James Fisher

New History Book Series Call for Proposals: Routledge Studies in Eighteenth- Century Cultures and Societies - BSECS Series Editors: Elaine Chalus, University of Liverpool, UK and Deborah Simonton, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark Routledge Editor: Max Novick The long eighteenth century sits as a pivotal poin...

***CALL FOR PROPOSALS***
Routledge Studies in #18thC Cultures & Societies (eds. @profelainechalus.bsky.social & Deborah Simonton) seeks proposals for book-length studies on aspects of British, European, or transnational culture and society c.1680-1850. Full details: www.bsecs.org.uk/news-and-eve...

All famines are man-made, all famines are political. Historians of empire and humanitarianism have known this forever. Gaza is not starving, Gaza is being starved, by Israel, and this starvation is enabled by our government and by every other government that does not step in to force food and aid.

Gaza health ministry says 33 people dead from malnutrition in last 48 hours New figures from the Hamas-run ministry include 12 children who have died, as the UN says Israel must allow aid into Gaza.

A tipping point has been reached.

Gaza is now starving to death in front of the whole world.

Those who facilitated and justified this abomination were given ample warning for 21 months.

You have no excuses, and nowhere to hide: you will be held to account for what you've done.

Initial Impressions of OpenAI's Agents: Unfinished, Unsuccessful, and Unsafe By 12 hours after the announcement I had seen OpenAI's promo video shared so many times on social media that I could recite the whole thing backwards. I am highly cynical of anything produced by a tec...

Want to see OpenAI’s newly hyped “Agent” in action? Prepare to be amazed at all the things it can’t actually do. #ArtificialIntelligence #AIEducation #AIEdu #AIInEd #AIInEdu #EduSky leonfurze.com/2025/07/19/i...

Absolutely dystopian juxtaposition from the Guardian front page. Difficult to understand how anyone of decency and conscience can defend this government at this point. Just sheer moral degeneracy to arm a state that does this and arrest people for objecting. Wtf are we doing as a country?

Opinion | I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. A scholar of genocide comes to a painful conclusion about Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” writes Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. “I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”

AI in the Writing Process: A Problem of Purpose When we value the product of writing more than the process, we’re bound to see students using GenAI to skip to the end. So, what are we going to do about it? #ArtificialIntelligence #AIEducation #AIEdu #AIInEd #AIInEdu #Writing #AIWriting

AI in the Writing Process: A Problem of Purpose

When we value the product of writing more than the process, we’re bound to see students using GenAI to skip to the end. So, what are we going to do about it? #ArtificialIntelligence #AIEducation #AIEdu #AIInEd #AIInEdu #Writing #AIWriting

A modern artist's illustration of what an 18th century Freedom Seeker named Jack might have looked like.

We can never know the lives, the beliefs, the hopes, and dreams of the enslaved people who dared to be free, but we can speculate, imagine, and research. If you've ever considered exploring these histories, Freedom Seekers is always accepting new submissions!
freedom-seekers.org/upload-your-...

Historians: We are having the wrong conversation about AI This might be the first in a series of posts exploring how historians can engage with AI tools.

Are we framing the AI discussion wrong in history departments? I think we're too focused on student “cheating” while missing the bigger picture. I've been thinking about this for a while and decided to write it down.

lucaspoy.substack.com/p/historians...

Front cover of book: title Farm Accounts in Rural Europe c.1700-1914

Contents page

First page of chapter 2 by James D Fisher titled Accounting for Labour on Capitalist Farms in Eighteenth-Century England

📖 I've got a new chapter out on accounting as a technique of labour management in C18th English capitalist agriculture

In this volume of Farm Accounts @boydellandbrewer.bsky.social >>

Smellmaxxer-in-chief

@willtullett.bsky.social

Front cover of book: title Farm Accounts in Rural Europe c.1700-1914

Contents page

First page of chapter 2 by James D Fisher titled Accounting for Labour on Capitalist Farms in Eighteenth-Century England

📖 I've got a new chapter out on accounting as a technique of labour management in C18th English capitalist agriculture

In this volume of Farm Accounts @boydellandbrewer.bsky.social >>

This is very much worth your time >>

Be ready to be shocked and offended at university, students told Guidance has been published by the Office for Students on new free speech rules coming into force this year.

The irony is that students are routinely shocked, just not in the ways desired by those driving this

E.g. that supposedly traditional Western ideas of gender and race are not, in fact, fixed universals
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Whereof one cannot speak One of the more frustrating, if unstated, presumptions of the early excitement about generative AI’s classroom potential — or, rather, coursework potential — was that papers (essa…

thinking out loud
memoriousblog.com/2025/06/18/w...

An 1876 illustration of children working in a British textile factory

When you picture exploitative child labour in C18-19th century England, you might think of a sooty-faced chimney sweep, or a small boy or girl crawling between machines in a cotton mill.

But the green and pleasant countryside was also populated by poor children working in oppressive conditions.

Ah how interesting. Many people will have those links without knowing

My new articles 'Bound to the Soil Part I & II' (free to access) explore how this operated in detail in the South West over the long C18th:

doi.org/10.1017/S026...
doi.org/10.1017/S026...

Painting by Gainsborough, 1778: Hilly landscape with peasant family at a Cottage Door, Children playing and Woodcutter returning

When we imagine rural England on the cusp of industrialisation, therefore, we should include the thousands of poor youth who lived and worked on farms as unfree servants - they did not choose their master, and they could not choose to leave until adulthood.

But as the child was often given to an unwilling master, and was bound by indenture to serve them, conditions were ripe for abuse and exploitation as cheap labour.

This was not a marginal experience: in some villages in Devon, as many as 1/4 of all local children were bound as pauper apprentices.

Local authorities could bind poor children as young as 7 as 'apprentices' to wealthier households to work unpaid for up to 17 years in exchange for maintenance and perhaps training.

Under a good master or mistress, this might be beneficial.

An 1876 illustration of children working in a British textile factory

When you picture exploitative child labour in C18-19th century England, you might think of a sooty-faced chimney sweep, or a small boy or girl crawling between machines in a cotton mill.

But the green and pleasant countryside was also populated by poor children working in oppressive conditions.

So what does this mean for the use of LLMs in history? I think these models interfere with our method at several points in crucial ways:

1) Source criticism: LLMs have already proven they aren’t capable of internal source crit., since they treat all text the same and can only produce coherence 9/

My 2nd article on the serfdom-like compulsory child labour schemes in C18th southwest England is now available (open access) doi.org/10.1017/S026...

It was distinctive not merely as a type of unfree labour, but as a centralised method for allocating servants to farmers

In these scenarios, ChatGPT functions as a kind of Magic 8 Ball that can generate an infinite variety of bespoke messages

Screenshot of introductory paragraph to journal article 'Bound to the Soil Part II', which tells the story of 7-year-old Rebecca Hayman bound into a complex local labour system.

This focuses on a case study of Awliscombe, Devon, in which a relatively small group of yeomen used their powers under the poor law to systematically bind poor children to each other as servants (rather than provide relief to parents).

My 2nd article on the serfdom-like compulsory child labour schemes in C18th southwest England is now available (open access) doi.org/10.1017/S026...

It was distinctive not merely as a type of unfree labour, but as a centralised method for allocating servants to farmers

Is Russian roulette safe despite its 'bullets' and risk of death?

History and Hermeneutics Cambridge Core - Global History - History and Hermeneutics

The latest title in the Cambridge Elements in Historical Theory and Practice series is out today and FREE till June 23rd: Paul Fairfield, History and Hermeneutics. ‪@cambridgeup.bsky.social‬ doi.org/10.1017/9781...