The transition to colonialism in South Asian history has been a vibrant and hotly contested part of India’s history. The role of scribes as historical actors of change in India’s history has only recently been explored. This talk will examine how the formation of early agrarian revenue settlements exacerbated late Mughal patterns in taxation, and how the colonial state was shaped by this extant paper-oriented revenue culture and its scribes. It proceeds to examine how the service and cultural histories of various Hindu scribal communities fit within broader changes in political administration, taxation and patterns of governance, arguing that British power after the late eighteenth century came as much through bureaucratic mastery, paper and taxes as it did through military force and commercial ruthlessness. In particular, this paper explores the cultural and service experiences of various Kayastha scribes and how they fit within the transitional period of the mid-late 18th century between late Mughal and early colonial rule.

Science, Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century Seminar series. All welcome, no booking required.

Dr James Emmott, Oxford Brookes University, will be speaking on On The Stratification of Language.

‘There are few sensations more pleasant than that of wondering,’ the philologist Max Müller declared at the opening of his Rede lecture, delivered in the University of Cambridge on 29 May 1868. The cause of wonder for Müller on this occasion was the thousands of years that humans had lived in ‘conscious ignorance’ of the ancient layers of rock and the remains of organic creatures, before geological eyes were opened in the eighteenth century; and, more strikingly, the centuries during which names had been given to a panoply of living things while ‘what was much nearer to them than even the gravel on which they trod, namely the words of their own language’, escaped systematic notice. ‘Here, too,’ Müller observed, ‘the clearly marked lines of different strata seemed almost to challenge attention, and the pulses of former life were still throbbing in the petrified forms imbedded in grammars and dictionaries’. Yet this attention did not fully arrive until the nineteenth century, when the idea that language was a fixed and stable structure gave way to the view that it was a ‘growing and developing medium’ (Hans Aarsleff), a material accumulation susceptible to sifting, analysing, and accounting. This paper will wonder about what new varieties of thought were made possible by the association of these fields, and the analogies they engendered. The vastness and composite complexity of the linguistic record, with models of preservation and decay borrowed from geology, prompted reappraisals both of the utility and applicability of universal laws to human culture, and a fundamental rethinking of language itself.

This talk examines the writings of Jamal al-din al-Afghani (1838-1897) with particular attention to his polemical piece against Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), entitled “The Refutation of the Materialists” (1881). Scholars have assumed that al-Afghani was anti-imperial and wrote this diatribe because Syed Ahmad Khan was pro-British. It is the speaker’s intention to show that al-Afghani was not consistently anti-imperial, and in fact shared with Syed Ahmad Khan many similar views on the role of science, education, and progress. Teena Purohit reads “The Refutation” and ancillary treatises to show how al-Afghani invokes the idiom of heresy for his arguments about reform: on the one hand, al-Afghani mounts an accusation of heresy against Syed Ahmad Khan and his followers, and on the other hand, he deploys “heretical” concepts to rationalize and legitimize his aspiration to serve as a redemptive leader for all Muslims.

A Roundtable Conversation with Akeel Bilgrami (Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University), Shruti Kapila (Fellow and Director of Studies, Corpus Christi College; Faculty of History, University of Cambridge) and Saeed Naqvi (Foreign Correspondent and Author).

Orgnaised by the TORCH Rethinking the Contemporary: The World since the Cold War Network in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Global History, the Modern European History Centre and the Asian Studies Centre of St Antony’s College.

Exploring the emotional terrain of the citizenship experiences of groups in Goa this paper will argue that through the linguistic choices made by the government of Goa it is not merely caste that is at the centre of citizenship experiences but in fact untouchability itself. Given that languages are not abstract forms but actively embodied practices, and that their linguistic forms and cultural productions are marked as impure and hence untouchable in the caste-Hindu centric Goan polity it is the lower-caste Catholic that is at the bottom of the pile. What obtains in Goa is not different from many other parts in India, allowing the suggestion that India is marked not an egalitarian, but a casteist polity.

Science, Medicine and Culture in the 19th Century seminar series. All welcome, no booking required.

Professor Oliver Zimmer, University of Oxford will be speaking on Time Tribes: How The Railways Made Communities (1840-1900)

When it comes to modern loyalties, scholars of various disciplines have predominantly looked at class, profession, region or nation. While these no doubt represent important sources of identity, in the long nineteenth century TIME emerged as a significant source of individual and collective self-definition. Increasingly, how people related to and made use of their own time marked out their actual and desired status. Time, that most elusive of matters, became instrumental for the making and unmaking of communities that sometimes transcended regional and national contexts. Much of this can be attributed to the railways and the temporal innovations they facilitated, above all standard time and railway timetables. This paper approaches the phenomenon in question – time tribes – through an investigation of British and German railway passengers.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published initially in 2004, is the work of roughly 10,000 scholars, runs to 60 volumes in print, and is made up of more than 62 million words. So immense is the ODNB that one early reviewer complained, ‘reviewing it is like exploring a continent by rowing boat’: ‘If you were to read one life in the new DNB every day you would take 137 years to finish it.’ Information overload is not a new problem in the humanities, but Christopher Howse’s analogy helpfully suggests why an engine of some sort might be desirable in studying historiography at scale. In this presentation, Chris will use digital humanities methods to map the people, places, and professions of the ODNB in a new way.

Christopher Warren is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches early modern studies, law and literature, and digital humanities. He is the author of Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580-1680 (OUP, 2015), which was awarded the 2016 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature by the Sixteenth Century Society. With Daniel Shore, he is co-founder of Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, a collaborative reconstruction of Britain’s early modern social network. His articles have appeared in journals including Humanity; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; The European Journal of International Law; English Literary Renaissance; and Digital Humanities Quarterly. His current projects include work on anachronism and presentism in the history of international law and a “distant reading” of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Speakers:
Richard Sorabji
Honorary Fellow, Wolfson College
Peter Adamson
Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, King’s College London

Schedule:
2-3.30: Professor Sir Richard Sorabji
3.30-4: Tea break
4-5.30: Professor Peter Adamson

Biography is only one of many disciplines that have been deeply influenced by advances in digital media and computing, and that have required new theoretical approaches to help understand the changes. Yet the digital revolution has arguably had a more profound effect on biography and life writing than on any other branch of literature, perhaps any branch of the arts. At the intersection of biography and digital humanities, key questions can be posed: In what ways does the Web act to co-shape our identities? Do we know ourselves, each other, or historical actors differently? How permanent are the digital records of lives that are being produced? Do we, or will we soon, remember differently? And, what are the research futures for digital biographical research?

Paul Arthur is Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of the Centre for Global Issues at Edith Cowan University, Australia. He was previously Professor in Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University. From 2010–2013 he was Deputy Director of the National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University, and Deputy General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Recent publications include Migrant Nation (in press, 2017, ed.), Private Lives, Intimate Readings (2015, ed. with Leena Kurvet-Käosaar), and Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories (2014, ed. with Katherine Bode).

Speakers:

Ivor Crewe (Master, University College, Oxford)

Anne Deighton (Emeritus Professor of European International Politics, St Antony’s College, Oxford)

Stephen Fisher (Associate Professor of Political Sociology, Trinity College, Oxford)

Iain McLean (Emeritus Professor of Politics, Nuffield College, Oxford)

Chair

Ben Jackson (Associate Professor of Modern History, University College, Oxford)

All are welcome.

Award-winning historian MARGARET MACMILLAN, Warden of St Antony’s College, considers how, a century after the First World War, we are still coming to terms with what that prolonged conflict meant for European society and the wider world.

Edmund Birch is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and works on French literature and cultural history. In his talk at the Reuters Institute, he will explore key points of his research on the relation between fiction and the press in the 19th century, and what it could mean for present-day debates on the role of journalism.

1. The history of the press in France and in particular the nineteenth century – the age of the rise of the press. His work looks to expose the points of continuity and difference which characterise our current sense of the media and its history.

2. The relation of fiction to journalism. This is at the heart of his work: the idea that, in the French context specifically, fiction plays an absolutely central role in the rise of the press. The economic health of newspapers was often tied to the kinds of fiction serialised in such newspapers. Today, few would expect to find a novel serialised in a daily paper – and yet this was a critical part of the newspaper’s history in the nineteenth century.

3. Fictions of the press. How is journalism represented in novels, plays, and other kinds of imaginative writing? This was the focus of Edmund Birch’s thesis, and first book; what kind of image of the press emerged in literature of the nineteenth century?

Join renowned chef Tom Kerridge and nutrition scientist, Susan Jebb, to discuss connections between emotions, food and weight. Tom explores how a diet of meat, eggs, fish, nuts and dairy can help us lose weight. Tom and Susan will discuss how the type of food on our plates affects our health and the tips and tricks that can help us to lose weight – and keep it off.

Tom Kerridge is a Michelin-starred chef appearing on Great British Menu, MasterChef and Saturday Kitchen. Between 2013 and 2016, Tom lost 11 stone (70 kg.) By developing and following a diet designed to boost dopamine levels, the reward hormone responsible for making us happy, Tom was able to maximize his enjoyment of food and so satisfy his appetite while eating less.
Susan Jebb is Professor of Diet and Population Health at the University of Oxford and a former government advisor on obesity and food policy. Her research puts different types of diets and behavioural techniques to the test. She was featured in the BBC Horizon series What’s the Right Diet for You?

Science is a universal and global endeavour with developments shared and interpreted among cultures, across language and throughout history.
Witness the story of science in both East and West from antiquity to the Enlightenment that effortlessly translates the work of ancient Mediterranean, Chinese, Islamic and Christian scholars.
This event will explore why understanding the history of science as a human endeavour matters so much to the way we live and think in the modern world.

Iwan Rhys Morus is Professor of History at Aberystwyth University working on the project Unsettling Scientific Stories: Expertise, Narrative and Future Histories. He has drawn on collaborators from across the globe to produce the first ever fully illustrated global history of science, from Aristotle to the atom bomb – and beyond.

An interesting talk planned for our monthly spot in July. Sylvia Vetta will visit us to talk about China under Mao.

Doors open at 7.30 so the talk will start promptly at 8pm, so that we have time for discussion, questions and coffee afterwards.

Members are free but we ask visitors to please give a £3 donation towards room costs etc

On Monday, 24 July 2017, Kathy Chater, the author of Tracing Your Huguenot Ancestors (2012), will give a talk to Oxfordshire FHS titled ‘Huguenots in the British Isles’.

Kathy says: ‘Five hundred years ago Martin Luther’s protests against the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church of his day sparked religious controversy all over Europe. The Protestants in France, called Huguenots, were among the many waves of refugees from persecution who have over the centuries sought shelter in the British Isles. Many people have a family story of descent from them. How do you go about seeing if the story is true?’
Doors open at 7:15pm, when there will be advisors offering computer and genealogy help, a selection of Black Sheep books for sale, and tea and coffee available.

Wendy Archer, Oxfordshire FHS Publicity Coordinator
Oxfordshire Family History Society
www.ofhs.org.uk
01865 358151

Numerous free talks, walking tours and workshops over two days in central Oxford. Visit the webpage to find out more and book into sessions.

Numerous free talks, walking tours and workshops over two days.

Dr John Naylor, from the Asmolean Museum, is the National Finds Advisor for Post Roman Coinage: together with James Mather, metal detectorist and the finder of the Watlington Hoard, they will be offering this lecture to accompany the Watlington Hoard Roadshow.

Not only is this a great opportunty to hear the inside story of the hoard but also to see selected items from the Watlington hoard presented by the curators from the Ashmolean Museum. The hoard will be on display for two hours only in Watlington Library, on 23 September, 2pm-4pm. The presentation of the hoard and the lecture are all part of the hoard roadshow event, so accompanied by drop in family friendly activities as well.

( Please note – we anticipate high demand for tickets, so release of tickets will be phased to time with publicity, a further 20 tickets will be released on 1 September and a further 15 on the 8 September, making a total of 65 tickets. )

As the Portuguese’s entry opened up a turbulent time in the Indian Ocean, Muslim scribal elites across the region presented them within the image of idolatrous infidels. Writing in Arabic, the scribes from Malabar categorised this period as the Age of Fasad (social disorder) and advocated for ‘valour’ as the counter strategy. However, by transliterating sufis and prophets, vernacular scribes in Malabar insisted on the emotion of ‘piety’ for recreating the glory of the bygone Islamic past, as the fasad situation continued. This paper examines this textual/ lyrical transition- from Arabic valour texts to Arabi-Malayalam pietistic poetry- when a large number of Muslims began moving away from maritime towns to settle down in agrarian hinterland.

The predominance of the state is overstated. In Burma and other countries, pockets of territory remain under the control of non-state actors. The processes through which these counter state orders emerge are varied and often not well understood. This paper examines the conditions under which the presence of resources presents opportunities for the emergence of counter state orders led by powerful strongmen. To do so, it looks at the role of opium in Mainland Southeast Asia in the period from 1948 to 1996. During this period, the sub-regions of northern Laos, Northern Thailand, and the Kachin and Shan States in eastern Burma all experienced booms in opium production and encountered societal dislocation producing by armed conflicts. Contrary to expectations that the presence of opium provides resources useful for the establishment of counter state orders, it is only in the Shan State that political authority fragmented into dozens of non-state armed groups of which powerful autonomous strongmen were the most pervasive. This paper considers the strategies pursued by strongmen to accrue opium revenue along with the implications of these strategies for their exercise of social control. It provides a basis for reconsidering the role of resources and their impacts on militarized violence and state formation.

Join us for what promises to be an amazing evening filled with passion and opportunity to have fun!

The evening will feature a panel discussion on the experiences of the generation that became known as the Windrush generation.
The experiences from post-Windrush generations in the United Kingdom will be discussed by Professor Patricia Daley, Nigel Carter, Junie James and Hannah Lowe.

This will be followed by an evening of celebration of culture including African dance, Asian drums, poetry from Siana Bangura and spoken word including creative work from Brookes students.

Food and refreshments freely available.

Book here or contact Pam Fortescue pfortescue@brookes.ac.uk to register your interest.

Speaker(s):
Romila Thapar (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Faisal Devji (St Antony’s)
Gautham Shiralagi (St Antony’s)
Adam Roberts (Balliol)
Chair:
Timothy Garton Ash (St Antony’s)
An event held under the auspices of St Antony’s College and the Oxford University Research Project on Civil Resistance and Power Politics, to mark 70 years of Indian independence.

Speaker: Michael Heaney

Percy Manning (1870-1917) was an extraordinary collector of all things Oxfordshire; his diverse interests ranged from archaeology and local buildings history to cricket and Morris dancing. Manning was interested in all periods of history and prehistory, collecting stone age tools, Roman coins, medieval tiles, and relics of ways of life that were disappearing in his own day, such as decorated police truncheons and local pottery. He moved beyond material objects to uncover and document superstitions, folklore and customs. Although he was working to the old county boundaries, there is also a considerable amount of material relating to Berkshire hidden in the collections. The talk will look at his life and work and take a special look at the Berkshire elements.

Michael Heaney is a well-known researcher into folk music and folklore who has published widely on the subject. He combines this with extensive knowledge of the collections in the Bodleian Library where he spent his professional career. He is a Editor of and chief contributor to the book Percy Manning: The Man Who Collected Oxfordshire. Folk Music Journal (2017) and curated the centenary display on Manning at the Bodleian Library.

Free for AAAHS Members.
Visitors are very welcome to attend meetings at a cost of £3.
No booking required.

Can the world be thought of in terms of sepia and light? This talk will explore the relationship between archaic labour and photography in colonial Ceylon with an emphasis on pearlescence and how this might contribute to phenomenologies of light. The economies of pearls and their relationship with visual representation perhaps can act as an allegory of colonialism pushed to the threshold of governmentality.

Talk followed by questions and discussion

All welcome

Oxford Communist Corresponding Society

What does it mean to be a feminist? Who can be a feminist? And is there a right and wrong way of doing it?

Join us on a unique journey through feminist history, adding your voice as we discuss key moments in literature, art, politics, music, sport, and science to develop our understanding of feminism.

You’ll discover knowledge you didn’t realise you had as we join together the pieces of feminist history and women’s achievements in this fun, interactive workshop.

We will identify different stages and criticisms of feminism and consider intersections with race, LGBTIQ, age, and disability politics. We look for silences and unacknowledged voices, and consider the privileges and biases in our own perspectives.

TOAST is a great story as well as a great beer – join us at Oxford Hub for a lunch time drink and some social enterprise conversation with Rob Wilson, entrepreneur and Chief Toaster.
Rob will be telling us more about his quest to end food waste, one beer at a time, telling us more about the TOAST rev-ALE-ution and sharing his advice for budding social entrepreneurs in Oxford.
Feel free to bring your own lunch for this talk at the Oxford Hub living room in Turl Street.
Price of ticket includes a TOAST ale to enjoy with lunch or take home!