Bede and other authors describe a destructive wave of plague sweeping across Britain and Ireland in the period 664–87. In the decades around and after this time, the English kingdoms saw rapid economic changes as urban settlements grew, monasteries were founded, and a large silver currency appeared. Here, it is proposed that these developments were influenced by the effects of the plague. Exact levels of mortality are uncertain, but the survivors may have had the capacity to produce more, and more diverse, goods. Relatively weak seigneurial powers on the part of landlords meant that non-elite cultivators became a more important economic constituency in these circumstances, while elites turned in two directions: to development of small but intensively worked central farms, and to liquidation of large stocks of silver, which enabled them to profit by engaging with a diverse body of partners. This liquidation took the form of a much expanded currency of silver pennies, which provides a case-study of monetization as an important yet comparatively short-term economic change.
{"title":"Economic Change, Silver, and the Plague of 664–687 in England","authors":"Rory Naismith","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae048","url":null,"abstract":"Bede and other authors describe a destructive wave of plague sweeping across Britain and Ireland in the period 664–87. In the decades around and after this time, the English kingdoms saw rapid economic changes as urban settlements grew, monasteries were founded, and a large silver currency appeared. Here, it is proposed that these developments were influenced by the effects of the plague. Exact levels of mortality are uncertain, but the survivors may have had the capacity to produce more, and more diverse, goods. Relatively weak seigneurial powers on the part of landlords meant that non-elite cultivators became a more important economic constituency in these circumstances, while elites turned in two directions: to development of small but intensively worked central farms, and to liquidation of large stocks of silver, which enabled them to profit by engaging with a diverse body of partners. This liquidation took the form of a much expanded currency of silver pennies, which provides a case-study of monetization as an important yet comparatively short-term economic change.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142936630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Starting in the fifteenth century, European city governments began to respond to the threat of plague by introducing quarantine measures, which presumed that risk arrived in the bodies and goods of travellers. The adoption of quarantine was long considered a milestone on the road to modern, rational public health and was linked to increased centralization and the rise of state power in the early modern period. Recent quarantine scholarship, however, is revealing a more contingent story. This paper uses surviving plague correspondence between the governments of Barcelona, Valencia, and Ciutat de Mallorca (now Palma) to uncover the chaotic practice of early quarantine in the late medieval Crown of Aragon. All three cities adopted quarantine in the later fifteenth century, but all of them also obscured their own health statuses and distrusted one another’s information about plague. Municipalities in the Crown of Aragon embraced quarantine during this period even as their correspondence thwarted cooperative plague control. The exigencies of quarantine demanded plague information in the form of fama (rumour or reputation), often linked to the behaviour of elites.
{"title":"Plague Correspondence, Rumour, and Mistrust in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon","authors":"Abigail Agresta","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae041","url":null,"abstract":"Starting in the fifteenth century, European city governments began to respond to the threat of plague by introducing quarantine measures, which presumed that risk arrived in the bodies and goods of travellers. The adoption of quarantine was long considered a milestone on the road to modern, rational public health and was linked to increased centralization and the rise of state power in the early modern period. Recent quarantine scholarship, however, is revealing a more contingent story. This paper uses surviving plague correspondence between the governments of Barcelona, Valencia, and Ciutat de Mallorca (now Palma) to uncover the chaotic practice of early quarantine in the late medieval Crown of Aragon. All three cities adopted quarantine in the later fifteenth century, but all of them also obscured their own health statuses and distrusted one another’s information about plague. Municipalities in the Crown of Aragon embraced quarantine during this period even as their correspondence thwarted cooperative plague control. The exigencies of quarantine demanded plague information in the form of fama (rumour or reputation), often linked to the behaviour of elites.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"113 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142805272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Taking its cue from the weather wars that unfolded around the Alps in the eighteenth century — conflicts between neighbouring towns and polities attempting to divert storms by firing cannons at clouds — this article studies the representation of an environment rarely seen in spatial history: earth’s atmosphere. A survey of maps in different historiographical traditions, climate history foremost, reveals a visual repertoire that is effective for determining the physical properties of weather and climate but detaches the atmosphere from its human and non-human environments. A more recent genre of historical maps employs algorithmic methods of layering data to represent the atmosphere at local scales and in close connection with the human environment yet remains committed to a physicalist vision of weather and society. Returning to the Alpine weather wars, the article introduces a sequence of maps that attempt to represent past storms as they were understood and confronted by the armed farmers at the foot of the Alps: steerable entities trapped in an atmo-terrestrial force field where physical, political and religious influences collided to determine the ways of weather. The wider proposition is for historians of atmospheric environment to craft cartographic arguments that complement the range and ambition of their prose.
