The body politic
JOANNA BOURKE looks at the best history books of 2016 that put people at centre stage
ThisT has been a year of ‘big books’. RichardR J Evans’s The Pursuit of
P Power: Europe 1815–1914 (Allen Lane) is a monumental achievement. It is a wide-ranging, transnational, political, economic, military, social, and cultural history of a complex continent that dominated the globe. Power in all its forms is Evans’s central theme, including the tensions between emancipatory revolutions and tyrannical regimes. However, he never forgets the individual: a French socialist-feminist trapped in an unhappy marriage, a bookish Austro-Hungarian countess, and a British suffragette are just a few of the people he breathes life into. I was captivated throughout all 819 pages.
Equally magisterial is Frank Trentmann’s Empire of Things: HowH We Became a World of Consumers,C from the Fifteenth CenturyC to the Twenty-First (Allen Lane). Consumption is more than purchasing ‘things’: it is also aboutb meaning and power. Trentman convincingly shows how a historical perspective can contribute not only to our understanding of how we got to this point in the history of consumption, but also how we might respond productively to some of the challenges we face. It is a global history; he needed every one of the 862 pages.
Meanwhile, Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine and Georges Vigarello’s edited volume
A History of Virility (Columbia UUniversity Press) is a ‘mere’ 744 pages long. This book sets out to trace the story of an elusive concept – virility – from ancient times to the present. Translated by Keith Cohen, it is a global history of the phallus, power, authority, sexual prowess, bodily shape, performance and masculinity. Thankfully, the authors, an international group of scholars, refrain from double entendre. This is both serious and mesmerising history.
Finally, I turn to a very different history of the body: Fay Bound Alberti’s This Mortal Coil: The HumanH Body in History and CultureC (OUP). In contrast to the oother three books, this is slight in wweight (at 289 pages), but not in intellectual breadth. Alberti gives us a new history of the body, primarily the female one. Crucially, she answers the ‘so what’ question, powerfully demonstrating why the history of the body matters.
She answers the ‘ so what’ question, powerfully demonstrating why the history of the body matters