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Step into the minds of leading academics with UCL Press Play: a podcast and documentary series featuring groundbreaking voices and cutting edge ideas.
Join UCL academics as they uncover ground-breaking new ideas and fresh insights on diverse topics such as queer histories, neurodiversity, and climate justice.
Season 4: A Cup of Tea With… is your chance to share a tea break with inspiring academics from UCL (University College London). Join Professor Judy Stephenson, Professor of Economic History of the Built Environment, to learn how they got into their field and hear insights from their research. Plus, find out how they like their tea!
Website and transcripts: https://uclpress.co.uk/ucl-press-play/
Judy Stephenson: Hello. Welcome to A Cup of Tea. I'm Professor Judy Stephenson, and I'm going to bring ten questions to our academics about research, about what drives them and about what the challenges ahead are. A cup of tea is a global commodity. It's also a British tradition. Let's get started.
Judy Stephenson: Welcome to A Cup of Tea, where we're interested in how academic research can change the world, and hopefully make it better. Today I am with Professor Matthew Smith. And you are director of The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery in the history department here at UCL.
Matthew J. Smith: Thank you.
Judy Stephenson: It's a cup of tea. It's a global commodity and a British tradition.
Matthew J. Smith: Absolutely.
Judy Stephenson: Can you tell us which tea you've chosen today?
Matthew J. Smith: I have lemon ginger tea, which is the tea I really enjoy. It's quite calming. It's a bit relaxing. And perks me up at the same time.
Judy Stephenson: Same time. Okay, good. When you're doing long stretches of historical research. Okay. So, thanks for coming today. So, on the topic of research, if somebody- the magic UCL fairy, the research fairy was to give you 1 million pounds for research, to study, to look at anything today for a project today, what would you spend it on and why?
Matthew J. Smith: 1 million pounds would give me some flexibility with the work we're doing at the center to really build a true robust yearlong project that connects the history of Britain and the Caribbean with researchers from both places. So we have a team in the Caribbean doing archival work there, we have a team here in London or the UK doing work here, meeting regularly online, sharing those insights, building on each other's strengths with the work that they're doing and coming out of that, producing a series of projects that can flow from it. One of the things that often happens when you have grant funding is a sort of fixed output. But if we had that dream, 1 million pounds, you have much more. You have much more latitude to organically develop a series of creative outputs, which really excites me. I'm really big about mentoring students, mentoring young researchers to have a stake in a project and to bring those ideas to the table. And that motivation, that- that input that they have, I find, often produces better work in the end. So that would give me that freedom to do something like that.
Judy Stephenson: Okay, so you said the magic words to a historian. You said archives. You said archives and you said they were over there, not over here. So tell me a little bit about what are the archival sources in the Caribbean and what would you be looking for, particularly in the-
Matthew J. Smith: Well, the Caribbean is really surprising to lots of people outside the Caribbean. It has a very strong archival tradition. Some of that sort of has been a consequence or legacy, if you will, of colonialism. But even in the national period, it's not as if when colonialism ended, people just didn't invest in the archives. I think what you had was actually a strengthening of archives and libraries in the Caribbean after the colonial era, when we got to the period of independence and a lot of that because people understood that in the archives, you could find the details of the story of a nation, the story of a people. The many different ways people go have gone through, these very difficult histories that we faced in the Caribbean from slavery, colonialism, climate change, environmental disaster and regime change, dictatorships and so on, depending on where you are, and the archives become this critical place where all of that sort of held and contained. And it's always been a joy for me from from my boyhood, spending time in libraries and just not only discovering things which are always presented and framed and carefully protected, as you know, treasures, whether it's a letter, a document, a photograph to see people in their white, lab coats with their white gloves, delicately handling things. You know, those are my first archival experiences. And that gave me a certain esteem for the archives. But at the same time, you can go in an archive or a library in the Caribbean. I've seen this, but it's, you know, the French-speaking Caribbean, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the Anglophone Caribbean. And you just see everyday people who come in there to just read the newspaper, just every day. They block out two hours a day to just sit down and read the newspaper. Sometimes they'll come on a Friday with all the stack of the papers for the week and just sit down there soaking up the atmosphere. But also for them, it's an opportunity to connect to the printed word in that space. And reflect on it in a way that they- they don't outside of it.
