Pleasure has been the subject of intense debate across history and became a particularly important part of discourse in the eighteenth century. This blog accompanies my recent article in Social History 49/3 ‘Emotional economies of pleasure among the gentry of eighteenth-century England.’ In that article I argue that amidst the many and varied pleasures of the public sphere, elite men and women laid claim to the family and family relations as the most enduring and pleasurable of pleasures. Continue reading →

The aim to highlight marginalised voices is nowadays a standard feature in historical research. While bringing these voices to the fore will continue to be important, I have become increasingly intrigued by the group of people caught between the marginalising power holders and the marginalised. In other words, I have become interested in the middle ground, history from the middle rather than history from below. My recent article in Social History considers this overlooked category in relation to the specific Finnish context of correctional labour facilities. Continue reading →

In 2023, a six-week strike by the United Auto Workers led to major wage and benefit gains for workers at America’s “Big Three” car makers – General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis.  The strike received widespread public attention, with a Gallup poll showing that 75 percent of Americans supported the UAW in its fight for higher pay and more job security.[1]  In September, President Biden even walked the UAW’s picket line in Belleville, Michigan, the first sitting U.S. president to join a picket line.  “Unions built the middle-class,” he asserted.  “That’s a fact.”[2]

Biden’s action reminds us that strikes – a unique expression of citizens’ frustration – matter.  In particular, the 2023 walkout showed the ability of big auto strikes to capture broader attention.  BBC News, The Guardian, and Reuters were among those there, seeing the dispute as integral to a broader upsurge in labour activism that was linked to the rising cost of living, a tight labor market, and wage stagnation.  Overall, 2023 would witness a “hot labor summer” of strikes in the U.S., the number of walkouts reaching levels not seen in decades.[3]  In the wake of the pandemic, there were similar trends elsewhere; in 2022, the number of working days lost to strikes in the UK rose to the highest level in over a decade, while the EU Observer reported a “new surge of industrial action” across Europe.[4]

In particular, there are parallels with a huge strike at General Motors (GM) in 1945-46.  Part of my wider research on the U.S. auto industry, this article was completed as the 2023 strike unfolded.  Both were important events that were led by the UAW, an 88-year old organization that was for decades America’s biggest industrial union.[5]

Continue reading →

In the 1830s, towns in England and Wales went through a series of dramatic changes of governance. Two were driven by famous pieces of legislation: the 1832 Reform Act, which reconstructed urban Parliamentary franchises; and the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, which recast civic government. The third was the significant reorganisation of civic space and property rights, which followed as an unintended consequence of these Acts. My recent Social History article shows that by changing who was represented, and how civic government was constructed in over 100 towns and boroughs, these acts restructured freemen’s (and their widows’) rights to corporate property, sometimes extinguishing rights to urban lands that had been possessed in common for centuries, and sometimes recasting the complicated political relationships that had grown up around these rights.[1] Continue reading →

Workhouses, and the poor who inhabited them, continue to fascinate us all. From social historians to the wider public, we are intrigued by the institution and the characters within. As I explore in a recent article for Social History, those who spent their old age in poverty under the Victorian New Poor Law regime did not always face a one-way route to the workhouse. In fact, the Board of Guardians provided welfare to those in their own homes if they successfully applied for outdoor relief. Before the introduction of old age pensions in 1908, there was no guarantee that one would receive welfare when they reached old age; one had to actively apply to the Board of Guardians for outdoor relief. The Board of Guardians thought older people were the ‘most deserving’ recipients of welfare, compared with the ‘able-bodied’, or ‘working-age’, population, owing to their perceived infirmity. Continue reading →

Listening to a History Extra podcast recently (this is what historians do on their days off!), I was struck by the truism reiterated by one of the contributors that all historical writing is to some extent autobiographical.[1] Our beliefs, lives and world view inevitably seep into the work we produce. This led me to reflect on the genesis of my piece (on the early labour movement’s turncoats and traitors) in the latest issue of Social History and on the mainspring of three earlier articles on different aspects of working-class leadership and agitational activity in reform-era Yorkshire. All four studies focus on the lesser-known local leaders of working-class agitations rather than their more famous, often metropolitan or gentlemanly, figureheads, thereby raising questions about why my research interests have tended to skew towards the undercard rather than the main protagonists of historical investigation. Continue reading →

I was absolutely delighted to join the journal’s team as Reviews Editor for Social History in September 2022. My own research deals with histories of crime and inequality in Britain and transnationally, with a particular focus on histories of burglary and policing (the subject of my first book, Night Raiders: Burglary and the Making of Modern Urban Life in London, 1860-1968, published with Oxford University Press in 2019). Indeed, in 2015 Social History published my article on the famous interwar Metropolitan Police Detective Frederick Porter Wensley, whose collection of scrapbooks at the Bishopsgate Institute Archives offers a unique insight into the way he sought to fashion his celebrity persona and detective career; especially during a period when the reputation of police, and their relationship with the press, were being called into question by politicians and the reading public. My experience of publishing with the journal was extremely supportive, with helpful feedback and a smooth publication process. Continue reading →

More than any other commodity in early modern England, grain was embedded within a web of assumptions about the social order and the ideologies that sustained it. While historians have examined how the politics of grain supply and marketing were informed by paternalism in various ways, my article considers a topic that has received relatively little attention: toll corn and the disputes that it generated.

‘Toll corn’ — like tolls on other goods — could involve monetary payments, but the term typically referred to a portion of grain that was taken from the total amount that sellers brought to market. A wide array of tolling practices operated from one market to the next, and toll corn was put to different uses depending on who had the right to its revenue. But in some markets, it played a role in local economies of poor relief or enabled grain to be distributed to poor consumers via extra-market channels. Continue reading →

Our special issue explores the intricate relationship between youth, activism and internationalism in the twentieth century, covering a variety of national, international and global contexts. We focus on youth for several reasons. Firstly, young people were among the pioneers of several international initiatives. Their role in the global protests of 1968 is arguably the most famous example, yet – as the contributions to our journal issue show – there is a rich and diverse history of youth action in the international realm. Continue reading →

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 →