Browse all reviews
Statelessness: A Modern History / Mira L. Siegelberg
Review Date: 27 November 2020
Mira Siegelberg’s important monograph retrieves and explores the debates in a range of different forums on a subject of fundamental significance: how, in the author’s words, ‘the problem of statelessness informed theories of rights, sovereignty, international legal order, and cosmopolitan justice, theories developed when the conceptual and political contours of the modern interstate order were being worked out, against the background of some of the most…
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.
Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies: Wealth, Power, and Slavery / P. J. Marshall
Review Date: 22 May 2020
Throughout his lengthy career as a leading historian of 18th-century Britain, Peter Marshall has written extensively on, to quote the title of one of his many books, ‘the making and unmaking of empires,’ and he spent more than a decade editing the correspondence of Edmund Burke.
Medieval Londoners: essays to mark the eightieth birthday of Caroline M. Barron / eds. Elizabeth A. New, Christian Steer
Review Date: 09 January 2020
The Festschrift, usually a gathering of articles composed to honour a scholar on his or her retirement, or to mark a significant anniversary, originated around the beginning of the 20th century, and has become an acknowledged feature of the academic landscape, albeit one rather irregular in its occurrence. Continental Festschriften have sometimes run to several volumes.
US Consular Representation in Britain Since 1790 / Nicholas M. Keegan
Review Date: 12 December 2019
The consular official has often been a derided figure in the historiography of foreign services, often seen as uneducated, involved in commerce, and corrupt, perhaps personified in the figure of ‘Charles Fortnum’ in Graham Greene’s spy novel The Honorary Consul.(1) Such criticisms were often levelled at consuls. Nonetheless, some scholars argue that the consular system of representation predated that of permanent ambassadors by almost 2,000 years.
Henry VII’s New Men and the Making of Tudor England / Steven Gunn
Review Date: 01 June 2017
As Professor Gunn observes in his foreword, this book has been a long time coming: first mooted in fact in 1985 (a very suitable date). This has had two significant consequences which I shall discuss sequentially.First, the time-lapse has meant that Professor Gunn has produced a book of breathtaking scholarship and thoroughness.
Voices of Conscience: Royal Confessors and Political Counsel in Seventeenth-Century Spain and France / Nicole Reinhardt
Review Date: 11 May 2017
As suggested by its subtitle, Nicole Reinhardt's fine new book undertakes a double mission. On the one hand, this is a study of a specific practice and the men who participated in it. Like other Catholics, the kings of 17th-century Spain and France were expected regularly to undergo the sacrament of confession, acknowledging their sins, accepting a priest's criticisms and admonitions, repenting, and finally receiving absolution.
Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648-1725 / Jan Hennings
Review Date: 20 April 2017
Complementing the growing academic interest in pre-modern diplomatic ceremonial, Jan Hennings’ Russia and Courtly Europe explores the relationship between Russia and Europe beyond the traditional portrayal of political incompatibility and clash of cultures from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) until the end of Peter I’s reign in 1725.
Manuscripts Online: Written Culture 1000-1500 – DIGITAL RESOURCE / ed. Orietta Da Rold
Review Date: 12 January 2017
Manuscripts Online: Written Culture 1000–1500 is an online gateway to digitised primary sources on medieval written culture. The website collects existing resources behind an interface similar to that of a library catalogue.
On the Fringes of Diplomacy: Influences on British Foreign Policy, 1800-1945 / eds. Anthony Best, John Fisher
Review Date: 01 February 2012
As a field, diplomatic history is not generally known for its conceptual adventurousness. To resort to stereotypes, if representatives of the historical profession were invited to a party, the diplomatic historian would be the stiff, bespectacled man in a suit examining his host’s bookshelves in the corner while the cultural historians smoked weed in the kitchen.