Editorial

When the West India Dock Company opened its new premises at West India Dock in 1802 a clear connection was made between West Africa, the United States, the Caribbean and Britain – a connection forged in sugar and slavery. One part of that building, depicted on our cover, is now the Museum in Docklands, whose new gallery ('London, Sugar and Slavery') opens this autumn. The rest of the original West India Dock buildings have been converted into smart restaurants catering for the workforce of the Canary Wharf development. These restaurants, together with shops, cinemas, museums, and health clubs, have fostered a leisure culture which couldn't be more different from that which existed before the transformation of the docklands in the late 1980s. The area has come to speak volumes about conspicuous consumption and global capital – and their entwined histories.

These histories are at the heart of this issue. It includes two features – the first remembering 1807 and the parliamentary abolition of the British slave-trade; the second responding to 'Historicizing the Global', Geoff Eley's provocative piece for History Workshop Journal 63. It has long been understood that the abolition of the slave-trade in 1807 and then of slavery in 1833 and 1838 marked a shift in the nature of the capitalist organization of world trade and consumption. These were moments when new areas of the globe were penetrated by capital, bringing new spaces, places and peoples into the sphere of Western power. The abolition of the slave-trade, for example, highlighted the possibilities of commerce in West Africa and, as David Lambert points out in this issue, brought Sierra Leone in particular into the spotlight.

The long history of globalization which is now being recovered has had to negotiate – not always successfully – the blind spots created by this capitalist world mapping and contributors to the second feature ('Global Times and Spaces') detail the attention which needs to be directed at forgotten regions, individuals and populations. These themes of coverage – or more particularly astonishing lack of coverage – are also elaborated in Jeff Wasserstrom's examination of our 'new ways in history' since 1966.

One of the imperatives behind the selection of pieces for the 'Articles and Essays' section and for 'History on the Line' has been to attend to some of these gaps and hidden histories. Ayhan Aktar, for example, looks at the discussion – and recognition – of the Armenian Massacres in the last Ottoman parliament, in 1918; Suchetana Chattopadhyay explores the remarkable transitions in the life of Muzaffar Ahmad as he moved from his rural peasant family to colonial Calcutta. This 'reshuffling of the self' is also reflected in the stories of migration detailed by Deirdre Keenan and Maya Jasanoff in their respective personal narratives – the one exploring the resonances and dissonances in Irish and native American migrations; the other looking at the intellectual journeys often associated with border crossings.

As the docklands themselves attest, a focus on one place can yield similar stories of complex transition. Sally Alexander in her piece on London analyses the drive to contain the metropolis and its meanings in the inter-war years, and the difficulties involved. The preoccupation with pinpointing and simplifying is always a concern in the contemporary but it has been part of historical and commemorative projects too. Madge Dresser illustrates the limits of commemoration in her discussion of London statuary. Stan Newens, meanwhile, problematizes the ways in which the authority of the professional historian can overwhelm the voice of the amateur. A recurring theme of this issue – pinpointed by Catherine Hall in her introduction to the 1807 feature – is the difficulty involved in negotiating fraught and contested histories.

These are all issues which are explored not only through the pages of journals such as this but in workshops and seminars (like those described by Esmé Cleall and by Jane Caplan and Catriona Kelly in 'Report Back', below), in the 'Conversations and Disputations' series (a joint enterprise between the Raphael Samuel Centre at the University of East London and History Workshop Journal) and many other events at which History Workshop readers would be warmly welcomed.