Celebrating Issue 250: A Special Virtual Issue

Only something by Eric Hobsbawm could properly convey the character and quality of Past and Present in its first decade. By the end of it the journal’s reputation was being established once and for all by the series of articles on the ‘General Crisis’ of the seventeenth century, which Eric had begun in nos. 5 and 6, and which produced the first collected volume in Past and Present Publications, Crisis in Europe: 1560-1660 (1965).  Less familiar, at least to me, was Eric’s article on ‘The Machine Breakers’ published in the very first number of the journal in 1952. Here he is, attacking Jack Plumb’s view that Luddism was a ‘pointless, frenzied, industrial jacquerie’, and arguing instead that it was often a rational form of bargaining – ‘collective bargaining by riot’ in a famous phrase. No one would now write so confidently about the economic role of the English state as Eric does here (and again in some of his remarks on the General Crisis), but there is no doubt at all that he had altered perceptions of Luddites — and perceptions of economic crises — for good.

Paul Slack

Moses Finlay’s article has a striking conversational tone. It was originally a talk to the Hellenic Society, then broadcast in shortened form on the Third Programme and published in the Listener (the first note tells us). I don’t think we publish much if anything quite like that now — and in fact it was at an extreme end of the spectrum even then: much of what was published smelt much more of the lamp. The form of this article nonetheless seems to me to reflect something enduring about how the editorial board conceives of the journal: as oriented to a broad and non-specialist, even if primarily academic-history readership. The article also combines erudition with breadth of vision, focusses on interpretation rather than just narration, and combines openness to the otherness of other times and places with a drive to understand, in common sense terms, how things really worked. All of which seem to me to be admirable qualities. They’re also ones that we continue to look for when we choose what to publish.

Joanna Innes

I loved this article when it came out, in part because Brazilian cangaceiros, bandits, had for long fascinated me; in part because it showed such a convincing view of how bandits always have to work inside other rural political structures. In short, Lewin argued that the famous bandit of the Brazilian North-East, Antônio Silvino, active 1897–1914, legendary in his time and after as a ‘good’ bandit, robbing the rich and giving to the poor etc., was kept afloat less by the rural poor than by the local bosses, coroneis (literally ‘colonels’), who ruled the sertão, the dry backlands of the inland North-East. The article is deft in its balancing of the oral and chapbook literature of the sertão, which still (just about) exists, against the letter-collections of one of the main oligarchs of Silvino’s zone of operations, Epitácio Pessoa, Brazilian president in 1919–22, and his family — the core of Lewin’s later thesis–book, Politics and Parentela in Paraíba. It is resolutely unromantic in its depiction of banditry, while not resorting to the demonization which other revisionist works on Brazilian bandits sometimes engage in.

Rereading it now, many of its themes are by now — forty years later — less novel. Of course bandits had to deal with local bosses. Of course their Robin Hood side had to be largely propaganda. Of course local patronage structures dominated poor and remote rural societies like these. And, also of course, no-one who was a bandit leader for seventeen years (most bandits manage only two or three) could have managed it without some pretty powerful protection. But the article stands all the same: for it remains one of the best studies I have yet seen of how local patronage structures actually worked in a society like this, linking the legal end (getting in the votes and suchlike) to the illegal end (local coercion, feud). Silvino was an operator on his own account, but the Pessoa family were bigger operators; both used the other, but guess which side was the more effective. And yet the Brazilian cangaço, the bandit community, doesn’t get denatured in this text; what it was like to be a bandit in that dry world comes through all the same. So the article remains as just good as it ever was.

Chris Wickham

In 1977 I was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, Australia. I wanted to go on to study in the US but had no idea how. So, I hand-wrote a letter to Natalie Zemon Davis.

There was no reason why she should have replied to a student she had never met at a university she had never visited. But I got a closely typed blue aerogramme from her, which I still have. It told me not only where to go, but what the weather was like, who I might work with, and whether it would be fun, things I could not then have found out from Australia. I was too shy to ask if she would take me on herself.

I knew Natalie’s work because I had followed it in Past and Present. Reading it was electrifying — it showed a different way of doing history. It did not make bombastic claims about causation or propose a grand sweeping analysis of history; it did not attack other historians. Instead, it brought a whole past epoch to life and opened up a distant, foreign world. It made me — and many of my generation — feel that I wanted to be a historian, and that I could be; that I didn’t have to study political history or wars or write narrative history; and that, even though I was in Australia, there was an international community of historians.

Natalie perfected the Past and Present article as a form, and that is why I have chosen her ‘The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon’ of 1981.  The argument builds over the course of the article, as she takes you through possible themes and interpretations, while the process of history-writing takes place as you watch; it truly is an ‘essay’. By choosing the unforgettable detail she lets you see Lyon in your mind’s eye, its two rivers, the ‘slow-moving, feminine Saone’ and the rapid Rhone, ‘powerful, masculine… and dangerous’; the bridges, the churches. When I first read the 1981 piece, I was disappointed: where were the women? Why all this focus on rivers and buildings? Reading it now, I realise just how path-breaking it was. She was one of the first to make historians think not only about space (now a whole sub-discipline) but also about movement, the flows of people, goods and ideas. She wrestles with explaining religious worldviews, showing that Protestants’ geographical mobility, involvement in skilled crafts and activities ‘at [the] nodes of oral and printed communication’ gave them a view of the community based in networks of communication, like the sinews of the body. Catholics, by contrast, could be found in a wide range of trades from ‘banking to baking’ and traditional forms of organization. Their doctrine and ritual undergirded ‘another sense of place, rhythm and community in the city’, and a more ordered, corporeal vision of the town as a body. Class and occupation become not determinants but constituents of two potentially different religious visions, two ‘languages’, two different styles of communication and connection to worlds beyond the town. Reading it now, I’m not sure it entirely works, or that it explains the violence that erupted between the two. But it remains a profound attempt to conceptualise religion through symbolic meaning, while embracing human life in all its elements, in movement through space and time.

Lyndal Roper

In this stimulating article Gordon T. Stewart mines the symbolic significance of the British ‘conquest of Everest’ on 29 May 1953, which fortuitously coincided with coronation of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. I was probably predisposed to like this piece, since as a boy in the early 1960s I was fascinated by the Himalayas, with their vertiginous peaks, plunging precipices, icy wastes, and cruel weather, not to speak of the shuttered kingdoms of Tibet and Nepal that sat on the ‘roof of the world’. I remember wondering about the exact height of Everest;[1] wondering if George Mallory and Andrew Irvine had actually conquered the summit in 1924 before their mysterious disappearance; wondering if ‘Sherpa Tensing’ (as I knew him) or Edmund Hillary had been the first to reach the top of Everest in 1953. In masterly fashion, Stewart analyses how attempts on Everest between the Edwardian era and the era of decolonization were narrated in ways that provided the British public with assurance that imperial verities were still intact.  He depicts the interwar mountaineering world as a preserve of upper-middle-class men, and anatomizes how the military cast of the 1953 expedition resonated with a public-school ethos, with ideals of sporting valour, with aspirations to raise up native peoples, and with a commitment to scientific discovery. In the second part of the article, he explores the representation of Tenzing Norgay in the British press and, in particular, the way in which his two wrist watches were interpreted. Stewart argues that a ‘one-dimensional orientalist interpretation’ that reads the watches as signs of his naiveté is insufficient, since Tenzing did not remain ‘encapsulated in the child-like, two-wrist-watch image’. Rather his entry on to the public stage signalled a transition from an old imperial world where brave natives worked loyally for British sahibs, to a new world where subaltern figures such as Tenzing could begin to communicate their histories in their own voices.

The article prompted a lengthy riposte from Peter H. Hansen that not only raised substantive differences of interpretation but also opened up some then very current issues about how to practise cultural history. In postmodern vein, he argued that Stewart’s analysis rested on a disputable notion of a unitary ‘master narrative’, and that in fixing Tenzing’s ‘voice’ in opposition to that narrative, he ‘reproduces the very thing he wants to criticise — a neo-Orientalist interpretation of the “conquest of Everest”’. Hansen countered that Tenzing’s ‘voice’ was not merely an object represented by others but a ‘dynamic and multiple subjectivity…defined by his movement through a variety of discursive positions’. 

