At the end of January 2020, I began teaching my third-year module on plague in late medieval Europe. As well as making my customary comparisons to outbreaks of modern plague – such as those which continue to afflict Madagascar – I also noted the appearance of a new disease in China, which, as I observed, was also where the pandemic of plague which struck Europe from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries was believed to have originated. By the third week of teaching, the mother of one of my students had just returned to the UK after having attended a festival in Milan and had been instructed to self-isolate at home. I tried to reassure my student that things would settle down. They didn’t. In mid-March we moved to online teaching and days later Boris Johnson announced the first national lockdown. Given the seismic events happening across the globe, the first essay deadline for the module, which came in late March, seemed trivial. Nonetheless, as is the way of universities, the academic calendar rolled on regardless, and, in what is surely a rare example of experiential teaching for medieval history, students had the joy of writing essays about quarantine while themselves being in lockdown.

While plague and COVID-19 are very different diseases (plague was especially deadly and killed perhaps half the population of Europe during the fourteenth-century outbreak known as the Black Death), nonetheless similar measures were used against them, which were largely based around the use of containment. During outbreaks of plague and COVID-19, the impact of these measures, while affecting all to some degree, fell hardest on the poorest socio-economic groups. Continue reading →

I first became interested in the issue of banditry in early modern Scotland while writing my PhD thesis on the government of the Highlands during the Restoration (1660-88). Wading through government papers, there seemed to be nothing short of an obsession with the depredations supposedly being committed by brigands and ‘broken men’, and indeed responding to these outlaws was apparently the single biggest issues that both Charles II and James VII & II felt themselves to be facing in the Highlands. Once the thesis was out of the way, I decided to probe the issue a little more deeply, aiming to gauge just how much of an issue banditry actually was in seventeenth-century Scotland, while also hoping to understand what it all meant. Continue reading →

Boso’s two rewritten transactions, recorded sequentially on the same parchment, Vic, Arxiu Capitular, calaix 6, núm. 547; photograph by the author, 2015.

What do you do if you lose or damage an important document, a contract or a lease or something like that? These days, you probably just download a fresh copy, but not so long ago that wasn’t an option; you might have had to go back to the relevant office and pay for a new copy to be made and given to you. But go back to the centuries after the breakdown of Roman rule in Western Europe and there were no such offices. My article in Social History 44.3 looked at what people did, in that world, to make something an official record when there were no officials to record them. Continue reading →

Frontier control post at Jisr Banat Yacoub on the border between Syria and Palestine, c. 1930. Matson Collection, LOC.

In my recent article in Social History, vol. 47, issue 3 (2022), I argue that the quiet colonial violence of deportation was lived and procedural for socio-economically precarious migrants. There are multiple methods by which historians can ascertain and understand how this violence becomes embedded in the lives and livelihoods of migrants. One such method is a focus on the corporeal effects of colonialism upon migrants at the levels of the intimate and the personal. But how might social and postcolonial historians best explore the bureaucratic and procedural brutality of forced expulsions when, as Adam Goodman asserts, the practice of deportation in the early and mid-twentieth century deliberately left few documentary traces? [1] My own research on mobility and border controls during the Palestine Mandate (1920-1948) centres on documents written either by family members (namely, spouses or children) of deportees or by the deportees themselves with reference to family members. Using these sources, I extrapolate the ways that deportability and illegibility (or conversely, a migrant’s legibility to the state) structure the conditions that allow for the conduct of the intimate, personal, and emotional aspects of life.

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In early modern England, prisoners relied on charity to survive. With next to no state funding, prisons were run for profit from fees and rents charged to those incarcerated, most of whom were either destitute debtors or awaiting criminal trial. As many of these prisoners were too impoverished to subsist in prison, let alone pay these fees, complex economies of aid developed around these institutions, and with these came ethical judgements about what prisoners deserved and how prisons might be used to punish and reform as well as to detain. My article in Social History 47.1 traces both these practices of prison charity and the developing ideologies of incarceration that they reveal, exploring new ideas about what prisons were for and how they might be used to shape and control social relations. Continue reading →

On 20 November 1684, months before Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, the French king ordered 93 Sephardic converso families to leave the southern part of present-day France. Around half of those families, known as the desterrados de Franca, arrived in Amsterdam, either directly or via detours by boat and on foot. One of the desterrados was Sara Gomez del Valle, who described her situation to the mahamad, the Jewish board of the Sephardic community in Amsterdam, as ‘helpless and without brothers.’[1] Asking for ‘legal powers of matrimony to her orphaned daughter Esther Gomez del Valle,’[2] del Valle’s request was one of many made by those arriving around 1685 in Amsterdam seeking assistance.

