New Books in British Studies

As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020), Manuel Barcia offers a striking rendition of the diseases that swept through the illegal slave trade Atlantic World. In fact, Barcia argues that the history of disease and the story of continuing traffic in enslaved people despite the abolition of the slave trade are processes that must be understood together. Barcia demonstrates that in the 19th century Atlantic, quarantines were politicized, sworn enemies were forced to work together to combat disease, and the medical expertise of enslaved people often prevailed despite efforts to silence or ignore it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The balance of power in nineteenth-century Europe was anchored on one end by the redoubtable Queen Victoria (1819 -1901), the doyenne of sovereigns, and at the opposite end by the autocratic Romanov dynasty — four successive emperors who ruled Russia during Victoria's own 63-year reign. Between these great powers lay the rising military power of Prussia, which concerned both Britain and Russia, and a decaying Ottoman Empire from which both hoped to benefit, as well as shipping routes vital to both countries' commercial and military interests. These and numerous other concerns made the relationship tense at the best of times. But Victoria's large family was also entangled with the Romanovs through the complicated web of royal and dynastic marriages that linked the ruling houses of Europe.These political and personal ties are the subject of royal biographer, Coryne Hall's new book, Queen Victoria and the Romanovs: 60 Years of Mutual Distrust (Amberley, 2020). Ms. Hall is a seasoned royal biographer and chronicler, who has delighted royal buffs with her authoritative biographies of Empress Maria Fyodorovna, Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, and her exploration of royal Princesses who served as wartime nurses as well as the Imperial estates in the Crimea. In "Queen Victoria and the Romanovs," Ms. Hall delves into the extensive trove of Queen Victoria's diaries and personal correspondence to construct an ambitious and highly informative portrait of her six-decade relationship with the Romanovs, which is at times cordial and diplomatic and at other times overtly hostile.The first encounter takes place "off stage" as far as Victoria is concerned, but very much sets the stage for the tension to come. Victoria's aunt, Juliane of Saxe-Coburg Saalfeld's miserable marriage to Russia's Grand Duke Constantine ended — most extraordinarily for the time — in divorce. The Coburg family felt that Juliane had been very badly treated by the Romanovs, a sentiment that was inherited by the next generation of Coburgs, which included Victoria and her cousin and future husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg.Before Albert linked his name in perpetuity with that of Victoria, however, the 20-year-old Queen was swept off her feet — quite literally— by the dashing Grand Duke Alexander, son and heir of Tsar Nicholas I. On a visit to London in 1839, the Grand Duke made quite an impression on the young Queen; all thoughts of poor Aunt Julie and the prudent warnings of Lord Melbourne and Victoria's Coburg Uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, were forgotten as Victoria indulged in champagne and her first "crush" on the future Tsar Alexander II.The heady attraction did not last. Though Nicholas I and Victoria exchanged courteous, diplomatic correspondence, they were destined to clash in one of the nineteenth century's most brutal conflicts: the Crimean War, in which the British prevailed and Nicholas was driven to an early grave.Coryne Hall is the author of 12 books, including A Biography of the Empress Marie Feodorovna 1847-1928, Imperial Dancer. Mathilde Kschessinska and the Romanovs, and Imperial Crimea: Estates, Enchantment & the Last of the Romanovs. Follow Coryne Hall on Twitter.Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

When Britain went to war in 1914, policemen throughout Great Britain found themselves called upon to perform an ever-increasing range of new tasks that reflected the expanded power of the British state in wartime. In Policing the Home Front, 1914-1918: The Control of the British Population at War (Routledge, 2018), Mary Fraser details the challenges these officers faced and how they worked to carry out their increased responsibilities in straitened circumstances. As Fraser notes, the war imposed new burdens upon the police from the start, as many men quit their posts in order to enlist in the armed forces. To compensate for their absence, auxiliaries were enlisted and women found themselves employed in policing for the first time. These officers were needed as the police were expected to perform a number of new duties, from the administration of wartime separation allowances to dealing with the expanded problems of prostitution, alcohol regulation and youth crime, many of which reflected an expectation by the government that the police could fill much of the void created by the absence of so many men who were serving at the front. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Charles Lord Cornwallis’s campaign through the southern American colonies came to an ignominious close on October 19, 1781, on an open field outside Yorktown, Virginia. At approximately noon, Cornwallis’s beleaguered soldiers, exhausted and low on provisions, emerged from behind their fortifications, laid down their arms, and delivered the earl’s sword to Continental General Benjamin Lincoln, a man whom Cornwallis had helped vanquish a little over a year before at the siege of Charleston. This dramatic reversal of fortune closed the door on a once aggressive British stratagem designed to end the American rebellion by dismembering its southern limbs one by one. Initial victories at Augusta, Savannah, Charleston, and Camden appeared to augur well for Cornwallis’s campaign.But what began with great promise in 1779 and 1780 soon ended in resounding defeat. After fighting Continental General Nathaniel Greene, Patriot partisans, and the Carolina backcountry throughout 1781, Cornwallis’s army was a spent force. Besieged at Yorktown, with no hope for relief, the earl was left with little choice but to surrender. Ever since, generals, historians, and popular culture have pilloried Cornwallis for his ostensibly inept handling of the southern campaign, and have laid responsibly for “losing” America firmly at his feet. But was the early truly to blame? Was Britain’s decision to move the seat of war to the southern colonies a sound strategy poorly executed, or simply a bad strategy? These questions form the analytical framework for Stanley D. M. Carpenter’s masterful strategic study, Southern Gambit: Cornwallis and the British March to Yorktown (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).Numerous scholars, including Jeremy Black, Don Higginbotham, and most recently Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, have examined Cornwallis’s southern campaign from the British perspective. These scholars have pushed back against the traditional historiographic charge of gross incompetence on the part of senior British commanders, and have highlighted the myriad logistical, political, spatial, and temporal impediments the British faced in their pursuit of victory. "Southern Gambit" follows and expands upon this tradition, providing the first monograph-length work to analyze the campaign exclusively through a strategic lens. Carpenter, a former Command Historian and Professor of Naval Strategy and Policy at the US Naval War College, offers a new perspective on Cornwallis’s march through the South, as well as fresh insight into why the earl, despite his formidable tactical acumen, proved unable to defeat the master strategist Nathaniel Greene. Moreover, in "Southern Gambit," Carpenter has produced a work possessing undeniable relevance to current US strategic planners. It is a requisite read for both scholars of the American Revolution and today's military professionals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2015), Natasha J. Lightfoot traces the ways Antiguans and Barbudans experienced freedom in the immediate years before and decades after British emancipation in 1834. With the exception of a handful of places, slavery ended immediately without a period of apprenticeship. However, Lightfoot deftly shows how immediate emancipation did not translate into complete freedom as Antiguan elites enacted new forms control to restrict the time, mobility, wages, and housing availability of freedpeople. They also continued to experience violence in their everyday lives. Despite these constraints, emancipated Antiguans and Barbudans managed to earn livelihoods, obtain land, secure housing, and build independent communities in accordance to and opposition against elites’ attitudes about them. Lightfoot’s study asks us to reconsider how freedom was lived in everyday life and how landlessness was not the primary obstacle for emancipated slaves in the Caribbean.Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In the 1870s, as colonial India witnessed some of the worst famines in its history where 6-10 million perished, observers watched in astonishment as famished people set out for the city of Bombay on foot in human caravans thousands of people long. Recently, images of a similar scale of deprivation have resurfaced in India as the COVID-19 crisis has once again forced the laboring poor to migrate in duress, this time in the opposite direction from city to country.Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (University of Washington Press, 2019) seems like a book written to explain precisely this moment. It asks: how can we understand the relationship between “the city” and its laboring poor? Inaugurating a paradigm shift in how we think of cities and urban space, the author Sheetal Chhabria argues that cities are not naturally occurring spaces or innocent administrative categories marked by lines on a map: instead they are spaced produced by constant labors of inclusion and exclusion which serve to keep capital flowing while stigmatizing the laboring poor. The book shows how “the wellbeing of the city–rather than of its people” took precedence starting in the late 19th century, thereby “positioning agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring poor as threats to be contained or excluded” rather than as constitutive parts of city space.This argument is crucial. It shows that the injustices faced by the laboring poor are not mistakes or signs of incomplete or failed urbanism. Those injustices are instead the very essence of what it means to mark a space as a “city.” Combining theoretical acuity and empirical depth with an abiding concern for economic justice, the book takes us on a journey through colonial Bombay as it lurched from crisis to crisis at the turn of the 20th century: poverty, famine, plague, and political unrest. In this volatile climate, it was the continual appeals to the “health of the city” which served to render class warfare subterranean, to generate consensus on anti-poor measures across the colonial divide, and to invent a stigmatized object called “the slum” which could be used as a perpetual foil to the city, making the results of deep capitalist inequality (poverty, unsanitary dwellings, hunger) appear instead like vestiges of an incompletely capitalist society which could then be further commercialized. This book is a must read for everyone interested in urban, housing, and economic justice, as well as for scholars of South Asia concerned with the subcontinent’s enduring inequalities.Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University studying the reproduction of inequality through development projects in rural western India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The history of the Caribbean Island of Trinidad bears witness to an important interplay between the religious practices of peoples of South Asian and those of peoples of African descent, and in particular the manner in which colonial religious categories shaped that interplay. In The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Alexander Rocklin draws on colonial archives and ethnographic work in this pioneering examination of the realities of indentured workers in colonial Trinidad wherein he illuminates in tandem the roots of the Caribbean Hindu diaspora and the very roots of Hinduism itself and its status as a World Religion. Join us on the follow up interview on Rocklin’s fascinating findings.For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The Economist is a curious publication. It always takes a point of view (as opposed to the all-the-news-that’s-fit-to-print approach). It maintains a uniform voice (editors and writers are typically handpicked from the same elite British universities, and rarely are there author bylines). And it has lasted a long time, originating back in London’s free-trade debates of the 1840s and continuing to be one of the most widely read magazines in the world. The Economist was a guiding hand in debates over imperialism, decolonization, and globalization.For all these reasons, The Economist also provides a useful window through which to peer into the history of liberalism. This is exactly what Alexander Zevin does in his perspicuous and provocative new book Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist (Verso Books, 2019). By examining The Economist, Zevin, an assistant professor of history at City University of New York and an editor at The New Left Review, helps us see what he calls “really existing liberalism”––that is, a liberalism that rooted for empire, embraced finance, and has always wielded an ambivalence towards democracy. This is a book that we will be talking about for a long time.Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

David A. Bateman’s fascinating new book opens with a puzzle. In 19th-century America, why was mass democratization – abolishing property and tax qualifications – accompanied by the mass disenfranchisement of black, male citizens? The book highlights the importance of understanding democratization as both a process of extending political rights and a deliberate effort to change the composition and character of a particular community. Democratization is not simply a neutral set of procedures but a conflict over people-making and Bateman explores the political importance of these narratives with both a deep dive into the American case and two complementary case studies: the United Kingdom and France in the early and late 19th century.Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the US, the UK, and France (Cambridge University Press, 2020) first explores democratization at the time of the American revolution – finding that democratization was neither connected to disenfranchisement nor focused on race. But, in the early Republic, bi-sectional factions within the Jeffersonian coalition contested black citizenship and the necessity of a white man’s republic. Understanding both the revolutionary and early republican narratives clarifies the mass disenfranchisement of black men in the antebellum period. Chapters on the United Kingdom and France explore the power of political narrative and the construction of “The Other” based on religion, gender, and class. Bateman connects all three cases to contemporary narratives of “real Americans” or “make American great again” arguing that these are new examples of how “the people” can be reconfigured to create hierarchies of worth.Disenfranchising Democracy won the American Political Science Association’s J. David Greenstone Award for the best book in history and politics. The podcast includes a trenchant analysis of New Jersey as a radical leader in democratization – for free people of color and independent property-owning women.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

As British colonial rulers expanded their control in South Asia legal resolutions were increasingly shaped by the English classification of social life. The definitional divide that structured the role of law in most cases was the line between what was deemed religious versus secular.In Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Julia Stephens, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, examines how Islam and Muslims were regulated within legal domains that managed various spheres of life. British rule determined that religious laws were most effective in governing family affairs but secular laws would govern markets and transactions. What complicated this simple binary was that Islamic “personal law” was very often bound up with economic issues. In our conversation we discuss British notions of “secular governance,” marriage and women’s property, the role of custom in legal reasoning, rulings around ritual and challenges to conformity, the construction of “personal law,” the relationships between colonial judges and Muslim legal scholars, how colonial law contributed to women’s economic marginalization, the relationship between gender and Islamic law, tensions between Hindus and Muslims, and how South Asia’s past can help us think about the present.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies