Browse all reviews
Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire / Tom Rice
Review Date: 02 October 2020
Tom Rice’s book offers an extensive and cogent history of the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) from its early conception in the minds of bureaucrats and educational specialists to its dissolution following the wave of independence movements in the mid-20th century.
Mr. Smith Goes to China: Three Scots in the Making of Britain’s Global Empire / Jessica Hanser
Review Date: 02 October 2020
Jessica Hanser, in her book Mr. Smith Goes to China, tells a tale of 18th-century globalisation involving three international actors–Britain, China and India–through the lives of three British (more precisely, Scottish) merchants. All of them bore the name of George Smith, an extremely common name at the time. And all of them were ‘private traders’” (i.e.
Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England / Susan North
Review Date: 25 September 2020
Students of history are not always aware when they live through major historiographic change; shifts are sometimes only recognizable in hindsight, with accumulated divergences sharply evident against the backdrop of the field. This volume by Susan North marks a historiographic advance from several perspectives, bringing questions of training, habit, labour, and lifestyle in early modern England into close conversation with health, fashion, morality, and materiality.
Women before the court: Law and patriarchy in the Anglo-American world, 1600–1800 / Lindsay R. Moore
Review Date: 25 September 2020
Lindsay R. Moore’s Women Before the Court is an important contribution to the growing body of research on premodern women’s access to justice that has been published over the past decade.(1) Recent debates have sought to complicate the limitations of the English common law doctrine of coverture which, at least in theory, prevented married women’s independent access to justice.
Animal worlds / Sabine Hanke
Review Date: 18 September 2020
The field of Human Animal Studies and the historical analysis of human-animal relations are relatively recent—and often interdisciplinary—approaches. Historian Harriet Ritvo has famously called the new interest in the topic an ‘animal turn’.
Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society / Cécile Vidal
Review Date: 11 September 2020
In Caribbean New Orleans Cécile Vidal has brought together a prodigious volume and range of archival research in what is the most detailed social history of the city during the French period.
Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution / Kevin W. Fogg
Review Date: 11 September 2020
In Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution, historian Kevin W. Fogg argues that the historiography of the Indonesian revolution and war of independence (1945–1949) urgently needs a broader perspective that takes Islam’s influence on both the grassroots and political elite levels seriously. Present historiography is strongly influenced by the popular secular nationalist narrative of Indonesian history.
Wem & Myddle, then and again / Peter Edwards
Review Date: 04 September 2020
In 1974, David Hey published his book on Myddle in Shropshire, a study based upon his doctoral research at Leicester University. One might wonder how a proud South Yorkshireman had even heard of an insignificant North Shropshire parish, let alone decided to carry out research on it. Fortunately, his supervisor, Professor W. G.
Mediterranean Encounters: Trade and Pluralism in Early Modern Galata / Fariba Zarinebaf
Review Date: 31 July 2020
The 18th century is still the least popular among Ottoman historians. Recently, with the influential counter-narrative of Ottoman decline and the coining of a new term—the 'Second Ottoman Empire'—by Baki Tezcan, our understanding of periodization in Ottoman history has changed. It is now recognized that there was no golden age followed by centuries of decline.
Catholic Nuns and Sisters in a Secular Age, Britain 1945-90 / Carmen M. Mangion
Review Date: 31 July 2020
In the preface of Catholic Nuns and Sisters in a Secular Age, Carmen M. Mangion admits ‘this was not a book I wanted to write. This was a book I thought should be written’ (p.xi). In recent decades there has been a ‘religious turn’ in gender and cultural history, epitomised by the publication of the 2011 Feminist Review special issue dedicated to religion and spirituality.