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.
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.
Total recall: complete and remembered lives / Thomas E. Keefe
Review Date: 16 October 2020
The Complete Lives of Camp People by Rudolf Mrázek is part of the Theory in Form series by Duke University Press, which ‘seeks new work that addresses the politics of life and death’. (1) Set in the Dutch Boven Digoel isolation camp and the Theresienstadt Nazi ghetto, Mrázek’s work is well suited for the series.
Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution / Kevin W. Fogg
Review Date: 11 September 2020
In Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution, historian Kevin W. Fogg argues that the historiography of the Indonesian revolution and war of independence (1945–1949) urgently needs a broader perspective that takes Islam’s influence on both the grassroots and political elite levels seriously. Present historiography is strongly influenced by the popular secular nationalist narrative of Indonesian history.
Insanity and Immigration Control in New Zealand and Australia, 1860–1930 / Jennifer Kain
Review Date: 30 January 2020
People down on their luck fleeing to the colonies on the first available ship is a mainstay of 19th century fiction. It was a convenient way for an author to either get rid of an unnecessary character, or to bring a surprise new person into the narrative mix with dramatic effect.
Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Colonial Australia, 1830–1890 / Jessie Mitchell, Ann Curthoys
Review Date: 31 October 2019
Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell have written an ambitious, detailed and wide-ranging book about government and Indigenous Australians in colonial Australia. They ask a number of questions about the connections between the two, including how the displacement of Indigenous Australians affected the ways in which colonists articulated their own claims to citizenship within Britain’s imperial system (claims, of course, that were already highly gendered).
Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds / Anne Salmond
Review Date: 13 September 2018
Dame Anne Salmond is one of New Zealand’s most respected public anthropologists and historians. No one has so effectively and lucidly crossed over between the two disciplines in New Zealand scholarship. Her interpretation of New Zealand’s past has had a wide and receptive audience and her now extensive body of work has been immensely important role in helping to normalise being Māori in a non-Māori world.
Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity / Rebe Taylor
Review Date: 19 October 2017
On the face of it Rebe Taylor’s Into the Heart of Tasmania is an intriguing, but essentially straight forward history of one of the many curious connections that define Britain’s imperial and post imperial history. Taylor’s study focuses on Ernest Westlake, an archaeologist cum anthropologist and his journey to Tasmania in the early 1900s to collect the archaeological remains of the island’s Aboriginal communities.
The World, the Flesh and the Devil: the Life and Opinions of Samuel Marsden in England and the Antipodes, 1765-1838 / Andrew Sharp
Review Date: 24 August 2017
Samuel Marsden was a Yorkshireman of humble origins (as his detractors liked to point out). After a brief spell at Cambridge, in 1793 he was appointed the second official Anglican chaplain in the recently established convict colony of New South Wales. In 1814, he took the Gospel to New Zealand.
Dancing with the King: The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864-1885 / Michael Belgrave
Review Date: 19 July 2017
After the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi on 6 February 1840, competing British and Maori sovereignties were established in New Zealand due to the contradictory English and Maori translations of the agreement.