This is the final post in a short series about the 2024 Historical Association Conference, held in Birmingham in May.

The final session of Day 1 was a Roundtable which discussed the value historians can add to contemporary and future issues?

Jonathan Phillips opened by suggesting that the main contribution is perspective born of context. Some words have different meanings in different contexts – he pointe out thatwe in the modern west use crusade as a secular word for things we care passionately about which are generally for good but in the east it is shorthand for westerners who invade. He also described a sense of diversity. Alison Kitson talked about “usable historical pasts”. She argued that unless the history we teach speaks to children’s lives and futures it will just be a list of stories. She talked about the book The History Manifesto and the study of long durée histories in combination with micro history. She argued that history has a public function in understanding and explaining the present- for example, inequalities, climate, threats to democracy. Climate, of course, is a very good example of how the past influences the presence the future. There were occasions in the past where we could have gone in different directions but didn’t. The choices we make now will have equally dramatic impacts on the future. History also provides us with different ways of living. Through most of history people had to make do with what they had. We can manage without things. We can wean ourselves off fossil fuels as quickly as we took then up so profoundly – a single lifetime!

Claire Langhamer pointed out several values that she thought history provided. Understanding the past helps us understand the present, and we can value it for its own sake, but those don’t always havemuch persuasive power for non-historians. But our projects and research have real value and contribute to improving people’s lives through influencing policy. It’s also hugely popular. it provokes feelings, encourages us to think antically about the present and help us to plan for the future.

Martin Spafford considered how we can help young people to use history to navigate the present and face their future. Is this the loneliest people have been in the history of our species? We only are who we are in the context of who we have met, and what we have heard. He pointed out that the critical thinking shills we develop in history are crucial for a generation constantly bombarded with opinions. We need to think about what our students need from their history lessons rather than what we think they ought to know. They will need to apply the skills they have learned about how to evaluate historical matters to issues in the present.

Day 1 ended with a drinks reception and the conference dinner, where I sat my my Historian colleagues Steve Illingworth and Maggie Green, and Sarah Fox. We thoroughly enjoyed the curry, and the quiz was brilliant, especially the ‘identify the playmobil figure’ and ‘craft a historical potato’ rounds! I think, although I might have got this wrong, that our team came joint third – largely due to Steve’s impressive contribution to the Birmingham music round. Our potato, in case you were wondering, was Sir Robert Peel…

Day 2 began with a keynote from William Dalrymple on The Anarchy which overthrew the East India Company and was the largest anti-colonial rebellion. He noted that we are now back in a world where corporations can take on a state because they can have larger incomes than individual states or even continents. The empire was Britain’s biggest contribution to global history and the corporations had a massive role within this. Dalrymple pointed out that there are more important artefacts from India in Powys Castle’s private collection than in 5 of the major Indian museum collections (including Mumbai) put together,..

The credit system was introduced to the empire by Indian bankers. The English then were able to ally with the Indian bankers and wins Bengal, the richest state, allowing them to take over the less wealthy states. They used the money to build the largest army in the world – so a corporation had an army twice the size of that of its home country. The sepoys joined the East India Army because they paid well, while the bankers leant to them because they knew that they would get the money back on time.

Now having taken control of the country in the 1780s, the Company no longer had to take gold out of London to pay for the textiles, they just need to tax people in India. They also planted the difficult agricultural areas with opium poppies. This opium trade lay at the root of the dumping of tea into Boston harbour in America. Meanwhile the offices and docks in London were expanding and the Company had become the largest employer in England. Only in May1857 when the sepoys rose up against them did the system begin to fall apart. The reports of the rape women and murder of children meant that when the English went in in September, the talk was of retaliation and the victims were dehumanised. At this point the East India Company was taken apart by Parliament, accused of nepotism, corruption and misgovernment.

The theme was maintained by Karin Doull and Susie Townsend in their presentation on ‘Vexatious women and the early East India Company’. They talked about their project working in the east end of London and introduced some of the historical women they encountered who were, despite the stereotypes of the period, neither weak nor unfit for anything. The first was Elizabeth Dale who took the East India Company to court in 1620 for £40,000 because they had cleared out her husband’s cabin when he died and taken her inheritance. Sadly she didn’t win but she represented many captains’ wives for whom the same thing happened. Another was Frances Steele who defied the Company’s order that no women should go out to the I-ndies. They used the historical evidence to create short stories. They talked about how archive and museum collections, documents and visual sources such as the Agas map of London helped them to imagine the context and places in which their characters lived.

After that, I went to hear Sarah Fox talk about midwifery practice in a northern town and what it could tell us about gender, church power and social relations in the 17th century. She discussed the tension between how licensed midwives were supposed to swear an oath that they would reveal to parish authorities the father of children but also that they should keep the secrets of the childbirth chamber. Her case study, Anne Knutsford, revealed these secrets and those of the marriages on which those children were based. Midwives possessed intimate and powerful knowledge and while Knutsford was challenged over her scandalous behaviour no-one said she was not able to do her job – midwives had to demonstrate skill. The worst they could say of her skills was that others were as good as she, not that she was in any way unskilled. Even after she had her license to practise revoked she was still called upon by women who had choice over who worked for them. But Nantwich was a struggling community in this period. Although she was herself only modestly middling, she was a moneylender and many of the people who accused her owed her money, so it is possible that this was at the root of many of the problems.

After lunch Danielle Shaw described Elizabethan attempts to capture Jesuits, which really spoke to my old research into John Roberts (more on that again in another post). She described how William Waad at the Tower of London was a mayor figure who collected information from abroad and were involved in investigating treason. He was really interested in finding Robert Persons. Waad was a career spy and diplomat and forwarded information to Cecil. His early administrative roles were less than successful but he recovered and he deciphered a semi-encoded paper which revealed a plot to invade England. He was also involved in the arrest of Mary Queen of Scots. He is in fact an important figure as someone feared. The prisoners who were charged with high treason were kept at the Tower and of course after the papal bull of 1571, Catholics were seen as being treasonous so more were being prosecuted. Waad was the commissioner to search for Catholic traitors. He had very great success in this role and undertook many diplomatic missions to continental Europe. She pointed out that funding for the lieutenant and ambassadors increased in the late 16th century and described how Waad was running his own agents domestically and internationally, on a level much higher than Walsingham and Cecil. Many prisoners were released after interrogations when they informed on illegal Catholic gatherings. These gatherings were then infiltrated. Some prisoners informed on others, and servants were installed in prison to extract information from prisoners who might be useful. Many of his prisoners complained about his methods, including listening in.

Finally, it was time for Anne Curry, who reflected on where her interest in Henry V came from. She thought about places, films (she noted that she had made her grandfather make a Henry VI model out of a fairy liquid bottle after watching the Wars of the Roses series) and Ladybird books, which reminded me of Michael Wood’s keynote at the HA Conference in Manchester back when I had just finished my PhD. She pointed out the fact that, of all medieval kings, Henry V is the only one who is not deposed or killed, and that Henry VIII wanted to be like him. She noted how visiting places has an impact on how we perceive historical sites. To bring the conference to an end, she reflected on what is influencing and interesting children now, when they have far more choices.

After the conference closed, I went for a drink with my old friend from the HA’s Bolton Branch, Sue Cox, before heading back north on the train for home.