Judy Stephenson: It's all amazing to me just to see those different cultures and cultural relations with the archives. Tell me a little bit about the field of Caribbean studies and studies into the legacy of slavery, and how you got into it.
Matthew J. Smith: Well, the field is a growing field, which is great. And one of the things for me as a professor of Caribbean history has always been about understanding the pulse of where the field is in different locations because, you know, do sort of navigate between the Caribbean, North America and the UK and Europe with my work. And, what's really been sort of universal, I think, is how much it's sort of grown over the course of my own career. When I started out as a graduate student doing Caribbean history, I studied in the United States. It was such a niche area. In fact, it was so niche that there was never any sort of course, that was specifically Caribbean or program Caribbean. It was all Latin America with this little bit there, you could do the Caribbean. It's changed so much now. It really- I mean, if you just go across these different locations and there's so many people with specialized knowledge and aspects of Caribbean history, which is exciting.
Judy Stephenson: So you did a degree in a liberal arts degree that led to history or did you study history?
Matthew J. Smith: history degree.
Judy Stephenson: Okay. And so this was a small field. And then you progressed as a graduate student
Matthew J. Smith: I did, yeah. But I will say though that my interest in the Caribbean predates all of that because I am from Jamaica. I went to school in Jamaica and learned Jamaican history as part of Caribbean history. And again, I had the benefit of being of a generation that was from the post-colonial era. So, some of the things I later had to learn what it meant to be part of the Empire and all of the British traditions that come with that were not things that I was taught when I was younger. I came of age at the time. What was really important to establish was a local Jamaican Caribbean identity in the education system. So I never really read many British Catholic novels. For instance, in secondary school I was reading Caribbean authors in Trinidad, Barbados, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts, Jamaica, of course. And then as I progressed as an undergraduate studying at the University of the West Indies, I was exposed to a lot. And there I felt that the- the- the learning I was getting in the classrooms had real world relevance. Right? Because you just leave the campus and all of a sudden everything around you comes in this sharp, vivid, picture because you're now studying slavery. And then you realise you're studying it on a campus that was once a plantation. Right? You're understanding questions of race and class and hierarchy, and you move around the society and it's all very, very visible to you. That made history not just a study of the past, but a study of the present for me. And that kept me going.
Judy Stephenson: Okay. So one of the biggest misconceptions in this field then?
Matthew J. Smith: The biggest misconception, I think, and I've encountered it in my career quite a bit in most places I've gone is people often believe that the because the Caribbean is a region of small islands with small populations, it has a very small history, which is pretty easy to sort of subsume under other histories. And that has a long tradition going back to the start of Empire and that long notion that, there is, you know, it was often said there is no history in the Caribbean, that whatever Caribbean people call history, it's a sort of borrowed history of Britain, of France, Spain, of the Netherlands. Oh, yes. People really sort of had this sense that it's the history of empire. And you are part of the- you're an outpost of empire. So your history is tied to us. So we're always sort of working with- against this notion really, that the Caribbean, because of its small size, has a manageable, easily digestible history, when in fact it's an incredibly complex history. The Caribbean was one of the first globalized places in the world. Everybody who ended up settling there came from somewhere else. It was the nexus of a sort of- land take, imperial trade wars were fought over those small islands. Masses of people came from other parts of the world, especially Africans coming to the Caribbean after slavery. Large numbers of Chinese and Indian indentured laborers came to the Caribbean. Then you have layers of people from the Levant, you know, broadly understood as Middle Eastern or Lebanese and Syrian residents of the Caribbean, very complex societies.
