'British History from the Middle of Nowhere', Julia Laite (Birkbeck, University of London)
When:
—
Venue:
External
Followed by a wine reception
Booking essential. Register your place here (HistoryMiddleNowhereRSML25.eventbrite.co.uk)
As one tourist wrote in his hunting guide to Newfoundland in 1907, ‘the average Englishman imagines it to be a little bit of a place somewhere near the north pole…[but] if he has been to school, he will have learnt that it is our oldest colonial possession, famous for codfish, caribou, and national debts.’ Today, the Island is no better known or understood in British historiography, even though it was the English empire’s first transatlantic site of colonial extraction and the site of its first North American settlements. It is also a place that witnessed one of the most totalizing destructions of an Indigenous culture in British imperial history, and where the dispossessions of empire in North America began. The codfish that was hauled from its waters was one of the most lucrative commodities of empire, which also sustained sugar production in the Caribbean. And yet, it has been largely forgotten in histories of the British World and it is more broadly relegated to that common descriptor: ‘the middle of nowhere’.
But who gets to decide where the Middles of Nowhere are? And what might British history look like if viewed from these places? In this Raphael Samual Memorial Lecture, Professor Julia Laite will explore these questions; in relation to the Island of Newfoundland, British North America, and the wider British Empire. She will explore how considering British history from the Middle of Nowhere can illuminate, challenge and connect wider and profoundly urgent histories.
Julia Laite is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. Her most recent book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey (2021) won the Golden Dagger for Non-Fiction from the British Crime Writer’s Association. She has published widely on the history of sexual labour, migration, crime history, family history, and historical methodologies, and she works as a historical consultant in British media. Her new book project, A Woman at the End of the World, will tell the life story of the Beothuk woman Shanawdithit, the dilletante ethnographer William Eppes Cormack, and her own Newfoundland ancestors.
Raphael Samuel History Centre in partnership with Queen Mary Centre for British Studies
This is the keynote lecture for the British History Today conference. See more information here
Contact name: Katy Pettit
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