New Books in British Studies
1,231 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★ - 2 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Britain about their New Books
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Episodes
Rupali Mishra, “A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company” (Harvard UP, 2018)
August 29, 2018 10:00 - 59 minutesThough today the public and private sectors are treated as distinct if not separate, the situation was quite different in early modern England. Back then the two were often intertwined, with one of the best examples of this being the English East India Company. In her book A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company (Harvard University Press, 2018), Rupali Mishra examines the relationship between the Company and the English state in the early 17th century,...
Jim Clifford, “West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshlands, 1839-1914” (UBC Press, 2017)
August 24, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourIn West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshlands, 1839-1914 (University of British Columbia Press, 2017), Jim Clifford brings together histories of water and river systems, urban history, environmental history, and labor history. Using archival materials with a particular focus on Ordnance Survey maps and historical GIS (geographical information systems), he explores Greater London’s second important river, the Lea, using it as a lens thr...
Irina Dumitrescu, “The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
August 03, 2018 10:00 - 52 minutesA sharply observed study of the representations of education found in Anglo-Saxon texts, Irina Dumitrescu’s The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge University Press 2018) invites readers to recognize just how often educational encounters crop up throughout the Anglo-Saxon corpus. By attending to the ways that violence, deceit, suspicion, sexual desire, concealed identities, and various temptations modulate the relationship between teacher and student, and the ways tha...
Joanna M. Williams, “Manchester’s Radical Mayor: Abel Heywood, The Man Who Built the Town Hall” (The History Press, 2017)
July 31, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourToday, the Neo-Gothic Manchester Town Hall stands as one of the notable architectural features of England’s second city. It also serves, however, as a towering monument to the career of Abel Heywood, a businessman and politician who, as Joanna M. Williams details in her book Manchester’s Radical Mayor: Abel Heywood, The Man Who Built the Town Hall (The History Press, 2017), did much to guide his city through its transition from a town still governed by medieval institutions into a modern indu...
David Edgerton, “The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History” (Allen Lane, 2018)
July 17, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourDavid Edgerton’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History (Allen Lane, 2018) argues the United Kingdom had a distinctive national moment characterized by a strong state, powerful military armed with advanced weapons, and dedicated to developmental economics. Far from repeating older claims that Britain did not have a nationalism or was not sufficiently nationalistic, Edgerton shows a country that is increasingly interventionist, militaristic, and devoted to science...
Elizabeth M. Sanders, “Genres of Doubt: Science Fiction, Fantasy and the Crisis of Victorian Faith” (McFarland, 2017)
July 12, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourThe Victorians left an indelible stamp on culture that continues to be in evidence today, not least of which is their refinement of the realist fiction medium known as the novel and their innovations, which led to the birth of fantasy and science fiction – two of today’s most popular genres. This period also gave rise to a Victorian “crisis of faith,” as the traditional Christian beliefs that had underpinned British society for centuries faced new challenges from scientific discoveries, the w...
Stacey Pierson, “Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club” (Routledge, 2017)
July 11, 2018 10:00 - 44 minutesIn her latest book, Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club (Routledge, 2017), Stacey J. Pierson reveals the fascinating history of one of the most refined and influential fine art clubs in London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club. Drawing on the club’s near-complete, yet understudied archives at the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Stacey focuses on the club’s exhibition practices. In this way, the B...
Steve R. Dunn, “Bayly’s War: The Battle for the Western Approaches in the First World War” (Naval Institute Press, 2018)
July 09, 2018 10:00 - 39 minutesThough Great Britain’s warships ruled the waves throughout the First World War, their greatest challenge came from just underneath them. Nowhere was this better demonstrated in the Western Approaches, where, as Steve R. Dunn details in his book Bayly’s War: The Battle for the Western Approaches in the First World War (Naval Institute Press, 2018), the Royal Navy found themselves hard pressed even to secure the trade routes just off their western shores from the threat posed by Germany U-boats...
