Research Report Roundup: Sarah-Gray Lesley, Xiaoyu Gao, Megan Maxwell and Ashima Mittal
Sarah-Gray Lesley, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, spent her time on a Nicholson Fellowship researching gender and imperial commodities within early modern English recipe books.
My archival trip to the British Library, sponsored by the Nicholson Graduate Research Grant, was very successful. I began working immediately upon arrival, and, over the course of the two-and-a-half-week trip, I was able to comb through dozens of manuscripts.
My first few days in London were dedicated to going through recipe books as well as some additional books that I had not considered before. About ten of these books were authored by women and cited as such on the title page, and about five of these were community-collected recipe books that folks from a given town (mostly anonymously) wrote in their medicinal or culinary practices. As expected, most of these recipe books were dedicated to the care and keeping of pregnant people or people who could become pregnant. Many of the prescriptions in the book were for heavy menstruation, miscarriage prevention, abortifacients, and postnatal care. On the culinary side of things, most of the recipes were devoted to preserves, jellies, jams, candies, cakes, tarts, etc. These extremely sugary practices were often attributed (even in the largely anonymous community books) to women. These authorial attributions would be written in the margins or even in the title of the recipe itself. Given the relative sparseness of recipes for things like meat, vegetables, and starches, I feel confident in saying that the knowledge transfer among women in the early modern period was by and large dictated by a twin obligation to supply the home both with healthy children and with sugary, class- and race-indicative wares.
As I am also a scholar of the early modern theater, I would be remiss not to mention the opportunities my time in London offered me in terms of performance. I work with a lot of Shakespeare, so it was lovely to get the chance to see three different performances of three different Shakespearean works. Two were at The Globe—A Midsummer Night’s Dream and A Comedy of Errors, and the third was at the Almeida—Romeo and Juliet. Of particular interest to me is the performance of Midsummer, which I plan to write on in a separate project from my dissertation.
Xiaoyu Gao, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, spent her time on a Nicholson Fellowship researching the Chilean copper trade in nineteenth-century China.
With the generous support of the Nicholson for British Studies, I conducted archival research in London from Aug. 25 to Oct. 25, 2023, for my dissertation, “Empire of Copper: British Global Trade, Chilean Copper, and the Transformation of the Chinese Monetary System (1800-1862),” which delves into the trade of Chilean copper by British private merchants to China, circumventing the East India Company. In China, the inflow of Chilean copper likely facilitated the breakout of counterfeit copper cash and might decimate China’s domestic copper industry. Given the illicit nature of this trade, Chinese official records are very scarce; my preliminary findings were informed by descriptions in UK Parliamentary Papers and an English commercial newspaper in Asia. The dissertation is twofold: uncovering the British-dominated global copper trade and assessing the impact of Chilean copper on China’s economy and society. My archival work in Britain at The National Archives, the British Library, the Baring Archive, and the London Metropolitan Archives aimed to uncover volumes, prices, participants, and routes of the Chilean copper trade, spread across four archives.
In retrospect, the archival research conducted in September and October has been pivotal for my dissertation, revealing not only the crucial role of British merchant bankers but also the integral contribution of American traders to the global copper narrative. It is so exciting to see the new hint emerge. I eagerly anticipate painting a comprehensive picture of the global trade network and its consequential impact on national economies and societies between 1800 and 1860, particularly for China.
Megan Maxwell, Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science, spent her time on a Nicholson Fellowship researching Singapore’s developing foreign policy strategy in the 1960s and 70s.
During the summer of 2023, I was given the opportunity to go to the London National Archives in Kew through the Nicholson Grant. The primary objective of my travel was to collect archival documents concerning Singapore’s developing foreign policy strategy from 1960 through the early 1970s. This period covers shortly before independence through the British military withdrawal from the region and the negotiations of the Five Powers Defence Arrangement and is a core case study for my dissertation, which seeks to explain the relationship between how states emerge in the international system and whether and how they develop a grand strategy that suits their needs.
In addition to providing me with an abundance of material for this particular project, I also gained material to support new research projects that make use of Singapore as a case study. For example, I collected a myriad of British Ministry of Defence documents of Chief of Staff meetings, allowing me to compare the bureaucratic demands of the defense against what the prime ministers ultimately decided in the retrograde from the East. I also found enough material to begin another project comparing British participation in military exercises supporting NATO versus other military exercises, which I hope will offer a partial explanation of how military exercises contribute to strengthening strategic partnerships, and how they vary based on the existence of an official alliance versus an alignment with another state. Ultimately, I gathered more than 20,000 pages of material and am still processing the data using OCR. I expect to find even more uses for the information that I gathered and hope to work with the Nicholson grant again in the future as I further develop my dissertation.
Ashima Mittal, Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology, spent her time on a Nicholson Fellowship researching the imperial dimensions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century meteorological studies of India.
I planned my research trip to the British Library from 15th May 2023 to 1st June 2023. During this time, I explored and scanned materials from the Royal Meteorological Society; particularly the research material collected and published by them on Atmospheric Science. I reviewed materials from the Geological Survey and the memoirs published by the different directors of the Royal Meteorological society ranging from 1870s-1950s. I also reviewed maps from Palanteologica Indica to map the comprehensive paleontological research in India and other neighboring regions under the British Empire.
My guiding questions while accessing and collecting these materials were: How is air and atmosphere constituted as an epistemic and ontological problem in colonial accounts? How do the different experts, stakeholders and institutions involved in producing specific technological know-how about the Indian atmosphere make sense of its dual status as an ecological phenomena and as a frontier of imperial capture? And what does the technological interest in studying atmospheric patterns reveal about the nature of the colonial-capitalist project of the British Empire?
The review of collected materials shows that during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the Indian monsoon and atmospheric conditions became pivotal to the expansionist thrust of the British Empire and made it one of the most studied, mapped, and researched aspect of the environment till the present day. The documents I reviewed clarified the innovations in mapping techniques and scientific instruments that converged with the solidification of the British rule in India.