New Books in British Studies

The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England (Hurst, 2025) by Dr. Martyn Percy offers a bold and unsettling truth: the British Empire and Great Britain are primarily English constructions, and the Church of England benefited from English enterprise and exploitation, serving as

In 1716 two princes from Mpfumo—what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique—boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for England. Instead, their perfidious captain sold them into slavery in Jamaica. After two years of pleading their case, the princes—known in the historical record as Prince James and

Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance de

British poet John Milton published one of the earliest and still tremendously important defenses of free speech for our modern world. From his famous pamphlet Areopagitca (1644) to Paradise Lost (1667), Milton participated in debates regarding censorship and the right of the public to access the inner workings of Parli

The period from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) witnessed the production of a substantial corpus of Middle English crusade romances. In English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291–1453 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Marcel Elias places thes

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literar