New Books in British Studies

Dr. Ashley Sweetman works in cyber security for a London-based global bank and holds a PhD from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. While studying for his PhD he spent a short time as Researcher-in-Residence at No. 10 Downing Street while working for The Strand Group in the Policy Institute at King's. Before this, Ashley studied History at Queen Mary, University of London. Ashl...

In Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World--A 10,000-Year History (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), Ian Morris chronicles the eight-thousand-year history of Britain's relationship to Europe as it has changed in the context of a globalizing world. When Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the 48 percent who wanted to stay and the 52 percent who wanted to go each accused the other o...

Why don't trains run on time? Why are fares so expensive? Why are there so many strikes? Few would disagree that Britain's railways are broken, and have been for a long time. In Derailed: How to Fix Britain's Broken Railways (Manchester University Press, 2022), Dr. Tom Haines-Doran provides an insightful new book that calls for a radical rethink of how we view the railways, and explains the proble...

In an exciting new book titled Vital Strife: Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Parris shows how early modern writing about care and sleep were deeply indebted with the Stoic principle of oikeiosis. While sleep could imperil the Christian soul, insomnia too could have deleterious effects on both communal and individual life. In Parris’s analysis, earl...

The Commodification Gap: Gentrification and Public Policy in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg (Wiley, 2022) provides an insightful institutionalist perspective on the field of gentrification studies. The book explores the relationship between the operation of gentrification and the institutions underpinning - but also influencing and restricting - it in three neighborhoods in London, Berlin and S...

In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappear...

Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help isn’t just an advice manual. It represents the invention of a genre, and not a moment too soon. Smiles was writing at a time when work conditions were extremely poor, and people were looking for ways to educate themselves and improve their conditions. Although Smiles may have written Self-Help with one particular society’s troubles in mind, his advice swiftly travelled aro...

Why is religion important in understanding creative industries? In British Muslim Women in the Cultural and Creative Industries (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Saskia Warren, a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester, presents an analysis of the fashion, digital media, and visual arts industries to show, for the first time, the centrality of faith and religion to any...

Modern imagination of the Puritans typically casts them in a repressive, conservative light. But that wasn't always the case. Abolitionist activists in the nineteenth century, especially in New England, understood their Puritan heritage as one with radical political and spiritual responsibilities. Kenyon Gradert's new book, Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination (U Chicago Press, 2020) te...

Content Warning: discussion of execution gets a bit gruesome.  Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey, A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England (University of Alabama Press, 2022) provides a new perspective on the representations of women on the scaffold, focusing on how female victims and those writing about them constructed meaning from the ritual. A significant part...

What do citizens do in response to threats to democracy? Citizenship in Hard Times: How Ordinary People Respond to Democratic Threat (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the mass politics of civic obligation in the US, UK, and Germany. Exploring threats like foreign interference in elections and polarization, Sara Wallace Goodman shows that citizens respond to threats to democracy as partisans, interpret...

The bestselling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters reclaims the daring freelance sailors who proved essential to the winning of the Revolutionary War. The heroic story of the founding of the U.S. Navy during the Revolution has been told many times, yet largely missing from maritime histories of America’s first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels that truly revealed the new nation’s characte...

The story of the Thirteen Colonies’ struggle for independence from Britain is well known to every American schoolchild. But at the start of the Revolutionary War, there were more than thirteen British colonies in North America. Patriots were surrounded by Indigenous homelands and loyal provinces. Independence had its limits. North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the L...

In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, an investigation into the nature of wealth. Smith is now considered the Father of Capitalism or the Father of Modern Economics. In fact, many people think of him as an economist and only an economist, but scholars tend to think of him as a moral philosopher. Smith lived in an era of great change, and the moral questions of the time were closely...

For many, the Beatles offered a delightful alternative to the dull and the staid, while for others, the mop-top haircuts, the unsettling music, and the hysterical girls that greeted the British imports wherever they went were a symbol of unwelcome social and cultural change. This opposition to the group--more widespread and deeper rooted in Chicago than in any other major American city--increased...

In this podcast Jakob Feinig introduces his ideas about how and when people's practices and institutions shape money and money creation. He provided deep insight into historical episodes to support his view. Towards the end, he comments on the challenges of digital currencies. Feinig is the author of Moral Economies of Money: Politics and the Monetary Constitution of Society (Stanford UP, 2022). I...

Origin stories of the United States often highlight religious freedom as a foundational pillar of the earliest English settlers. But Evan Haefeli tells a more complex story in Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497–1662 (University of Chicago Press, 2021). In this ambitious contribution to the origins of American religious tolerance, Haefeli argues that...

Sandeep Banerjee's book Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-Figurations of the Postcolony (Routledge, 2021) illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British Indian colony as the postcolony in diverse and contested ways. Focusing on the literary field of South Asia between, large...

Joseph Conrad, who published 20 books and several best-sellers by the time of his death, was also a sailor. Heart of Darkness follows seaman Charles Marlow’s journey down a river in Africa. It is Conrad’s most well-known book today. This tale of colonialism in Africa is shrouded in mystery, and the book itself has fallen in and out of favor since its publication. Harvard professor Maya Jassanoff d...

In 1651, the English Civil Wars were ending, and Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan. He used the book to advocate his ideal government: an absolute, monarchical sovereign. He also highlighted the problems that will inevitably arise in a democracy, the kinds of division and inaction that challenge us today. Professor Susanna Siegel discusses the way Hobbes’ Leviathan shaped the way we understand our...

To the degree that Canadians remember the treatment passengers on the Komagata Maru received when they were barred entry to the port of Vancouver in 1914, it is typically remembered in contrast to the supposed multiculturalism and openness of the country today. Contributors to this volume challenge this framing from top to bottom; not only do they trace out the legacies of the Komagata Maru as ong...

Dining out used to be considered exceptional. However, the Food Standards Authority reported that in 2014, one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain. Previously considered a necessary substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out has become a popular recreational activity for a majority of the population, offering pleasure as well as refreshment. The Social Si...

Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England: Gender, Law and Political Culture (Boydell Press, 2020) by Dr. E. Amanda McVitty presents a groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender. Conflicts over treason tormented English political society in the later Middle Ages. As legal and political historians have shown, treason was al...

Given that we live in an era roiled by concerns about how democratic supposedly democratic countries actually are and when skepticism abounds about how truly representative our electoral systems are, a scholarly study of debates on many of these issues among leading theorists of democracy in Victorian Britain is just the ticket. That is what is on offer in Gregory Conti's book Parliament the Mirro...

Empire and Emancipation: Scottish and Irish Catholics at the Atlantic Fringe, 1780–1850 (U Toronto Press, 2021) by Dr. S. Karly Kehoe explores how the agency of Scottish and Irish Catholics redefined understandings of Britishness and British imperial identity in colonial landscapes. In highlighting the relationship of Scottish and Irish Catholics with the British Empire, Dr. S. Karly Kehoe starts...