Island and Empires in the Age of Sail

In this blog, Douglas Hamilton, Professor of History at SHU, tells us about his new book on islands and the British empire. You can also see the online exhibition at the National Maritime Museum that accompanies the project.

In the great Age of Sail – from the late sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century – islands played vital roles in establishing and securing European empires around the world. They had an importance far beyond their small size and isolation in distant seas. Instead, they offer sites for us to consider the big themes of imperialism, global wars, and revolutions and to reflect on their impact on diverse populations.

The idea for our new book emerged from a series of workshops that I and Dr John McAleer (Southampton University) organised with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/N003225/1) between 2016 and 2019. We invited historians and museum specialists from Britain, the United States and Australia with interests in islands to discuss their work and then to contribute to the book.

As a result of the research by the contributors, which was discussed in our seminars, our book argues that we should not see islands just as little fragments of land in the middle of vast oceans. Instead, we suggest that islands were crucial to the British empire: by providing vital strategic stops for sailing ships, islands connected the empire. But they were more than that: islands were great prizes in themselves. Some (like those in the Caribbean) provided sources of wealth for Britain, while others were important sites of scientific enquiry. The significance of the islands meant that European countries fought over them, and so they were drawn into the great global power struggles of the eighteenth century.

It’s important to remember, too, that many of these islands were already inhabited. For indigenous populations, or for enslaved people trafficked there, this is a history of invasion and exploitation. Their opposition shows some of the ways that people resisted the British empire, in ways that sometimes connect to the tumultuous Age of Revolutions. You can study these issues in modules on the BA History at Sheffield Hallam.

As well as thinking about how we could write about the history of islands, we wanted to produce something visual, in the form of an online exhibition. To do this, we worked closely with our friends at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. You can see the exhibition based on the NMM collections – ‘Islands and Empires’ – on the museum’s website.

Reminiscing About Research Trips: the Rockefeller Archive Centre

Ben Offiler, Senior Lecturer in History, is our current Course Leader. His research focuses on the history of American philanthropy, development discourse, and US-Iranian relations during the Cold War. Here he writes about doing archive research and what this means to him.

One of the things that many people have missed over the past year due to the global pandemic, is the freedom to travel beyond their own “local area” – however that is supposed to be defined. And if it is true that since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic most people in Britain would, given the opportunity and resources, like to take a trip farther from home than the local supermarket, then it is also true for most historians.

In many ways, it is a perk of the job that academics have the chance to visit interesting and exciting places all in the name of their research. I am convinced that there would be a burgeoning field of Hawaiian Studies in the UK, if only the flights were cheaper.

When I began my postgraduate studies at the University of Nottingham, I chose to specialise in US foreign relations during the Cold War because I found the subject fascinating – US power and influence is one of the defining features of the post-WWII international landscape. It was a happy coincidence that doing so would give me the opportunity to visit different cities and states in the US, from my first research trip to the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas to the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, a stone’s throw from the historic capital, Washington DC.

Most recently, my research has shifted slightly away from analysing the foreign policies and decision-making processes of American presidents and their administrations, to a focus on the role that philanthropic and charitable organisations play in shaping US relations with the wider world. Specifically, I am researching the programmes that one philanthropic NGO, the Near East Foundation, established in Iran shortly after the Second World War at the behest of the government in Tehran. These efforts included agricultural reform experiments, education and training for rural girls, and disease-control programmes.

The Near East Foundation’s involvement in Iran (from 1943 to 1979) coincided with a turbulent period in official US-Iranian relations, as successive American governments came to support the authoritarian Pahlavi regime, headed by the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. By examining the Near East Foundation and moving beyond a traditional focus on governments and state actors, I am hoping to further our understanding of the complex, dynamic and evolving relationship between the United States and Iran during the twentieth-century.

The NEF’s extensive archives – beginning from its inception as Near East Relief in 1915 in response to the Armenian Genocide and containing a huge variety of letters, telegrams, memoranda, reports, films and more – are housed at the Rockefeller Archive Centre in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

Yes, that Sleepy Hollow.

