Portrait of Elizabeth Woodville

When Queens were witches: Elizabeth Woodville and the Fear of Female Power by Darcie Bunting

MadiganLeave a comment

The council chamber fell silent. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, thrust his arm into the air. “Look upon me!” he cried. “See how I am bewitched.” 

Sir Laurence Olivier as Richard III in the 1955 film (The Guardian).

Candlelight flickered across the twisted flesh of his limb as he turned it stiffly, with deliberate theatricality. The councillors glanced at one another, unsure whether to speak or even breathe. Though the fire roared in the hearth, a chill had crept through the stone room. Richard’s gaze cut through the shadows as he turned sharply to the lords before him. “This,” he declared, his voice low and measured, “is the work of Edward’s wife — that monstrous witch.” His words hung in the smoky air, heavy with accusation. The woman had just named had once been England’s queen. Now, she was to be its sorceress.

*          *          *

In the summer of 1483, England was a kingdom holding its breath. A child king sat nominally on the throne, the court was split by faction, and memories of civil war still bled into the present. Edward IV was scarcely cold in his grave when his brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, began to consolidate power as Lord Protector, a role that promised stability but concealed ambition. The dramatic scene above, imagined in the spirit of Shakespeare’s Richard III, captures the political volatility of the moment. It portrays Richard as unstable, willing to blame anyone for anything in his pursuit of the crown. By casting England’s queen as a witch, he could suggest that her sons — the rightful heirs to the kingdom — were tainted, their claim corrupted, and his own ascent justified.

Yet the episode itself is almost entirely unhistorical. No contemporary chronicler records such a display, and the 2012 excavation of Richard’s skeleton revealed a perfectly normal arm. The wider accusation was, however, very real. Elizabeth Woodville, Queen of England, was charged with witchcraft — not for cursing a king’s limb, but for a far greater transgression: being a woman who wielded power.

Elizabeth Woodville, Queen Consort of Edward IV of England. Unknown artist, c. 1470s. National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 626).

That a late-medieval queen could be accused of sorcery seems extraordinary, but Woodville had been no ordinary queen. When Edward IV announced in 1464 that he had married Elizabeth Woodville, his courtiers simply could not believe what they were being told. He had chosen not a foreign princess but an English widow — the daughter of a mere knight — and elevated her straight to the throne.

Elizabeth would pay dearly for this. Her beauty and sudden rise seemed too extraordinary to be attributed to love alone. A king marrying for passion defied every principle of dynastic logic; many in the court therefore assumed there must be a darker explanation. Whispers echoed through noble halls: enchantments, they murmured, had ensnared the king’s heart. Behind them, they claimed, stood Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, who was said to have woven charms that raised her daughter to the exalted heights of the English crown.

By 1483, however, Edward IV was dead, the crown could no longer shield his widow, and rumour had hardened into accusation against Elizabeth herself. For nearly twenty years, she had been England’s most powerful woman, granting favours, hearing petitions, and governing estates from the New Tower at Westminster with the composure of a sovereign born to power.

Now she stood exposed; a widow whose future hung in peril.

Elizabeth, however, refused to yield. She moved swiftly to secure her son’s succession, directing her brother Anthony Woodville and her son Richard Grey to escort the young Edward V to London for his coronation. But when both men were seized en route by the boy’s uncle, Richard of Gloucester, Elizabeth grasped the gravity of the peril at once. Gathering her daughters and younger son, Prince Richard, she fled to Westminster Abbey and claimed sanctuary.

And yet this flight was no capitulation, but a challenge — a public declaration that Gloucester could not be trusted, casting him not as protector of the realm but as its would-be usurper.

Richard wasted no time in silencing her influence. On 10 June 1483, he wrote to his loyal Yorkist supporters, warning that Elizabeth was using ‘subtle and damnable ways’ to ‘forecast’ his destruction. The wording was deliberate. This was no ordinary accusation of treason but a hint of something darker. By describing her ‘forecasting’ as ‘subtle’ and ‘damnable,’ Richard invoked the spectre of forbidden magic — transforming political rivalry into a tale of enchantment.

By mid-July, Richard’s position seemed unassailable. He had taken Prince Richard from sanctuary, placed both boys in the Tower, secured a declaration of their illegitimacy, and crowned himself king. For the moment, his world appeared perfectly ordered — the obstacles removed, the crown his. Yet the boys were never seen again, becoming the Lost Princes in the Tower, a mystery that continues to haunt English history.

‘The Princes in the Tower’, John Everett Millais, 1878 (Royal Holloway, Picture Gallery).

But, still in sanctuary, Elizabeth was proving to be a formidable force. That autumn, she began a covert correspondence with the Lancastrian Margaret Beaufort, whose son, Henry Tudor, posed the greatest threat to Richard’s crown. From the shadows, the two women forged a daring pact: to unite the houses of York and Lancaster through the marriage of Elizabeth’s eldest daughter to Henry himself. It was a gamble that could end years of civil war, and secure Elizabeth’s legacy through her daughter, should the Tudor claimant prevail.

When word of this alliance reached Richard, he erupted in fury. Determined to crush both Elizabeth’s influence and the threat she had helped to nurture, he moved swiftly to legitimise his usurpation and destroy her reputation in one stroke. In early 1484, Parliament passed Titulus Regius, declaring Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth void — not merely because Edward was allegedly precontracted to another woman, but because, it claimed, the match had been sealed through ‘sorcerie and witchcrafte’ wrought by Elizabeth and her mother.

It was a masterstroke of propaganda. Richard exploited a growing continental fear of female magic, a growing panic that would soon erupt into the witch-hunts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By recasting Elizabeth as a sorceress, he stripped her queenship of legitimacy and her power of its humanity, ensuring she could never command loyalty.

Yet history would not bend to Richard’s will. In August 1485, Richard fell in battle at Bosworth, his crown seized by the very man Elizabeth had championed: Henry Tudor. Within months, her daughter, Elizabeth of York, was queen. Indeed, the woman scorned as a commoner and condemned as a witch had forged the dawn of Tudor England.

But Elizabeth’s story reveals something deeper about the world she inhabited and sheds some uncomfortable light on our own. She was neither the first nor the last woman whose power was treated as unnatural. The pattern is perennial: when women’s authority refuses containment, it is rewritten as transgression.

In the fifteenth century, female power was called witchcraft. Our world prefers subtler spells: ambition called manipulation, leadership called luck. When Kamala Harris’ rise is dismissed as the result of sexual favour, or Greta Thunberg’s defiance reduced to ‘anger issues,’ we hear the same old fear in a modern tongue. Female power must never, it seems, be allowed to stand on its own terms.

Elizabeth Woodville, the so-called ‘white queen’, was no witch. She was something far more dangerous: a woman who refused to be still. In her defiance — in that quiet, enduring act of power — lay her truest sorcery.

Darcie Bunting is a student on the MA Public History programme at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Further reading:

Baldwin, David. Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2002. 

Hollman, Gemma. Royal Witches: Witchcraft and the Nobility in Fifteenth-Century England. London: The History Press, 2019.

Okerlund, Arlene. Elizabeth Wydeville: The Slandered Queen. Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2005. 

Where Museums End: Gift Shops and their Narratives by Alisa Makarova

MadiganLeave a comment

When Walter Benjamin wrote his most famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in 1935, he raised issues that would shape the field of cultural studies for years to come. What happens to art, its uniqueness and ‘genuineness’ in an age when any masterpiece can be copied and distributed on a massive scale? How does mechanical reproduction change the way we interact with works of art, and how does it affect our perception of artefacts? When Benjamin wrote about technologies that allowed for the infinite reproduction of any culturally significant image, he voiced a fairly grave concern and warned against major political consequences. Now, almost a century later, we can see the phenomenon he described play out in a rather intriguing way: mechanical reproduction of art is now an integral part of any museum and has its dedicated space filled with tea towels, postcards, socks, magnets and rubber ducks – the gift shop.

Walter Benjamin, 1928 (public domain)

The idea of copying works of art and selling memorabilia at culturally significant sites can be traced back to the middle ages. There is evidence dating from the 13th century of traders selling pilgrim badges and other souvenirs at Christian shrines in France. While the Catholic Church recognized the badges as holy objects in themselves (and thus tried to maintain monopoly over the trade), the items simultaneously served as souvenirs. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as visiting museums and historical sites became a popular activity among the more affluent social classes, many cultural sites started offering catalogues and guidebooks for sale.

The advent of photography marked a sea change in the world of heritage merchandise, as museums could now sell reproductions of works in their collection. Photography stalls, both private and museum-owned, started selling photoprints to the visitors at the biggest London attractions, such as the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum. By the beginning of the 20th century photographs were followed with postcards (which proved to be a big hit), cast miniatures, sets of china and scarves – the items we can always expect to find in modern day giftshops.

The most important function of the modern giftshop is obvious; it is one of the main sources of self-generated revenue for museums and heritage sites. However, there are less explicit functions these spaces perform; as Benjamin foresaw, they have the power to influence how we experience and understand art and history.

Sharon Macdonald identifies three categories into which the products of gift shops can be split: reproductions, insignia and associations. The first category shouldn’t be reduced only to copies of certain items in the museum’s collection. It also includes any products on which images of these artefacts can be printed. For example, the British museum has a whole collection inspired by the Rosetta Stone with 72 items, including a tie, a T-shirt, a tote bag, a thermos cup and earrings. This category of products serves a very important purpose: it reinforces the cult status of certain items in the collection and makes them more significant than others in the eyes of a visitor.

This poses a complicated question. On the one hand, the most valuable elements of the collection are considered as such for a reason. There is really no arguing that the Rosetta Stone is one of the most, if not the most significant objects, housed in the British Museum, or why Monet’s ‘The Water Lily Pond’ and ‘Sunflowers’ by Van Gogh are highlights of the National Gallery’s collection. In a sense, a gift shop at the entrance of a museum maps out a route for visitors. Instead of wondering around for hours not knowing what to look at, a person visiting the British Museum for the very first time can step into the gift shop and get an idea of what they shouldn’t miss: the Rosetta Stone, the Gayer-Anderson cat, the Lewis Chessmen, the mummies, the Egyptian blue hippo … However, there are a few problems with such a list.

A division between ‘important’ elements of the collection and ‘the rest’ can of course make visitors miss out on entire sections or aspects of exhibitions. For example, even though the shop at the British museum offers items inspired by Indian culture like the Amaravati Marbles, it puts a much heavier emphasis on objects from Egypt. One can argue that this is an inevitable downside of any curatorship – it always limits independent exploration and perpetuates a certain narrative. The problem lies in the fact that a gift shop is not a space in which a visitor expects to encounter a narrative. One might imagine that, driven by commercial success, a shop simply sells the images that are objectively the most popular, interesting or beautiful. How the product range relates to the Museum’s narratives and why most of these best-selling images have to do more with victory over France in Egypt and the groundbreaking work of brave British archeologists, rather than with much less romantic stories of bringing items from other colonies … well, a gift shop is not exactly the space that invites such questions.

On the other hand, some of the objects are popular with shops not so much due to their historical significance, but because they have high selling potential. The blue hippo and the Gayer-Anderson cat are just two of the many animal-related images represented at the British Museum gift shop, alongside versions of a Greek Owl, a Greek Horse, the Hoji Frog and several variations of Anubis statues. The gift shop at the HMS Belfast sells printed images of dogs and cats on the ship and a soft toy of Frankenstein cat. The gift shops at the Tower of London have an entire raven-inspired section. All of these are, of course, connected to real historical images and fascinating stories, but their main commercial value is that they are cute. And, for the visitors, this can create a sense that a historical event or an archeological finding is more attention-worthy if there is an animal involved.

Prints featuring animals who ‘served’ as mascots on British warships at the HMS Belfast gift shop

Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction shifts our perception of art from its cult significance and its context to its display value. This principle can also be extended towards history. Cute animal souvenirs seem to have more display value, and less historical context. The same happens when a shop reproduces a lot of old machinery-related imagery: the Imperial War Museum shop has entire collections of merchandise dedicated to Second World War aircraft such as the Spitfire, Lancaster Bomber, Typhoon and others. These souvenirs convey one simple messages: look how cool these planes were! However, focusing on the technical and design aspects of these airplanes, and overlooking their status as extremely efficient killing machines, arguably strips the history of war of its political and human context.

Another category of souvenirs, Insignia, describes items with the name of the museum or historical site on them. It can be hard to imagine how such simple memorabilia can be problematic, but the issue arises when such items are distributed at the sites of ‘dark tourism’. Places connected to tragedies and human suffering have always drawn and intrigued people. Many of the biggest historical attractions in the world, such as the Coliseum or the Tower of London, have a very bloody history. But while it is absolutely acceptable to wear ‘The Tower of London’ T-shirt, clothes in a very similar design sold at the Titanic Belfast cause a somewhat uneasy feeling. After visiting a thoroughly researched, captivating and touching exhibition that dedicates a lot of space to personal stories of people, 1500 of whom died in great fear and pain, it causes quite a feeling of dissonance to walk into the gift shop and see socks and baby clothes saying ‘Titanic Belfast’ (not to mention rubber ducks and Titanic replicas for a bathtub).

Souvenirs on display at the ‘Titanic Store’ at the Titanic Belfast site (Alisa Makarova)

Drawing a line concerning what is acceptable when it comes to ‘dark tourism’ sites is a complicated and ever-changing challenge. Is it just the historical distance that makes certain topics less triggering? And, if so, does it mean that there is a theoretical amount of time that would make it ethical to sell merchandise at the museums of former concentration camps or the Kresty prison in St. Petersburg (one of the symbols of the Great Terror), even if it is just something with the name of the site on it?

Illustration from guidebook bought at Tower of London, 2010s

Some museums seem to realise that historical distance does not erase ethical considerations. The Tower of London is an interesting example of how the narrative of a museum’s gift shop can change over time. Most of the souvenirs sold there fall into the third category of museum products – associations. These are items that are inspired by images, characters and stories connected to the place, but not the real objects one can find at the site. Around 20 years ago the tower used to sell some dark humour-themed souvenirs inspired by associations with the history of executions at the Tower: my grandparents still have coasters with a smiling executioner that they remember purchasing at the Tower during their trip to London in the early 2000s. Another souvenir from the Tower our family possesses is a 2010s guidebook which has some humorous headings and caricature drawings, including one of an executioner chasing an old lady around with an axe. Today the Tower of London giftshops don’t have any execution-related souvenirs. Moreover, the shops feature a surprisingly small number of products directly related to certain historical events, characters or objects. Instead, many of the items convey the feeling of ‘pastness’ and an overall atmosphere: bottles of mead, figures of knights, goblets and decorative skulls create an idea of a vague medieval past.

Most of the products referring to specific historical events are souvenirs related to Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, his other wives and Elizabeth I. Although there are souvenirs related to other aspects of the Tower’s history (for example, a figure of a suffragette) the story of Anne Boleyn is the main narrative presented in the gift shops. From the line of merchandise with a famous B necklace and a slogan ‘well behaved women rarely make history’ to Anne Boleyn-inspired head bands and books about her; the first of the three queens executed at the fortress is clearly presented by the gift shops as the Tower’s main character. Whether it has to do with the media popularity of the character, or with the fact that the other stories, such as that of Jane Grey or the two murdered princes, might be too tragic to inspire souvenirs, whether reinforcing the significance of one narrative can ever overshadow 1,000 years of other historical events and whether this is a trend that will be eventually replaced with something else – these are all questions that can and should be studied. The gift shop is one the many media through which the public engages with the past, and it should be approached critically, and recognised for the influence it has over our experience and interpretation of historical sites.

Alisa Makarova is a graduate of the MA in Public History programme at Royal Holloway, University of London. Drawing from her background in journalism and marketing, Alisa’s research focuses on the issues of representation of the past and the analysis of historical narratives.

Further Reading

Benjamin, Walter, and J. A Underwood. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Macdonald, Sharon. The Shop: Multiple Economies of Things in Museums. Museum X Zur Neuvermessung Eines Mehrdimensionalen Raumes Herausgegeben Von Friedrich Von Bose, Kerstin Poehls, Franka Schneider, Annett Schulze, 2012.

Larkin, J. ‘All Museums Will Become Department Stores’: The Development and Implications of Retailing at Museums and Heritage Sites. Archaeology International, 19(1), 2016.

Hooper, G., & Lennon, J.J. (Eds.). Dark Tourism: Practice and interpretation (1st ed.). Routledge, 2016.

The Greatest Showman? Pablo Fanque and the Black British Circus by Charlotte Bookham

Madigan2 Comments

The year is 1847. You have just squeezed into your bench at the top of Astley’s Amphitheatre in Lambeth, jostled by the eager crowd as they peer into the ring below you. The smell of sawdust, sweat and horses overwhelms you as the music begins to swell, quietening the crowd. Your friend points towards a box beside the stage – Queen Victoria is apparently in attendance. Watching with bated breath, you see the performer enter the ring with his horse, a beautiful black mare. The pair’s movements match seamlessly with the tempo of the orchestra, as if he has trained the animal to dance. As the crowd erupts into cheers, you know you have just seen one of the greatest showmen in the world.

‘Mr Pablo Fanque, and his trained Steed’, Illustrated London News (20 March 1847)

The March 1847 performance by Pablo Fanque, Britain’s first black circus proprietor was  described in The Illustrated London News as a spectacle that ‘far exceeds anything that has ever yet been brought from the continent’, where the “horse dancing” known as manège originated. And Fanque certainly won over the London crowds. Performing in the window between the abolition of the British slave trade and the Scramble for Africa, he occupied a precarious pocket of opportunity in circus when most professions discriminated against people of colour, especially those of African descent. Yet his contribution and that of performers of colour across the country have usually been overlooked in popular histories.

Mr Kite Poster, wood engraved print, Jones and Crosskill Printers, Rochdale, 1843

While some readers may recognise Pablo Fanque from the famous Beatles’ song, ‘Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite’, the link with the Fab Four has tended to diminish his considerable achievements, ironically making him a footnote in his own history. If we instead foreground Fanque’s life as a mixed-race performer, showman and businessman, we can begin to genuinely appreciate the significant number of performers of colour that were engaged at every level of the circus during its golden age.

Establishing his own circus in 1841 with just two horses, one clown and his name, Fanque’s business was quite a risky venture. Two years later, however, a review of his performance at Ashton in Lancashire described:

‘… the excitement of the delighted audiences who nightly flock to witness the extraordinary performances, executed by the extensive company of equestrians, so advantageously known throughout the three kingdoms were never yet exceeded in any equestrian company.’

