Posted by Matthew Hilton, P&P Publications Editor   On Thursday 27 November, I was pleased to be able to help to launch four new books in the Past and Present series. As ever, they are on a wide diversity of topics that attest to the generalist nature of the journal itself. They were Giora Sternberg’s Status Interaction during the Reign of Louis XIV, Oleg Benesch’s Inventing the Way of the Samurai, David Motadel’s edited collection, Islam and the European Empires and Manuel Barcia Paz’s West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba.   The series began in 1976 with Cambridge University Press. The books have covered all periods and all places, as well as featuring some classics such as Hobsbawn and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition. In 2009, the series was relaunched as we moved over to Oxford University Press, and P&P Board member Jo Innes became the first author to release with the new publisher with Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain.   As a generalist journal there is a particular ethos to the articles we publish. Like all good journals, we expect them to be empirically rich, theoretically informed, and challenging to the existing historiography. […]