{"title":"The Atmosphere in Spatial History: Digital Evidence and Visual Argument","authors":"Luca Scholz","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae042","url":null,"abstract":"Taking its cue from the weather wars that unfolded around the Alps in the eighteenth century — conflicts between neighbouring towns and polities attempting to divert storms by firing cannons at clouds — this article studies the representation of an environment rarely seen in spatial history: earth’s atmosphere. A survey of maps in different historiographical traditions, climate history foremost, reveals a visual repertoire that is effective for determining the physical properties of weather and climate but detaches the atmosphere from its human and non-human environments. A more recent genre of historical maps employs algorithmic methods of layering data to represent the atmosphere at local scales and in close connection with the human environment yet remains committed to a physicalist vision of weather and society. Returning to the Alpine weather wars, the article introduces a sequence of maps that attempt to represent past storms as they were understood and confronted by the armed farmers at the foot of the Alps: steerable entities trapped in an atmo-terrestrial force field where physical, political and religious influences collided to determine the ways of weather. The wider proposition is for historians of atmospheric environment to craft cartographic arguments that complement the range and ambition of their prose.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142805444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explains how the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of radical queer nuns, created gay ‘religious relics’ in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia, in the 1980s. The Sisters’ relics are a neglected part of twentieth-century queer history and reflect the role of urban spaces and sexual cultures in the formation of contemporary queer identities. They also represent an early effort to preserve and commemorate queer histories. The Sisters drew on deliberately archaic medieval models to preserve pieces of destroyed sex-on-premises venues and cruising sites that were important to gay men. During the early 1980s, arson and hostile civic authorities destroyed these places and the HIV/AIDS epidemic began to threaten the gay community which patronized them. In Sydney, the Sisters also held reliquary exhibitions which commemorated and defended gay identity and dignity through the veneration of campy pieces of popular culture and the reclamation of seemingly homophobic religious discourses and concepts. The refashioning of the medieval cult of relics into a vehicle for queer identity and history speaks to the ongoing role of imagined pasts in the formation of present selves, and of the erasure of certain kinds of sexual experience from mainstream presentations of queer history.
{"title":"The Cult of Gay Relics and Queer Medievalism in 1980s Sydney","authors":"Miles Pattenden, Michael D Barbezat","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae043","url":null,"abstract":"This article explains how the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of radical queer nuns, created gay ‘religious relics’ in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia, in the 1980s. The Sisters’ relics are a neglected part of twentieth-century queer history and reflect the role of urban spaces and sexual cultures in the formation of contemporary queer identities. They also represent an early effort to preserve and commemorate queer histories. The Sisters drew on deliberately archaic medieval models to preserve pieces of destroyed sex-on-premises venues and cruising sites that were important to gay men. During the early 1980s, arson and hostile civic authorities destroyed these places and the HIV/AIDS epidemic began to threaten the gay community which patronized them. In Sydney, the Sisters also held reliquary exhibitions which commemorated and defended gay identity and dignity through the veneration of campy pieces of popular culture and the reclamation of seemingly homophobic religious discourses and concepts. The refashioning of the medieval cult of relics into a vehicle for queer identity and history speaks to the ongoing role of imagined pasts in the formation of present selves, and of the erasure of certain kinds of sexual experience from mainstream presentations of queer history.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142753573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Historical scholarship has long highlighted the extensive landscape interventions initiated by state agents, early capitalists and experts in the early modern period, and pointed to the fierce, often violent resistance they evoked from local and rural communities. Such an approach risks narrowly aligning expertise with intervention in the service of states or capitalist elites and positioning experts in direct opposition to people. This article uses the history of land reclamation in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, usually told as a harmonious success story of premodern human intervention in nature, to explore the nature and politics of expertise and environmental thought as different elites clashed. Focusing on the proposed but not executed drainage of the Haarlemmermeer, it demonstrates how experts came to act as agents of resistance who argued for conservation and caution rather than intervention, and shows we can use expert exchanges to gain better insight into the divisive nature of environmental thought in the early modern period.
