Skip to content

Browse all reviews

The Crimean War and its Afterlife: Making Modern Britain / Lara Kriegel

No image found

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

No image found

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.


Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans / Nathaniel Morris

No image found

Review Date: 12 August 2022

The period 1910-40 was tumultuous in Mexican history. The armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) was followed by fragmented attempts by Revolutionary politicians to assert Federal control and modernisation in the face of military rebellion, resistance to social reform, two major religious revolts known as the Cristiada, and ongoing, albeit often unremarked, agency from Mexico’s indigenous populations.


Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour / Sarah Goldsmith

No image found

Review Date: 21 May 2021

Englishmen have always travelled. According to French Abbé Le Blanc, they travelled more than other people of Europe because `they look upon their isle as a sort of prison; and the first use they make of their liberty is to get out of it'.(1) For young elite males who travelled to France and Italy for up to five years, the Grand Tour was, most historians agree, ‘intended to provide the final education and polish’.


A Promised Land / Barack Obama

No image found

Review Date: 12 February 2021

‘We are the Moses generation.’ Dr Otis Moss, a veteran of the civil rights movement, friend of Martin Luther King and former adviser to Jimmy Carter was addressing reassuring words to the latest aspirant for the presidency, the young Barack Obama. ‘We marched, we sat in, we went to jail … We got us out of Egypt, you could say.


Statelessness: A Modern History / Mira L. Siegelberg

No image found

Review Date: 27 November 2020

Mira Siegelberg’s important monograph retrieves and explores the debates in a range of different forums on a subject of fundamental significance: how, in the author’s words, ‘the problem of statelessness informed theories of rights, sovereignty, international legal order, and cosmopolitan justice, theories developed when the conceptual and political contours of the modern interstate order were being worked out, against the background of some of the most…


Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution / Kevin W. Fogg

No image found

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.


Empire and epidemic / Amina Marzouk Chouchene

No image found

Review Date: 24 July 2020

Covid-19 has fuelled widespread panic across the world. Every day there are new cases of infected people and deaths. We became accustomed to seeing crowds of people emptying stores from all necessary provisions. In most discussions, there are constant references to various forms of panic surrounding Covid-19. Headlines such as “Do not panic,” “Remain calm,” “Be smart but don’t panic” became ubiquitous.


How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution 1500-1800 / Jonathan Scott

No image found

Review Date: 17 July 2020

Jonathan Scott, Professor of History at the University of Auckland, in his recent book, How the Old World Ended (2019), has provided an intellectual bridge between the early modern period and the modern world, which was born out of the Industrial Revolution.


Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation / Konstantina Zanou

No image found

Review Date: 03 July 2020

How did the world of nation-states come about? What happened to the world of empires that preceded it? How did the transition take place and how inevitable was it? These may seem (and indeed are) old questions.