Past & Present最新文献

The Transition to Wage Labour, in Stone, in North Wales, in Jamaica 《向雇佣劳动的过渡》，石碑，北威尔士，牙买加

IF 1.8 1区历史学

Past & Present Pub Date : 2026-10-14 DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtag031

Siân Davies

{"title":"The Transition to Wage Labour, in Stone, in North Wales, in Jamaica","authors":"Siân Davies","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtag031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtag031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Completed around 1821, a monument commemorating the enslaver and industrialist Richard Pennant and his wife, Anne Susannah Warburton, elides any mention of the family’s sugar plantations in Jamaica and instead celebrates the Pennants as benevolent modernizers who transformed their Welsh estate and tenants. A material artefact of national history writing, the monument severs this local story from imperial concerns. Yet a comparative study of the transition to wage labour on the family’s properties in North Wales and Jamaica reveals the work the Pennant memorial’s story was doing for both Britain’s local and its imperial labour projects. In North Wales, estate managers confronted labourers’ independence; in post-emancipation Jamaica, plantation authorities similarly faced freed people’s efforts to defend their autonomy. Racial ideology reconciled these parallel histories by constructing Black labourers as uniquely idle, thereby legitimizing restrictive post-emancipation labour regimes while masking coercion within Britain itself. By tracing the circulation of labour ideologies, moral vocabularies, and managerial practices across North Wales and Jamaica, this article challenges historical narratives that separate industrial Britain from slave and post-slave colonies, a tendency epitomized in the Pennant monument, and instead exposes the joint construction of national mythology and imperial rationality.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149210863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Daughters of the First Empire: Inherited wealth, surveillance, and Napoleon’s contested imperial power 第一帝国的女儿：继承的财富，监视，以及拿破仑有争议的皇权

IF 1.8 1区历史学

Past & Present Pub Date : 2026-10-08 DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtag029

Netta Green

{"title":"Daughters of the First Empire: Inherited wealth, surveillance, and Napoleon’s contested imperial power","authors":"Netta Green","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtag029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtag029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Young daughters occupy an anomalous position in the legal landscape of Napoleonic France. While the Civil Code of 1804 reduced wives to legal dependents, it guaranteed daughters equal inheritance rights alongside their brothers, a striking exception within an otherwise conservative family law. This article suggests that the anomaly was not incidental: rather than reflecting principled commitment, Napoleon’s retention of egalitarian inheritance may have derived from his recognition that a growing market of wealthy heiresses could serve as instruments of political consolidation. By orchestrating marriages between these women and loyal officers, his government hoped to fuse old noble families with the new imperial notables. To identify suitable candidates, Savary, the minister of police, secretly ordered prefects to compile detailed lists on young women across the empire. Two surviving tables, from the departments of Vienne and the annexed Simplon (today Valais, Switzerland), illustrate how this project unfolded on the ground, and why it largely failed. Though Napoleon’s matchmaking schemes yielded meagre results, the tables themselves document a significant moment in the history of state bureaucratic science and surveillance: the incorporation of young women’s bodies, fortunes, and futures into the administrative machinery of imperial power.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149151713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Gandhi’s Voice, Mass Politics, and the Arrival of Public Address Technology in India, 1927–1931 甘地的声音、大众政治和印度公共演讲技术的到来，1927-1931

IF 1.8 1区历史学

Past & Present Pub Date : 2026-10-01 DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtag028

Kama Maclean

引用次数: 0

The Politics of Energy in Colonial Suriname 苏里南殖民地的能源政治

IF 1.8 1区历史学

Past & Present Pub Date : 2026-09-04 DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtag027

Chelsea Schields

{"title":"The Politics of Energy in Colonial Suriname","authors":"Chelsea Schields","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtag027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtag027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In colonial Suriname, a society shaped by slavery and indenture, the infrastructure and technologies of energy arrived as extensions of a colonial order that had long concentrated resources among elites. Drawing on colonial and company archives, this article shows how working-class Surinamese women and men engaged with gas and electricity, destroying street lamps one day while demanding connection the next. During the tumultuous 1930s, these communities protested against unequal access to power, exploitative labour practices at energy plants, and the racialized logics of privatization. As a monopoly in a small colonial society eager to expand its customer base, the European energy utility was compelled to respond to these demands. Yet even as energy use crossed from public into private space, working-class households continued to thwart colonial expectations that it would appease them, instead adapting these technologies to the survival of their own social worlds. Whether on the street or in the home, working-class engagement with energy revealed an ambivalence towards colonial modernity that challenged the terms of its imposition. This examination of how energy became a site of conflict shaped by a Caribbean plantation context thus extends energy history beyond its usual focus of the Global North.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"386 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148902039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Microhistory and Women’s Time Use 微观历史与女性的时间利用

IF 1.8 1区历史学

Past & Present Pub Date : 2026-09-03 DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtag025