View of the Portuguese and the Great Synagogue from the east. Painting by G. A. Berckheyde. Collection Jewish Historical Museum, M011075

In media, literature, and movies, the city of Amsterdam is depicted as a tolerant shelter and safe haven for persecuted Jews and is praised for its early modern benevolence and fair treatment. But what this treatment entailed and the reason behind the assistance is less known. In Dutch Jewish historiography, historians such as Tirtsah Levie-Bernfeld, Jonathan Israel, and Miriam Bodian, depict the early modern Jewish charity system as a communal endeavor, organized by the board of the Jewish community who asked their members to donate.[3] For example, Tirtsah Levie-Bernfeld wrote in her book Poverty and Welfare that the ‘religious commandment to help and assist persecuted fellow Jews – in Judaism called a mitzvah – created the urge of the Jewish community in Amsterdam ‘to join’ the godly plight.’[4] By examining the charity initiatives for the incoming Jewish refugees from France, this blog post will demonstrate that the early modern civic authorities in Amsterdam also started to support the needs of arriving Jewish refugees. Continue reading →

Penny Hedge Planting 1998 – Whitby Museum Photo Archive PTh742-26

What, you might ask, is the point of writing the longue durée social history of one medieval fish weir? In the case of my article in Social History 46.4, this is a history of the Horngarth (later the Penny Hedge) at Whitby, North Yorkshire. Local histories have been somewhat marginalised by the recognition that we need to write global histories and decolonise and diversify accounts of the past. However, local histories and global histories may be fundamental to one another; and local histories have a key role in addressing the decolonisation and diversification of the past in the service of the present. To exemplify this, we can reflect on how the history of the Horngarth speaks to the present state of Whitby and plans for its future. Continue reading →

One of the typical characteristics of pre-modern military life was the chronic shortage of barracks. This is why troops used to stay in private homes. At the time, the coexistence of soldiers and locals under the same roof was the rule and not the exception. In fact, the accommodation of soldiers was an exaction that all commoners were compelled to satisfy when it was required. It was not an arbitrary measure, but a legitimate prerogative recognised by the monarchs, although it was no less unpopular for that reason. Continue reading →

Although they are usually seen purely as a terrorist event, the attacks of September 11, 2001, had clear social dimensions.  As we mark the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, my Social History article (46:3) opens a conversation about these little-known dimensions.  I emphasize that the attack targets were workplaces, and most of those killed – close to 3,000 people – were at work.  On the day of the attacks, Manhattan’s World Trade Center was home to 430 companies with more than 35,000 employees.  My article seeks to explore the workers who were killed or survived the attacks, as well as the 90,000 more who toiled at Ground Zero in a lengthy – and dangerous – clean up process that left many scarred, physically and mentally.[1]

On the tenth anniversary of the attacks, the Washington Post first identified these ‘invisible workers.’[2] As the twentieth anniversary approached, I wanted to try and detail their experiences more closely, and to draw some parallels with the Coronavirus crisis, another generation-defining event. Continue reading →

The growing importance of ‘politeness’ in English culture between the 1660s and 1740s coincided with Britain’s emergence as a major imperial power. Alongside a new elite emphasis on refined speech and manners were criticisms of the ‘vulgar’ and the disorders allegedly engendered by traditional festive practices. Non-genteel sounds – or ‘noise’ – were important elements in these criticisms, though they possessed a unique relevance in new colonial environments. I argue in Social History 46.3 that novel colonial soundscapes in the Americas were important sites of early modern sociocultural contestation. Continue reading →