New Books in British Studies

Working-Class Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce in Scotland, 1855–1939 (Oxford UP, 2025) by Professor Eleanor Gordon, Professor Katie Barclay, and Dr. Jeff Meeks is the first book-length study of the history of working-class courtship and marriage in Scotland, from the establishment of civil registration to the introduction in 1939 of legislation which abolished irregular marriage and introduced ci...

A compelling dual biography of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that shines new light on two of the greatest figures of the 20th century. Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle were thrown together by war. They incarnated the resistance of Britain and France to the existential threat from Nazi Germany, and their ultimate victory over Hitler has ensured their achievements will never be forg...

Throughout the twentieth century, many women in Ireland and Britain endured shame and institutionalisation for becoming pregnant outside of marriage. In Single Mothers in Twentieth-century Ireland and Britain: Pregnancy, Migration and Institutionalization (Bloomsbury, 2025), Dr. Lorraine Grimes examines the journeys made by hundreds of pregnant Irish women to Britain as they fled to escape their l...

There can be little doubt that Hong Kong has stood out as a particularly intense East Asian news hotspot in recent years. Whether reports have focused on pro-democracy protests, abducted booksellers or PRC Mainland integration plans, most of this news has revolved around a common theme - namely questions over Beijing's ruling Chinese Communist Party and its influence in Hong Kong. On this backgrou...

Leah Astbury's new book, Making Babies in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2025), explores the ideals and realities that governed generation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Astbury uses the family as her unit of study to understand how people approached fertility, pregnancy, preparing for birth, delivery, and the recovery process, as well as early infant care. As she argues, making...

In the 1950s, American glamour swept into a war-torn Britain as part of a broader transatlantic exchange of culture and commodities. But in this process, the American ideal of the blonde became uniquely British—Marilyn Monroe transformed into Diana Dors. British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain (Yale UP, 2025) by Professor Lynda Nead examines postwar Britain through the chan...

In the wide realm of Shakespeare worship, the house in Stratford-upon-Avon where William Shakespeare was born in 1564 – known colloquially as the 'Birthplace' – remains the chief shrine. It's not as romantic as Anne Hathaway's thatched cottage, it's not where he wrote any of his plays, and there's nothing inside the house that once belonged to Shakespeare himself. So why, for centuries, have peopl...

In Man in a Hurry: Murray MacLehose and Colonial Autonomy in Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2024), Ray Yep explores the latest available archival materials and re-examines MacLehose’s pivotal governorship in Hong Kong (1971–1982). MacLehose arrived in the challenging 1970s, when there were expectations for social reforms, uneasiness in the relationship between Hong Kong and London, and the 1997 factor...

Auctions and the Consumption of Second-Hand Goods in Georgian England (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Dr. Sara Pennell & Professor Jon Stobart provides the first comprehensive examination of household auctions as the key mechanism for recirculating household goods through the 18th and early 19th century. Dr. Pennell and Dr. Stobart contextualise and historicise the importance of used goods to consumer choic...

In Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg presents a lively exploration of the medieval and early modern attitudes towards dance, as the perception of dancers changed from saints dancing after Christ into cows dancing after the devil. The devil’s cows, impudent camels, or damsels animated by the de...

What seems mundane today—walking into a supermarket, picking up goods, and paying at a checkout—was once a radical experiment. In our latest New Books Network episode, I speak with Andrew Godley about The Making of the Modern Supermarkett: Self-Service Adoption in British Food Retailing, 1950-1975 (Oxford UP, 2025), co-authored with Bridget Salmon, former archivist at J. Sainsbury plc. This is a...

Most people associate Britain and Ireland with the English language, a vast, sprawling linguistic tree with roots in Latin, French, and German, and branches spanning the world, from Australia and India to North America. But the inhabitants of these islands originally spoke another tongue. Look closely enough and English contains traces of the Celtic soil from which it sprung, found in words like b...

Today we are joined by Claire Nicolas, a chercheuse du Fonds National Suisse at Basel University, a holder of a prestigious Ambizione Research Grant, and the author of Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d’Ivoire (années 1900-1970) (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024). In our conversation, we discussed physical culture in colonial and post-colonial Cote d’Ivo...

The United Kingdom has sixteen nuclear power stations. Most go under the radar, but their presence is enormous, both physically and culturally. They divide opinion like nothing else. Are they relics of a past era, or a crucial part of our futures? Are they cathedrals of science or temples of doom? Atomic Albion: Journeys Around Britain’s Nuclear Power Stations (Strange Attractor, 2025) by Dr. Tom...

In 1706, Edinburgh was on the brink of a popular uprising. Men and women took to the streets to protest the planned union with England, fearing the end of Scottish sovereignty. But unbeknownst to the mob, a spy was in their midst—the English writer Daniel Defoe, now bankrupt and thrice pilloried, had turned a government agent. In A Spy Amongst Us: Daniel Defoe's Secret Service and the Plot to End...

In Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Ian Smith urges readers of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet to develop “racial literacy.” Through both wide social influences and specific professional pressures, Shakespearean critics have been taught to ignore, suppress, and explain away the racial thinking of the plays, a set of evasion strategies t...

In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With small staffs and shoestring budgets, these newspapers nonetheless became powerful vehicles for the expression of Black political thought. Drawing on papers from Trinidad, Jamaica, Ghana, and Nigeria, Leslie James shows how t...

Welcome to the hard streets: working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London (Profile, 2026) by Dr. Jacqueline Riding. Charlie Chaplin rose from the hard streets of Edwardian London to worldwide fame. But his work and outlook were always shaped by the world he came from, a place of cheap entertainments and...

Scotland is a nation that has undergone significant changes over the last 50 years or so. This is, of course, true of much of the Western world but, as David McCrone shows in his Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity (Edinburgh UP, 2025), these change have had particular impacts and been understood in particular ways in Scotland. Using a sociological approach in which politics, identit...

Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived—decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of globa...

The violence of colonial wars between 1890 and 1914 is often thought to have been uniquely shaped by the nature of each of the European empires. The Colonial Way of War: Violence and Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Empires, c. 1890-1914 (Cambridge UP, 2025) argues instead that these wars' extreme violence was part of a shared 'Colonial Way of War'. Through detailed study of Briti...

Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company (Bloomsbury, 2025) pieces together a new architectural history of West Africa from the high colonial period through to independence. From the imperial Royal Niger Company’s charter in the 1890s through to commercial developments in the 1960s, the United Africa Company – a British company firmly embedded in the economies of colonialism, ex...

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, venereal disease, or the 'pox,' was a dreaded diagnosis throughout Europe. Its ghastly marks, along with their inexorable link to sex, were so stigmatizing that it was commonly called 'the secret disease.' How do we capture everyday experiences of a disease that so few people admitted having? In The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London (C...

Military historian Jeremy Black continues his review of the global context of martial conflict and spatial conquest into the modern era (16th-20th centuries) in Britain's Imperial Histories (St. Augustine's Press, 2025), focusing on the British empire and its lasting effect on this landscape. Black offers a representation of the "imperial experience" that is eye-opening for a generation of reader...

In eighteenth-century America, genealogy was more than a simple record of family ties—it was a powerful force that shaped society. Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Karin Wulf delves into an era where individuals, families, and institutions meticulously documented their connections. Whether driven by personal passion or mandated by churches, l...