The meeting and the discussions surrounding it had implications for understandings of women's sexuality in Europe and Africa both then and today. Accounts resulting from it formed part of the knowledge constructions of anthropology and psychoanalysis – one discipline was central to both colonial oppression and emancipation, the other to both the consolidation of patriarchy and to movements of sexual liberation. Central themes were the universality of the Oedipus complex and the role of ‘sublimation’ in relation to the development of moral and intellectual capabilities in Europe and Africa. The article describes the meeting and its background in the context of social reform movements and African nationalism, and discusses the interchange between anthropology and psychoanalysis concerning women's sexual experience that surrounded it. A concluding section examines the relevance of historical accounts for present-day understanding of the problem of female genital cutting.

These themes are teased out through a microhistorical examination of a late medieval English marriage case involving two Londoners named Joan Stokton Turnaunt and Richard Turnaunt. In the circumstances surrounding the Turnaunt case, someone manipulated the processes of law, using the authority and perceived truthfulness of the legal record – the power of the archive – to perpetrate a falsity. As historians, we pride ourselves on our empiricism: we derive our arguments from archival, textual, and material evidence. The epistemic problem for a discipline that relies on what can be documented, however, is that what is documentable is sometimes false, and indeed deliberately written and archived so as to deceive. Moreover, the possible scenarios for the Turnaunt marriage that we can derive from the surviving documents remind us that individuals sometimes acted in unpredictable or irrational ways. This creates further difficulties for us as historians, for we often depend upon our assumptions about rational strategies of social negotiation to make narrative connections between the scattered bits of evidence out of which we write our history. How can we account for the emotional and the irrational in our understanding of the past?

In contrast to the historical attention given to the Contagious Diseases Acts, the solicitation laws are seriously under-examined. Yet these laws were put in place prior to the CD Acts, lasted long after their repeal, affected a far greater number of women, and were significantly more important to the police and the state in their control of prostitution than were the short-lived and geographically limited CD Acts. In the context of the CD Acts, historians have looked at the ways in which a prostitute identity was developed and assigned by medical discourse and medical registration. However, the far more common and long-lasting experience of prostitute women in Britain was governed by the solicitation laws and a legal, not medical, process of classification. Through Nellie Johnson's story, we can begin to explore the intricacies of a legal system of prostitution control peculiar to Britain at a crucial point in its development.

This article argues that over the course of the early twentieth century, the criminalization of identity became the grounds upon which the entire system of street- prostitution control in England and Wales rested. The fingerprinting of prostitutes, and Nellie Johnson's personal experiences, fit into a larger story of modernization in early twentieth-century Britain and the early twentieth-century world. This period witnessed the development of particular, and technical, forms of identification which were applied to particular groups of people, an abstraction which turned the body itself into a text that had very real consequences for women like Nellie Johnson.

For many years, we knew next to nothing about the private lives of ordinary Soviet citizens during Stalin's reign. Until very recently, the social history of the Soviet Union written by Soviet and Western historians alike was limited entirely to the public sphere – politics and ideology, and the collective experience of the ‘Soviet masses.’ The individual (insofar as he or she appeared at all) featured mainly as a letter-writer to the Soviet authorities – as a public actor rather than a private person or member of a family.

Sources were the obvious problem. Apart from a few memoirs by great writers, there was practically no reliable evidence about the private sphere of family life. For ordinary people in the Soviet Union, for the tens of millions who suffered from repression, their family history was a forbidden zone of memory – something they would never talk or write about.

This article addresses that difficulty by exploring the results of a large-scale project of historical recovery. With three teams of researchers from various towns in Russia, I have been recovering the family archives of ordinary Russians who lived through the years of Stalin's rule. In all, we collected approximately 250 family archives which had been in private homes across Russia, even more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet regime. In each family extensive interviews were carried out with the oldest relatives, who were able to explain the context of these private documents and place them in the family's unspoken history. The interviews explore how families reacted to the various pressures of the Soviet regime. How did they preserve their traditions and beliefs, and pass them down to children, if they were in conflict with the public values of the Soviet system? How did living in a system ruled by terror affect intimate relationhips? How could human feelings and emotions retain their force in the moral vacuum of the Stalinist regime? What were the strategies for survival, the silences, the lies, the friendships and betrayals, the moral compromises and accommodations that shaped millions of lives?

