New Books in British Studies

Shallow and quickly outdated Christian worship practices have left many searching for something with deeper roots. Many churches have rediscovered the importance of the sacraments, particularly the Lord's Supper. The number of churches that are observing more frequent communion continues to grow. What's lacking is guidance from the past on this issue. How did infrequent communion become a "tradition" in so many churches? What historical, political, and theological factors were involved? As one of the leading evangelical pastors and scholars of the late eighteenth century, John Brown of Haddington has much to teach. Not satisfied with the practice of his own Scottish Reformed tradition, Brown left a manuscript advocating more frequent communion among his papers after his death. It was published in 1804 but has remained inaccessible to a large audience until now. Dr. Gregory Soderberg used Brown as one of his sources in his doctoral study of communion frequency in the Reformed tradition, which was the first full-length, scholarly treatment of the subject. Although Brown wrote for his own time, his arguments are still relevant. In John Brown of Haddington on Frequent Communion (Wipf & Stock, 2024), readers will find a brilliant mind engaging the issue of communion frequency with wit and erudition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Trauma, Memory and Silence of the Irish Woman in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2023) studies the manifestations of female trauma through the exploration of multiple wounds, inflicted on both body and mind and the soul of Irish women from Northern Ireland and the Republic within a contemporary context, and in literary works written at the turn of the twenty-first century and beyond. These artistic manifestations connect tradition and modernity, debunk myths, break the silence with the exposure of uncomfortable realities, dismantle stereotypes and reflect reality with precision. Women’s issues and female experiences depicted in contemporary fiction may provide an explanation for past and present gender dynamics, revealing a pathway for further renegotiation of gender roles and the achievement of equilibrium and equality between sexes. These works might help to seal and heal wounds both old and new and offer solutions to the quandaries of tomorrow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. The crisis of democracy in rich countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of neoliberal capitalism. This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.Abby Innes is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at the LSE.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The years leading up to the independence and accompanying partition of India mark a tumultuous period in the history of Bengal. Representing both a major front in the Indian struggle against colonial rule, as well as a crucial Allied outpost in the British/American war against Japan, Bengal stood at the crossroads of complex and contentious structural forces - both domestic and international - which, taken together, defined an era of political uncertainty, social turmoil, and collective violence. While for the British the overarching priority was to save the empire from imminent collapse at any cost, for the majority of the Indian population the 1940s were years of acute scarcity, violent dislocation and enduring calamity. In particular there are three major crises that shaped the social, economic and political context of pre-partition Bengal: the Second World War, the Bengal famine of 1943, and the Calcutta riots of 1946. Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (Oxford UP, 2015) examines these intricately interconnected events, foregrounding the political economy of war and famine in order to analyze the complex nexus of hunger, war and civil violence in colonial Bengal at the twilight of British rule.NBN Host: Sohini Majumdar teaches history at University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The Royal Albert Hall: Building the Arts and Sciences (Brepols, 2024) by Dr. Simona Valeriani takes one of London’s most iconic buildings and deconstructs it to offer new insights into the society that produced it. As part of the new cultural quarter built in South Kensington on the proceeds from The Great Exhibition of 1851, the Royal Albert Hall was originally intended to be a ‘Central Hall of Arts and Sciences’. Prince Albert’s overarching vision was to promote technological and industrial progress to a wider audience, and in so doing increase its cultural and economic reach.Lighting, ventilation, fireproofing, ‘ascending rooms’, cements, acoustics, the organ, the record-breaking iron dome, and the organisation of internal spaces were all attempts to attain progress - and subject to intense public scrutiny. From iron structures to terracotta, from the education of women to the abolition of slavery, in the making of the Royal Albert Hall scientific knowledge and socio-cultural reform were intertwined.This book shows, for the first time, how the Royal Albert Hall’s building was itself a crucible for innovation. Illustrious techniques from antiquity were reimagined for the new mechanical age, placing the building at the heart of a process of collecting, describing, and systematising arts and practices. At the same time, the Royal Albert Hall was conceived as a ‘manifesto’ of what the Victorians thought Britain ought to be, at a crucial moment of its socio-economic history: a symbolic cultural hub for the Empire’s metropole.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Empire of Culture: Neo-Victorian Narratives in the Global Creative Economy (SUNY Press, 2024) by Dr. Waiyee Loh brings together contemporary representations of Victorian Britain to reveal how the nation's imperial past inheres in the ways post-imperial subjects commodify and consume "culture" in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The globalization of English literature, along with British forms of dress, etiquette, and dining, in the nineteenth century presumed and produced the idea that British culture is a universal standard to which everyone should aspire.Examining neo-Victorian texts and practices from Britain, the United States, Japan, and Singapore—from A. S. Byatt's novel Possession and its Hollywood film adaptation to Japanese Lolita fashion and the Lady Victorian manga series—Dr. Loh argues that the British heritage industry thrives on the persistence of this idea. Yet this industry also competes and collaborates with the US and Japanese cultural industries, as they, too, engage with the legacy of British universalism to carve out their own empires in a global creative economy. Unique in its scope, Empire of Culture centers Britain's engagements with the US and East Asia to illuminate fresh axes of influence and appropriation, and further bring Victorian studies into contact with various sites of literary and cultural fandom.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Sideways Migration: Being French in London (Routledge, 2025) examines the relationship between migration and socioeconomic status. In particular, it charts a set of middle-class aspirations that lead people to move to a nearby nation that is similar in wealth and social indicators - a type of horizontal relocation that it terms "sideways migration." It chronicles the experiences of a diverse group of French middle-class citizens who moved to London during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork over a ten-year period, this book engages at length with their strategies of emplacement through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social space. Against a backdrop of heightened anxieties about immigration, the disruptions of the Brexit process and, more recently, a pandemic, it shows how middle-class migration is affected by processes of dislocation and relocation, settling and unsettling, and the search for belonging. This book points to new directions for understanding transnationalism among middle-class migrants through its consideration of the French emigration apparatus and the role of the multisite French nation in the lives of its citizens living abroad. It will be key reading for scholars and students interested in emigration and migration from anthropology, sociology, geography, political science, history, and international studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Caroline Dunn joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Ladies-in-Waiting in Medieval England (Cambridge UP, 2025), which examines female attendants who served queens and aristocratic women during the late medieval period. Using a unique set of primary source–based statistics, Caroline Dunn reveals that the lady-in-waiting was far more than a pretty girl sewing in the queen’s chamber while seeking to catch the eye of an eligible bachelor. Ladies-in-waiting witnessed major historical events of the era and were sophisticated players who earned significant rewards. They had both family and personal interests to advance – through employment they linked kin and court, and through marriage they built bridges between families. Whether royal or aristocratic, ladies-in-waiting worked within gendered spaces, building female-dominated social networks, while also operating within a masculine milieu that offered courtiers of both sexes access to power. Working from a range of sources wider than the subjective anecdote, Dunn presents the first scholarly treatment of medieval English ladies-in-waiting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Jana Byars talks to Ellen Arnold about Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, 300 - 1100 (Cambridge UP, 2024). Fishermen, monks, saints, and dragons met in medieval riverscapes; their interactions reveal a rich and complex world. Using religious narrative sources to evaluate the environmental mentalities of medieval communities, Ellen F. Arnold explores the cultural meanings applied to rivers over a broad span of time, ca. 300-1100 CE. Hagiographical material, poetry, charters, chronicles, and historiographical works are explored to examine the medieval environmental imaginations about rivers, and how storytelling and memory are connected to lived experiences in riverscapes. She argues that rivers provided unique opportunities for medieval communities to understand and respond to ecological and socio-cultural transformations, and to connect their ideas about the shared religious past to hopes about the future. 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 complete military history of Britain's pacification of the Arab revolt in Palestine, Britain's Pacification of Palestine (Cambridge UP, 2019), Matthew Hughes shows how the British Army was so devastatingly effective against colonial rebellion. The Army had a long tradition of pacification to draw upon to support operations, underpinned by the creation of an emergency colonial state in Palestine. After conquering Palestine in 1917, the British established a civil Government that ruled by proclamation and, without any local legislature, the colonial authorities codified in law norms of collective punishment that the Army used in 1936. The Army used 'lawfare', emergency legislation enabled by the colonial state, to grind out the rebellion. Soldiers with support from the RAF launched kinetic operations to search and destroy rebel bands, alongside which the villagers on whom the rebels depended were subjected to curfews, fines, detention, punitive searches, demolitions and reprisals. Rebels were disorganised and unable to withstand the power of such pacification measures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies