Browse all reviews
No Return / Rowan Dorin
Review Date: 08 June 2023
It is hard to review this book without lapsing into the language of academic letters of recommendation: it is brilliant, illuminating. The genre is the Anglo-American 'book of the thesis’. This genre contrasts with that of first books from young German and French scholars in that the author has taken years to revise his 2015 Harvard thesis thoroughly.
Nehru’s Voice /
Review Date: 11 May 2023
The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru have been published in 100 volumes. The first 15 volumes together make up the First Series, and the following 85 are the Second Series. These roughly cover the pre- and post-1946 periods and are thus divided by the formation of the interim government in India during the transfer of power from British rule.
The Politics of Humiliation / Ute Frevert
Review Date: 02 September 2022
In this informative book, Ute Frevert examines shame and shaming during the early modern and modern periods, mostly in Germany and Britain, but in other European countries as well. It is based upon her German book, Die Politik der Demütigung: Schauplätze von Macht und Ohnmacht, published in 2017.
Migrant City: A New History of London / Panikos Panayi
Review Date: 30 June 2022
According to a survey carried out by the National Federation of Fish Fryers in the 1960s, the first fish and chip shop was opened by Joseph Malins in 1860 on Old Ford Road in the East End of London (p. 234).
Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 / Judith Surkis
Review Date: 04 June 2021
In recent decades historians, postcolonial theorists and feminist scholars have demonstrated how, in a variety of geographical settings, gendered stereotypes supported the conquest and domination of overseas territories by European colonial regimes.
Medieval Welsh Genealogy: An Introduction and Textual Study / Benjamin M. Guyer
Review Date: 14 May 2021
This substantial book does two jobs. It undertakes the first full textual study of Welsh genealogical literature in the Middle Ages, and it provides a new critical edition of the most important texts. In the second of these roles it replaces Peter Bartrum’s Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts (1966), the workhorse on which everyone relied till now. In the first role, however, it has no predecessor.
Early Modern Ecclesiastical Law and Consistory Courts / Jennifer McNabb
Review Date: 23 April 2021
Attention to the law and its development across the medieval and early modern centuries has never been out of fashion and scholars continue to take a keen interest in the topic.
Conceived in Crisis: The Revolutionary Creation of an American State / Christopher R. Pearl
Review Date: 16 April 2021
In 2003, Max M. Edling published a field-changing book exploring the influence of European models of state-building on the framing and ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Edling termed this process, which took place in the late 1780s, ‘a revolution in favour of government’. (1) Christopher R.
Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition / Bronwen Everill
Review Date: 16 April 2021
Recent social media campaigns have promoted #BuyBlack and #BuyIndigenous businesses, and corporations have been working to align themselves with these and other social justice movements in a bid to publicly perform their corporate social responsibility. Coffee companies have built global brands based on their fair-trade partnerships, and key players in the fashion industry have begun to re-think their role as ethical producers and consumers.
A Promised Land / Barack Obama
Review Date: 12 February 2021
‘We are the Moses generation.’ Dr Otis Moss, a veteran of the civil rights movement, friend of Martin Luther King and former adviser to Jimmy Carter was addressing reassuring words to the latest aspirant for the presidency, the young Barack Obama. ‘We marched, we sat in, we went to jail … We got us out of Egypt, you could say.