sources sufficient and appropriate for such an analysis? If many histori-
ans 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 contrib-
uted, is the commitment not to reject inconsistencies, inaccuracies and fic-
tions 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).
39
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.
40
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
41
there is a library devoted to the collection of diaries. See <http://www.

thegreatdiaryproject.co.uk/> [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.
42
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.
43
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
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.
44
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.
45
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 bod-
ily 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 par-
ticular –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 psy-
chology 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
46
46 ROB BODDICE
opinion. Human experience, under certain conditions, could be altered, pre-

scribed, directed. For example, the experiences of piety and religious devo-
tion, 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 cor-
pus 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, behaviour-
ists and, more recently, biological determinists.2 Neuroscience, however, is
increasingly intertwined with cultural and social studies today, which sug-
gests 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 con-
temporaries nor the psychology of his ancestors was fit for a global appli-
cation 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 psych-
ology texts that shaped the discipline, he would have found more encour-
agement. 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 physi-
ology and mental activity. But bodies and brains, for Bain, were situated
and bound by the societies in which they existed. Natural ‘emotional cur-
rents’ 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
47
THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS 47
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 emo-
tional worlds can seem unbridgeable: ‘we are far removed in natural consti-
tution, 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 associa-
tional 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 val-
idity 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 psych-
ologist William James took this a stage further. Whereas Bain felt it neces-
sary 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 eter-
nally 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 infin-
ite, so were emotions. Instead of searching for ‘real’ or ‘typical’ emotions,
he thought we should only ask ‘how any given “expression” . . . may have
48
48 ROB BODDICE
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 essen-
tial 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 rap-
idity.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 selec-
tion 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 ana-
logue 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 prescrip-
tions 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
49
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 asso-
ciational 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 preoccu-
pation 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 for-
ward the notion of an ‘emotional regime’ to explain how emotional experi-
ence 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 emo-
tional 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 pre-
scription 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
50
50 ROB BODDICE
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 deter-
ministic. Children and adults caught on the frontier between rival authori-
ties 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 influ-
ences 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 emo-
tional 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 situa-
tions: 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
51
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 con-
text and what they mean. Since Peter and Carol Stearns first mooted ‘emo-
tionology’ 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 dis-
plays 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 abstrac-
tion, 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 con-
nection 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 inten-
tions and a politics of orthodoxy. Both these factors are already proving to
be highly influential in what we do as historians of emotion. Should histori-
ans 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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52 ROB BODDICE
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 impor-
tant 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 com-
promise 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 rhet-
orical 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 experi-
mental subject: a cocktail of genetic, chemical and cultural factors that situ-
ate 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 understand-
ing 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,
53
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 ‘emo-
tions’ 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 under-
standing 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 philoso-
phers 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 histor-
ical actors in context and to demonstrate how this affected both practice
and experience. Taken to its logical conclusion, this subsumes (or will sub-
sume) 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 pro-
vide 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 adjudg-
ing 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 func-
tioning 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 compunc-
tion 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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54 ROB BODDICE
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 exist-
ence 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 expe-
rience. 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 vir-
tue 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 possibili-
ties 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 activ-
ity 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
55
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 mean-
ings 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 import-
antly, 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 stimu-
lus 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, out-
bound 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 neuroscien-
tists 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 path-
ways 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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56 ROB BODDICE
treated with circumspection. Fortunately for historians, we are not so inter-

ested 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 over-
tures 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 histori-
ans 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 neu-
roplasticity 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 experi-
ence. 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 function-
ally to create a rich culture, but a rich culture has been created as a con-
sequence 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 for-
mation, and is the rationale behind repetitive action when trying to become
accomplished at a practice (from playing basketball to writing to perform-
ing 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
57
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 infu-
riation to joy and a sense of liberation. Our bodies and minds are bound
up in the everyday practice of dealing with technological innovation, per-
forming 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 ver-
nacular 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 fix-
ity 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 histori-
cal 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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58 ROB BODDICE
situated in deep knowledge of a given historical context, encompassing eve-

ryday practice; familial life; spiritual and cosmological beliefs; social, politi-
cal 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 his-
tory 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 oth-
ers. 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 pack-
aging of genetic material, which might affect how genes are ‘turned on’ or
‘off’, both in the course of an individual’s development and through inherit-
ance.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 necessar-
ily 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
59
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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60 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
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
61
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).
62
62 ROB BODDICE
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.
63
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
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.
Smail, D. M. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2008.
64
65
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 rumi-
nations 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 behav-
ioural 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
66
66 JUDITH A. ALLEN
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 chap-
ter. 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, histori-
ans seem shackled to representations of the body, as mediated by observ-
ers, 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 pro-
vokes 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 dimen-
sions 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
67
THE BODY AND THE SENSES 67
ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension; con-
stituted 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 suc-
cessor 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 ‘philosophi-
cally 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 sci-
ence Maureen McNeil, half of the allocated words describe a formidable
miscellany of topics: from tattoos to eating disorders, self-cutting to cos-
metic 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, there-
fore 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 dichot-
omies 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
68
68 JUDITH A. ALLEN
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 under-
wrote 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 cul-
ture as irredeemably determinate or logocentric and, simultaneously, mascu-
linist, 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 bodybuild-
ing, beauty and fashion, transsexualism, witchcraft and more.15 Historians
probed historical genealogies of sex itself, and the conditions for the emer-
gence of the concepts of gender and sexuality. Parallels between feminiza-
tion and racialization illuminated widely disparate historical projects, from
genealogies of Jim Crow segregation in the American South to the postcolo-
nial 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 lan-
guage’, ‘in shock’, ‘in pain’. The historicized body ‘of the artisan’, ‘the
69
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’, ‘dissem-
bled’, ‘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 under-

standings of both biology and experience, alienating many medical and
social historians. Alternatively, cultural historians embraced Foucault’s dis-
cursive 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 develop-
ment. It includes works of great sophistication, plumbing epistemological
paradoxes engaged with critical theory scholars at one end of the contin-
uum.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’ some-
where in the title, they have little or nothing to say about corporeality as a
Western intellectual problem. Indeed, in such work, one senses that histo-
rians 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 cor-
poreality. 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 griev-
ing, 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
70
70 JUDITH A. ALLEN
the millennium.23 In a 1999 international anthology on the subject, col-

lecting 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 sig-
nalled 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 cen-
tred 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 con-
structionist. 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 ‘construction-
ism, 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 dis-
cipline 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 the-
ory’. 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 his-
tory 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 his-
tory’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 rep-
resent them.28
The unevenness of body history –its intellectual and methodological patchi-

ness –needs analysis.29 As noted above, much historical work purporting
71
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 his-
torians sought to narrate the lived and embodied existences of individuals,
groups, subcultures, communities and regions. As such, they confronted his-
tory’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 gen-
erative 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 dis-
dained 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 expe-
rience. 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 typi-
cally established ‘meaning’ and, specifically, the ways that ‘some things and
not others came to be included in the term’. Historians could not legiti-
mately 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
72
72 JUDITH A. ALLEN
facts of any historical matter, the grounding evidence. Whatever the ori-
gin story informing histories of the body, evidence looms as a key meth-
odological 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 transforma-
tion 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 sensa-
tion, 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 special-
ists, forensic scientists, physical archaeologists, or even ethnographers and
practitioners in other fields.38 Some regretfully note this inescapable media-
tion between bodily experiences and their sensation, as registered in pri-
mary 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 ear-
liest 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
73
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 intellectu-
ally 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 exist-
ence, by foregrounding flagrant sensuality, vice, excess, immorality connot-
ing 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 sig-
nificance in the investigation of change over time, confront vexing dilem-
mas 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 gen-
res.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, sweat-
ing profusely, said to have shiverings, swollen and tender in the bowels,
slightly jaundiced, and her symptoms generally indicated blood poison-
ing. I saw her again about 11 that night . . . Her condition then was coma-
tose, 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 embodi-
ment 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 elu-
sive. 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
74
74 JUDITH A. ALLEN
methods and the recorded perceptions of carers and intimates of miscarry-

ing 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 abor-
tifacients, 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 induc-
ing 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 dele-
tion 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 instru-
ments became a misdemeanour conviction with up to three years imprison-
ment. 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 abor-
tion. 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
75
peril as abortion providers. Dying depositions still provided clues to wom-

