In Asia, pangolins have generated a rich set of indigenous oral traditions. These contrast with the often confused, or failed, colonial and Western scientific practices of classifying, domesticating and collecting the pangolin. More recently this long-standing encounter between the pangolin and human has shifted into exponential killing. The pangolin has become the mammal which is most trafficked by humans. This trade has been a global one, a fact that is important to remember given the racist ideas and inequalities that have been highlighted through the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The changing relationship between the pangolin and the human in modern history is used here as a window onto the interlinked histories of the pandemic and environmental crisis, both of which arose partly from human encroachment into biodiverse and forested areas, including pangolin habitats. The phases of the pangolin-human relationship can be read for the preconditions of these interlinked crises that face the planet and its historians in 2020. It is vital that historians respond confidently and fully to causation at the interspecies frontier without using the pandemic to mount theoretically naive 'compare and contrast' exercises with past disease events to provide lessons for the present. A post-pandemic historiography will surely be interdisciplinary, with critical, philosophical and collaborative engagement with scientists.

During the long eighteenth century the capital code, and more specifically the so-called 'Bloody Code' which subjected a vast and increasing range of property crimes to the death penalty, was the centre of much popular attention and of extensive debate. The impact of the Bloody Code has also attracted much attention from historians, some of whom have argued that it played a vital role both within the criminal law and in eighteenth-century social relations more generally. However, the geography of the Bloody Code and the possibility that there were major regional differences both in the use of hanging, and in attitudes to it, has been largely ignored by historians. By systematically exploring the spatial dimensions of capital punishment in eighteenth-century Britain, this article demonstrates the refusal of many areas on the periphery to implement the Bloody Code. The reluctance in the far western and northern periphery of Britain to execute property offenders, it is argued, requires us to rethink some of our core assumptions about the key role historians have given to the Bloody Code in maintaining the hegemony of the elite, about the process by which the capital code came to be reformed, and about the reach of the state in the long eighteenth century.