The article makes no mention of Fanque’s race. Nor did the majority of the 300 periodicals analysed by Vanessa Toulmin in her research on Black circus performers. Rather, contemporary reviews, bills and advertisements referred to his ‘extraordinary performances’ and ‘unparalleled’ success in the business. Treated as an exception for his race today, in his own lifetime Fanque was celebrated for his exceptional skill. He was also praised for his philanthropy and impeccable respectability. Many of his performances offered cheaper or free tickets to younger children, which established him as a moral entertainer. Local periodicals regularly advertised Fanque’s benefits for the poor and other performers, with the Birmingham Gazette repeating early advertisements beside Relief Committee donation rosters.

So, why does this matter? Well, charity propelled the British moral mission following the abolition of slavery and left its mark on several countries’ cultural and physical landscape. The moral “charity donor” figure of the nineteenth century was almost exclusively white and middle or upper class, with historians of philanthropy only noting significant change in participants towards the end of the century. By founding institutions like schools through endowments or providing money for the poor, these charitable ventures reinforced unequal power relations along race, class and gender lines, while forming a burgeoning charity market. Within the entertainment industry, charitable events were initially held for ailing members of the community – such as Pablo Fanque’s ‘Mr Kite’ – before extending to other ventures. That fact that Fanque, a Black British man, led charitable work through his performances and membership of the Freemasons complicates the victim/saviour or victim/oppressor narratives that continue to dominate Victorian history.

Nor was Fanque alone. His sons followed him into the circus business, with his eldest, William Darby Bunham, emigrating to Australia to take the Fanque name global. Joseph Hillier, an equestrian who briefly led Andrew Ducrow’s Circus, was described as ‘black’ by contemporaries and has been theorised by historian Steve Ward to be of mixed Indian birth. Generations of those bearing the ‘Maccomo’ lion taming name were almost exclusively of African descent. Though the names of behind-the-scenes workers often do not appear on circus bills or photography, these non-white workers were responsible for much of the art form’s soaring success.

Noted as a ‘great favourite’ within Lancashire and neighbouring counties by the Illustrated London News in 1847, it was not until recently that Pablo Fanque was commemorated by a blue plaque in Leeds. Unveiled in September 2023 by Leeds Civic Trust, the plaque reads:

PABLO FANQUE; Born William Darby, he was the first Black circus owner in Britain. He regularly performed in Leeds. On 18th March 1848, near to this location in King Charles’ Croft, his circus building collapsed causing the death of his wife Susannah. Both are now buried in the Leeds General Cemetery. 1810 – 1871

Despite noting his significance as the ‘first Black circus owner’, the Leeds plaque, and the accompanying BBC article centre life tragedies or Beatles fame over Fanque’s achievements. John Lennon’s own plaques do not discuss personal tragedy, so why is this the case for Pablo Fanque?

Farewell Benefit Poster, c. 1850s (The Tribune)

The once hugely popular spectacle of the circus remains on the periphery of popular and academic history, usually being referenced as an amusing anecdote to generate excitement in narrative of the Victorian past, rather than credited as significant in its own right. And yet, as a popular entertainment, the Victorian circus cut across class divisions, drawing crowds from all walks of life. As an art form, it developed performance techniques and globally recognisable iconography. As a profession, it championed skill often over race or gender. As Thomas Horne of the Showmen’s Guild of Great Britain boldly proclaimed in 1905: ‘In the great brotherhood of the equestrian world, there is no colour-line.’

Pablo Fanque did not need Lennon and McCartney to immortalise him, he established his own legacy in life. Often conflated with freak shows, the Victorian circus can be challenging to integrate into existing knowledge of the era. But that does not mean it should be ignored. Skilled performers like Fanque challenged notions of blackness as they were formed, providing a counterbalance to early theories of scientific racism. As interest in diverse histories continues to grow, it is the perfect time for circus performers to step back into the spotlight.

Further Reading

Charlotte Bookham is a student on the MA Public History programme at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research explores Victorian circuses, material culture and animal/human relationships.

Black British x Public History: Past, Present and Future by Nom Ncube

MadiganLeave a comment

In 1987 the Ghanaian journalist, Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, laid the first foundations of a month dedicated to making Africans and people of African descent visible in Britain’s public memory. Addai-Sebo was working at the Greater London Council and had been moved by the cries of one of his colleagues, a broken-hearted mother distraught by her seven-year-old son’s desire to be white despite being named after Marcus Garvey. He witnessed Black children shrinking in their identity; young Ghanaians masqueraded as Afro-Caribbeans, and Afro-Caribbeans took offense at being called ‘African’. Determined to improve the self-image of Black British children, Addai-Sebo sought to broaden and enrich our collective memory of the British past by highlighting Black historical lives and experiences annually.

Perhaps my parents were motivated by the same sentiments when they curated our engagement with history by creating their own curriculum at home, featuring the films of Tshaka, freedom songs, and videos of traditional dances and dresses. They so desperately wanted my siblings and I to remember our roots, our heritage, our ancestry, our history. In a similar fashion, historians such as David Olusoga, sociologists like Kehinde Andrews, community organisations like BLAM UK and rapper, Akala, have been weaving the threads of Britain’s past, ensuring that Black Britons are visible in the Nation’s historical tapestry.

Black British history has grown in popularity in recent years, with some opportunities in the school curriculum for children to learn about historical figures such as Mary Seacole, African Kingdoms like Benin, the Black experience of the British Empire, and the abolition of slavery. There is still much work to be done, however, and, as an artist and academic specialising in telling histories and stories of Southern Africans and their diaspora, I can attest to the need to continue to diversify the histories we tell the public. Our engagement with history influences how we perceive and interact with cultures from the African continent, the Caribbean islands, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe.

Opening Roundtable [from left] Dr Ayshah Johnston, Tony Warner, Jade Bentil, Colin Grant and Montaz Marche.

In a world in which we’re so connected, it is crucial for young people to be knowledgeable about the intersections within Black identities and their nuances. This understanding can help prevent identity crises that were faced by Black youth from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, when being African was often stigmatised. The lack of visibility of different African ethnic groups’ cultures, languages, dialects, and histories affects the esteem of the diaspora.

I remember a time when speaking with an African English accent was grounds to be called a ‘freshie’, and the only way to assimilate in school was to imitate the London accent from the ‘endz’. Fast forward to the 2010s, the rise in popularity of Afrobeats and Afrobashment exposed Britons to other dialects of English, like Nigerian English. The more we diversify heritage, the further we can push against the notion that there can only be one way to express Blackness. My motivation for attending ‘Black British x Public History: Past, Present and Future’ was to understand where we are and where we are going in this journey of representation and understanding.

This two-day workshop took place at the London Archives on the 6th and 7th of September. The event was organised by the London Archives, University College London, and Royal Holloway, University of London, and brought together established and emerging figures in Black British history to discuss how things stand and what’s next. As I entered the space, I was thrilled to see that New Beacon Books, which specialises in African and Caribbean literature, had a stall in the building. The room where we were hosted also had two pieces of art that immediately caught my attention: a photographic piece by Annie-Marie Akussah and a mixed media portrait made from natural resources by Tara Jerome Bernabe. My iPhone made a debut; I snapped away wondering about the archival material that had inspired them.

Tara Jerome-Bernabé’s ‘Fafanto’s Children’, commissioned as part of for London Archives’ ‘Art at the Archives’ project.

The sound of conversations between colleagues being reunited and new relationships being formed soon died down as the chair of our first roundtable, Montaz Marche, welcomed us to the event. She briefly introduced the organisers before unveiling a whopping line-up of contributors to the discussion: Author of Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, Colin Grant; Learning and Engagement Manager at Black Cultural Archives, Dr Ayshah Johnston; founder of Black History Walks, Tony Warner; and Jade Bentil, a Black feminist historian. All sat at the front as we eagerly waited to probe their minds and glean insights from their wealth of knowledge.

The discussion commenced, and the topic of narrative nonfiction crept up. Jade posed the question, “What constitutes a fact or truth?” As a historian, her concern is not so much about the given event but the perception of the event. This reminded me of the works of other historians like Ivan Jablonka, sociologists like Xolela Mangcu, and artists like George the Poet, who have inserted themselves into the historical narrative, drawing from their memory, their communities’ memories, and public memory to tell stories of historical significance. Colin Grant simply framed this as curating rather than writing history.

Calypso artist Alexander D. Great performs at the workshop’s Cultural Showcase

This made me think about how I can lean into oral traditions, songs, folklore, African languages, and dialects to curate historical narratives within my communities. Orality is instrumental in how we historicize events, so why not follow that narrative style? I particularly liked Colin’s emphasis on our limitations as humans; we are not omniscient, so why pretend to be? This roundtable revealed to me the importance of pushing the boundaries of the discipline to make space for different ways of storytelling that can accommodate different facets of Blackness.

Naturally, funding emerged as a significant issue later in the discussion, but Tony Warner was a beacon of hope. He told us how the Black History Walks, in collaboration with Nubian Jak, have funded English Heritage plaques of Black Historical figures across London. By creating a commercial enterprise, Tony had the agency to spearhead the creation of blue plaques that could allow more Black Britons to be immortalised and not forgotten. It became clear, though, that the heritage sector’s dependency on public funding is something of a threat to Black British History. The sustainability needed to continue to tell Black stories and have agency to act requires deeper thinking on business structures and profit maximisation.

We also discussed the way in which telling Black histories can come at a cost, not just financially but mentally. The societal pressures to produce excellent bodies of work with ridiculous Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) written in bids to score funding is emotionally and mentally taxing. In addition to low wage thresholds that are prevalent in the sector, it’s hard to imagine Gen Z confidently taking the baton in this struggle against erasure.

Nicole Rachelle-Moore of the British Library leads a session on inclusive public engagement.

Luckily, the programme included mini workshops designed to allow us to ponder questions that arose during the roundtable discussion. Curator of Caribbean Collections at British Library, Nicole Rachelle-Moore’s call to think more broadly about cultural spaces where heritage lives outside of the institution resonated with me. Her question sparked ideas for approaches and practices that could also address the sector’s dependency on public funding.

Imagine, for example, a Red Bull TV partnership with the Young Historians Project to tell histories of dance styles in Black communities as a digital campaign for their dance event in the UK. Take this idea and apply the 3-line challenge we learned from producer, Tony T, to pitch to Red Bull. The result is a historical narrative that can reach national and international audiences while generating enough income to fund another project. The rule of thumb when creating commissions in the arts and entertainment sector is to charge three times the initial quote; however, the same cannot be said for the heritage industry. Its backbone is Arts Council England and the National Heritage Lottery Fund.

Whilst the workshops pushed my thinking on narration and commercialisation, the closing roundtable on the last day challenged me deeply as an artist and academic. Tej Adeleye, writer, radio producer and arts programmer, posed the following questions I’ll be asking myself, and perhaps we should all be asking ourselves when curating Black British history:

  1. Are you making Black history because you want Black people to live in the present and in the future?
  2. What are we doing with memory and why?
  3. How can public history (memory) projects you’re working on restore the human dignity of Black people?

It is clear that practitioners, artists, communities, academics, and history enthusiasts who hope to present Black British pasts to the public face significant challenges. However, I left the workshop feeling inspired and filled with a sense of renewed purpose for my own work and hope for the future of Black British history.

Nom Ncube is a is a graduate of Royal Holloway’s MA in Public History programme; a visual artist and creative producer, Nom’s practice is informed by her academic background in photojournalism and public history.

The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 by Jessica Wadley

Madigan1 Comment

“On January 15, 1919, a two-million-gallon tsunami of molasses leveled Boston’s North end.

“Wait. Like, molasses … molasses?”

“Molasses.”

This is a common conversation I have when people discover I’m a historian. They often ask, “What’s your favorite crazy historical fact?”, and the Great Molasses Flood is a grade-A icebreaker. It is exactly what it sounds like. And that is, frankly, unbelievable.

In a nutshell, a five story-sized tank of sickly sweet, sticky syrup burst and a fifteen foot “tidal wave of death and destruction stalked through North End Park and Commercial St”. I love telling this story because it is so bizarre. At face value, it sounds almost whimsical, or like an urban myth or an episode of The Simpsons. But, as soon as you start to consider it, the horror sinks in. Molasses is well known for being thick, sticky, and slow. But this wall of treacle careened down the street at 35mph. And because it is 1.5 times denser than water, it would have behaved more like a landslide than a flash flood. In the days after the disaster, the Boston Globe reported:

‘There was no escape from the wave. Caught, human being and animal alike could not flee. Running in it was impossible. Snared in its flood was to be stifled. Once it smeared a head – human or animal – there was no coughing off the sticky mass. To attempt to wipe it with hands was to make it worse. Most of those who died, died from suffocation. It plugged nostrils almost air-tight.’

Report of the incident in Boston Daily Globe, 16 January 1919 (BDG Archive)

Ultimately, 21 people were killed and more than 150 others were injured. Of those 21, about half of them literally drowned in the molasses. Including two ten-year-old children – Pasquale Iantosca and Maria Distasio who were returning home from school for lunch with Maria’s brother Antonio, who survived. Pasquale’s father watched from their apartment window as the children disappeared into the sludge. Others died in the following days due toinfection or trauma. More still were crushed under rubble. Most of the victims, including little Maria and Pasquale, were Italian immigrants – who made up 90percent of the North End’s residents by 1900 – impoverished by prejudice and circumstance.

            I don’t tell this story merely because of its natural clickability. I think it’s an important case study on how we consider stories from the past. It feels other-worldly, and yet, placing it within its historical context sheds light on more than just the Molasses Flood of 1919.

            How does something like this even happen? What was anybody doing with that much molasses in the first place? Beforethe First World War, molasses was the favorite sweetener in America, dating back to the first European colonies. Its strong flavor makes it perfect for spiced bakes (like those delicious little molasses cookies) and even more commonly, rum. But a 2.5-million-gallon tank seems a little excessive for household use. In fact, king molasses was already beginning to be usurped by granulated sugar for its dropping prices and longer shelf-life. So, we ask again, why did anyone need so much molasses? In a word, the Great War.

Aerial photograph taken at tank site, showing destruction caused by molasses flood

            The tank was built by the U.S. Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA) which was in the business of fermenting molasses to produce  ethanol, one of the key ingredients in gunpowder. So, even though the war had ended, the US being only a few votes away from prohibition (no more rum), and the availability of granulated sugar being on the rise, molasses was in surprisingly high demand in 1919. This demand, lack of federal regulation, and a culture of big business bolstered by the Great War and the Spanish Flu pandemic caused a fatal lack of oversight when it came to the construction of the USIA molasses tank in Boston.

 It was 50 feet tall and 90 feet wide, capable of holding more than 3 million gallons of liquid. Although, I suppose ‘capable’, isn’t exactly the word. You see, the walls of the tank were less than an inch thick and the steel used had been mixed with too little manganese, making it devastatingly brittle in temperatures below 50 degrees Fahrenheit. A typical January day in Boston sits around 36° Fahrenheit (about 2° Celsius). After the flood, USIA claimed the rupture was caused by sabotage. They insisted that an exterior explosion was set up by an unknown individual as an act of terror against the company. The trouble, from their point of view, was that everybody already knew the tank was failing. Even before the fatal top-off in 1919, the tank had leaked. The leakage was so significant and well-known that kids and grown-ups alike would grab a free cup like it was a sugar fountain. The company responded by recalking some of the biggest cracks and painting the whole thing brown so you couldn’t see the sweet stuff seeping down the sides. Eventually, an employee of the company presented hunks of metal to the USIA executives as evidence of the danger to which they reportedly replied, “The tank still stands …” Given all this evidence, the residents of the North End filed suit and litigation lasting more than five years ensued. In the end, it was determined that the tank was structurally unsound, external forces did not cause the disaster, and USIA was liable for negligence. Ultimately, USIA paid more than $600,000 (the equivalent of more than $10.5 million today) in settlements. The victim’s families received $7,000 each. This was the first successful class action lawsuit in the United States.

            But beyond this being a bizarrestory, what’s the point of telling it? Well, this disaster served as a springboard for modern regulation and oversight and serves as a great case study for the need for corporate and industrial ethics. But the most important reason to tell this story is that despite it being such a fantastical event, almost no one I talk to has heard of it. Much of the period from 1900 to1919 is strangely vacant from public memory in the US. Author Stephen Puelo argues that the flood may have fallen out of memory because no one of social significance was affected. The property damage – besides USIA’s – was largely city and working-class residences and businesses.

Diagram of scene of ‘explosion’ printed in local paper (Boston Fire Historical Society Website)

Today, the North End is considered Boston’s “Little Italy.” With its saint festivals and divine cuisine with cannoli for days, it is one of the highlights of tourism in the city. It is also Boston’s oldest neighborhood. Before the Revolution, its proximity to the harbour provided a perfect place to settle and build a shipping empire. The population boomed, factories and industry moved in, and the poor immigrant residents did not move out. By the mid-19th century, the North End became one of the country’s first tenement slums. As the Irish community began to assimilate into social acceptance, the Italian immigrants were ruthlessly criminalized by American society. They only had each other, and the North End became a powerful community of (mostly) Southern Italians. The single square mile neighborhood was extremely overcrowded and covered in soot and grime, but it was the one place they could find housing and safety in numbers. However, most of the Italians of the North End were apolitical non-citizens and therefore had little power to speak out about injustices being imposed on them by big business and the state – like the recklessly swift construction of a three-million-gallon molasses tank right outside their front doors.  This likely was a major factor in USIA’s selection of the site. Proximity to the harbor, to be sure, but also the fact that no one was going to speak for the safety of these people until it was too late.

Another reason the flood has essentially disappeared from public memory is that there were so many other watershed events going on in the world at the time. The Great War had ended two months before, the 19th amendment was nearing ratification, Prohibition was knocking at the door, and the Spanish Flu pandemic was raging through the nation. The Roaring 20s are considered a time of major social change in the US and the causes of that change were eclipsed by the political, cultural, and economic upheaval seen in the following years. So, while the smell of molasses lingered in the streets of Boston for decades, it too eventually faded.

Further Reading:

Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 2004).

Jessica Wadley is a student on the MA in Public History programme at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Viral Victorians, Undercover Journalism and Homelessness Today by Adela Davis

MadiganLeave a comment

It’s January 1866, Victorian London is in the throes of an unusually bitter winter, and you are hurrying home. Although eager to escape the icy wind, you briefly pause to purchase some evening reading from a news vendor.

The paper is the Pall Mall Gazette, and as you flip through the pages, thawing out by the fire at home, a curious column catches your eye.