Michael Belgrave, “Dancing with the King: The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864–1885” (Auckland UP, 2017)
June 29, 2018 10:00 - 17 minutesIn his new book, Dancing with the King: The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864–1885 (Auckland University Press, 2017), Michael Belgrave, Professor of History at Massey University, tells the story of the negotiations, or diplomatic “dance,” between the Māori of the Rohe Pōtae (the King Country in the western part of the North Island) and the colonial Europeans. Belgrave traces the negotiations through successive stages, culminating in an agreement in 1883, which, by being the first writ...
Simon Kerry, “Lansdowne: The Last Great Whig” (Unicorn Publishing Group, 2018).
June 27, 2018 10:00 - 41 minutesDespite having been Foreign Secretary, Secretary of State for War, Governor-General of Canada and Viceroy of India, Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, the 5th Marquess of Lansdowne is one of the least well known political figures of the 1st rank in late 19th-century / early 20th-century British politics. The great-grandson of Talleyrand and according to Lord Vansittart, the Foreign Secretary with the best command of French of any in his personal experience, Lord Lansdowne has not had a bi...
Sumita Mukherjee, “Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks” (Oxford UP, 2018)
June 26, 2018 10:00 - 42 minutesIn her new book, Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks (Oxford University Press, 2018), Sumita Mukherjee highlights the centrality of Indian women in the fight for the vote in the first half of the twentieth century. Taking up a geographic organization around global “contact zones,” Mukherjee skillfully guides readers through multiple sites of Indian suffragette networking: from Britain and its commonwealth, to international locales in the US and Europe, to eastern...
Adam Kuper, “Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the Twentieth-Century” (Routledge, 2014)
June 20, 2018 10:00 - 55 minutesAdam Kuper‘s Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the Twentieth-Century (Fourth Edition; Routledge, 2014) is an excellent, comprehensive tour through one of the most important and influential schools of anthropological theory, easily ranking alongside the Structuralist school of Claude-Levi Strauss and the Historical Particularist school of Franz Boas. In this concise, but comprehensive edition, Kuper explores the characters and ideas that built the school through both coll...
Lisa Walters, “Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
June 12, 2018 10:00 - 49 minutesAs a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed as a royalist and a conservative within the context of the social and political issues of her time. In Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Lisa Walters offers a very different interpretation of Cavendish’s thought, revealing the nuance and complexity of Cavendish’s thinking on a variety of subjec...
James Cook, “Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s” (Unbound, 2018)
June 07, 2018 10:00 - 46 minutesToday on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The book details the author’s own adolescent musical obsessions from The Beatles to John Barry from Led Zeppelin to The Waterboys that led him to form his own band Flamingoes with his twin brother, Jude, and move to London in the early 1990s and begin the long the often perilous road to becoming a full-time working musician. The book is par...
Andre Magnan, “When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade” (U British Columbia Press, 2016)
June 06, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourIn When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), André Magnan connects the cultivation of wheat on the Canadian prairies to the consumption of bread in Britain. Using the concept of a “food regime” as a theoretical frame, Magnan identifies three broad periods of stability in the relationship between Canadian wheat and British bread: a “UK-centered” food regime from about 1870 to 1914, a “mercantile-industrial” food regime fro...
Tarak Barkawi, “Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
May 25, 2018 10:00 - 38 minutesTarak Barkawi, a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics, has written an important book that will cause many of us to rethink the way we understand the relationships between armies and societies. In Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Barkawi argues that many scholars of Western armies tend to overstate the degree to which motivation and fighting spirit as well as the urge to commit atrocity derive from ...
Kate Skinner, “The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
May 15, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourIn her book, The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Kate Skinner examines the history behind the failed project that sought the reunification of Togoland. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Germans colonized the small territory of Togo in West Africa. During the first world war, the British and French invaded Togo and split it between them, introducing a new border that was criticized by the African i...
John Nathaniel Clarke, “British Media and the Rwandan Genocide” (Routledge Press, 2018)
May 04, 2018 13:28 - 1 hourIt seems safe to assume that media coverage changes the behavior of politicians and voters. And it seems safe to assume this happens in cases of humanitarian crisis. But it’s really hard to go beyond these platitudes to determine exactly how this feedback loop works. John Nathaniel Clarke’s new book, British Media and the Rwandan Genocide (Routledge, 2018), uses Rwanda as a test case to tease out the relationship between media coverage and policy. To do so, he uses carefully structured, l...
