Browse all reviews
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.
Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s / eds. Jill Pellew, Miles Taylor
Review Date: 08 January 2021
The most remarkable feature of the mould-breaking expansion of higher education that took place across the world in the 1960s was the foundation of some 200 entirely new universities.
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.
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.
Remaking Policy: Scale, Pace, and Political Strategy in Health Care Reform / Carolyn Hughes Tuohy
Review Date: 24 October 2019
These days, expenditure on health amounts on average to some 9 per cent of gross domestic product in the prosperous nations of the West. Whether through direct taxation, social security, social health insurance or private means, it’s a substantial amount. It’s no surprise then, that the politics of health care loom large amongst governments’ priorities, nor that those politics should be fiercely contested.
A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649 / David Rollison
Review Date: 01 June 2010
David Rollison has written a remarkable work of social and political history: vertiginously ambitious, A Commonwealth of the People showcases England’s constitutional and economic development from the 11th to the 17th century within world histories of nationalism, democratization, and globalization. ‘My subject’, he writes, ‘is the emergence of a “civilization”’ (p. 16).