I have been fortunate to be able to visit the RAC three times now, which has allowed me to dive deep into the period of its involvement in Iran. While I have literally thousands of digital photographs of archival material carefully stored on my computer (and backed up elsewhere), there is something exciting and invigorating about doing research in an actual archive.

Rockefeller Archive Centre, front of building https://rockarch.org/assets/img/hero_image.jpg

And the Rockefeller Archive Centre is a wonderful place to embed yourself in history, not least due to the outstanding and informed archivists that are always on hand to provide expert advice. Over lunch, the visiting researchers often get together to discuss their projects, share ideas and celebrate their successes.

As historians everywhere anticipate the easing of travel restrictions, I for one can’t wait to return to the archives.

Office Life in the Twentieth Century

Dr Nicole Robertson, Reader in Modern British History at Sheffield Hallam University tells us about her research into office life in the twentieth century. You can also view the full digital exhibition for this research project here.

The rising prominence of the clerical sector was one of the most important changes in the twentieth-century workplace. Clerical workers became a key component of cityscapes and urban communities. As organisations grew larger and more complex, the need for greater communication and documentation transformed clerical work. The growth of modern corporations necessitated a flood of paperwork and administrative systems. New technologies - such as adding machines, Xerography and electric typewriters - brought greater speed and legibility to the workplace whilst rationalised work procedures transformed offices into nerve centres of business. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the impact this had on the working lives of clerks.  My research explores this group of workers, who form a particularly rich aspect of recent British social, economic, gender and business history.

Funded by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship, I worked closely with the Working Class Movement Library (Salford) and the Bishopsgate Institute (London) on several public engagement and impact events. Collaborating with staff at the Bishopsgate Institute, we curated and produced a free, eleven-panel public exhibition entitled ‘Office Life in Twentieth Century London’ at the Bishopgate Institute, which was then digitised for the Institute's website.  The exhibition booklet is available here.  The exhibition was accompanied by public lectures and a community learning workshop on ‘Office Girls and City Gents’, which enabled the public to handle and work with historical materials in creative ways, and had an online legacy in the form of a Pinterest page. 

Image credit: Working Class Movement Library

Dame Beatrice Anne Godwin (1897-1992) joined the AWCS in 1920. She was a trade union organiser, responsible for negotiation and general administration for the AWCS, Assistant General Secretary of the Clerical and Administrative Workers Union, and one of the first women to become President of the Trade Union Congress.

Interpreting and utilising the internationally renowned collections on clerical trade unions at the Working Class Movement Library, we created activities to connect present-day/former office workers with the historical campaigns of their forbears and raised awareness of trade union activism among non-manual workers. This included a public lecture as part of the Library’s ‘Invisible Histories’ series. We showcased items in the Library’s collections to public audiences in the ‘Object of the Month’ series and in the Library’s magazine, Shelf Life which featured the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries (AWCS).

Shipping and globalisation

Niels P Petersson, Professor of History at SHU, tells us about his work on shipping.

Shipping and Globalization in the Post-war Era: Contexts, Companies, Connections

Ships transport 90% of everything we produce and consume, as writer Rose George explains in a very readable book. Periodically, news reports about a major disruption to shipping, such as the blockage of the Suez Canal by the container ship Ever Given in March 2021, draws wider attention to the importance of the shipping industry to our economies and daily lives. But how exactly has shipping as a business and infrastructure developed historically, and when did it acquire such a crucial importance? This is a question I and some colleagues tackle in our volume Shipping and Globalization in the Post-war Era: Contexts, Companies, Connections. Our research covers topics such as the rise of Asia as a centre of the world’s shipping and ship building, the international law of shipping, decolonisation, case studies of successful and unsuccessful container shipping companies, and the links between the shipping industry and the wider economy and society.

