Browse all reviews
The Strange Survival of Liberal Britain: Politics and Power Before the First World War / Vernon Bogdanor
Review Date: 28 February 2023
This magnum opus of 842 pages, plus notes, takes the reader from 1895, and the politics of Unionism, to the onset of the First World War. It deals with every subject a reader interested to understand modern Britain might want to know, from domestic questions like the rise of the Labour Party to imperial issues like Britain’s complex relationship with Japan.
The Indentured Archipelago: Experiences of Indian Labour in Mauritius and Fiji, 1871–1916 / Reshaad Durgahee
Review Date: 27 January 2023
Between 1834 and 1917, some 1.37 million Indian migrants travelled the length and breadth of the British Empire under contracts of indentureship.
Settlers at the End of Empire: Race and the Politics of Migration in South Africa, Rhodesia, and the United Kingdom / Jean P. Smith
Review Date: 29 November 2022
The image that Jean Smith opens her book with is an apt one. A 1969 Evening Standard cartoon depicting a South Asian family and a white British family passing each other on a beach, a boat pulled ashore in the background with the caption, ‘Agreed then, you have 14 Upper Pinner Road, we take the boat, and the best of British luck to you!’ (p. 2).
The Crimean War and its Afterlife: Making Modern Britain / Lara Kriegel
Review Date: 04 November 2022
Writing in Macmillan’s Magazine a few years after the denouement of the Crimean War, Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s School Days, declared that this conflict’s ‘drama ... will never fail deeply to move the heart of England, at least until the grave has closed over our generation.
Authority and Power in the Medieval Church, c. 1000–c. 1500 / ed. Thomas W. Smith
Review Date: 21 October 2022
Books that manage to encapsulate something essential but often elusive quickly turn indispensable for scholars. Authority and Power in the Medieval Church is one such volume. Expertly edited by Thomas W. Smith, the collection of essays tackles one of the most profound issues of studying the Medieval Church—the interplay between authority and power as understood, articulated, and exercised by ecclesiastic actors and received by their surroundings.
Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918 / Katja Hoyer
Review Date: 07 October 2022
The publicity surrounding the German empire has not been good lately, to put it mildly. In August 2020, several hundred members of the far-right Reichsbürger (‘Reich Citizens’) group tried to storm the German parliament building in Berlin. They did so while holding the red, white, and black flags of Imperial Germany.
Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching / Jarvis R. Givens
Review Date: 23 September 2022
Born in 1865 during the last years of the American Civil War, Carter H. Barnett was a teacher and the principal of Frederick Douglass School in Huntington, West Virginia, where he edited the West Virginia Spokesman and contributed to the state’s Black teacher association.
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.
Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans / Nathaniel Morris
Review Date: 12 August 2022
The period 1910-40 was tumultuous in Mexican history. The armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) was followed by fragmented attempts by Revolutionary politicians to assert Federal control and modernisation in the face of military rebellion, resistance to social reform, two major religious revolts known as the Cristiada, and ongoing, albeit often unremarked, agency from Mexico’s indigenous populations.
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).