Leah Bassel and Akwugo Emejulu, “Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain” (Policy Press, 2017)
April 27, 2018 10:00 - 41 minutesWhat is the impact of austerity on minority women? How has this impacted on already long standing forms of social inequality across England, France and Scotland? These questions are the subject of Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain (Policy Press, 2017), the new book from Dr. Leah Bassel, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Leicester, and Professor Akwugo Emejulu, a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick. The book foreg...
Catherine Layton, “The Life and Times of Mary, Dowager Duchess of Sutherland” (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018)
April 26, 2018 10:00 - 58 minutesAs the thrice-married widow of one of the richest dukes in Victorian Britain, Mary Mitchell lived a life often at variance with the expectations of propriety for her time. In The Life and Times of Mary, Dowager Duchess of Sutherland (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018), Catherine Layton goes beyond the headlines from her time to understand who Mary was and the world in which she lived. The daughter of an Oxford academic, Mary grew up in the interconnected world of the English elite. While her fir...
Aidan Forth, “Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903” (U California Press, 2017)
April 24, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourIn his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017), Aidan Forth employs a comparative and trans-imperial approach to map a global network of camps established by Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1876 and 1903, officials set up famine, plague, and wartime concentration camps across India and South Africa in response to a number of interconnected global emergencies. Situating these imperial c...
Lisa Ze Winters, “The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic” (U Georgia Press, 2016)
April 20, 2018 10:00 - 38 minutesPopular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic (University of Georgia Press, 2016), Lisa Ze Winters traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across...
David Atkinson, “The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States” (UNC Press, 2016)
April 19, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourRecent historical scholarship stresses the transnational linkages between movements to restrict Asian migration in the Anglophone world. David Atkinson’s The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (UNC Press, 2016) offers an important revision to this literature by examining legal and social responses to Japanese and South Asian mobility in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and the U.S. between 1896 and 1924. Atkinson argu...
Karen Teoh, “Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s to 1960s” (Oxford UP, 2018)
April 17, 2018 10:00 - 34 minutesIn Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s to 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2018), Karen Teoh relates the history of English and Chinese girls’ schools that overseas Chinese founded and attended from the 1850s to the 1960s in British Malaya and Singapore. She examines the strategies of missionaries, colonial authorities, and Chinese reformists and revolutionaries for educating girls, as well as the impact that this education had ...
Steven Gray, “Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
April 10, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourIn Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal role of coal in the Royal Navy, during the short-lived but crucial “age of steam.” Drawing on British government and military records, ships’ logs and mariners memoirs, Gray examines coal from multiple, intersecting perspectives. Beginning with its geopolitical importance, Gray shows that steam powered ships significantly increased the nature an...
Carolyn Day, “Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease” (Bloomsbury, 2017)
April 10, 2018 10:00 - 52 minutesIn her new book, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease (Bloomsbury, 2017), Carolyn Day tracks the relationship between dress, appearance, and tuberculosis in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Blending the histories of medicine and fashion, she charts multiple and often contested understandings of consumption and its socio-cultural significance. Day’s focus on experiences of upper- and middle-class women highlights gendered critiques of fashionable activitie...
June Purvis, “Christabel Pankhurst: A Biography” (Routledge, 2018)
April 03, 2018 10:00 - 39 minutesDespite her prominent role in the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain, Christabel Pankhurst has not received the same degree of attention from scholars that had been given to her mother Emmeline or her sister Sylvia. In Christabel Pankhurst: A Biography (Routledge, 2018), June Purvis offers a thorough accounting of her life, revealing the full extent of her contribution to the campaign to win for women in Britain the right to vote. The eldest daughter of Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst...
Alex Wade, “Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
March 23, 2018 10:00 - 50 minutesIn his book Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Alex Wade examines the culture of bedroom coding, arcades, and format wars in 1980s Britain. Wade interviews gamers, developers and journalists to better understand the cultural habitus of early gaming. Wade expertly explores the bedroom culture of early coders, examining the ways in which games were copied and distributed among players. He situates gaming in the underground subcultures of arcades, conn...
