ARTICLES

City Leagues, Mercenary Companies, and Regional Recruitment in Late Medieval Tuscany

Michael Paul Martoccio

Pages 1303–1345

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac257

Abstract: This article discusses the anti-mercenary city-leagues, or taglie, of Renaissance Tuscany. Anti-mercenary leagues were coalitions of cities tied together for protection against foreign companies of French, English, German, and Hungarian mercenaries. While these leagues flourished in the middle of the fourteenth century (1347–96) among the cities of Tuscany, taglie often failed militarily or collapsed after only a few months. Earlier scholarship has blamed these failures on military competition among Italian cities and an incipient culture of deception. By examining diplomatic correspondence, legal statutes and texts, and army musters, this article shows instead how the taglie were in fact corporate associations (societas) that provided not only military protection, but financial co-ordination, social control, and a common ideology of urban autonomy.

New England in the Royalist Imagination, 1637–89

Samuel Fullerton

Pages 1346–1376

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac213

Abstract: This essay examines representations of New England puritanism in royalist print and manuscript polemic during the English Revolution of 1642–1660 and beyond. Royalist attitudes toward the North American godly colonies have been largely overlooked by modern scholars, who continue to privilege New England’s significance in intra-parliamentarian religious debates over its impact on the events of the civil war itself. As a result, they have neglected a substantial canon of hostile anti-puritan royalist literature that identified colonial puritanism, along with other malevolent international godly influences, as a horrifying example of the future awaiting old England if Charles I’s parliamentarian enemies were to triumph. As a pre-eminent puritan sanctuary from which some godly rebels had been recruited to perpetuate the civil war in Britain and to which domestic parliamentarians later allegedly intended to flee once their uprising had succeeded, New England thus occupied an important place in the royalist political imagination. Although royalist attitudes toward the American puritan colonies waxed and waned in significance during the revolutionary decades, and while New Englanders themselves may not have paid considerable attention to hostile royalist commentary, interested English readers and domestic parliamentarian polemicists alike paid a great deal of attention to the anti-colonial thrust of mid-century cavalier print. Moreover, certain aspects of royalist anti-New England rhetoric lived on to provide later anti-puritan commentators with a convenient explanation for the ongoing hostility of colonial puritans toward Stuart rule for decades following the Restoration.

Rethinking British Militarism before the First World War: The Case of An Englishman’s Home (1909)

Christian K Melby

Pages 1377–1401

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac258

Abstract: British pre-First World War culture has often been described as militaristic. An Englishman’s Home, Guy du Maurier’s 1909 play about a German invasion of Britain, forms part of this picture. Yet the message of the play was not clear-cut, and Edwardian society reacted as much with bemusement and criticism to the idea that Britain could be invaded as with militaristic fervour. This article investigates the reactions to du Maurier’s play, and sets it in the context of the wider invasion-scare and future-war genre, a popular element in late Victorian and Edwardian culture. The play was quickly linked with a recruitment drive for the newly organised Territorial Force, and its success has been interpreted as a sign of increased British uncertainty, militarism and xenophobia. However, the play was also mocked, its success as a recruitment vehicle was uncertain, and the audience interpreted the play in different and often contradictory ways. The article offers a reinterpretation and a critical assessment of the pre-war period, showing that Edwardian society was not as militaristic or fearful of invasion as has previously been argued. It presents a new interpretation of invasion-scare and future-war fiction, and a new analysis of the question of pre-war militarism in Britain.

Public Health and Prostitution in Revolutionary Petrograd, 1917–1918

Siobhán Hearne

Pages 1402–1428

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac214

Abstract: The February revolution of 1917 brought about the complete collapse of the tsarist autocracy and offered multiple possibilities for the reorganisation of society based on new principles of democracy, equality and citizenship. Amid societal reconfiguration, the tsarist system for the regulation of prostitution was repealed in July 1917. After this, the Provisional Government and later the Bolshevik Party looked for new methods to prevent the spread of venereal diseases (VD), which had reached epidemic proportions. The regulation of prostitution had been the tsarist government’s main form of VD control and it was frequently attacked by commentators across the political spectrum on both medical and moral grounds in the decades preceding February 1917. Therefore, its abolition was a political project that was interconnected with broader discourses of liberation and efforts to rid society of the unwanted remnants of the old regime. Physicians rallied around the issue of prostitution, and its eternal bedfellow VD, as part of their broader efforts to dominate the public health agenda of the new revolutionary state. In the Russian capital of Petrograd, the February revolution did not disrupt well-established class or gender stereotypes, which had profound implications for the way in which medical professionals and the police dealt with the issues of prostitution and VD. This article examines how experts, state bureaucrats and the police approached prostitution and VD in Petrograd throughout 1917 and 1918. In doing so, it traces continuities in administrative-bureaucratic regimes and informal policing practices across collapsing regimes and governments in revolutionary Russia.

‘Alien Seamen’ or ‘Imperial Family’? Race, Belonging and British Sailors of Colour in the Royal Navy, 1939–47

Frances Houghton

Pages 1429–1461

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac216

Abstract: In October 1939, the British Government lifted a formal ‘colour bar’ to military service for the duration of hostilities. Yet despite the state’s rhetoric of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic ‘People’s War’, racial discrimination continued to pervade Britain’s wartime armed forces. In particular, the Royal Navy (RN) fiercely resisted opening up naval service to eligible British men of colour. Providing a fresh critical perspective on wartime Admiralty records, this article establishes that the Second World War catalysed a significant shift from a codified de jure structure of racial exclusion in the Navy, to a more informal system that was rooted in a complex and diffuse web of de facto racist recruiting practices. It demonstrates the ways in which, between the temporary removal of the formal ‘colour bar’ to naval service in 1939 and its permanent abolition in 1947, the RN enacted a series of complicated covert mechanisms that were designed to shut out men of colour by stealth as far as possible. The article also scrutinises a number of letters of protest that were written to the Admiralty on behalf of Black West Indian, Maltese and Anglo-Indian individuals who were denied entry to the Service. These letter-writers collectively sought to expose the Navy’s hidden racial discrimination and to challenge, with varying degrees of individual success, the naval institution’s continued practices of racial exclusion. Overall, this article ascertains how complex and contested meanings of ‘race’, national ‘belonging’ and ‘Britishness’ were invested in the Royal Navy during the Second World War.

‘Take Power—Vote Liberal’: Jeremy Thorpe, the 1974 Liberal Revival, and the Politics of 1970s Britain

Peter Sloman

Pages 1462–1492

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac260

Abstract

The Liberal Party’s 1972–4 revival under Jeremy Thorpe placed it at the heart of political debate in 1970s Britain—a period marked by inflation, strikes, and recurrent talk of political ‘crisis’. This article explores the evolution of Liberal policy, strategy, and support between 1970 and 1979, and argues that Thorpe and his colleagues were agents as well as beneficiaries of electoral dealignment. As long-standing critics of class politics, Liberals were well placed to exploit voters’ frustrations with Edward Heath and Harold Wilson and to articulate demands for a more collaborative and participatory style of government. Thorpe’s populist critique of the two-party system was backed up by a distinctive plan for economic and political renewal, in which social, industrial, and constitutional reforms would give governments the legitimacy to make incomes policies work. These ideas resonated strongly in the two 1974 general elections, but the Liberals’ new-found support was relatively shallow, and Thorpe’s appeal was waning even before the Norman Scott affair forced his 1976 resignation. The 1970s Liberal revival nevertheless laid important political foundations which the SDP/Liberal Alliance would build on after 1981, as it sought to articulate a centrist alternative to Thatcherism.

BOOK REVIEWS

Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History, by Kyle Harper

Samuel Cohn, JR

Pages 1495–1497

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac174

Extract

This is a prodigious historical synthesis. Reaching back before the birth of Homo sapiens, it glides through pre-history to documentary history as late as our present struggles with COVID-19 and further pathogenic forces on the horizon. This history has not taken the usual path of concentrating on epidemics; rather, it integrates numerous endemic diseases with epidemics and spends more space on endemic killers, which have weighed more heavily on human populations, from hunters and gatherers to the present, than the more studied pandemics. I know of no wide-ranging historical work to have so meticulously integrated the epidemic with the endemic.

