Sources and methods in African history: spoken, written, unearthed. Edited by T. Falola and C. Jennings. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004. Pp. xxi+409. ISBN 1-58046-140-9. £50.00.

Honour in African history. By John Iliffe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xv+404. ISBN 0-521-54685-0. £16.99.

Black experience and the empire. Edited by P. Morgan and S. Hawkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xv+416. ISBN 0-19-926029-x. £39.00.

Muslim societies in African history. By D. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xx+220. ISBN 0-521-533566-x. £10.99.

The study of African culture stands in a uneasy relationship with the study of African history. Historians work by pegging people, places, and events to a place on time's ever-lengthening yardstick. For the historical discipline, time is a structure that stands behind and lends meaning to human events. Culture, by contrast, is often claimed to be timeless, the unique inheritance of a distinct group of people. Culture builders work by short-circuiting chronology. They poach events, names, clothing styles, and other inspirational elements from the past and marshal them as a tradition to be proud of. The study of cultural history enters into a field where the partitions between past and present are being trampled by the traffic of human imagination.

The precisianist strain: disciplinary religion and antinomian backlash in puritanism to 1638. By Theodore Dwight Bozeman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xv+349. ISBN 0-8078-2850-5. $49.95.

Making heretics: militant Protestantism and free grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641. By Michael P. Winship. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. xv+322. ISBN 0-691-08943-4. $33.95.

Blown by the spirit: puritanism and the emergence of an antinomian underground in pre-civil-war England. By David R. Como. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. ix+513. ISBN 0-8047-4443-2. $70.00.

The English radical imagination: culture, religion, and revolution, 1630–1660. By Nicholas McDowell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. 219. ISBN 0-19-926051-6. £49.00.

There has only been one historical monograph on the English antinomians and that was published in 1951. They are long overdue for reassessment. Fortunately, that task is well underway. Taken together, three recent books – cumulatively amounting to well over one thousand pages of text – advance our understanding in substantial and significant ways. Of course, the antinomians have not been absent from the historiography over the last five decades. Their involvement in the ‘antinomian controversy’ that wracked the early New England colony during the mid-1630s has been well-worked ground, whilst they are much too colourful a feature of the mid-seventeenth-century English ferment and upheaval to be overlooked. But they have, more often than not, been background figures, tangential characters in a bigger story. By contrast, in these works, they are in the foreground, with an elaborate and illuminating background within which to understand them in fresh and important ways. The result is a welcome reappraisal that is helpful, insightful, and comprehensive.

Protestant war: the ‘British’ of Ireland and the wars of the three kingdoms. By Robert Armstrong. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Pp. viii+261. ISBN 0-7190-6983-1. £55.00.

The origins of sectarianism in early modern Ireland. Edited by Alan Ford and John McCafferty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. ix+249. ISBN 0-521-83755-3. £50.00.

Scottish communities abroad in the early modern period. Edited by Alexia Grosjean and Steve Murdoch. Leiden: Brill Academic Press, 2005. Pp. xxi+417. ISBN 90-04-14306-8. €147.00.

Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian union with Ireland and Scotland. By Patrick Little. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004. Pp. xvi+270. ISBN 184383099X. £50.00.

The British revolution, 1629–1660. By Allan Macinnes. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xi+337. ISBN 0-333-59749-4. £59.50.

1659: the crisis of the Commonwealth. By Ruth E. Mayers. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004. Pp. xii+306. ISBN 0861932684. £45.00.

The English Atlantic in an age of revolution, 1640–1661. By Carla Gardina Pestana. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii+342. ISBN 0-674-01502-9. £32.95.

Politics and war in the three Stuart kingdoms, 1637–1649. By David Scott. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. xiv+233. ISBN 0-333-65873-6. £52.50.

The Irish and British wars, 1637–1654: triumph, tragedy, and failure. By Scott Wheeler. London: Routledge, London, 2002. Pp. x+272. ISBN 0415221315. £32.50.

Britain in revolution, 1625–1660. By Austin Woolrych. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+814. ISBN 0-19-820081-1. £25.00.

Making modern science: a historical survey. By Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. viii+528. ISBN 0-226-06861-7. $25.00.

The morals of measurement: accuracy, irony and trust in late Victorian electrical practice. By Graeme J. N. Gooday. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xxv+285. ISBN 0-521-43098-4. L40.

Victorian relativity: radical thought and scientific discovery. By Christopher Herbert. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xv+302. ISBN 0-226-32733-7. $21.00.

Engineering empires: a cultural history of technology in nineteenth-century Britain. By Ben Marsden and Crosbie Smith. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave and Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xi+351. ISBN 0-333-77278-4. L58.

The electric vehicle: technology and expectations in the automobile age. By Gijs Mom. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii+423. $54.95.

When physics became king. By Iwan Rhys Morus. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xii+303. ISBN 0-226-54202-5. $25.00.

Masters of theory: Cambridge and the rise of mathematical physics. By Andrew Warwick. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. xiv+572. ISBN 0-226-87374-9. $95.00.

Over the past three decades, a growing number of historians of science and (to a lesser extent) historians of technology have offered compelling cultural histories that depict the inextricable links between the content of scientific and technological knowledge and the context in which it was created. Rather than assuming at face value that science is a trans-temporal body of knowledge, these historians describe the scientific enterprise as being culturally contingent. Most of the socio-cultural histories of science of the 1980s and 1990s were synchronic, focusing on various aspects of science and culture during a relatively short span of time. As important and successful as those studies were, a number of historians feared that the discipline was losing sight of the longue durée. Precisely because scientific theories and practices can be successful over long periods of time and throughout different cultures, micro-histories with a penchant for contextualizing, while necessary, seemed insufficient. The question was then raised: could the analytical tools and historiographies offered by these earlier microanalyses be applied diachronically? A number of recent works discussed in this review article have answered this question with a resounding ‘yes.’ By focusing on macro-historical themes, such as pedagogy, standardization, imperialism, credibility, and trustworthiness, these works detail the importance of science and technology to Victorian society, and illustrate how the social relations typical of the period shaped physical and technical knowledge.