Henry Curwen (1845–1892) was a journalist and author who became editor of the Times of India. First published in 1874, A History of Booksellers aimed at providing an informative but entertaining picture of British bookselling and publishing, by means of 'biographies' of the major publishing houses and their output. He begins with a general survey of publishing and bookselling from Roman times…
Bangladesh is a new name for an old land whose history is little known to the wider world. A country chiefly famous in the West for media images of poverty, underdevelopment, and natural disasters, Bangladesh did not exist as an independent state until 1971. Willem van Schendel's history reveals the country's vibrant, colourful past and its diverse culture as it navigates the extraordinary twis…
Since early times, agriculture has been pivotal to England's economy. This is the sixth in a magisterial seven-volume, eight-piece compilation by the economist James E. Thorold Rogers (1823–90), which represents the most complete record of produce costs in England between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a variety of sources including college archives and the Public Record …
Shrouded in poetry, the earliest accounts of Hindu astronomy can strike modern readers as obscure. They involve the marriage of the moon to twenty-seven princesses, a war between gods and giants, and shadows that give birth to planets. In this fascinating study, first published in Calcutta in 1823 and reissued here in the 1825 edition, John Bentley (c.1750–1824) strives to strip back the myth…
Popular culture in Africa is the product of everyday life: the unofficial, the non-canonical. And it is the dynamism of this culture that makes Africa what it is. In this book, Karin Barber offers a journey through the history of music, theatre, fiction, song, dance, poetry, and film from the seventeenth century to the present day. From satires created by those living in West African coastal to…
In 1906, Nello Vernon-Wood (1882–1978) reinvented himself as Tex Wood, Banff hunting guide and writer of “yarns of the wilderness by a competent outdoorsman.” His homespun stories of a vanishing era, in such periodicals as The Sportsman, Hunting and Fishing, and the Canadian Alpine Journal, have much to tell us about the west as envisioned by those who wanted to leave the industrialized w…
This history of African motherhood over the longue durée demonstrates that it was, ideologically and practically, central to social, economic, cultural and political life. The book explores how people in the North Nyanzan societies of Uganda used an ideology of motherhood to shape their communities. More than biology, motherhood created essential social and political connections that cut acros…
Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired. To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong . Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It not just incomplete or i…
The churches in Africa probably constitute the most important growth area for Christianity in the second half of the twentieth century. From being a number of rather tightly controlled 'mission fields' zealously guarded by the great missionary societies, Catholic and Protestant, they have emerged across the last decades in bewildering variety to selfhood, a membership of close on a hundred mill…
Strabo's Geography, completed in the early first century AD, is the primary source for the history of Greek geography. This Guide provides the first English analysis of and commentary on this long and difficult text, and serves as a companion to the author's The Geography of Strabo, the first English translation of the work in many years. It thoroughly analyzes each of the seventeen books and p…