Editors’Introduction
Matthew Hilton and Alexandra Walsham
Pages 3–10
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa049
In introducing this issue of the journal — our 250th — we feel the presence of our predecessors. Past and Present is not overly concerned with its own past, but its editors have, at key moments, reflected on the founding principles of the journal and their persistence over the decades. In 1983, to mark the 100th edition, three of the founding editors, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, offered their thoughts on the origins of the journal and its scholarly ambitions, followed by an article by Jacques Le Goff covering the later years. In 2002, to mark our fiftieth anniversary, Lyndal Roper and Chris Wickham remarked on how little the journal’s mission had changed during the preceding half-century.
Eighteen years later we see little reason to disagree. Past and Present was founded as a generalist journal, covering all periods of history, from the ancient to the contemporary, and with an intention to cover all parts of the world. Our 250th issue does not quite fulfil that ambition, though the articles do stretch from the thirteenth century to the late twentieth and the geographical coverage reaches beyond Europe to Mongolia and south-east Asia. Articles, then as now, needed to be thoroughly grounded in deep historical research. Their findings also had to be not only accessible in style but have wider implications for non-specialists and for the wider audience beyond academia that the journal hoped to attract as its readers. It sought to do so by deliberately setting its subscriptions at affordable levels. It hoped its pages would be read by everyone interested in history, not simply by scholars sitting in their ivory towers.
ARTICLES
Disenchanting Heaven: Interfaith Debate, Sacral Kingship, and Conversion to Islam in the Mongol Empire, 1260–1335
Jonathan Brack
Pages 11–53
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa002
Historians examine the Mongol practice of holding interfaith court debates either with regard to the efforts of religious representatives to convert the khans, or as emblematic of the Mongols’ religious pluralism. However, staging interfaith debates had other religious and political purposes as well. The debate was an arena for the religiously and ideologically charged performance of the Mongol khan’s own divine-like wisdom and model of sacral, deified kingship. From the Mongol perspective, the objectives of the debate were not only different from those of its religious participants, but the debate further represented an altogether different mode of religiosity. Situating the debate in the context of the Mongol religious world view, this article proceeds to examine it in the Mongol court in medieval Iran (the Ilkhanate) shortly after its conversion to Islam. Muslim interlocutors there identified and exploited the Mongols’ religious logic to reinforce the Mongol rulers’ conversion. They transformed the debate into a forum for experimenting with a new synthesis of Mongol and Muslim, divinized and righteous, kingship. The continuous role of the debate in the performance of sacral monarchy among the Mongols’ successors, especially the Mughals in early modern India, testifies to the enduring impact of Mongol religiosity on the Islamic world.
From Written Record to Bureaucratic Mind: Imagining a Criminal Record
Margaret McGlynn
Pages 55–86
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa015
In 1518 the chief justice of King’s Bench initiated an attempt to track successful claims of benefit of clergy on the assize circuits to ensure that laymen could make such claims only once, as mandated by a statute dating from 1490. By doing so he was the first to attempt to create a criminal record in England, where an individual felon’s crimes were recorded with the expectation that an earlier crime would have implications for the punishment of a subsequent one. Both this attempt and a later statutory attempt in 1543 were largely unsuccessful, however. They failed, not because of principled opposition or even inertia, but because the well-established bureaucratic structures of the early Tudor period struggled to keep up with the bureaucratic imagination of those who sought to reform or extend the reach of government. The failed attempt to construct a criminal record demonstrates that as the development of print changed information cultures, and the policies of the Tudors led to an intensification of governance, legal records remained profoundly limited by the intellectual and administrative structures within which they operated. Masters of the gathering of information, Tudor governors struggled to adapt old documents to new purposes or to manage information dynamically.
Family Standards of Living Over the Long Run, England 1280–1850
Sara Horrell and others
Pages 87–134
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa005
This article uses new wage series for men, women and children in combination with an established cost of living index and standard assumptions about family size to construct a measure of family welfare in England, 1280–1850. It asks whether this family could achieve a standard of living historically defined as ‘respectable’. It extracts information from primary and secondary sources to make adjustments for the participation rates of women and children, the varying number of days worked over time, the changing involvement of married women in paid work, and the evolving occupational structure. The resulting series is the first to depict the living standard of a representative working family over the very long run. Prior to the Black Death, this family existed just above subsistence; afterwards shortage of labour brought substantial albeit not unassailable gains. Tudor-era turmoil and constraints on women’s work pushed the family below the ‘respectable’ standard. From the mid 1600s however, the gradual transformation of the economy coincided with improved welfare. Over these centuries, it was rare for men’s work alone to sustain the family at a respectable level; women and children’s earnings were necessary. This article calls for a re-evaluation of the chronology, causes and consequences of long-run growth.
