New Books in British Studies

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Great Britain was forced to give up the bulk of its vast, globe-spanning empire. While most histories of this process have examined it from the perspective of high politics and focused on matters of state construction, in The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) Sarah Stockwell addresses the role played by a number of non-state and quasi-state bodies – the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Bank of England, the Royal Mint, and the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst – in the process of decolonization. As Stockwell notes, these institutions played a growing role in the British Empire in the interwar era, one that started to change soon after the war as Britain accepted the reality of her postwar situation and began preparing the colonies in places such as Africa for independence. As British educational institutions trained a post-imperial generation of soldiers and administrators, the Bank of England aided in the creation of new central banks, and the Royal Mint produced coinage that symbolized the independence of these colonies, they did so in ways that maintained a continuing British influence in these places, even after formal control came to an end. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

It was a pleasure, earlier today, to speak to Jeremy Black, professor of history at the University of Exeter, about his new book, Britain and Europe: A Short History (Hurst, 2018). Jeremy is one of the best-known and certainly the most prolific of British historians, and his new book demonstrates both his extraordinary range and his compelling arguments. Beginning in the iron age and concluding in the present, Britain and Europe traces relationships between territories and cultures that change and conflict even as they participate in the construction of each other. The current debate about Brexit has shown how important historical arguments can be in public discourse, as well as how frequently these historical arguments can be abused. Grand in scope, and always accessible, Britain and Europe challenges lazy political appropriations of a difficult and rewarding past.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Debra Thompson, in her award-winning* book The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016), explores the complexities of the politics of the census. This book, which unpacks the census itself, leads the reader to consider how this mundane tool actually translates the abstraction of the state into a concrete entity, and, at the same time, how this tool has been and is used in contradictory ways in regard to the issue of race. Thompson, in exploring the census, contextualizes her analysis within three case studies: the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. She examines these cases over the course of more than 200 years of history and data, and she traces the shifts and changes in terms of racial categorization on the census, noting the fluid nature of understandings of race as applied to the citizen body in each of these countries, and how race was made legible by the census. The Schematic State also digs into the state, how it makes use of the data that is gleaned from the census, and what these uses suggest in terms of the instrument of the census. This book will be of interest to a variety of scholars and lay people, since the text and the research knit together different fields within and beyond political science, including comparative politics, critical race studies, critical legal studies, political theory, public policy, institutional political development, and statistical studies.*Winner, 2017 Race and Comparative Politics Best Book Award, Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section, American Political Science Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Earlier today I caught up with my colleague at Queen’s University Belfast, Andrew R. Holmes, to discuss his outstanding new book, The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Experience, and Modern Criticism, 1830-1930 (Oxford UP, 2018). Andrew has been working on the history of Irish Presbyterianism for the last fifteen years or so, and along the way has produced some of the most exciting work on the history of evangelicalism in Britain and Ireland. His distinctive vantage point allows Andrew to make compelling and original arguments about culture, community and criticism in the long nineteenth century. In his latest book, Andrew surveys the period in which Irish Presbyterians came together as a community, to debate different ways of being conservative, and to deal with tensions that arose between their increasingly conflicting commitments to the Westminster Confession, their statement of faith, and the new emphasis upon experience that was being promoted in trans-Atlantic evangelicalism. It was evangelical ideas that both pulled Irish Presbyterians together and at the end of the century pushed them apart.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Who gets in to top professions? In The Class Ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged (Policy Press, 2019), Drs Sam Friedman, an associate professor of sociology at LSE, and Daniel Laurison, an assistant professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, explore the dominance of social elites in top professions. The book draws on theories of social mobility and the work of Pierre Bourdieu to explain how top professions are highly exclusive, with under representations of women, ethnic minorities, and those from working class backgrounds. Moreover, even when individuals from these demographics do enter top jobs such as law, medicine, and accountancy, along with media occupations and acting, they suffer gaps in pay because of their class, race, and gender. The intersection of these demographics is crucial to the analysis, and the book uses detailed qualitative research to explain this 'class ceiling', showing how economic, cultural, and social capital play out to account for how inequality is replicated in the workplace and beyond. The book is essential reading for everyone interested in contemporary social inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generations. As George R. Boyer details in The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain (Princeton University Press, 2019), it only emerged after decades of different legislative responses to the problems of poverty that reflected shifting societal attitudes on the subject. As Boyer explains, welfare policy in the early 19th century primarily consisted of cash or in-kind payments provided for people living in their homes. This changed with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which replaced it with the infamous workhouse system. Though this brought down expenditures on the poor, the expectation that poverty was being reduced was belied by a series of reports at the end of the century which exposed the extent of urban poverty to a shocked nation. In response, the Liberal governments of the early 20th century passed a series of laws that established unemployment insurance and pensions for the elderly. While these expanded considerably the role of the state in providing for the poor, Boyer demonstrates that they fell well short of a comprehensive system, one which William Beveridge detailed in a famous 1942 report that served as the blueprint for the legislation passed by the Labour government after the Second World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Experiencing a major crisis from different viewpoints, step by step:  the Suez crisis of 1956— one of the major crises of the 1950s offers a potential master class in statecraft and the politics of strategy. It was an explosive Middle East confrontation capped by a surprise move that reshaped the region for many years to come. It was a diplomatic confrontation between the world’s two major colonial powers (France & Britain) and a major third-world country (Egypt), as well as a conflict between the world’s premier Arab country (Egypt) and Israel. A confrontation that riveted the world’s attention. And it was a short but startling war that ended in unexpected ways for every country involved.Six countries, including the two superpowers, had major roles, but each saw the situation differently. From one stage to the next, it could be hard to tell which state was really driving the action. As in any good ensemble, all the actors had pivotal parts to play. Among the world-renown figures involved were Sir Anthony Eden, Dwight Eisenhower, David Ben-Gurion, Abdel Nasser and John Foster Dulles.Like an illustration that uses an exploded view of an object to show how it works, Philip Zelikow and Ernest May's Suez Deconstructed: An Interactive Study in Crisis, War, and Peacemaking (Brookings Institution, 2018) uses an unprecedented design to deconstruct the Suez crisis. The story is broken down into three distinct phases. In each phase, the reader sees the issues as they were perceived by each country involved, taking into account different types of information and diverse characteristics of each leader and that leader’s unique perspectives. Then, after each phase has been laid out, editorial observations invite the reader to consider the interplay.Using the most updated primary source material and research; developed by an unusual group of veteran policy practitioners and historians working as a team, Suez Deconstructed is not just a fresh and novel way to understand the history of a major world crisis. Whether one’s primary interest is statecraft or history, this study provides a fascinating step-by-step experience, repeatedly shifting from one viewpoint to another. At each stage, readers can gain rare experience in the way these very human leaders sized up their situations, defined and redefined their problems, improvised diplomatic or military solutions, sought ways to influence each other, and tried to change the course of history.Professor Zelkow has served five Presidents from Reagan through Obama, in various capacities at the State Department, White House, and the Defense Department. He was also the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission. He is currently a professor at the University of Virginia.Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Hidetaka Hirota is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Advanced Study at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Prior to his current position, he was a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and taught at the City University of New York-City College. Dr. Hirota’s book, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2018) has received awards from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the New England American Studies Association, and the American Conference for Irish Studies, and Dr. Hirota’s book also received a special commendation for the Massachusetts Historical Society book prize.Dr. Hirota’s book focuses on state legislation policies of immigration control in New York and Massachusetts. Dr. Hirota asserts those laws come to act as a framework for subsequent federal policy. While most American Studies scholars have mostly aligned with the dominant theory that our nation had open borders prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Hirota’s research reveals that prior to the 1880s laws of exclusion and deportation were used to to rid communities of the poor and infirm."Hidetaka Hirota's Expelling the Poor is an exceptional, deeply researched, and timely study that transforms our understanding of U.S. immigration history and of Irish American studies. Shockingly, Hirota demonstrates that in the mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts and New York officials, inspired by nativism, anti-Catholicism, and what would now be called neoliberalism, excluded and/or deported roughly 100,000 would-be immigrants to the United States: mostly Irish paupers, many of them helpless widows and orphans, often expelled in the cruelest and most autocratic manner. As Hirota also shows, these vicious state policies were later adopted on the federal level, and, indeed, they are implemented today against the immigrants and refugees that US economic and foreign policies have uprooted from their homes."​--Kerby A. Miller, author of ​Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

