Category: Essays
Lucy Jane Santos’ ‘Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium’
Lucy Jane Santos In the late 19th century that Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a previously unknown form of powerful radiation that was invisible to the human eye. This type of ray, which no one (including Röntgen) fully understood at the time, was so mysterious that… Continue Reading “Lucy Jane Santos’ ‘Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium’”
James Forbes’ Mango and the Art of British Indian Empire
Apurba Chatterjee In 1765, James Forbes, a mere Scottish lad of less than sixteen years of age, set sail to India following his appointment as a Writer for the English East India Company (EIC) in Bombay. Forbes was to stay in India for eighteen… Continue Reading “James Forbes’ Mango and the Art of British Indian Empire”
Historians Call for a Review of Home Office Citizenship and Settlement Test
21 July 2020 Historians Call for a Review of Home Office Citizenship and Settlement Test We are historians of Britain and the British Empire and writing in protest at the on-going misrepresentation of slavery and Empire in the “Life in the UK Test”, which… Continue Reading “Historians Call for a Review of Home Office Citizenship and Settlement Test”
How to Run an Empire: Early Modern Style
L.H. Roper Dr C. Annemieke Romein recently offered a very helpful discussion here of how the habitual misunderstanding and misuse of nineteenth-century characterisations of ‘-isms’ and ‘the state’ continue to obscure our understanding of the nature and history of European government prior to 1789. … Continue Reading “How to Run an Empire: Early Modern Style”
Edgerton & Empire: Nationalism, Imperialism and Decolonisation
Liam Liburd One of the indirect and unintended side-effects of the tragic murder of George Floyd by an officer of the Minneapolis Police Department in late May has been a renewed effort to confront Britain’s own history of racism, especially that in the form… Continue Reading “Edgerton & Empire: Nationalism, Imperialism and Decolonisation”
Healing the Whig schism: 300 years on
Robin Eagles Fractures within political parties are nothing new. In 1717, the apparent unity that the Hanoverian accession had instilled in the Whigs came to an end amid infighting over direction of policy and disagreement over who was to hold what post in the… Continue Reading “Healing the Whig schism: 300 years on”
The jokes always saved us: humour in the time of Stalin
Jonathan Waterlow This piece was originally published at Aeon under a creative commons licence, and has been reproduced here with the agreement and encouragement of the author. Stalinism. The word conjures dozens of associations, and ‘funny’ isn’t usually one of them. The ‘S-word’ is… Continue Reading “The jokes always saved us: humour in the time of Stalin”
Worrying about the Field of the History of Emotions in Ireland – A report
Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi Back in November, when the world was still in a relatively ‘normal’ state, I asked Dr Hannah Parker about the possibly of writing a report for the new History website concerning a series of events I was organising under the title,… Continue Reading “Worrying about the Field of the History of Emotions in Ireland – A report”
How to run a country: Early modern style.
C. Annemieke Romein Let us assume you are governing an early modern ’country’: how should you provide order? How do you keep its inhabitants safe? And how might you organise governance and policy-making? Most researchers who deal with these questions tend to focus on… Continue Reading “How to run a country: Early modern style.”
Emotions and Work: an interview with Agnes Arnold-Forster and Alison moulds
In November 2019, Agnes Arnold-Forster and Alison Moulds held ‘Emotions and Work’, a day-long conference funded by the Royal Historical Society and the Wellcome Trust via the Living with Feeling Project at QMUL, exploring the troubled relationship between emotions and labour, and considering how… Continue Reading “Emotions and Work: an interview with Agnes Arnold-Forster and Alison moulds”
History Journal 