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Royal Holloway History Department Research Seminar Series

1 December 2009

Tommaso Bobbio - Urban change, inequality and collective violence in the construction of an Indian metropolis: Ahmedabad, 1930-2000

What dynamics contribute to emergence of social tensions and conflicts in an urban environment?  Mass mobilisations and episodes of collective violence have been a constant element in the development of large Indian cities over the twentieth century, and the emergence of a deep fracture between the Hindu and the Muslim community has informed social, political and cultural transformations in post-colonial urban environments.  Taking Ahmedabad city (north-western India) as a case study, this paper analyses the explosion of collective violence as part of long-term dynamics of urban transformation.  Group tensions can be seen as the expression of social, economic and spatial inequalities that consolidated unbalanced patterns of urban territorial and demographic growth.  At the same time, the management of urban growth at a political level contributed to the construction of an urban geography where social differences are inscribed in the organisation of the space.  In this context, episodes of collective violence have two dimensions: on one side, they can be read as moments when the many instances of inequality find expression in open confrontations at a street level; on the other, violence leaves deep marks in the city’s social and physical landscape and, in this sense, it is an integral element in the process of urban construction and organisation over time.

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Royal Holloway University of London

Department of History

Date: 26 November 2009

Russell Wallis (Royal Holloway) – Britons, Poles and Jews after WWI

From WWI onwards, British society responded to a series of atrocities and humanitarian crises in different parts of the world. The first of these was the so-called ‘rape of Belgium’ by German forces in late 1914. The second was the race murder of the Armenians by Turks. Part of the response to German and Turkish crimes in 1914 and the mass murder of the Armenians by Turks was that atrocity was un-English. In this sense, the response to atrocity was framed by a sense of national identity: in other words, who the English thought themselves to be. Victory in the Great War had confirmed Britain’s international reputation and self-perception both as a defender of small nations and a protector of vulnerable minorities. However, with regard to the nascent Polish state these two ideas came into conflict. This paper explores the forces that dictated British reactions to brutal anti-Semitism in Poland. In particular two distinct but connected war aims were at variance: firstly, the re-establishment of Poland as a separate democratic state and, secondly, the banishment of repression as a method of control. To accommodate the former, the British felt compelled to give the latter considerable latitude.

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Royal Holloway History Department Research Seminar Series

Date: 10 November 2009

Nick Holder (Royal Holloway) – History and Archaeology: Finding some Common Ground

The disciplines of history and archaeology have much in common, not least a common origin as they both grew out of antiquarianism in the 19th century. For much of the 20th century, however, history and archaeology moved apart, particularly as different theoretical approaches led them in different directions. In order to explore the possibilities of common ground, historians and archaeologists need to understand each other’s ‘protocols of evidence’. Nick Holder will look at the types of evidence and data created by archaeologists and consider ways that historians can make use of that body of evidence, as well as at some case studies of fruitful co-operation between archaeologists and historians.

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Royal Holloway History Department Research Seminar Series

Date:  3 November 2009

The Republican Party and the Rise of the New Right in American Politics since the 1960s

United States Round Table:

• John Kirk (Royal Holloway)
• Joe Merton (Oxford University)
• Sandra Scalon (London School of Economics)
• Tim Stanley (Royal Holloway)

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Royal Holloway History Department Research Seminar Series

Date: 27 October 2009

Professor Humayun Ansari (Royal Holloway)
‘Place-making, Identity and Islam: the Struggle to Create ‘a mosque in London worthy of the tradition of Islam and worthy of the capital of the British Empire’, 1910-1944.

Post 9/11 and 7/7, the mosque, as a socially dynamic and influential multi-purpose community institution, has come under increasing scrutiny as academic and political debates surrounding identity and belonging, the radicalisation of young Muslims, struggles for power within and beyond Muslim communities and policies on integration and social cohesion reach a new pitch. For a Muslim to feel at home or for a non-Muslim to recognize a Muslim space, the presence of certain Islamic symbols is important. In Britain, the construction of mosques has been part of a process of identity formation, a process that has become concerned with non-Muslim anxieties over visible and audible Muslim presence. By exploring historically the dynamic interplay between Muslim experience and the institutions of British society with regard to the efforts for establishing a mosque in London, this paper attempts to deepen our understanding of how Muslims have sought to establish themselves as an integral part of British society, through a specific kind of place-making.

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Royal Holloway History Department Research Seminar Series

Date: 20 October 2009

Peregrine Horden – What’s Wrong with Medieval Medicine?

As the late great Roy Porter observed, we in the developed world have never have it so good. By any measure we have never been healthier. And yet we have also never been so anxious about our health, or so critical of modern medicine—biomedicine. We look to alternative traditions, many of them Asian. Why do we not also look back to the pre-modern medicine of Europe? What’s wrong with medieval medicine? What could a study of it offer our current malaise? Peregrine Horden explores the medicine of medieval Europe, not as a repository of neglected herbal remedies, but as an example of a medicine that acknowledges its limitations, that aims for rhetorical ‘success’ in the therapeutic encounter rather than biological efficacy; that provides prognosis as much as cure – and that derives its pharmacopoeia from (to us) strange material such as dead vultures as well as from ‘traditional’ herbal lore.

