In a new article, ‘The geography of Old Bailey crime prosecutions, 1720–1820’, published in Social History this month, we used the recently updated website, Locating London’s Past, to explore the impact of changes in policing and justice on patterns of prosecutions in eighteenth-century London. In it, we use the distribution of crime prosecutions mapped against innovations in detective policing and access to magistrates over the century prior to the foundation of the Metropolitan Police to illuminate how these changes impacted the lives of eighteenth-century Londoners. Along the way, we also sought to demonstrate some of the possibilities of using this kind of mapping resource to research the social, economic, political and cultural history of Europe’s first million-person city. From the distribution of wealth and poverty, to patterns of voting in Westminster elections, to archaeological artefacts, to street music; to an almost unlimited range of social historical topics, Locating London’s Past makes new types of research possible. The article and the website are built on John Rocque’s remarkable 1746 map of London—a comprehensive view of the metropolis, including not just its streets and alleys but many individual buildings, as well as illustrative ships and individuals. Digitised to the highest standards, geo-rectified to make it GIS compatible, and then indexed with the shapes of the city’s 173 parishes, 98 wards, and 5,898 individual streets and buildings, the site turns the map into an interactive environment allowing you to explore location evidence in eighteen individual datasets and to generate per-capita statistics based on detailed parish population estimates for the 1690s, 1740s, and early 1800s. Among those datasets is the Old Bailey Proceedings, containing tens of thousands of accounts of trials for serious crime from London’s central criminal court, marked up to identify geographical locations as well as types of crime and other key aspects of the trials. Our starting point was this map. It shows the distribution of crime locations displayed as 110 square metre tiles, allowing us to illustrate where in London per capita prosecutions were highest (the darker shades of red). It shows that between 1720 and 1750 prosecutions were concentrated in the West End, and to a lesser extent the East End, with the City of London and north of City characterised by low prosecution rates (locations south of the Thames are not included as they fell outside the jurisdiction of the Old Bailey). But of course, prosecution rates have […] Continue reading
Mapping the Social History of Eighteenth-Century London by Tim Hitchcock and Bob Shoemaker
In a new article, ‘The geography of Old Bailey crime prosecutions, 1720–1820’, published in Social History this month, we used the recently updated website, Locating London’s Past, to explore the impact of changes in policing and justice on patterns of prosecutions in eighteenth-century London. In it, we use the distribution of crime prosecutions mapped against innovations in detective policing and access to magistrates over the century prior to the foundation of the Metropolitan Police to illuminate how these changes impacted the lives of eighteenth-century Londoners. Along the way, we also sought to demonstrate some of the possibilities of using this kind of mapping resource to research the social, economic, political and cultural history of Europe’s first million-person city. From the distribution of wealth and poverty, to patterns of voting in Westminster elections, to archaeological artefacts, to street music; to an almost unlimited range of social historical topics, Locating London’s Past makes new types of research possible. The article and the website are built on John Rocque’s remarkable 1746 map of London—a comprehensive view of the metropolis, including not just its streets and alleys but many individual buildings, as well as illustrative ships and individuals. Digitised to the highest standards, geo-rectified to make it GIS compatible, and then indexed with the shapes of the city’s 173 parishes, 98 wards, and 5,898 individual streets and buildings, the site turns the map into an interactive environment allowing you to explore location evidence in eighteen individual datasets and to generate per-capita statistics based on detailed parish population estimates for the 1690s, 1740s, and early 1800s. Among those datasets is the Old Bailey Proceedings, containing tens of thousands of accounts of trials for serious crime from London’s central criminal court, marked up to identify geographical locations as well as types of crime and other key aspects of the trials. Our starting point was this map. It shows the distribution of crime locations displayed as 110 square metre tiles, allowing us to illustrate where in London per capita prosecutions were highest (the darker shades of red). It shows that between 1720 and 1750 prosecutions were concentrated in the West End, and to a lesser extent the East End, with the City of London and north of City characterised by low prosecution rates (locations south of the Thames are not included as they fell outside the jurisdiction of the Old Bailey). But of course, prosecution rates have […] Continue reading
Yugoslavia’s post‑war labour migration has long been recognised as a defining feature of the country’s development, but its gendered dimensions remain insufficiently examined. This blog post asks whether the Yugoslav state’s management of labour migration stood in striking contrast to its domestic policies of gender equality and women’s emancipation. It reflects on whether women in Yugoslavia experienced their most equal treatment within the institutionalised management of labour migration to the West. 
In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of minors with troublesome behaviour were sent to reform schools. Often, they spent months or even years inside the walls of disciplinary institutions. Did their young age influence how minors experienced their confinement, compared to adult detainees? This blog post discusses the different meanings of time for juvenile delinquents, using case files from Belgian state reform schools between 1900 and 1960. 