To examine the long story of how humans acquired their ‘distinctive disease pool’, Kyle Harper focuses his book on four ‘transformative energy revolutions’. The first is fire and begins well before Homo sapiens’ rise with australopithecines in Africa around four million years ago. The second is the Neolithic Revolution of farming, c.10,000 years ago. The third begins with Christopher Columbus and ‘regular crossing of the Atlantic Ocean’ (p. 8), and the fourth concerns the harnessing of fossil fuels that extracted ‘eons of congealed sunlight’ from coal, oil and gas. One timely strand is Harper’s charting of new evidence on the interactions between humans and their parasites derived from the work of geneticists, bioarchaeologists, physical anthropologists and other scholars over the past three decades. These scientific endeavours have created two new archives: ancient DNA of pathogens, and phylogenetic trees constructed from genome sequencing of present-day humans, animals and plants.

The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300–525 CE, by Robin Fleming

Thomas Pickles

Pages 1495–1497

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac175

Extract

An arresting observation introduces Robin Fleming’s fascinating study of the ending of Roman Britain: ‘No other period in Britain’s prehistory or history witnessed the loss of so many classes of once-common objects, and these disappearances triggered fundamental changes in the structures of everyday life’ (p. 6). Of course, the visible material and social differences between Roman and post-Roman Britain have attracted a lot of previous attention. What marks out this original study is its focus, not on the causes of the ending of Roman Britain, or why quotidian objects disappeared, but on how they were used and what implications the disappearances had.

Indeed, the model for how Roman Britain worked, and why it ended, may be familiar. In line with influential structural analyses, the Roman tax state is seen as the key to economic, social and material complexity, and its unravelling. Chapter One—‘The World the Annona Made’—presents a stylish, up-to-date overview of how the tax system produced that complexity, developed directly from the evidence, and a summary of the idea of ‘systems collapse’ in the fourth and fifth centuries. What Robin Fleming does is take up where this model leaves off, identifying how the objects that disappeared were bound up with social relationships and practices, and confronting the challenges their disappearances posed.

A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly

Verena Krebs

Pages 1497–1498

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac173

Extract

This cohesive volume offers a comprehensive yet highly readable introduction to the ‘medieval’ history of Ethiopia and Eritrea, covering a broad range of subjects from the seventh to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The editor, Samantha Kelly, has brought together more than a dozen leading scholars, international experts in their respective fields, whose articles explore the religious, political and cultural history of the Christian, Muslim and local-religious realms of the North-East African highland plateau and adjacent areas, as well as the history of women, diasporas and trade in and out of the region.

Kelly’s introduction clearly sketches out the aims and content of the volume; it introduces the reader to the region’s specific historical and historiographical terminology and draws attention to several threads running through the book, among them the centrality of the region’s links with the eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea area. The very first chapter, by Marie-Laure Derat, casts the history of the Christian kingdom(s) in the post-Aksumite and Zagwe eras, and thus the seventh to late thirteenth centuries, in an entirely new light, significantly revising long-held scholarship beliefs on the ethnic identity, territorial anchorage and even chronology of Zagwe rule. Deresse Ayenachew subsequently traces the territorial and political expansion of the Solomonic dynasty from 1270 CE to the mid-sixteenth century, delineating the development and adaption of the Christian kingdom’s administrative structure, and how the evolution of courtly and military offices enabled the Solomonic kings to govern their highly diverse and geographically challenging realm. Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch contribute two chapters to the volume: the first, on the Sultanates of medieval Ethiopia, combines the findings of recent archaeological research with new readings of textual sources. It offers a cohesive view of the Islamic history of the region between the ninth and sixteenth centuries, tracing two different axes of Islamisation, shedding light on the different polities’ political organisation, and their conflicts and connections with their Christian neighbours. François-Xavier Fauvelle, meanwhile, uses recent archaeological findings to shine a light onto the political and economic history of the local-religious societies that resisted conversion to monotheistic faiths, from the regions of Šäwa to Damot.

Social Inequality in Early Medieval Europe: Local Societies and Beyond, ed. Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo

Shami Ghosh

Pages 1498–1500

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac172

Extract

That inequality was common within medieval society is a well-established fact. However, it has been studied mostly in connection with the differences between quite discrete social strata: landlords and peasants, guild masters and apprentices, wealthy householders and servants. Less attention has been paid to stratification within each of these layers of medieval society, though it has become apparent from the research of the past few decades that rural society was, at least in the later Middle Ages, indeed quite differentiated. For the earlier period, despite the insights provided by careful studies of local societies by scholars such as Wendy Davies and Chris Wickham, most research has tended in general to revert to a binary—only slightly shaded with grey—of landowners and their more or less dependent tenants. The past decade or so has seen a growth of interest in the problem of social inequality, and a number of research projects have aimed to provide a more nuanced view of village societies and the differences within them. The volume under review is a major contribution that challenges the binary view of early medieval society on the basis of rigorous empirical research using both the traditional tools of the historian—written materials—and the material record and methods of archaeology; and it also provides a theoretical and methodological stimulus for new ways of approaching early medieval rural societies.

Illuminating the Middle Ages: Tributes to Prof. John Lowden from his Students, Friends and Colleagues, ed. Laura Cleaver, Alixe Bovey and Lucy Donkin

Matthew Holford

Pages 1500–1502

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac169

Extract

This large and handsome volume, edited by Laura Cleaver, Alixe Bovey and Lucy Donkin and produced to the usual high standards of the series, brings together twenty-eight of John Lowden’s students, colleagues and collaborators. Their essays span the period from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance and are organised chronologically rather than thematically. The result is a stimulating but eclectic volume which most readers, perhaps, will dip into rather than read at length.

The contributors bring to bear a range of approaches. Some focus on manuscript history and provenance: Frederica Law-Turner explores the origin and travels of a thirteenth-century Bible from St Augustine’s Canterbury, now at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, while a thought-provoking essay by Kathryn Gerry looks at composite manuscripts from St Albans Abbey, asking why separate booklets came to be bound together in the later Middle Ages. Three essays address broader debates in art history. Kathleen Doyle considers the vexed question of Cistercian attitudes to manuscript illumination in the context of large-format manuscripts from Clairvaux written around the second quarter of the twelfth century. Martin Kauffmann explores changing relationships between text and image through the captions provided in illustrated copies of Matthew Paris’s saints’ lives. And the stimulating final essay by Jack Hartnell engages with the global turn in art history and medieval studies by exploring anatomical images in three very different contexts: a fifteenth-century Hebrew manuscript, a Tang dynasty scroll from Dunhuang, and a Mesoamerican ‘book of fate’.

Inscribing Knowledge in the Medieval Book: The Power of Paratexts, ed. Rosalind Brown-Grant, Patrizia Carmassi, Gisela Drossbach, Anne D. Hedeman, Victoria Turner and Iolanda Ventura

Richard Gameson

Pages 1502–1503

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac170

Extract

This portentously titled volume, the fruit of two workshops and a conference, reflects the wish ‘to gain a fuller understanding of how key paratextual elements such as rubrics, tables of contents, glosses, marginal annotations and additions, images, and prefaces operate within the parameters of works that disseminated a specific body of knowledge in the course of the Middle Ages’ (p. xviii). The range of text types discussed is broad, embracing law, science, medicine, the liberal arts, Christian allegory, the ancient classics, history, travel, romance and liturgy. So, too, is the range of paratextual elements considered—prefaces, diagrams, tables, imagery, rubrics, formal glosses and readers’ annotations. With the exception of a single contribution on glosses in Carolingian Vergil manuscripts, the focus is on material from the high and late Middle Ages (the innocent reader should be aware that the paratextual elements discussed in these case-studies were present in earlier books). Most of the contributions are illustrated with colour images showing the features under consideration; those that lack pictures (chs 2, 7 and 8) are, in consequence, more difficult to follow—a lapse that is rather ironic in a volume whose contributors make the point that some texts were ‘possibly unintelligible without the accompanying explanatory illustration[s]’ (p. 57).

