It's Always More Complicated

Steps towards identifying new Black voters in 18th-century Westminster and Hertfordshire, way back in 1700s, when being able to vote meant having certain property qualifications e.g. being a householder.

***

What did the Romans ever do for us? Not so much of the benefits we're always told: Urban populations in southern Britain experienced a decline in health that lasted for generations after the Romans arrived.

***

The history of mutual aid organisations: Prior to the development of government and employer health insurance and financial services, friendly or ‘benevolent’ societies were an important part of many people’s lives.

***

There are no pure cultures: All of our religions, stories, languages and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange throughout history (and I don't seem to have saved the links about the numbers of immigrants in medieval England....)

***

This is an older link I don't think I ever posted: Vitriol to Corrosive Fluid: ‘Acid’ Assault in the Twentieth Century:

There seems to have been a spike in cases in the late 1960s, but the pattern established in the nineteenth century was clearly at an end. With fewer cases occurring, and fewer making headline news, the incidence of this unique offence continued to fall until its reappearance in a different guise in the twenty-first century. However, the ongoing digitization of late twentieth-century newspapers may yet reveal further cases.

Dept of, Wow symbolism: Garden shed of vaccine pioneer Edward Jenner added to heritage at risk register:

It was there that he first trialled a vaccine for smallpox in the late 18th century. The hut, built from brick and rubble stone with a simple thatched roof, was christened “the Temple of Vaccinia” by Jenner.

***

Dept of, maybe the murmuration is trying to tell us something: Starling Spectacular over the Avalon Marshes - is something foretold stirring???

***

Dept of, no, really, I am trying to avoid going 'urgent phallic much' over this arboricultural saga....: How the giant sequoia came to England:

Lobb collected seed, shoots, and seedlings. In fewer than two years’ time these would give rise to thousands of saplings, snatched up by wealthy Victorians to adorn great British estates. The larger-than-life conifer, so symbolic of the vast American wilderness, suddenly became a status symbol in Britain.

***

Dept of, now thinking about ancient books bound in selkie skin as basis for fantasy: Eight pages bound in furry seal skin may be Norway's oldest book. You know, the Danes really do not have a very good record:

But when Denmark ruled over Norway, old books and manuscripts were sent out of the country. The Danish king was the one who claimed important relics of the past.

***

Dept of, are cockatoos actually parrots (apparently yes)? There’s a statue of a dead parrot in Greenwich.

Although the big London celebration was last Sunday: Diwali On Trafalgar Square: Sunday 27th October 2024 - and as I haven't seen anything to indicate that there were any kind of ructions, presumably it all went off peaceably.

London has, of course, long been a multicultural city. While I daresay we could go back to the Romans and the diverse citizen of that Empire inhabiting Londinium, I will present for your information this, lately brought to attention by The National Archives: List of immigrant Londoners from 1483: This 15th-century list of ‘alien’ residents, gathered for tax purposes, gives us a remarkable insight into London’s medieval immigrant population. It only includes those immigrants who were supposed to pay the 'alien subsidy':

Italian merchants, Hanseatic merchants (members of the Northern European Hanseatic League, predominantly of German origin), and Castilian (Spanish) merchants were all exempt, as were those French people from parts of France that had formerly been subject to the English Crown, for example Normandy.

In Bishopsgate Ward in 1483, Matthew the Greek and his German wife Johanna lived alongside their Scottish neighbour John Broun, who made sheaths for swords. Benedict Calaman and his wife Antonia had travelled from much further afield – the tax record describes them as ‘de India’, from India. Elsewhere in London, Lombards (from what is now northern Italy) and Icelanders rubbed shoulders with Picards (from what is now northern France) and Danes.

Incidentally, on the Danes, this news item suggested something I thought following an exchange earlier this year, that they too have a not at all pristine relationship to European colonialism:

Many Danish people were ignorant of how strongly influenced by their colonial history they were, even as many identified as liberal advocates of human rights. “So when I try to make them aware, by speaking Greenlandic, that there are actually inequalities, that the things that they’ve been taught their whole lives – that they’re ‘good’ colonisers trying to teach savage people how to live a good and healthy life – it’s difficult for them to understand or admit that it might not have all been good,” she said.

