Yale University Press is a leading publisher of groundbreaking history books. Our list includes many award-winners, the authoritative Yale English Monarchs series and the much-loved Little Histories books. With our London office established in 1961, Yale is the only American university press with a full-scale publishing operation in Europe.
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From the Publisher
Yale University Press is a leading publisher of groundbreaking history books. Our list includes many award-winners, the authoritative Yale English Monarchs series and the much-loved Little Histories books. With our London office established in 1961, Yale is the only American university press with a full-scale publishing operation in Europe.
In the 1950s and 60s, Word War Two was a recent memory for most families who had nearly all been involved in the struggle one way or another. At that time, escape stories and the daring exploits of servicemen who had been captured regularly appeared on shop bookshelves. Films were released like The Wooden Horse, The Colditz Story, and, of course, The Great Escape. I doubt ...
Merchants, in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are ubiquitous. One finds them represented on the stage, for example, in the works of Shakespeare and Jonson (‘let’s see him creep!’). The word itself conjures up a host of senses: the jingling of coins in purses, the frantic pounding of footsteps as news of expected cargo is awaited, and the rich scent of spices. The ...
British Intelligence operations of the Second World War have been the frequent subject of both scholarly and creative attention, often appearing in popular culture in films such as The Imitation Game and A Call To Spy. Some might argue that there is little left to uncover on the topic, but
It seems fitting given recent events, to examine the history of jihad in Northeast Africa through the lens of western interventionism. As Warren Dockter, author of Churchill and the Islamic World, puts it: Empire and Jihad is a ‘sobering bridge’ between British imperialist activity in the 19th century and ...
Most of us have probably never heard of Operation Foursquare, a top secret operation into Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War. On the night of 4th May 1945, an RAF plane takes off from Dijon in France, with four Czech soldiers on board, who have been given secret instructions. The plane flew over Bohemia; the men feeling a sense of pleasure at the justice they hoped to ...
Edmond Smith, what inspired you to write about these early entrepreneurs, the subject of your new book, Merchants?My PhD set out to explore how individual investors shaped the infamous East India Company, but the more I dug into this, the more links I discovered with other parts
Neil Faulkner, your book opens in 1851 with the explorer and missionary, David Livingstone, who encounters what turns out to be a huge slave trade that stretches from Africa to India. Whilst Britain had abolished slavery in 1833, what were the numbers that were involved in this ongoing practice?There are no precise figures, but a rough estimate is that the East African ...
The British Way of War is about the interconnected lives of a man and an idea, lives that reached a climax in the catastrophe of the First World War Western Front. Great ideas do not emerge in a vacuum, they are shaped by individuals, and reflect the time in which they live. In this respect it is critical ...
The West African slave trade has become a staple of history teaching and popularisation. Rightly so. The triangular trade – trinkets from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to the Americas, plantation commodities from the Americas to Europe – was the most visceral expression of the brutality of early capitalism, a system ‘dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ ...
Abandoned on the banks of the Benin River in 1553, the first English merchants to travel to West Africa could only look back and reflect that, perhaps, their organisational strategy had not been very effective. Things had started well enough, with a painless departure from Portsmouth leading to rapid progress down the African coast through tropical seas and under a scorching sun. On arrival, ...
I have just published a study of the formative years of Oliver Cromwell’s career, up until the end of the Great Civil War in 1646 when he was established as the leading cavalry commander of the victorious Long Parliament, and as such one of its main agents in the military victory over King Charles I. In selecting what might have been his finest hour in that period, it is easy to think first ...
Talks between the East India companies of Britain and France in 1754 promised to end a war between them in India and to transform the Franco-British relationship there. Responding to hints from London, the French proposed that the two companies ally to resist political pressure from Indian powers, that they neutralize the whole zone east of the Cape of Good Hope in case of future ...
As German tanks rolled over the border and occupied Poland on 1 September 1939, one of Britain’s most senior spymasters MI6 intelligence officer Thomas Joseph Kendrick arrived at the Tower of London. Within a special compound, away from the public eye, he opened a unit that would secretly bug the conversations of German prisoners of war in their rooms. Those prisoners were held in the ...
MI9 is best known for the daring exploits of escape and evasion by soldiers and airmen in the Second World War. New research uncovered in declassified files by Eye Spy associate editor and historian Dr Helen Fry now adds to the superb histories of MI9 written after the war by Airey Neave, and Foot and Langley. It reveals just how important MI9 was for the wider wartime clandestine operations ...
It was the 1st Duke of Marlborough (1715) who once said: ‘No war can be conducted successfully without early and good intelligence.’ That was also the belief of Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair (the head of MI6) in 1938 as Britain faced the escalating threat of war from Nazi Germany. Sinclair believed whoever would win the intelligence game would win the war – and with that in mind, he purchased ...
In autumn 1940 British intelligence, MI9, opened a secret interrogation centre on behalf of in the heart of the millionaire enclave of London’s Kensington Palace Gardens. Taking over Nos. 6-7 and 8 & 8a, its commanding officer Colonel Alexander Scotland ensured that the mansion houses were stripped off their former luxury and the ‘cage’ was established as a grim prison. It soon developed ...
