New Books in British Studies

Today I spoke to John D. Gazzelli about his book Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, KCB: The Planner Who Saved Europe (Palmetto, 2021).History has forgotten Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, yet without Morgan there would have been no D-Day. In the development and execute of the operational plan that was to become OVERLORD, Lieutenant General Morgan faced numerous challenges, the most pressing being the inability of American and British political and military senior leaders to agree to a common strategy for the defeat of Germany. Morgan also faced challenges with a lack of resources to support what was to become the primary mission of the Allies, the return to the Continent. Finally, Morgan dealt with personalities, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bernard L. Montgomery, who assumed responsibility for OVERLORD and in the case of Montgomery summarily dismissed all of Morgan's efforts. Despite all these challenges, Morgan produced a plan for OVERLORD that was fundamentally followed on June 6, 1944. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Bishop Stephen Neill was one of the most prolific, accomplished, and fascinating Christian leaders of the global church in the twentieth century. Privileged to live in radically different cultural contexts over the course of his life, Neill was also a supremely gifted individual. He excelled by turns as a missionary, a bishop, an ecumenist, a professor, and a prolific author, all the while travelling around the world to share his tremendous knowledge of the world Christian movement with scholars, clergy and laypersons alike. This is the first complete biography of this influential figure, and builds on Daughrity's previous work Bishop Stephen Neill: From Edinburgh to South India (Peter Lang Publications, 2008). Worldly Christian: The Life and Times of Stephen Neill (Lutterworth Press, 2022) stands to become the authoritative word on a man who understood Christianity's changing contours better than most during the dramatic diversification that it underwent during his lifetime.Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History & Ecumenics, focusing on World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. His research interest lies in Indonesia and the Muslim dominant regions of Southeast Asia, from the postcolonial approach to Christianity and the coexistence of various religions, including the study of Christianity and the Islamic faith in a Muslim dominant society that includes challenges of ethnic diversity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In this ambitious book, Max Siollun provides an overview of Nigerian history from 1472 to the 1950s. As such, What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule (Hurst, 2021) provides an excellent primer for those interested in learning about the gradual process of colonial conquest and the attendant resistance by local populations, as well as colonialism’s long-term impact on what would become modern-day Nigeria.Part I and II of the book explore early trade relations between the peoples of coastal Nigeria and European merchants. Particular attention is given here to George Taubman Goldie and his business ventures, most notably the Royal Niger Company. By examining the Royal Niger Company’s tactics of fraudulent (or at minimum, misleading) treaties and the violent misconduct of its employees, Siollun evidences the destructive nature of Britain’s presence even before the official start of colonization.Part III concerns colonial conquest, from 1851 to 1920. Siollun starts with an exploration of what gets referred to as Glover’s Hausas, generally considered to be the start of the modern-day Nigerian army. This provides an entry point for Siollun to examine Britain’s policy of racialized military recruitment, and to reflect on the problems this caused in post-colonial Nigeria. Siollun’s detailed description of the violence of colonial conquest, as well as the resistance by ordinary Nigerians across the country (the subject of Part IV), make plain that despite British claims of a “civilizing mission,” colonization was very much self-serving and unwanted.Part V considers “how British rule radically changed Nigeria’s cultural, educational, and religious identity,” and in doing so, depended divides between the Northern and Southern parts of the country.Max Siollun is a historian and author who specializes in Nigeria's history. Besides What Britain Did to Nigeria, he is the author of the books Oil, Politics and Violence: Nigeria's Military Coup Culture 1966-1976, Soldiers of Fortune: A History of Nigeria (1983-1993), and Nigeria's Soldiers of Fortune: The Abacha and Obasanjo Years.Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Marking the third centenary of the office of Prime Minister, The Impossible Office?: The History of the British Prime Minister (Cambridge UP, 2021) tells its extraordinary story, explaining how and why it has endured longer than any other democratic political office in world history. Sir Anthony Seldon, historian of Number 10 Downing Street, explores the lives and careers, loves and scandals, successes and failures, of all our great Prime Ministers. From Robert Walpole and William Pitt the Younger, to Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher, Seldon discusses which of our Prime Ministers have been most effective and why. He reveals the changing relationship between the Monarchy and the office of the Prime Minister in intimate detail, describing how the increasing power of the Prime Minister in becoming leader of Britain coincided with the steadily falling influence of the Monarchy. This book celebrates the humanity and frailty, work and achievement, of these 55 remarkable individuals, who averted revolution and civil war, leading the country through times of peace, crisis and war.Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Antony Best's British Engagement with Japan, 1854-1922: The Origins and Course of an Unlikely Alliance (Routledge, 2020) reconsiders the circumstances which led to the unlikely alliance of 1902 to 1922 between Britain, the leading world power of the day and Japan, an Asian, non-European nation which had only recently emerged from self-imposed isolation. Based on extensive original research, the book not only provides an overview of Anglo-Japanese relations between the 1850s and 1920s, but also goes beyond existing accounts which concentrate on high politics, strategy and simple assertions about the two countries’ similarities as island empires. It brings into the picture cultural factors, particularly the ways in which Japan was portrayed in Britain, and ambivalent British attitudes to race and supposed European superiority which were overcome but remained difficulties. It charts how the relationship developed as events unfolded, including Japan’s wars against China and Russia, and in addition looks at royal diplomacy, where the Japanese Court came eventually to be treated as a respected equal. Overall, the book provides a major reassessment of this important subject.Antony Best is a professor of international history at the London School of Economics (LSE). Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation project explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