Further multicultural exchanges: Missing Pieces Project maps buildings in 189 locations where African American abolitionists spoke against slavery:

The story of how black Americans came to Britain to fight slavery has still not been fully recognised. The Missing Pieces Project aims to shed new light on the struggle by charting the locations on the lecture tours of 19th-century activists. In church halls, factories and theatres across Britain, Christians, workers, radicals and liberals came to hear African American abolitionists talk and show solidarity with the cause. Now, buildings in 189 cities, towns and villages have been added to Historic England’s Missing Pieces Project, which uncovers overlooked stories behind historic sites with an interactive online map.

And unexpected, given that even these days the Met is not entirely noted for its record on policing in a multicultural society: Branford, Robert (1817x20–1869), police superintendent, was born in Stoke by Nayland, Suffolk, the son of Hannah Branford and an unknown father of African descent.

Yesterday I noted on the site formerly known at Twitter an exchange between somebody who had just edited a scholarly volume on the history of the British Empire and colonialism, and somebody who wanted to know 'and did they say was it a force for good or bad?', to which somebody else immediately responded that of course Woke Academics were going to mark it down BAD.

To which the understandably annoyed historian responded that doing that sort of thing, for something that existed over a long period of time, vast swathes of the globe, a enormous range of cultures and uncounted millions of people, is not actually something that historians do:

[S]erious historians would never think it reasonable, helpful or rational to say whether a vast sweep of history involving trillions of diverse & largely unrecorded experiences was ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

Clio descends with a codfish, if only.

However, and conversely, there is such a thing as over-complicating the issue: New research suggests some 16th-century writers were confident Shakespeare was the pseudonym of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Using, as far as I can see, the equivalent of doing numerology of the Book of Revelation to predict the Apocalypse.

Okay, maybe people were going around claiming that the Earl of Oxford was secretly dabbling in that low genre, writing for The Theatre, shock horror? Really??? (Because presumably at that early date Shakespeare himself had not attained the status of cultural icon that needed showing up as Not Really That Oik.)

Thinking of that biography of Laetitia Pilkington and how she was actually a ghost-writer for posh blokes wot wanted a reputation as poet and wit, has anyone ever mooted the possibility that Oxford's works were really by Mr W. S.?

‘There is joy, and there is rage’: the new generation of novelists writing about motherhood: not sure it's saying anything very remarkable, but I will give it massive kudos for actually acknowledging the history there:

Books about motherhood come in waves: the recent spate only the latest in a long line of literary endeavours. In the 1950s there was Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages. The 1960s wave saw Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, alongside Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; the 1970s The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, and In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker. In the 1980s writing about motherhood became even more transgressive and imaginative, with Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. The early 2000s saw an explosion in nonfiction, including accounts by Rachel Cusk and Anne Enright. And on and on, up to the present day, where no matter how much is written about motherhood, it feels as though there is still more to say.

***

I am just a bit suspicious of the story of Tipu Sultan’s female entourage, untold for centuries on the grounds of 'untold by whom?' and maybe there is a rich oral or vernacular tradition there???

Says Howes, “The reports I’ve found were by British men, so when the women of Tipu’s court are discussed, you know it is because they were making a lot of trouble. That is what has made this project so interesting for me. We are helping them have their #MeToo moment.”

***

‘With Her Own Hair’: A Victorian Prisoner’s Art: Arrested over 400 times, Annie Parker found redemption in intricate cross-stitch and crochet using her own hair.:

Between her hairwork embroideries and her presence in workhouse records and newspapers from Kent, London and further afield, we know significantly more about Annie Parker than we do about many other late 19th-century women. It is clear that Parker had become an object of widespread fascination. But even with this surplus of information, we are left trying to find the ‘real’ Annie Parker, the one not sensationalised in newspapers as a ‘notorious woman’ described as having ‘“a screw loose somewhere,” and it seems […] to have been just where the alcohol goes to’. In print she is mythologised and sensationalised, her agency lost. In stitch we have not only her own words, but also a glimpse into how she expressed her emotions, passed the time, and perhaps found some peace behind prison bars.

Out in the open and not as confined as myth gives her out: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Forgotten Treasure at the Intersection of Science and Poetry.

***

Readers of Nancy Mitford will recall that one of Uncle Matthew's objections to peeresses sitting in the House of Lords was the vexed question of loos for the Ladies: here is a fascinating article about historical sanitary (it all sounds a leetle insanitary, no?) provision in the Houses of Parliament: The smallest room in the House.

