Publications and Achievements

Chloe Ireton, Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic. Cambridge University Press (2025)

Weaving together thousands of archival fragments, this study explores a shared Black Atlantic world where the meanings of slavery and freedom were fiercely contested and claimed. It recreates the worlds of extraordinary individuals and communities in the long sixteenth century, whilst mapping the development of early modern Black thought about slavery and freedom.

From a free Black mother's embarkation license to cross the Atlantic Ocean, to an enslaved Sevillian woman's epistles to her freed husband in New Spain, to an enslaved man's negotiations with prospective buyers on the auction block in Mexico City, to a Black man's petition to reclaim his liberty after his illegitimate enslavement, Chloe L. Ireton explores how Africans and their descendants reckoned with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people and the varied meanings of freedom across legal jurisdictions. Their intellectual labor reimagined the epistemic worlds of slavery and freedom in the early modern Atlantic.

Eva Miller, Early Civilization and the American Modern: Images of Middle Eastern Origins in the United States, 1893–1939. UCL Press (2024)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a particular story about the United States’ role in the long history of world civilization was constructed in public spaces, through public art and popular histories. This narrative posited that civilization and its benefits – science, law, writing, art and architecture – began in Egypt and Mesopotamia before passing ever further westward, towards a triumphant culmination on the American continent.

Early Civilization and the American Modern explores how this teleological story answered anxieties about the United States’ unique role in the long march of progress. Eva Miller focuses on important figures who collaborated on the creation of a visual, progressive narrative in key institutions, world’s fairs and popular media: Orientalist and public intellectual James Henry Breasted, astronomer George Ellery Hale, architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and decorative artists Lee Lawrie and Hildreth Meière. At a time when new information about the ancient Middle East was emerging through archaeological excavation, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia appeared simultaneously old and new. This same period was crucial to the development of public space and civic life across the United States, as a shared sense of historical consciousness was actively pursued by politicians, philanthropists, intellectuals, architects and artists.

Benedetta Rossi, ‘An Abolitionist Vicious Circle: Slaving, Antislavery, and Violence on the Shores of Lake Tanganyika at the Onset of Colonial Occupation‘. Slavery & Abolition, 1-41. Taylor & Francis Online (2024)

In the late nineteenth century, abolitionists felt entitled to use all possible means to save the African victims of the slave trade. As European imperialism rose, abolitionism legitimized interventionism. This article explores how a major humanitarian movement could sanction colonial occupation and the violence that accompanied it. It also examines the position of African slaveholders who resisted the entrenchment of European rule and defended an order in which slavery was common. It focuses on two main actors: French Captain Leopold Joubert, Catholic royalist and former pontifical Zouave who supported Cardinal Lavigerie's Missionaries of Africa and Belgian King Leopold II's allegedly abolitionist endeavours; and Tippu Tip, a trader and slaver who, like Joubert, worked for self-styled abolitionists such as Leopold II and the Sultan of Zanzibar.

The connected microhistories of these men show how the international problematization of African slavery fuelled both European imperialism and anti-colonial resistance, while also creating circumstances in which enslaved persons emancipated themselves. The article investigates the moral perceptions of individuals whose sense of self was predicated upon values embodied by Europe's monarchies, the papacy of Rome, and the sultanate of Zanzibar. Faced with what they perceived as existential threats to these institutions, they responded with rising radicalism.

Benedetta Rossi, ‘The Abolition of Slavery in Africa’s Legal Histories‘. Law & History Review, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 1-29. Introduction to Special Issue guest-edited by Benedetta Rossi. Cambridge University Press (2024)

This introduction contextualizes the special issue's articles in the broader continental dynamics. It discusses the Eurocentric bias of the historiography and suggests that the view that Europe was responsible for the legal abolition of slavery in Africa should be nuanced and qualified. Some independent African polities abolished slavery before Europe's colonial occupation. Nowhere did European abolitionists encounter a tabula rasa: African polities had complex jurisdictions, oral or written, which formed the normative background against which slavery's abolition should be studied.

