Doing history in urgent times: forum introduction

Abstract

As we enter the 2020s, our times are daily getting more urgent. The climate and ecological emergency, catastrophic Australian bushfires, and now the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic meltdown have launched us into a new era of seemingly incessant crisis. Through it all, history remains omnipresent. In press conferences and Zoom meetings, in newspapers and Twitter feeds, history is invoked to bring sense and meaning to our disorienting present. As public commentary mythologises the past in order to manage a destabilised and unknown future, what should the response of professional historians be? What are our responsibilities in the face of cataclysmic change? In this forum on 'History in Urgent Times', we present three attempts to grapple with what it means to be a historian in this alarming historical moment, and ask how historians ought to respond.

‘Our land abounds in nature's gifts’: Commodity frontiers, Australian capitalism, and socioecological crisis

“…My thesis begins from this context, from the pressing contemporary conjuncture of fires, floods, ecosystem collapse and – paradoxically – rapid expansion of fossil capital in the form of natural gas, and other follies. It has been argued that this moment calls for ‘urgent histories’ (Rees & Huf, 2020), that the ‘shock of the Anthropocene’ ought to ramify through how we approach our work as historians. It is for this reason, that my work considers how the radical implications of our current crises might cause us to reconsider histories of capitalism in Australia.…”

‘A great many of them die’: Sugar, race and cheapness in colonial Queensland

“…The rise and fall of Queensland plantation sugar production speaks directly to many ongoing conversations in history and critical theory, with implications for the politics of the ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore, 2016); it speaks to conversations around the production of nature (Smith, 1984/2010), the materiality of race under capitalism (Robinson, 1983/2000) and the constitution of uneven development through commodity frontiers (Beckert et al, 2021)—all debates that have direct bearing on how we understand the origins and nature of our current conjuncture of socioecological crisis, spanning the reproduction of water, soil, biodiversity and climate in a world still defined by classed, gendered and racial difference. It is, in this sense, ‘urgent history’ (Rees & Huf, 2020). It also tells a complex story of the contested (re)production of racial hierarchies; capitalist production premised on stolen Aboriginal land, secured through great violence.…”

“…[Correction added on 3 May 2024, after first online publication: the reference year for Robinson has been updated to cite the latest edition in the preceding sentence.] Considering a recent resurgence of historical interest in capitalism as a denaturalized, historically specific object within Australian history (Forsyth & Loy‐Wilson, 2017, 2021; Huf et al, 2020; Rees & Huf, 2020), together with the political and theoretical necessity of an explanation for the origins of our current socioecological crises, the time is ripe for serious, historical, world‐ecological contributions. This lacuna is also identified by Julie McIntyre, who notes ‘Australian historians of labour and environment do not participate in international debates about whether or how to consider the historical intersection of nature and labour, or, indeed, nature, labour, and capitalism’ (McIntyre, 2021, p. 73).…”