Reginald of Durham: The Life and Miracles of Saint Godric, Hermit of Finchale, ed. and tr. Margaret Coombe

Nicholas Morton

Pages 1503–1505

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac171

Extract

Speaking as a historian of the crusades, my interest in Godric of Finchale began when I learned that he was at various moments a trader, a hermit, a pilgrim to Jerusalem and a merchant. Such a colourful individual—or at least his hagiographer—must, I thought, surely have some interesting stories to tell. And indeed he does—this fabulous new critical edition and translation of Reginald of Durham’s De Vita Sancti Godrici represents a significant step forward for this important source, which in turn sheds light on a very wide range of issues.

Godric himself was remarkable in many ways. As Margaret Coombe explains in her introduction, he is the only saint from a peasant background to have received a detailed hagiographical work on his life and this marks him out as an individual warranting close scholarly attention. The son of two pious parents, Godric was born and raised on the Norfolk coast where he grew up combing the beach for salvageable goods. He then took up a mercantile profession, rising to become part-owner of a trading vessel. He travelled twice to Jerusalem, returning on one occasion by way of Santiago de Compostela. At one point, he became to steward to a noble household before finally abandoning the pursuit of earthly wealth for the service of God by becoming a hermit at Finchale outside the city of Durham; there he spent the remaining six decades of his life, dying in 1170.

Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland: This Spattered Isle, by Oren Falk

Carolyne Larrington

Pages 1505–1507

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac181

Extract

Medieval Iceland was, according to its sagas, a society riven with feud. Numerous prose narratives composed from the thirteenth century onwards related narratives that focused on feud, set in the centuries from the island’s settlement (around 870) to just after its conversion to Christianity (roughly 1030). These are conventionally known as the ‘sagas of Icelanders’ (Íslendingasögur). During the same period, a further set of sagas was composed, dealing with more recent history, from the mid-twelfth century up until a few decades before the date of composition: these are known as the ‘contemporary sagas’ or samtíðarsögur. Both saga genres derive their narrative material and dramatic impetus from stories of kin-group-based reciprocal violence. Much has been written, by historians, literary scholars, legal historians and anthropologists about the violence apparently endemic in medieval Icelandic society. Can anything new be said about it?

The answer to this question turns out to be an emphatic ‘yes’. This new book, by Oren Falk, takes a fresh look at violence as a phenomenon in the saga corpus. Falk propounds a complex and persuasive analysis of violence, as being concerned not only with the exercise of power and the creation of symbolic significance, but also—as his title signals—with risk. Falk nuances standard theories of violence as instrumental or expressive with a sophisticated understanding of the ways in which violent actors assess risk; he incorporates notions of jeopardy with regard to multiple factors, and ‘edgework’—the recognition that some actors do not care about minimising risk, but rather take pleasure in exhibiting their particular skills in risky situations.

Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900: A Sourcebook, ed. Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec

Kateryna Dysa

Pages 1507–1509

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac182

Extract

In witchcraft studies the 1990s–2000s were fruitful years in terms of the publication of influential monographs and edited volumes, as well as proposals for new approaches to the subject. In recent years we have witnessed a prevalence of publications about witchcraft trials in previously ignored or neglected countries or regions of Europe. This new sourcebook on Russia and Ukraine, edited by Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec, fits perfectly into this trend, broadening the scope of knowledge about the specifics of witchcraft beliefs and trials in this East European region. The editors have collected and translated many extremely rich source materials that were previously unknown to an English-speaking audience, and a large number of these documents have never been previously published. Their aim is to acquaint their readership with the peculiarity of witchcraft trials, beliefs and practices in Russia and Ukraine—which were in many respects quite different in these two regions—in the context of their social structure, cultural and religious practices (in the Russian case, Orthodox, in the Ukrainian, multicultural and multi-religious).

Patronage and Power in the Medieval Welsh March: One Family’s Story, by David Stephenson

Sara Elin Roberts

Pages 1509–1510

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac184

Extract

This monograph by David Stephenson is, according to its subtitle, ‘one family’s story’, and it focuses on Hywel ap Meurig and his descendants, who became an important family of administrators—among other things—from their base in Herefordshire and adjacent regions. However, simply calling this work a family history would be to underplay its importance in scholarship on medieval Wales. Taking into account this one family over a period of two centuries—from the 1250s up to 1422—Stephenson discusses major events in both Welsh and English history, including a superb account of the March of Wales and its central place in medieval history. The author is, of course, well-known for his work on medieval Wales and the March, with an emphasis in his recent publications on bringing the study of the March of Wales to the fore.

This present work is specific and is not intended to be a general introduction to the March, but the explanation of what the March was in the Preface would easily work as a first stop for examining Marcher history. Here, Stephenson states that in studies of the March ‘the Welsh population is often pictured as being of little account, the principal focus being on the Marcher lords themselves’, but this book demonstrates brilliantly the critical importance of a slightly lower level in society, described by him as ‘the gentry’. The Welsh gentry in the March is rightly described by Stephenson as an ‘elusive group’ compared to their English counterparts and is an under-studied subject, but this work proves the value of looking at one family as a case-study. It may be that families such as this one, Hywel ap Meurig and his descendants, have been neglected as they do not fit into the category of ‘heroic Welshmen’: instead, they were quite the opposite, and focused their energies on looking eastward to England, and by the third generation the men had stopped using the traditional patronymic form and had adopted more Anglicised naming patterns. However, as Stephenson shows, the family was able to advance their administrative careers because of their Welsh origins, rather than despite them, and as Marcher men they were able ‘to move easily from milieux which were predominantly Welsh to association with officials who were overwhelmingly English’, and it was their background that meant that they could transition freely from the March into both England and Wales.

Reliquary Tabernacles in Fourteenth-Century Italy: Image, Relic and Material Culture, by Beth Williamson

Mary Laven

Pages 1511–1512

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac185

Extract

The protagonists of this book are eleven fourteenth-century reliquary tabernacles. They all hail from Siena, though have ended up in collections across Europe and the US, from Baltimore and Cleveland to Lyon, London, Florence and Milan. Some are moderately well known and on public view; others are little studied and in private hands. Three-dimensional objects that were meant to be carried in procession or which formed the focal point for intense personal devotions have been transformed into flat things, displayed on walls, and often mutilated in the process. The gilded glass Virgin Enthroned, wrenched from its tabernacle (now in Cleveland), has found its resting place in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. A panel depicting the standing Virgin and Child by Pietro Lorenzetti, acquired by Bernard Berenson in 1903 for the Villa I Tatti, turns out to be the other side of an Enthroned Redeemer, now in private ownership in Milan. All but two of the surviving tabernacles have been denuded of their relics. In this work of impressive scholarship, Beth Williamson reconstructs these fragmented objects as whole pieces, made of paint and wood, of stones and human bones, animated by their materials and by devotion. At the same time, Williamson brings these scattered pieces back into conversation with one another. She argues that they belong to a particular moment of artistic innovation and reveals the importance of multi-materiality and inter-mediality in shaping their distinctive character.

Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, by Amanda Phillips

Eiren Shea

Pages 1512–1514

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac183

Extract

This book is a comprehensive, beautifully illustrated and much-needed-art historical study of Ottoman textiles. Drawing on surviving material, legal texts and other historical documents, Amanda Phillips effectively guides the reader through four hundred years of weaving, exchanging, wearing and using woven materials. Textiles were a centrally important material in the pre-modern and early modern period across the globe and tracing their history and use between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries in the expansive Ottoman empire allows Phillips not only to open an entire art-historical world to the reader, but also to give insight into the political, economic and cultural history of the Ottomans.

A central argument of Phillips’s book is the importance of textiles and the need for art historians to take them seriously. Long relegated to the realm of ‘craft’, and not considered proper objects of art-historical study (as opposed to painting, sculpture and architecture), textiles have long been overlooked by art historians. What work has been done in the field of textile studies has been almost uniquely the bailiwick of museum curators and conservators working in museums with large textiles holdings. In recent years, however, textiles have been enjoying a larger art-historical profile, attested by a growing number of art history books focusing on textiles, and on museum exhibitions centred on pre-modern and early modern textiles (initiated by When Silk Was Gold at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1998 and continuing with more recent shows such as The Interwoven Globe, also at the Met, in 2015). Phillips is a leading voice in this movement, and her book is a welcome addition to the growing field.

Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia: The Transfer of Power, 1450–1725, by Paul Bushkovitch

Gary Marker

Pages 1514–1516

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac180

Extract

In his long and prodigious scholarly career, Paul Bushkovitch’s scholarship has time and again enriched our field with its depth of research, signature sharp insight, and mastery of sources. Let me venture that, with the publication of this book, he has outdone himself. This is quite simply a brilliant piece of work, exhaustively researched, consistently thought-provoking and articulated with crystal-clear prose, one that will immediately become a foundational study within early modern Russian history. It offers nothing less than an original, multi-faceted analysis of every Russian succession from the mid-fifteenth century, more precisely beginning roughly from just before Ivan III, and continuing until the death of Peter I and the crowning of Catherine I.

Bushkovitch uses this story to pose fundamental questions about the elite’s understandings of sovereignty and autocracy. He demonstrates convincingly that, until Peter’s decree of 1721, there existed no specific principle of princely succession—indeed no explicit principle at all, either in law or in practices of precedence. Grand princely testaments, through which inheritance of rulership was most commonly articulated, did show a preference for the first-born male to succeed to the throne, but they also conveyed alternative or contingent possibilities, since in many cases, de facto primogeniture failed to materialise. Peter I’s decree of 1721 famously placed the choice of successor into the hands of the reigning tsar, but even then, the practice was honoured as much in the breach, either out of contingency (Catherine I, Anna Ioannovna), or via palace coups (Elizabeth, Catherine II).

A Global History of Early Modern Violence, ed. Erica Charters, Marie Houllemare and Peter H. Wilson

Philip Dwyer

Pages 1516–1518

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac179

Extract

The traditional narrative around violence that many readers will be familiar with, inspired by Norbert Elias’s ‘civilising process’, is that as the state assumed a ‘legitimate monopoly of power’ in the course of the early modern era, violence declined. The state compelled its subjects to become more disciplined and more pliant, norms that were eventually internalised so the state’s external coercion gave way to individual self-discipline. After the state tamed violence within—by disarming and punishing its subjects and then waging war on its enemies—it then proceeded to inhabit and police the international order by putting an end to piracy and slavery.

This western-centric narrative of the rise of the modern state is decisively challenged in this collection of essays on violence in the early modern world. That era was not, the editors (Erica Charters, Marie Houllemare and Peter H. Wilson) argue, a ‘random collection of barbarous brutalities, but rather a period in which violence was used brutally as well as rationally’ (p. 2). We are presented with thirteen case-studies, as well as an introduction that defines violence, the early modern and the global. The case-studies are predominantly non-Western histories of violence, although some of the essays touch on Europe and North America, and some of them cross over into what would normally be considered the modern era. There are two goals here: deliberate attempts on the part of the editors to redefine the early modern from the mid-fifteenth into the early nineteenth centuries; and to inject war and violence, an often-neglected topic, into the field of global history. The case-studies are thus meant to demonstrate ‘how a global methodology can shape one’s understandings of the early modern period and its relationship to violence’ (p. 7).

Riches and Reform: Ecclesiastical Wealth in St Andrews, c.1520–1580, by Bess Rhodes

Allan Kennedy

Pages 1518–1520

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac189

Extract

The Scottish Reformation is often presented primarily as a political story—as a noble-led revolt against the unpopular Francophile regime of the Queen Regent, Mary of Guise—and secondarily as a religious story, focused on the triumph of the supposedly thrusting forces of Protestantism against the allegedly sclerotic ranks of Roman Catholicism. Both these narratives have in common a distinct whiff of teleology, since both of them imply that Catholicism had by 1560 become weak, alien and outmoded, positively inviting its own obliteration at the hands of the reformers. In this book, Bess Rhodes seeks to nuance that picture through a detailed study of Church finances in St Andrews, the primatial see and thus the beating heart of Scottish Catholicism. The results are surprising and stimulating in equal measure.

The book opens with a sketch of St Andrews prior to the Reformation, painting a picture of a small, wealthy town unusually thickly provided with ecclesiastical institutions, upon which it was heavily dependent for its prosperity. This serves as the foundation-stone for the next four chapters, which delve into the Church’s pre-Reformation finances. Chapter Two offers a detailed reconstruction of ecclesiastical income, demonstrating that it comprised a complex mix of ‘spiritual’ and ‘temporal’ revenue streams originating from all over Scotland. More importantly, the chapter shows convincingly that ecclesiastical revenues remained very robust throughout the early sixteenth century. Chapter Three looks at the administration of these revenues, and suggests that the systems in place, though complex, remained effective. Rhodes here is particularly keen to push back on the phenomenon of revenue secularisation, of which she finds very little pre-Reformation evidence.

Who Ruled Tudor England: An Essay in the Paradoxes of Power, by G.W. Bernard

Laura Flannigan

Pages 1520–1522

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac187

Extract

Throughout the expansion and advancement of historical studies in the last half-century and more, Tudor England has retained its place on undergraduate programmes in the UK and beyond. We are even now witnessing something of a revival in histories of the period written through the traditional lens of politics and government. New and ongoing projects engage directly with the central archive, boosted by an abundance of digitised resources, and a ‘New Administrative History’ of governmental institutions is emerging. Consequently, we find ourselves turning back to the field’s most influential work: The Tudor Revolution in Government by Geoffrey Elton, published in 1953. This thesis has generated decades of debate among Tudor historians, shaped the historical narratives of scholars working on later periods, and even made its way into popular fiction. So, this new book, written by a historian with personal remembrances of Elton as well as a broad knowledge of the field, is a welcome and timely intervention. Not only can it help us to introduce students to the major topics and debates of the Tudor age, it may also help to sharpen our sense of what administrative and governmental history can still achieve.

The Jews and the Reformation, by Kenneth Austin

Emily Michelson

Pages 1523–1525

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac186

Extract

A comprehensive discussion of Reformation attitudes towards Jews and Judaism is both timely and necessary. Fortunately, in Kenneth Austin’s hands, it is also masterly. His book provides a lucid, thorough and erudite introduction to almost every aspect of this subject. As Austin points out, Judaism has long been a shameful and embarrassing subject for Reformation historians of all denominations. Early modern treatment of Jews ranged from dismissive to intellectually predatory to actively persecutory. For Lutheran and Calvinist denominations, in particular, the treatment of Jews contradicted long-standing and self-congratulatory assumptions that the Reformation advanced modernity and tolerance. With this book, scholars can now take a more sober and clear-eyed view.

The great strength of Austin’s approach is its breadth of perspective. The title says ‘Jews’ but in fact Austin considers all modes of Christian interaction with Judaism. This includes interactions between Christian and Jewish people and communities; theological concepts regarding the role(s) of Judaism within Christian doctrine; Christian study of Hebrew; Jews in the Christian literary imaginary; artistic motifs and the stereotypes they disseminated. In this way, Austin expands the tradition of scholarship that examines Jews as simultaneously a real and an imagined presence in Christian Europe. Austin’s view of the Reformation is similarly all-encompassing. His Reformation includes historical, political and cultural factors along with theology, and treats religious movements in comparison with each other. This by itself is no drastic innovation in Reformation history, but it is especially necessary to get it right in this case. Austin shows that Reformation-era Christians engaged with Jews on many different fronts at once, and that attitudes that arose in one sphere could have consequences or implications in another.

Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany, by Laura Kounine

Louise Nyholm Kallestrup

Pages 1525–1527

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab112

Extract

Can we access the inner lives of people, and how? Do we ever reach the authentic voices of the people living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? These are the questions Laura Kounine sets off with in her fascinating book. The challenge of accessing the inner lives of early modern people has drawn historians for the past half century, and the strong interest in the history of emotions for the past fifteen years has sparked a renewed interest. Kounine comes from a strong Anglo-academic tradition of brilliant scholars working on early modern Germany, and she elegantly fuses works on witchcraft and gender with the history of the self in the early modern (Lutheran) world. She makes no secret of her inspiration gained from the works of Tom Robisheaux, David Sabean and Lyndal Roper, to mention some well-known scholars, although Kounine challenges their arguments throughout the book.

Kounine uses trial records as a lens to examine the psychological landscape of the early modern world, focusing on the emotional world and subjectivity of the people on trial for witchcraft. She reminds us that scholars should avoid being trapped in chronologies of selfhood that focus on the Enlightenment as the turning point in the development of the modern individual self. Her focus is on how emotions were read and judged on trial, which emotions were succesful in affecting outcomes and which failed, and why. Clearly she is on familiar ground when she is introducing the various recent directions of emotions history to the reader. Especially drawing on the work of Monique Scheer on emotions and the body, Kounine argues that a history of emotions must equally historicise the body and incorporate the relationship between body and emotion.

Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy: Transforming Nature in Early New England, by Strother E. Roberts

Paul Warde

Pages 1527–1529

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac191

Extract

This book is a very welcome addition to the environmental history of New England and, more broadly, as an ‘exploration of how the early modern revolution in world commerce transformed human and ecological relationships in the lands touched by European colonialism’. It sets out a case that fundamental changes in the land preceded the era of ‘improvement’ and industrialisation that came to the region in the late eighteenth century, and that the commercial opportunities offered by the early Atlantic economy were taken up by both natives and colonists as agents of change—rather than explaining change through the agency of a disembodied capitalism.

Strother E. Roberts accomplishes this through a study of the Connecticut Valley, a region defined by the river’s catchment. The book is divided into five chapters that each focus on one aspect of the ‘mundane chores of economic production’: beaver hunting, crop growing, provision of firewood, lumbering and raising livestock. There is a narrative logic to this order which also reflects something of chronological developments. Without underplaying the material and cultural disaster that befell native Americans during this period, Roberts is keen to demonstrate their adaptability to their new connections in the Atlantic world. Equally, he demonstrates that Europeans did not see America as an infinite cornucopia ripe for exploitation, but from the very start were mindful of potential scarcities. This, one might observe, is unsurprising given the long-standing concerns within western Europe about the same kinds of issues, and pushes against the idea that environmental change—and degradation—can easily be attributed to very general mentalités that later have to be unlearned.

The Revolution in Time: Chronology, Modernity, and 1688–1689 in England, by Tony Claydon

Daniel Woolf

Pages 1529–1531

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac190

Extract

Time is ‘hot’ these days. Its investigation once the preserve of philosophers and horologists, study of the ‘fourth dimension’ has dramatically increased over the past quarter century, within multiple disciplines. The late medieval/early modern centuries have provided ample material for the study of shifting perceptions of and adjustments to time on scales ranging from the hourly to the yearly, and beyond. Apart from intensively empirical research into the more practical aspects of time-keeping by historians (following David Landes’s influential 1983 book Revolution in Time, to which the title of the present book punningly alludes) and others such as the geographers Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, historical theorists dwelling outside philosophy departments have increasingly made ‘temporality’ (or its plural, temporalities) an important category of historiographical analysis. Some of this thinking has been brought to bear on political history, given that the flow of information, its volume, its seemingly accelerated speed during times of crisis, and its ambiguity, influenced people’s perceptions of how events, especially during such times of crisis, were moving, and how those on the periphery could make sense of events at the centre at a time when communication was still no quicker than the speed of the swiftest horse. (As recent years have shown, the speed and volume of communications does not do much to fix the ambiguity problem.) Since F.J. Levy’s important 1982 essay ‘How Information Spread among the Gentry’, much further work on what may be called ‘the politics of information’ has been done by historians of the book and of news such as Joad Raymond, Steve Pincus and Brendan Dooley, much of it inspired or at least influenced by the 1988 translation into English of Jürgen Habermas’s classic The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie, ed. Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall

Grant Tapsell

Pages 1531–1533

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac188

Extract

Few modern scholars deserve a Festschrift more than Mark Goldie. As the fifteen-page bibliography of his writings makes clear, his contribution to Restoration and eighteenth-century studies has been immense, and also highly varied. Although perhaps best known as a commentator on Locke, his work has also touched on Restoration clergymen and informers, the politics of office-holding, the Scottish Enlightenment, theories of religious intolerance, James Harrington, and even the architecture of Churchill College, Cambridge. It seems fitting that someone who has enjoyed a number of fruitful publishing collaborations with colleagues should be celebrated by a volume edited by no fewer than four of his former students, one of whom—Justin Champion—sadly died very shortly after the book’s appearance. Together they provide an eighteen-page introductory tribute discussing the honorand’s role as writer, teacher and mentor.

But there seems to be little place for mere sentiment in the pitiless modern world of academic publishing. Is the book worth acquiring and reading in and of itself? The answer is a firm ‘yes’, partly because of the quality of the team of contributors that has been assembled—mostly Goldie’s own former students. More important is the fact that two clusters of essays offer riches for significant groups of scholars: those who are interested in John Locke, and those working on the intellectual culture of pre-modern Scotland. Sami Savonius-Wroth’s discussion of corruption makes a strong case for Locke’s main concern being the future of European civilisation, which was to be safeguarded by pursuing ‘a particular regenerative enterprise’ (p. 144). An appropriately educated ruling class would be ‘galvanised by revelation’ to persevere ‘in the constant struggle to reorder the psyche to a more rational, chastened and regulated, a less erratic and desire-driven, mode of life’ (p. 158). Delphine Soulard’s study of literary journals published in the Dutch Republic demonstrates the extent to which Locke’s ideas were received by Francophone readers. Jean Le Clerc in particular was ‘instrumental in erecting Locke as the epitome of toleration, truth and liberty’ (p. 217)—findings framed to complement Goldie’s own work on Locke’s wider reception in the anglophone world. Geoff Kemp fruitfully links together Locke’s time as a censor at Christ Church in 1664 and his writings against censorship in the 1690s. These are connected and understood through classical understandings of the role of censors in supervising and promoting the character and virtue of the people. Locke was against legislation censoring the press both because it was ‘ecclesiastical’ in its function, designed to shield ‘mother church’, and due to his loathing of the monopolistic oppression perpetrated against scholars by the Stationers’ Company (pp. 173, 176). For his part, John Marshall offers a timely piece linking together support for slavery overseas and forced labour at home in the context of the difficult economic circumstances of the 1690s. Locke’s position on the Board of Trade included support for the expansion of slavery in the Caribbean; his writings in the 1690s recommended ‘suppression’ of ‘begging drones’ who live ‘unnecessarily upon other people’s labour’ and ‘pretend they cannot get work’ (p. 194). Such an outlook fed into the expansion of workhouses in the capital.

Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon, by Ronit Ricci

Amrita Malhi

Pages 1533–1535

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac167

Extract

The practice of banishment, an imperial tool for coercing mobility as a form of discipline or punishment, has been an important force in driving diaspora creation and cultural diffusion across the Indian Ocean world. The experience of physical, social and emotional distance from their place of origin led banished exiles and their descendants to transplant and transform beliefs and practices from their homeland in the process of making sense of, and adapting to, new environments. Ronit Ricci explores these processes with reference to a variety of manuscripts preserved by the descendants of Malay exiles and the community they created in Ceylon, later Lanka, where they were banished by the Dutch and British empires.

Ricci’s book traces the creation of that community—now known as the ‘Sri Lankan Malays’—back to its origins in the lives of rebellious royals and their retinues, as well as religious leaders, convicts, slaves and troops transported or stationed there from the Indonesian archipelago and Malay Peninsula. Arriving in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, these exiles and their descendants have, according to Ricci, repeatedly reimagined their place of exile and the ‘routes and roots’ connecting it with both their homelands and the Holy Lands of the Middle East. In her discussion of texts by and about these exiles, Ricci shows how they have mobilised ‘traditions, histories, and attachments’ to construct a sense of belonging in displacement. By preserving, telling and retelling these narratives, this community has actively shaped the ‘experiences and affiliations’ of successive generations, along with the way its history has been remembered in sites and signs around contemporary Colombo and other parts of Sri Lanka.

Iran and a French Empire of Trade, 1700–1808: The Other Persian Letters, by Junko Thérèse Takeda

Elizabeth Cross

Pages 1535–1537

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac211

Extract

According to Junko Takeda’s riveting new book, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters represents only the most famous example of Enlightenment France’s fascination with Persia. Yet, France’s haphazard initiatives—or ‘failures’ (p. 3)—to develop commercial and diplomatic ties to Persia in the period have led historians to marginalise this history, with greater scholarly attention paid to France’s alliance with Safavid Iran’s Ottoman rivals, or to French imperial conquests in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Challenging our geographical assumptions about the eighteenth-century French commercial empire, Takeda argues that Franco-Persian relations in the eighteenth century were characterised by an ‘entrepreneurial imperialism’ (p. 16) that blended private ambition and state sanction in pursuit of an ‘empire of trade’ (p. 204). She uses the writings of these ‘entrepreneurs’—from merchants to diplomats—to explicate their efforts to develop French commercial relations with Persia, or to use ties to Persia to pursue broader imperial designs upon Asia, especially in India. She further argues that these ‘other Persian letters’ allow scholars to think about how the French began to develop their own understandings of political change in the age of ‘democratic revolutions’ (p. 5). Takeda’s is a French, not a Persian story, in which French actors look at Persia with an array of political, imperial and commercial prejudices and aspirations.

Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire, by Christine Walker

Matthew J Smith

Pages 1537–1539

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac212

Extract

This impressive book by Christine Walker forces a new appreciation of the role and power of British women in the creation of the Atlantic plantation world. Its contributions are significant. The past two decades have seen the publication of several path-breaking histories of women on both sides of racial slavery’s oppression. Our understanding of the complexities of quotidian negotiations of black people for limited freedoms now incorporates a greater sensitivity to women’s struggles under and after British slavery; from their intentional efforts to maintain cultural ties to Africa through to their efforts to reconstitute families and wrest control of their reproductive power from their owners. Much of this work has been on African and creole women, a large constituency given greater context by Walker’s examination of free and freed women in Jamaica who became slave-owners.

Walker, moving out of the tempting light of the robust archive of the nineteenth century, makes the persuasive argument that ‘free’ women in Jamaica were both subjected by patriarchy and co-creators with men of the notoriously violent plantation system of Jamaica from the mid-seventeenth century. The author finds evidence in thousands of wills, codicils, probate records, parish registers, plantation inventories and the rare surviving letters of her subjects. From these she reconstructs complicated lives of women of position and prestige, and how they came to hold property that was once the exclusive domain of men. As the system became more intense in the eighteenth century, freed women grasped the fragile opportunities for autonomy their freedom afforded, asserting their new social position by becoming enslavers of persons with some of whom they shared heritage.

The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History, by Alexander Mikaberidze

Catriona Kennedy

Pages 1539–1541

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac204

Extract

In one of the many evocative episodes narrated by Alexander Mikaberidze in his ambitious and authoritative history of the Napoleonic wars, we follow the Iranian envoy Mirza Mohammed-Reza Qazvini on a diplomatic mission to negotiate an alliance with the French in 1806. Stopping first at Constantinople for negotiations with the Ottomans, the Iranian mission travelled onwards to Paris only to learn that Napoleon had already headed eastwards to engage the Russians at Eylau. Pursuing Napoleon through the snowy fields of Poland, Qazvini would finally, in May 1807, agree the Treaty of Finckenstein, granting Napoleon access, through Iran, to India for a prospective invasion.

As this episode illustrates, the Napoleonic wars had ramifications well beyond the borders of Europe. Though they were not, as Mikaberidze reminds us, the first conflict to be described as a world war, a distinction that belongs to the Seven Years War (1756–63), in terms of their global scale and impact they surpassed anything which came before. The theatre of war stretched from Mayo to Moscow and from Iceland to Istria, but the conflict also reached far beyond Europe from Martinique to Mauritius, from Jaffa to Java.

The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires, 1783–1972, by Kathleen Burk

Fabian Hilfrich

Pages 1541–1543

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac195

Extract

Kathleen Burk has written another monumental volume on Anglo-American relations, this time focusing on the two countries’ interaction as empires—from the American Revolution to the translatio imperii in the post-war period. Burk targets a broad audience here, still motivated by the ‘very strong conviction that the academy and the general reader have drifted too far apart, and that those who take the public penny have a responsibility to convey the results of their research to the public’, as she wrote in Old World, New World (2007, p. xiii). The book is an example of traditional diplomatic history, analysing the interactions of top diplomats and policy-makers.

American readers especially may wonder at how readily Burk labels both countries ‘empires’ in light of that nation’s anti-imperialist beginnings and traditions. Burk dismisses this objection, invoking the founding fathers’ reference to the emerging nation as a ‘territorial empire’ (p. 4). In line with recent historiography, she views westward expansion as foreign, rather than domestic, policy because it involved the displacement and annihilation of Native Americans and conflict with other empires. Burk also interprets the use of informal power as evidence of empire.

The Evangelical Quadrilateral, I: Characterising the British Gospel Movement; and II: The Denominational Mosaic of the British Gospel Movement, by David Bebbington

G M Ditchfield

Pages 1543–1545

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac193

Extract

A measure of the distinction achieved by David Bebbington in the field of modern British religious history is the article by Grayson Carter entitled ‘Evangelicalism’ in the fourth edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, published in February 2022. It begins with Bebbington’s definition of the four essential characteristics of Evangelicalism, internationally as well as in national contexts, as set out in his deservedly influential Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (1989; rev. ante, cvii [1992], pp. 747–8), a book which is the first item listed in Carter’s bibliography. An appreciation of those characteristics, namely the fundamental authority of the Bible, the emphasis upon the cross of Christ as the hope of salvation, the pressing need for the conversion of individuals and nations, and the duty of activism (mainly in the form of preaching, teaching and organising) has inspired numerous, perhaps most, subsequent studies of the subject. Since, as Carter’s article concludes, ‘throughout the world as many as one-third of all Christians could be regarded as belonging to this important tradition’, Evangelicalism remains a factor of international significance, and, by his research into its origins and development from the eighteenth century to the present day, Bebbington has illuminated the history of a very wide range of human activity.

Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism, 1830–1870, by Zoë Laidlaw

Alex Middleton

Pages 1545–1547

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac200

Extract

Zoë Laidlaw’s first book, Colonial Connections: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (2006; rev. ante, cxxiii [2008], pp. 1,576–7) examined the processes of British imperial administration from the inside, in a globe-spanning, intensely archival, and pioneering fashion. This second monograph, while sharing the same concern with archives, networks, information, and the misunderstandings which shaped colonial government, turns to those who sought to influence the running of the empire from without.

