New Books in British Studies

In December of 1937, four men robbed a representative of the diamond company Cartier of eight diamond rings in the Hyde Park Hotel. What made this crime unique was the identity of the perpetrators: all four men were from well-respected, wealthy London families. The trial and eventual punishment of these four men sent the London presses into a frenzy. In his brilliant historical analysis, Professor...

Monica Mattfeld’s Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Penn State University Press, 2017) explores the complex relationship between men and their horses, and reflects upon how these interactions defined a man’s gendered and political positions within society. Focusing on training manuals, memoirs, images, satires, and other rich materials produced by some of t...

How do individuals on national or societal peripheries make use of tradition and to what ends? How can narratives discursively construct a complex worldview? These are some of the questions Ray Cashman seeks to answer in his new book Packy Jim: Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016). Focusing on the singular character of Packy Jim McGrath and the narrative...

Randy M. Browne in Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) uses the overlooked archives of the fiscal, a legal legacy from Dutch colonialism, and protector of slaves to reveal the political dynamics of slavery in the British colony of Berbice during amelioration. By minutely mining these sources, Browne is able to uncover the multifaceted strategies of s...

Though the preeminent English theologian of the 17th century, there is much about John Owen’s life which remains obscured to us today. One of the achievements of Crawford Gribben‘s new book John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxford University Press, 2017) is to use Owen’s voluminous writings on religion to provide new insights into this critical Puritan figure. Born in 1616,...

Sheshalatha Reddy’s British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) examines historical and literary texts relating to three rebellions in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 in India, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 in Jamaica, and the Fenian Rebellion of 1867 in Ireland. The book argues that these...

David Morgan-Owen‘s The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2017) tells a complex story clearly and concisely. In the decades prior to the Great War, British preparations for defense of its commercial and imperial interests were warped by fears of an invasion of the home islands. The specter of a French, or after 1905, a German invasi...

What was the British abolition of the slave trade like in practice? Padraic Scanlan, in his beautifully-written first book, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2017), explores the bureaucratic, economic, and military consequences of translating abolition law into lived reality for the British colony of Sierra Leone. It overturns h...

I Was Britpopped: The A-Z of Britpop (Valley Press, 2017) is a comprehensive guide to the people, the bands, the places, and the events that shaped British music in the mid-to-late 1990s. Taking on the form of a A-Z guide, the book doesn’t gloss over even the most remote B-Side or bands who only fleetingly played a role in the genre. Every entry is carefully researched and expertly written to pain...

Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait (University of Virginia Press, 2016) is the most recent work from distinguished historian Jack Greene. Using a treasure trove of records from the middle of the eighteenth century, Greene paints in incredible detail a societal picture of Britain’s wealthiest Caribbean colony. Greene finds much more social and economic diversity in Jamaica than traditi...

Richard Power Sayeed’s book, 1997: The Future that Never Happened (Zed Books, 2017), is a brilliant and exhaustively researched account of the late 1990s. The subject matter covered is broad. From music to politics, from feminism to the media, it paints a picture of an era in which those living and invested in British society never had it so good. The outlook was sunny, yet this positive future ne...

Just after World War II, West Indians began moving to London in large numbers. The artists, writers, and musicians among them found a place to create, and they found ways to express their complex notions of belonging to both the Caribbean and to the British Empire. Amanda Bidnall‘s The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945-1965 (Liverpool University Press, 2017) traces t...

Candace Ward’s Crossing the Line: Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age of Emancipation (University of Virginia Press, 2017) foregrounds an understudied group of writers: white creole novelists in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. White creoles in the Caribbean were characterized as lazy, depraved, and provincial by their contemporaries in Britain, particularly amid early nin...

Rebecca Fraser is a writer, journalist, and broadcaster whose work has been published in Tatler, Vogue, The Times, and The Spectator. President of the Bronte Society for many years, she is the author of a biography of Charlotte Bronte that examines her life in the context of contemporary attitudes about women. Her last book was The Story of Britain, a single-volume history of how England was gover...

Katherine Paugh‘s new book The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines the crucial role that reproduction took in the evolution of slavery in the British Caribbean. Using plantation records, Paugh reconstructs the life and work routine of Doll, an enslaved midwife tasked with delivering children on a Barbadian estate....

Laura Lee’s Oscar’s Ghost: The Battle for Oscar Wilde’s Legacy (Amberley Publishing, 2017) offers a detailed investigation of a conflict involving the writer and his two friends with whom he maintained sexual relations, Lord Alfred Douglas and Robert Ross. In her endeavor to disclose the root of the conflict that, as a matter of fact, marked and instigated Oscar Wilde’s decline, Laura Lee attempts...

“How can the modern individual maintain control over his or her self-representation when the whole world seems to be watching?” This is the question that prompts Julia Fawcett‘s new book, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801 (University of Michigan Press, 2016). Drawing on a diverse range of material to analyze some of England’s earliest modern celebrities, Fawcett offers a...

What are your impressions when you think of the flapper? Who is she in your mind? When and where does she exist? In her new book Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper (Reaktion Books, 2017), Linda Simon tracks the historical narrative surrounding the flapper from the late-nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth century. Using sources from popular culture and from people of th...

In her new book, Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Jane McCabe, Lecturer in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago, explores the tale of the “Kalimpong Kids,” 130 Anglo-Indian adolescents who were sent from the tea plantations in northeast India to New Zealand in the early 20th century. Their stories were...

Great Britain’s victory in the First World War brought with it the competing challenges of defending an expanded empire while reducing military expenditures. In The Royal Navy in the Age of Austerity, 1919-22: Naval and Foreign Policy under Lloyd George (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Harry Bennett details how British policymakers responded to the quandary that the postwar strategic and political sit...

Despite the recent booms in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, technology studies still remain scarce: one of the recent attempts to fill the void is Andrea L. Stanton‘s ‘This is Jerusalem Calling’: State Radio in Mandate Palestine (University of Texas Press, 2013). She weaves together different narratives to tell the story of the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS), launched in 1936...

In the decades following the end of the Second World War, the British economy evolved from a manufacturing-based economy to one driven by service industries, most notably finance. As Aled Davies explains in his book The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-war Britain (Oxford University Press, 2017), this shift posed a challenge to the prevailing concept of...

Drawing on an ethnography of Down’s syndrome screening in two UK clinics, Gareth M. Thomas‘ Down’s Syndrome and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic (Routledge, 2017) explores how and why we are so invested in this practice and what effects this has on those involved. Informed by theoretical approaches that privilege the mundane and micro practices, discourses...

Carla Pestana’s new book The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a rousing look at a transformative moment in Caribbean history. Pestana details the various political, economic, and religious factors that inspired England’s government, led by its new Protector Oliver Cromwell, to attempt an invasion of Spanish-held territory in the West...

Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) describes how The Fens was transformed into the environment we know...