In my own chapter, I look at the crucial role played by engineers’ and managers’ knowledge and strategy in the development of Ocean, a leading UK-based shipping company that pioneered container shipping on its Far Eastern routes and later left the industry to turn itself into a broad-based logistics business. I am not normally a business historian and I learned a lot working with a body of sources and theoretical concepts that were new to me.

Merseyside Maritime Museum Archives

I also greatly enjoyed writing the concluding chapter where I discuss what the history of shipping can tell us about the rhythms of globalisation over the course of the 20th century and also attempt a comparative overview of the three company case studies in the volume.

Taken together, our chapters highlight the contribution of the shipping industry to the transformations in business and society of the post-war era. Without shipping and its ability to forge connections and networks of a global reach, the modern world would look very different.

Thanks to the support offered by SHU and my co-authors’ institutions, it is an ‘open access’ publication – while the physical book still costs money, everyone can download and read an electronic copy free of charge.

- Niels

Follow @NielsPetersson

Working the Land: A History of the Farmworker in England from 1850 to the Present Day

Nicola Verdon tells us about her book, Working the Land (2017)

Working the Land was published by Nicola Verdon in 2017. In this post, she tells us about the many years of research, thinking and writing, that went in to this important book for historians and new history students alike. Spoiler alert: The writing was the hardest bit! Here’s what Nicola says about her research and her subsequent publication.

I’ve been researching and writing about gender and employment in the British countryside all my academic career. My first book, Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth Century England (2002), was a typical book-based-on-PhD publication. It is packed full of sources and is a very dense and probably intense read – I can hardly bare to look at it myself anymore. With Working the Land I wanted to do something different. Something that was more accessible to a broader audience, and that spanned a long chronology where patterns of continuity and change over time could be teased out. The chronology posed some challenges for me. I am very well trained in locating and interpreting 19th century sources, and whilst I had moved my research focus into the 1920s and 1930s more recently, I had never written about the Second World War or the decades that followed it. The more contemporary the sources, the more difficult I found them to work with.

Most of all what I wanted to do in this book was to write about the men, women and children who worked on the land from their own perspective, using their own voices where possible. Agricultural work has traditionally been (and in some respects remains) a very poorly paid and highly casualised occupation. People who lived and worked on the land were typically seen as ‘backward’, unimaginative and unsophisticated. The farmworker was periodically subjected to scrutiny from government investigators, journalists and commentators during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, and again for a new generation of sociologists and agricultural economists in the post Second World War period. Whilst these all include interviews and evidence from farmworkers, their stories are mediated through the lens of the writer. Autobiographies and personal memoirs enable the farmworker to take centre stage in their own lives and add a personal perspective but these may not be representative of the farm labour force as whole – they are self-selecting and written by those with the means and drive to tell their story. Whilst all these types of sources are problematic they feature heavily in the book and allowed me to consider the farm as a site of work (in the way you might a mine, or a factory), the types of work that men, women and children did, how they experienced and understood that work, and the importance (or not) that they attached to that work. As Jane Stevenson of Westmorland (now Cumbria) told a government commissioner in the late 1860s, ‘I like out-door work, and I find myself quite unwell if I stay at home for a day’ (p. 95)

I also wrote this book because it reflects my own family history and upbringing. The book is dedicated to my grandad Peter Verdon (1921-2014). One of eight children, he grew up in the Derbyshire village of Spinkhill, where his father Joseph was a gardener at St Mary’s College. After a rudimentary schooling, Peter started farm work as a teenager in the mid 1903s, first in his immediate locality and then, after answering an advert in a farming newspaper, on Glebe farm in the Nottinghamshire village of Norwell, where he ‘lived-in’ with the family and with fellow worker Wallace Smith. There Peter met and married my grandma, Kathleen Dobbs (1925-1981).

Her family rented the adjacent farm, a 42-acre dairy farm, where she grew up, one of 11 children. Peter left farm work in the late 1950s to work as a lorry-driver for a local farmer-haulier. His entry into farm work in the 1930s and his exit from it in the 1950s was very typical for young rural men of his era and social class. Kath didn’t work outside the home after marriage. Peter and Kath remained lifelong friends with Wallace and his wife Phyllis (also from the village). They were all an important part of my childhood in Norwell, where I grew up and went to primary school.    

