Jeudi 10 avril à 17h : Simeon Koole (Bristol): ‘Lines of Force: Bodies, Tides, and the Scales of Global History in London’s Docklands, c.1870-1928’.
Abstract : This paper examines changes in the bodies and environment of labourers carrying timber imported into London’s docks to provide a history of global capitalism from the ground up. Moving between London and Sweden between the 1860s and 1920s, it shows how microphysical changes in docker skeletons, the wood they carried, and rivers in both countries materialized and modified ‘macro’-level changes in tides, forestry, and shipping. Repurposing the concept ‘lines of force’ from nineteenth-century physics, the paper argues that lines—material, temporal, and spatial—reveal hidden relations between bodies and environments than those traced by global history’s typical focus on the movement of people and things. Lines etched into bones or running through tree grain show how humans and other-than-humans were exposed to one another across varying distances, and how this exposure accentuated under industrial capitalism. Second, they show how this mutual exposure operated over multiple timescales, from a worker’s lifetime to century-long changes in tree growth and river flows. Finally, such lines reveal how ‘the world’ was not simply a space which steamships crossed but a predicament, unique to and made by the relations living beings had with one another.
Simeon Koole est senior lecturer en Histoire à l’université de Bristol. Il est l’auteur de Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain’s Cerebral Age (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press 2024)
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
fbensimon (4 avril 2025). Simeon Koole: ‘Lines of Force: Bodies, Tides, and the Scales of Global History in London’s Docklands, c.1870-1928’ (10 avril). Séminaire franco-britannique d'histoire. Consulté le 8 novembre 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13onq