Co-Head Editors’ Letter

Readers will no doubt have guessed already that this issue was shaped by the period in which it was conceived. Distance has taken on new aspects in the past six months of forced isolation, many of which have been particularly interesting from a historical perspective. The fault lines of the unprecedented globalisation of the last few decades have been uncovered, the belief that we could ever crush the physical distance separating opposite sides of the globe exposed as fantasy. Space, and the time it takes to move across that space, haunts us, because we simply can’t overcome its tedious reality (at least, not until we work out how to teleport). The best we can do is communicate with each other across the divide, as we’ve done for centuries. While on the one hand these contemporary concerns attune historians’ sensitivities to untapped aspects of historical experience, it is also true that historical enquiry can offer fresh perspectives on our present anxieties surrounding distance by placing them in the longue durée. A focus on distance hence has the duel effect of illuminating both past and present. Distance has been a good topic to think with, too, because it is so multifaceted. Each of our contributions in its own way addresses our central theme, but in doing so they make fertile inroads into various subfields. Several of our contributors use distance as a gateway into exploring the ways in which hierarchies of power are constructed and contested. Alex Kither’s contribution on the tangled lives of French political prisoners and indigenous New Caledonians in the aftermath of the Paris Commune charts the ways in which physical separation constitutes an important element of the psychological discipline which legal systems bring to bear against citizenries. Ryan O’Reilly, meanwhile, teases out the blurred boundaries between feminist resistance and social conservatism in the Pink Film movement in pos=t-war Japan. Isaac Hawcock and Manny Campion-Dye’s study on maps likewise invites us to consider how historical actors’ experience of space is shaped through its normative cultural representations. Luke Bateman and Morgan Breene’s contributions – on ancient Rome and on seafaring in the long eighteenth century, respectively – offer important insights into the ways in which space as a physical rather than constructed presence has throughout history confounded human agency. Jake Lavine’s study of Albert Camus’ exile draws out the mundane, lived reality of carrying on one’s life far away from home. John Merrington and Joana Neves Teixeira’s contributions on early medieval Europe and modern Brazil, respectively, consider letters as a mechanism for enabling actors to extend their social presence across great distances. Merrington’s interest in the ways in which early medieval Christendom reconfigured relationships with space is shared by Benjamin Starkey, who considers the routes which connected the vast Christian diaspora of medieval Asia.

Perhaps the central upshot of this collection of essays is that distance is both conceptual and physical; it is produced and experienced both within the cultural sphere and in the embodied world. The theme of distance hence sharpens our toolkits by helping us to recognise that the world of ideas and the physical world – so often contrasted to one another – are inseparable and mutually constituting. The phrase ‘uncertain times’ has been repeated so often that it’s essentially meaningless now, but we hope that our regular slot at the back of the magazine, ‘Historical Debates’, will provide a measure of stability. We’ve chosen the mystery of the Princes in the Tower for this issue because it’s at once reassuringly unsolvable and endlessly fascinating – like an optical illusion, the facts look completely different depending on which side you’re coming from, as Sam Harper and Laura de Lisle show. We’ll never know what happened to those two boys, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still write about them.