Browse all reviews
Milk / eds. Honor Beddard, Marianne Templeton
Review Date: 30 September 2023
The very first displays in Milk, a major Wellcome Collection exhibition, convey the strangeness of a food we all know well. Entitled 'the story of milk', the opening room sparks reflection on the oddness of the narratives and images imprinted on a deceptively simple part of our diet.
Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multi-Racial Jewish Family / Laura Arnold Leibman
Review Date: 25 August 2023
Sometimes (not often enough) an academic book comes along that ticks all the boxes: it is based on thorough research, spanning archives on different continents, engaging with rich and varied source materials; it is held together by a tight set of themes; it is written in beautiful prose.
The Strange Survival of Liberal Britain: Politics and Power Before the First World War / Vernon Bogdanor
Review Date: 28 February 2023
This magnum opus of 842 pages, plus notes, takes the reader from 1895, and the politics of Unionism, to the onset of the First World War. It deals with every subject a reader interested to understand modern Britain might want to know, from domestic questions like the rise of the Labour Party to imperial issues like Britain’s complex relationship with Japan.
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.
The Crimean War and its Afterlife: Making Modern Britain / Lara Kriegel
Review Date: 04 November 2022
Writing in Macmillan’s Magazine a few years after the denouement of the Crimean War, Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s School Days, declared that this conflict’s ‘drama ... will never fail deeply to move the heart of England, at least until the grave has closed over our generation.
Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918 / Katja Hoyer
Review Date: 07 October 2022
The publicity surrounding the German empire has not been good lately, to put it mildly. In August 2020, several hundred members of the far-right Reichsbürger (‘Reich Citizens’) group tried to storm the German parliament building in Berlin. They did so while holding the red, white, and black flags of Imperial Germany.
Public Opinion in Early Modern Scotland, c.1560-1707 / Karin Bowie
Review Date: 25 March 2022
This is Karin Bowie’s second book about the history of public opinion in Scotland. Her first, in 2007, examined the period 1699-1707 in depth, covering the debate leading up to the Union of Parliaments.(1) The present book deals with a longer period, and has no single focus like the Union.
Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (Dis)united Kingdom / eds. Naomi Lloyd-Jones, Margaret M. Scull
Review Date: 11 March 2022
Four Nations Approaches, as the editors acknowledge from the start, follows in the footsteps of a very solid tradition of edited collections, brought about by the rise of ‘New British History’ in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 / Judith Surkis
Review Date: 04 June 2021
In recent decades historians, postcolonial theorists and feminist scholars have demonstrated how, in a variety of geographical settings, gendered stereotypes supported the conquest and domination of overseas territories by European colonial regimes.
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.