New Books in British Studies

During the 18th century English country houses served an important function in their society as stages for the display of the status and power of the landed aristocracy. As Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery demonstrate in Consumption and the Country House(Oxford University Press, 2016), though, they also played a revealing role as centers of consumption. Using three aristocratic families from the Midlands as case studies, Stobart and Rothery survey their patterns of spending over several generations, revealing the factors that shaped them. This spending, they argue, was not constant but instead saw fluctuations that coincided with life events, such as deaths and inheritances. Such dramatic changes were followed by the acquisition of goods that often were then used to create venues for these families to display their elite identity, with pursuit of the fashionable often tempered by issues of taste, rank and lineage. Stobart and Rothery’s analysis is not confined to large expenditures, however, as they also examine the more mundane spending necessary to keep these large households functioning and the gendered spheres that often defined the roles played by husband and wife in purchasing goods and services. Their analysis of these activities helps to refine our understanding of country houses, demonstrating how they were not the static exhibits we know today but fluid environments in which families left an ever-changing imprint. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Marc-William Palen challenges this commonplace. Instead, he notes, American adherents to Richard Cobden’s free-trade philosophy faced off against and ultimately lost to a powerful version of protectionist economic nationalism inspired by German-American economic theorist Friedrich List. The success of Listian protectionism spurred closed-door, aggressive US expansionism and also challenged free-trade orthodoxies in Britain, where political-economic policy also shifted toward protectionism by the end of the nineteenth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Air pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016), William Cavert examines how Londoners first grappled with the problem of air pollution created by the burning of coal. With concerns expressed for the dwindling supply of wood in England, Londoners in the 16th and 17th centuries increasingly turned to coal to heat their homes and power their businesses. As the amount of smoke produced by burning coal grew it prompted a variety of responses, from crown-directed efforts to prevent it from contaminating the royal space to its adoption in poems and plays as a symbol of modern urban life. As Cavert reveals, these efforts to grapple with the problem of coal smoke presaged the reaction to the much larger issue of industrial pollution throughout England during the Industrial Revolution and, in the process, framed many of these issues in ways with which people are familiar today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Among the achievements of Irish medicine in the twentieth century was ending the persistent epidemic of tuberculosis throughout the island, and one of the central figures in that effort was Dorothy Stopford Price. In her book Dorothy Stopford Price: Rebel Doctor (Irish Academic Press, 2014), Anne Mac Lellan provides readers with an account of the life of a pioneering MD and medical researcher. The daughter of an Anglo-Irish family, she trained as a doctor while Ireland participated in a world war and fought for its independence. As a member of Cumann na mBan, she provided medical care for members of the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence against the British. Following the war, she became a pediatrician, in which capacity she developed her interest in the tuberculosis vaccine BCG then being introduced in Europe. As Dr. Mac Lellan demonstrates, Price’s tireless championing of tuberculosis vaccination in the 1930s and 1940s played a key role in winning acceptance for both the vaccine and the nationwide campaign that ended the scourge of the disease in Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

You read a lot about “Orientalism,” that is, the often odd ways in which Westerners tried to understand predominantly Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. You don’t read a lot about good Western scholarship on predominately Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. All of which is to say we tend to focus on how Europeans got the Middle East wrong, not how the got it right. But, as Anders Ingram points out in his excellent new book Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015) they often got it right, despite their “Orientalist” prejudices. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Benjamin Disraeli was unique among British prime ministers in the 19th century in many ways, but perhaps none more so than for his career as a novelist. Whereas many scholars have treated Disraeli’s literary endeavors as an aberration born of financial necessity, in his book Disraeli: The Romance of Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2014), Robert O’Kell presents the novels as key to understanding his inner life and how he conceptualized his political career. Beginning with his participation in publisher John Murray’s attempt in the 1820s to establish a rival newspaper to The Times, O’Kell uses Disraeli’s novels and other writings to illuminate his self-image, one defined by his Jewish ancestry and his own intellectual and rhetorical gifts. Though convinced of his own genius, Disraeli had to overcome both anti-Semitic slurs and the stigma gained as the author of gossipy “silver-fork” novels to win election to Parliament and to become the leader of the Conservative Party. Many of his novels reflect his efforts to work out those challenges for himself, serving as a chronicle of his continuing attempts to come to terms with his identity within the context of the society and politics of his era. 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 early 18th century, country houses in Ireland underwent a dramatic physical transformation. In her book Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland (Paul Mellon Centre, 2016), Patricia McCarthy describes the course of this evolution, as the Palladian style turned aristocratic domiciles in rural Ireland from fortified buildings into elegant structures with columns, porticos, and other classically-influenced touches. From there she goes on to describe the interiors of the homes, the functions of the various rooms, and the lives lived both by the upper class and the people who served them. By describing the manifold ways in which the occupants used the spaces, a portrait of their domestic lives emerges that enriches our understanding not just of country house life in the 18th century but the world of the Protestant elite in Georgian Ireland as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Though in many ways the forgotten man of Irish politics, John Redmond came closer to achieving the long-sought goal of Home Rule for Ireland than had his more illustrious predecessors Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. In John Redmond: The National Leader (Merrion Press, 2014), Dermot Meleady describes how Redmond led the Irish Parliamentary Party to the cusp of this political victory and how it came apart for him. Picking up where his previous volume, Redmond: The Parnellite left off, Meleady introduces his readers to Redmond immediately after his assumption of his party’s leadership in 1900. With the anti-Home Rule Unionist Party in office, Redmond bided his time by shepherding other reforms that reshaped Irish society. When his party gained the balance of power in Parliament after the elections of 1910 Redmond used his newfound leverage to push Home Rule to the forefront of British politics, winning its passage but bringing Ireland to the brink of civil war by 1914 as a consequence. The outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914 led to a suspension of British politics and triggered a split in the Irish nationalist movement over Redmond’s appeal to support the war effort a split that, with the British response to the Easter Rising in 1916, led to Redmond’s political eclipse and the failure of his vision of an autonomous Ireland prospering within the British empire. 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 Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York University Press, 2015), Adam Mendelsohn, Associate Professor of History at the University of Cape Town, embarks on a comparative exploration of Jews in the rag (or clothing) trade in the British Empire and the U.S. Differences within the garment industries in, for example, London and New York, explain the divergence in social and economic outcomes for Jews in each setting. Mendelsohn’s narrative helps us better understand the limits of “cultural,” and other, explanations for modern Jewish economic mobility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Why does higher education still matter? In Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters, Les Back, a professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, offers a series of reflections framed by the time of the academic year. The first book from Goldsmiths Press, Academic Diary consists of short entries that think through the problems of university management, defend the idea of scholarship, and consider what ideas of being ‘honored’ as an academic might mean. Other chapters extol the virtues of the library and take a witty and wry look at the academy. Thus, the book, with its insights into academic life as well as broader analysis of the social forces shaping the university, offers a picture of the contemporary university, illuminating the pleasures and pains of working within this modern institution. Ultimately, Academic Diary offers a defense of the idea of the university and will be relevant and readable to anyone working or interested in the sector. Dave OBrien is the host of New Books in Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr. Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies