With her latest book, Jordanna Bailkin makes a singularly impressive contribution to 20th-century British history.Her focus is on the various sites that were built or, more commonly, re-purposed to hold refugees who reached Britain at various stages in the 20th century.Her wide-ranging approach allows her to cast fresh light on fairly familiar episodes, such as the arrival of Jewish and Basque refugees in the late 1930s, Hungarian refugees in 1956 and Ugandan Asians in the 1970s, but also to cover groups whose arrival in Britain is much less well known, such as Belgian refugees during the First World War, Anglo-Egyptians in the wake of the Suez crisis in 1956, and Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s.(However, she does not discuss Bosnian Muslim refugees in the 1990s.)Some of these episodes have been the subject of specialist study, much of it very recent.[1]But, as we shall see, there is much to be gained from bringing these episodes within a single frame.
The 1911 Revolution overthrew Manchu rule, ushering in the Republican era in China.As Xiaowei Zheng indicates at the beginning of this book, the traditional historiography on the 1911 Revolution focuses largely on the political dimension.Some stress the role of the Tongmenghui, the predecessor of the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party), in launching the revolution, while Marxist historians have tended to explain it as a bourgeois revolution against the feudal rule of the Qing dynasty.Another approach positions the revolution in the framework of social history, examining how political elites redefined the relations between the central and local governments.The third perspective draws on modernisation theory, regarding the revolution as an attempt to build a modern nation-state.However, none of these studies have discussed in detail the significance of ideas and culture in mobilising the masses and shaping the path of the revolution, and Zheng's monograph is therefore a timely intervention to complement and transcend the existing literature.
s latest book distils ideas evident in his work for over three decades to present an account of how 'in seeking to manage the economy' British governments have 'sought simultaneously to manage popular understanding of economic issues' (p. 1).Tomlinson tracks the narratives British governments have attempted to craft to explain the state of the economy and the policies required to improve it from the postwar period up until the present day.Receiving special attention are efforts aimed at altering the behaviour of the public -either as a whole, or certain sections such as the working class -that were held to be necessary to allow the government's proposed economic policies to function successfully.
In popular and academic discourse, the American Civil War has never really ended in the United States.For the first century or so after the resolution of the military conflict, most white Americans, including historians shaped by the resurrection of white supremacy, factored slavery as being somewhere between a negligible factor to one of many contributory variables that eventually pushed the nation to war.During the United States' Civil Rights era, as the American academic community began to more closely scrutinize its own racist proclivities, scholarship improved in both depth and breadth.The resulting work made plain that slavery was not solely one of many causal factors, but it was the cause -virtually everything that divided the North and the South to the point of war stemmed from slavery and debates about slavery.
There are few historical events with a cultural legacy as enduring as that connected to the Second World War.The conflict occupies an important place within many personal, as well as national, narratives.Those interested in its history and heritage are confronted by an enormous range of writing, on a wide variety of themes.The problem, according to Jan Black, a 94-year-old RAF veteran quoted on the first page of Wendy Webster's Mixing It: Diversity in World War Two Britain, is that 'people just don't know their history' (p.3).Black, who was born Jan Stangryczuk in eastern Poland, volunteered to join the British war effort in 1940.He travelled to Britain via Buenos Aires and Belfast, joined the RAF, and trained as an air gunner in Blackpool.His globe-crossing story is similar to many of those contained within Mixing It.The book deliberately challenges popular assumptions about the British home front by showing that it was inhabited by people drawn from across the world.These arrivals included allies like Jan Black, but also war-workers, refugees, nurses, exiles, prisoners of war, and neutral observers.Their existence, argues Webster, made Britain more diverse than at any time in its past (p.2).
The biggest surprise in Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921-1931 is how timely it is.Many of the same debates about global finance and its influence on the people of Austria, Swiss
Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury (1120–70) is one of the iconic figures in British history – a man who most people have not only heard of, but also have an opinion on. Yet, despite the brutality of his murder, such opinions are not always positive. In fact, this medieval archbishop is an unusually divisive figure, and always has been. In the 12th century, he was both revered as a saint and dismissed (by his fellow bishop Gilbert Foliot) with the famous line ‘[he] always was a fool and always will be’. More recently, he has been included in lists of both the greatest and the worst Britons of all time. Notably, in 2005, he was runner-up to Jack the Ripper in a BBC History Magazine poll – above King John and Oswald Mosley. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the strength of feeling he is capable of provoking, he has also been the subject of vast quantities of writing in the eight centuries since his death.
The architect, like other professions in the modern world distinguished by specialist training (doctors, engineers, etc.), cannot be conceived easily without some notion of ‘expertise’. The architect’s authority derives from their mastery of certain skills, their fluency in technical vocabularies, and importantly the accumulation of experience – ‘expert’ from the Latin expertus, the past participle of experiri, ‘to try’.[1] [2] It is the centrality of ‘expertise’ to architectural practice that has facilitated, on the one hand, fevered scholarly interest in ‘architecture without architects’ (those outsider or subaltern exceptions that prove the general rule), and, on the other, the easy identification of architects with the great projects of technoscientific regulation, standardization and disciplining seen to characterize our modern world.[2] [3] As Peter H Christensen suggests in his introduction to the volume under review, it is due to the latter that the history of architectural practice in the modern Islamic world has been focused primarily through the lens of ‘hegemony, subjugation and force’ (p. 3). Colonial and postcolonial eras facilitated the global peregrinations of Western-trained experts and the dissemination of modern technologies, either for paternalist uplift or developmental agendas, and as such have been routinely presented as ‘harbingers of erosion’, corrupting the earlier ‘purity and clarity’ of Islamic artistic and building practice (p. 3). The essays assembled in Expertise and Architecture in the Modern Islamic World look to challenge this scholarly consensus, providing a more nuanced narrative of historical change and in the process opening up the very category of ‘expertise’ for interrogation.
For almost 30 years David Edgerton has produced a series of well-researched and ground-breaking revisionist accounts of this country's recent past, which have exposed the inadequacies and weaknesses of 'declinism' as an explanation of Britain's changing domestic and international experience since 1900.In studies such as England and the Aeroplane (1991 and 2013) and Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970(2005) he has convincingly shown how and why the nation remained a major power with its own formidable military-industrial complex for much of the last century.The Rise and Fall of the British Nation takes up these arguments but goes beyond them, reaching out to social and cultural as well as military, political, economic and technological history.Edgerton seeks to explain how a British nation was constructed after 1945, emerging out of the British Empire and the global, free trade economy which had been constructed during the 19th century.By contrast, the British nation rejected imperialism and cosmopolitanism.Like most of its continental neighbours at the same time, post-1945 Britain adopted industrial protectionism, encouraged agricultural self-sufficiency, and promoted growth and modernization through a developmental state.It built a National Health Service and ran 'nationalized' industries such as British Rail or British Steel.The mines were publicly owned and run by a National Coal Board.From the early 1960s this post-imperial nation, initially concerned to protect its interests in the world via a large and powerful military, complete with state-of-the-art aircraft and an independent nuclear deterrent, reduced its defence budget and increased investment in welfare and education.By the 1970s it had become a social-democratic state.
It is an ambitious book that would try to cover the Conquest of Mexico, the rise and fall of the country's hacienda system, the emergence of the Virgen de Guadalupe, the intricacies of Emiliano Zapata's role in the Mexican Revolution, and the exodus of women from rural regions in the mid-1960s to look for work as 'household help' in the nation's fast-growing capital city.But John Tutino, professor of history and international affairs at Georgetown University, does not just stop there in his new book, a 500-page tome covering 500 years of social, political, and economic change.At the same time as giving us a fine-grained, politico-economic history of the highlands that ring Mexico City, Tutino's book is an analysis of the economic foundations of patriarchy, a study of the violence engendered by extreme inequality, and a history of world capitalism, which in its first pages critiques , and in its epilogue namechecks NAFTA, Trump, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the work of radical economist Thomas Piketty (p.411).Over thirteen intervening chapters, Tutino sets out to explore the 'largest processes of capitalism … in their global dimensions,' while concurrently investigating 'its social and cultural realities … in local detail' (p.10).Tutino's local case studies are mostly centred on the 'Mexican Heartland' of the title, which includes parts of the centrally located states of Morelos, Hidalgo, and the Estado de México.This region -made up of fertile lake-basins, sub-tropical valleys and arid hills, and traditionally inhabited by Nahuatl-and Otomíspeaking peoples -was the breadbasket (or rather 'tortilla basket') of the Aztec Empire, home to the peasants and the traders who put food on the tables of Tenochtitlán.After the arrival of the Spaniards, the region's communities were re-organised into autonomous 'Indian Republics' by missionaries and colonial administrators, but continued to feed the city now known as 'México', as well as the nearby silver mines.These provided the Spanish Empire with much of its currency, which Tutino -developing Braudel's longue durée analysis of the emergence of capitalism -has already, in previous work, presented as the motor of an expanding proto-capitalist global trade network.[1]Mexico's heartland thus became 'an early crucible of entrepreneurship, native adaptation, and cultural innovation' (p.67), whose agricultural products, and the surplus labour of its indigenous, Afro-descendant, European and mixed-race inhabitants, would go on to support five centuries of regional booms in mining, pulque production, sugar, industrial manufacturing, and construction.As a result, the communities of the heartland 'lived five centuries of intense interactions with
Spanish Ministry of Defence, 2011).It sheds new light on an obscure, but fundamental, episode of the undeclared Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604) that took place a year after the Spanish Armada.Interestingly, although Queen Elizabeth I was at first intentionally misinformed about this, once she knew the grim reality, she silenced it.The Queen prohibited any publication about the English Armada (also known as the Counter-Armada or Drake-Norris expedition) trying, successfully, to hide the disastrous result suffered by the English in that military campaign on the Iberian mainland.Only a few propaganda pamphlets were published in order to hide the truth, treating real but unfavorable facts as false rumors and instead showing a false aftermath of the campaign favorable to the English.According to the author, these pamphlets -the first by Anthony Wingfield (1) -were taken for reliable sources by British historians.Gorrochategui's thesis is that little attention has been paid to the Counter-Armada by historians, particularly in the English-speaking world.The author contrasts this fact with the vast literature produced on the Spanish Armada.There are a few exceptions: for instance, the British Hispanist Martin A. S. Hume (2) dedicated a full chapter to the Counter-
post-war Britain's diaspora through the prism of oral history in Migrants of the British Diaspora since the 1960s: Stories from Modern Nomads.This focus on oral history was also present in Speaking to Immigrants: Oral Testimony and the History
In The Loyal Republic, Erik Mathisen attempts to redefine the way Americans saw themselves, their citizenship and loyalty in the Civil War era.Mathisen ably demonstrates the loose conglomeration of states that existed in 1861 and the tenuous link the average American had to the federal state, as well as the emphasis placed on state loyalty by proto-Confederates during the secession crisis, and the redefinition of American citizenship prompted by the secession of the Confederate states in the North.Mathisen 'examines the debate over citizenship that the Civil War set in motion' (p.9), both by scouring the national macrosocietal and political consciousness and the localised debates in Mississippi which he has chosen as a statelevel case study.