Concerts and Inadvertent Secularization: Religious Music in the Entertainment Market of Eighteenth-Century Paris
Andrei Pesic
Pages 135–169
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa011
Public concerts offer a new perspective on the controversial subject of secularization and the Enlightenment. From 1725–90, the Concert spirituel in Paris, one of the earliest and most famous concert series in Europe, presented a mixture of sacred and secular music when other entertainments were forbidden during religious holidays. Over the course of the century, the proportion of religious works in its repertoire declined significantly. Whereas previous interpretations tended to describe secularization as resulting either from battles between philosophes and the Church or from broader declines in belief, this article casts doubt on these explanations by showing the heterogeneous composition of the Concert’s audience. Instead, it depicts a process of ‘inadvertent secularization’ stemming from market pressure, in this case due to the multiplication of new concert series and other entertainments in Paris during the second half of the eighteenth century. This framework accounts for secularization at the institutional level without assuming that the society as a whole was marked by declining Christian belief. Bringing together the study of markets and religion reveals how multiple logics increased the autonomy of artistic fields formerly subject to religious constraints.
Civil Death, Radical Protest and The Theatre of Punishment in the Reign of Alexander II
Daniel Beer
Pages 171–202
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa003
Civil executions in Imperial Russia were punitive ceremonies that were staged before crowds and presaged a sentence of penal labour and lifelong exile in Siberia. Intended to underline the absolute supremacy of the autocracy, they choreographed the public humiliation of the criminal and collective condemnation from the crowds who gathered to witness the stripping away of the rights and entitlements that gave civil life in the autocracy its meaning. Many took place without incident, and followed the ritual of debasement and expulsion endorsed by the state. Yet when at the civil executions of revolutionaries during the reign of Alexander II both convicts and spectators departed from the state’s script of public humiliation and orderly opprobrium, the performance of monarchical power and autocratic justice proved liable to subversion. Russian radicals sometimes succeeded in hijacking the ceremony to denounce despotism and proclaim an alternative vision of activism, solidarity, and revolution. In so doing, they contested the autocrat’s position as the source of status, rights and, ultimately, of sovereignty. Building on studies of law, punishment, performance, and the revolutionary movement, this article demonstrates how radicals and their supporters recast “scenarios of power” as “scenarios of rebellion”.
Renovating Christian Charity: Global Catholicism, the Save the Children Fund, and Humanitarianism During The First World War
Patrick J Houlihan
Pages 203–241
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa010
This article argues that the Vatican’s involvement in the fledgling stages of the Save the Children Fund helped globalize what began as a local British charity, reshaping Christian humanitarianism as a response to total war. Centred on children as irreproachable war victims and the hope of the future, the ideology of Christian charity and the Vatican’s financial networks helped mobilize resources to combat famine across shattered imperial state structures in Central and Eastern Europe. With diplomatic credentials as a peace advocate, Pope Benedict XV (1914–22) symbolically led this new wave of religious humanitarianism. Attempting to stabilize war-torn societies, Christian humanitarianism towards children was an ideology that overcame wartime British anti-Germanism, raising fears about the spectre of Bolshevism after the Russian Revolution of 1917. In contrast to 19th-century religious mobilization that hardened confessional boundaries against the liberal secular state, however, this was a moment when the Catholic Church as a global religious organization intervened for all people, irrespective of faith commitments. Influencing later human rights developments, religiously informed humanitarianism became forgotten in the Vatican’s aggressive anti-communist diplomacy in the inter-war era. Ecumenical religious charity was important for the modern history of humanitarianism and non-governmental organizations.
Internationalizing Colonial War: on the Unintended Consequences of the Interventions of the International Committee of the Red Cross in South-East Asia, 1945–1949
Boyd van Dijk
Pages 243–283
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa009
What is the relationship between decolonization and international law? Most historians agree that empires framed their colonial wars as emergencies in order to escape international scrutiny. After 1945, however, those same imperial powers invited the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to intervene in their wars of decolonization while resisting an official state of war. This article seeks to solve this puzzle by drawing attention to the ICRC’s critical part in reshaping the international legal system regarding colonial war in the critical years before the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) and the Bandung Conference (1955). In this formative period, the organization, together with anti-colonial activists, played a transformative role in contesting accepted ideas of global governance and international law while providing a new stage for anti-colonial resistance, with far-reaching consequences, not just for the ICRC’s own institutional future, but also for the legitimization of (post-)colonial sovereignty in the twentieth century.
