Editorial

Abstract

This issue of History Workshop Journal covers a broad chronological range. From Anna Bayman's exploration of the impact of new print cultures in the sixteenth century to Bill McGraw's reflections on life in the post-industrial wreckage of today's Detroit may seem a tremendous leap, but the two pieces are connected by a core concern with the possibilities and problems wrought by technological innovation. That concern is shared by Nigel Leask, who looks at the intellectual and political reverberations that accompanied the invention of the telegraph, and by Richard Maguire, who examines the behind-the-scenes debates, crises and compromises attending Britain's entry into the nuclear arms race. On the eve of the renewal of the Trident missile, Maguire shows that there has been nothing inevitable about the way the UK's nuclear arsenal has been deployed. Though Maguire's piece focuses tightly on the British context, his argument clearly has an international dimension, as does Leask's, which takes the forced migration of the Scottish radical Thomas Muir as the starting point for his examination of the telegraph. Such transnational journeys feature elsewhere in this issue, showing the historical knowledge that can be gained by mapping such movements. Dennis Dworkin's article focuses on the journalist, activist and internationalist C. L. R. James, whose own migrations from the West Indies to London to a Nevada dude ranch critically affected his political thinking. Bertie Mandelblatt's piece on Irish salt beef and the French Atlantic reveals the strange triangulation that the trade in foodstuffs generated between France, the Caribbean, and Ireland. In her account African slaves become not just producers of goods but consumers, a perspective that allows her a fresh take on international markets. Richard Phillips juxtaposes Josephine Butler's crusades with today's campaigns against homophobia in the Caribbean, showing how a historical perspective can fuel, and complicate, drives for international human rights. That sense of the ambiguities of imperialism informs not only Phillips's work, but that of David Feldman, who explores the critical but unexamined connections between Jews and the British Empire, and of Nancy Green, who reflects on the ways in which France's colonial past is being memorialized as plans develop for a museum of French immigration history.