{"title":"Failure to Drain: Expert Resistance and Environmental Thought in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic","authors":"Anna-Luna Post","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae039","url":null,"abstract":"Historical scholarship has long highlighted the extensive landscape interventions initiated by state agents, early capitalists and experts in the early modern period, and pointed to the fierce, often violent resistance they evoked from local and rural communities. Such an approach risks narrowly aligning expertise with intervention in the service of states or capitalist elites and positioning experts in direct opposition to people. This article uses the history of land reclamation in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, usually told as a harmonious success story of premodern human intervention in nature, to explore the nature and politics of expertise and environmental thought as different elites clashed. Focusing on the proposed but not executed drainage of the Haarlemmermeer, it demonstrates how experts came to act as agents of resistance who argued for conservation and caution rather than intervention, and shows we can use expert exchanges to gain better insight into the divisive nature of environmental thought in the early modern period.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"99 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142672905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
When Giuseppe Garibaldi set sail for Sicily on the campaign that led to the unification of Italy in 1860, he gave a group of exiled political radicals living in the port city of Genoa the task of procuring weapons, equipment and reinforcements for his expedition. These exiled veterans of the 1848 revolutions quickly developed a fluid yet highly integrated fundraising and procurement organization that provided Garibaldi with the means for success. To do this, they leveraged decades of experience as clandestine transnational organizers, but also relied on the business and professional expertise and contacts they had accrued during a commercial and industrial boom in Genoa in the 1850s. Crucially, they took advantage of logistical innovations like steam travel to concentrate people and equipment where and when they needed them and guarantee a positive outcome for their revolution. They also successfully negotiated with trans-imperial power brokers and navigated jurisdictional gaps in the waters of the Mediterranean. These former 48ers used their experiences as exiles and businessmen to challenge the conservative status quo of the 1850s and force the creation of a united Italy. A focus on the material underpinning of their success restores their role in transforming nineteenth-century Europe.
{"title":"Ships, Guns and Money: The Logistics of Revolution and Garibaldi’s Campaign of 1860","authors":"Daniel F Banks","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae044","url":null,"abstract":"When Giuseppe Garibaldi set sail for Sicily on the campaign that led to the unification of Italy in 1860, he gave a group of exiled political radicals living in the port city of Genoa the task of procuring weapons, equipment and reinforcements for his expedition. These exiled veterans of the 1848 revolutions quickly developed a fluid yet highly integrated fundraising and procurement organization that provided Garibaldi with the means for success. To do this, they leveraged decades of experience as clandestine transnational organizers, but also relied on the business and professional expertise and contacts they had accrued during a commercial and industrial boom in Genoa in the 1850s. Crucially, they took advantage of logistical innovations like steam travel to concentrate people and equipment where and when they needed them and guarantee a positive outcome for their revolution. They also successfully negotiated with trans-imperial power brokers and navigated jurisdictional gaps in the waters of the Mediterranean. These former 48ers used their experiences as exiles and businessmen to challenge the conservative status quo of the 1850s and force the creation of a united Italy. A focus on the material underpinning of their success restores their role in transforming nineteenth-century Europe.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142902260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Russian Empire collapsed because it failed to assimilate non-Russian minorities, and did not provide a coherent national narrative to unite the Russian population. Its religious policies were key contributors to these failures, and this article examines their impact in order to shine a new light on the religious background to the empire’s demise. The Orthodox Church was supposed to provide the means to assimilate non-Russians and offer up the core cultural component for a Russian national consciousness. Its inability to do so became clear in the 1860s–1880s when, in the liminal regions of the empire, Orthodoxy fragmented along ethnic lines. Russians deserted churches for the dissenting Old Believer movement, and non-Russians returned to their ancestral faiths of animism and Islam. This was partly down to an inconsistency in government, which meant that religious repression overlapped with the principle of toleration; however, an exploration of the dynamics of apostasy at a parish level shows that where Russians and non-Russians were compelled to worship together, religious tensions emerged and churches lost their sacred character. As well as providing new insights into how the empire alienated its subjects at a local level, this exploration reveals pathways to ethnic consciousness from below. Ethnicization was the process that separated ethnicity from religion, and places of worship possessed characteristics, most importantly the performance of communal historical memory, that made them into key sites of ethnic boundary formation.
