Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775-1945
By Michael Francis Laffan
September 2022
An imam banished from eastern Indonesia to the Cape of Good Hope in 1780 builds a new Muslim community with a mix of fellow exiles, enslaved people, and even the men tasked with supervising his detention. Nineteenth-century colonial chroniclers invent the legend of the “loyal Malay” warrior, whose anger can be tamed through the “mildness” of British rule. A Tunisian-born teacher who arrived in Java from Istanbul in the early twentieth century becomes an enterprising Arabic-language journalist caught between competing nationalisms. Read more about Under Empire.
Lessons from the History of UK Environmental Policy
By Susan Owens, John Haldon, Harriet Ritvo, Tony Burton, Cornell Hanxomphou, and Graham Walker
October 2022
Environmental policymaking has a long history, even if ‘the environment’ has been framed as a category for public and political concern only in more recent times. A policy history, as John Haldon argues in his long view, "should be about how and why the decisions made by those with power to decide, and the way in which they made their decisions, changed through time". The processes involved, and their intended and unintended consequences, are fascinating in their own right. Importantly, however, they can also offer insights for policy- and decision-makers today. With hindsight, it is possible to see more clearly what has endured and what has changed, and to understand better how progressive environmental policies have emerged and evolved. Read more about Lessons from the History of UK Environmental Policy.
After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America
Edited by Rhae Lynn Barnes, Keri Leigh Merritt, and Yohuru Williams
October 2022
After Life is a collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the near presidential coup in 2021 following the 2020 election. Inspired by the writers who documented American life during the Great Depression and World War II for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the editors asked twenty-first-century historians and legal experts to focus on the parallels, convergences, and differences between the exceptional "long 2020", while it unfolds, and earlier eras in U.S. History. Read more about After Life.