Romantic Memory: Forgetting, Remembering and Feeling in the Chartist Pantheon of Heroes, c.1790–1840

This blog post explores the politics of remembrance in Chartism and British political culture, and is based on a seminar paper recently presented by Dr Matthew Roberts to the Institute of Historical Research as part of the Parliament, Politics and People Series. The paper, entitled Romantic Memory: Forgetting, Remembering and Feeling in the Chartist Pantheon of Heroes, c.1790–1840’, is available here.

Pantheonism, the invention of tradition, heritage politics and even the broader political uses of the past, are under-explored aspects of modern British political culture. When groups go to the length of instituting discrete remembrance events, practices and rituals, it becomes clear just how important these things were, and British politics is no exception.

There is no shortage of material here: if some of the heroes are well known – King Alfred, Peel, the Tolpuddle Martyrs – and some of the historical episodes familiar – Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Peterloo – what function they were made to perform and how they have been imaginatively re-constructed remains unclear. Focusing on collective memory, posthumous and heroic reputation can also shed new light on familiar historical figures and episodes.

My paper for the Parliaments, Politics and People seminar approaches some of these issues through a case-study of Chartism, the mass movement for democratic and social rights which swept across Britain from the late 1830s to the 1850s. Such forms of dissident commemoration have received much less attention than ‘official’ forms of state remembrance.

Chartism took its name from its foundational document listing its demands for parliamentary reform, The People’s Charter, published in 1838. Public Domain [British Library].

Unlike elite forms of commemoration, dissident groups had neither access to the public sphere nor the funds to build pantheons in stone. Rather, the Chartist pantheon was a paper one: an imagined group of mostly dead radicals – pre-eminently Thomas Paine and William Cobbett.

Along with William Cobbett, Thomas Paine was the co-reigning deity in the Chartist pantheon. CC British Museum.

To learn more about the form and composition of the Chartist pantheon, about who was included and why, you can visit an online exhibition that I curated using Art UK’s curation tool.

In my most recent research, I have begun to explore the question, not of remembering, but forgetting and erasure; that is, which individuals and episodes in the radical tradition were either forgotten or consciously excluded? Forgetting and excluding can be just as revealing as remembering and including. Why, for example, was the hugely popular and influential 1790s British radical John Thelwall largely forgotten by the Chartists? What determines posthumous potential – is it mainly factors in the life of the historical figure as they lived, or does it depend more on what happens after they die?

John Thelwall, member of the London Corresponding Society, was famously acquitted of treason in 1794 and widely feted by radicals in the 1790s as this commemorative token suggests, but not by the 1840s. CC British Museum.

Like much else in the first half of the nineteenth century, politics, society and culture were profoundly shaped by the legacy of Romanticism. Chartist heritage politics was no exception. The form and composition of the Chartist pantheon was shaped by a romantic aesthetic – a pantheon of flawed heroes – some of whom like the Romantic poets explicitly wrote for posterity. While the impact of Romanticism can be hardly denied, not all Chartists were keen to dress their heroes in romantic clothing. Some Chartists like the London artisan William Lovett rejected the unchecked appeals to the passions and introversion associated with Romanticism. Chartist aversion to this pull was a legacy, in part, of the enduring impact of the radical Enlightenment which sought to re-establish an age of reason as against passion.

Minute Book of the London Working Men’s Association, the body of self-improving and respectable artisan Chartists led by William Lovett who spoke out against passion in politics. Public Domain [British Library].

Chartist heritage politics became an arena for a broader debate about the place of feeling in politics. This is the focus of my forthcoming book, Democratic Passions: The Politics of Feeling in British Radicalism, 1809–1848, due to be published by Manchester University Press later this year. In this book, I challenge the assumption – just as alive today as it was then – that the political sphere was an arena of reason in which feelings had no part to play.

- MR

The post was originally published on the History of Parliament Blog in January 2021.