A NIGHT IN A WORKHOUSE

At about nine o’clock on the evening of Monday, the 8th inst., a neat but unpretentious carriage might have been seen turning cautiously from the Kennington-road into Princes-road, Lambeth … From [the carriage] door emerged a sly and ruffianly figure, marked with every sign of squalor …

This mysterious figure was that of the present writer.

Would you believe that you have just read the opening of one of Britain’s first ever viral news stories?

*          *   *

James Greenwood, 1870s (NPG, London)

Over three days in January 1866, journalist James Greenwood released his ground-breaking exposé “A Night in a Workhouse” under the pseudonym “The Amateur Casual”. Each instalment documented the harsh conditions of the casual ward, a section of the nineteenth-century workhouse specifically reserved for the wandering poor – people we would refer to as ‘homeless’ today. They could receive one night’s accommodation in exchange for a day’s manual labour.

Reporting on this topic was not particularly innovative but Greenwood’s methods certainly were. He wrote from firsthand experience. How? By disguising himself as a vagrant and getting himself admitted for an overnight stay in Lambeth casual ward.A media frenzy ensued. Greenwood’s visceral descriptions of “weak mutton broth” baths, a ceiling “furred with … damp and filth”, and inmates lying “like covered corpses”, captured public interest like no story ever before. “A Night in a Workhouse” was reprinted hundreds of times, reached international audiences, and, bizarrely, even inspired its own theatrical production starring “Daddy”, a real-life pauper featured in Greenwood’s articles. Copycat journalists quickly caught on and Britain officially entered what the Daily News called the “exciting era of ‘amateur casuals’”.

An early and significant development was the rise of ‘lady amateur casuals’. Especially from the 1880s onwards, journalism became a more viable profession for educated women. With charitable work deemed an appropriate ‘women’s topic’, some of these new female journalists turned to undercover ‘social investigation’ writing. One such woman was Olive Christian Malvery. From 1904-1905, she issued a series of articles in Pearson’s Magazine that recounted her incognito escapades amongst London’s poor working women, along with photographs of her dressed in various working-class ‘costumes’

Olive Christian Malvery, dressed as flower girl, early 1900s (The Soul Market)

Some of the best-known male authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also went undercover to witness and write about the degradation and squalor with which the English poor had to contend; Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903) and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) are rightly regarded as classics of the genre. The heyday of the genre drew to a close in the 1910s, and it had mostly disappeared by the late 1930s, possibly corresponding with the formal end of the workhouse system. So ends the story of the amateur casuals. But there is still a crucial question to answer: why? Why did this ‘cross-class camouflage’ seem like such a good idea at the time? To understand, we need to unpack a few layers of Victorian and Edwardian society.

The amateur casual craze emerged during a general rise in middle-class enthusiasm for philanthropy. Industrialisation and urbanisation had caused huge social problems in nineteenth-century Britain. Millions were living in abject poverty, and improved statistical techniques had made this seem far more visible and alarming. This newly fashionable concern for the poor did bring about some important social reform, but there was a darker side too.

Data could only achieve so much. The lives and worlds of impoverished people still ultimately felt inaccessible to the middle classes, and some believed that the only way to truly understand the plight of the poor was to join them. Or, as one amateur casual put it, “Inspection is good, but experience is better”. Compassion and awareness-raising undoubtedly motivated many of these undercover stunts but, in reality, the resulting articles often perpetuated the condescending attitudes and sensationalist language that already surrounded the poor and working classes.

Meanwhile, the public and the press were uniquely well-positioned for a news story to spread like wildfire. Higher literacy rates, cheaper newspapers, and a shift towards more personal, reader-friendly writing meant that more people were reading the news than ever before. Technological advances also allowed publishers to meet this demand. Reporters who embraced the new commercial glamour of journalism with daring exploits and gripping plots could enjoy great success.

Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward after 1908 Sir Luke Fildes 1843-1927 (Tate Britain)

But does the appeal of the amateur casual story sit even deeper than this historical context? After all, don’t we find these stories compelling too?

Of course, we are intrigued by a journalistic practice we now find odd and uncomfortable. We might also feel the vivid descriptions of workhouse life offer a fascinating window into past lives. More unsettlingly,  we are perhaps somewhat drawn in by the sensationalism. After all, our society certainly isn’t immune to these tactics; indeed, we still grapple with the line between activism and ‘poverty porn’.

But, as some social investigation scholars have suggested, perhaps James Greenwood himself best captured the essence of the amateur casuals’ success. When asked what he most feared during his workhouse stay, he simply replied:

“This was it – What if it were true?”

To rephrase more directly, Greenwood really meant, “What if it were true – for me?”

It’s an impactful question, and one that may well have driven both the story’s popularity, and some public empathy and social action. Nineteenth-century journalist and sometime editor of The Times W. T. Stead believed that Greenwood helped secure “a definitive improvement in the treatment of the poorest of the poor”. Charities and change-makers also recognise this question’s power today. In fact, it lies behind one of our most pervasive refrains: ‘Homelessness could happen to anyone’. Or, in other words, ‘If it could happen to anyone, it could happen to me.’ But the amateur casuals leave us with a cautionary note as well. ‘What if it happened to me?’ can quickly turn from a useful equaliser into a distraction from the issue at hand. Amateur casual articles focus so much on the experience of the investigator that the voices of those they claim to represent are largely absent. For us, too, this question can divert attention away from real, lived experiences of homelessness. As policy researchers have highlighted, homelessness doesn’t just happen to ‘anyone’, and it’s unlikely to happen to you. But it is happening now for so many. Could that be enough for us to listen and respond?

            *          *   *

If you would like to respond, donating to a homelessness charity like Crisis or Shelter could be a good place to start. If you feel unsure about what to do when you see a homeless person on the street, this Big Issue article has some helpful advice. Lastly, you may be interested in the innovative work of the Museum of Homelessness, an activist museum run by people with direct experience of homelessness.

Adela Davis is a student on the MA in Public History programme at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Further Reading

Higgs, Mary, Glimpses into the Abyss (London: P. S. King & Son, 1906)

London, Jack, The People of the Abyss (The Floating Press, 1903)

Malvery, Olive Christian, The Soul Market (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1907

The Recent Legacy Bill Cannot Hope to Address Northern Ireland’s Difficult, Unresolved Past by Jack Hepworth

MadiganLeave a comment

Between British troop deployments in 1969 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the Northern Ireland conflict cost in excess of 3,600 lives. More than 1,000 of these killings remain unsolved. In 2017, a report by the Northern Ireland Victims and Survivors Commission found that 26 percent of the adult population identified as victims, due to injury and harm experienced personally or through bereavement. Now undergoing its final review in the House of Commons, the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill proposes to transform how Northern Ireland deals with the conflict’s entangled legacies.

British soldiers watch Ulster Defence Association parade, Belfast 1972 (Daily Telegraph)

The current protocols for addressing this painful past stem from the Stormont House Agreement (SHA), signed in 2014 by Northern Ireland’s political parties and supported by the British and Irish governments. After nearly three months of negotiations, the SHA established several interlocking mechanisms to address legacy issues. Crucially, an Historical Investigations Unit – overseen by the Northern Ireland Policing Board – was set up to pursue criminal investigations into conflict-related deaths. Meanwhile, an Independent Commission for Information Retrieval enabled families privately to seek information about the deaths of their loved ones. Supported by all major parties in Northern Ireland except for the Ulster Unionist Party, the SHA was founded upon the principle of ‘upholding the rule of law’.

Although the UK government pledged up to £150 million to fund the SHA’s initiatives for five years, there were recurring problems with their implementation. For ten weeks in 2015, representatives of the British and Irish governments joined the parties in Northern Ireland’s devolved executive to establish their policy priorities. The so-called ‘Fresh Start’ talks agreed fiscal reforms for the devolved assembly, but lapsed without establishing a legislative framework for dealing with the past.

During the ensuing impasse, in 2018, Karen Bradley, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, coordinated a public consultation on legacy issues. More than 17,000 citizens wrote to Bradley’s office, expressing their views on the way the history of conflict should be presented to future generations, and how to expedite post-conflict reconciliation. Most respondents declared ‘broad support’ for the SHA framework for pursuing prosecutions, indicating a clear preference for resolutions consonant with ‘the rule of law’ and ‘the needs of victims and survivors’. The British government’s review of the consultation held that ‘almost all respondents agreed that any approach to dealing with the past should be victim-centred’: the government insisted that it remained ‘fully committed’ to implementing the SHA.

However, despite the Historical Enquiries Team’s (HET) £30 million annual budget, the pursuit of prosecutions yielded limited results. Over a ten-year period, just three of the 1,615 cases reviewed by the HET resulted in murder convictions. Between 2015 and 2021, only nine people were charged in connection with Troubles-related deaths, and just one person was convicted.

The new Legacy Bill represents a profound change of tack, from pursuing prosecutions to offering de facto amnesties. The legislation will create a new truth recovery body called the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIC). Most contentiously, the ICRIC will be empowered to grant immunity from prosecution for perpetrators and ex-combatants who cooperate. Provided that they provide information ‘true to the best of [their] knowledge and belief’, republicans, loyalists, and British service personnel alike can access an effective amnesty. When the ICRIC becomes operational in May 2024, legacy inquests and investigations will cease. As such, the Bill threatens some twenty inquest cases currently awaiting a court date.

