Posts com a Tag ‘Europa – País de Gales’
Migrant City: A New History of London | Panilos Panayi
Panilos Panayi | Imagem: Times Higher Education
According to a survey carried out by the National Federation of Fish Fryers in the 1960s, the first fish and chip shop was opened by Joseph Malins in 1860 on Old Ford Road in the East End of London (p. 234). The combination of the fried fish that had been sold and eaten in the Jewish East End since the early nineteenth century with chips created what became a quintessentially British meal. This is one of many examples included in Panikos Panayi’s Migrant City: A New History of London of how migrants have contributed to the culture and economy of London and in turn the United Kingdom.
Panayi makes clear the crucial role that migrants have played in the development of London as a global centre of trade, finance, culture, and politics. He ties this to London’s status as both the centre of a global empire and the largest city in the world for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More than half of migrants arriving in the United Kingdom from abroad moved to London, whose history of migration stretches back to its Roman founding. London, therefore, had long been cosmopolitan and by the late twentieth century had become ‘super-diverse’, with residents born in more than 179 countries, many beyond Europe or the former British Empire. Leia Mais
Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (Dis)united Kingdom | Naomi Lloyd-Jones e Margaret M. Scull
Naomi Lloyd-Jones | Imagem: Royal Historical Society
Four Nations Approaches, as the editors acknowledge from the start, follows in the footsteps of a very solid tradition of edited collections, brought about by the rise of ‘New British History’ in the 1990s and early 2000s. Unlike the majority of that scholarship, however, this volume focuses on the modern rather than the early modern period: the stated aim of this chronology is that it allows the historian to transcend the discussion of ‘state formation’ (p. 5, and see also p. 62). Hugh Kearney’s ‘four nations’ label is adopted here to highlight the fact that ‘the extent to which’ England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales ‘shared a “British” history is interrogated, rather than assumed’ (p. 6), and the approach remains ‘pluralistic’ rather than ‘wholeistic’ (p. 5). ‘Interactions’, instead of ‘integration’, form the focus of analysis (p. 5).
On the whole, there are two dangers that the volume sets out to avoid: the Anglocentrism which is residual in J. G. A. Pocock’s work, and, almost inevitably, in many political and state-centred histories; and a backstaging of the differences and peculiarities of each nation in an effort to look at how they fit into a British ‘whole’. This backstaging usually leaves behind especially Wales, tacitly subsumed into England, and—as Krishan Kumar has most eloquently noted—England itself, whose supposed essence is often reduced to positional dominance in the Union and in the Empire.(1) In this historical moment, however, an explicitly dis-homogenising historiographical approach is made most relevant by the post-2016 trajectories not of Wales and England, but of Scotland and Northern Ireland (pp. 15-18). Lloyd-Jones and Scull are very aware of the risks of hindsight-thinking. That of coming to see the United Kingdom as less of a historical reality merely because of its present disgregation was an issue with which historians had to grapple already in the 1990s. (2) Yet in firmly choosing the Four Nations framework, and determinedly bypassing not only Anglocentric paradigms, but the very idea of ‘Britishness’, this book may well be riding an early wave of what will become the politically mainstream understanding of ‘British’ history. Leia Mais
Medieval Welsh Genealogy: An Introduction and Textual Study | Ben Guy (R)
This substantial book does two jobs. It undertakes the first full textual study of Welsh genealogical literature in the Middle Ages, and it provides a new critical edition of the most important texts. In the second of these roles it replaces Peter Bartrum’s Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts (1966), the workhorse on which everyone relied till now. In the first role, however, it has no predecessor. Bartrum offered only a modest commentary and apparatus. That cannot be said of Ben Guy’s book. The task of reviewing this imposing volume calls to mind a certain early Welsh poem in which an inferior warrior takes on the hero, like ‘a shrew that scrabbled against a cliffside.’
Readers may want to know what is so important about genealogy, and also why such basic source criticism is still needed in 2021. Genealogical thinking pervaded medieval Welsh views of the past and there was a dedicated literature of genealogy from a quite early date. There is plenty of material, therefore, and the general shortage of historical sources from early medieval Wales means that genealogies play an outsize role in the reconstruction of the country’s political history. As to why the texts were still in such a deplorable state of confusion, that is a consequence of an abundance of material combined with a shortage of investigators. Few historians have the time or inclination for this work. The astonishingly productive Peter Bartrum was an amateur scholar who worked in his professional life for the Meteorological Office. He has had few emulators, though the name of David Thornton deserves honourable mention, and other historians have dealt with individual problems. As a corpus, however, the earliest Welsh genealogical literature has never been reduced to textual order – until now. Leia Mais