The Ties That Bind: Siblings, Family and Society in Early Modern England is a new monograph by Emeritus Professor Bernard Capp, published by OUP Oxford in 2018.

The family is a major area of scholarly research and public debate. Many studies have explored the English family in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on husbands and wives, parents and children. The Ties that Bind explores in depth the other key dimension: the place of brothers and sisters in family life, and in society.

Moralists urged mutual love and support between siblings, but recognized that sibling rivalry was a common and potent force. The widespread practice of primogeniture made England distinctive. The eldest son inherited most of the estate and with it, a moral obligation to advance the welfare of his brothers and sisters. The Ties that Bind explores how this operated in practice, and shows how the resentment of younger brothers and sisters made sibling relationships a heated issue in this period, in family life, in print, and also on the stage.

Details of all the monographs and edited collection of the Warwick University History Department's academic staff are available online.

 
Professor Rebecca Earle has been awarded the William and Mary Quarterly Douglass Adair Memorial Award 2018 for her article, The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification, and Colonialism, which also won the William and Mary Quarterly Lester J Cappon Award 2016.

 
Peter Marshall, Professor of History at the University of Warwick, has won this year’s Wolfson History Prize with his book Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (Yale University Press).

This year’s winner was selected from over 150 books by a panel of four eminent historians. Expert in Islamic history, Professor Carole Hillenbrand, of the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews, joined the judging panel this year alongside Professor Sir David Cannadine (Chair), Professor Sir Richard Evans and Revd Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Please see http://www.wolfson.org.uk/history-prize/ for more details.

The shortlist for the Wolfson History Prize 2018 has been revealed, recognising and celebrating books which combine excellence in historical research with readability for a wider general audience, and includes Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation by Professor Peter Marshall of the Warwick History Department. The overall winner will be announced on Monday 4th June 2018 at a reception at Claridge’s in London.

For the full shortlist, please see http://www.wolfson.org.uk/history-prize/2018-prize/.

For details of all the academic publications of the academic staff of the Warwick History Department, please see https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/research/publications/.

 
Professor Peter Marshall of the Warwick University History Department has been interviewed by Kurt Manwaring reagrding his new publication, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation. The full interview is available on the From The Desk website and details of all the History Department's academic publications are available on the History Department website.

Kurt Manwaring is a freelance writer and contributor to many news sites, and holds a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Utah.

 
Susan Carruthers, Professor in American History at the Warwick University History Department, has had her article, 'When Americans Were Afraid of Being Brainwashed', published in The New York Times online, and in print in the Sunday Review section on Sunday 21st January 2018.

 
'Trouble at the Mill: Factory Law and the Emergence of Labour Question in Late Nineteenth-Century Bombay' is a new monograph by Dr Aditya Sarkar of the Warwick University History Department, published by OUP India.

The book uses the Factory Acts of the late nineteenth century as an entry point into the early history of labour relations in India, specifically the mill industry of Bombay. It unites legal and social history in a manner which differs from most social histories of labour, and offers a new perspective on the constitution of industrial relations in colonial India.

The Factory Act passed by the Government of British India in 1881 produced the first official definition of 'factories' in modern Indian history as workplaces using steam power and regularly employing over 100 workers. It imposed certain minimal restrictions upon the freedom of employers in a limited range of industrial workplaces and invested factory workers, most explicitly children, with a slim set of immunities and entitlements. In 1891, the Factory Act was amended: factories were redefined as workplaces employing over 50 workers, the upper age limit of legal 'protection' was raised, weekly holidays were established, and women mill-workers were brought within its ambit. In its own time, factory law was experienced as a minor official initiative, but it connected with some of the most potent ideological debates and political oppositions of the age.

This book takes these two pieces of labour legislation as an entry point into the history of 'industrial relations' (the term did not yet exist in its present sense) in colonial India, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century combining the legal and social history which diverges from most studies of Indian workers. It identifies an emergent 'factory question' built on the problem of protective labour legislation. The cotton-mill industry of Bombay, long familiar to labour historians as one of the nodal points of modern Indian capitalism, is the principal focal point of this investigation. While this is a book about law and regulation, it is neither a legislative nor a policy history. While it is preoccupied with the history of factory legislation, it does not offer a full narrative that takes this as its 'object'. And while the book focuses on Bombay's cotton mills, it contains significant departures both from the city and its major industry. A number of questions which have only rarely been thematized by labour historians-the ideologies of factory reform, the politics of factory commissions, the routines of factory inspection, and the earliest waves of strike action in the cotton textile industry-are raised in this book.

Details of all the monographs and edited collection of the Warwick University History Department's academic staff are available online.

Dr Claire Shaw of the Warwick University History Department has been named in Australian Book Review's Books of the Year 2017, recommended by Mark Edele:

"Claire L. Shaw’s Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, community, and Soviet identity, 1917–1991 (Cornell) is a landmark in the history of disability and the Soviet welfare state. A stunning first book, it covers the entire Soviet experience from a thought-provoking perspective."

The full range of monographs and edited collections written or edited by the Warwick University History Department's academic staff is available online.