New Books in British Studies

In Jamestown: The Truth Revealed (University of Virginia Press, 2017; paperback, 2018), William Kelso, Emeritus Head Archaeologist of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, takes us literally to the soil where the 1607 Jamestown colony began, unearthing footprints of a series of structures, beginning with the James Fort, to reveal fascinating evidence of the lives and deaths of the first settlers, of their endeavors and struggles, and new insight into their relationships with the Virginia Indians. He offers up a lively but fact-based account, framed around a narrative of the archaeological team's exciting discoveries.Unpersuaded by the common assumption that James Fort had long ago been washed away by the James River, William Kelso and his collaborators estimated the likely site for the fort and began to unearth its extensive remains, including palisade walls, bulwarks, interior buildings, a well, a warehouse, and several pits. By Jamestown’s quadricentennial over 2 million objects were cataloged, more than half dating to the time of Queen Elizabeth and King James. Kelso’s work has continued with recent excavations of numerous additional buildings, including the settlement’s first church, which served as the burial place of four Jamestown leaders, the governor’s rowhouse during the term of Samuel Argall, and substantial dump sites, which are troves for archaeologists. He also recounts how researchers confirmed the practice of survival cannibalism in the colony following the recovery from an abandoned cellar bakery of the cleaver-scarred remains of a young English girl. CT scanning and computer graphics have even allowed researchers to put a face on this victim of the brutal winter of 1609–10, a period that has come to be known as the "starving time."Refuting the now decades-old stereotype that attributed the high mortality rate of the Jamestown settlers to their laziness and ineptitude, Jamestown, the Truth Revealed produces a vivid picture of the settlement that is far more complex, incorporating the most recent archaeology and using twenty-first-century technology to give Jamestown its rightful place in history, thereby contributing to a broader understanding of the transatlantic world.Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In November 2013, two mass burials were discovered unexpectedly on a construction site in the city of Durham in northeast England. Over the next two years, a complex jigsaw of evidence was pieced together by Christopher Gerrard, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Durham, and a team of archaeologists to establish the identity of the human remains. Today we know them to be some of the Scottish prisoners who died in the autumn of 1650 in Durham cathedral and castle following the battle of Dunbar on the south-east coast of Scotland. Fought between the English and the Scots, this was one of the key engagements of the War of the Three Kingdoms. Using the latest techniques of skeleton science, this book gives back to the men a voice through an understanding of their childhood and later lives. Archaeological and historical evidence also allows us to reconstruct with vivid accuracy how and why these men vanished off the historical radar. Of the prisoners who survived their ordeal after Dunbar, new evidence has emerged about their involvement in local industries and in one of the great infrastructural projects of the day, the draining of the Fens. Others were sent far away, transported to the colonies as indentured servants to begin a new life at the edge of the known world. Following the trail of their biographies takes us across the Atlantic where the Dunbar men supported each other throughout their lives on the frontiers of New England. Here they worked in ironworks and sawmills, farmed and fished and adapted to the vast forested landscapes which they named ‘Scotland’ and ‘Unity’, after the vessel they had sailed in. None returned to the country of their birth. Winner of the Best Archaeological Book at the 2018 British Archaeology Awards, Lost Lives, New Voices: Unlocking the Stories of the Scottish Soldiers from the Battle of Dunbar, 1650 (Oxbow Books, 2018) is a collaboration between academic researchers and professional archaeologists working on the Scottish Soldiers Research Project.Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Onur Ulas Ince constructs an important analysis of liberalism, capitalism, and empire in his new book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018). This text brings together a number of lenses through which to consider the writings and ideas of British liberal thinkers, especially John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. This book—which is part of a larger project that will contain another book paying attention to Adam Smith, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and others—focuses on the political thought, socioeconomic context, and the cultural understanding of British empire, the growth of capitalism, and the rise of Anglo-liberal thought. This extremely clear and beautifully written book links together a variety of methodological approaches to consider these often-distinct areas within political thought, economic thought, cultural studies, and theories of empire. Ince explores this analysis through the triad of private property, market exchange, and free labor, especially as these components became the structure of the British colonial undertakings across continents, countries, and people, while also being integrated into the foundation of liberal political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The most recent addition to Baylor University Press’s Studies in World Christianity is Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan: Civil War, Migration, and the Rise of Dinka Anglicanism (Baylor UP, 2018), by Jesse A. Zink, who is among many other things principal of Montreal Diocesan Theological College. Zink’s book is an outstanding account of the growth and evolution of Anglican Christianity among the Dinka people of what is now South Sudan. Zink traces the origins of the Anglican mission to the Dinka people, explains its early weakness, and documents its transformation after the expulsion from Sudan of foreign missionaries in 1964. As Dinka Christians took their faith back to their rural heartland, and as the church’s leaders began to tolerate the informal authority of prophetic figures, Anglicanism itself began to change. Zink’s extraordinary account describes multiple conversions – the conversion of Dinka people to Anglican religion, and their conversion of Anglican religion into the cultural forms that support the faith and practice of one of the fastest-growing churches in the region.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