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Date  -  Speaker and Title

Autumn Term

20 Oct.

Peregrine Horden (Royal Holloway)
What’s wrong with medieval medicine?

27 Oct.

Humayun Ansari (Royal Holloway)
Place-making, Identity and Islam: the Struggle to Create ‘a mosque in
London worthy of the tradition of Islam and worthy of the capital of the
British Empire’, 1910-1944.

3 Nov.

United States Round Table:
John Kirk (Royal Holloway),
Joe Merton,(Oxford University),
Sandra Scanlon (London School of Economics),
Tim Stanley (Royal Holloway)
The Republican Party and the Rise of the New Right in American Politics since the 1960s

10 Nov.

Nick Holder (Royal Holloway)
History, Archaeology and Engagement with the Public

24 Nov.

Russell Wallis (Royal Holloway)
Britons, Poles and Jews after WWI

1 Dec.

Tommaso Bobbio (Royal Holloway)
Economic and Social Change and Violence in Ahmadabad 1950-2000.

Spring Term

12 Jan.

Daniel Beer (Royal Holloway)
The Vanishing Liberal Subject: Morality in Russian Literature 1860-1910

19 Jan.

History and Extra-Europe: Joint Presentation

Markus Daechsel (Royal Holloway)
The Historian and the Pakistan Crisis

Vanessa Martin (Royal Holloway)
The Historian and the Iraq War

9 Feb.

Margaret Bird (Royal Holloway)
‘A person in black, sent to you from afar’: the Evangelical Clergy’s Awakening of the Flock in Rural Norfolk 1773-1813

2 Mar.

Hayes Robinson Lecture: Stefan Collini – History in English Literary Criticism

29 April

Bojan Aleksov (School of Slavonic and East European Studies)
The Alleged Marian Apparition Site of Medjugorje and its Relation to WWII Memory and the Conflict in Former Yugoslavia

Vanessa Martin
Series Convenor

Royal Holloway University of London Department of History and

The University of Leeds School of History

Event Date: 12 August 2009

From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan 1947 – 1964

Programme / Index:

Introduction & Welcome

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Session I – Citizenship: concepts and problems
(click speaker/title for individual archive pages)

Chair: Yasmin Khan (RHUL)

• Ornit Shani - ‘Concrete conceptions of citizenship and everyday life: India, 1940s–1970s’
  
• Talat Ahmed – ‘Becoming an Indian citizen through ‘Bollywood’: the films of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’
• Vazira Zamindar -  ‘Citizenship and national boundries in postcolonial South Asia’
• Questions / Discussion

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Session II – Violence and the everyday state
(click speaker/title for individual archive pages)

Chair: Francis Robinson (RHUL)

• William Gould – ‘Policing, ‘punishment and quotidian violence in late colonial and early independent north India’
• Taylor Sherman – ‘Retaliation, not rehabilitation: everyday violence in the aftermath of the Police Action in Hyderabad, 1947-51‘
• Questions / Discussion

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Session III – Development and resettlement
(click speaker/title for individual archive pages)

Chair: Markus Daechel (RHUL)

• Ilyas Chattha – Differential treatment: Kashmiri refugees’ experiences of rehabilitation and Punjab-centre relations, 1947-1961
• Tommaso Bobbio – ‘Countrymen within the city’: the construction of citizenship and the rhetoric of ‘slum development’ in twentieth-century Ahmedabad
• Questions / Discussion

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Session IV: Gender, childhood and the nation
(click speaker/title for individual archive pages)

Chair: Eleanor Newbigin (Cambridge)

• Ravinder Kaur ‘Bodies of partition: gendered subjects, ‘social’ work and the limits of moral citizenship’
• Uditi Sen – Rehabilitation’s residue: recasting refugee women as ‘permanent liabilities’
• Sarah Ansari - Children, citizenship and the state in 1950s Pakistan
• Questions / Discussion

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Concluding Discussion

Project website: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/subjectstocitizens/index.html

Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Departmental Research Seminar Series 2008/2009

Event Date: 29 April 2009

Two historians – Professor Peregrine Horden and Professor Penelope Corfield –   and one geographer – Professor Clive Gamble – explore the relationship between ‘time’ and ‘History’ and how  the study of History over long periods of time, or ‘Deep History’, can further an understanding the past. While present research points to a shift in periodisation and classification, teaching History in ‘Deep Time’ is clearly something that has not yet entered the syllabus of undergraduate teaching. The discussion here proposes some practical models.

TEACHING HISTORY IN DEEP TIME

a discussion with:

Professor Clive Gamble (Geography)

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Professor Peregrine Horden (History)

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Professor Penelope Corfield (History)

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Handout (Corfield)

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Discussion:

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Royal Holloway University of London

Department of History

17 February, 2009

Dr. Nelida Fuccaro (School of Oriental and African Studies)

‘Middle Eastern Urban Frontiers, Migrants and States: The Persian Gulf 1820 – 1947’

Dr. Fuccaro traces the development of the urban settlements of Bahrain and Kuwait and their (predominantly Iranian) migrant communities, as well as the rapid economic change from pearl fishing and merchants to the modern petroleum industry.

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