Browse all reviews
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.
Provincializing Global History: Money, Ideas, and Things in the Languedoc, 1680-1830 / James Livesey
Review Date: 06 May 2022
James Livesey’s Provincializing Global History: Money, Ideas, and Things in the Languedoc, 1680-1830 examines the ways significant knowledge shifts amongst ordinary men and women tied into, and helped create and solidify, deep economic change in the long eighteenth century. Part of making that argument for Livesey entails tying changes in culture in a specific place, here Languedoc, to broader economic development and transformation.
Animal City: The Domestication of America / Andrew A. Robichaud
Review Date: 13 November 2020
Late June 2020 was an extraordinary time to be reading Animal City. COVID-19, a zoonotic disease, had already killed around 130,000 people in the United States, with urban areas suffering the highest death rates. In New York City alone, 30,000 people had died.
Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society / Cécile Vidal
Review Date: 11 September 2020
In Caribbean New Orleans Cécile Vidal has brought together a prodigious volume and range of archival research in what is the most detailed social history of the city during the French period.
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.
Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy: Transforming Nature in Early New England / Strother E. Roberts
Review Date: 10 July 2020
Environmental history is one of the most dynamic, innovative, and though-provoking areas of current academic enquiry, and the connection between environmental change, imperialism, and expanding global economies has recently received increased scholarly attention.[1] Building on the foundational works of historians such as William Cronon, Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy explores the intricate relationships between ecological change and economic expansion in the early modern British-Atlantic.
The Grim Years: Settling South Carolina, 1670–1720 /
Review Date: 10 July 2020
John J. Navin offers a new account of the first half century of settlement in the colony of South Carolina, which he characterizes as The Grim Years. By the mid-18th century South Carolina would become the wealthiest British colony in mainland North America, but in recent years scholars long familiar with its distinctive plantation system have turned more attention to these earlier, formative decades.
Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700-1830 / Briony McDonagh
Review Date: 25 October 2018
Briony McDonagh estimates that over 10 per cent of land in Georgian Britain was owned by female landowners. Assuming her sample of 250,000 acres to be representative of broader patterns and trends, McDonagh surmises that ‘somewhere in excess of 3 million acres in England were owned by women in the later eighteenth century and more than 6 million acres in Great Britain as a whole’ (p.
The Global History of Organic Farming / Gregory A. Barton
Review Date: 11 October 2018
50 or 60 years ago the market for organic food (as now defined) was vanishingly small, less than 0.1 per cent of the market in European countries, according to one estimate.(1) Organic farming at that time was derided by most farmers in the UK as a matter of ‘muck [i.e.farmyard manure] and mystery’.
Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms : the Roots of Impermanence / Maxim Bolt
Review Date: 11 August 2016
Grootplaas, a produce farm that specialises in citrus and numbers around 900 hectares in size, is the subject of Maxim Bolt’s latest monograph, Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms: The Roots of Impermanence.