British soldiers survey the aftermath of a riot, East Belfast 1971 (Keystone)

The Legacy Bill has occasioned extraordinary unanimity across Northern Ireland’s divided political realm. Since the Bill was formulated in 2021, its proposals have united in opposition victims’ and survivors’ groups, as well as parties across Northern Ireland’s political spectrum. Aside from its Conservative sponsors at Westminster and British Army veterans’ organisations, the Bill has proved universally unpopular. On the Opposition benches at Westminster, where Labour has opposed the Bill outright, Keir Starmer has indicated that a Labour government would repeal the legislation. Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin, the Irish Taoiseach and Tanáiste respectively, have been scathing in their criticism of [EM1] the Bill and reiterated their commitment to the SHA model. International human rights organisations have joined the chorus of opposition. Fabián Salvioli, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, and reparations, and Gráinne Teggart, Amnesty International’s Northern Ireland Deputy Director, have insisted that the Bill breaches the state’s obligation to investigate serious human rights violations.

Across Northern Ireland’s divided society, there is no consensus on the causes and character of the conflict. For unionists, the Troubles represented a despicable republican ‘terrorist’ campaign; for nationalists and republicans, the conflict was the inevitable product of ‘undemocratic’ partition and of British rule in the north. Meanwhile, survivors and the bereaved indict paramilitaries and state forces tout court for perpetuating a conflict in which the majority of victims were civilians. But while interpretations of the conflict differ profoundly in Northern Ireland, there is widespread agreement that its difficult legacies remain to be addressed. Each political community has unresolved grievances. Unionists seethe as republican ‘terrorists’ released early from jail enter political office. Nationalists and republicans accuse state forces of whitewashing their deadly collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. Closing judicial routes to dealing with the past, the Legacy Bill unifies Northern Ireland’s political spectrum in opposition.

Legislation has rarely precipitated such a consensus of public and political opinion in Northern Ireland. On the one hand, unionists vehemently oppose a Bill which offers amnesties to the republican ‘terrorists’ responsible for 60 percent of deaths during the conflict. Democratic Unionist Party MP Carla Lockhart, for example, has castigated the ‘immoral’ and ‘unjust’ Bill which would ‘protect’ terrorists. Simultaneously, nationalists abhor a Bill which curtails judicial proceedings against former British service personnel, and prevents civil inquiries into claims of lethal collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. Sinn Féin MP John Finucane – whose father, Pat Finucane, was murdered by loyalists in 1989 – alleges that the Conservatives have backed the ‘cruel and callous’ legislation to conceal the British Army’s record in Northern Ireland. Republicans regard the proposals as a case of the British state designing legislative cover for historical human rights abuses. After decades of judicial campaigning by determined activists, last month the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) formally apologised to ‘the hooded men’ – fourteen Catholics interned in 1971 – for torture under interrogation by state forces. Victims’ and survivors’ groups have also repudiated a Bill which would prevent perpetrators of all political stripes being brought to justice. The decision of the present Secretary of State, Chris Heaton-Harris, to appoint Sir Declan Morgan to chair the ICRIC – even before the requisite legislation was passed to create the commission – has raised further hackles.

For their part, the Bill’s Conservative backers primarily expound pragmatism, arguing that pursuing prosecutions more than half a century since the conflict erupted is simply impractical. The Command Paper which precipitated the Legacy Bill in 2021 arraigned the SHA as an ineffective mechanism which failed victims and survivors: ‘More than two thirds of deaths from The Troubles occurred more than 40 years ago… The prospect of successful criminal justice outcomes is vanishingly small… The divisive cycle of criminal investigations and prosecutions… is not working for anyone and has kept Northern Ireland hamstrung by its past’. The Legacy Bill’s most prominent parliamentary supporters, such as the military veterans Sir Iain Duncan Smith and Johnny Mercer, also highlight the SHA framework’s suboptimal outcomes.

Promoting the Bill also reflects the embattled Conservative government’s desire for a rapprochement with military veterans and their supporters. Founded in 2015 to pressure the authorities to ‘stop the prosecutions’, the Northern Ireland Veterans Movement (NIVM) identified the Tory government as its ‘main enemy’. The Conservatives’ general election manifesto in 2019 pledged to ‘tackle the vexatious legal claims that undermine our Armed Forces’ and to ‘give veterans the protections they deserve’. Introducing the Bill in the Commons in 2022, then-Secretary of State Brandon Lewis explicitly underlined how the legislation honoured that promise.

British Fusilier and child, Belfast 1981

British military personnel killed at least 150 unarmed civilians during the conflict, yet only six former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland have been prosecuted. The four soldiers convicted of murder were the subject of high-profile campaigns in Britain demanding their release: all four were freed on licence within three years, and allowed to rejoin the Army. These few cases have nonetheless garnered significant media attention and political controversy. Perceptions of a ‘witch hunt’ have impelled Army veterans to back the Bill to curtail criminal proceedings against ex-soldiers. The case of the late Dennis Hutchings became something of a cause célèbre. In October 2021, Hutchings, an 80-year-old former Corporal, died while standing trial on charges pertaining to the death of John Pat Cunningham, a young man with learning disabilities who was shot in the back while running from an Army patrol in County Tyrone in 1974. Reflecting on the case, prominent veterans’ activist Robin Horsfall said that Hutchings was a ‘hero’ who had been failed by the state that he served.

In November 2022, in an equally well-documented case, David Holden was convicted of the manslaughter by gross negligence of 23-year-old Aidan McAnespie. McAnespie was shot in the back as he crossed a border checkpoint in February 1988. Holden, who was serving with the Grenadier Guards, was found to have fired the fatal shot. Commenting after the verdict, Paul Young, national spokesperson for the NIVM, told reporters that the ruling was part of a ‘witch hunt’ against former service personnel: ‘That’s why we support the Legacy Bill that is going through parliament now which will stop any further prosecutions of veterans that have previously been investigated’.

But without political support beyond an enfeebled Conservative Party, and devoid of popular legitimacy, the Legacy Bill will pass parliament but remain incapable of functioning. Its operational prospects rest heavily upon a spirit of voluntarism, yet without public confidence and the institutional support of political parties, human rights organisations, and victims’ groups, the new truth recovery mechanism is unlikely to persuade ex-combatants to engage. The authoritative Belfast journalist Allison Morris reports that representatives of all but one of Northern Ireland’s paramilitary groups have already ruled out cooperating. In any case, the incentive for ex-combatants to seek immunity from prosecution is marginal at best: the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act of 1998 already established a maximum prison term of just two years for Troubles-related offences.

The problems facing the Bill are both political and practical. Legal experts from the Model Bill team at Queen’s University Belfast and the Committee on the Administration of Justice have suggested that in its current form the Bill fails to comply with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)’s Article 2 on the right to life. As Anna Bryson and Kieran McEvoy have shown, the ECHR allows for amnesties only where they are demonstrably ‘necessary’, and where they comply with victims’ rights to access truth recovery and reparations.

The controversy surrounding the Bill has illuminated once again among the British public the remarkable degree of indifference towards Northern Ireland’s fate. On the one hand, British responses to the Legacy Bill indicate residual defensive loyalty to the British Army’s record in Northern Ireland. Successive governments’ political justifications for military deployment from 1969 – ostensibly to keep apart two warring factions in Ulster – continually resonate with a significant proportion of the British electorate. When Hutchings and Holden faced criminal charges, right-wing tabloids led popular campaigns against the ‘witch hunts’. From 2018, the Daily Express fulminated against the ‘betrayal of our veterans’, who were ‘hounded’ over ‘Troubles-related killings’. By July 2022, Conservative leadership contenders Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss – both would serve as Prime Minister within three months – signed the Sun’s ‘veterans’ pledge’, vowing to support ‘our boys’ and to ‘end the witch hunts’. ‘It is absolutely right to support the men and women who have honourably served their queen and country’, said Truss. ‘As Prime Minister, I will make sure they are protected from being prosecuted for historic allegations and ensure that no new evidence can be brought towards them in court’.

There is certainly support in Britain for Holden, Hutchings, and their comrades. But such sympathy for ‘our boys’ does not necessarily mean enthusiasm for the union, less still a positive orientation towards Northern Ireland. A YouGov survey of 1,700 British voters in March 2020 found that only 37 percent of respondents thought that Northern Ireland should remain part of the UK, and some 54 percent said that they did not care whether Northern Ireland left the union. Even among Conservative voters, whose party officially maintains the ‘unionist’ moniker, there is major indifference where Northern Ireland is concerned: only 47 percent of Tory supporters said that the union should continue.

Given the Bill’s abject unpopularity across Northern Ireland, it is unlikely that its institutions can function, less still that they can deliver a robust mechanism for dealing with such a difficult past. The Irish government has also recently indicated that it will consider interstate legal action against the legislation, meaning that protracted disputes in the European Court of Human Rights could yet follow. The present Bill therefore risks becoming a dead letter, further delaying progress with the difficult legacy issues which have bedevilled a stalling peace process.

Jack Hepworth is Canon Murray Fellow in Irish History at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Ida Tarbell and the ‘Muckrakers’: Then and Now by Rachel Davies

Madigan2 Comments

How can we judge activism when we haven’t yet seen the results? In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United States, felt qualified to do just this, denigrating investigative journalists for their activism. He dismissed them for being too focused on the ‘muck’ of society and for refusing to look onwards and upwards. The so-called ‘muckrakers’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries called for political and economic reform and exposed a range of pressing social issues, including sex and racial discrimination, industrial malpractice and corruption; in so doing, they blazed a trail for Evelyn Cunningham, Bob Woodward, Ronan Farrow and a host of other modern investigative journalists .

‘Muckraking’, despite not being the first identifiable form of investigative journalism (which most historians date to the late 1700s), is regarded as the gold standard for modern investigative journalists (see, for example, David Sloan’s American Journalism). While these early journalists are generally regarded positively in 21st century discussions, the term ‘muckraker’ came from Roosevelt and other contemporaries’ much more critical attitude. The origin of the name, in contrast to their largely positive legacy today, reminds us how difficult it can be to judge activism when it’s happening rather than in retrospect, as perceptions of certain protests change over time. We might consider, for example, the recent Just Stop Oil protests, which have received widespread criticism.

Ida Minerva Tarbell, 1904 (Library of Congress)

Although she, unsurprisingly, resented being described as such, Ida Tarbell was one of the most celebrated of these ‘muckraker’ journalists. Tarbell’s life and career illustrate the achievements of early investigative journalism, and also raise timely questions about the kinds of activism we celebrate, and when. To what extent are we willing to tolerate disruption, and how do we measure the effectiveness of protest as it happens? Should our appreciation of Tarbell and her fellow ‘muckrakers’ encourage us to temper our judgment on the protests of today despite our immediate discomfort?

Ida Tarbell and the Oil Industry

Tarbell was born in 1857 to Esther and Franklin Tarbell, a teacher and successful businessman made wealthy by the Pennsylvania oil rush of 1859. Growing up around the oil fields, Tarbell held strong negative opinions about the oil industry from an early age, as she witnessed both the natural and human destruction caused by the production of the so-called ‘black gold’. Her father worked in several different areas of the oil industry, from his beginning making oil barrels to eventually owning his own small oil production company. The family’s fortunes took a turn for the worse, however, when the Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust embarked on a series of hostile takeovers, swallowing Franklin Tarbell’s oil company.

Like her father, Ida initially went on to work as a teacher. She also continued to hone her writing and journalistic skills, moving to Paris and contributing to several publications from there. Eventually, Tarbell would begin to contribute to McClure’s Magazine, an American illustrated monthly periodical popular at the turn of the 20th century, and wrote prolifically for the publication, leading up to her monumental exposé of the Standard Oil Trust and, in 1904, the publication of a book, The History of the Standard Oil Company. This series of works struck a major blow against the mega-corporation, exposing the same kind of hostile practices that had brought her father’s company down decades earlier. Most importantly, Tarbell’s investigative journalism exposed the dangers of Standard Oil operating as a monopoly, dictating the market with no regulation or oversight.

Tarbell’s articles shook the oil industry, and the wider American economic system, to its core. Her journalism helped to bring about a series of regulatory reforms, including the creation of the Federal Trade Commission in 1914. While Roosevelt was perhaps correct in noting that the ‘Muckraker’ journalists focused on the darker parts of society, Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company was instrumental in lifting the American economy out of the grips of the Oil Giant, and breaking up a ruthless and very damaging monopoly.

Ida Tarbell, Activism and Contemporary Opinion

Most of the traditional historical works on Tarbell focus on her as an adversary to big business, or as a forerunner of American investigative journalism. Some public history projects, such as Paul Lyon’s “The Diary Review,” have allowed for Tarbell, and particularly her archival material, to be re-examined in a way that challenges these dominant narratives. Few, however, have looked into Tarbell’s story as an example of evolving public attitudes towards investigative journalism as activism or protest.

Standard Oil Octopus cartoon, Puck, September 1904

Tarbell is quite widely celebrated now, yet at the time she was disparaged alongside the other ‘muckrakers.’ One can’t help but draw parallels between Tarbell’s protest, and the recent campaign by Just Stop Oil (conducting several protests, including roadblocks and infamously throwing canned soup onto Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery). Just Stop Oil have also been criticized by contemporary commentators, albeit for different reasons (being too divisive and chasing publicity rather than specific policy change). While the actions of Just Stop Oil certainly deserve their own examination, we can look at the trajectory of Tarbell’s legacy and consider whether this very contemporary protest will also go on to be widely celebrated.

Comparing Just Stop Oil’s form of activism with Tarbell’s reveals how attitudes towards various forms of protest change over time, as their context also changes. A hundred years ago, when Tarbell and the other ‘muckraker’ journalists thrived, print media was highly influential. In contrast, the 21st Century has seen an explosion of highly accessible social media, a development that has arguably reduced the impact of Tarbell’s style of print journalism and thrown the impetus onto more direct action. Perhaps Tarbell’s form of activism is easier to celebrate now, as her protest is considered more palatable to our contemporary sentiment. However, looking at the push-back she got from society at the time should remind us that judging the reasoning for a particular protest action is difficult without the benefit of hindsight.

Theodore Roosevelt criticized Tarbell as he thought that her articles were ultimately just raking a respectable business enterprise into the muck, for little purpose. Few would agree with Roosevelt now, knowing that Tarbell’s activism contributed to the transformation of the American economy. Who knows what the final results of Just Stop Oil’s protest will prove to be?

Rachel Davies is an MA in Public History student at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Still Unheard? The Voices of African POWs Imprisoned in Wartime France

MadiganLeave a comment

Among the sound of whispering trees and the squelch of mud underfoot, a soldier stares into a camera. Maybe the photographer, most probably a German soldier, called out to him. What do we see in his eyes? A sense of defeat? Hopelessness? Defiance? If only we could ask this man what he had seen, but to us he remains a silent figure, trapped in a single, unsettling moment. The photo was taken in June 1940, the month that France fell to the invading German forces and descended into Nazi occupation. Only a month earlier, the German army had launched its Blitzkrieg (‘Lightning War’) and pushed the stunned British and French forces back to the coast. By early June most of the British force had been evacuated from Dunkirk and the French army had been left to fight on alone.

French African troops of the French Army, captured by advancing German forces, France, June 1940 (Imperial War Museum HU 49148)

Almost nine per cent of the French Army were ‘Colonial Troops’ – drawn from the areas of Africa or South-East Asia that France had violently colonised. Some were willing to fight, but most had been forcibly conscripted into the army. The majority formed the ‘Senegalese Tirailleurs’ – men drawn from across Western, Central and Eastern Africa. About 35,000 men formed the ‘Malagasy Tirailleurs’, who were taken from Madagascar. There was also a small division of ‘Indochinese Tirailleurs’, men from present-day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Map highlighting French colonial territories in 1920

During the Fall of France, a large part of the French army was taken captive and made Prisoners of War (POWs). While over one million white French servicemen were sent to POW camps in Germany, 120,000 African and South-East Asian soldiers were segregated into work camps within Nazi-occupied France, so as not to ‘contaminate’ German land. All POWs, regardless of race, were at risk of abuse. And yet men from Africa and South-East Asia were particularly vulnerable because many of their German captors fervently adhered to racist Nazi ideology. Indeed, there are numerous accounts of African soldiers being massacred by German soldiers instead of being taken prisoner.

How can we find these men’s stories? Have their voices not been lost to time and the prison walls? The short answer is no, because remarkably some men’s voices have survived.

The poems of Léopold Sédar Senghor, written in French, record his experiences of the work camps. The ‘Songs of the Shadows’ were published in 1948 and bring to life the horrors that these POWs endured. One particularly revealing poem is entitled ‘Camp 1940’:

‘They lie there stretched out by the captive roads, along the roads of disaster… / Senegalese prisoners miserably lying on the French land.’

‘Hatred and hunger ferment there in the torpor of a deadly summer. / It is a large village surrounded by the immobile spite of barbed wire / A large village under the tyranny of four machine guns / Always ready to fire. / And the noble warriors beg for cigarette butts, / Fight with dogs over bones, and argue among themselves / Like imaginary cats and dogs.’

Senghor also wrote a seven-page report on conditions in the camp in the summer of 1942. The document was only rediscovered in 2010 by the historians Raffael Scheck and it is a visceral reflection on the brutality of his German captors:

‘The most demoralizing thing is hunger… Captain Hahn… fires at a Senegalese who “chips” potatoes, and he is killed… It is the reign of arbitrariness.’
Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1949 (Picture Post)

Soon after writing this report, Senghor faked an illness and was released into Paris. Many men became terminally ill from tuberculosis and were removed from the camps. Senghor became a teacher in Paris, and after the war returned to Senegal and entered politics. His time as a POW shaped his political path as he had spoken to many Senegalese men – often peasants – while in captivity about their experiences of French colonial rule. He had also witnessed many men die in the service of their colonial master. He became the first President of the Republic of Senegal in 1960 and wrote their National Anthem.

We can also hear the stories of POWs through the work of Hélène de Gobineau, who was a volunteer in the wartime prisons and hospitals and recorded many of the men’s experiences. Her book, Noblesse d’Afrique (‘The Nobility of Africa’), was published in 1946. She wrote:

‘I knew them unhappy, harassed, cut off from everything they loved, fighting against death. … And each of these stories expresses the same common values: nobility, generosity, courage, a sense of equality and justice.’

The POWs’ voices, their thoughts, fears and hopes, shine through de Gobineau’s account. She not only preserved their experiences, but also their personalities and their humanity. The POWs that de Gobineau spoke with, believed that black soldiers were placed on the front lines deliberately, and ‘died by the thousands’ as cannon fodder. They also witnessed ‘the Germans [putting] the Whites on one side and loaded them into waiting trucks while the Blacks were lined up against a wall on the other side, and tac…tac…tac…’.