en’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 hospitaliza-
tion, 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 –septicae-
mia, peritonitis, pyaemia, cellulitis or gas gangrene of the uterus.50
Beyond women’s own words, carers testified as to abortion’s corpore-
ality, 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, con-
vulsions, spasms, trembling, shaking, dehydration, discharges, the dreadful
and unmistakable stenches –first through the bedroom, soon throughout
the abode –accompanied irreversible blood poisoning and uterine infec-
tions. 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 com-
pounded 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 abor-
tion 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 fam-
ily 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 histo-
rians prefer to explain the British chapter of this Western decline as the out-
come of abstinence and coitus interruptus, in the unique erotic sacrifices of
76
76 JUDITH A. ALLEN
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, regis-
tered 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 recom-
mended 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, analge-
sia 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 scru-
pulous care, perhaps informing patients’ and providers’ risk assessments.
Doctors could consult specialists, hospitalize patients and, in extremis, cer-
tify 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
77
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 prescrip-
tions: 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 eye-
witness 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 clar-
ity 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 crimi-
nal 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 con-
ceal. With so much passing undetected, a working hypothesis for histori-
cal 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
78
78 JUDITH A. ALLEN
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 elu-
sive corporeal evidence about practices like abortion? Its narratives illumi-
nate important issues, signalling episodes derived from sea changes in sexual
culture. One of the most decisive changes was the twentieth-century consen-
sus 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 spe-
cific 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 his-
torical 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 devasta-
tion, 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 gene-
alogies 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.
79
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
17 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History’, in A.
Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen
80
80 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.
81
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
82
82 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 <www.oldbaileyonline.org> [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
83
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
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.
84
85
PART TWO
The material turn
As the introduction showed, the shift among social historians towards cul-
tural 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 (particu-
larly 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: show-
ing 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 decon-
structing the visual conventions of a culture. No image, we learn, ever sim-
ply 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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86 THE MATERIAL TURN
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 con-
cern 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 pub-
lic 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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CHAPTER FOUR
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 inequal-
ity 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 back-
ground rather than the foreground of historical analysis, at least in Western
Anglophone social history. Outside of the specific discipline of global stud-
ies, 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 cul-
tural 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 struc-
tures’ has occurred in social history. It does not argue that social and cul-
tural 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 struc-
ture 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, his-
torians 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 mate-
rial 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 fac-
tors: 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 indi-
vidualist 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 his-
tories of industrial production and commerce became outdated. Instead,
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A RETURN TO MATERIALISM? 89
socio-economic historians began to emphasize the history of consumption,

particularly in its cultural contexts. Studies of what people bought and con-
sumed 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 appropri-
ation, 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 arti-
cle, 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 iden-
tities 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 individu-
als 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 collec-
tive 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 socie-
ties.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 aris-
ing 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 deter-
minant 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, politi-
cal 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 practi-
cal 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 eco-
nomic and political conditions. There are, however, broader consequences
of this change of focus. As Jürgen Kocka has pointed out, ‘Historians have
91
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 predeter-
mined 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 materi-
alism 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 analyti-
cal 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 mis-
understood 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 call-
ing 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 learn-
ing from anthropology, economics, ethnography, sociology and other disci-
plines.25 History Workshop also attempted (if not always democratically)
a genuinely integrative interdisciplinary way of working as well as writ-
ing 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 gen-
eral public as well as academic scholars.26 Perhaps more ‘standard’ politi-
cal 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 his-
tory 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
93
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 ‘microhisto-
ries’ of individual settlements and wider trends in the national economy.33
As discussed below, much of this new work has been influenced by the meth-
ods 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 organ-
izing in Western forms of collective action, resistance was enacted through
individual actions such as foot-dragging and gossip, disguised from employ-
ers 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, how-
ever, 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 clev-
erly 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 pov-
erty and the poor often tend to sidestep the issue of larger class and eco-
nomic 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 pau-
per 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 cur-
rent 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 strug-
gle 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 progres-
sion 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 canoni-
cal cultural English Marxist of the 1960s and 1970s, Thompson offered a
foot in both camps of traditional materialist social history and newer cul-
tural approaches. Thompson defined class as a process rather than an objec-
tive 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
95
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 situ-
ated 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 aspira-
tion, ‘social and economic circumstances shape class relations, limit hori-
zons and circumscribe actions’.49 Thompson’s moral economy has remained
influential outside British history, and has been applied to studies of contem-
porary 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-encom-
passing 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 pri-
mary 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 examin-
ing 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 his-
tory, 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 evi-
dence relied too much on focusing on capitalist firms and elites, while work-
ers played an overly abstract and passive role in the process. Andrew Herod
therefore called strongly for ‘a much more active conceptualization of work-
ers 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 can-
not be fully situated without understanding the social, political and eco-
nomic 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 opportun-
ities 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 rela-
tions in the Cowley motorworks in Oxford in the 1960s and found that
‘local’ conflicts between capital and labour were embedded in place, spe-
cific 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 relation-
ships’.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 con-
flict 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 differ-
ent 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 econ-
omy 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 differ-
ent 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 pro-
cess 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 geog-
raphy 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 glo-
balized 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 ‘pre-
cariat’ 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 eco-
nomic 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 globalisa-
tion’.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 rela-
tions 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.
99
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 con-
tour 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 chal-
lenged 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 move-
ments 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 pio-
neered 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
100
100 KATRINA NAVICKAS
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 tra-
dition of research by historians and sociologists on the long run evolution
of wages, prices and wealth’.76 Historical and national specificity and reac-
tions 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 pro-
vided 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 fore-
grounding 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 capital-
ist 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 cen-
tury? 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 the ‘state’ and the political frameworks governing laws, policing and
the economy
ll capital and the economic systems built on capital, and their
materiality
101
ll labour in all its various forms, from the organized to the unskilled,
casual, domestic and migrant
ll 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 deindi-
vidualize 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
102
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
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’,
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.
103
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
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, <https://mbsbham.wordpress.com/working-papers/working-
paper-no-2/>; full collection at <https://mbsbham.wordpress.com/working-
papers/> [accessed 18 January 2017].
28 <http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/> [accessed 18 January 2017].
104
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
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.
105
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
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.
106
Martin’s Press, 1985), pp. 128–63; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
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
107
(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.
108
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.
109
CHAPTER FIVE
Markets and culture

Donna Loftus
Introduction
We live in increasingly complicated economic times characterized by the pro-
liferation 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 mathema-
ticians to produce models for calculating flows of commodities and capi-
tal. 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 ques-
tions 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 per-
sonal relationships and social life.2
The cultural turn has been central to the development of these new under-
standings of markets. By focusing on the ‘constructedness’ of life and on
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110 DONNA LOFTUS
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 stud-
ied as systems and attitudes that are produced and reproduced in social and
cultural life. These cultural approaches are well suited to describing capital-
ist 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 work-
ers, 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 embed-
ded 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 com-
pounded by the methodologies of the cultural turn and, in particular, post-
modern 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, bureau-
cracies 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 facili-
tated ‘virtualism’, a process through which history has been made to con-
form 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
111
MARKETS AND CULTURE 111
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 direc-
tions 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 philoso-
pher 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, under-
taken 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 land-
lords 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 entre-
preneurialism 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 pro-
duced works of detail and synthesis that took up the question of moder-
nity 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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112 DONNA LOFTUS
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 deindustrial-
ization 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 par-
ticular –have increasingly come to the fore’.14 As he noted, the move cor-
responded 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 stud-
ies 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 develop-
ment brought households, artisans and pre-industrial production into the
foreground. Jan de Vries argued that an ‘industrious revolution’ was trig-
gered 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 show-
ing how consumption reshaped landscapes and cities and transformed the
urban experience with arcades and department stores.17 Women were liber-
ated 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 eco-
nomic 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 vari-
ation in ‘consumption regimes’.20 It provided a way of linking the every-
day 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
113
has demonstrated, consumption was a political as well as a cultural phe-

nomenon, a ‘third force’ able to free politics from the ‘stranglehold of self-
interested 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 con-
vergence 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 spe-
cific social and cultural contexts, embedded in systems of meaning and con-
nected 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 challeng-
ing 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 distinc-
tion 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 demon-
strate 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 custom-
ary 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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114 DONNA LOFTUS
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 illu-
sory. 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 calcu-
late 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 net-
works of trust could extend beyond the local to provide national even inter-
national 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 con-
verged 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 lit-
erary devices intended to bring markets to life rather than provide a scien-
tific description of the natural world.36 In turn, novels were explored for
115
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 sim-
ply 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 econom-
ics with science and, when combined with developments in publishing and
accountancy, exercised a subtle philosophical shift which made the individ-
ual 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 facili-
tate 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 pro-
duction of a new language and epistemology intended to describe the work-
ings of this new financial system to the middle class.42 Detailed studies of
accounts and accountancy, banks and banking, statements and share reg-
isters showed how by the nineteenth century ‘befuddled Victorians grad-
ually 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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116 DONNA LOFTUS
opportunities to secure their personal interests and the welfare of the fam-
ily.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 liv-
ing 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 transforma-
tion 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 flexibil-
ity 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 inequali-
ties 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
117
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 rent-
iers 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, pro-
jects 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 illus-
trated in the history of slavery. Studies have shown the physical and repre-
sentational 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 aboli-
tion 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 business-
men and financiers, landed families and London gentry as well as widows
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118 DONNA LOFTUS
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 busi-
ness.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 for-
mations are further demonstrated in projects that have tracked the owner-
ship 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 port-
folios 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 eco-
nomic 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 domes-
tic outworkers and casual labourers throughout the nineteenth century. In
other sectors the impact of deskilling can be seen. The sons of artisans expe-
rienced a decline in the age at which they started work in the classic period
of industrialization, from 1791 to 1820, confirming the impact of competi-
tion on trade and on the lives of working people.
These directions show the benefits of combining macro-and microanaly-
sis, 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 his-
torians 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 indus-
trial revolution in the British Isles.64 Detailed investigations of shareholding
119
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 twen-
tieth 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 forma-
tion 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 soci-
ety 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 land-
scapes 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 mas-
ter 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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120 DONNA LOFTUS
processes of description, ordering and through the production of regula-

