New Books in British Studies

Stretching across the north of England, from coast to coast, are the 73-mile long remnants of a fortification built by the Roman Army during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. It is, as our guest Adrian Goldsworthy has written, “the largest of the many monuments left by the Roman Empire and one of the most famous.” For centuries the purpose of Hadrian’s Wall, and the life of those who built it and...

In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, if not indeed on the entire planet, explores the forty-one years from the beginning of the Great War in August 1914 to the surrender of Japan in August 1945. This book provides the reader with an innovat...

Guy Beiner, who is professor of modern history at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has written one of the longest and certainly one of the most extraordinary recent contributions to the historiography of Ireland and of memory studies. His new book, Forgetful Remembering: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster(Oxford University Press, 2018), argues for the compl...

John Owen is one of the most significant seventeenth-century Protestant theologians. He is often discussed by historians of politics and religion in terms of his contributions to the national church settlement of the British Republic (1649-60) or to the post-reformation scholastic theological tradition. But, as this new book argues, Owen regarded himself as a biblical interpreter more than as a do...

Drawing on new archival resources, and opening up an entirely new research agenda in the field, David Woodbridge has written an outstanding new book. Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity: The Brethren in Twentieth-Century China (Brill, 2019) focuses on a small but very significant evangelical community, the so-called Plymouth Brethren, and documents the attempts made by their missionaries...

When we think of the history of the British empire we tend to think big: oceans were crossed; colonies grew from small settlements to territories many times larger than England; entire Continents, each with substantial indigenous populations, were brought under British rule. Maps were an important part of rule in America, but from the point of view of the Board of Trade, the lack of ‘exact Surveys...

Religion and empire are often intertwined. Regarding Muslims there are well known dynasties like the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid, the Ottoman, and many others. But the empire governing the largest Muslim population was, of course, the British. In Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Scott S. Reese, Professor at No...

Does publishing have a diversity problem? In Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom Dr Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, an associate professor at UCL’s Centre for Publishing lays bare the crisis of underrepresentation for British authors of colour. Focusing on the high profile, but also marginalised, Young Adult Fiction genre, Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colou...

Ryan Hackenbracht, who is an associate professor of English at Texas Tech University, has just published one of the most innovative and stimulating discussions of the interplay between literature and religion in early modern England. National Reckonings: The Last Judgement and Literature in Milton’s England (Cornell University Press, 2019) opens up questions about how seventeenth-century writers u...

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is widely recognised as the greatest epic poem in the English language – and it is buried in the commentary of thousands of other texts. William Poole, who is John Galsworthy Fellow and Tutor in English at New College, Oxford, has written what will be recognised as one of the most important contributions to this formidable body of scholarship. Milton and the Maki...

Are you tired of the constant refrain from our campus radicals and their bien-pensant allies in the intelligentsia that the United States and the United Kingdom, AKA the American and the British empires are the source of all the problems in the world, past and present?  Do you not regard Sir Winston Churchill and other heroic figures of the recent and not so recent Anglo-American past as villains...

In Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London, 1884-1914 (Wayne State University Press, 2018), Vivi Lachs, social and cultural historian, Yiddishist, performer, and associate research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, looks at London's Yiddish popular culture. She positions it in historical perspective within Anglo-Jewish history, English socialist aesthetic...

Who is excluded from science? What is the role of museums in this exclusion? In Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups (Routledge, 2019), Dr Emily Dawson, an Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London, introduces the idea of everyday science learning to critically engage with our understanding...

From its humble beginnings as a crossing point over the river Thames Londinium grew into the largest city in Roman Britain. In Londinium: A Biography (Routledge, 2018), Richard Hingley draws upon the latest archaeological discoveries to provide a look at the growth and development of London over the first centuries of its existence. Though typically thought of as a community established by Roman c...

Naomi Pullin, who is Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick, UK, has just published an outstanding account of Female Friends and the Making of Trans-Atlantic Quakerism, 1650-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Appearing in the prestigious series, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, the book offers the first account of the ways in which...

Eighteenth-century England was a place of both the enlightenment and progress: new ideas abounded in science, politics, transportation, commerce, philosophy, religion, and the arts. But even as England propelled itself into the future, it was preoccupied with notions of its past, both its immediate past and its far distant past. Professor of History Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian (more...

Throughout modern history, British and American rivalry has gone hand in hand with common interests. Now renown diplomatic historian Professor Kathleen Burk in her newest book, The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires, 1783-1972 (Bloomsbury, 2019), examines and looks at the different kinds and forms of power and influence that these the two empires have projected...

Histories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunning revision, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Elena Schneider restores the central roles of enslaved Africans in all stag...

In Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia(New York University Press, 2019), Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, shifts the lens on the well-known narrative of Virginia’s founding to reveal the previously untold and utterly compelling story of the youths who, often unwillingly, entered into cross-cultural relationsh...

In an empire built on racial slavery, what roles do blood purity and citizenship play in the creation of subject citizens? This is one of the many questions broached by Dr. Brooke Newman in her new book A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Yale University Press, 2018), Newman tells the story of how racial mixing affected the status of many different groups of people in col...

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Pr...

Andrew T. Fede is a lawyer in private practice in northern New Jersey and an adjunct professor of law at Montclair State University.  His new book Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and Atlantic World (University of Georgia Press, 2017) is a comparative account of slave homicide law in the American colonies and states, covering the period from the early 17th ce...

The Indian caste system is an ancient, pervasive institution of social organization within the subcontinent – or is it? Join me as I speak with Dr. Prakash Shah (Reader in Culture and Law at the Queen Mary University of London, UK) about his co-edited work, Western Foundations of the Caste System(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Ranging from ancient Indian history to modern British law, the contribution...

In the twenty-first century, India and the United States are two closely connected states. Some of this is economic, and with it comes a concern that jobs in the United States are being outsourced to India. The two countries also face concerns over terrorism, engage in cultural dialogue with each other, and lay claim to being two of the largest and most powerful democracies in the world. However,...

The Westminster Assembly (1643-53) was one of the most important ecclesiastical councils in the history of Reformed Protestantism, but until very recently it had received little in the way of scholarly attention. With the rediscovery of the minutes of the assembly, and their publication in 5 volumes by Oxford University Press, historians are now able to see inside its workings, and to understand h...