I cannot help thinking there is a lot of fusty ol' nostalgia in the objections here: : "Cultural vandalism" row as Kew Gardens and Natural History Museum plan to move collections out of London. There is, wow, here we are treading where Sir Joseph Banks trod, and there is, decent facilities for modern times research.... And me, personally, myself, have more than once looked out of a plane window on the way into or out of Heathrow, and observed the location of The National Archives, and winced, and wondered why they thought there was an eligible place to store archives? Looks a bit At Risk to me, rather close to the river an' all. Have absolutely no sentimental attachment to former locations(s) of Public Record Office in Chancery Lane and places thereabouts, but was this ideal?

Also, given the faff of getting to Kew from other parts of London, not sure e.g. Reading would be that much less inconvenient.

***

Yay for English Heritage: Colonial past must be in mainstream of UK history, says new English Heritage chief:

Merriman, the chief executive of the Horniman Museum in south London, is due to take up his post at Britain’s highest-profile heritage organisation in the new year. English Heritage, a charitable trust, looks after the national heritage collection of more than 400 historic monuments on behalf of the state, including Tintagel Castle, Osborne, parts of Hadrian’s wall and Stonehenge....

Under Merriman’s stewardship, the Horniman formally returned its collection of 72 Benin City artefacts, looted by British forces in 1897, to Nigerian ownership. Such returns of artefacts, he said, “will now be an inevitable although small part of the heritage practice that acknowledges the history of slavery and colonialism which is at the background of so many UK collections”.

And on problematic Stuff in museums, a fascinating article on how dodgy dealers set up scams: Reputation laundering and museum collections: patterns, priorities, provenance, and hidden crime:

[T]he knowledge that is hidden within the provenance histories of multiple museum objects across multiple institutions can provide us with information about forms of crime that we do not expect and are not actively looking for. In particular this includes crimes where object-museum interactions were, themselves, not criminal, but the interactions were crucial to the modus operandi of a criminal towards committing fraud, tax evasion, etc. We assert that an object in a museum’s collection may not, itself, be illegal, at least not in any provable way, but could be a key element in the committing of other crimes. Second, we argue that if we focus our provenance efforts only on singular objects with expected problems, we will overlook important patterns of crime that are invisible to a non-networked approach where particular assumptions have already been made. Finally, we argue that provenance researchers and museums need to find effective ways to reset focus and challenge priorities to move beyond locating what we expect to see in our collections.

It never existed: The idea of a ‘precolonial’ Africa is theoretically vacuous, racist and plain wrong about the continent’s actual history:

How often do we encounter this designation in discourses about other continents? If not, what explains the peculiar representation – treating the continent as if it were a single unit of analysis – when it comes to Africa? I am afraid it comes from a not-so-kind genealogy that always takes Africa to be a simple place, homogenises its peoples and their history, and treats their politics and thought as if they were uncomplicated, each substitutable for the other across time and space. Once you are thinking of ‘Africa’ as a simple whole, it becomes easier to grossly misrepresent an entire continent in the temporal frame of ‘precolonial’.

***

Complicating decolonising museums:

Reflections on Decolonising the Museum (2019, but popped up recently):

No bookkeeping can re-order and restore the catastrophe, the epistemicide, this hollowing out of the world and its spirit. The balance sheet is insufficient, in many ways the balance sheet itself is the problem. In trying to make the intangible quantifiable we lose the beauty of the intangible and cannot account for its loss.

Adam Kuper: Insiders’ understanding is not always deeper than experts’:

On the issue of repatriating objects acquired by museums during colonial times, Kuper points to a number of concerns. It is often unclear or disputed to whom they should be returned if they date back to well before the creation of today’s independent states. And there are also questions about what happens to them once they are “back home”.
....
“Do any Oxford museums insist that only a clergyman may curate a display of medieval Christian art and artefacts? Yet some respectable institutions go along with the equally questionable doctrine that only people with an ancestral relationship to a particular precolonial cult are entitled to say what it is all about.”

Today there has been definitely A Theme in things popping up over various different places I interact with.

Two reviews via mailing lists:

Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism:

Hore ably makes the case for interpreting the works of these photographers across national and colonial boundaries, while acknowledging contingencies and the importance of the local. The tension between visions that highlight the grandeur of the majestically sublime in a universal sense, with attention to the specificity of developing understandings of geological formations across deep time is shown to reveal common pathways of settler-colonial thought. The “spectre of waste” and the deliberate erasure of Indigenous peoples from settler-colonial worldviews are identified as key to understanding how and why visions of nature return to common themes and compositions in service of notions of settler territoriality. In this way, Visions of Nature demonstrates how the constructed universality of Western aesthetics and sciences “cultivated ties to place and diminished existing Indigenous connection” (p. 235).

Pandemic India: From Cholera to Covid-19:

Arnold suggests convincingly that “the pandemic idea has had an intimate connection with the history of empire” (p. 242). India was the site of British imperial expansion and control through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was the site on which both discourse and institutions to study and control pandemics were developed under the “Raj.” Arnold makes an excellent case for the work of historians in studying pandemics—not just in the past, but also in the present (such as COVID-19). In this way, he engages with larger questions about continuities between colonial and postcolonial governance in India, drawing a clear line connecting the violence which characterizes the control of pandemics and contagion by the Raj and by the postcolonial Indian state.

Lourenco da Silva Mendonca and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century:

José Lingna Nafafé's remarkable book studies the efforts of an Angolan prince, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, to have slavery abolished by the Vatican’s Propaganda Fide tribunal in the Catholic world in the second half of the seventeenth century. Nafafé’s book then is a long-overdue analysis and recounting of Mendonça’s abolitionist efforts. As Nafafé emphasizes, not until the nineteenth century would we see so totalizing an effort to end slavery.
....
Mendonça was a pioneer of human rights, fighting to free enslaved Africans and to keep more Africans from being enslaved, and should be studied with the likes of Bartolomé de las Casas as a foundational theoretician of human rights.

Apparently of a microhistory, but demonstrating how family histories illuminate wider historical stories: The Troubled House: Families, Heritance and the Reckoning of Empire. (I am intrigued that they were Welsh missionaries i.e. from an oppressed colonised population themselves. Layers.)

***

Uncritical use of ahistorical painting: Robert Thom’s painting J. Marion Sims: Gynecologic Surgeon - a deconstruction of the origins of this image and its original purpose and context:

[T]his rendering is, in fact, a painting, that it was produced around 100 years after the history it describes, and that it was commissioned by a major pharmaceutical corporation, all of which shape how and what it means.

***

The theme of internal colonisation or at least, repression of minorities: Writing an abstract in a language with no writing conventions:

The language that I will be discussing in this post is a Southern Italo-Romance language spoken in the southern Apulian town of San Marco in Lamis (Foggia). For the purposes of this discussion, I will refer to it as Sammarchese. Sammarchese is a so-called dialect of Italy spoken by approximately 15,000 people in the town and its surrounding area. For those who are not very familiar with the Italian linguistic landscape: in the Italophone world, a dialetto is a non-official language spoken alongside Italian, but contrary to what it is meant by dialect in the anglophone world, it is not a variety of the standard language, i.e., it does not come from Italian. The Romance dialects of Italy originate from Vulgar Latin, just like Italian, Spanish, or French. So Sammarchese, like other Romance dialetti, is a sister language to Italian.

This is an older post that I think fits in here: The Presence of Black Voters in the 18th and 19th Centuries:

In the last 20 years significant scholarship into Black British history has exposed the richness of Black lives in all areas of British life: Black MPs have been identified, as have Black property owners, and the mixed-race children of West Indian merchants and plantation owners have been recognised and studied. One enduring area of interest is the British electoral system; how it functions now is under consistent scrutiny and the introduction of political reform in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a subject of increasing historical interest.

A Paris Museum Has 18,000 Skulls. It’s Reluctant to Say Whose.

Beneath the galleries, hidden in the basement, lies a more contentious collection: 18,000 skulls that include the remains of African tribal chiefs, Cambodian rebels and Indigenous people from Oceania. Many were gathered in France’s former colonies, and the collection also includes the skulls of more than 200 Native Americans, including from the Sioux and Navajo tribes.
....
While France has led the way in Europe in investigating and returning colonial-era collections of artifacts — cultural objects, made by human hands — it has lagged behind its neighbors when it comes to remains.

Here is another instance: Trinity College Dublin considers returning Inishbofin skulls: Skulls’ removal from island in 1890s was colonial-era violation, say campaigners:

In the late 19th century there was a belief that craniology – the study of skulls – could shed light on the intelligence and development of different races. Ireland’s west coast islanders were of special interest because of a theory that they descended from an indigenous race undiluted by Anglo-Saxons and other outsiders. Haddon, a British anthropologist and ethnologist, and Dixon, an Irish medical student, sailed to Inishbofin in 1890 ostensibly as part of a fishing survey. In his diary Haddon described their clandestine mission to the ruins of St Colman’s monastery in derring-do tones. The pair told their boat’s crew that the sack of centuries-old skulls contained poitín, an Irish moonshine. They eventually delivered 20 skulls to Trinity – 13 from Inishbofin and the rest from the Aran Islands and St Finian’s Bay in County Kerry[.]

***

A different kind of ghastly WTF: Women in the UK Are Being Denied Medical Treatment Because They’re Virgins:

VICE World News has spoken to five women from around the UK who have been denied a transvaginal ultrasound over the past two years because they had been asked – by male and female medical staff – whether they were sexually active or “virgins.”
....
According to the guidance from the British Medical Ultrasound Society, “if a patient has not had penetrative sex, they are still entitled to be offered, and to accept, a TVUS [transvaginal ultrasound] in the same way that cervical screening is offered to all eligible patients. The concept of virginity plays no part in the clinical decision making for a TVUS, and the examination should be offered by the ultrasound practitioner, when clinically indicated. It is, however, acknowledged that health tests such as cervical screening and TVUS may be more uncomfortable for patients who have not had penetrative sex, and therefore the ultrasound practitioner must be extra vigilant if they are to proceed.” Virginity is a social construct with no biological reality, sometimes erroneously connected in women and those assigned female at birth to the presence of a hymen or their physical anatomy – which has long been debunked by the scientific community and challenged for perpetuating heteronormativity. Questioning around sexual activity often presumes that the female patient is heterosexual and ignores solo sex.

I am, shall we say, iffy on the whole 'let's extend women's fertility' thing. I can possibly see the benefit of research that would do away with some of the more adverse post-menopause effects, e.g. bone-thinning, and various concomitants of the reduction in hormone production, but in a world which is not exactly lacking in population.... why the emphasis on keeping on popping out baybeez? Also, I can't help thinking that that would not come without certain downsides for health?

Also, those of us who were 'Yay, menopause! no more periods! no more faffing around with contraception [if applicable to circs]!' are surely not that tiny a constituency? are we?

This seems to me a bit in the same category as 'Wheeeee! bringing back Extinct Animal' when actual creatures are still going extinct for preventable reasons.

***

Apparently there is a thing going round about the Game of Thrones prequel and the the argument (that I think was also made for GoT?) that it is being somehow Authentically Medeeevle (in spite of all the dragons and other fantastikal elements) to have sexy sexy objectification and abuse of women? and people saying 'Tell me you know nothing about history without saying "I know nothing about history".'

We have been here before (at least, I've been here before) with unexamined assumptions and facile preconceptions about history, because some while ago there was a vogue for fantasy or sf Evil Empires, where the USP was not so much that they were Evil for the reasons that empires have historically been Evil, but that they were Sexy Sexy Evil, due to vague memories of Hollywood sagas about The Roman Empire and the notion that said Empire fell because Vice and Debauchery.

('Tell me you haven't read Gibbon's Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire....' in which he lays the blame on Christianity and too much concern for souls and too little on keeping the roads and aqueducts in order.)

(I see I posted about it here, although LJ link I was riffing off is now gone.)

***

Literalising the metaphor of erasure of women artists: Atlantic City by Helen Saunders discovered under Praxitella by Wyndham Lewis, who may have painted over it on purpose:

A lost masterpiece by a leading abstract artist of the early 20th century has been discovered beneath a portrait by a contemporary who may have painted over the original in a “fit of pique”. Atlantic City by Helen Saunders, a member of the radical and short-lived vorticist movement, depicts a fragmented modern metropolis, almost certainly in the vibrant colours associated with the group. A black and white image of the painting appeared in Blast, the avant garde journal of the vorticists produced shortly before the outbreak of the first world war. Almost all of Saunders’ vorticist paintings are thought to be lost, although drawings survive and will be exhibited at the Courtauld Gallery in London in October. But an investigation of Praxitella, a portrait of the film critic Iris Barry by Wyndham Lewis, the founder of the vorticists, by two Courtauld students revealed it was almost certainly painted on top of Atlantic City.