tions which are imprinted on the landscape in roads, railways, warehouses
and factories.
The material turn, then, reminds historians that markets are fundamen-
tally 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, eco-
nomic, cultural and biological forces.70 Rothschild has traced such interplay
in twentieth-century debates between conservationists and free market lib-
ertarians 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 conservation-
ists, 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 commodi-
ties 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 environ-
mental 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 productiv-
ity 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 con-
stant 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 moral-
ity, ethics and scientific reasoning in response to current concerns. It suggests
121
that historians of markets and culture need to work with a broader politi-
cal 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 mar-
kets and culture by opening up the interaction between ideas, things, prac-
tices, 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 capi-
talism have shifted the focus from manufacturing, trade unions and work-
ers 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 dif-
ferent values compete and how different kinds of modernity exist in differ-
ent 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 accu-
mulation 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 organi-
zation: it negated modern concepts of contract and, in the Southern states
of the United States, directed investment away from industrial and agricul-
tural 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.
122
122 DONNA LOFTUS
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 econ-
omies with the desire for goods seen as providing the dynamics for indus-
trial 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 con-
sumption 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 pros-
perity 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 produc-
tion 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 eco-
nomic 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 cre-
ated work, kept money circulating and produced a modicum of pleasure.
Integrated histories of work, consumption and finance show how these con-
tradictions are not the unforeseen consequences of capitalism but its ‘very
foundation’.81
123
Conclusion
It would be remiss to finish a chapter on markets and culture without say-
ing 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 tak-
ing 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.
124
124 DONNA LOFTUS
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.
125
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).
126
126 DONNA LOFTUS
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
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.
127
57 See Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman (eds), British Capitalism and
Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge
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.
128
128 DONNA LOFTUS
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.
Green, G., G. Maltby, A. Owens and J. Rutterford (eds). Men, Women and
Money: Perspectives on Gender, Wealth and Investment, 1850–1930.
Hall, C., K. McClelland, N. Draper, K. Donington and R. Lang. Legacies of British
Slave-Ownership, Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain.
Hilton, M. Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge
Jameson, F. Representing Capital. London: Verso, 2011.
Johnson, P. Making the Market: Victorian Origins of Corporate Capitalism.
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.
129
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 assem-
ble 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 expecta-
tion 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 assem-
bling 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
130
130 JENNIFER TUCKER
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 for-
gotten. A small number has been excavated from obscurity and woven into
historical accounts as documents of the past: the earliest surviving illumi-
nated scriptures, early modern Japanese picture scrolls, sixteenth-century
Aztec historical codices, history paintings, photo histories of war and indus-
trial progress, 1950s Biblical epic films, passport photos, illustrated maga-
zines 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 vis-
ual culture, and what students of visual culture might learn from the diver-
sity 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
131
VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURES 131
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 analyti-
cal 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 set-
tled’, 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 influ-
ential Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy introduced the
notion of ‘the period eye’, the idea that people within a culture share expe-
riences 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 gram-
mar’ 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 omni-
presence 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 expan-
sion of television and advertising, and coincided with the growth of picture
libraries that were making image-based material accessible to historians as
never before.
132
132 JENNIFER TUCKER
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 photogra-
phy’ 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 adver-
tising 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 photog-
raphy 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 par-
ticular regard to labour, gender, sexuality and ethnicity and their associated
epistemologies and practices.19 W. J. T. Mitchell’s writings attend to pat-
terns 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 mecha-
nized 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
133
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 view-
ers 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 mean-
ings 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 impor-
tant.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
134
134 JENNIFER TUCKER
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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
135
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 extraor-
dinary richness and wide scope of visual studies as a field and the applica-
bility 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 emo-
tions. 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 ques-
tions 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, develop-

ing 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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136 JENNIFER TUCKER
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’ docu-
ments –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 histor-
ical 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 histori-
ans 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 materi-
als 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 produc-
tion 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, distribu-
tion 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
137
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 bet-
ter 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.
138
138 JENNIFER TUCKER
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,
139
magazine articles), and suggested that images had played an import-

ant 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 vis-
ual studies. Scholarship on art and empire is especially notable, for exam-
ple, 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 inves-
tigation 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 reward-
ing 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
140
140 JENNIFER TUCKER
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 citizen-
ship 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 commu-
nications systems’ –is used to denote a broader condition of contemporary
visual culture, replacing an older notion of media spectatorship.63 For his-
torians, 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 photog-
raphy, 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 histori-
cal 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
141
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 unan-
alysed in most environmental histories, which often focus heavily on politi-
cal 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 pol-
itics, 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 his-
torians are yielding fresh understanding of the interplay between photogra-
phy 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 ear-
lier 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 import-
ant to new directions will likely be the incorporation of new critical vis-
ual methodologies into histories of all kinds. As I have suggested in this
essay, historians have many valuable tools and techniques that can be use-
fully 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 vis-
ual 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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142 JENNIFER TUCKER
art history, is important and often vital. Yet, as this chapter has suggested,
historians also have developed useful approaches and methods to contrib-
ute to advancing the cutting edge of interdisciplinary research on visual
sources. In fact, social and cultural historians are particularly well posi-
tioned to address questions being raised in contemporary visual and mater-
ial 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 criti-
cally 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 meth-
ods 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
143
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
144
144 JENNIFER TUCKER
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.
145
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.
146
146 JENNIFER TUCKER
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
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
147
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
148
148 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
149
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
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.
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.
150
151
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 ‘dimin-
ished 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 pro-
grammes 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 his-
tory 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, histori-
ans such as Michael Frisch were calling for a ‘shared authority’. Their idea
was that professional historians should not simply provide the public with
152
152 PAUL ASHTON AND MEG FOSTER
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 cul-
tural tourism.6 Academically trained public historians had to confront chal-
lenges 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 employ-
ment and the narrowing of audiences to academics’. This was due in part
to increasing specialization, which resulted in the ‘marginalization of pro-
fessional 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 aca-
demic 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 heav-
ily 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 under-
taken 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 envir-
onmental, 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 his-
tory in the context of the new social history in the 1980s and the various,
ongoing rights movements.14 Despite these different understandings, most
153
PUBLIC HISTORIES 153
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 predom-
inantly 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 rela-
tion 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 profes-
sion, 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’, under-
taken 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 profes-
sional advisors or consultants’.20
Public history’s reception by the British academy, however, has in gen-
eral been more in accord with the North American experience. An aca-
demic 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 lit-
tle 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 admit-
tedly, ‘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 com-
mittee until 2009.24
154
Public history took other forms in different countries. Cliomedia, a com-

pany 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 his-
tory was also blended into progressive museum, archival and heritage pro-
grammes 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 dec-
ades of local, national and international repression, conflict and strug-
gles, 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 gen-
erations 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
155
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 histori-
ans. 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 main-
tenance 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 criti-
cized by indigenous and ethnic communities as well as postcolonial schol-
ars 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 academ-
ics, 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
156
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 muse-
ums. And they have provided strong evidence to suggest that ‘history profes-
sionals 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 aca-
demically trained historians to ‘rebuild their role as enlightened skeptics in
the knowledge economy’.46 Questions of audience, authority, reach and par-
ticipation remain multifaceted. But technological developments have accel-
erated 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 them-
selves or disseminating their work to limited or specialist audiences. Engaged,
community-based rather than aloof scholarship has been a significant fac-
tor 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 place-
ment 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 obsta-
cles preventing an holistic approach –if this is possible –to the public past.
157
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 nego-
tiation 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 lin-
gering 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 histori-
ans are voicing concerns about their relevance in a rapidly changing world.52
Once-distinct boundaries between the ‘expert’ historian and the ‘lay’ pub-
lic 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 manag-
ers –the list goes on.
158
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 prac-
titioners 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 sup-
port 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 univer-
sities’ 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 them-
selves 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 histo-
rians] 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 sug-
gested, professionals are coming together to discuss the pressures on their
position and practice. Through conventional mediums such as journal arti-
cles and conferences, historians are mapping the shifting contours of the
field, discussing the impact of different mediums of communication, com-
munity 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 audi-
ences. 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
159
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 digi-
tal 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 move-
ment, 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, sur-
vey 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 becom-
ing 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 arte-
facts, 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
160
virtual forum. These practitioners not only post sources from their institu-
tional 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 his-
tory by using the historypin site. The Reading Museum was the main local
partner involved in the project, and its public historians participated in pin-
ning 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 press-
ing 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 histor-
ian was the authority on the past, the person equipped by years of profes-
sional training to bring the lessons of the past to bear on the present. In the
161
United Kingdom, as we have seen, public history was born from a set of dif-
ferent 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 his-
tory 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 histori-
ans’. 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 profes-
sionals 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 communi-
ties. 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 prac-
tices rather than just an academic hierarchy, then ‘the number of its practi-
tioners 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
162
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 inves-
tigated by the Waitangi tribunal. The courtroom is a space used by indigen-
ous 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, his-
torians 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 profession-
als 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 encour-
aged 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 ten-
sion 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 histori-
ans 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’ peo-
ple 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.
163
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 see-
ing 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 sim-
plest; that public historians know public history when they see it.83
With these definitional issues, it is possible that ‘public history’ as a uni-
fying 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, her-
itage, museum exhibitions, archival management and even the design of
stamps –risks telling us nothing.’ In his view, ‘conflating these with his-
tory 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.
164
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.
165
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.
166
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
167
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=
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
168
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).
169
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.
170
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.
171
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 inter-
linked 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 anthrozoolo-
gists 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
172
172 Challenges and provocations
environmental historians owe to research in the physical sciences, which

