Disabled people have always been at the heart of British economic and labour history, but their contributions in the workplace often go unrecognised. Gill Crawshaw explores.
Ayahs and Amahs were empire's care-workers, raising the children of colonial families. Julia Laite on a new online exhibition that foregrounds their stories.
Julie Hardwick, Marybeth Hamilton, Kate Gibson, Sarah Roddy, Orsi Husz, Andrew Popp & Alexia Yates
What does it mean to write "intimate histories" of economic life? How might a focus on "the intimate" transform the way historians perceive and describe the economic past?
As the Scottish Parliament considers the ‘not proven’ verdict’s future, Valerie Wallace and Tommy Boyd look back at the nineteenth-century debate on the verdict in colonial New Zealand.
What can tools - for cutting, sharpening or carrying - tell us about the nature of work in the past? Paul Warde on how the skills that tools embodied can nuance narratives of modernity and productivity.
The term 'racial capitalism' has been widely used by activists and historians. Catherine Hall turns to the 18th century entanglements between Jamaica and England to reflect on the shifting forms of racial capitalism across generations.
How might we understand the origins and the impact of current controversies raging in Britain over changing interpretations of British colonial history? Corinne Fowler has close personal experience of those controversies.
What can a dot in the Dorset landscape, marked by a simple chapel, tell us about the Tolpuddle Martyrs and their religious and political convictions? And how might this rare vernacular chapel be restored as a site of living history today?
Today's culture wars over Britain's statues, placenames, and monuments are part of a long history in which "siege narratives" became interwoven with Britain’s older island stories.
Why did the British labour movement come to advocate state insurance at the turn of the 20th century? Maya Adereth examines transformations in worker benefit schemes through the lens of Friendly Societies.
What is the difference between poverty and scarcity? Julia McClure explores how different communities and societies mitigated the risks of resource scarcity before capitalism created poverty.
How might a verbose Victorian Parliamentary Report provide a source of radical rural Scottish history? Andy Drummond explores the unlikely story of the 1884 Napier Report.
What can the arrival of an anonymous letter to a local police station tell us about the administration of justice in nineteenth-century Scotland? Hannah Telling discusses the case surrounding the discovery of a woman's body in 1853, and…
Madeleine Goodall discusses the radical life of Eliza Sharples, whose letters to freethinking poet Thomas Cooper in the mid-19th century depict an idealistic figure struggling to survive.
What does an elegant, hand-written programme tell us about the harsh realities of emigration, and the colonisation of Australia in the nineteenth century? How does it exemplify the mindset of settlers, who assumed they needed to import…
How can the lives of those historically labelled as vagrants be humanised? Nick Crowson explores creative and archival methods for moving past a fixed point of prosecution, and towards visibility across time and place.
Smallpox was the first contagious disease for which a vaccine was invented. As the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, Sanne Muurling, Tim Riswick and Katalin Buzasi ask how social inequalities shaped the last smallpox epidemic in…