This paper offers close readings of two novels – Ian McEwan's Atonement (2002) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) – which both engage with the claims of storytelling as a means to assimilate and even atone for the past. While McEwan recreates in scrupulous detail the experience of British soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk, his treatment of his novelist heroine, Briony, underlines the selfish motives behind any such retelling. For Morrison, writing from and for her own community, the writer's subjective shaping of her material is not a point of entry for self interest but a necessary way of changing our relation to the past, and so creating possibilities for the future.

This article presents a detailed analysis of one such report by the insurance corporation Royal Sun & Alliance, submitted in 2002. It demonstrates that the company disclosure opens up a hitherto occluded aspect of slave resistance. As the report confirms, eighteenth-century maritime insurance policies on slaves in transit to the Americas initially developed in relation to European kidnap and ransom policies. In the later part of the eighteenth century underwriters began to include clauses in their policies that compensated traders for losses in the event of insurrection. Insurrection was considered to be so predictable that policies also included an excess of five or ten per cent.

In conclusion, the article argues that the Reparations movement is reactivating the history of slavery by facilitating the exposure of connections between the past and the present. As the history of insurance reveals, slavery and resistance are central to the development of key conceptual structures that govern the financial and legal parameters of contemporary global capital.

It demonstrates that while absentee ownership varied significantly between colonies, nevertheless across the Caribbean colonies as a whole more than half the compensation awarded can be traced to owners or other recipients in Britain. It acknowledges the widely-recognized importance of mercantile interests in London, Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow as beneficiaries of compensation, both as owners and creditors, and emphasizes that new entrepreneurial capital continued to flow into highly profitable areas of the slave economy even after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

Through tracing the flows of compensation payments, the article also identifies a hitherto neglected but material component of rentier slave-ownership, both large-scale ownership of the enslaved on colonial estates among sections of the British aristocracy and gentry, and smaller-scale ownership of the enslaved among the urban upper middle-classes in centres of polite leisured society along the south coast and in towns such as Bath, Clifton and Edinburgh. Within this rentier ownership, ‘property’ in the enslaved had been transformed in the years prior to Emancipation into an array of financial assets which were then managed by the established means of transmission and control of property between generations and genders, through marriage settlements, entail, annuities and legacies, thereby disseminating ownership more broadly within sections of British society. The article shows that the slave owners of the metropole, numbered in their thousands, appear disproportionately influential, being relatively heavily represented both in the unreformed and reformed House of Commons as well as within county society, for example as sheriffs. Slave-owners who received compensation were also concentrated in newly assertive Anglican organizations and activities of the period, including the subscribers to the funding of King’s College London in the late 1820s. The article goes on to explore the discourses adopted by the metropolitan slave-owners in their dealings with the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, noting the gendered languages deployed, of entitlement by male slave-owners and of entreaty by female owners.

The article seeks to raise two overarching issues. One is the extent to which traditional narratives of Emancipation require revision to incorporate more fully the role of compensation in securing the end of slavery in the British colonies, given the apparent continued influence of slave-owning and slave-owners within British society into the 1830s. The second is to suggest that, while more work is required to complete the tracing of the recycling of the compensation money into the British economy, notably the railway boom, nevertheless the work already done clearly highlights the existence of a number of families and firms still prominent in Britain which benefited directly from slave compensation, and that these historic linkages need to be weighed in any discussion of reparations for slavery.

Hodgkin made interventions in the missionary debate over whether conversion should precede or follow efforts to ‘civilize’ the heathen, favouring the latter. He criticized the emphasis of missionaries on spiritual, at the expense of material, welfare; and he was concerned that they colluded with settler interests in southern Africa, New Zealand and Canada. Hodgkin envied the missionary societies their success at raising funds and creating extensive networks through which information could be disseminated; and he despaired at their supporters’ ignorance of the APS.

Although he condemned slavery, and knew many of the leading British anti-slavery campaigners (including Thomas Clarkson and Thomas Fowell Buxton) this did not prevent Hodgkin from offering a critique of anti-slavery activity. Unfashionably, he emphasized long-term economic and social stability over immediate and unconditional freedom for slaves in the 1830s, arguing for a gradualist approach. Subsequently, while Britons increasingly made recourse to racial explanations for the Caribbean’s economic decline, Hodgkin blamed it on the colonies’ inequitable political and social circumstances. Hodgkin also argued that the development of ‘civilized’ West African communities, which engaged in ‘legitimate commerce’ rather than the slave-trade, was critical for ending slavery. He passionately supported the controversial American Colonization Society, and became involved in several similar British schemes designed to encourage emancipists from the Caribbean and the USA to colonize Africa.