With prison reform a topic of international conversation and debate, Marica Morgan’s Black Women Prison Employees: The Intersectionality of Gender and Race  offers an in-depth and unique analysis of a population largely lost in these debates and discussions: black women. By centering their experiences, Morgan offers and intersectional and psychodynamic examination of the prison worker and the organizational nature of the prison. This book offers added insight into not only the prison system as a place of employment, but also for any white-male-dominated organization. Taking the reader through the experiences of black women prison employees, Morgan highlights the importance of intersectional qualitative methodology when investigating institutional or organizational culture. Black Women Prison Employees is a necessary and timely read for policymakers and researchers interested in organizational structures and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

How has the council estate been represented on stage? In Social Housing In Performance: The English Council Estate On and Off Stage (Methuen Drama, 2018),  Dr. Katie Beswick, a lecturer in drama at the University of Exeter, explores this question using a mixture of dramatic and social theory, along with examples from a variety of theatre performances and forms. The book sets out the history of social housing and the council estate, along with a reading of the (mis)representations of the estate across contemporary media. The book shows the longstanding and complex relationship between theatre, class, and the estate, using examples including high profile state pieces, as well as site specific theatre. The book will be essential reading for theatre and performance scholars, along with anyone interested in issues of class and culture, as well as housing, space and place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies