Browse all reviews
Feminisms: A Global History / Lucy Delap
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Review Date: 09 April 2021
The historian Lucy Delap, author of The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (CUP, 2007), winner of the 2008 Women’s History Network Prize, has now published another book—Feminisms: A Global History (Penguin in the UK, and the University of Chicago Press in the US). This book, at nearly 400 pages, is a truly global history, dealing with 250 years of feminisms.
Mr. Smith Goes to China: Three Scots in the Making of Britain’s Global Empire / Jessica Hanser
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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.
Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World / ed. Paula Findlen
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Review Date: 28 November 2019
Francis Bacon’s unfinished utopian novel The New Atlantis is often invoked in scholarship about early modern scientific projects. With its ‘Merchants of Light’ who gather information and bring it back to the House of Solomon, The New Atlantis seems to capture perfectly the aspirations of a group of European scholars who saw themselves as reassessing the bases of knowledge by revaluing personal experience.
Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c.1500–1820 / Beverly Lemire
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Review Date: 11 October 2018
In Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 movie Bend it like Beckham, the football-loving principal protagonist Jess Bhamra, daughter of Punjabi parents living in Hounslow, is upbraided by her mother for being too keen on sports to be able to make ‘aloo gobi’ properly, which gives this dish the appearance of being a key component in the repertoire of any suitably marriageable Punjabi girl at the start of the…
Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System / Lee Grieveson
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Review Date: 11 October 2018
Lee Grieveson’s bold historical analysis of the relationship between media and capital is nothing if not timely. As I write, a new wave of consolidation among traditional telecommunication and media companies in America is concentrating unprecedented wealth and power in the hands of an ever-narrowing elite.
Armageddon and Paranoia: The Nuclear Confrontation / Rodric Braithwaite
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Review Date: 24 May 2018
Of all former government officials who have turned to the pen, Sir Rodric Braithwaite should arguably be considered one of the more welcome additions. Following three previous books focusing on the Soviet Union and Russia, he has recently turned his attention to the issue of nuclear weapons and the precarious deterrence which has kept them from being used in warfare since 1945.
War: An Enquiry / A. C. Grayling
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Review Date: 07 December 2017
Media, with alarming regularity, reports nuclear threats from North Korea and President Trump’s rhetorical belligerency; Russian and Chinese irredentism conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan, across the Sahel region of Africa and Yemen; not to forget the asymmentry of terrorism.
Legacies of British Slave-Ownership / eds. Nick Draper, Rachel Lang, Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington, Kristy Warren
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Review Date: 14 September 2017
In 1833, after centuries of resistance and rebellion by enslaved people, decades of popularly-mobilized antislavery protests, and years of economic struggle on colonial plantations, England’s Parliament initiated the process of slave emancipation in the British Empire.