Throughout his life, Hodgkin’s tendency was to universalize and generalize. His involvement in the nascent discipline of ‘ethnology’ (he founded the Ethnological Society of London), both demonstrated this tendency and bound his scientific and humanitarian concerns together. Hodgkin saw ethnology as the ‘universal history of mankind’; simultaneously proving the monogenetic origins of humanity and providing a reminder of Britain’s responsibilities to the Empire’s colonized. Yet this strength, which led him to combat racism and to promote the rights of indigenous peoples, was also Hodgkin’s weakness. He had no first-hand experience of the colonies, and, because of his reductive view of humanity, was often blind to the particularities of the colonial context. The universal ‘civilization’ that he embraced and promoted was profoundly ethnocentric. Despite their flaws, however, Hodgkin’s criticisms of mid nineteenth-century humanitarian activity provoke a reassessment of the missionary and anti-slavery movements, in particular exposing their inconsistencies, ethnocentric nature and paternalism, while illuminating the fear of failure which arose from such significant investment in the mighty experiment and missionary activity.

The museum activities in 2007 have also revealed that transatlantic slavery and African-Caribbean history in general are not yet considered a normal or ordinary part of a British museum's brief. The perceived difficulties of mounting exhibitions or planning ancillary events on these topics lead to a ‘curating by committee’ approach which undermines bold and imaginative treatments and waters down direct language. These problems appear to be magnified for 'blockbuster' exhibitions involving large amounts of public funding, suggesting that in future scarce resources would be better directed towards smaller, more focused projects.

This article examines some key moments of debates on the issue in the Ottoman Parliament in the autumn of 1918, and describes their political and emotional context. The Deputies taking part had lived through the Armenian massacres, and none of them, Muslim or non-Muslim, denied that atrocities had happened. Nor at first were there legal impediments to discussions in press and Parliament. However, the demands of Armenian and Greek Deputies for more detailed debate and for punishment of those responsible were blocked by the Parliament, where Deputies aligned with the just-disbanded Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the party which had authorized the ‘relocations’, were in the majority.

Some of the views concerning the Armenian massacres put forward in official circles in Turkey today were also to be heard at the Ottoman Parliament. But protests by the Unionist Deputies (such as ‘Turks died, too’) on the one hand, and on the other, denunciation by Deputies of minority origin of those responsible for massacres and demands for their punishment, could all be expressed under the same roof. The Deputies of the Ottoman Parliament were able to engage in serious discussion of these important issues, unlike now.

Ten years earlier London’s growth had been seen as neither ominous nor dangerous. In the late nineteen-twenties a vision of the metropolis as a vital economic force, risen from the ashes of the Great War and governed by a progressive political authority which extended outward to empire and inward to an educated, democratic population, was imposed over London’s rambling development by the New Survey of London Life and Labour (1928-1935). The New Survey, product of the London School of Economics, follow-up to Booth’s pioneering study forty years earlier, uncovered higher incomes, less poverty, a shorter working day and improved literacy. Londoners were readers, gardeners, ‘listeners-in’; they were dancers, musicians, gamblers; they had acquired the ‘habit of travel’ and went to the cinema once a week – the price of ticket so cheap it kept the cost of all entertainments low. All these forces combined to ‘shift the main centre of interest of a worker’s life more and more from his daily work to his daily leisure’.

This essay explores these historical forces – economic growth, the commerce in pleasure, migration, housing, city mentality – through the lens of the New Survey which captured London’s economy and people on the cusp of change from want to ‘decent comforts’. Education is the ‘master-key’ of progress; mobility and aspiration follow in its wake. If social research is the means through which the nation understood itself, then the New Survey marks a shift in liberal sentiment from empathy to entitlement, and its idiom overlaps with that of oral and written memory.

Had death not cut him short Samuel would undoubtedly have produced a number of other fascinating volumes, one of which might have been the companion volume to East End Underworld, promised in his Prefatory Note. Raphael assured me that this would tell the story of the origins of the book. It is sad in the extreme that Raphael never fulfilled his intention of writing a companion volume. In its absence, this article is an attempt to fill in some of the background.