{"title":"Religious Tension and Ethnic Consciousness in the Later Russian Empire","authors":"Thomas Marsden","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae040","url":null,"abstract":"The Russian Empire collapsed because it failed to assimilate non-Russian minorities, and did not provide a coherent national narrative to unite the Russian population. Its religious policies were key contributors to these failures, and this article examines their impact in order to shine a new light on the religious background to the empire’s demise. The Orthodox Church was supposed to provide the means to assimilate non-Russians and offer up the core cultural component for a Russian national consciousness. Its inability to do so became clear in the 1860s–1880s when, in the liminal regions of the empire, Orthodoxy fragmented along ethnic lines. Russians deserted churches for the dissenting Old Believer movement, and non-Russians returned to their ancestral faiths of animism and Islam. This was partly down to an inconsistency in government, which meant that religious repression overlapped with the principle of toleration; however, an exploration of the dynamics of apostasy at a parish level shows that where Russians and non-Russians were compelled to worship together, religious tensions emerged and churches lost their sacred character. As well as providing new insights into how the empire alienated its subjects at a local level, this exploration reveals pathways to ethnic consciousness from below. Ethnicization was the process that separated ethnicity from religion, and places of worship possessed characteristics, most importantly the performance of communal historical memory, that made them into key sites of ethnic boundary formation.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142902263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article focuses on the consequences of a single major international affair — the shipwreck of a French ship carrying 165 Muslim pilgrims along the southern shores of Sicily in 1716 — to address two pivotal issues in the reordering of eighteenth-century legal and political systems: the limits of domestic sovereignty in absolutist states and the status of non-Christian polities in the theory and practice of the law of nations. Both the time and place of this episode, which had a vast resonance at the time, have broad implications for how we write about the development of modern international law. While much of the debate on the maritime dimension of the eighteenth-century law of nations focuses on the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, we spotlight the Mediterranean, where endemic corsairing activities coexisted with age-old diplomatic and day-to-day practices of accommodation and mutual recognition between Christian and Muslim polities. Here we draw attention to shipwrecks that occurred in foreign territorial waters and their heuristic potential for better understanding controversial issues of maritime law, such as the status of shorelines, neutrality and the law of the flag. Even after the Peace of Utrecht (1713–15), which is often regarded as a watershed moment in the history of international law, these rules were far from settled and shipwrecks continued to fuel legal and philosophical battles that extended well beyond the confines of the famous controversy between supporters of mare liberum and advocates of mare clausum. The close examination of the 1716 shipwreck leads us to challenge the land/sea divide as constructed by Carl Schmitt and demonstrate that territorial waters were objects of sovereign disputes in much the same way as land territories. We also show how the emerging Eurocentric discourse about the ‘barbarity’ of non-Christian peoples and nations coexisted with intellectual, economic and diplomatic forces interested in establishing formal agreements between Western European nations, the Ottoman Empire and its North African provinces.
{"title":"‘The Shipwreck of the Turks’: Sovereignty, Barbarism and Civilization in the Legal Order of the Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean","authors":"Guillaume Calafat, Francesca Trivellato","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae030","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the consequences of a single major international affair — the shipwreck of a French ship carrying 165 Muslim pilgrims along the southern shores of Sicily in 1716 — to address two pivotal issues in the reordering of eighteenth-century legal and political systems: the limits of domestic sovereignty in absolutist states and the status of non-Christian polities in the theory and practice of the law of nations. Both the time and place of this episode, which had a vast resonance at the time, have broad implications for how we write about the development of modern international law. While much of the debate on the maritime dimension of the eighteenth-century law of nations focuses on the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, we spotlight the Mediterranean, where endemic corsairing activities coexisted with age-old diplomatic and day-to-day practices of accommodation and mutual recognition between Christian and Muslim polities. Here we draw attention to shipwrecks that occurred in foreign territorial waters and their heuristic potential for better understanding controversial issues of maritime law, such as the status of shorelines, neutrality and the law of the flag. Even after the Peace of Utrecht (1713–15), which is often regarded as a watershed moment in the history of international law, these rules were far from settled and shipwrecks continued to fuel legal and philosophical battles that extended well beyond the confines of the famous controversy between supporters of mare liberum and advocates of mare clausum. The close examination of the 1716 shipwreck leads us to challenge the land/sea divide as constructed by Carl Schmitt and demonstrate that territorial waters were objects of sovereign disputes in much the same way as land territories. We also show how the emerging Eurocentric discourse about the ‘barbarity’ of non-Christian peoples and nations coexisted with intellectual, economic and diplomatic forces interested in establishing formal agreements between Western European nations, the Ottoman Empire and its North African provinces.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142556194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyzes the practices and politics of Caribbean prize courts at the turn of the nineteenth century, in order to better understand the dynamics of these peculiar legal institutions on the ground in one of the most volatile inter-imperial maritime spaces of the period. The focus is on the daily operation of the courts, the relationship between different regional courts (within and between empires), and, importantly, on their role within wider Caribbean networks. The article asks how knowledge about these courts was shared within the trans- imperial networks of the region. Court shopping was a common practice and claimants would often go out of their way to take captures or cases to specific courts, either within a single empire or even in a different imperial jurisdiction, but how did potential claimants come to be so familiar with the characteristics of individual administrations and magistrates? And how did they disseminate this information? The story of Caribbean prize courts is the story of order-making at different, sometimes clashing, levels. While the legal regime around prizes can be seen as an ordering mechanism for interactions between empires, the Caribbean saw its own order-building project driven less by decision-makers in faraway metropoles and more by individual actors within the region, equally likely to exploit, support, or circumvent the legal mechanisms set up by officials. These regional groups were especially likely to act against the prize regime when it posed a challenge to the sanctity of their private property, be it goods or enslaved.