has catalogued intensive human interventions into seemingly ‘natural’ envir-
onments. 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 inequal-
ities based on power, wealth, gender and race hierarchies. Environmental
historians, he argues, can and should play a role in resisting the ‘totaliz-
ing’ discourses of climate change and in explaining the formation of new
global political alliances among environmentally ‘marginalized’ communi-
ties. 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.
173
CHAPTER EIGHT
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 symboli-
cally 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
174
174 HILDA KEAN
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 don-
keys, were used to operate machines such as treadmills to raise water from
wells and rivers.5 The subsequent role of horses and donkeys included car-
rying and transporting goods, such as coal in underground mines.6 The rail-
way network in the nineteenth century, far from making horses redundant,
was reliant for expansion on the increased use of animals: ‘Without car-
riages 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 sym-
bolically 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
175
ANIMAL-HUMAN HISTORIES 175
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 fam-
ily 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 pur-
portedly 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 march-
ing 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 natur-
ally 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 acknowledg-
ing 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 import-
ant –and as an aspect of British radical traditions. But it was not –nor was
176
176 HILDA KEAN
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 ani-
mal 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 soci-
ety, 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 inter-
disciplinary 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 pris-
ons 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 – empha-
sized 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 char-
acterized 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 ani-
mal’s lack of human language. More recently the work of French thinkers
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari has been appropriated in similar ways
177
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 writ-
ing 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 ani-
mal 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 straight-
forwardly as, say, empirical historians. When historians committed to writ-
ing 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 stud-
ies/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 possi-
ble 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 conse-
quent compulsion to make the discipline respond to the question of non-
human 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
178
178 HILDA KEAN
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 his-
torical 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 experi-
ence. 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 ref-
erence 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 environ-
ment, they are unlikely to share their homes or leisure time with such ani-
mals. Unsurprisingly, his position has been challenged. Radical theologian
Andrew Linzey, who uses history in his work, has countered Nagel, saying
179
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 conscious-
ness 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 impos-
sibility 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 his-
tory, 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 histor-
ical 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 geog-
raphies. 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 dif-
ferently. Thus by careful detailed reference to animal welfare campaigners’
visual material of the nineteenth century, Keri Cronin argues that represen-
tation of speaking animals ‘allowed readers and activists to recognize ani-
mal 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
180
180 HILDA KEAN
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 repre-
sentations 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 his-
tories 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 ‘per-
spective’ 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?
181
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 char-
ities –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 nar-
rative of the war is challenged. If we draw on material from other discip-
lines, 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 fre-
quently 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 prod-
uct of an imaginative human mind we might consider other possibilities. As
biologist and anthrozoologist John Bradshaw has argued, dogs are very sen-
sitive 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 mam-
malian 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 soci-
ety 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
182
182 HILDA KEAN
findings are divorced from external cultural contexts and the effect of dif-
ferent historical times. However, in the example of the animal-human rela-
tionship 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 discus-
sion was the contribution of vets to the world food supply.63 I am not suggest-
ing 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 nation-
ally 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 treat-
ment 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
183
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 conven-
tional 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 car-
riages 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 develop-
ments 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 soci-
ety. 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.
184
184 HILDA KEAN
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.
185
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.
186
186 HILDA KEAN
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.
187
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
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.
188
188 HILDA KEAN
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
189
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
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.
190
191
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 trans-
national history were used by previous generations before the term ‘trans-
national’ 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 struc-
tures, 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 chap-
ter 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
192
192 DURBA GHOSH
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 cen-
tral 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, pol-
icy 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 citi-
zens, 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 conver-
sation ranged from a discussion about how transnational history related to
193
NEW DIRECTIONS IN TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY 193
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 dif-
ferentiating 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 pre-
sumed 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 particu-
lar, the ways in which history writing has depended on a hierarchy of which
countries or regions are considered ‘advanced’. Eschewing the terms of com-
parative 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 his-
torical 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 exam-
ple; he challenged a long-dominant narrative that England’s industrial pro-
gress 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
194
194 DURBA GHOSH
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 con-
versations about how and whether entanglement forms another kind of
transnational thinking.14 As I show below, scholars working on early mod-
ern 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 inaccu-
rate 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 sub-
altern studies?’ to which Hofmeyr, Kozol and Seed responded unequivo-
cally 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 suc-
cessful 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 dimen-
sion.18 Sven Beckert, in contrast, voiced a different aspiration for trans-
national history and its subaltern inclinations, which was that ‘we should
certainly study culture and ideas, but we will never understand them prop-
erly without also studying such issues as investment patterns, elite net-
works 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 his-
torical scholarship, to override those with less historical scholarship.20 She
asked, ‘What constitutes the object of historical inquiry once you challenge
195
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 histo-
riographical 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 recolo-
nized 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 impe-
rial history, particularly when scholars in dominant specialities end up pro-
claiming 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, argu-
ing that a transnational method cannot fully capture the exceptionalism of
particular historiographies. Below, I return to the case of pre-1800 US his-
tory 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 ste-
reotypes 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 rela-
tionships. 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 boundar-

ies 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, schol-
ars 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 jour-
nal 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 edi-
tor 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
197
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 his-
tory have proliferated, from Black Atlantic to Spanish Atlantic to French
Atlantic, national historiographies that were once conceived by the bounda-
ries of sovereign states with putatively homogenous populations have been
reframed as the grounds on which a steady traffic of slaves, priests, smug-
glers, 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 dem-
onstrates 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: politi-
cal, 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 trans-
national 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 adjec-
tives 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 his-
tory, 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 con-
versation 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 pos-
sibilities, 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 colo-
nies on the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean.37 The abolition of slave
traffic in the British Empire reduced the number of Africans who were forci-
bly taken from the west coast of Africa to the Americas, yet slave emancipa-
tion 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
199
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 intel-
lectuals, 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 tacti-
cal advantage of, temporized before, redefined, and overcome the disciplin-
ing 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 pre-
modern periods to the present. At the heart of these projects of Asian trans-
nationalism 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, par-
ticularly 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 impe-
rial nations engaged in transnational relationships that exceeded national
boundaries.
The work of British imperial historians and scholars of the Chinese dias-
pora and Asian transnationalism may seem quite distant (both geographically
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200 DURBA GHOSH
and historiographically), but scholars in these fields share a concern with

the question of ‘family’, which can be defined as kin and institutional net-
works 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 patrilin-
eal 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 busi-
ness. 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 dove-
tailed 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 dif-
ferent conceptions of community and selfhood.47
Using a prosopographical approach that blends the microhistory of indi-
viduals, families and their households together with a study of the political
economy of late eighteenth- century Britain, Emma Rothschild has nar-
rated 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 micro-
historical 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;
201
the Johnstones of Westerhall lived in Paris, Jamaica, Florida, Calcutta and

London. These kinds of histories of transnational individuals and their fami-
lies 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 vari-
ous 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 geo-
graphical regions and specify how some diaspora groups were able to sus-
tain commercial and kin networks over long periods of time.
While imperial history and diaspora history have expanded into trans-
national history, histories of gender and sexuality have long depended on
transnational conversations across historiographies, drawing from com-
parisons, 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 transna-
tional 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, femi-
nist 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 transna-
tional 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 sin-
gle 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 commu-
nity 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 grad-
ual overcoming of obstacles to sexual freedom’. Challenging a grand nar-
rative 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 les-
bian 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 emer-
gent 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 ques-
tions about transnationality.
203
Lara Putnam notes that ‘the transnational turn is accelerating simultane-

ously with the digital turn . . . Digital search has become the unacknowl-
edged 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 sensi-
tive 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 avail-
able 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 valu-
able 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 his-
tory, 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 ances-
try: 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 identifica-
tion. We can no longer assume that globalization is a contemporary condi-
tion 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
205
exclusively nation-minded is insufficiently inclusive of historical events, devel-

opments 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
206
206 DURBA GHOSH
Ghosh, ‘The “Great Divergence”, Politics and Capitalism’, Journal of Early

Modern History 19 (2015): pp. 1–43.
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.
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’,
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.
207
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
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
208
208 DURBA GHOSH
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;
209
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
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
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
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
210
210 DURBA GHOSH
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
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.
211
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
Subrahmanyam, S. ‘Connected Histories: Notes Toward a Reconfiguration of Early
Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): pp. 735–62.
212
213
CHAPTER TEN
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 surround-
ings both play an active role in shaping history.1 This chapter offers an over-
view 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 rela-
tively 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
214
214 JOHN MORGAN
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 his-
tory, 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, fol-
lowing 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, increas-
ing 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 con-
template how and why industrial societies had contributed to changes tak-
ing 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 cul-
tural turn in historiography: some, like Worster, advocated a more materi-
ally 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 rep-
resentation in all environmental histories.9 Yet beyond this, scholars have
been content to follow their noses in an enormous number of directions,
215
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 215
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 ‘une-
venly spreading blob’.10 Yet the field is spreading with considerable exuber-
ance, 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 environmen-
tal 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 environmen-
tal 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 cul-
tural 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 dis-
tinct ‘levels’ of interactions between people and the natural world (material
conditions, production, reproduction and representation), by studying envi-
ronmental 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 spe-
cifically 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
216
216 JOHN MORGAN
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 histo-
rians therefore study ‘the entangled connections between the natural and the
cultural’, uncovering the natural in the cultural and the cultural in the natu-
ral.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 per-
spectives 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 envi-
ronmental history in the distinctly man-made landscape features of the
canal and the railway.25 We have also learned how seemingly riven and bar-
ren 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
217
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 com-
munities, which without external interruption would continue ad infinitum.
With this understanding of nature behind them, early environmental histo-
ries 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 his-
torians 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 preso-
cial 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 adventur-
ous 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 dat-
ing, environmental historians today are net importers of scientific mate-
rial.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 sta-
sis, or society and culture are seen as co-constructing environments with
218
218 JOHN MORGAN
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 strat-
egies 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 provoca-
tion that the social and the cultural are not everything. Environmental his-
tory 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) identi-
fied 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 problema-
tization 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 socioen-
vironmental 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.
219
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 ‘socioenvi-
ronmental 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 mech-
anisms for their distribution. Both the resource endowment of a commu-
nity 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, geog-
rapher 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 “environ-
ment” –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 sedi-
mentary 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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220 JOHN MORGAN
the analysis of socioenvironmental metabolisms and expose where and why

benefits and burdens fall.
This ability to disaggregate societies can benefit both social and envi-
ronmental 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 histo-
rians ‘split’ these groups down into their constituent subjective elements.53
In recent years, environmental historians have moved beyond generaliza-
tions 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 pris-
tine nature that Europeans then desecrated, has been replaced with the
acknowledgement that ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse peo-
ples 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 mul-
tiple 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 indi-
genes 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 rela-
tively 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 per-
spective 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 reinvigor-
ated 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
221
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 anthro-
pogenic landscape change.59 Amartya Sen’s entitlement concept has proved
useful for historians of flooding and famine to show how a variety of disas-
ters were the result of ‘entitlement failures’ rather than the result of ‘exog-
enous’ 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 his-
tory, 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 envi-
ronmental 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 segrega-
tion 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 inequal-
ity 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 schol-
ars have demonstrated how nineteenth-century conservationists ‘whitened’
222
222 JOHN MORGAN
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 exploita-
tion 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 ‘natu-
ral’ in which they invested so much being almost entirely manufactured.
Malarial wetlands and open mountainsides were not part of the fascist con-
ception 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 envi-
ronment, beginning with the historical link between humoral understand-
ings 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
223
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 environmen-
tal 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 environ-
mental movements have shown that environmental consciousness is preva-
lent 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 pro-
vide a corrective to at times totalizing environmental discourses.
Environmental approaches also have the capacity to reveal new connect-
ing 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 pro-
posed 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 environ-
mental, 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 pro-
jects such as ‘Active History’, a Canadian website co-founded by environ-
mental 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 univer-
sally bleak picture of conflict, forced migration, hazard and insecurity. Such
224
224 JOHN MORGAN
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 famil-
ial networks, perceived economic incentives and gendered and generational
expectations, rather than as the result of a simple environmental push fac-
tor.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 opera-
tions 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
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
225
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
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.
226
226 JOHN MORGAN
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.
227
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.
228
228 JOHN MORGAN
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
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.
229
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
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.
230
230 JOHN MORGAN
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
231
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.
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.
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.
Worster, D. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1994.
232
233
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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 fragmen-
tary moments and memories recorded in the archives prompt a number of
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234 NICOLA WHYTE
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 sig-
nificant 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 discus-
sion 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 his-
torians 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 reconfigur-
ing 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 understand-
ing human relations.7 In his widely cited work, The Production of Space,
published in 1974, Lefebvre explains that it is not enough to seek knowl-
edge 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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SPATIAL HISTORY 235
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 conse-
quences 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 apply-
ing 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 spa-
tial . . . 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 moderni-
zation paradigm, an imperative that is of course not unique to this field.17
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236 NICOLA WHYTE
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 con-
stantly placed under scrutiny. Nevertheless, as Lynn Abrams points out, the
implicit positioning of many historians often serves to reinforce the impor-
tance 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, ‘per-
sistently 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 order-
ing of the landscape that was continually in formation and drew into play
memory, imagination, social processes and a deep sense of time, both ances-
tral 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 testimo-
nies of deponents in this case and in others reveal alternative understand-
ings 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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SPATIAL HISTORY 237
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 sug-
gested, one that views ‘location’ (a specific position or universally identifi-
able 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 par-
ticipate 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 (con-
ceived 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 back-
drop, 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 relation-
ship cannot exist without this underpinning. While some scholars have
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238 NICOLA WHYTE
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 lin-
ear expositions of the passage of time. He gives shape to a sociospatial tran-
sition –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 con-
ceptions of time, the reader is invited to think about how the past is continu-
ally 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 geog-
raphy and archaeology, for over half a century landscape history has
been concerned with spatial relationships in a range of contexts includ-
ing the development of regional agrarian systems, settlement morpholo-
gies, 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 activi-
ties 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 break-
ing down the problematic nature/culture binary, their influential work on
eighteenth-century designed landscapes showed how art, cartography, lit-
erature and the physical landscape itself can all be viewed as visual repre-
sentations 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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SPATIAL HISTORY 239
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 pro-
ductive 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 relation-
ships.33 How people related to one another through the places and landscapes
they made and remade, modified and perhaps even destroyed, is fundamen-
tally important to understanding the practices of everyday life and processes
of change and continuity over time. This oversight may be in part a conse-
quence of the dominant Western notion of landscape as exterior, objectified,
distanced and dehumanized.34 This particular perspective draws from an aes-
thetic 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 ‘empiri-
cal 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 land-
scape 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 per-
ceived –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 main-
tenance 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 mod-
ern 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 pro-
prietorship 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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240 NICOLA WHYTE
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 inter-
preted 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 acknowledge-
ment 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 mate-
rial 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 com-
municated through symbol and inscription, through text, image and repre-
sentation, 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 stud-
ies, 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 tempo-
ral 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 indi-
vidual, moreover, tends to contradict social histories interested in social
entanglements, inequality, collectivized conflict and resistance. Feminist
241
SPATIAL HISTORY 241
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 inextri-
cably 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 remem-
bered 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 mon-
uments 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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242 NICOLA WHYTE
may have thought about the past in relation to their own lives, and the pro-
cesses that shaped the landscapes in which they lived.56
The empirical evidence invites us to further develop our project of think-
ing spatially. Archival sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
reveal the strong, often highly charged, importance of knowing and commu-
nicating 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 prac-
tices and customs. Everyday time was not comprehended as a linear transi-
tion, 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 under-
standing 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 capac-
ity 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 fur-
ther 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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SPATIAL HISTORY 243
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 defin-
able 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 struc-
tures and also by the senses of belonging attached to other less obvious (to
modern historians at least) landscapes and places.62 Furthermore, perambu-
lations 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 contra-
dictions are realized spatially. The contradictions of space thus make the
contradictions of social relations operative. In other words, spatial contra-
dictions “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 physi-
cal 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 par-
ish 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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244 NICOLA WHYTE
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 sur-
rounding 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 func-
tion societies need a minimum of agreed upon rules, established modes
of communication and (arguably) spatial demarcations’. Each constitu-
ent 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 mate-
rial and political conditions of any given moment. One way in which histo-
rians 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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SPATIAL HISTORY 245
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 memo-
ries and experiences of places and landscapes, which often had little to do
with elite representations of spatial order. Practices of everyday life, gather-
ing 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 mean-
ingful 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 there-
fore to include a deeper understanding of the processes and meanings of
inhabitation and dwelling. Rather than seeking to define moments of rup-
ture and transformation, arranged in chronological sequence, researchers
from across disciplines are now more concerned with the quotidian, rou-
tine, 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 under-
taking 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 alterna-
tive knowledge and practice.67 Mark Levene has recently urged historians
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246 NICOLA WHYTE
to seriously consider the ethics of writing history and to make visible alter-
native 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 eas-
ily 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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SPATIAL HISTORY 247
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith

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
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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248 NICOLA WHYTE
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
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
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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SPATIAL HISTORY 249
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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250 NICOLA WHYTE
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
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).
251
SPATIAL HISTORY 251
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.
252
253
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
254
254 SETH DENBO
modern London. The researchers modelled that day’s weather using histori-
cal 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 contemporar-
ies 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 mod-
ern 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 consid-
erations as the weather, the number of people attending and the construc-
tion 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 pri-
marily 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 undeni-
ably 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, envir-
onment, performance and even social relations. Modelling historic spaces is
explication, which involves layers of interpretation of the physical proper-
ties 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 giv-
ing 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 histori-
cal 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 com-
putational 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 mod-
elling 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 commu-
nities of practice, computational methodologies that ‘read’ large-scale cor-
pora 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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256 SETH DENBO
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 interpret-
ing 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 ques-
tions 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 prac-
tice, the best examples are rooted in long-established historical and histo-
riographical 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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AFTERWORD 257
beginning with the text, as most interfaces that provide access to archi-
val 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 man-
ner 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 pro-
ject, which employs an interactive map to present tabular data. This pro-
ject 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 occu-
pying 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 informa-
tion, it can be problematic to interpret what it meant. Mapping Occupation
attempts to tackle some of these discoveries and interpretive issues by provid-
ing 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 peo-
ple 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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258 SETH DENBO
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 under-
standing 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) tech-
nologies 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 spa-
tial 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 driv-
ing 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 inher-
ently 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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AFTERWORD 259
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 cul-
tural history narrowed the focus and interests of many historians and made
them marginal in the eyes of the public and policymakers. This controver-
sial 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 pub-
lic discourse. And the authors have called for a return to long-term social
history, larger questions and time scales in order to reinsert historical know-
ledge 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 ‘tradi-
tional 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 histo-
rians 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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260 SETH DENBO
vast digitized primary source collections has changed the window through
which we view past cultures. Libraries, archives and their classificatory sys-
tems 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 pre-
mium 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 num-
ber 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, regard-
less 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 relation-
ship 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 discoverabil-
ity, digital history offers the opportunity of making lived experience and
historical processes visible. This visibility has interpretive value and com-
municative 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 meth-
odologies. 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 publish-
ing. 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 transforma-
tions in how we communicate. This shift appears to be at least as momen-
tous 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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262 SETH DENBO
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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264 SETH DENBO
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
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
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/research-
publications/supporting-changing-research-practices-historians [accessed 23
May 2013].
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AFTERWORD 265
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/).
266
267
INDEX
3D visualization 15 Art Worlds (Becker) 132

3D visual models 255 Artist as Anthropologist, The
(Cowling) 136
Abrams, Lynn 236 Asian transnationalism 199–200
aggressive individualism 21 Australian National War Memorial 182
Alborn, Timothy 116 autobiographies 23–4
Algerian War 2 defects of 24
American Declaration of Independence,
1776 198 backwardness 193
American Historical Bain, Alexander 46–7, 57
Association 213–14 Ballantyne, Tony 198
American Historical Review Bauman, Zygmunt 10
(AHR) 192 Bayly, Chris 193
American Society for Environmental Beck, Ulrich 223
History 214 Beckert, Sven 100, 194–5
Animal Companions (Tague) 178 Bell, David 197
animal-human histories 13, 171 Benson, Etienne 180
animals in war 175 Bentham, Jeremy 176
breeding and milk production 182 Berger, John 131
debates and issues in 178–80 big data 15
in disciplines outside 177–8 Birke, Lynda 181
dogs as companions 174–5 Black, Jeremy 156
growth and impact of animal Boddice, Rob 192
studies 176–8 body and senses, history of 65–6
issue of agency 179 in academic knowledge 72
memorialization and commemoration analysis of corporeality 69–70
of animals 182–3 bodily experiences and their
modernity and animal presence 174 sensation 70–3
nature of experience 178–9 concepts of gender and sexuality 68
representation 179 criminal abortion and British sexual
role of horses and donkeys in culture 73–7
transporting goods 174 cultural historians’ view 71–2
Second World War, from animal feminist theorists’ views 67–8, 70
perspective 181 historians’ contributions to
animal studies scholars 177 understanding 66–70
Anitha, Sundari 98 historicized body 68–9
Annales school 6–7, 13, 92, 100 new keywords used 67
archival reorientation 27 non-essentialist approach 69
archives 26 Booth, Charles 122
Armiero, Marco 222 Bradshaw, John 174, 181
268
268 Index
Bread, Knowledge and Freedom abortion’s corporeality 75

(Vincent) 23–4 Alice Birmingham, case of 76–7
British imperial history 198–200 conviction for inducing
legacies of empire 204 miscarriage 74
Bryk, Nancy Villa 151 cultural representations of induced
Bulmer, Sarah 223 abortion 74–5
Burt, Jonathan 174, 179 instrumental miscarriage 76
Burton, Antoinette 30–2, 198 managing complications 76
Croce, Benedetto 116
Calvinism 5 Cronin, Keri 179
Camera Lucida (Barthes) 135 Cronon, William 213, 220
Campbell, Bruce 218 Crosby, Alfred 218
Campbell, John L. 99 Crozier, Ivan 72
Canaday, Margot 201 Cultural and Social History 12, 92
Cannadine, David 111 cultural history 3, 5, 10, 254, 259
Canning, Kathleen 26 of capitalism 85, 95–6, 100
Capital in the Twenty-First Century class 89
(Piketty) 99 congruence with social history 91–2
Carr, E. H. 21–2 foundation texts of 5
Carrier, James 114 individual and group identities 89–90
Carruthers, Jane 222 ‘other’, the 10
Chartier, Roger 26 present times 11–14
Cheese and the Worms, The (Ginzburg) 8 study of ‘representations’ 10
Childhood and Child Labour in the terminology 10
British Industrial Revolution cultural turn of the 1980s 25–7, 109–
(Humphries) 24, 118 11, 113, 119
Chinese transnationalism 199 Cumbers, Andrew 97
Church Missionary Society (CMS) 30 Cunfer, Geoff 258
civil rights movement 8 Curthoys, Ann 195
Civilisation (Clark) 131
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy Darwin, Charles 45–6, 48, 57
(Burkhardt) 5 Origin of Species 46
class and cotton mills, history of 111–12 Davison, Graeme 155
class conflict and revolution 89, 94, 97–8 de Certeau, Michel 26
class struggle 7 Deleuze, Gilles 176
Clifford, Jim 223 Democratic Subjects (Waugh) 27, 29
Cohn, Samuel 224 Department of History and
Columbian Exchange (Crosby) 218 Ethnography at Mizoram
Communist Party Historians Group 6 University 157
composure, concept of 34–5 Derrida, Jacques 29, 68, 177
connected histories 194 diary writing 27–9
Connelly, Matthew 194 diasporas, histories of 198–9
Connerton, Paul 241 Chinese diaspora 200
consumerism 11, 89 Dickson, Peter 115
consumption, history of 112–13 digital history 256, 259
Cooper, Timothy 223 digital tools and methods for 258–61
Cox, Pamela 156 Invisible Australians project 256–7
Crary, Jonathan 132 Mapping Occupation project 257–9
criminal abortion, history of 73–7 digital tools 253
269
Index 269
digitized history 260 Elias, Norbert 48

Discipline and Punish emotional communities 49
(Foucault) 132 emotional economy 50
DNA testing 204 emotional frontier 50
Donald, Diana 180 emotional refuge 50
Donne, John 253 emotions, history of 12, 20
Douglas, Mary 54 biocultural emotional
Downs, Gregory P. 257 change 48
Dubois, Laurent 197 biocultural emotions 50
challenge of neurosciences 52–8
Earsden, Thomas 233 emotional regime 49
Ecological Imperialism (Crosby) 218 empathy 53–5
ecological turn 214 historical reconstruction of past
economic historians 24, 89, 99, 111, emotions 46–7
118, 175 origins and developments 45–9
economic history 4, 7, 10, 114–17 reflex actions 47–8
bubbles and crashes 116 theoretical approaches and analytical
cultures of bookkeeping and financial tools 49–52
reporting 115 understanding the associations
distribution of wealth 116–17 of emotions in other times and
East India Company, study places 47
of 119–20 Emotions and the Will (Bain) 46
environmental movement, empathy 53–5
effect of 120 Empire of Nature, The (Mackenzie) 175
financial revolution 115 Engels, Friedrich 222
investments connections 116 England’s Great Transformation:
joint-stock enterprise and company Law, Labor and the Industrial
fraud 116 Revolution (Steinberg) 99
knowledge associated with liberal environmental historians 218–20
modernity 115 enquiries 215
link between production and methodologies and subjects 214
consumption 122 environmental histories 140–1, 213
London’s manufacturing of climate change 223–4
economy 122 demographic changes 221
material turn in 119–21 entanglements of humans and their
meanings of work and economic surroundings, study of 216
impact of child labour 118–19 environmental consequences of US
movement of capital to social race legislation, study of 221
formations 118 environmental inequalities 221–2
production and circulation of environmental racism 221–2
knowledge about markets 116 of fascist ideals of race, nation and
rise of mass consumer society 122 history 222
slave economies 121 groups and their relationships to
social composition of natural world, study of 220
shareholders 118 influence on human history 215
use of digital technologies 117–19 of interface between society and
wealth inequality and development of nature 222
capitalism 220–1 opportunities and threats to social
Eley, Geoff 91, 217 and cultural history 217–24
270
270 Index
processes of socio-environmental globalization 5