To do so, however, it is misleading to imagine abolitionism as a unitary movement spreading globally out of Europe. What happened differed from context to context. Normative systems varied, and so did abolition's legal processes. This introduction examines the dynamics that led to the introduction and implementation of anti-slavery laws in African legal systems. It recenters the analysis of the legal abolition of slavery in Africa around particular African actors, concepts, strategies, and procedures.

Peter Schröder, Zur Entstehung des Staates. Staat und Souveränität im politischen Denken der Frühen Neuzeit (Baden-Baden, 2024)

In early modern Europe, a new concept of the state emerged, initially consisting of the simple but ambitious claim to guarantee peace and security. The authors in this volume not only helped to shape the political discourse of their time, but their writings also provided a reservoir of ideas, terms and concepts from which we still draw today. These thinkers competed over the best way forward, over what could and should be drawn from this reservoir for the development of politics and the state. The main aim of this volume is to provide a better understanding of this debate.

Heffron Y and F Tütüncü Çağlar “A Partnership of Unequals: Historicising Labour Relations between Local and Foreign Archaeologists in Türkiye through Ottoman Comparanda” Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 34/1: 1-16 (2024)

This article takes its departure from the authors’ ethnobiographical accounts of labour relations between local and foreign archaeologists collaborating on fieldwork projects in Türkiye, where native speakers undertake a double burden of becoming mediators in order to facilitate the professional, educational, and day-to-day activities of their foreign counterparts. While the need for interpreters is often an inevitable and legitimate aspect of fieldwork conducted outside one’s own linguistic and cultural milieu, the ubiquitously informal reliance on native-speakers to take on interlocutors’ tasks as favours or side-jobs conceals the extent of time, labour, and resources being extracted. This can interfere with the agency of local archaeologists as trained experts in their own right, pushing them to the periphery of professional research activity and reinforcing colonial notions of archaeological knowledge as the prerogative of Western ‘experts’ assisted by local ‘facilitators’.

Margot Finn, ‘Gendering Reparative Histories’, Journal of the British Academy, 12: 1-2 (2024).

a close up black and white image of a woman in front of a bookcase

The ‘culture wars’ that dominate public discourse in the UK turn, very often, on the significance accorded to histories of empire, slavery, and colonialism. What seems to be primarily of concern is the place of such histories in the telling of our national story. In this section, the articles explore different ways in which we could think about the relationship of the past with the present. Specifically, the articles collected here use the frame of ‘reparative histories’ as a potentially more effective way of engaging with complex and contested pasts. They address the idea of a reparatory sociology, colonial photography, representation and indigenous spaces, the gendering of reparative histories, and the need to rethink the welfare state from such a perspective.

Margot Finn, ‘Colonialism: A Methodological Reckoning’, in Alan Lester (ed.), The Truth about Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism. Hurst Publishing, 2024.

The Truth About Empire comes from expert historians who believe that the truth, as far as we can pinpoint it, matters; that our decades of painstaking research make us worth listening to; and that our authority as leading professionals should count for something in today’s polarised debates over Britain’s imperial past.

In the culture wars, the public’s understanding of colonial history is continually distorted by wilful caricatures. With their fight to highlight Empire’s horrors, communities whose voices once went unheard have alienated many who would prefer a celebratory national history. The backlash, orchestrated by elements of the media, has produced a concerted denial of British imperial racism and violence—a disinformation campaign sharing both tactics and motivations with those around Covid, Brexit and climate change.

From Australia and China to India and South Africa, this essay collection is an accessible guide to the British Empire, and a shield against the assault on historical truth. The disturbing stories told in these pages, of Empire’s culture, politics and economics, show why professional research matters, when deciding what can and cannot be known about Britain’s colonial past.

Michael Aidan Pope, 'Expansion, Reform, and Homogenisation: Three Phases of Proselytising in the Early Modern Iberian Atlantic', Church History and Religious Culture (2024).

