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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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Review Date: 10 March 2016

Angela Woollacott’s new book is a good example of the ways in which Australian historians are being influenced by recent approaches to British imperial history. Just as importantly it shows how the interests of scholars working in these hitherto largely separate fields have converged.

Review Date: 25 September 2014

Posted up on my fridge door is one of those certificates with which any parent of primary school aged children over the past decade or so would be familiar – accessorised with stars and stickers and smiley faces, the award acknowledges one of the kids for their ‘Awesome Effort for Remaining Open to Continuous Learning’.

Review Date: 17 October 2013

The title of this book, Antarctica: a Biography, might cause some initial confusion but this is rectified by the publisher’s puff on the front inside flap of the dust jacket where it is described as ‘the first major international history of this forbidding continent’.

Review Date: 30 May 2013

Military men, as histories of the Royal Navy in particular have shown, tend to be interested in controlling sanitary conditions. Among seamen, maintaining health was always essential otherwise ships could not remain at sea. The main theme of Dr. Katherine Foxhall’s interesting book is voyages to Australia.