change 218–20 Globalization and Its Discontents
rural studies 222 (Stiglitz) 192
of social class 222–3 ‘Golden Record’ 129–30
storm flooding 220–1 Gordon-Reed, Annette 203–4
in United States 214 Great Divergence, The (Pomeranz) 193
Environmental History 214 Greer, Allan 195
Eurocentrism 139 Grosz, Elizabeth 70
European colonialism 214 Guattari, Félix 176
Evans, Richard 21 Guidoboni, Emanuela 221
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 7
Hall, Stuart 132, 194
Featherstone, David 97 Haraway, Donna 138
Febvre, Lucien 46 Hard Times (Terkel) 8
female historians 8 Hardenberg, Wilko 222
femininity 10, 28–9, 32–3, 90 Harvey, David 96
feminist history 32 Hemingses of Monticello,
Feudal Society (Bloch) 6 The: An American Family
Finch, Edmund 233, 236 (Gordon-Reed) 203
Finn, Margot 114, 122 Herod, Andrew 96
Fitzpatrick, Sheila 155 Herzog, Dagmar 202
flexible citizenship 199 Hidden from History: Three Hundred
Foster, Meg 155 Years of Women’s Oppression
Foucault, Michel 9, 25, 68, 114 and the Fight against It
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of (Rowbotham) 173
the Prison 25 Hill, Christopher 6
individual self 25 Hilton, Rodney 6
non-essentialist approach to the Hinton, James 26
body 69 Histoire de France (Michelet) 4
Francoist Spain 2 Historical Association in Britain 153
Freie Universität Berlin 154 historical disciplines, building 3–11
French national identity 1 historical materialism 98–9
French Revolution 9, 56, 197 history from below 6, 22
friendly societies 114 History Manifesto, The (Guldi and
Frisch, Michael 151 Armitage) 14, 259
Front National, France 1 History Workshop 92
Fudge, Erica 173, 177 historypin 159–60
Furet, François 9 Hitchcock, Tim 256
Hobsbawm, Eric 6
Gagnier, Regenia 25 Hockenhull, Joanna 181
Garfield, Seth 224 Hofmeyr, Isabel 193
Gate Gourmet strike, 2005 98 H-Public 159
Geertz, Clifford 7, 54 Hughes, J. Donald 215
Gell, Alfred 241 Hulme, Mike 224
gender and sexuality, histories of human history 19–20
198, 202 human sleep and sleep disorders,
geographical information systems (GIS) study of 13
technologies 258 Humphries, Jane 24, 118
Gilroy, Paul 194 Hunt, Lynn 56, 197
271
Index 271
identity politics 1 Lockwood, MaryAnn 74

imperial histories 198 Loftus, Donna 11, 192
imperialism 5 London Corresponding Society 98
industrialization 3 Lord Smail, Daniel 54
Ingold, T. 240 Lynd, Staughton 92
International Federation for Public
History 157 MacKenzie, John 175
International Seminar on Public Making of the English Working-Class,
History 157 The (Thompson) 173
Invisible Australians project 256–7 Man and the Natural World: Changing
Ismay, Penelope 114 Attitudes in England 1500–1800
(Thomas) 175
James, William 47 Mandela, Nelson 154
Jameson, Frederic 110 Mandler, Peter 12
Jay, Martin 133, 135 Mapping Occupation project 257–9
Johnson, Paul 110 market culture 13, 109–10
Jones, Andrew 241 cultural turn and rise of
Jones, Kevin M. 90 markets 113–14
Jordanova, Ludmilla 155 deindustrialization 112
Journal of Visual Culture 135 industrial revolution 112
Joyce, Patrick 27–9 social embeddedness of markets 110
wages and wage forms 113–14
Kalela, Jorma 156, 158, 162 Martin, Paul 161
Kean, Hilda 161 Marx, Karl 4
Kocka, Jürgen 90–1 Marxism 6, 9, 85, 90
Kozol, Wendy 194 masculinity 10, 28–9, 32–3, 36, 90
Mason, James 74
labour geography 96–7 Massey, Doreen 235, 237
labour history 88, 90 material turn 85–6
materialism and labour McAloon, Jim 163
relations 98–9 McCalman, Iain 155
migrant and casual labour 97–8 McCloskey, Deirdre 100
resistance movements 93, 98 McDowell, Linda 98
Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy 217 McKeown, Adam 200
landscape history 236, 238–9, 242 McLuhan, Marshall 140
Landseer, Edwin Henry 174–5 McNeill, John 215
Lanzoni, Susan 55 McShane, Clay 175
Last, Nella 181 Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II,
Lefebvre, Henri 96 The (Braudel) 6
Legacies of British Slave Ownership memoir writing 35–6
project 118 Merchant, Carolyn 213, 215
letter writing 30–2 microhistory 8
Levene, Mark 245 militant particularism 97
life history 23 Mill, John Stuart 115
life story 23 Mitchell, W. J. T. 132
Lincoln’s Body (Fox) 69 Monash University, Australia 154
Linzey, Andrew 178–9 monographs 24
lived landscape 13 Moore, Jason W. 223
living history 136 moral economy 50
272
272 Index
Morgan, John 192 Capital in the Twenty-First

Muldrew, Craig 114 Century 116
Myths of Sexuality (Nead) 137 political economy 114–15
political history 6
Nagel, Thomas 178 Poovey, Mary 115
Nash, Roderick 213 Popkin, Jeremy 197
National Guard 14 postmodernism 9
national historiography 195–6 post-structuralism 19, 24–6, 37, 89
national history 195 post-structuralist history 89
natural selection 45 subjectivity 25–7
Nature’s Metropolis (Cronon) 119 post-structuralist theory 26
Netherlands Institute for War poverty, history of 93–4
Documentation 154 Power, Eileen 8
neurohistory 56 pre-Columbian North America 220
neuroscientific explanation of preverbal or nonverbal modes of
emotions 52–8 expression 13
new historicism 11 Production of Space, The
new materialism 95–6 (Lefevbre) 234
New Social Order, 1999 157 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Nield, Keith 91 Capitalism, The (Weber) 5
Nonini, Donald 199 Protestant rule 253
Nora, Pierre 1 Protestant work ethic 5
North Carolina State University Protestantism 5
(NCSU) 253–4 psychoanalysis 35–7
Public Historian, The (Filene) 159
ocularcentrism 133 public historians 151–2, 160
Ogborn, Miles 119 in New Zealand 162
On Photography (Sontag) 131 purpose of 161
Ong, Aihwa 199 status of 156
oral history 8, 24, 33–4 in Western countries 155
up-close-and-personal qualities of 34 public history 14, 255
Orteleva, Peppino 154 in Britain 153
‘other’, the 29–32 in China 157
convergence of academic and 152–3
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth- demise of apartheid and rise of
Century Italy (Baxandall) 131 democratic South Africa 154
Paris 14 democratization of 151–2
Paris Commune 14 developments in 155–7
parish spaces 242–4 engagements 154
path dependence 99 forms in different countries 153–4
Pearson, Ruth 98 in India 157
personal narratives 23–4 in Indonesia 157
personal testimony 22–4, 27 levels of public engagement 160, 162
genres of 24 modern 152
Pew Centre for Arts and Heritage 162 movement 156
phallologocentrism 68 self-reflexive practice 157–60
Photography: A Middle-Brow Art social movements for rights and
(Bourdieu) 132 freedoms 151
Piketty, Thomas 99–100 Public History Reader, The 161
273
Index 273
punishment regimes 25 Seed, Patricia 194

Putnam, Lara 203 self-differentiation 31
Pyr, Joseph 74 selfhood 20
self and the ‘other’ 29–32
quantitative and qualitative Sen, Amartya 221
histories 22–4 sermons 253–4
autobiographies 23 Sewell, William 110
life history 23 Sharpe, Pam 114
life story 23 Silent Spring (Carson) 214
monographs 24 slavery 117–18, 200, 204
personal narratives 23–4 abolition of 198
personal testimony 22–4 Smiles, Samuel 122
working-class autobiographies 23 Smith, Adam 200
working-class memoirs 24 Smith, Mark 72
social class, structuralist idea of 27
Reagan, Ronald 9 social democracy 6
Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives social historians 4–5, 7, 9
(Summerfield) 32 social history 2–3, 22, 259
Reddy, William 49, 113 Annales approach 6
Religion and the Decline of Magic category of ‘experience’ 9–10
(Thomas) 7 class struggle 7
Republic of Nature, The (Fiege) 221 congruence with cultural
resistance movements 93, 98 history 91–2
Riello, Giorgio 122 democratizing tendencies of 8
Ripartito, Kenneth 100 early 6–7
Ritvo, Harriet 120, 215 history of science and scientific
River Cocket 233 discoveries 7
Roper, Michael 35–7 idea of 4
Rose, Nikolas 25 of middle class 7
Rosenstone, Robert 140 nineteenth-century social science 4
Rosenwein, Barbara 49 orthodoxies of 8–9
Rosenzweig, Roy 155 present times 11–14
Rothschild, Emma 120, 200 of race and legacies of imperialism 8
Royal Netherlands Institute of of slavery 8
Southeast Asian and Caribbean social movements 8
Studies 154 as a subset of economic history 4
Royal Society for the Prevention of of twentieth-century Britain 92
Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) 175 social neuroscience 56
Social Production of Art, The
Sagan, Carl 129 (Wolff) 132
Said, Edward 194 socioenvironmental history 218–19
Samuel, Raphael 135, 153 Soens, Tim 220
science and medicine, history of 12 Sometimes and Art: Nine Essays on
emotions and emotional History (Bailyn) 196
expressions 12 Sorabji, Cornelia 30–2
human sleep and sleep disorders 13 Sörlin, Sverker 215
Scott, James C. 93 South African Truth and Reconciliation
Scott, Joan Wallach 9–10, 71, 201 Commission 154
screen memory 36 spatial history 255
274
274 Index
binary spatial categorizations 244 taskscape 240

landscape history 236, 238–9, 242 Taylor, William 243
Lefebvre’s philosophy of space 234– Tea Party movement 1
5, 237–8, 241 technology of the self 24, 28–9
materiality of space 241 Thatcher, Margaret 9
meanings of space 234–5 Thatcherism 95
parish space 242–4 Thelen, David 155
production of space 237–44 Thompson, E.P. 6, 67, 93
of public and private spheres 235–6 approach to materialism and cultures
representational space 237 of class 94–100
social space 241 definition of class 94
spaces of capitalism 239 Making of the English Working
spatial homogeneity 243 Class, The 95
spatial practices 237 model of ‘moral economy’ of social
symbiotic relationship between space protest 93, 95
and time 238 Thompson, F. M. L. 175
spatial triad 237 Todd, Selina 92, 94–5
spatial turn 172, 234–7, 239, 244, 246 Tomlinson, Ann 33–5
Spirited: Australia’s Horse Story 183 Traces on the Rhodian Shore
splitting 36 (Glacken) 215
Srishti Institute of Art, Design and traditional historiographical
Technology, Bangalore 157 narrative 88–91
Stearns, Carol 50 transimperial, idea of 194
Stearns, Peter 50 transnational history 14, 191–2, 255
Steedman, Carolyn 37 approaches in US history 196–7
Stoler, Ann 201 definition 192–7
Stone, Lawrence 88 distinctions between world, global
subaltern people 93 and 193
subjectivity 20, 27–8 of families and diasporas 198–201
discursive constructions 32–4 impact on smaller
economic historian’s view 24 historiographies 195
idea of the ‘other’ 29–32 of interracial families 201–2
institutions and discourses, following merits of 197
cultural turn 25–7 patriarchy and narratives of
intersubjective relationship between kinship 201
teller and audience 35 of sex and sexuality 202
post-structural approach 25–7 sources of 203
psychoanalytic concepts 35–7 subfields of 197–202
quantitative and qualitative transnational and intercontinental
histories 22–4 relationships 195–6
subjective and intersubjective ways of doing 197–204
composure 34–5 Trump, Donald 2
technology of the self 24, 28–9
Waugh’s diary, case study 27–9 UN World Cultural Heritage
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 194 Site 154
Swyngedouw, Erik 219 United Kingdom Independence Party 1
University of Amsterdam 154
Tagg, John 132 University of Technology Sydney,
Tarr, Joel 175 Australia 154
275
Index 275
University of the Western Cape, South visual studies 130–1, 194

Africa 154 idea of an ‘anthology of
urbanization 3 images’ 131
Urwick, Lyndall 35–6 ideologies in visual images 131–2
US National Council on Public History interdisciplinarity of 131
(NCPH) 159, 163 sites and modalities of images 133–4
US National Park Service 155 voluntarism 91
veterinary historians 182 Walkowitz, Daniel 90

Vincent, David 23 War Horse: Fact or Fiction? 183
Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Warde, Paul 215
Project 253–4 wartime femininity 33–4
visual culture 13, 129–31 Waugh, Edwin 27–9
theoretical foundations of visual Ways of Seeing (Berger) 131
studies 131–5 Weber, Max 4
visual history 135–9 Weiner, Douglas 219
digitized versions of objects 140 welfare states 6
forms of images 137–8 West/ non-West dichotomy 193
hybridized discourse 136–7 Western Anglophone social history 87
intertextual discursive approach 136 Western environmentalism 214
media images 141 White, Richard 214
present times and future 139–41 William and Mary Quarterly 196
scientific images, study of 141 Williams, Raymond 215
scientific vision and materiality, Winch, Donald 115
study of 141 Wolfe, Cary 177
of social movements 139–40 women’s history 8, 10, 179
sources 136, 139 women’s movement 8
visual materials 129 Wood, Gordon S. 196–7
Visual Methodologies: An Introduction Woods, Abigail 182
to Research with Visual Materials working-class memoirs 24
(Rose) 133, 135 Worster, Donald 213
276
277
278
279
280

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i

NEW DIRECTIONS IN SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY

Series Editors: Sasha Handley (University of Manchester, UK), Rohan

Forthcoming from Bloomsbury:

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

© Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam, Lucy Noakes and Contributors, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on

British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Series: New Directions in Social and Cultural History

Series design by Liron Eilenberg

Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

List of figures vii

Introduction: Towards new social and cultural histories 1

PART ONE Histories of the human 19

1 Subjectivity, the self and historical practice 21

PART TWO The material turn 85

4 A return to materialism? Putting social history back into

7 Public histories 151

PART THREE Challenges and provocations 171

8 Animal-​human histories 173

Afterword: Digital history 253

6.1 The ‘Golden Record’, launched on Voyager 1 and 2, 1977 130

New Directions in Social and Cultural History represents an attempt to

Judith A. Allen, educated at the University of Sydney and Macquarie

Paul Ashton was professor of public history at the University of Technology,

Rob Boddice works at the Department of History and Cultural Studies,

Pamela Cox is professor of sociology and social history at the University

Seth Denbo is director of scholarly communication and digital initiatives

Meg Foster is a PhD candidate in history at the University of New South

Durba Ghosh is associate professor of history and is affiliated with Asian

Sasha Handley is senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of

Devils in the Early Modern World’ at Manchester’s John Rylands Library

Hilda Kean is visiting professor of history at the University of Greenwich and

Donna Loftus is senior lecturer in history at the Open University with an

Rohan McWilliam is professor of modern British history at Anglia Ruskin

John Morgan is an environmental and social historian. He is a lecturer

Frank Mort is professor of cultural histories at the University of Manchester.

Katrina Navickas is reader in history at the University of Hertfordshire.

(2015) and Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–​1815 (2009).

Lucy Noakes is professor in history at the University of Essex. Her publica-

Penny Summerfield is professor emerita in modern history at the University

Jennifer Tucker is associate professor of modern history and science in society

Introduction: Why social and cultural history?

2 SASHA HANDLEY, ROHAN MCWILLIAM AND LUCY NOAKES

Building historical disciplines

4 SASHA HANDLEY, ROHAN MCWILLIAM AND LUCY NOAKES

6 SASHA HANDLEY, ROHAN MCWILLIAM AND LUCY NOAKES

Early social history was thus distinguished by its willingness to bor-

8 SASHA HANDLEY, ROHAN MCWILLIAM AND LUCY NOAKES

onwards of ‘microhistory’: taking an episode from the past (especially one

ambition of social history was essentially to produce a synthesis that paid

10 SASHA HANDLEY, ROHAN MCWILLIAM AND LUCY NOAKES

claiming to be recreating past experience, historians fail to reflect on their

modernity’.20 This describes the twenty-​first-​century world which is shaped

Where are we today?

12 SASHA HANDLEY, ROHAN MCWILLIAM AND LUCY NOAKES

approaches to familiar questions as well as opened the door to new sources

seventeenth-​century European writers and artists to stir fear, anxiety and

14 SASHA HANDLEY, ROHAN MCWILLIAM AND LUCY NOAKES

What does the future hold?

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

8 Animal-human histories 173

(2015) and Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–1815 (2009).

modernity’.20 This describes the twenty-first-century world which is shaped

seventeenth-century European writers and artists to stir fear, anxiety and

In contrast, Jane Humphries, an economic historian who uses working-

work a middle-class woman should do. She rejected a secretarial posting

there is a library devoted to the collection of diaries. See <http://www.

Gammerl, Emotional Styles –Concepts and Challenges, special issue of

49 Smail, On Deep History, pp. 147–8.