This article argues that proselytising across the Iberian Atlantic during the early modern period occurred in three historical phases. The first such phase is one of expansion, in which many mass conversion took place without much attention to catechising (1492–1539). The second phase is reforming in nature, as debates on how best to educate the converted in their new faith developed (1540–1579). The third and final phase is homogenising, as the ways in which all the newly converted groups were expected to behave were consolidated around the image of the Old Christin nobility (1580–1640). The sources used in this article include papal bulls, royal decrees, and catechisms, which have been analysed alongside the current historiography.

Angus Gowland, 'Hamlet's Melancholic Imagination', Shakespeare (2024), 1–20.

This article presents an interpretation of Hamlet's psychological condition through the prism of early modern ideas about the melancholic imagination. It begins with an account of what Shakespeare took from one of his principal sources, Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, on the subject of ‘Amleth's’ melancholy (part I). It proceeds with a summary of the relationship between melancholy and the imagination in ancient and early modern medicine, and its reception in Shakespeare's England (part II). It then turns to the role of the imagination in Hamlet (parts III and IV). It suggests that Shakespeare used the relationship between melancholy and imagination to create, in the world of the play, a melancholic ‘imaginary reality’, where Hamlet's ‘diseased’ imagination is an unsettling and corrupting force not only in his own mind and body, but also in the wider environment of Elsinore.

Peter Schröder (ed.), Pufendorf's International Political and Legal Thought. Oxford University Press, 2024.

As attested by a steadily expanding scholarship, Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94) was one of the most eminent and influential political thinkers in early modern times. In particular, he significantly shaped early modern natural jurisprudence, being called, for instance, ‘the most influential figure in the academic institutionalisation of natural law’. In addition, Pufendorf’s importance is also increasingly recognized among scholars working on (the history of) international law and thought. Yet, there has, to date, been no comprehensive work dedicated to this dimension of his thought. The present volume seeks to remedy this state of affairs by clarifying Pufendorf’s—sometimes understated—ideas about interstate relations from a variety of new and multidisciplinary perspectives.

Benjamin Kaplan and Jaap Geraerts, eds., Early Modern Toleration: New Approaches. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024.

This book examines the practice of toleration and the experience of religious diversity in the early modern world.

Recent scholarship has shown the myriad ways in which religious differences were accommodated in the early modern era (1500–1800). This book propels this revisionist wave further by linking the accommodation of religious diversity in early modern communities to the experience of this diversity by individuals. It does so by studying the forms and patterns of interaction between members of different religious groups, including Christian denominations, Muslims, and Jews, in territories ranging from Europe to the Americas and South-East Asia. This book is structured around five key concepts: the senses, identities, boundaries, interaction, and space. For each concept, the book provides chapters based on new, original research plus an introduction that situates the chapters in their historiographic context.

Early Modern Toleration: New Approaches is aimed primarily at undergraduate and postgraduate students, to whom it offers an accessible introduction to the study of religious toleration in the early modern era. Additionally, scholars will find cutting-edge contributions to the field in the book’s chapters.

Gartrell, A., (2024) ‘A Divine Right to Rule? The Gods as Legitimators of Power’, Traditional Structures of Power in the Roman Empire, eds. S. Betjes, O. Hekster, K. Iannoantono, and E. Manders, Brill, p11–26.

This volume focuses on the interface between tradition and the shifting configuration of power structures in the Roman Empire. By examining various time periods and locales, its contributions show the Empire as a world filed with a wide variety of cultural, political, social, and religious traditions. These traditions were constantly played upon in the processes of negotiation and (re)definition that made the empire into a superstructure whose coherence was embedded in its diversity.

Edited by Julietta Steinhauer (et al) Beneath the Surface: Gender and Agency in Religious Contexts in Antiquity, Special Issue Religion and Gender, Leiden/Boston, Brill 2024.

What can we find beneath the surface if we read the ancient sources and think beyond established biases in research? This special issue focuses on the role of women and individuals that were not legally considered male in religious contexts throughout the ancient Mediterranean world from the Archaic period to Late Antiquity (sixth century BCE–fourth century CE).

Publications and Achievements

Edited by Julietta Steinhauer (et al) Beneath the Surface: Gender and Agency in Religious Contexts in Antiquity, Special Issue Religion and Gender, Leiden/Boston, Brill 2024.

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