One man, Zemba, only wished to die so his ‘soul’ could ‘fly unfettered back to his mother-country’. Another, named Diallo, would not leave the side of a ‘comrade dying of [tuberculosis]’. Fatoum wanted his photo taken, ‘standing to attention when facing death on the morning of his passing’.

When the war ended, while white French POWs found they could return home and collect their pay with relative ease, African men were not always rewarded for their services. In 1944, in the Senegalese town of Thiaroye, African veterans protested after the French authorities refused to pay them for their four years of captivity and forced labour. French soldiers fired on them, and historians estimate that over 300 men were killed – although the French government still maintains that ‘only’ 70 men died. Veterans were killed by the colonial power they had sacrificed so much for.

Afterwards, Senghor wrote a poem entitled Thiaroye:

‘No, you have not died in vain. / You are the witnesses of immortal Africa / You are the witnesses of the new world to come. / Sleep now, O Dead! Let my voice rock you to sleep, / My voice of rage cradling hope.’

Through both Senghor’s poems and de Gobineau’s writing some of the voices of the 120,000 POWs can still be heard today. But is anyone listening? The sacrifices of these African POWs are rarely commemorated in France. While there are some anonymous graves, they do not reflect the lives of the 120,000 men who were imprisoned on French soil. Today, in France, there is growing support for far-right politicians who have built their platform on anti-immigration policies and the rejection of multi-culturalism. For them, French citizenship only belongs to white Christians. The nations that sacrificed their people in the name of France, are not welcome on French soil. France’s colonial past has not only been forgotten, but also silenced.

‘They put flowers on tombs and warm the Unknown Soldier. / You my dark brothers, no one appoints you.’
 
Senghor, To The Senegalese Riflemen Who Died For France (1938).

It is no wonder that today the Black Lives Matter protests continually call for noise, for us to ‘Say Their Names’ and ‘Break [the] Silence’. If these men are not heard, they remain unknown; they become silent figures trapped in photographs with their voices erased from history. The silence needs to be shattered, not only for their memory to survive but for their relatives to receive justice today.

The ‘Songs of the Shadows’ need to soar once more … and we all need to listen.

‘The vast song of your blood will defeat machines and canons / Your speech throbbing deceptions and lies / No hate in your soul, you are not hateful, no cunning / …soul without cunning. / O Black Martyrs, immortal race, let me say the / …words that forgive.’
Senghor, Camp 1940: Assassinations.

Further Reading

Myron Echenberg, ‘Morts Pour la France’; The African Soldier in France During the Second World War’, The Journal of African History, 26.4 (1985), 363-80.

Raffael Scheck, ‘French Colonial Soldiers in German PRISONER-OF-WAR Camps (1940–1945)’, French History, 24.3 (2010), 420-46.

The Climate Emergency and the Inadequacy of the Historical Nation State by Markus Daechsel

Madigan1 Comment
Flooding in Sindh, Pakistan, 2022 (Ali Hyder Junejo)

The recent COP27 conference was dominated by discussions about the creation of a ‘loss and damage’ fund financed by the world’s richer nations to help poorer countries cope with the devastating effects of the climate emergency. The global South has been suffering disproportionally from rising sea levels, extreme weather events, crop failure and potentially deadly rises in temperature, despite having contributed far less to carbon emissions over time than the prosperous industrialised North. In Pakistan – a country with a relatively small carbon footprint – this summer brought the most devastating monsoon floods in historical memory, inundating as much as one third of the country’s populated area. Much of this year’s harvest has been destroyed, and millions of Pakistanis remain stuck in temporary camps. In the words of Sherry Rehman, the country’s new climate change minister and veteran ‘liberal’ voice, Pakistan has become the ‘ground zero’ of the climate catastrophe. While the international fossil fuel industry was raking in record profits and deceiving the public with ‘greenwashing’ spin, her country had the right to ask for ‘reparations’ to make up for the loss to infrastructure and economic productivity caused by others. This fiery rhetoric was subsequently dialled down by Rehman’s own government, but a tentative step towards a ‘loss and damage’ fund turned out to be the only tangible outcome of COP27. While the question of how to quantify and apportion responsibility to individual countries remained hotly contested, the assembled world leaders seemed to find it easier to negotiate ways to pay for the effects of greenhouse gas emissions than to make any meaningful commitments to limiting emissions themselves.

It is clear that the global North has to accept responsibility for global warming and is in a moral bind to the people of the global South. But whether government-to-government transfers akin to ‘reparations’ – if indeed they ever materialise in substantial amounts – should stand at the heart of a solution is a more complicated question. While the COP format by necessity regards negotiations between nation states as the most meaningful way to address global problems, historians should be much more sceptical about approaching global heating in this manner. The nation state may still be the most readily accepted building block of global politics, but it is worth remembering that it started its career as a legal construct designed to bring an end to the devastating religious wars of early modern Europe. When it comes to understanding large-scale processes of economic and social change such as the development of fossil fuel capitalism, a ‘methodological nationalism’ – thinking in terms of national units – can actually be less than helpful. And this is not even asking difficult questions about when and where the nation state concept ever adequately reflected real structures of power. It certainly only applied to a small proportion of humanity during the age of the modern European Empires from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and its conceptual validity remains at best limited in our own age of multinational corporations, international tax havens, transnational elites and global production chains.

Woman working in a Cotton Mill, Witney, Oxfordshire, 1898 (Historic England)

Histories of global capitalism such as the world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein have alerted us to the need to understand global capitalism as a single integrated whole, where development in one place always has immediate and causal connections with ‘underdevelopment’ in another. While the debate about the local roots of Britain’s original industrial revolution rambles on, a more globalist vantage point suggests that industrialisation has rarely exclusively or even predominantly been a ‘national’ story. The flourishing of the Lancashire cotton industry, for example, was dependent on a supply of cheap cotton produced on the slave plantations of the American South. The workers toiling in Britain’s factories could not be fed, moreover, without cheap imported food from the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, or a little later, the beef herds of Argentina and Uruguay. And British textiles would not have been so profitable if British colonialism had not first ruined highly accomplished artisan weavers in India, and then ensured tariff free access to the Indian mass market for British goods. Industrial capitalism is not an ‘advanced’ form of production, while plantation slavery, cattle-ranching or small-holding agriculture are ‘backward’. They are all equally ‘up to date’ in their time, and integral to the same stage of global development.

Indian Cotton Weavers, gouache drawing, c. 1840 (Wellcome Collection)

What is more, the winners and losers of the global capitalist system were never neatly divided between North and South, even if on the final balance sheet the system was decisively rigged in favour of Northern interests. It is easy to identify the biggest beneficiaries: European and North American capitalists, and the most exploited: racialised slaved labour. But there were a large number of social groups that fell somewhere in between, and whose balance of benefit and loss is not always straightforward to calculate or compare. Who profited more from industrial capitalism – the increasingly comfortable but still exploited working classes of Great Britain or the newly prosperous import-export trader conducting his business under British overlordship in colonial Bombay? In the area of British India that later became Pakistan, farmer-landowners producing rice or wheat for export could only become as politically and economically powerful as they did because British colonial policies restricted the ability of local bankers and financiers to become successful industrialists and create a new capitalist ruling class.

In recent decades, the growing interconnectedness of the global economy and the large-scale outsourcing of industrial production to countries with cheaper labour have made calculations of who benefits and who is responsible for harmful externalities like carbon emissions even more complicated. What about a chip manufacturer in Taiwan or an iPhone factory in China? Or, to return to flood-stricken Pakistan, a garment factory in the country’s own ‘Manchester’ – Faisalabad – or a sports good manufacturer in Sialkot, where most of the world’s footballs are stitched? In a remarkable irony of history, many international fashion brands are now producing their wares in unsafe and overcrowded factories in Bangladesh, only a few hundred miles to the East of where British colonialism had driven the world’s most accomplished makers of luxury cotton fabrics into ruin about 200 years earlier. Most of these outsourced products end up under global brand names in the shops, where the greatest share of profit accrues. But the governments of Pakistan, Bangladesh and many other countries, whose efforts to achieve their own ‘national’ versions of industrialisation had often spectacularly failed by the 1970s, have nevertheless courted these multinationals with soft-touch labour and environmental laws to maintain economic growth and support growing middle class aspirations.

The outsourcing of labour to South Asia and other parts of the world went hand in hand with the outsourcing of greenhouse gas emissions, environmental degradation and urban overcrowding. Sherry Rehman could increase the moral pressure for climate ‘reparations’ by pointing out that some proportion of Pakistan’s modest global greenhouse emissions are not in fact Pakistan’s own, but emissions produced ‘on behalf’ of Europeans or North Americans. But such an argument shifts the overall thrust of policy making in the wrong direction. The interconnectedness of global capitalism as a single system, which easily goes as far back as the time of the first coal-fired steam engines, means that emissions must be cut everywhere rather than being outsourced with a conscience-calming ‘loss and damage’ payment thrown in as compensation. A fund to help the poorest nations still has an important role to play, but the most meaningful way the beneficiaries of centuries of capitalist development could address their historical debt to the losers is to genuinely eliminate carbon-burning from global supply chains.

Markus Daechsel is Reader in the History of Modern Islamic Societies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on the history, politics and social dynamics of South Asia.