Jane Humphries

{"title":"Microhistory and Women’s Time Use","authors":"Jane Humphries","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtag025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtag025","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Gender historians have pioneered attention to ‘doing words’ to identify otherwise invisible women’s work. Searches in court records for verbs with female subjects have documented women’s widespread participation in economic activity, often directing and managing, while playing down their unpaid care for family members. This article turns to a microhistorical source, diaries written by Peter Walkden, a farmer and Nonconformist minister living in eighteenth-century Lancashire. Walkden’s account of his farming routine and interactions with family and community incidentally describes the activities of his wife, Catherine. Evidence of her ‘doings’ identifies Catherine’s repertoire of tasks but is extended here to identify work and labour relations by the ownership of equipment, production for use or sale, and the need for occasional stand-ins when Catherine was indisposed or unavailable. Additional circumstantial evidence and other historical and modern sources enable the estimation of the frequency and duration of tasks, so providing the first breakdown of an early modern woman’s working day. Findings confirm the extent of women’s work but reinstate unpaid care as vital to the functioning of Walkden’s household, and by inference to social reproduction generally. Significantly, when Walkden himself had to provide care or pay for an understudy, it was understood as work and its value recognized.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148902040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Institutionalization and Market Integration in the Archaic Greek Economy: Modelling Overseas Trade from the Distribution Pattern of Samian Transport Amphoras 古希腊经济中的制度化与市场一体化：从萨米安运输双耳罐的分布模式看海外贸易

IF 1.8 1区历史学

Past & Present Pub Date : 2026-07-08 DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtag021

Michael Loy

引用次数: 0

Displaced women, law and competing patriarchies in late Ottoman Serbia 奥斯曼塞尔维亚晚期流离失所的妇女、法律和相互竞争的父权制

IF 1.8 1区历史学

Past & Present Pub Date : 2026-07-08 DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtag020

Emily Greble

{"title":"Displaced women, law and competing patriarchies in late Ottoman Serbia","authors":"Emily Greble","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtag020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtag020","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on women who were displaced, unclaimed, or left without protection in the shifting legal order of early nineteenth-century Ottoman Serbia— runaway wives, enslaved and manumitted women, fugitives, and kidnapped girls —this article argues that the burdens of transition into the modern state were experienced most acutely by women who fell through the cracks of overlapping spatial and legal regimes of control. Despite their varied circumstances, women shared a structural problem: they had no pathway to legal personhood, no rights to return to or leave their homes, and no protection unless recognized within a patriarchal household. Their legal belonging remained tethered to household authority even as new centralizing political and legal orders took shape. In this unstable transitional period, patriarchy was distributed and enforced across competing scales and legal structures, including households, villages, Ottoman imperial institutions, and emerging Serbian state structures. Drawing on Serbian court and administrative records from the 1820s–30s, this article traces how various local and imperial officials negotiated these tensions, suggesting that transitional legal systems inscribed gendered asymmetries into modern practices of repatriation, citizenship, trafficking, and statelessness. The article contends that modern patriarchies emerged out of early modern household-based legal regimes and systems of village authority, and that modern forms of statelessness stem from problems that became legible during transitional periods and were never resolved.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148401008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Begging and lower-class giving in late Imperial Russia 俄罗斯帝国晚期的乞讨和下层阶级的施舍

IF 1.8 1区历史学

Past & Present Pub Date : 2026-03-30 DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtag015

Felix Cowan, Sarah Badcock

{"title":"Begging and lower-class giving in late Imperial Russia","authors":"Felix Cowan, Sarah Badcock","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtag015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtag015","url":null,"abstract":"Begging was everywhere in the late Russian Empire, and presents a distinctive case study for lower-class charitable giving. Unlike many Western European states at the turn of the twentieth century, Russia had no institutionalized social safety net. For most lower-class Russians, direct alms from other lower-class people were the only form of poor relief. This article shows that poverty in urban and rural spaces was entangled. As lower-class Russians moved between the countryside and the city, they engaged with poverty and begging in comparable ways, revealing how rural peasants, urban workers, and people in between understood their society through a shared moral landscape. Studying everyday interactions between beggars and individual almsgivers indicates that lower-class people were largely cautious and discriminating in their decisions about who to give alms to, why, and in what forms. Although perceived hierarchies of need along lines of gender, age, and physical ability were similar in urban and rural spaces, mechanisms of discrimination were very different. In villages, lower-class people used personal networks and face-to-face interaction to assess need. In cities, crowds of anonymous strangers made that approach impossible, so they relied on information provided by modern forms of communication such as the daily newspaper to identify people and causes worthy of charitable giving, demonstrating processes of lower-class adaptation to Russia’s modernizing society.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"132 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147586316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The migration–innovation nexus in the early modern world 近代早期世界的移民与创新关系

IF 1.8 1区历史学

Past & Present Pub Date : 2026-03-19 DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtag013

Felicia Gottmann, Floris van Swet, Rémi Dewière

引用次数: 0

The Colonial Metamorphosis of Egyptian Capital Punishment, 1884–1903 埃及死刑的殖民蜕变，1884-1903

IF 1.8 1区历史学

Past & Present Pub Date : 2025-10-13 DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtaf030

Alaa El-Shafei

引用次数: 0