Katrina Gulliver

What do you do when one of your possessions goes missing? Search behind the sofa cushions? Ask other members of the household where they put it? If you lived in Renaissance England, there’s a chance you would have consulted a local magician for advice, especially if the lost item was of value. In the absence of police to investigate theft or insurance to cover a loss, a wizard tracing the item seemed like a fair choice. Nor was it the entirely foolish idea it might seem now. In a time when belief in magic was widely held, making it known that a magician was on the case could prompt a guilty party to come forward. In Tabitha Stanmore’s Cunning Folk, these figures played an important social and cultural role in Britain, from the medieval to early modern period.

While I was reading Most Delicious Poison, I visited a herbal garden in Spain which features the plants grown by the Nasrid rulers of Granada hundreds of years ago. They cultivated myrtle for its medicinal uses and jasmine for its fragrance. How did they know of myrtle’s properties? Some ancient ancestor must have figured it out. And that ancestor might be more ancient than we realise. Noah Whiteman explains that DNA from plants found in Neanderthals’ teeth tartar suggests even they were self-medicating with herbs. We have been entangled with the chemicals around us for as long as we have been human. The author of this book, a professor of biology at Berkeley, takes us on a global trip through plants and their chemicals.

In April this year, a jogger in the Italian Alps was mauled to death by a brown bear. This was reported as the first bear killing in Italy in modern times. But it probably won’t be the last. Bears have been reappearing in northern Italy as part of a rewilding project in the last two decades, returning to regions they had been driven from hundreds of years ago. More encounters between bears and humans are inevitable. The poor Sun and Moon bears are preyed on in Asia for their bile, valued in Chinese traditional medicine In Eight Bears, Gloria Dickie explores how we can coexist with the remaining bear species on Earth, protecting those in danger as well as negotiating how to share space with those that are not.

There is a small town in Hungary called Nagyrév. With a population of 800, it seems unlikely to make the news. But a century ago it turned out to be the centre of a murder ring, and suddenly it became the focus of news-paper reports across the world. The unlikely setting made the story. It was a backwater, literally: the redirecting of the Tiszaltiver river decades earlier had cut Nagyrév off. Forget cars: this was a town where it was notable in the 1920s if someone owned a bicycle. Yet the place had the murder rate of a violent city. By the time the authorities woke up to what was going on, they discovered dozens of homicides going back several years, and all traced to the town’s midwife, Suzannah Fazekas.

The war in Ukraine has turned a lot of people’s attention to oligarchs in the UK. How did these guys all end up in London, seemingly owning half of Belgravia? In Butler to the World, Oliver Bullough offers an answer. I read his earlier work Moneyland slack-jawed at the blatant – and mundane – techniques employed to register UK Ltd companies through frontmen and use them to launder money. I thought the middle men would be glamorous and slick, not running a website from an office above a chip shop. In this work Bullough looks at the bigger picture: the way Britain became the destination of choice for so many who don’t want questions asked about their wealth.

The premise of White Debt is that the author’s ancestors ran a business selling a product grown by slaves. Therefore he wants to investigate Britain’s role in slavery — which is a rather odd framing, since his family’s tobacco firm wasn’t started until decades after slavery in British colonies was abolished. But Thomas Harding apparently only recently learned that slavery happened in the British Empire. He goes as far as to ask: ‘How could I not have known this?’ Well, truly, I don’t know. I don’t recall the time when I wasn’t aware that slavery was the reason that people of African descent live in the Caribbean today. Some of their ancestors were enslaved in territories that belonged to Britain.

E.H. Carr’s 1961 book What is History? has cast a long shadow over the discipline. I recall being assigned to read it as a teen-ager, and it has prompted multiple reconsiderations over the years — as acknowledged by the editors in their introduction to this book. Reappraisals and conferences on ‘What is History?’ are launched with regularity. (One of the editors of this volume is Carr’s great-granddaughter.) Aside from the reappraisal of Carr’s original work, the fact that books like this continue to be produced in academic history says something about the slipperiness of defining it in the first place — and the discipline’s own anxieties.

Wrestling with the history of the British Empire is the unfinished and unfinishable project of our history. Time’s Monster takes a meta-approach to this. Its author Priya Satia has read widely, and has written essentially a cultural history of the Empire from the early modern period to today, of the way Britain’s colonial expansion has been interwoven with the culture. Many of the connections she draws are intriguing and her narrative is nuanced enough to be sympathetic to both pro- and anti-imperial arguments past and present.

In Money for Nothing, Thomas Levenson brings us into the story of the South Sea Bubble by writing about the development of the mathematics of odds and prediction. These advances were the beginnings of actuarial science: an understanding of risk that underpins insurance. We start with Isaac Newton and his role in attempting to stabilise the currency with something we now think of as quite normal: currency revaluation (Levenson’s previous work on Newton means he’s well prepared here). Much of early modern Europe based their currencies on silver, and fluctuations in the value of the metal were a recurring issue. Ongoing wars meant England was massively in debt, and having its coins worth more (as silver bullion) than their face value in pounds was a problem.

In Japan, people thought the world would end in 1052. In the decades leading up to judgment day, Kyoto was rocked by a series of epidemics. It seemed the end was truly nigh. Of course they were wrong, but they were hardly the only people to predict the end of humanity on a specific date. For many tenth-century Christians, the year of the expected doom was 1000 AD. Valerie Hansen’s book focuses on this non-apocalyptic but significant year as the beginning of what we would think of as globalisation. Obviously with our European perspective we’re familiar with such major events of the 11th century as the Norman Conquest and the First Crusade. But this book draws us to what was going on in the Americas and Asia as well.

I was shocked some years ago to discover, as I scratched bites on my ankles on holiday on Maui, that mosquitoes are not native to Hawaii. They first arrived in the 1820s, in barrels of water from a visiting ship. Of course, the climate was perfect for them, and they settled in very happily. But we could have had tropical islands free of them  — and the risk of diseases they can carry. The story of invasive species is often one of accidental introduction. Or of misguided humans who think they are somehow setting a creature ‘free’ — like the group of Buddhists who released hundreds of foreign lobsters from a boat off the English coast in 2015 as part of a religious ceremony.

‘Below the Forties there is no law, and below the Fifties there is no God.’ Most sailors know some version of this saying, referring to the dangerous waters more than 40º south of the equator. In Wild Sea, Joy McCann focuses on these waters with a history of the Southern Ocean. The ocean surrounds Antarctica, its northern bound still open to dispute. In the 1928 first edition of Limits of Oceans and Seas, the Southern Ocean was delineated by land-based limits: Antarctica to the south, and South America, Africa, Australia and Broughton Island, New Zealand to the north. More recently, cartographers have tried to limit its scope.