For me, reading the article after 25 years I am struck less by the theoretical issues of whether the subaltern can speak and more by Stewart’s conclusion that the Everest story was ‘a lingering farewell to empire’.  Certainly, the symbolism of Everest today no longer bespeaks the values and valour of the British empire. Its melting icecaps, its litter of human excrement, spent oxygen tanks, abandoned tents, empty cans and bottles, its hour-long queues to get to the top in perishing temperatures, evoke the global climate crisis and the evils of mass tourism. In fact I’m pretty sure that even in the 1960s, the conquest of Everest did not exercise its grip on my boyish imagination because of any evocation of imperial romance,  perhaps due to the fact that I grew up in an Irish-Catholic, working-class community in Halifax. In my heart, I was convinced that Tenzing had reached the top first, but that the Establishment had hushed it up. In post-Brexit times, however, it is salutary to remember that if the imperial symbolism of Everest is long a thing of the past, there have been other conduits through which the reverberations of empire have continued up to the present.  

S. A. Smith

[1] 29,032 feet, according to the recent agreement between Nepal and China.

‘Rewriting the Soul’ is a beautifully crafted study of how two Flemish missionaries confronted the psychic trauma inflicted by colonisation in twentieth-century Africa. It is a triangular tale of two men devoted to garnering souls for Christ in the Congo and the former colonial agent who campaigned against indigenous hygiene practices that appeared to explain the worrying infertility of a ‘dying race’. It patiently unravels the logic that led the latter to tour the region giving public lectures on how to make babies and which drove the former to blame not sin but forced labour for the ‘degeneration’ of the Mongo people. Provoked by a chance discovery in an archive, this is a classic microhistory with a twist. By piecing together its scattered fragments, Nancy Rose Hunt focuses our attention on the metanarratives of Belgian colonialism that this episode contests, destabilises and ‘unmakes’. Disrupting a conventional ‘heart of darkness’ story of empire, violence and humanitarian intervention, what she offers is a profound meditation on the politics of memory, subject formation and subjectivity. What she exposes is the angst and guilt felt by Europeans confronting the legacies of their own colonialism. As fresh and compelling now as it was when it first appeared, like all the very best P&P articles, this one speaks trenchantly to the present as well as the past. It feels like a tract for our times.

Alexandra Walsham

When we received ‘The United States as a Developing Nation’, it was clear that it had been deliberately written for Past and Present. It was submitted to us, and published as, a ‘Viewpoint’. We relaunched these several years ago, the aim being to encourage more pointed, even deliberately controversial, historiographical interventions. There was a worry that the conventional form of the academic article, with its focus on primary research and historiographical positioning, was discouraging the more adventurous, even polemical, type of essay Past and Present had seen in its earliest issues. At first, we commissioned or encouraged the submission of a few of these ourselves, but eventually we began receiving some really excellent ones from out of the blue.

Link and Maggor’s is among the very best. It tackles a huge subject, the rise of the United States as an industrial economy, turns conventional analysis on its head and assumes there is nothing exceptional about America’s economic growth. Taking their cue from Blackbourn and Eley’s famous critique of the German Sonderweg thesis, they instead compared the developing US economy to any number of other nations’, particularly that of Argentina. In doing so, they present a powerful argument about the importance of state institutions in shaping the markets we live in. They brought a series of debates within economic history back into the historical mainstream and, admittedly following others, placed capitalism back at the centre of historical analysis.

During the review process, more than one of the readers remarked that the author(s) of the articles appeared to be looking to provoke a debate. But that is exactly what we were looking for in a viewpoint. As with many of the others we have published, Link and Maggor’s intervention has prompted many a seminar and a response on the page. And like those others, I am sure we will see further references to their paper in future submissions to Past and Present.

Matthew Hilton

This beautifully written and moving article uses civilian witness testimony about killings during the Irish Revolution to understand the impact of this violence on non-combatants in particular. Its focus is on ‘another set of voices’ from those of the soldiers most commonly heard; at its heart is the question posed early on: ‘In a history of killing who do historians choose to listen to and what are some of the consequences of that choice?’

Its argument is subtle and cumulative; its focus on emotion and representation rather than the political has implications for all histories of war and violence as well as for the historiography of the Irish Revolution. Dolan uses the insights of early modern historians to comprehend the ways in which testimony may be shaped, and what we can learn from how witnesses chose to represent and control their stories. The article’s exploration of what terror meant and how it worked is powerful and resonant, the intimacy and immediacy of the violence conveyed to the reader with sparing, devastating quotation.

‘Is it easier to let these kinds of voices fade away and stay with the politics of whose side [those who were killed] were on?’ Dolan asks. Quite possibly, but this essay provides compelling reasons not to do so.

Anna Bayman