The "Thombos" are a rather unique collection of eighteenth-century land and population registers detailing the lives lived, lands held, and labour provided by tens of thousands of people inhabiting the coastal regions of Sri Lanka that were colonised by the Dutch East India Company. Turning this archive inside out by highlighting both the indigenous and colonial roots of this administrative system, Luc Bulten presents a gateway into everyday social realities surrounding caste, conjugality, (forced) work, and land tenure. In doing so, he demonstrates how both European expansionism and local agency reciprocally affected the ways such social realities were shaped. Tune in to our conversation about Lives, Land, and Labour: A Social History of Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka (Brill, 2026)

Dr Luc Bulten is Assistant Professor of Social and Economic History at Radboud University and Postdoctoral Fellow in Sri Lankan History at the University of Cambridge. This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.

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Regency gardens dazzled with colour, invention and theatricality: trellises heavy with roses and jasmine, shrubberies designed for intrigue and lawns enlivened with pools, grottoes and fanciful ornaments. Yet behind this world of perfume and spectacle lay a striking social shift. In a domain long defined by men, women began to play an active role, influencing Humphry Repton and other designers to realize their visions of pleasure grounds. These gardens became stages for al fresco entertainments, displays of taste and private encounters alike.

All Around Is Fairy Ground: Pleasure and the Regency Garden (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Timothy Mowl offers the first sustained account of ornamental gardening in Regency Britain, revealing a vivid, feminine-inflected landscape where horticulture, fashion and sociability intertwined – and where artistry still resonates two centuries later.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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When the founding fathers of the United States inaugurated a system of government that was unprecedented in the modern world, they knew that a functioning democracy required an educated electorate capable of making rational decisions. But who would validate the information that influenced citizens’ opinions? By spotlighting various institutions of learning in Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic (U Virginia Press, 2025), George Oberle provides a comprehensive look at how knowledge was created, circulated, and consumed in the early American republic.

Many of the founders, including George Washington, initially favored the creation of a centralized national university to educate Americans from all backgrounds. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, however, politicians moved away from any notion of publicly educated laypeople generating useful knowledge. The federal government ultimately founded the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to be run by experts only. Oberle’s insightful analysis of the competing ideas over the nature of education offers food for thought as we continue to grapple with a rapidly evolving media landscape amid contested meanings of knowledge, expertise, and the obligations of citizenship.

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