Judy Stephenson: So as a historian, if you want to sort of clear this small history problem of, you know, how do you clear up the misconception? What are the methods? What are the sources?
Matthew J. Smith: I think the really important first method to develop, and this is something I try and teach my students a lot, is to see that the Caribbean, even for its unique history, it's a history where it's constantly tied to other places. So when I go and teach and speak in those other places and try and find those attachments recently, for instance, I gave a talk last month, in North Carolina, in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was really striking that the people there didn't realize that Sir Walter Raleigh never came to Raleigh, North Carolina, but he did spend extended periods in Trinidad, so that made him think, what does that mean, that- that he spent time in Trinidad. But you're the ones who are named after him. What are the connections between Britain, Trinidad, North Carolina, through the person of Walter Raleigh? And then once you start to- to approach it that way, you see these various places that in, you know, a public mind might seem so disparate, so far flung, so completely different from one another, has actually tied together in these very, very peculiar ways and again, tied back to the question of empire and movement. So I find that one way to really, enter it here in the UK, I find everywhere I go as a Caribbean national, I'm seeing reflections of the Caribbean constantly, from the building names to, you know, the smells of the Caribbean. I'm in south London and smelling Jamaican food. The language- hearing kids queuing up for the bus stop at school and saying words that they will think are London slang words which I can pick up immediately as Jamaican Patois words. All of that has a story where the kids are saying those things while I'm smelling those- those scents, and I walk around Brixton or the building name.
Judy Stephenson: So where do you find the stories then, in what people discuss? Is it in the cultural history? I mean, there's different sorts of methodology-
Matthew J. Smith: Yeah, there's different sort of branches. You know, we're all different types of historians, aren't we? You know, some of us are data people, some of us are archive people, some of us are spoken word, some of us are pictures, some of us are, you know, a material world.
Judy Stephenson: What- what's your- what are the- do you have a materiality or a particular kind of source?
Matthew J. Smith: I suppose I do, yes. It might be more than any other perhaps culture. I see it as one way of sort of getting entry into understanding human experience. But for me, I often approach history through the lens of a story. Here is a story. And all of these various parts of it are chapters in that story. Now, how do you write and learn each of those chapters? Sometimes you need metadata. Methodologically, you can't do it with- with the same tools. So then you have to learn those tools. Is it oral history that- do I need to go and interview people? Is it the economic history? Do I need to now learn the tools of economic history? Increasingly, particularly with the work we're doing at the center currently, it's tools of digital history. How do you tell digital history narratives? How do you understand that? But that makes it exciting because you're learning new, new things, new skills. You're opening yourself up to a much wider community of people involved in the research process, trusting that what comes out of it is a clearer, more nuanced story.
Judy Stephenson: Okay, so what are you working on right now and what are the particular challenges?
Matthew J. Smith: Well, there are many things that I'm working on now, but I'll select one part, which is my personal research project, which is looking at a social history of Jamaican music from the period of the 1940s to roughly the 1980s. And what I'm trying to do with that project is to see how you can tell the story of the evolution of a nation through music history. It seems somewhat sort of, you know, straightforward, but it's actually very involved in the sense that you have to understand these two very different spaces that musicians and composers may not necessarily be thinking in the same ways as academics who are charged with the job of writing a national story. So how do you find a way to- to present them both as a sort of parallel approach to understanding Jamaica?
Judy Stephenson: So are you looking at the social phenomena of people making music at the time, or are you studying the musicology, the linguistics-
Matthew J. Smith: Both, but a big part of this is the production and consumption of music. So understanding the whole long story of how people became composers, how they became a popular music industry and to begin with, very early Jamaican jazz music all the way up through reggae and sort of music of the 1980s. And what's interesting to me doing that is you understand what music means to people, because as a historian, I'm always searching for the human experience. And you're also trying to understand how the music itself that's created from the sort of tensions of how do you create a national identity coming out of British colonialism and chart a path forward? How that metamorphoses when the music travels to other places with people. So when Jamaicans come here to the UK, they're bringing musical experiences which are then reinterpreted differently when it lands here. So people understand the song very differently here than back home, which is very endlessly fascinating to me. And I could be in a space here musically and here. The same artists that I hear in Jamaica. But people respond to lines very differently here than back home.
