New Books in Early Modern History

From the mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth century, a wide network of English-speaking men, women, and children took up residence in the Ottoman Maghrebi regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. There they formed expatriate communities, engaged with the societies around them, and undertook their businesses, from trading to captivity redemption to international politics.

Moving beyond official diplomatic records and printed texts, Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662–1712: Merchants, Consuls, and Cultural Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nat Cutter delves into thousands of personal letters and financial records, where we find friendship, conflict, adoration, derision, manipulation, and scandal across cultures and countries. In so doing, it offers new ways of thinking about British-Maghrebi relations in a transitional age for global trade and military-naval power, moving beyond plaintive consular complaints, gunboat diplomacy, and brutal captivity to accommodate positive cooperation and mutual benefit.

These expatriates became embedded mediators, hybridised European and Ottoman cultural forms, and experienced distanciation from both homeland and hostland to enjoy and manipulate both. For them, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli were not solely sites for danger or exploitation but, as peace was progressively established with each regency, increasingly places for pragmatic cooperation, personal and professional advancement, commercial success, and enjoyment.

Expansive networks of correspondence and cooperation around the Maghreb, Mediterranean, and Britain embedded the expatriates in a cross-cultural trade in material goods and information and allowed them to manipulate the course of trade and diplomacy between Britain and the Maghreb. The expatriates were less marginal, miserable, and misbehaving Britons and more embedded, canny, Mediterranean actors.
Nat Cutter, Mary Lugton Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Lecturer in History, University of Melbourne
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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When the founding fathers of the United States inaugurated a system of government that was unprecedented in the modern world, they knew that a functioning democracy required an educated electorate capable of making rational decisions. But who would validate the information that influenced citizens’ opinions? By spotlighting various institutions of learning in Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic (U Virginia Press, 2025), George Oberle provides a comprehensive look at how knowledge was created, circulated, and consumed in the early American republic.

Many of the founders, including George Washington, initially favored the creation of a centralized national university to educate Americans from all backgrounds. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, however, politicians moved away from any notion of publicly educated laypeople generating useful knowledge. The federal government ultimately founded the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to be run by experts only. Oberle’s insightful analysis of the competing ideas over the nature of education offers food for thought as we continue to grapple with a rapidly evolving media landscape amid contested meanings of knowledge, expertise, and the obligations of citizenship.

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Regency gardens dazzled with colour, invention and theatricality: trellises heavy with roses and jasmine, shrubberies designed for intrigue and lawns enlivened with pools, grottoes and fanciful ornaments. Yet behind this world of perfume and spectacle lay a striking social shift. In a domain long defined by men, women began to play an active role, influencing Humphry Repton and other designers to realize their visions of pleasure grounds. These gardens became stages for al fresco entertainments, displays of taste and private encounters alike.
All Around Is Fairy Ground: Pleasure and the Regency Garden (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Timothy Mowl offers the first sustained account of ornamental gardening in Regency Britain, revealing a vivid, feminine-inflected landscape where horticulture, fashion and sociability intertwined – and where artistry still resonates two centuries later.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The "Thombos" are a rather unique collection of eighteenth-century land and population registers detailing the lives lived, lands held, and labour provided by tens of thousands of people inhabiting the coastal regions of Sri Lanka that were colonised by the Dutch East India Company. Turning this archive inside out by highlighting both the indigenous and colonial roots of this administrative system, Luc Bulten presents a gateway into everyday social realities surrounding caste, conjugality, (forced) work, and land tenure. In doing so, he demonstrates how both European expansionism and local agency reciprocally affected the ways such social realities were shaped. Tune in to our conversation about Lives, Land, and Labour: A Social History of Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka (Brill, 2026)
Dr Luc Bulten is Assistant Professor of Social and Economic History at Radboud University and Postdoctoral Fellow in Sri Lankan History at the University of Cambridge. This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick chats with Professor Dr. Natalia Filatkina, Dr. Kerstin Roth and Research Associate Miriam Hinterholzer. All three work at the University of Hamburg in Germany on a long-term research project, called FSL Digital, that investigates language history, language attitudes and everyday communication in the context of multilingualism in early modern Europe.
As part of this project, today’s guests annotate and analyse multilingual foreign language textbooks from the 15th to 17th centuries.
Today’s guests discuss these textbooks, the research project, and what historical foreign language manuals can tell us about language attitudes and expectations of foreign language learning.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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