{"title":"Prize court politics and regional ordering in the Caribbean","authors":"Jeppe Mulich","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae027","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes the practices and politics of Caribbean prize courts at the turn of the nineteenth century, in order to better understand the dynamics of these peculiar legal institutions on the ground in one of the most volatile inter-imperial maritime spaces of the period. The focus is on the daily operation of the courts, the relationship between different regional courts (within and between empires), and, importantly, on their role within wider Caribbean networks. The article asks how knowledge about these courts was shared within the trans- imperial networks of the region. Court shopping was a common practice and claimants would often go out of their way to take captures or cases to specific courts, either within a single empire or even in a different imperial jurisdiction, but how did potential claimants come to be so familiar with the characteristics of individual administrations and magistrates? And how did they disseminate this information? The story of Caribbean prize courts is the story of order-making at different, sometimes clashing, levels. While the legal regime around prizes can be seen as an ordering mechanism for interactions between empires, the Caribbean saw its own order-building project driven less by decision-makers in faraway metropoles and more by individual actors within the region, equally likely to exploit, support, or circumvent the legal mechanisms set up by officials. These regional groups were especially likely to act against the prize regime when it posed a challenge to the sanctity of their private property, be it goods or enslaved.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"195 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142556192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
During the wars of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries tens of thousands of English sailors had their wages deferred because the government could not come up with the cash to pay them. Instead, Navy sailors were discharged with undated government promissory notes, usually called ‘sailors’ tickets’, which they and their families sometimes had to wait months or years to have paid. This essay traces the way the Navy tried to institutionalize this system, and it also looks at competing ordering projects coming from within the London maritime community that sought to pressure the government to pay the tickets in a timely fashion, to manage overextended credit networks and — in the face of considerable Navy opposition — to make tickets more fungible so they could be used as collateral for debts. One feature of these conflicts was the rise of frauds on sailors’ pay tickets, and over time the Navy endorsed increasingly punitive methods to deal with the problem, most notably various kinds of institutional prosecution. The people indicted for ticket fraud, many of them at the Old Bailey, were predominantly women, and their ‘crimes’ were linked to more legitimate activities long associated with sailors’ female relatives. This essay argues that predatory borrowing by the State and the competing ordering projects to which it gave rise helped to configure as well as to distort social relations and economic opportunity both for women and men within the maritime community.
{"title":"Frauds on Navy Pay and the Men and Women of Maritime London, c.1620–1740","authors":"Margaret R Hunt","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae026","url":null,"abstract":"During the wars of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries tens of thousands of English sailors had their wages deferred because the government could not come up with the cash to pay them. Instead, Navy sailors were discharged with undated government promissory notes, usually called ‘sailors’ tickets’, which they and their families sometimes had to wait months or years to have paid. This essay traces the way the Navy tried to institutionalize this system, and it also looks at competing ordering projects coming from within the London maritime community that sought to pressure the government to pay the tickets in a timely fashion, to manage overextended credit networks and — in the face of considerable Navy opposition — to make tickets more fungible so they could be used as collateral for debts. One feature of these conflicts was the rise of frauds on sailors’ pay tickets, and over time the Navy endorsed increasingly punitive methods to deal with the problem, most notably various kinds of institutional prosecution. The people indicted for ticket fraud, many of them at the Old Bailey, were predominantly women, and their ‘crimes’ were linked to more legitimate activities long associated with sailors’ female relatives. This essay argues that predatory borrowing by the State and the competing ordering projects to which it gave rise helped to configure as well as to distort social relations and economic opportunity both for women and men within the maritime community.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"126 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142556189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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