Srinath Raghavan

Thanks to the pandemic I found myself reaching for older volumes on my shelves rather more often than picking up new ones. Yet this strange year also saw the publication of books by some of the historians I most admire. Jairus Banaji’s A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (Haymarket) is a brilliant, wide-ranging yet succinct study of merchant capitalism from the 12th to the 19th centuries. John Darwin’s Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalization in the Age of Steam 1830-1930 (Allen Lane) is a magisterial account that takes the story forward and shows how port cities acted as crucial vestibules for global capitalism to transform their hinterlands.

Roy Foster’s On Seamus Heaney (Princeton University Press) is a crystalline study that at once places the great Irish poet in a historical context and offers acute and subtle readings of his work. It sent me right back to the two volumes of Heaney’s Selected Poems. The book I have most enjoyed over the past couple of weeks is Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose (Black Kite). This capacious but reasonably sized volume includes many lesser-known authors and difficult-to-find pieces. Editorial modesty has alas prevented Mehrotra from including his own wonderful essay, ‘Partial Recall’, which I nevertheless re-read.

Keith Thomas’ In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (Yale University Press) was published in paperback this year. The book is a useful reminder of what an extraordinary scholar he is. I was tickled to notice that the first footnote in the book refers to Early English Books Online. Thomas is something of an EEBO himself. It almost feels unfair that anyone could have read so much—even over a long lifetime. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of his masterpiece, Religion and the Decline of Magic. Pandemic or not, that’s a book I am definitely going to re-read in 2021.

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