Browse all reviews
Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948 / Kevin Grant
Review Date: 29 January 2021
Historians of the British Empire have long recognized the hunger strike—famously embraced by suffragettes in Britain, and by nationalists in Ireland and India—as a transnational tactic of democratic, anti-colonial resistance. Kevin Grant’s thoroughly researched and conceptually sophisticated study confirms that ‘British transimperial network[s]’ were ‘critically important in the spread of hunger in protest around the world’ (p. 3).
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.
Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan / Susan C. Townsend, Simon Gunn
Review Date: 19 June 2020
In Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan, Simon Gunn and Susan Townsend have written the equivalent of three books.
The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India / Amelia Bonea
Review Date: 10 August 2017
Amelia Bonea has presented a timely book that combines the mechanisms of technology and news making in critically meaningful ways to present the production of printed news as contingent, variable and even accidental.
Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919-1970 / Stephen Lovell
Review Date: 10 March 2016
Early in his study of radio in the USSR, Stephen Lovell quotes Rick Altman: ‘new technologies are always born nameless’ (p. 2). New technologies, that is to say, do not arrive with a self-evident purpose, and are understood initially relative to what already exists.
Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture / Ran Zwigenberg
Review Date: 20 August 2015
We have a sense of living on in our children and their children, an endless biological chain of being. Or in our work, small or large, in our influence upon others; or in something we call spiritual attainment, some sort of religious idea or belief; or in the idea of eternal nature, which all societies symbolize in some way.
Technology and Rural Change in Eastern India, 1830-1980 / Smritikumar Sarkar
Review Date: 30 April 2015
'Big’ technologies like the railways, the electric telegraph and the steamer seem to attract ‘big’ narratives of change. Many scholars have described their effects on the fabric of society and on everyday life as ‘revolutionary’. The railways, the telegraph and the steamer provided new avenues for the political and socio-economic empowerment of some social groups, while proving detrimental to the development of others.
Soviet Medicine: Culture, Practice, and Science / eds. Frances Bernstein, Christopher Burton, Dan Healey
Review Date: 01 July 2011
In 1990 Susan Gross Solomon and John F. Hutchinson published Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia(1), an edited volume that has served as a touchstone for scholars of medicine, gender, revolution, culture, professionalization, economics, and state power. Frances L. Bernstein, Christopher Burton, and Dan Healey call to mind this forbearer in the sweep and scope of their Soviet Medicine: Culture, Practice and Science.