Sam Wetherell

My students usually enjoy my lectures, but I think they particularly enjoyed yesterday’s, when two random twelve year olds stormed the stage, called me a specky twat, then were chased away by two frantic security officers.

Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts In the early twentieth century, the worldwide rubber boom led British entrepreneur Lord Leverhulme to the Belgian Congo. Warmly welcomed by the murderous regime of King Leopold II, Leverhulme set up a...

And of course in the context of Lever particularly, focussing on working and housing conditions only in the sense that it pertained to a very narrow segment of their white workforce in Britain itself. www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...

Factory tourism in inter-war Britain: the spectacular construction of social-democratic mass production Abstract. In the 1920s and 1930s, British mass-manufacturers opened their factories to hundreds of thousands of ordinary consumers. As the market for brand

academic.oup.com/tcbh/article...

This new piece by @hornseyhq.bsky.social in Modern British Studies looks fascinating: Factory tourism in inter-war Britain: the spectacular construction of social-democratic mass production.

The university I work at it is literally encircled by England flags targeted sometimes implicitly and sometimes very explicitly at students of colour. I wonder why that isn’t part of the discussion about “keeping universities free from hate”? (I don’t actually wonder this).

Just checked and I think this journal doesn't do abstracts, alas!

Just emailed to your Royal Holloway account!

This essay by @sonalidhanpal.bsky.social on the relationship between decolonisation and mass council housing is one of the most exciting works of British urban history I've read in a long, long time. It points the way to a different kind of future for our work. direct.mit.edu/grey/article...

Come see Liam talk about prisons in York! Its open to all and I'll be chairing.

Explaining a burger to a British person: "Imagine a sausage"

“Why haven’t the protests against successive governments’ complicity in genocide stopped”, a mystery that is apparently beyond our finest political minds to fathom

I've got a new article out @historyworkshop.org.uk. It argues for history as a form of intergenerational friendship.
History, like friendship, can be a politically powerful way of talking and thinking across time, and can connect past, present, and future struggle ✊
academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-...

Striking and grimly predictable that the most consequential effect of Liz Truss's premiership has been to radically constrain the state's political and economic imagination. She lost the battle, but won the war by binding Britain seemingly forever to austerity. www.ft.com/content/7615...

The essay concludes by saying that we should, in the face of our present moment, return to the works of John Stewart Mill and Locke. It is a great shame that we have the public intellectuals we deserve, rather than the ones we greatly need.

It should be more incredible that even now, the central contradiction of liberalism — that its emergence was coterminous with settler colonial expansion, slavery and ecological devastation — is utterly lost on one of the leading public historians of our generation.

The qualifying sentence that begins "to be sure" is doing an *enormous* amount of heavy lifting in this saccharine and naive attempt to rehabilitate the nascent liberalism of the eighteenth century Atlantic World. The ruins of the present owe so much to this past. www.ft.com/content/650a...

With great cat content!

A tortoiseshell cat, sitting on curled up human legs, on which a copy of a book is also visible. The human to whom the legs belong is sitting on a carpeted floor, and is in increasing discomfort due to not being very flexible.

End of week reading. @samwetherell.bsky.social's excellent new urban history of post-war Liverpool.

Sounds very much like a 1930s chemist’s concoction!

Let’s say, hypothetically, you had a big public book event in front of 120 people later, and you’d completely lost your voice this morning. What could someone in this situation do in the next ten hours?

Very pleased that my piece 'Urban history as urgent work, an argument for disciplinary promiscuity' has been published in @urbanhistory.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S096...
Many thanks to @mctom.bsky.social for organising the roundtable that got these thoughts going back in 2023! #UrbanHist #EnvHums

Labour Party politicians and grandees speed running the British Empire by doing indentured servitude and Mandatory Palestine in the same week.

He’s was like a gangly stoned cassandra.

When he was PM in 2004 Tony Blair visited my now academised sixth form in Milton Keynes which was built during his reign. He was due to walk under an enclosed windowed bridge and my friend Dan was about to press his bare arse against the glass when a teacher stopped him at the last minute. Alas.

Blair's post-genocide plans for a new Mandatory Palestine should be a delegitimising project for an entire faction of Labour. In terms of scandal by association this is far worse than anything Mandleson has done. A generation of British politicians should be haunted by the words "Gaza Trump Riviera"

The problem here is the limitations of viewing "racism" as individual pathology rather than a structural historical force. Doing the former is to fall into a political trap that Reform will always win. Doing the latter implicates Labour too, as it should.

My two year old woke up, seemingly for the day, at 2.45am. Happy weekend everyone

I wonder if mandatory ID cards inevitably with little flags on them tied directly to citizenship will make Reform's plans to round up and deport more than a hundred thousand people easier, or harder?

Bodies, Tides, Timber, and the Global History of London’s Docks, 1860–1928* Abstract. This article examines changes in the bodies and environment of labourers carrying timber imported into London’s docks in the 1860s to the 1920s t

New on advance access: "Bodies, Tides, Timber, and the Global History of London’s Docks, 1860–1928"

by Simeon Koole (@uobrishistory.bsky.social) and @benmechen.bsky.social (@uclhistory.bsky.social)

#OpenAccess

doi.org/10.1093/past...