EMH EarlyModernHistory

  Caribbean Connections: Seventeenth-Century Barbados and Britain King’s College London, Strand Campus 25th - 26th June 2025 Organisers: Dr Michael Bennett (University of Sheffield), Dr Misha Ewen (University of Sussex), and Dr Hannah Murphy (MMoR & CEMS, KCL) Barbados is central to the global history of slavery. The island’s “sugar boom” in the 1640s made it the first and largest “slave society” in the seventeenth-century British empire, whose prosperity was underpinned by plantation-based chattel slavery. By the 1680s, approximately 40,000 enslaved African people were forced to labour in the Barbadian plantation economy, producing sugar and other tropical commodities for sale in European markets. Historians have long been aware that the ideas, practices, and institutions which emerged in seventeenth-century Barbados shaped the development of slavery elsewhere in the English empire, including Jamaica and South Carolina (Dunn, 1972; Robe...

There is an interesting account of their lives and accounts (recently published by the Camden Society) to be found here .

The World Turned Upside Down website has a new podcast in which Andrew Hopper and Peter Wilson, both from the University of Oxford, discuss the relationship between these struggles in continental Europe and the British Isles. A transcript is available to download.

  Conference | 24 June 2025 | University of York Magic, Monstrosity, and the Natural World in the Early Modern Period Call for Papers, deadline – 3 March 2025 In early modern Europe, new philosophical trends and novel technologies increasingly influenced people’s understanding and uses of the natural world. Yet, magic still flourished, deeply rooted in everyday beliefs about that world. This seminar invites papers exploring the intersection of magical beliefs and practices (elite and common), technological advancements, and emerging modes of inquiry, focusing on their implications for understanding the natural world we inhabit. This year, we are particularly interested in how early modern plays and cultural artefacts invoke “weirdness” in encounters with wilderness and the natural world. Do weird phenomena in literature and performance reveal an uncanny overlap between life’s natural, supernatural, and preternatural dimensions and the world? Have modern critical appr...

 Well, I first became acquainted with the Institute of Historical Research in the author of 1968. I had been fortunate enough to be appointed to one of the junior research fellowships of the IHR and came to London, I think, with considerable expectations about the contact I should hope to have with senior historians in the University of London and visiting scholars from United States, Australia, and elsewhere, and of course with postgraduates from other UK universities. However, I was considerably surprised when I got to the IHR to discover a feature of university life which I had not come across before. That was the deference which senior figures in the historical profession, people who held chairs, expected to be treated, people like, AG Dickens, who was the director of the institute, Stanley Bindoff, who worked on the Penguin History of Tudor England  that I had admired for many years, JJ Scarisbrick and , of course, Joel Hurstfield, who was J E Neale's successor as Astor p...