The book is really a methodological experiment. It is a study centred on a single, massive personal archive: that of Thomas Hodgkin, the Quaker doctor and philanthropist. In 1837, Hodgkin co-founded the Aborigines’ Protection Society—for generations thereafter the most prominent metropolitan organisation which claimed to want to protect the indigenous peoples of the British empire against the depredations of governors and settlers—and remained until his death in 1866 one of its leading lights, as well as promoting a range of other imperial and para-imperial ‘humanitarian’ causes. Laidlaw’s approach is to follow the spokes of his archive (currently housed at the Wellcome Library in London) outwards, interrogating virtually all the imperial concerns, contacts and networks for which it supplies evidence. This is a novel strategy, at least for nineteenth-century imperial history. Hodgkin’s archive could hardly be better chosen as a starting point for the scheme, given the extraordinary reach and scope of his preoccupations. Not the least significant result of Laidlaw’s endeavours is to provide comfortably the most sophisticated and reflective history of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, in its early decades, which is now available. But the broader purpose of the book is to probe the wider tensions, ties, and contradictions within British imperial humanitarianism between the 1830s and the 1860s.

Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor, by Margrit Pernau

Ilyse R Morgenstein Fuerst

Pages 1547–1548

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac206

Extract

To think about modernity is, in my reading, to think about a cataclysmic shift in and, in many cases, invention of categories: race, class, gender, sexuality and, as Margrit Pernau suggests, emotion. This innovative history of emotions and modernity in colonial India helps trace new pathways for thinking through human expressions, why emotions are valuable historical and social evidence, and affect.

Using an impressive—and vast—collection of largely Urdu writings, Pernau traces the rhetoric of emotions in colonial India, from 1857 until 1913, calling this period ‘the high noon of imperialism’ (p. 8). The archive she draws on is not merely vast in size, but in scope: Pernau cites speeches, journals, theological treatises, philosophical essays, children’s literature, sermons, essays and writings on psychology. The sheer scope of this project is therefore impressive and multifaceted, aiming to explore the shift in emotive language among South Asians. Pernau argues that the reigning style of emotion in South Asia was balance or harmony (‘adl) until the 1870s, when it was ‘increasingly displaced by josh, ebullition, enthusiasm, or fervor’ (p. 8). In short, then, Pernau seeks to trace a shift in how emotions were expressed as well as interpret how we might theorise that shift effectively.

Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, by Dinyar Patel

Osama Siddiqui

Pages 1548–1550

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac205

Extract

Biography is a curiously under-used genre in Indian academic history (in marked contrast to Indian popular history and cinema, where biography and biopics continue to thrive). Whether this absence is because of a dearth of sources, a theoretical scepticism of methods that assume a fundamental unity and narrative coherence of individual lives, or because Indian historians, as Dinyar Patel mordantly puts it, ‘are very prone to the vagaries of academic fashion [and] have been loath to accept biography as a legitimate form of scholarship’ (p. 10), is difficult to say. Whatever the reason may be, there are few biographies of modern Indian figures beyond the now classic studies of canonical nationalist leaders such as Gandhi or Jinnah, a fact that represents a significant gap in the field. Patel’s meticulously researched and elegantly written biography of Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917) provides an admirable model of what this genre can offer to the field of modern Indian history. In doing so, the book also narrates a fascinating transnational account of Indian nationalism and wider British imperial politics in the long nineteenth century.

Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Siècle: The Culture of English Religion in a Decadent Age, by Frances Knight

Gareth Atkins

Pages 1551–1552

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac201

Extract

Over the past twenty years, historians have tended to follow Callum Brown in locating the ‘death of Christian Britain’ in the 1960s. To advance that argument, Brown emphasised the grip of a post-Victorian ‘discursive Christianity’ anchored in gendered moral codes, and underpinned by the restless energy of spiritual entrepreneurs. While this story has been criticised by Jeremy Morris, Clive Field and others for mashing denominations together into one homogeneous lump, it has nevertheless helped to clear the way for a reappraisal of nineteenth-century religion, which was once assumed to be assailed by doubt, materialism and the march of mind. The main lineaments of that reappraisal are now becoming clear. Some historians, such as W.M. Jacob, emphasise the strength of institutional religion. Others, such as John Wolffe, S.J. Brown, Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas, are more interested in religious politics, thought and culture beyond the pew and the pulpit. Hovering often half-glimpsed behind such research are two linked assumptions. One is that religious institutions were not so much victims of modernity as agents of it, via their provision of education, social work and health care, and that nationalism, the pluralisation of the state and democratisation were not straightforwardly secularising shifts. The other assumption is that religion—including habits that earlier scholars dismissed as ‘superstition’—is not, like the tide, fated to ebb away; rather, it sees beliefs, practices and habits as adapting; infusing into other things; melding into new shapes. The focus of earlier generations of historians on the struggle of ‘honest doubters’ like George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin against institutions presented as always and everywhere rigid, ethically conservative and opposed to change now looks very old-fashioned indeed.

Fiscal Capacity and the Colonial State in Asia and Africa, c.1850–1960, ed. Ewout Frankema and Anne Booth

Aashish Velkar

Pages 1553–1555

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac196

Extract

Did colonial states have fiscal capacity comparable to their metropolitan counterparts? The contributors to this fine collection of essays on colonial states in Asia and Africa explore this question in a comparative and critical manner. Their basic premise is that existing concepts and theories of state formation do not adequately shed light on colonial fiscal development because building colonial economies and societies was notoriously difficult when attempted. Although many European states had already undergone fiscal modernisation by c.1850, the solutions to revenue generation in the colonies—and how this translated into growth and development—varied significantly across and within their Asian and African empires. This collection of essays provides key insights into the extent and nature of fiscal capacity building, the consequences of decisions in terms of state formation, and the legacy of the systems that the colonial powers left behind.

Editors Ewout Frankema and Anne Booth define fiscal capacity as ‘the ability of the state to collect revenues to provide public goods and services’ (p. 1). Their definition includes tax and non-tax revenues (such as income from state monopolies) as well as the capacity to raise loans in global financial markets. Supplementary to the question of building fiscal systems is the issue of the extent to which revenue generation policies led to better state capacity. The editors identify four conditions for fiscal modernisation that provide an important conceptual framework for the project. Fiscal modernisation is understood to be the ability of states to centralise revenues (a challenging task given the vast and complex geographies that these states covered), their ability to establish a long-term floating debt position (given the vicissitudes of often narrow revenue streams), the ability and willingness to deliver public goods (especially, but not only, to justify their means of revenue extraction), and the extent to which the states displayed fiscal responsibility and accountability (in terms of investment in welfare infrastructure such as education and healthcare). Individual essays use this framework in varying degrees, recognising its challenges and limitations in the colonial context.

The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster: How Globalized Trade Led Britain to Its Worst Defeat of the First World War, by Nicholas A. Lambert

Jenny Macleod

Pages 1555–1556

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac202

Extract

In February 2022, Turkey closed the Dardanelles and Bosphorus straits to all military vessels. Meanwhile, with Russia and Ukraine responsible for 30 per cent of the wheat traded globally, the anticipated disruption caused by Russia’s invasion of its neighbour has led to a 50 per cent price increase for this vital foodstuff in trading in Chicago. Such is the nature of the interconnections of this trade that repercussions are reported for Australia (anticipating a bonanza), Egypt (resorting to food protectionism to protect its population), and unrest is feared in the Middle East and North Africa. Here is a vivid and unwelcome demonstration of enduring strategic considerations that lie at the heart of Nicholas Lambert’s excellent new book. It situates British decision-making in the First World War in the context not simply of the shifting obligations of alliances and the calculation of how best to deploy military and naval assets, but also the dangers arising from financial entanglements with Russia and the risk of social unrest from price inflation.

China and the Globalization of Biomedicine, ed. David Luesink, William H. Schneider and Zhang Daqing

Ling Ma

Pages 1556–1558

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab105

Learned Lives in England, 1900–1950: Institutions, Ideas and Intellectual Experience, by William C. Lubenow

Chris Renwick

Pages 1559–1560

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac203

Extract

This is the latest in a series of books by William C. Lubenow that form a substantial contribution to our understanding of the university and intellectual life in England since 1800 more generally. In this volume, Lubenow turns his attention to the academy during the first half of the twentieth century—a period that he contends was transformative in the organisation of universities and the practices of those who work within them. Through a jostling for relevance and power both within universities and between an array of related institutions, such as scholarly societies, the landscape of intellectual life was turned into something that an early twenty-first-century observer would recognise as broadly similar to the one they inhabit. Institutions changed but so did knowledge itself, with the lines between fields redrawn or put down for the first time and, in many cases, a transformation in the very processes by which knowledge is acquired.

Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affect under Stalin, by Anna Toropova

David L Hoffmann

Pages 1559–1562

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac209

Extract

This book by Anna Toropova is an excellent new study of Soviet cinema during the Stalin era. The book is part of Oxford University Press’s Emotions in History series, and it focuses on the role films were to play in the emotional education of Soviet viewers. Toropova bases her work on some 150 films from the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s, as well as on extensive archival and periodical research. She is careful to cover both the aesthetic and the political dimensions of cultural production, with particular attention to debates among directors, critics, theorists and officials. These figures involved in film-making sought to develop distinctly Soviet film genres, which in turn were to forge the emotional complexion of the New Soviet Person.

As other scholars have noted, the Soviet project entailed more than just the socio-economic transformation of the country. While the abolition of capitalism was to eliminate class antagonisms, the establishment of a socialist society also required the creation of a new type of person—one free of the egotism and petty selfishness of bourgeois society. Previous studies have highlighted the importance Communist Party authorities placed on literacy, education and consciousness. But, as Toropova argues, Party theorists also saw the cultivation of new emotional values as pivotal to the formation of Soviet selfhood.

Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph, by David Shneer

Elijah Teitelbaum

Pages 1564–1566

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac208

Extract

The late David Shneer’s final monograph is an ambitious project: he focuses the entire book on a single iconic image and writes a ‘biography’ of that photograph, beginning with the events leading to its production and examining its continuing significance, from its first printing to the present day. The photograph at hand, simply titled ‘Grief’, depicts the aftermath of a Nazi mass killing following their occupation of Kerch, in Ukraine. ‘Biography’ summarises well Shneer’s approach to this image, as he emphasises the role of its creator, Dmitri Baltermants, in examining its interpretation throughout the twentieth century. Whether taking this photo, editing it or shaping its place in later exhibitions, Baltermants is rarely out of sight in the book. The result of this approach brings together the historical and the personal to provide a full picture of this image at different points in history.

Shneer begins his biography before the creation of ‘Grief’ itself, looking at Baltermants’s approach to photography and relevant influences on his work. These include aesthetic and technical aspects of Soviet photography as well as the role and reach of photographs in an early twentieth-century Soviet context. In this framework, Shneer notes how newspapers formed the platform for photographic reports.

Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India, by Arup K. Chatterjee

Sumita Mukherjee

Pages 1566–1568

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac197

Extract

There is a rich history of the migration, both short- and long-term, of Indians to London from at least the early seventeenth century. The varied nature of Indian presences, settlements, interactions and influences upon the imperial metropole are worth relaying to a wider audience to understand better the connected nature of Indian and English history up until the present. Arup K. Chatterjee’s new book is a welcome addition to the market precisely because it opens up this rich, varied history and aims to reach a wide audience. Chatterjee admits that there are not many footnotes and endnotes in the book and that it is heavily indebted to the work of Rozina Visram, Michael Fisher, Antoinette Burton, Susheila Nasta and the ‘Making Britain’ project and database (https://www.open.ac.uk/makingbritain). This is evident throughout the book and something I will come back to throughout this review.

The book starts with a map of London that lists various Indians in London in the manner of the London Underground map. Following an introduction that offers some historical background and some discussion of the literature, it then follows a format inspired by Shakespeare with five parts or ‘Acts’, each divided into ‘Scenes’. This literary device is instructive: Chatterjee is not only inspired by Shakespeare but also by a number of Indian writers in London and he intermingles the literary, the personal, the historical and the contemporary in his account of the long, varied history of Indians in London. Chatterjee’s literary background is clear from his structure, his prose and his engagement with writers. The history of Indians in London from the early sixteenth century to 1947 is presented through a range of biographical sketches, long quotations and blocks of information, interspersed with literary allusions. The geographical focus is on London solely, and yet Chatterjee is keen to show the interconnected nature of the relationship between Britain and India over four centuries more broadly throughout. There are times when I wonder if the focus on London limits the book, especially early on when he addresses wider themes such as Orientalism, although it is clear why London should feature so heavily in an account of Indians in Britain, especially as so much of the focus in the book is on political figures.

The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy, by J. Russell Hawkins

Alison Collis Greene

Pages 1568–1570

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac199

Extract

As I write this review, state legislatures across the United States vote to limit the work that public schools and even public universities can do to teach the nation’s history of racism, white supremacy, and Black resistance. J. Russell Hawkins examines the kind of history that many conservative nationalists want neither to hear nor to allow. It is, then, a pressing and timely read.

The book focuses on segregationist theology and politics from 1955 to 1970 among South Carolina Southern Baptists and members of the Methodist Church (after 1968, the United Methodist Church). Hawkins makes two central arguments: first, that segregationist evangelicals’ politics followed their theology—that they read scripture and understood Christian orthodoxy in a way that drove their political engagement. Secondly, Hawkins argues that segregationist theology persisted, largely unchanged, even after the civil rights movement forced an outward shift in language and strategy, from segregationist rhetoric to a colour-blind family-values rhetoric.

German Angst: Fear and Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany, by Frank Biess

Joachim C Häberlen

Pages 1570–1572

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac194

Extract

In October 1983, 17-year-old Frank Biess participated in a ‘human chain’ demonstration in south-western Germany, protesting the stationing of American Pershing II missiles, armed with nuclear warheads, in the Federal Republic. As did many of his peers, Biess professed a profound fear of a ‘nuclear holocaust’, the destruction of the world in a nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers. Afraid was how he felt at the time, writing (by his own admission) dark and very bad poetry, walking through the Swabian forest to see its alleged dying (the infamous German Waldsterben) for himself, reading the novels of Gudrun Pausewang about the consequences of nuclear war, or watching movies such as The Day After, depicting what nuclear war would do to the American Midwest.

The historian Frank Biess uses this autobiographical sketch as an entry point for a history of the Federal Republic, from its foundation to the present, through the lens of one emotion: fear. What were Germans afraid about, he inquires, and what did this mean for the country’s political history? Did fear undermine the project of building a democratic polity in the aftermath of National Socialism, or did fear actually help with West Germany’s democratisation? Asking these questions, Biess seeks to challenge narratives of post-war German history that portray the Federal Republic somewhat uncritically as a ‘successful democracy’. ‘Was there not a peculiar tension between the optimistic story of the Federal Republic as told by historians and the pessimism of contemporaries’, Biess wonders (p. viii).

Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism, ed. Reiland Rabaka

Onyeka Nubia

Pages 1572–1574

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac176

Extract

‘… the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up to the total liberation of Africa …’

President Kwame Nkrumah, 6 March 1957, Accra, Ghana

President Nkrumah’s emotive statement was part of his inaugural speech as President of Ghana. Ghana had won its independence combating the debilitating effects of the Maafa (Disaster of Enslavement); ‘foreign rule and imperialism’; political disenfranchisement; and economic, cultural and social exploitation. And yet Nkrumah chose not to revel in unitary nationalism, but to offer a corrective—Ghana’s independence was ‘meaningless’. Nkrumah’s statement was political and originated from his commitment to Pan-Africanism. It was a commitment shared by his contemporaries, Patrice Lumumba of Zaire and Ahmed Sekou Toure of the Republic of Guinea. Nkrumah was part of a generation of African revolutionaries who viewed national independence and the nations it created as ‘trinkets.’ They struggled for another ‘prize’—a ‘United States of Africa’, where each nation state would be transformed into part of a supra-national federation, transcending ethnic, linguistic and national identities: in other words, Pan-Africanism. This ideology was central to African independence. And yet this historical significance does not mean that Pan-Africanism has been widely considered a subject worthy of scholarly discourse.