Sailortowns could be found across the globe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These port district neighbourhoods were often characterized by entertainment venues, lodging houses and brothels, where temporary visitors such as seafarers and residents met. However, the vibrant and transient culture of sailortowns symbolised a lifestyle that middle-class observers deemed chaotic and threatening to societal order. In our recent article in Social History 50:4, ‘Port communities on both sides of the Atlantic: neighbourhood life and public festivities in the sailortowns of Antwerp and Buenos Aires, c. 1880–1930’, we challenge this one-dimensional view. By adopting a comparative approach to two port districts with some of the most notorious reputations worldwide, we show that although sailortowns could indeed be dangerous and rowdy places, they equally fostered urban communities defined by civic life and mutual aid, while also highlighting the distinctive features of each district. 
Historian and poet John Seed (1950-2025) played a vital role in the development of Social History, joining the Editorial Board in 1982 and serving as Reviews Editor (1982-94) and as an Associate Editor (2010-13) following the death of his friend Keith Nield (founding editor with Janet Blackman). John was also a regular contributor to Social History as an author over many years – on religious dissenters and liberal ideology and, through his collaborations with Keith Nield, on the continued salience of Marxism for the practice of a politically engaged social history. In this reflection, the first of two tributes, historian Simon Gunn reflects on John’s contributions to the journal and to social history more broadly. You can read the tributes together with some of John’s poetry in Social History 50, 4. 
I would like to respond briefly to Stefan Kirmse’s observations about “revisionism” among historians who wrote about the Soviet Union from the 1970s onward. I found myself in agreement with much of what he wrote but, as someone whose work has been characterized as “revisionist” and who has commented from time to time on these historiographic debates (most recently, in the Introduction and chapter one of Reflections on Stalinism, 2024), I am moved to add a few comments. First, to the extent that the term “revisionist” has any utility – and I agree with Kirmse that it has been overloaded with largely abusive allusions – it is to denote the contributions of those who, writing within the framework of political history, revised the master narrative of totalitarian control of society. The arch-revisionist, in my view, was the late J. Arch Getty. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Donald Filtzer, Wendy Goldman, myself and others are better understood as social historians. We did not necessarily analyze Soviet history from the bottom up, but we did not restrict ourselves to top-down analysis. Eventually, we engaged in many different points of entry – from the side, in the middle, regionally, sectorally, and so forth. Second, the heyday of social historical analysis in our field was somewhat foreshortened by the emergence of the subjectivity school associated with Jochen Hellbeck’s Revolution on My Mind (2006). Hellbeck challenged social history’s animus and conceptual frameworks by focusing not on collective social actors but individuals’ sense of “self” and their relationship to Soviet modernity. Third and finally, in recent decades, many self-identified social historians have absorbed and been engaged in applying a variety of different perspectives – from subjectivity to gender, ecology, migration, borderland studies, and political economy – while also expanding the chronological scope of their work. These developments have enriched understanding of the Stalin era (the focus of so much earlier work) by adding comparative dimensions with other countries as well as within the span of Soviet history. I thus agree with Stefan Kirmse that “revisionism,” along with “totalitarianism,” should be consigned to the dustbin of historiography. Lewis H. Siegelbaum is the Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History at Michigan State University. He has published extensively on histories of Russia, Stalinism and life under Soviet rule. 
Informing an archivist in the post-Soviet space about your plans to work on the international ties of a Soviet republic often elicits a broadly similar response: raised eyebrows, shrugged shoulders, followed by a laconic comment that “it was all done by Moscow anyway.” Indeed, the classic narrative posits that the Soviet republics were Moscow’s pawns and had little agency of their own. That national identities were systematically repressed until at last, criticism of the Soviet system became possible under glasnost and perestroika. ‘Naturally’ this criticism came to be couched in national terms, and it was national mobilisation that led to, or at least dramatically accelerated, the collapse of the Soviet Union. 
In recent years, approximately 72 million Europeans—representing 17% of the European Union’s population—have been classified as living in poverty. However, the current definitions of poverty have only been in use since the early 2000s. What, then, was the situation prior to that? Since when, and by what methods, has poverty been measured? What developments have taken place over the last century since the first conceptual frameworks emerged in Britain? 
On 14 February 2025, I proudly defended my dissertation. After five years of wrestling with history, I was thrilled to have written a thesis that I could be proud of: The Lodging House and the City. Is this what it feels like to become a parent? Perhaps not entirely. I do not assume that new parents are asked if they perhaps like their baby too much. I was, when one of my jury-members asked if I had deliberately chosen the sacred day of Saint Valentine to declare my love for the lodging house as a bridgeway into questioning me on the rather optimistic narrative I had constructed. Had my “love” for the historical subject made me too blind to critically analyse it? Obviously, I had to disagree – I was there to defend, after all. But afterwards, it did trigger a reflection on how and why my research had pivoted in four years.