When inspiration struck Robert McCrum to write a book about the Bard, it came while watching one of the playwright’s plays in Central Park, New York. Here, McCrum realized that we, today, are undoubtedly living in Shakespearean times. Joe Krulder, a British Historian, interviews Robert about his latest book, Shakespearean: On Life and Language in Times of Disruption (Pegasus Books, 2021)Current events such as the Covid-19 Pandemic, the election and then four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, and this twenty-first-century obsession with conspiracy theories, mirror London’s many plagues from 1592 to 1603, Shakespeare’s Caesar and Richard III, and of course our post-modern social media outlets are simply riddled with conspiracies. Shakespearean, indeed.What Shakespearean: On Life and Language in Times of Disruption accomplishes is to place the reader in William Shakespeare’s London. There is danger at Bishops Gate, the neighborhood the Bard chose to reside in; danger appeared both from below and above. Sword fights, punch ups, and stabbings demarcate a rough “from below” existence while political intrigues from the execution of the Earl of Essex to the Gun Powder Plot of 1605 imperilled all of London’s theatre productions if not William Shakespeare himself.Robert McCrum is the author of dozens of works, fiction as well as non-fiction, plus he’s an Emmy Award-winning documentarian. A long-time editor for Faber and Faber and The Observer, McCrum career continues on despite a stroke. His recovery gave him time to read and Shakespeare, once again, filled his gaze.Joe Krulder is the author of The Execution of Admiral John Byng as a Microhistory of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Routledge 2021) teaching college History in Northern California. Joe earned his doctorate at the University of Bristol in West England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Eileen Hunt Botting is a Professor political science at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Botting is a widely published and cited scholar on the thought of Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. As editor of a two-volume collection, Portraits of Wollstonecraft (Bloomsbury Academic,2021), she offers primary sources of criticism, literature and representation in portraiture, from the early international reception to Wollstonecraft’s present global influence. Through well curated selections, we see Wollstonecraft in new light. From the iconic portrait painted by John Opie in 1797, to Sarah A. Underwood’s essay Heroines of Free Thought in 1876, to references by modern feminists including Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and the artist Judy Chicago, the reader discovers the many implications of Wollstonecraft’s ideas. This two-volume collection is sure to be of interest to anyone curious about Wollstonecraft’s contribution to political philosophy, literature, and feminist thought.Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the intellectual history of women and the origins of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

What is the future of care? In The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? (Verso, 2021),  Emma Dowling, an associate professor at the Institute for Sociology University of Vienna, introduces the extent of the global crisis of care. Drawing on a feminist perspective, the book thinks through the multiple ways that care is rendered invisible in contemporary society, subject to a public storm of privatisation and austerity. The crisis is exacerbated by broader social trends, from the monitoring and exploitation of precarious workers to the individualisation of self-care. Most crucially, the book offers ways to properly value care, democratising and de-financialising this most important part of society. The book is essential reading. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Greg Vargo's Chartist Drama (Manchester UP, 2021) opens a window into a fascinating aspect of working-class radical drama. This book includes scripts of four dramas performed or published by members of the Chartist movement, as well as an informative introduction situating these plays in their historical context. Ranging from history plays to political drama to Gothic melodrama, these plays show that Chartism was much more than a political movement. It included an entire cultural world, of which drama was a central part.  Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Rebirth of the English Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope, 1847-1870 (UP of Mississippi, 2021) enters deep into an era of comic history that has been entirely neglected. This buried cache of mid-Victorian graphic humor is marvelously rich in pictorial narratives of all kinds. Author David Kunzle calls this period a "rebirth" because of the preceding long hiatus in use of the new genre, since the Great Age of Caricature (c.1780-c.1820) when the comic strip was practiced as a sideline. Suddenly in 1847, a new, post-Töpffer comic strip sparks to life in Britain, mostly in periodicals, and especially in Punch, where all the best artists of the period participated, if only sporadically: Richard Doyle, John Tenniel, John Leech, Charles Keene, and George Du Maurier. Until now, this aspect of the extensive oeuvre of the well-known masters of the new journal cartoon in Punch has been almost completely ignored. Exceptionally, George Cruikshank revived just once in The Bottle, independently, the whole serious, contrasting Hogarthian picture story.Numerous comic strips and picture stories appeared in periodicals other than Punch by artists who were likewise largely ignored. Like the Punch luminaries, they adopt in semirealistic style sociopolitical subject matter easily accessible to their (lower-)middle-class readership. The topics covered in and out of Punch by these strips and graphic novels range from French enemies King Louis-Philippe and Emperor Napoleon III to farcical treatment of major historical events: the Bayeux tapestry (1848), the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Artists explore a great variety of social types, occupations, and situations such as the emigrant, the tourist, fox hunting and Indian big game hunting, dueling, the forlorn lover, the student, the artist, the toothache, the burglar, the paramilitary volunteer, Darwinian animal metamorphoses, and even nightmares. In Rebirth of the English Comic Strip, Kunzle analyzes these much-neglected works down to the precocious modernist and absurdist scribbles of Marie Duval, Europe's first female professional cartoonist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies