This post is part of the Monster Carnival 2022 – Why Early Modern History Matters Now. Urvashi Chakravarty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and works on early modern literature and the history of race and slavery. She tweets at @UrvashiChakrav.

Urvashi Chakravarty

What is the history of race, and what is the history of class? How are they interwoven and when and why are they rendered separate? We often think of these two genealogies as fundamentally opposed, and certainly current cultural discourse frequently treats them that way (‘But what about class?’ is a familiar rejoinder to those of us who speak and write on race in the past and the present). In particular, we might imagine these histories—of race and class—as converging most explicitly around the sites of slavery, but as I explore in my work, they are in fact deeply interwoven in the literary and cultural texts of early modern England, and in the documentary evidence around labour that persists: if we want to recover a labour history and a class history, I argue, we need to understand the history of race.

In this piece, therefore, I want to think about an early modern fragmentary document, what it might reveal about the entwined relationship between race and labour, and how we might use such documentary evidence to recover and complicate a premodern English history of class and labour.

To begin, then: what is the place of slavery in early modern England, how and why is it
racialised, and what might forms of early modern labour have to teach us about the construction of race in the premodern period and its enduring legacy today? These are the central questions that have been consuming my work and thinking for over a decade, and so it’s no surprise that they lie at the heart of my recently published book Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude and Free Service in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022, published as the first book in its new series on ‘RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern’). Fictions of Consent argues that forms of household service, apprenticeship, indenture, and liveried retainership in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England are on the one hand pervasive and everyday, and on the other hand are vexed sites of consent and contract that are paradoxically implicated in the development of racialised slavery.

The two questions that come up frequently when I speak or write about this topic are: was there slavery in early modern England? And what does ‘race’ mean, particularly in an early modern context – and can we even talk about race in this historical period? (‘Don’t we want to talk about class instead?’).

This post is part of the Monster Carnival 2022 – Why Early Modern History Matters Now. Lisa Olson is a librarian and recent graduate of the Master of Information program at Dalhousie University where she completed a thesis focussed on plague publications in seventeenth-century England. Find her on Twitter @Olson_Bochord.

Lisa Olson

Three years since the start of the pandemic seems like an apposite time to see what lessons we can learn about the experience from a closer examination of early modern history. We have seen how widespread illness can effect profound change in society, as it has many times before. We have yet to understand the lasting effects of the current pandemic, however, and may benefit from a closer examination of similar occurrences throughout history.

This post is part of the Monster Carnival 2022 – Why Early Modern History Matters Now. Misha Ewen (@mishaewen) is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bristol, and has published on gender, colonialism, and trading companies in The Historical Journal, Gender & History, and Cultural and Social History. She has just published The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580-1660 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).

Misha Ewen

Since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, we have witnessed renewed scrutiny of British involvement in colonialism and the transatlantic trade in enslaved people. Many of the names and institutions at the centre of debates (and the manufactured so-called culture war) are early modern, from Edward Colston and Tobias Rustat to the Bank of England. It’s through the lens, and understanding, of the early modern period that apologies have been issued, new findings about institutional complicity have been made, and statues have been torn down. Calls for reparations, from private individuals like Richard Drax MP and institutions like the British monarchy, are also distinctly early modern in their basis and legitimacy.

With good reason, recent action and debate has focused on these particularly prominent individuals and institutions, but this narrowing of attention does mean that we often don’t discuss the wider public interest in and support for colonisation that permeated society in early modern Britain. My impression is that our general understanding about early modern colonisation does not extend to knowing how ordinary women, men, and children encountered and engaged with colonial activity in myriad ways, how they profited from it and upheld it. There were those who shaped policy in the Houses of Parliament and meeting rooms of trading companies, and then there are those who outfitted ships and provided food and lodging to colonists in the days leading up to their departure: women like Elizabeth Hibbert, who earned fifteen shillings providing this service to Virginia colonists departing aboard the Margaret from Gloucestershire in 1619.

Participation in the colonial project operated on a spectrum like this, from what could be considered more passive or fleeting, to active, deeper, engagement. For those individuals and institutions which were more tightly involved with colonial policy and projects, we sometimes have ample evidence of their outlook and activity, and this is where our focus usually lies, rather than on others like Elizabeth Hibbert, who contributed at the margins and remain there. Their imprint on the archive is much lighter, and their interaction with the colonial project appears short-lived. How does evidence of this kind, however fragmentary it is, not only impact how historians understand histories of colonisation and empire, but potentially challenge engrained narratives about our heritage?

This post is part of the Monster Carnival 2022 – Why Early Modern History Matters Now. Clare Griffin is an assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington and a historian of the early modern Russian empire in global context. You can find more of her work at www.claregriffin.org.

Clare Griffin

If you have been in a state of consciousness at any time since February ‘22, you may have noticed something is up with Russia and Ukraine. Depending on which news sources you read, you may or may not know how central early modern Russian history is to this twenty-first-century war. Yet it is. Russian propaganda justifying the war, and Ukraine’s responses to that, are heavily concerned with both medieval Kyiv and early modern Moscow and its empire.

Earlier this year, I was in the bizarre situation of having an interview for a Russian history job on the same day that Russia invaded Ukraine. I had a pitch all lined up for why early modern Russia is relevant, but when the leader of the country you study is justifying an invasion on the basis of what you study this all becomes a decidedly dark moot point.

So what is Putin’s version of premodern East Slavic history, and why is this important to the Kremlin’s propaganda machine?