Marcus Rediker, “The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became The First Revolutionary Abolitionist” (Beacon Press, 2017)
March 20, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourIn the annals of abolitionist history, names like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, the Grimke sisters, and Harriet Tubman are well known. Dr. Marcus Rediker‘s new book, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became The First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Beacon Press, 2017) adds an important abolitionist to this group of revolutionaries. Benjamin Lay lived and proclaimed a life dedicated to the immediate abolition of slavery over a century before many of the women and men af...
Antony G. Hopkins, “American Empire: A Global History” (Princeton UP, 2018)
March 19, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourIn an expansive, engrossing, voluminously in depth analysis of the subject, Professor A. G. Hopkins, Professor Emeritus of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, one of the foremost historians of the 19th- and 20th-century British Empire, engages in the fraught, but little studied subject of why and how the ‘American Empire’ differs if at all, from its British progenitor. In American Empire: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2018)—a book of enormous sweep, ranging wi...
Daniel Livesay, “Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833” (UNC Press, 2018)
March 16, 2018 10:00 - 52 minutesMany were wealthy, but others were destitute. Many traveled to Britain to be educated, some returned to Jamaica, others went to India to seek careers and fortunes. They were members of families, with all of the struggle, drama, intimacy and ambition that that entails. In his new book Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (UNC Press, 2018), Dan Livesay tells the stories of Jamaicans of mixed-race backgrounds as embedded in the broader...
Sadek Hamid, “Sufis, Salafis and Islamists: The Contested Grounds of British Islamic Activism” (I.B. Tauris, 2016)
March 08, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourIn Sufis, Salafis and Islamists: The Contested Grounds of British Islamic Activism (I.B. Tauris, 2016), Sadek Hamid explores the contours of “Islamic activism”—and indeed the meaning of this key term—in the context of the UK. Despite the specific focus, however, he also gives attention to transnational implications, especially insofar as British Muslims represent a variety of ethnic backgrounds and political influences. Hamid gives meticulous attention to the social and political histories of...
Jean R. Freedman, “Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics” (U Illinois Press, 2017)
March 08, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourWhen folklorist Jean Freedman first met Peggy Seeger in 1979, Freedman was an undergraduate on her junior year abroad in London, while her American compatriot had been living in the UK for two decades. Their encounter took place in the Singers’ Club, a folk music venue that Seeger and her husband Ewan MacColl founded in the early 1960s and to which Freedman returned many times during her London sojourn. After Freedman returned to the States, the pair kept in touch for a while but their contac...
Anthimos Tsirigotis, “Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse” Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
March 06, 2018 11:00 - 52 minutesOn this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given the significant efforts of the field’s founder, Norbert Wiener, to distance cybernetics from military research and application, as well as the ethical stances of some of the field’s later leading lights such as Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Herbert Brun, Ranulph Glanville and Larry Richard...
John Broich, “Squadron: Ending the African Slave Trade” (Overlook Duckworth Press, 2017)
March 01, 2018 11:00 - 32 minutesDespite the British being early abolitionists, a significant slave trade remained in the western Indian Ocean through the mid-1800s, even after the cessation of most imperial slave trading activities in the Atlantic World. The British Royal Navy’s response was to dispatch a squadron to patrol East Africa’s coast. Following what began as a simple policing action, Squadron: Ending the African Slave Trade (Overlook Duckworth Press, 2017) is the story of four Royal Naval officers who witnessed an...
Taisu Zhang, “The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship Property in Preindustrial China and England” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
February 27, 2018 11:00 - 58 minutesTaisu Zhang ties together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics in The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths. Late Imperial and Republican China (1860-1949) was dominated of Neo-Confucian social hierarchies, under which advanced age and generational seniority were...
David Narrett, “Adventurism and Empire” (UNC Press, 2015)
February 23, 2018 11:00 - 57 minutesIn his new book, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762-1803 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), David Narrett explores the international political and diplomatic competition for control of the Old Southwest. His book begins with the conclusion of the French and Indian War and follows the story until the Louisiana Purchase secured the area for the United States. It superbly illustrates the weak control exerted by Britain, France, an...
Timothy J. Shannon, “Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain” (Harvard UP, 2018)
February 20, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourIn 1758, Peter Williamson appeared on the streets of Aberdeen, Scotland, dressed as a Native American and telling a remarkable tale. He claimed that as a young boy he had been kidnapped from the city and sold into slavery in America. In performances and in a printed narrative he peddled to his audiences, Williamson described his tribulations as an indentured servant, Indian captive, soldier, and prisoner of war. Aberdeen’s magistrates called him a liar and banished him from the city, but Will...
Mark G. Hanna, “Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740” (UNC Press, 2015)
February 19, 2018 11:00 - 57 minutesMark G. Hanna offers a unique perspective on the roles played by piracy in the formation of the British colonial project. In Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2015), Hanna weaves a fascinating tale from legal and commercial sources to illustrate ways that the English government often tolerated, and at times encouraged predation on the high seas. The goods obtained...
James Delbourgo, “Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane” (Allen Lane, 2017)
February 09, 2018 16:17 - 1 hourJames Delbourgo‘s new book Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Allen Lane, 2017) tells the fascinatingly complex and controversial story of Hans Sloane, the man whose collection and last will laid the foundation for the British Museum, the first national, free, public museum. For Delbourgo, Sloane was for far too long an overlooked figure, who knitted together the interests of a rising empire through methods of botany, natural history and medicine. Overshadowed in pa...
Brian Jenkins, “Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Age of Nationalism and War” (McGill-Queens UP, 2014)
February 08, 2018 11:00 - 56 minutesDescribed upon his death in 1887 as the ideal diplomatist, Richard Lyons served Great Britain in a variety of roles over the course of a long and distinguished career. In Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Age of Nationalism and War (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), Brian Jenkins describes Lyons’s eventful life and the often subtle impact he made in international relations. The son of an officer in the Royal Navy, Lyons was long drawn to diplomatic service. Sent to Greece as an aide soon aft...
Sasha Turner, “Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Child-Rearing, and Slavery in Jamaica” (Penn Press, 2017)
February 08, 2018 11:00 - 43 minutesSasha Turner’s Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Child-Rearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) reveals enslaved women’s contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children in plantation-era Jamaica. Turner argues that, as the source of new labour, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide r...
Emily C. Nacol, “An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain” (Princeton UP, 2016)
January 29, 2018 11:00 - 41 minutesEmily C. Nacol has written a fascinating interrogation of the idea of risk, the concept of vulnerability, and the evolution of probabilistic thinking as conceived of and explored by four of the preeminent British thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nacol’s book, An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain (Princeton University Press, 2016) examines the political, economic, and epistemological works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Ea...
David Cannadine, “Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906” (Viking, 2018)
January 26, 2018 14:27 - 43 minutesSir David Cannadine, Professor of History at Princeton University, president of the British Academy, and the general editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, narrates the century of Pax Britannica in the Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 (Viking, 2018). From the successful end of the Napoleonic Wars to the near debacle that was the Boer War, Victorious Century provides a comprehensive view of 19th-century British history in all its aspects: politics, society, art...
Angus McLaren, “Playboys and Mayfair Men: Crime, Class, Masculinity, and Fascism in 1930s London” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017).
January 23, 2018 13:17 - 42 minutesIn 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 Angus McLaren (Professor Emeritus, University of Victoria) documents the crime, trial, and tribu...
Monica Mattfeld, “Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship” (Penn State UP, 2017)
January 19, 2018 12:20 - 32 minutesMonica 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 the periods most influential equestrians, Mattfeld examines how the concepts and practices of hors...
Ray Cashman, “Packy Jim: Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border” (U Wisconsin Press, 2016)
January 17, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourHow 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 narratives that feature in his repertoire—from personal experience narratives to stories about the superna...
Randy M. Browne, “Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)
January 08, 2018 11:00 - 50 minutesRandy 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 survival that enslaved people used to attempt to live through the deathtrap of plantation slavery....
Crawford Gribben, “John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat” (Oxford UP, 2017)
January 05, 2018 11:00 - 50 minutesThough 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, Owen grew up in an Anglican faith increasingly influenced by Arminian doctrine. Though Owen side...
Sheshalatha Reddy, “British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
December 08, 2017 13:20 - 37 minutesSheshalatha 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 rebellions—while arguably unsuccessful in their particular moments—signaled turning points in the...