The Uni­ver­si­ty of Cen­tral Lan­cashire’s Spe­cial Col­lec­tions con­tain a large num­ber of books, doc­u­ments, and his­tor­i­cal resources of both nation­al and inter­na­tion­al impor­tance. For exam­ple, the Livesey Col­lec­tion forms an inter­na­tion­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant resource for the study of the Tem­per­ance Move­ment, while the Jere­mi­ah Hor­rocks Obser­va­to­ry archive con­sists of records and papers from the Jere­mi­ah Hor­rocks Obser­va­to­ry on Moor Park in Pre­ston. The Wain­wright Col­lec­tion, donat­ed to the Uni­ver­si­ty by the Wain­wright Con­ser­v­a­tive Club in Black­pool, com­pris­es large­ly late Vic­to­ri­an texts cov­er­ing a range of top­ics relat­ed to British and Irish polit­i­cal his­to­ry. The col­lec­tions have recent­ly found a new home on the Pre­ston campus. 

At the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cen­tral Lan­cashire Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, I research archival mate­ri­als relat­ed to 18^th- and 19^th-cen­tu­ry phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal recipes and home eco­nom­ics guide­books from the same peri­od. As observed in Lan­cashire Archives, med­i­cine at that time became increas­ing­ly for­malised and reg­u­lat­ed as a pro­fes­sion. This shift was accom­pa­nied by the struc­tur­al era­sure of women from prac­tices relat­ed to the man­age­ment of health. While med­i­cine grew more male-led, a grow­ing body of lit­er­a­ture sought to impart moral prin­ci­ples to women. Soon after, domes­tic sci­ences emerged, fur­ther dis­tanc­ing women from activ­i­ties and forms of work in which they had once played cen­tral roles, such as farm­ing, trad­ing, and heal­ing, to name only a few.

Anoth­er strik­ing phe­nom­e­non observed in med­ical recipes is the inclu­sion of ingre­di­ents derived from non-native species, made pos­si­ble by British colo­nial trade. This high­lights anoth­er dimen­sion of inequal­i­ty and unequal pow­er rela­tions. The pres­ence of car­damom, gin­ger, cur­cuma, and oth­er spices in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal texts serves as a reminder of the British Empire’s mer­can­tilist and tight­ly con­trolled trade net­works, which pri­ori­tised nation­al wealth through the cre­ation and main­te­nance of eco­nom­ic dis­par­i­ties. These exploita­tive prac­tices laid impor­tant foun­da­tions for glob­al cap­i­tal­ism, shap­ing pat­terns of trade and con­sump­tion that con­tin­ue to influ­ence the world today.

The drag­on and the desert

Give way to the gar­den and the lake. 

We have seen the drag­on laid low 

But the desert is still with us. 

There are ruins everywhere,

Sham­bles where once were homes,

And des­o­la­tion in place of civilization. 

The squads of gravediggers

In man’s des­o­lat­ed world

The debris at our doors.

Select­ed excerpts from a post WW2 edi­tion of the Methodist peri­od­i­cal The Home Fel­low­ship, from an Arti­cle enti­tled The Delec­table Land. 

I

DESERTS

“In France the war has made sev­er­al kinds of desert, each with a qual­i­ty of its own, derived from the way in which it was made. Ver­dun I have not seen. Of the oth­er deserts the first in date was

that of the Somme bat­tle­field. In ear­li­er parts of the ​“West­ern Front” it has been drawn, in sam­ple, sev­er­al times. It spreads so far that, in bulk, it can only be seen from the air. It is the most even­ly fin­ished of all these made deserts. From the Ancre to the San­terre you pass through dif­fer­ent kinds of land­scape. There are lit­tle hills, riv­er mead­ows, and a high grain-bear­ing flat. Over them all there was laid in 1916 a kind of spot­ted brown coun­ter­pane or mask which makes them all look alike. The spots on this cloth are dense along its mid­dle and grow less dense towards its fringe all round. To an eye that knew the coun­try well before the war, it must seem now as if the vil­lages, with all their dif­fer­ences of look, and the var­i­ous greens or yel­lows of the old crops, must sure­ly be hid­den under this spot­ted cov­er­let. But real­ly they are not there, and the brown is that of bare and raw earth, and the spots are shell-holes.” Muir­head Bone GHQ, France, 1917