Judy Stephenson: So what is the scariest thing you've ever done as a researcher?
Matthew J. Smith: Scariest- We've been- So many things that come to mind, but one that's most striking at the moment is many years ago I was doing research in the presidential libraries in the United States for work I've been doing on Haiti. I do a lot of research and write quite a bit on Haiti. And I got a small grant to do research at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. Actually, sorry, the Harry Truman Library in Missouri, a place called Independence, Missouri. And it was the dead of winter. And while I was there, I decided I wanted to do research in the Eisenhower Library as well. Wasn't too far. So I hired a car and said I'd drive from Saint Louis, Missouri to Abilene, Kansas. It's not the smart thing to do during winter. Bad snow, black ice. I was on the road-
Judy Stephenson: How far?
Matthew J. Smith: I mean, that's like a couple- four hours or so, and then I had to drive back as well. And so I said, I hope I never have to do this again!
Judy Stephenson: So have you got- because sometimes people do- a favorite writer or author or researcher in your field, or in another one who has been a real inspiration to you in researching or working with you like that many?
Matthew J. Smith: Actually, I've been very, very lucky to have had lots of role models from living, some dead, some that I never met. But one person that has had a consistent influence on me is an American historian named Julius Scott. So Julius did an incredible PhD dissertation back in the 1980s, looking at the Haitian Revolution and the- the impact of the Haitian Revolution, which he measured through movements of people, movements of ideas, movements of culture, songs and so on from San Domingue, which is the French name before it became Haiti in 1804, to other parts of the world. The sort of elegant way in which he used his sources was very, very inspirational to me. So he would look at perhaps reams of paper that a lot of historians had gone over for centuries- not so much looking for the facts and the dates for the narrative. He's looking for how people are responding to those particular stimuli of events. And one of the things I remember reading in his dissertation was the story of a man who had been arrested and put in prison a few weeks after the Haitian Revolution started, and there was a record of lines he was singing from prison. So this is the 1790s, and some of the lines that were reported in that record were about the revolution. So he then begins to imagine and to question, how did this man in Kingston being locked up in prison, have this knowledge about something that happened in a French colony across the sea? And that was really fascinating, the way in which he- he worked with that small piece of information was really inspirational to me.
Judy Stephenson: Oh, good. So how did this prisoner in the 1790s have this song of resistance from the French?
Matthew J. Smith: The thing about Julius's analysis- He didn't have to be conclusive. He didn’t need to say, well, you heard it from that person. The fact that he could step back from the documents to sort of understand human nature, how would people interact, get- getting a sense of the lived environment and using that to inform how we analyse that very fragmentary piece of information. The records were really inspirational in that sense. As I said, he did this in the 1980s, and in a sense, he kind of prefigures where we see a lot of historical scholarship, going now where there's a- there's much more freedom, if you will, much more willingness. Particularly for the Caribbean, where so much of our history, of Caribbean people, exists in fragments. That some people are willing to sort of be a bit more speculative to think about nontraditional sources to use. Right? I mean, before Julius, few people would think about lyrics of a song a prisoner’s singing as a potential source. Now people are approaching things differently, which is very exciting, actually. So it gives- it gives you sources, it gives you ideas, these sources, ideas, you- and more importantly, you keep tapping into how people do what what does thing, what does history in the past mean to people today? How do they interact? What's the geographical connection between one island to the next, to a place in Europe and even among neighborhoods and parishes? And that's what I sort of look for in my research. I think a lot of it is in the oral spaces. Right. So through stories, it's through folk tales, it's through habits and utterances. So that's kind of how history matters, but that's also how history travels and is taken up by- by people of different generations. And for me, and it's something I teach my students, all the time, that we have to always be sensitive to the popular interpretation of history, not just the scholarly interpretation. And even if part of the tools we learn as historians are tools to get us to greater objectivity, greater accuracy. But if you find that that, you know, collides with a popular interpretation, don't write off that interpretation. Try and understand how they arrive at this very different understanding of this same thing. You are- you are interpreting this way from the sources. And this is- we've had a debate, not a debate, but there's been a thread through these conversations about what is data or what is evidence. And one of the things that emerges from pretty much all of the people we've had that conversation with so far is, that, you know, if you try to boil it down to data, you're missing the point.
