Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times

Despite its sensational title and cover, this book deserves serious attention from readers of this journal, even though it was not written specifically for academics, interdisciplinary or otherwise, but for a general readership. It largely adopts a chronological organization, with five chapters covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (to 2015, in fact), although three thematic chapters in the middle of the book study the “Unwitchers of late Victorian Britain,” occultists studying “Black Arts 1850–1900,” and “Witchcraft in the British Empire and Beyond.” As the focus of these thematic chapters suggests, Waters pays most of his attention to the period c.1850 to 1914, during which, he argues, the fear of witchcraft or other forms of being “cursed” was still powerful, particularly among ordinary people. But educated people were not immune either—not least those who served the Empire and came to conclude that the magical practices of colonial peoples had “something” to...