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As the bicentenary of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade approached, the past few years saw a great outpouring of scholarship on subjects related to the relationship between Britain, slavery, race and empire, with particular focus upon Britain's entry into participation in the slave trade and plantation agriculture, and upon the rise of popular opposition to slavery.
It would be easy, but facile, to dismiss emigration from Ireland to Argentina as a minor aberration in the history of both countries.
Forty years ago last autumn, Cornell University Press published a revised and expanded dissertation, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1).
The Caribbean is not only made up of the islands in the Caribbean Sea but also of the mainland territories of Belize, Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana. The region is marked by diversity. Some territories are very small, such as St. Martin, which has a surface area of thirty-seven square miles and a population of 73,000.
One of the strengths of the recent historiography of the First World War has been the shift in focus away from the Western Front towards a broader understanding of the conflict as a world war.
Sometimes you get lucky when you publish a book. Matthew Mulcahy's intriguing and well-written analysis of the cultural impact of hurricanes in the plantation regions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America came out at an extremely apposite time for an academic publication, a month or so after one of the biggest natural disasters in American history.
NB. This review has been translated from the Spanish by Natalie Sobrevilla.
This volume is a collection of seven essays on Latin America by James Dunkerley, all written and published separately between 1992 and 1999. The most immediate question posed, given the wide and varied range in topic covered and in approach (no two essays being alike), is both how the essays work individually and, more pertinently, how coherently they hang together.
Recent studies in Latin American history have increasingly rejected the periodisation inherited in the traditional historiography. In other words, the notion that the Wars of Independence (c. 1810 - c. 1825) represented a clear break with the colonial past has become both questioned and contested.
In this fascinating book, Colin Clarke draws together work from a range of disciplinary traditions to produce a monograph on the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Known predominantly for its large indigenous population and its tourist industry, Clarke uses the concept of 'peasantries' to examine the processes that have shaped one of Mexico's economically-poorest states.