Judy Stephenson: So if there were three of the world's big problems, I mean, the big problems that your research could speak to or assist in in some way, what might they be?
Matthew J. Smith: It's a good question. I would say one thing, which is a preoccupation of a lot of my work, is understanding the psychological impact of colonialism. There's much discussion that we have on colonialism, and it's a way to, you know, import, whether we're discussing the silences around the British Empire that still dominate discourse about that here or even in the most, you know, reductive way to say that there was more benefit than, you know, than negatives of colonialism. I think it misses the point. The fact that I have older relatives in Jamaica, we've never been here to the- to the UK, never visited. And me moving here, the Caribbean citizen. I'm understanding them better being here because they have absorbed so completely a colonial ethos. The way they speak, the way they present. So you're interacting with the power- and it's understanding that question of power. There's a psychological reason why these people are functioning this way. Another one is the question of race, which is closely tied to it, that I also think that we're not understanding and grasping. Well, the many, many different ways in which race operates. So it's never a fixed entity and that it's very much tied to- to concepts of self, of beauty, of- of relationships, of- of even where you see yourself vis a vis people who are not the same race. And in the Caribbean, we deal with that a lot. That's interesting because it's built in the way that it's treated in policy as a monolithic aspect, you know, it's a binary thing. You're one or the other, or you are- another. But what you're saying is it's much more complex than that in terms of ethnicity or culture or all of these things, and experience and power dynamics and understanding the way even in very small spaces where someone is able to assert some tiny degree of power that might come from colour, might come from racial association, that becomes important to them. And a lot of the even well-meaning policies that attempt to sort of establish equality, diversity, fairness, inclusion miss the point. If they're not trying, if they're not really grappling or accepting, they really can't resolve it. But accepting the way in which the historical application and understanding and making of race and- you know, sort of categorisation classing people according to different races explains that.
Judy Stephenson: Did you have a third?
Matthew J. Smith: I do have a third. One more generally about history. I think that history needs to still stand out strongly as absolutely important to how we understand and navigate today and the future. One of the things that troubles me as a historian is seeing how people often dilute history. They try and find in history, essentially protagonists and antagonists. That's increasingly happening because history is commercialised now. It's on TV, it's on podcasts. These are good things, by the way. These are great ways in which you get people to still see the relevance of history. The danger, though, is that it starts to create this expectation that history has to be easily and neatly ordered. And if it doesn't, if there are all these scratchings and- and frayed out threads of history, people don't want to touch it. We as professional historians need to remind people that is actually the story you need to be trying to explain.
Judy Stephenson: The timber is still crooked and it always will be.
Matthew J. Smith: Okay, yeah- Good point.
Judy Stephenson: So, this is another one which is interesting for historians, which is, you know, the impact of artificial intelligence. Does it help or is it going to take your job or is it going to transform it?
Matthew J. Smith: It won't take my job. Because a lot of artificial generated AI sort of scoops up what's on the surface. Yeah, so much of Caribbean history and some of the stuff we've been talking today about, everything it is about is all underneath. You’ve got to know it. You’ve got to spend time with it. You have to think about it, you have to live with the thoughts of this. And you have the bots and the, you know, the generative AI, Gemini, all of those things are not thinking about it. Their job is to reproduce and reproduce rapidly. And once you do that, it shows, right? That what you're seeing is a surface of something. You're not going below it. And I think that's the great danger, the other aspect to it as well, I discuss this a lot with colleagues, humans, not just historians, is the ability to tell good stories. That's really- that's never going to lose value. And that's a human thing, that the machines can put things together. They're excellent in assembly. But to tell something where there's feeling in it, there's- there's an experience that one can relate to. As of yet, it hasn't figured that out. That said- there are labour saving aspects to it which are increasingly becoming very useful. But we can't sort of fall into the trap of saying that. We still need to understand the art of research and machine generated, interventions cannot really give you that.
Judy Stephenson: So how do you guide your students on it?
Matthew J. Smith: Pick up a book that's physical, not online and digitally available. That way they can do that, of course, for some. But make sure you do incorporate some tangible, tactile, book because a lot of students do also feel a bit imprisoned by the digital technology. It's overwhelming. It's so much. And the ability to sort of pull back and find a common ground between how you get that information, but how you use other skills to analyze other types of data to arrive at some, you know, deeper sense of what you're studying? I find they really feel that they're getting their money's worth with their education doing that.
Judy Stephenson: Good. Cool. Okay, so it's a funny time because of AI, because of, you know, the atmosphere politically was- it's a funny time generally to be a researcher in a university. What are your hopes and fears for university academic research going forward?
Matthew J. Smith: Big hope is that universities, as they strive increasingly to maintain relevance in a rapidly changing world, don't lose sight of the demands of their major stakeholders, which are their students. And the students come here really not just to get a degree as so many do, but also to have some value of the learning and the knowledge that they're getting. And they're coming to us at the universities these days, increasingly with more weight than students of the past. It's a- it's a difficult time. Many of our students have to work to pay, to come to uni. Many of our students are increasingly carers for family, and many students want that their time is spent here to be giving them something they don't have. And I think the universities globally need to always be aware of what those demands are. But- but at the same time that they're striving so hard to remain relevant in this world, be careful that you don't over-bureaucracise. Those processes where everything is- is simplified or done with a massive sort of objective of being labour intensive and cutting out certain things. Because if you do that, you know, when a university is at its optimal is where everybody in that space staff, employees, students feel that they're all grappling with the same sorts of missions to try and find something, learn something, make sense of the past, but also make sense of a future that we're all going to be part of. And that the university needs to be alert to that. I mean, my great fear is that universities become too caught up in questions of competition against everything else out there and also, yield too quickly to external political influences. A university still needs to maintain some of its independent spirit, and that if there's a push that's national global against the kind of work we do, don't erase it. Don't water it down, don't close it down. Find a way to defend it, because that's really what made the university be so important to humankind. And the two, the two are very associated. I mean, because to say to- I think there's lots of students who want- they want those easy stories. We were talking about goodies and baddies, you know, and if I just study that, then I get the first and then I go off into the world and it's like, oh, it doesn't work like that. And they don't always want to know that, and but, you know, having the it feels sort of uncommercial or scary to say because of the whole funding issue, to say, no, actually, it's not that simple. Some of my- my most cherished comments from students are when students may not get a good grade in a module I teach, but they still say I learned something from it. You know, it's really important they come and knock on my door and say, I really enjoyed that module. I learned something from it, and you want to hold that and we want to always sort of cherish that. But it takes work. And that's the thing a university needs to understand in a changing time that that labour of doing that to get students to, to feel that they're learning what regardless of the outcome is, is really what we need to be doing.
Judy Stephenson: Yeah that's true. Okay. Well how was- how was the tea?
Matthew J. Smith: I love the tea. Actually. It was quite refreshing
Judy Stephenson: Thank you very much, Professor Matthew Smith. It was great to have a cup of tea with you.