The history of Palestine is overly political; most studies, especially of the Mandate period, when the British effectively colonized Palestine, focus on the political actors. In Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2018), Suzanne Schneider  produces a social and cultural study that does not ignore the political actors, walking us through how religion was used by the British in educational settings in attempts to quell nationalism. Schneider’s work is also unique because in examines the Jewish and Arab populations in Mandate Palestine simultaneously, allowing us to see how the same British policies affected both populations. She also draws on British colonial history and late Ottoman history to inform her dense analysis of Mandate Palestine’s educational and religious history.  Thus, she demonstrates where there is overlap and where there is divergence. We talk to her about the theory underpinning her work, how to write about religion in the early 20th century Middle East,  the difference between private and public education in Mandate Palestine, and her work at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.Suzanne Schneider is the deputy director at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where, in addition to teaching, she oversees program execution, development initiatives, and institutional partnerships. She received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. An interdisciplinary scholar working in the fields of history, religious studies, and political theory, Suzanne’s research interests relate to Jewish and Islamic modernism, religious movements in the modern Middle East, the history of modern Palestine/Israel, secularism, and political identity.  She is also a regular contributor to The Revealer: A Review of Religion and Media. She is the author of Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2018).Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Victoria Brownlee is the author of an exciting new contribution to discussions of early modern religion and literature. Her new book, Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625 (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers an illuminating account of how, why, when, where and by whom Bibles were read in early modern England, as well as a series of case studies of particular characters or passages in the Old and New Testaments. Why did Bible reading matter so much in the England of Elizabeth I and James VI/I? Did it matter that the Bible was an illustrated text? Why did expositors work so hard to limit the language of the Song of Songs, when creative writers worked so hard to expand its reference? Join us on this podcast as Dr. Brownlee suggests answers to these and other questions about readings of the Bible in early modern England.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

In the decades following the Second World War, the British government increasingly turned to covert operations as a means of achieving their foreign policy goals. In Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2018), Rory Cormac describes the establishment of covert action as a tool of foreign policy and the various ways in which it was applied. As he explains, covert action was initially seen as a tool of warfare the use of which was inappropriate in times of peace. This view changed with the burgeoning Cold War, as covert actions ranging from propaganda campaigns to direct political and economic manipulations of other countries were often viewed as effective means of achieving British foreign policy goals in ways less expensive and overtly confrontational than more traditional methods. Though the British employed such efforts cautiously in Europe, they were far less restrained in doing the territories of their former empire, believing that such efforts were a useful means of maintaining their influence throughout the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Kate Fullagar's and Michael A. McDonnell's edited volume Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) reimagines the Age of Revolution from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Rather than treating indigenous peoples as distant and passive players in the political struggles of the time, this book argues that they helped create and exploit the volatility that marked an era while playing a central role in the profound acceleration in encounters and contacts between peoples around the world. Focusing in particular on indigenous peoples’ experiences of the British Empire, this volume takes a unique comparative approach in thinking about how indigenous peoples shaped, influenced, redirected, ignored, and sometimes even forced the course of modern imperialism. The essays demonstrate how indigenous-shaped local exchanges, cultural relations, and warfare provoked discussion and policymaking in London as much as it did in Charleston, Cape Town, or Sydney. Facing Empire charts a fresh way forward for historians of empire, indigenous studies, and the Age of Revolution and shows why scholars can no longer continue to exclude indigenous peoples from histories of the modern world. These past conflicts over land and water, labor and resources, and hearts and minds have left a living legacy of contested relations that continue to resonate in contemporary politics and societies today. Covering the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Australia, and West and South Africa, as well as North America, this book looks at the often misrepresented and underrepresented complexity of the indigenous experience on a global scale.Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of race through the formation of the British Empire.  While scholars have often addressed this phenomenon through the lenses of academic anatomy and natural history, Seth suggests that medical care and theories of pathology were central to how Britons began to see their bodies as fundamentally distinct from other peoples.  After the Seven Years War, medical thinkers started contributing to British imperial ambitions by interpreting the distinct disease environments of the empire’s disparate parts.  Initially, a “seasoning sickness” was thought unavoidable as colonists entered a new clime, for the body’s complexion had to adapt to the qualities of the new environment.  Through numerous iterations and variations, this Hippocratic sense of a porous and variable body was abandoned as illness and vulnerability became ever more tightly tied to inherited somatic traits and behaviors.  This figured strongly in debates over abolition and the legitimacy of slavery and provided the precedent for nineteenth-century scientific racism.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico.  He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of bringing colonial peripheries and non-Western spaces into the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Was World War II really the 'Good War'? In the years since the declaration of peace in 1945 many myths have sprung up around the conflict in the victorious nations, especially the United Kingdom. In his newest book, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), writer and journalist, Peter Hitchens, past winner of the Orwell Prize and regular columnist for the Mail on Sunday, takes on the myth of World War II as the 'good war', and in the process he deconstructs the many fables which have become associated with this highly popular historical narrative. Whilst not per se arguing against the idea that at some point in time Hitler's Germany had to be defeated, Hitchens queries the need to have commenced that war in September 1939. Along the way, Hitchens queries and or attacks various other myths such as Anglo-American solidarity and the so-called 'Special Relationship'; that the Battle of Britain was an important turning point in the war, or that British and American involvement were the key aspect to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany. By turns, erudite, unorthodox and even funny, Hitchens book is a must read for anyone who is interested in the run-up to World War II and the way in which that conflict was fought.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