Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Michelle Schwarze’s engaging new book, Recognizing Resentment: Sympathy, Injustice, and Liberal Political Thought (Cambridge UP, 2020), delves into the idea and role of resentment within the political environment and how spectatorial resentment can work to support the pursuit of justice within society and political systems. Schwarze argues that resentment, as an emotion, recognizes the humanity in others, and, if realized appropriately, can help integrate emotions into political life. The liberal political project focuses so much on rationality and eliding the emotions, the turn to resentment and, from it, sympathy can seem at odds both with the modern liberal approach and with our general understanding of resentment. Schwarze’s research centers around three thinkers from the Scottish Enlightenment, Bishop Joseph Butler, Adam Smith, and David Hume. Recognizing Resentment also integrates work by Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, Samuel von Pufendorf, as all of these thinkers were considering the role of sentiment, specifically sympathy within liberal society, and this is a path towards sympathetic resentment, which allows a citizen to put themselves in the shoes of another, particularly an individual who has been wronged or is a victim, and to advocate for justice on behalf of another. Spectatorial resentment is the embodiment of this capacity, this ability to adopt emotions on behalf of other people—especially anger—and this can sustain a kind of contagion sympathy. Recognizing Resentment’s focus on Butler, Hume, and Smith as their work is trying to get at the emotions that are behind justice, pursuing the specific concern with social trust. The individual needs to be able to adopt the resentment of others—this also provides a kind of equality across citizens, thus leading to a form of political equality, which is a key component of liberal society. Schwarze also discussed the pitfalls or problems with sympathetic resentment, and the forms of inequality that can undermine the capacity for true spectatorial resentment. If citizens are too stratified, particularly based on class and wealth, it becomes quite difficult to sympathize with each other. Recognizing Resentment: Sympathy, Injustice, and Liberal Political Thought leads the reader through the complexities of affect within politics and political thought, and argues for the importance of resentment within a just political order. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

Today I talked to Joseph McQuade about his book A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Using India as a case study, Joseph McQuade demonstrates how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the 'thugs', 'pirates', and 'fanatics' of the nineteenth century, McQuade traces the emerging and novel legal category of 'the terrorist' in early twentieth-century colonial law, ending with an examination of the first international law to target global terrorism in the 1930s. Drawing on a wide range of archival research and a detailed empirical study of evolving emergency laws in British India, he argues that the idea of terrorism emerged as a deliberate strategy by officials seeking to depoliticize the actions of anti-colonial revolutionaries, and that many of the ideas embedded in this colonial legislation continue to shape contemporary understandings of terrorism today. Dr. Joseph McQuade is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83

Listen to this interview of Ken Hyland, Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education at the University of East Anglia, UK. We talked about his book Second Language Writing (Cambridge UP, 2019), the importance of reflection to teaching, and about the importance of teaching to research, and about the importance of research to reflection. Interviewer : "I wonder whether second language writing isn't sometimes identifying itself too closely with language learning, and not–––well, it should be writing in a second language, shouldn't it? You know, put something up front which is what this is really about." Ken Hyland : "Yeah, I think that one thing that an emphasis on second language writing has given us is the recognition that writing is important. I don't think that there is a university anywhere now that doesn't have a writing center or at least an office where students can go and get consultation about their texts. Writing has been recognized as important, and also in native-English-speaking contexts as well, and in UK universities. And in fact, when we look at writing at advanced levels, like PhDs and writing for publication, language doesn't really come into it anymore. It's a rhetorical issue. And this crude native/nonnative polarization I think breaks down entirely. You know, it's counterproductive, because it demoralizes second-language writers who are trying to get their PhD or publish in journals, and it ignores the very real writing problems experienced by native English speakers, by L1s, you know. So, the L1s get ignored, in favor of the L2s, who get the courses, but everyone's unhappy because it's seen as a language issue rather than as a writing issue."

What does it mean to be resilient in a societal or in an international context? Where does resilience come from? From which discipline was it 'imported' into international relations? If a particular government employs the meaning of resilience to its own benefit, should scholars reject the analytical purchase of the concept of resilience as a whole? Does a government have the monopoly of understanding how resilience is defined and applied? Philippe Bourbeau's book On Resilience: Genealogy, Logics, and World Politics (Cambridge UP, 2021) addresses these questions. Even though resilience in global politics is not new, a major shift is currently happening in how we understand and apply resilience in world politics. Resilience is indeed increasingly theorized, rather than simply employed as a noun; it has left the realm of vocabulary and entered the terrain of concept. This book demonstrates the multiple origins of resilience, traces the diverse expressions of resilience in IR to various historical markers, and propose a theory of resilience in world politics.

Genocide is not only a problem of mass death, but also of how, as a relatively new idea and law, it organizes and distorts thinking about civilian destruction. Taking the normative perspective of civilian immunity from military attack, A. Dirk Moses argues that the implicit hierarchy of international criminal law, atop which sits genocide as the 'crime of crimes', blinds us to other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities, and the 'collateral damage' of missile and drone strikes. Talk of genocide, then, can function ideologically to detract from systematic violence against civilians perpetrated by governments of all types. The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge UP, 2021) contends that this violence is the consequence of 'permanent security' imperatives: the striving of states, and armed groups seeking to found states, to make themselves invulnerable to threats. Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC.

In Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge University Press, 2016), John D. Wong examines the Canton trade networks that helped to shape the modern world through the lens of the prominent Chinese merchant Houqua, whose trading network and financial connections stretched from China to India, America and Britain. In contrast to interpretations that see Chinese merchants in this era as victims of rising Western mercantilism and oppressive Chinese traditions, Houqua maintained a complex balance between his commercial interests and those of his Western counterparts, all in an era of transnationalism before the imposition of the Western world order. The success of Houqua and Co. in configuring its networks in the fluid context of the early nineteenth century remains instructive today, as the contemporary balance of political power renders the imposition of a West-centric world system increasingly problematic, and requires international traders to adapt to a new world order in which China, once again, occupies center stage. John D. Wong is associate professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the flow of people, goods, capital and ideas. With a particular interest in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta area, he explores how such flow connected the region to the Chinese political center in the north as well as their maritime partners in the South China Sea and beyond. He is the co-convenor of a new collaborative research project titled "Delta on the Move: The Becoming of the Greater Bay Region, 1700 – 2000." Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, tentatively titled Banking on the Chinese Frontier: Foreign Banks, Global Finance and the Making of Modern China, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

The First World War marked the end point of a process of German globalization that began in the 1870s, well before Germany acquired a colonial empire or extensive overseas commercial interests. Structured around the figures of five influential economists who shaped the German political landscape, Professor of History, Erik Grimmer-Solem’s Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), explores how their overseas experiences shaped public perceptions of the world and Germany's place in it. These men helped define a German liberal imperialism that came to influence the 'world policy' (Weltpolitik) of Kaiser Wilhelm, Chancellor Bülow, and Admiral Tirpitz. They devised naval propaganda, reshaped Reichstag politics, were involved in colonial and financial reforms, and helped define the debate over war aims in the First World War. Looking closely at German worldwide entanglements, Learning Empire recasts how we interpret German imperialism, the origins of the First World War, and the rise of Nazism, inviting reflection on the challenges of globalization in the current century. Grimmer-Solem, has written an imaginative and first-rate account of several aspects of Kaiserreich Germany’s politics. No one will in the future look at Germany in this period without referencing this book. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

In this episode, I interview Daniel Herskowitz, Career Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, about his first book, Heidegger and His Jewish Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2020). In the book, Herskowitz examines the rich, intense, and persistent Jewish engagement with one of the most important and controversial modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger. Contextualizing this encounter within wider intellectual, cultural, and political contexts, he outlines the main patterns and the diverse Jewish responses to Heidegger. Herskowitz shows that through a dialectic of attraction and repulsion, Jewish thinkers developed a version of Jewishness that sought to offer the way out of the overall crisis plaguing their world, which was embodied, as they saw it, in Heidegger's life and thought. Neither turning a blind eye to Heidegger's anti-Semitism nor using it as an excuse for ignoring his philosophy, they wrestled with his existential analytic and what they took to be its religious, ethical, and political failings. Ironically, Heidegger's thought proved itself to be fertile ground for re-conceptualizing what it means to be Jewish in the modern world. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

In his new book, Strangling the Axis: The Fight for Control of the Mediterranean during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2020) , Dr. Richard Hammond, Lecturer in War Studies at the University of Brunel, offers a major reassessment of the causes of Allied victory in the Second World War in the Mediterranean region. Drawing on a unique range of multinational source material, Dr. Hammond demonstrates how the Allies' ability to gain control of the key routes across the sea and sink large quantities of enemy shipping denied the Axis forces in North Africa crucial supplies and proved vital to securing ultimate victory there. Furthermore, the sheer scale of attrition to Axis shipping outstripped their industrial capacity to compensate, leading to the collapse of the Axis position across key territories maintained by seaborne supply, such as Sardinia, Corsica and the Aegean islands. As such, Dr. Hammond demonstrates how the anti-shipping campaign in the Mediterranean was the fulcrum about which strategy in the theatre pivoted, and the vital enabling factor ultimately leading to Allied victory in the region.In short, Strangling the Axis is a major new treatment of this always interesting subject. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

In this engaging and innovative history of the communist movement in colonial India, Ali Raza reveals the lives, geographies, and anti-colonial struggles of Indian revolutionaries and how they sought to remake the world. Driven by the utopian visions of Communist Internationalism, Indian revolutionaries yearned and struggled for a global upheaval that would overthrow European imperialisms and radically transform India and the world. In an age marked by political upheavals, intellectual ferment, collapsing empires, and global conflicts, Indian revolutionaries stood alongside countless others in the colonized world and beyond in their desire to usher in a future liberated from colonialism and capitalism. In Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge UP, 2020), Raza demonstrates how Communist Internationalism was a crucial project in the struggle for national liberation and inaugurates a new approach to the global history of communism and decolonization. Dr. Ali Raza is Associate Professor of History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83

How did Indonesia’s labour movement go from being small and divided at the demise of the New Order regime in 1998 to play lead parts in politics some two decades later? What lessons have labour organizers learned along the way? And what lessons can we draw from Indonesia relevant to industrial organizing elsewhere? Informed by over a decade of multi-method research in selected sites across the west of the archipelago, Teri Caraway and Michele Ford address these and other questions in their Labor and Politics in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2020), our featured title for this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. Tracking how labour unions found resources and identified opportunity structures by sequentially coupling contentious street politics with strategic targeting of executive offices and legislative contests, Caraway and Ford show that Indonesian unions and their allies have succeeded not only in greatly elevating wages and improving workplace conditions but also have built an identifiable working-class constituency. This constituency has given organized labour political clout far beyond what was or what seemed possible a couple of decades ago. And it has made for a more democratic Indonesia, one in which workers not only have participated in but at times taken the lead in local and national political struggles. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Ben Bland, Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel and hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series on the New Books Network.

This is a reassessment of British and Italian grand strategies during the First World War. Dr. Stefano Marcuzzi, Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, tries to shed new light on a hitherto overlooked but central aspect of Britain and Italy's war experiences: the uneasy and only partial overlap between Britain's strategy for imperial defense and Italy's ambition for imperial expansion in his book: Britain and Italy in the Era of the First World War: Defending and Forging Empires (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Taking Anglo-Italian bilateral relations as a special lens through which to understand the workings of the Entente in World War I, Dr. Marcuzzi reveals how the ups-and-downs of that relationship influenced and shaped to a limited degree Allied grand strategy. Dr. Marcuzzi considers three main issues – war aims, war strategy and peace-making – and examines how, under the pressure of divergent interests and wartime events, the Anglo-Italian 'traditional friendship' turned increasingly into competition by the end of the war, casting a shadow on Anglo-Italian relations both at the Peace Conference and in the interwar period. While not everyone will be convinced by some of his arguments and propositions (such as the partial rehabilitation of such rightly discredited figures as Salandra and Sonnino), that does not take away from the great effort that Dr. Marcuzzi has made. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

Today on New Books in History, Mark A. Waddell, Associate professor of History, Philosophy & Sociology of Science in the Department of History at Michigan State University in beautiful East Lansing Michigan, talks about his recent book, Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2021). From the recovery of ancient ritual magic at the height of the Renaissance to the ignominious demise of alchemy at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Mark A. Waddell explores the rich and complex ways that premodern people made sense of their world. He describes a time when witches flew through the dark of night to feast on the flesh of unbaptized infants, magicians conversed with angels or struck pacts with demons, and astrologers cast the horoscopes of royalty. Ground-breaking discoveries changed the way that people understood the universe while, in laboratories and coffee houses, philosophers discussed how to reconcile the scientific method with the veneration of God. This engaging, illustrated new study introduces readers to the vibrant history behind the emergence of the modern world. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Today on the New Books in History, a channel on the New Books Network, we’re here today with Christopher Close, Associate Professor of History at St. Joseph’s University in the incomparable city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to talk about his latest book, State Formation and Shared Sovereignty: The Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic, 1488- 1696, out this year, 2021, with Cambridge University Press. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dozens of alliances asserting shared sovereignty formed in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries. Many accounts of state formation struggle to explain these leagues, since they characterize state formation as a process of internal bureaucratization within individual states. This comparative study of alliances in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries focuses on a formative time in European history, from the late fifteenth century until the immediate aftermath of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, to demonstrate how the sharing of sovereignty through alliances influenced the evolution of the Empire, the Dutch Republic, and their various member states in fundamental ways. Alliances simultaneously supported and constrained central and territorial authorities, while their collaborative policy-making process empowered smaller states, helping to ensure their survival. By revealing how the interdependencies of alliance shaped states of all sizes in the Empire and the Low Countries, Christopher W. Close opens new perspectives on state formation with profound implications for understanding the development of states across Europe. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

“Economics is the long-run driver” in the history of Europe’s monetary union, writes Richard Pomfret in the first of a new Cambridge Elements series on the Economics of European Integration: The Road to Monetary Union (Cambridge University Press, 2021). “Politics often determined the timing of the next step ... but it has not determined the direction of change”. In this "Element" – intended to be “longer than standard journal articles yet shorter than normal-length book manuscripts”, according to series editor Nauro Campos – Pomfret runs through the 50-year history of the project but with that core theme. While decisive political moments like German reunification are acknowledged, it is the economic drivers – the development of common policies, the single market and global value chains – that assume a central role in the process. Richard Pomfret is professor of economics at the University of Adelaide and was, until 2020, the Jean Monnet Chair in the Economics of European Integration. Before moving to Australia in 1992, he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, Bologna and Nanjing. *The author's own book recommendations are Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis (William Collins, 2020), and Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck (Granta Books, 2018 - translated by Susan Bernofsky). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.

Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (Cambridge UP, 2021) disrupts the male-dominated narratives by focusing on gendered patterns of migration and showing how South Asian women labour migrants engaged with the process of migration, interacted with other migrants and negotiated colonial laws. This is the first study of Indian coolie women in British Malaya to date. In exploring the politicization of labour migration trends and gender relations in the colonial plantation society in British Malaya, the author foregrounds how the migrant Indian 'coolie' women manipulated colonial legal and administrative perceptions of Indian women; their gender-prescriptive roles, relations within patriarchal marriage institutions, and even the emerging Indian national independence movement in India and Malaya. All this, to ensure their survival, escape from unfavourable relations and situations, and improve their lives. The book also introduces the concept of situational or fleeting agency, which contributes to further a nuanced understanding of agency in the lives of Indian coolie women. Arunima Datta is a historian of South and Southeast Asia and the British Empire. Her main area of research interest focuses on the transnational mobility of South Asians in the colonial period (nineteenth and twentieth century) across different parts of the British Empire. Much of Dr. Datta’s research has simultaneously also focused on themes of labor history, transnational Indian nationalism, women’s and gender history. In addition to Fleeting Agencies, she has also published a number of articles and chapters, concerning South Asian labor, migration and women’s histories. Her current research project is centered around the migration and mobility of Indian Travelling Ayahs (travelling nannies) across the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Dr. Datta also serves as a member of the editorial board for the journal Gender & History, Journal of Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and Asian Journal of Social Science Studies.

The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge University Press, 2019) shows how China's authoritarian state ensures political control by non-violent mechanisms. Daniel C. Mattingly demonstrates how coercive control is achieved through informal means to achieve goals such as land redistribution, the enforcement of family planning policies, and the suppression of protest. He draws on a broad combination of empirical evidence - from qualitative case studies, experiments and national surveys, to challenge conventional understandings of political control. Surprisingly, Mattingly shows that it is strong civil societies which strengthens the state's coercive capacities, while those that lack strong civil societies have the greatest potential to act collectively and spontaneously to resist the state. The Art of Political Control in China was named one of Foreign Affairs Magazine as one of the best books in 2020. It is important reading for our times to understand how governments - and especially authoritarian governments - foster political compliance through coercive mechanisms. Daniel Mattingly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His work focuses on the political economy of development and authoritarian politics with a focus on China. Some of his current research focuses on the military, revolutions, elite politics, and technological innovation in China, both in the present in past. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

Are we in the midst of a financial bubble? Do the current valuations of the electronic vehicle stocks or their SPACs make you raise an eyebrow? The trouble with bubbles is that they are hard to spot from within, and much easier to define and analyze after the fact. In their new book, Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles (Cambridge University Press, 2020), William Quinn and John D. Turner analyze past instances of extreme speculation to come up with a typology of the phenomenon. Using what they call the Bubble Triangle of Marketability, Easy Money, and overt Speculation, they have created a tool for financial economists, and the rest of us, to judge what makes a bubble and what makes it pop. Given the unusual nature of the capital markets at the present time, you will want to be familiar with their analysis as you view your own investments. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at [email protected] or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinvestor.com

How do we make sense of the “durability and gigantic scale” of China’s economic expansion alongside the reports of “rising” and “explosive” corruption? How has China moved from an “impoverished communist regime to a capitalist superpower rivaling the United States” despite a crisis of corruption that its own leadership describes as “gave” and “shocking”? Dr. Yuen Yuen Ang’s her new book China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption (Cambridge University Press, 2020) argues corruption comes in different forms and she “unbundles” different types of corruption to explain not only why China can boom but why political scientists need to “fundamentally revise our believes about the relationship between corruption and capitalism.” The book demystifies the Chinese paradox of growth with corruption by unbundling the four types of corruption and placing China in comparative-historical perspective. China is an outlier but not in the ways that most analysts assume. The closest parallel is the United States in the late 19th century, a gilded age characterized by both feverish growth and glaring inequality, conniving plutocrats and corrupt politicians. The book offers a four-part explanation for this paradox focused on the dominant type of corruption (access money which stimulates growth but generates distortions and risks), the relationship between the profit sharing model (where the rewards of leaders and bureaucrats are linked to economic performance) and access money, the role of capacity-building reforms in curtailing corruption involving theft and speed money, and the checking of predatory corruption by regional competition (spurring development and deal-making). Dr. Yuen Yuen Ang is an associate professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. She works at the intersection of business, governance, and innovation to better understand how governments and organizations respond to deep uncertainty and complex, novel problems and which institutions are able to adapt. She considers China’s Gilded Age to be a sequel to her award-winning book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell University Press, 2016) and you can hear her conversation with my NBN colleague here. Dr. Ang translates her ideas to wider audiences in Foreign Affairs, Project Syndicate, and the South China Morning Post. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

Egypt is often the focus of religious and political histories of early twentieth century. The striking hardening of nationalist and Islamic movements within Arab societies during this period is frequently described through the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood, specific pan-Arab ideals, or questions of Egyptian identity under Gamal Abdel Nasser. However, the religious and political spheres intersected within new forms of Egyptian cultural production. In Islam and the Culture of Modern Egypt: From the Monarchy to the Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Mohammad Salama, Professor at San Francisco State University, explores how Egyptian authors and filmmakers articulate the role of religion and the nation in the lives of the modern subject. He provides a short genealogy of Arabic literature in the first half of the twentieth century that address questions of nationalism and Islamism and demonstrates how authors oscillate between tradition and secular values in modern Egypt. In our conversation we discuss the religious and political contexts of 20th century Egypt, British imperialism, the emergence of the novel in Egypt, well-known authors Taha Husayn, Naguib Mahfouz, and Yusuf Idris, the Muslim Brotherhood, short stories, theatre, national identity, and director Youssef Chahine. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected].

Todays’ guest is Mack P. Holt, Professor Emeritus of History at George Mason University in Virginia, talking about his recent book, The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France: Religion and Popular Culture in Burgundy, 1477-1630, out 2018 with Cambridge University Press. In the late fifteenth century, Burgundy was incorporated in the kingdom of France. This, coupled with the advent of Protestantism in the early sixteenth century, opened up new avenues for participation in public life by ordinary Burgundians and led to considerably greater interaction between the elites and the ordinary people. Mack Holt examines the relationship between the ruling and popular classes from Burgundy's re-incorporation into France in 1477 until the Lanturelu riot in Dijon in 1630, focusing on the local wine industry. Indeed, the vineyard workers were crucial in turning back the tide of Protestantism in the province until 1630 when, following royal attempts to reduce the level of popular participation in public affairs, Louis XIII tried to remove them from the city altogether. More than just a local study, this book shows how the popular classes often worked together with local elites to shape policies that affected them. This joyful conversation lingers on the delights of the archive, a variety of historical methodologies, and the contours of the historical craft. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Whether framed as complaints about cancel culture or as increased awareness of prejudice, stories about offensive language are common in our daily news cycle. In On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2020), linguist Karen Stollznow explores the history of language that offends, including talk about race and ethnicity, gender, religion, mental health, physical appearance, and age. Her book tells the origin story of how terms come to have the power to offend. It also investigates the euphemism treadmill, the phenomenon of offensive terms being replaced with new, neutral terms which eventually become offensive as well. Despite the large number of terms the book deals with, she argues that it isn’t impossible to keep track of what’s offensive and what isn’t. By explaining the background to our language and its implications for the lived experiences of human beings, Stollznow hopes the book will enable its readers to examine their own language and its power—for harm and for good. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

How do we make sense of Turkey’s recent turn against the West – after decades of Turkish cooperation and desire to be integrated into the European and wider Western community in terms of foreign policy? Dr. Oya Dursun-Özkanca’s new book Turkey-West Relations: The Politics of Intra-alliance Opposition (Cambridge UP, 2019) interrogates the dynamics of the relationship between Turkey and the West, particularly the EU, NATO, and the United States. The compelling book develops a framework of intra-alliance opposition to explain this shift from Turkey’s engagement with the West as a desirable ally to Turkey’s increasingly hostility to the West after 2010. Moving beyond the power and personality of Erdogan, Dursun-Özkanca develops an analytical framework of the politics of intra-alliance opposition and provides a comprehensive and nuanced account of how and why Turkish foreign policy has changed within the transatlantic alliance. She offers three categories of intra-alliance opposition behavior: boundary testing; boundary challenging; boundary breaking. She deploys these categories to differentiate between the motivations behind the use of each tool – providing an analysis of Turkey that can also be exported to other cases. This extensively researched book depends upon extensive fieldwork and more than 200 semi-structured elite interviews conducted with government officials, diplomats, academics, officials, and journalists in Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, the UK, Germany, and the U.S. The book provides 6 case studies (Turkey’s pragmatic foreign policy in the Western Balkans, the Turkish vote over the EU-NATO security exchange, the EU-Turkey deal on the refugee crisis, Turkey’s energy policies, Turkish rapprochement with Russia in security and defense and Turkish foreign policy on Syria and Iraqi) that demonstrate the 3 categories. The book concludes three possible alternative futures for Turkey’s relations with the West and the podcast includes an analysis of what the change in U.S. leadership (Biden-Blinken) might mean for Turkish-Western relations. Dr. Dursun-Özkanca is the Endowed Chair of International Studies and Professor of Political Science at Elizabethtown College. She has edited two books – The European Union as an Actor in Security Sector Reform (Routledge, 2014) and External Interventions in Civil Wars (co-edited with Stefan Wolff, Routledge, 2014) – and has a forthcoming book entitled The Nexus Between Security Sector Reform/Governance and Sustainable Development Goal-16: An Examination of Conceptual Linkages and Policy Recommendations, forthcoming by Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF) (London: Ubiquity Press). Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

Edited by Drs. Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder, As if She Were Free (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a collective biography of African and African-descended women across the Americas. This collection of twenty-four beautifully crafted chapters, spans across centuries and geographies, giving us a varied and textured reading of women’s lives and experiences. More importantly than that, and herein lies the revolutionary character of this book, As If She Were Free changes our ways of understanding and conceptualizing freedom and emancipation, ultimately transforming how we narrate the past of our societies and understand our present. As the editors of the book tell us in this interview, this is a feminist project at its core, a useful history for today because African and African-descended women in the Americas, both in the past and present, have crafted their own understandings of freedom, advocated for new ways of defining and living freely, and achieved revolutionary changes in our societies. Enjoy this wonderful conversation! PS. By the end of the interview, you may notice Tatiana Seijas does not answer some questions. The recording of this episode occurred during the Texas Winter storms, and she had to rush home before sunset. Her commitment to this interview, even under such circumstances, was remarkable even if not surprising for those of us who know her and her love for history. Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron

Bryce Traister has edited a collection of 13 original essays exploring the shifting landscape in the historiography of American Puritanism in American Literature and the New Puritan Studies (Cambridge UP, 2017). These essays explore how studies in American literature(s) can benefit from the shifting trends in 21st-century scholarship under the broad themes of post-secular, post-national, and post-colonial literary readings. In this interview, Traister introduces the themes that led to the assembly of this new collection and describes the emerging trends in the long history of Puritan literature studies. Perhaps the postmortem calls for the end of Puritan literary studies in the academy were premature. New theoretical frameworks have opened entirely new vistas for re-engaging the Puritan archives with a new set of questions and interpretive opportunities.

Using a mix of ethnographic, survey, and comparative historical methodologies, Marina Zaloznaya's The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption in Post-Transitional Eastern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2017) offers an unprecedented insight into the corruption economies of Ukrainian and Belarusian universities, hospitals, and secondary schools. Its detailed analysis suggests that political turnover in hybrid political regimes has a strong impact on petty economic crime in service-provision bureaucracies. Theoretically, the book rejects the dominant paradigm that attributes corruption to the allegedly ongoing political transition. Instead, it develops a more nuanced approach that appreciates the complexity of corruption economies in non-Western societies, embraces the local meanings and functions of corruption, and recognizes the stability of new post-transitional regimes in Eastern Europe and beyond. This book offers a critical look at the social costs of transparency, develops a blueprint for a 'sociology of corruption', and offers concrete and feasible policy recommendations. It will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, policymakers and a variety of anti-corruption and social justice activists.

Religious people have a range of new media in which they can share their beliefs and reflect on what it means to believe, to act, and to be members of their religious communities. In Talk about Faith: How Debate and Conversation Shape Belief (Cambridge UP, 2021), Stephen Pihlaja investigates how Christians and Muslims interact with each other through debates broadcast online, podcasts, and YouTube videos. He explores the way in which they present themselves and their faiths and how they situate their ideas in relationship to each other and to their perceived audiences Pihlaja argues that people position themselves and others differently depending on conversational contexts and topic, generalizing about themselves in relationship to a range of already-existing storylines, whether they're talking about biblical inerrancy, the nature of Islam, to homosexuality and interracial dating.

Dr. Juan José Ponce Vázquez's new book, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690 (Cambridge UP, 2020) tracks the importance of smuggling to the society, economy, and politics of the island of Hispaniola in this “long seventeenth century.” Smuggling, in his words, made people's lives on the island, an island that had suffered from imperial commercial neglect and a declining sugar industry. Concomitant with this endemic smuggling, local elites began asserting their authority over local and imperial institutions on the island, taking advantage of royal officials’ isolation from the Spanish metropole and their need for local alliances. These factors, Dr. Ponce Vásquez argues, allowed local elites to gain immense wealth and power, alter the course of European inter-imperial struggles, limit, redirect, and suppress the Spanish crown’s policies, and thus take control of the destinies of Hispaniola, other Spanish Caribbean territories, and the Spanish Empire in the region during this period. R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world.

The concept of the individual self - a being that is autonomous, rational and largely without vulnerability - shapes current legal frameworks, the power dynamics between individuals, and limits the opportunities of many people who are marginalised to flourish in their own conception of the good life. In his latest book, Professor Jonathan Herring argues for a radical reconceptualisation of the self. One based not on individual rights, but instead which focuses on promoting and protecting caring relationships between people. He argues that the law has the potential to play a powerful role in shaping a relational concept of self, and that this is what it should do. Instead of discriminating against vulnerability, the law should celebrate the universal vulnerabilities of all. Rather than disadvantaging carers, the law has the power to recognise our mutual interdependence and interconnectedness; this will bring about a more equitable society for all, one in which the value and dignity of all variations of what it is to be human can be recognised and celebrated. In Law and the Relational Self (Cambridge UP, 2019) Herring provides a comprehensive theoretical framework of the relational self which he applies in real-life practical situations: he examines domestic abuse, medical law, family law and criminal law. In each of these examples the Herring makes a convincing case for replacing the concept of the individual self with that of the relational self, and shows the power of law in doing so. This is an important book and should change the way that legal scholars, practitioners and all individuals think about themselves and how the law works. It offers potential for a new way of being, and a world where the things that really matter are protected in law. Jonathan Herring is a fellow in Law at Exeter College, and a professor of Law in the Law Faculty at the University of Oxford. At the time that this interview was recorded he had over 250 publications, including 107 books on topics spanning family law, medical law, criminal law and legal issues surrounding care and old age. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

The Puritans of Early America did not start out with gendered society and piety. Instead, Monica D. Fitzerald suggests, growing tensions between lay men and clergy over what was perceived as a feminized piety led toward a gradual separation of masculinity and femininity into distinct spheres. In Puritans Behaving Badly: Gender, Religion, and Punishment in Early America (Cambridge UP, 2020), Fitzgerald presents original research in the church disciplinary records of censure cases among Puritan congregations in the first three generations of American Puritanism. The records tell a fascinating story about how, even though the Puritan ministers advocated a holistic spirituality that was at once inwardly pietistic and externally dutiful, the lists of sins and confessions recorded in the chronicles of church discipline cases indicate that only men were being held accountable for sins of duty and honor, and only women for sins of personal spirituality and heart religion. Filled with vivid tales of squabbles, rifts, and deadly rivalries, Fitzgerald's book is sure to fascinate and delight readers interested in the development of religion and culture in early America. Follow Monica on Twitter (@mofitz66), or visit her book page on Cambridge Core.

The dramatic religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved a battle over social memory. On one side, the Reformation repudiated key aspects of medieval commemorative culture; on the other, traditional religion claimed that Protestantism was a religion without memory. Memory and the English Reformation (Cambridge UP, 2020) shows how religious memory was sometimes attacked and extinguished, while at other times rehabilitated in a modified guise. It investigates how new modes of memorialisation were embodied in texts, material objects, images, physical buildings, rituals, and bodily gestures. Attentive to the roles played by denial, amnesia, and fabrication, it also considers the retrospective processes by which the English Reformation became identified as an historic event. Examining dissident as well as official versions of this story, this richly illustrated, interdisciplinary collection traces how memory of the religious revolution evolved in the two centuries following the Henrician schism, and how the Reformation embedded itself in the early modern cultural imagination. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton, which ruled that the Title VII prohibition on sex discrimination in employment extends to discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender status, may imperil the fundamental right of parents to educate their children in line with their values. This right is examined brilliantly in the 2016 book, To Whom Do Children Belong? Parental Rights, Civic Education, and Children's Autonomy by scholar Melissa Moschella. Given the rise of the transgender movement and other aspects of wokeism, this book has only increased in importance. It is a rare combination of a serious scholarly work and a book that general audiences, particularly and crucially, the parents of school-age children should read. Moschella addresses timely questions such as, “Can we defend parental rights against those who believe we need more extensive state educational control to protect children's autonomy or prepare them for citizenship in a diverse society?” and draws upon psychological and social scientific research to make a compelling philosophical argument for the right of parents to determine fundamental questions of morals when it comes to their children. And this is not only a matter for philosophers. Moschella makes clear that under the cover of such seemingly innocuous verbiage as “diversity education” and “education for citizenship,” public schools are engaging in outright indoctrination of children in left-wing social justice and libertarian moral views. Moreover, progressives are increasingly targeting even private schools and some are even calling for an outright ban on homeschooling. Moschella’s book is eerily prescient in the way she was able to predict that parents who seek to pass on a traditional understanding of sexuality find their efforts directly undermined in ever more public schools. Many parents cannot afford private schools or are unable to home school—and, as noted, even those refuges are under threat. Moschella foretold in her book that if the views of the progressive scholars whose arguments she delineates with scrupulous fairness prevail, parents will have no choice but to send their children into an educational environment that may sow damaging confusion about the basic truths of human identity. Readers of this book need not even be religious but simply parents and other readers who worry that children will be stigmatized and parents’ rights erased if children are forced by schools to deny that maleness and femaleness are grounded on objective biological reality rather than subjective self-image, or that the purpose of human sexuality is not merely pleasure or self-expression, but to unite a man and woman in marriage and enable them to form a family. This is not solely a question of religious liberty but of conscience rights more broadly, which she discusses both authoritatively and movingly. Moschella examines the arguments for expanding school choice, vouchers and granting exemptions when educational programs or regulations threaten parents' ability to raise their children in line with their values and moral codes. The questions raised in this important book have become even more salient in the era of the Biden administration. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

David Onnekink, professor of early modern history at the University of Utrecht discusses his latest book, the delightful, The Dutch in the Early Modern World: History of a Global Power (Cambridge University Press, 2019). European audiences can shop here. Emerging at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic rose to become a powerhouse of economic growth, artistic creativity, military innovation, religious tolerance and intellectual development. This is the first textbook to present this period of early modern Dutch history in a global context. It makes an active use of illustrations, objects, personal stories and anecdotes to present a lively overview of Dutch global history that is solidly grounded in sources and literature. Focusing on themes that resonate with contemporary concerns, such as overseas exploration, war, slavery, migration, identity and racism, this volume charts the multiple ways in which the Dutch were connected with the outside world. It serves as an engaging and accessible introduction to Dutch history as well as a case study in early modern global expansion.

Alexander Morrison’s study of the conquest of Central Asia offers new perspectives on a topic long obscured by misleading grand narratives. Based on years of research in several countries, The Russian Conquest of Central Asia (Cambridge UP, 2020) not only outright debunks many of these older narratives, but also provides us a detailed military and diplomatic history of the conquest, one which pays specific attention to the contingency and logistics of its multi-stage process. Based on an enormous number of Russian-language materials and supplemented with Persianate chronicles, this work is essential reading for anyone interested in Russian and Central Asian history, military history, or the history of colonialism and comparative empires.

Modern markets and exchange, compared with other social and political spheres, are seen through technical abstractions. This intellectual compartmentalization has political consequences: if capitalism operates through arcane, objective, and rational mechanics, the very real interests and very real consequences of exchange are disguised and simplified. In their empirically dense and theoretically bold edited volume, Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-White, Douglas Haynes, and Sebastian Schwecke gather historians and anthropologists to reflect on the dynamic, adaptive, and ambiguous realities of markets and exchange in India. Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction (Cambridge University Press, 2020) provides a rich array of vivid case studies – from colonial property and advertising milieus to today’s bazaar and criminal economies – to examine the friction and interdependence between commerce, society, and state. Beyond providing a vantage point for rethinking global capitalism from one of the world’s major economies, the volume conceptualizes the moral, spatial, legal, and symbolic dynamics of markets in a way that is broadly relevant through the Global South. Two of the volume’s editors, Ajay Gandhi, assistant professor at Leiden University, and Sebastian Schwecke, head of the Delhi office of the Max Weber Foundation, discuss the book’s theoretical ambitions and empirical range. Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on South Asian economic writing. He is also coordinator of the Medical Humanities Working Group at NYU, and of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. He also co-hosts the podcast High Theory.

Vaccines make us wholly or partly immune to disease, such as Covid-19. But what is it to be immune? What is an immune system, and what does it do? In its beginnings, immunology was considered the science of the self/non-self distinction: the immune system comprised the self’s defenses against invading non-self pathogens, and was a sophisticated system possessed only by vertebrates. In Philosophy of Immunology (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Thomas Pradeu explains why these traditional conceptions have been upended over the past 20 years or so. It is now accepted that even single celled organisms have immune systems and that immune systems are also active in many biological activities, including regulation of foreign entities that are not part of the body but are not pathogens either, such as the gut microbiome. Pradeu, who is senior researcher at CNRS and University of Bordeau, defends his view of the individual as an immunologically unified chimera, and speculates about the implications for our understanding of cognition and psychiatric illness in the light of new discoveries of overlap between the immune and nervous systems.

In Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya (Cambridge UP, 2020), Teren Sevea reveals the economic, environmental and religious significance of Islamic miracle workers (pawangs) in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Malay world. Through close textual analysis of hitherto overlooked manuscripts and personal interaction with modern pawangs readers are introduced to a universe of miracle workers that existed both in the past and in the present, uncovering connections between miracles and material life. Sevea demonstrates how societies in which the production and extraction of natural resources, as well as the uses of technology, were intertwined with the knowledge of charismatic religious figures, and locates the role of the pawangs in the spiritual economy of the Indian Ocean world, across maritime connections and Sufi networks, and on the frontier of the British Empire. Teren Sevea is a scholar of Islam and Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia, and received his PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining Harvard Divinity School, he served as Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Sevea is the author of Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and co-edited Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia (ISEAS, 2009). He is currently working on a forthcoming book entitled Singapore Islam: The Prophet's Port and Sufism across the Oceans. Kelvin Ng hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit.

In this conversation, Sara Salem, author of Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (Cambridge University Press, 2020), talks to host Yi Ning Chang about temporality, capitalism, and hegemony in her history of Egypt’s two revolutions. From Gamal Abdel Nasser to Gramsci and Fanon, from revolution to the coronavirus pandemic, Sara reflects on the unfinished project of Nasserism, what it has come to mean for Egypt, and what its coming apart tells us about our own moment in history. Sara Salem’s Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. This book builds its analysis of the afterlives of Egypt’s moment of decolonisation through an imagined conversation between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon around questions of anticolonialism, resistance, revolution and liberation. Anticolonial Afterlives argues that the Nasserist project – created by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers in 1952 – remains the only instance of hegemony in modern Egyptian history, and that the 2011 revolution signified the end-point of its decline, decades after it was created. Nasserism was made possible in and through local, regional and global anticolonial politics, even as it reproduced colonial ways of governing that reverberate into Egypt’s present. Anticolonial Afterlives explores these tensions through Gramsci and Fanon, foundational theorists of anti-capitalism and anticolonialism, and in doing so engages with some of the problematics around applying Gramsci’s thought in contexts such as Egypt and thinking about Fanon’s writing in relation to anticolonialism today. Yi Ning Chang is a PhD student in political theory at the Department of Government at Harvard University. She works on the history of contemporary political thought, postcolonial theory, and the global histories of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism in Southeast Asia. Yi Ning can be reached at [email protected].

To better understand the lasting legacy of international relations in the post-Ottoman Middle East, Amit Bein's Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East: International Relations in the Interwar Period (Cambridge University Press, 2017), reexamines Turkey’s engagement with the region during the interwar period. Long assumed to be a period of deliberate disengagement and ruptured ties between Turkey and its neighbors, the volatile 1930s, Bein argues, was instead a period during which Turkey was in fact perceived as taking steps toward increasing its regional prominence. Bein examines the unstable situation along Turkey’s Middle Eastern borders, the bilateral diplomatic relations Ankara established with fledgling governments in the region, grand plans for transforming Turkey into a major transit hub for Middle Eastern and Eurasian transportation and trade, and Ankara’s effort to enhance its image as a model for modernization of non-Western societies. Through this, he offers a fresh, enlightening perspective on the Kemalist legacy, which still resonates in the modern politics of the region today. Reuben Silverman is a PhD candidate at University of California, San Diego

We are familiar with the history of the division of Vietnam in 1954 into two states, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south. What started out essentially as a civil war turned into one of the bloodiest conflicts of the Cold War. Much of the scholarly, and indeed popular interest in the history of this period has been about the bitter and divisive American experience of the war. But beyond the military conflict we are much less familiar with the everyday live of the youth in the two opposing states. Olga Dror's Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965-1975 (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a rich and fascinating study of how Vietnamese youth in the two states experienced this tumultuous period in very different ways. Dror also argues that much maligned South Vietnam deserves fairer treatment in the history of the Vietnam War. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: [email protected].

What is the role of the intellectual? Is violence, not to mention radical change, necessary? Can there be a revolution without them? Realistic Revolution: Contesting Chinese History, Culture, and Politics after 1989 by Els van Dongen (Cambridge University Press, 2019) analyses a series of debates in the early 1990s between Chinese intellectuals as they discussed such questions. Grappling with China’s turbulent twentieth century, such intellectuals came to say goodbye to radicalism, and instead advocated for “realistic revolution” in the service of future modernization. Using journal articles, official newspapers, monographs, and edited volumes, as well as interviews conducted with the main scholars involved in the debates, this book unpacks these complex—often convoluted yet always fascinating—debates effortlessly. Shedding light on the transnational nature of these debates and tracing intellectual exchanges and the evolution of concepts and ideas borrowed from other thinkers, van Dongen has created an intimate look at intellectual thought in early 1990s China. This book should interest those seeking to learn more about Chinese intellectual thought and this moment in global intellectual history, as well as those seeking a model for thinking beyond Eurocentric definitions and interpretations of concepts like ‘conservatism,’ ‘radicalism,’ and ‘modernity.’ Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike.

F. B. Chang and S. T. Rucker-Chang's Roma Rights and Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Comparison (Cambridge UP, 2020) tackles the movements for - and expressions of - equality for Roma in Central and Southeast Europe and African Americans from two complementary perspectives: law and cultural studies. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book engages with comparative law, European studies, cultural studies, and critical race theory. Its central contribution is to compare the experiences of Roma and African Americans regarding racialization, marginalization, and mobilization for equality. Deploying a novel approach, the book challenges conventional notions of civil rights and paradigms in Romani studies.

Twenty-eight years after Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history” and pronounced Western-style liberalism as the culmination of a Hegelian narrative of progress, pundits and academics of all stripes find themselves struggling to explain the failed prediction that China’s increased activity in international markets would inevitably lead to increasing political and social liberalization in that country. With his ground-breaking book, Network Origins of the Global Economy: East vs. West in a Complex Systems Perspective, out from Cambridge University Press in 2020, Hilton L. Root takes a road less-traveled in contemporary economics and brings the analytical tools of systems theory to bear on this perplexing question, believing that a study of network structure might be able to shed more light than the traditional tools of economic analysis. This clearly argued and eminently readable book accounts for much of the current state of affairs by tracing the contrasting historical evolution of Europe as a Small World Network constituted by the dense connectivity of dynastic marriages between the continent’s royal houses, and China as a Hub and Spoke Network with communications flowing outward through the branches of its vast and robustly structured bureaucracy from a primary central node. Other networked social factors under consideration are the development of Europe’s blend of Germanic custom and Roman law, and China’s tradition of the ideal Confucian gentleman and its deep commitment to merit rather than birthright as the condition for ascending the ranks of administrative power structures. Emerging from this thoughtful and well-researched study is a compelling explanatory narrative of Europe’s ongoing capacity to adapt to rapid change and China’s pattern of long stretches of stability, sudden collapse, and subsequent resurrection of largely unchanged network structure. This adventurous scholarly work simultaneously opens new theoretical doors for economists and provides systems scholars with access to new dimensions of application. Tom Scholte is a Professor of Directing and Acting in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia located on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Musqueam people.

The Idea of Development in Africa: A History (Cambridge UP, 2020) challenges prevailing international development discourses about the continent, by tracing the history of ideas, practices, and 'problems' of development used in Africa. In doing so, it offers an innovative approach to examining the history and culture of development through the lens of the development episteme, which has been foundational to the 'idea of Africa' in western discourses since the early 1800s. The study weaves together an historical narrative of how the idea of development emerged with an account of the policies and practices of development in colonial and postcolonial Africa. The book highlights four enduring themes in African development, including their present-day ramifications: domesticity, education, health, and industrialization. Offering a balance between historical overview and analysis of past and present case studies, Elisabeth McMahon and Corrie Decker demonstrate that Africans have always co-opted, challenged, and reformed the idea of development, even as the western-centric development episteme presumes a one-way flow of ideas and funding from the West to Africa. Elisa Prosperetti is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African history at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here.

Since the early twentieth-century, Kurds have challenged the borders and national identities of the states they inhabit. Nowhere is this more evident than in their promotion of the 'Map of Greater Kurdistan', an ideal of a unified Kurdish homeland in an ethnically and geographically complex region. This powerful image is embedded in the consciousness of the Kurdish people, both within the region and, perhaps even more strongly, in the diaspora. Addressing the lack of rigorous research and analysis of Kurdish politics from an international perspective, Zeynep Kaya focuses on self-determination, territorial identity and international norms to suggest how these imaginations of homelands have been socially, politically and historically constructed (much like the state territories the Kurds inhabit), as opposed to their perception of being natural, perennial or intrinsic. Adopting a non-political approach to notions of nationhood and territoriality, Mapping Kurdistan: Territory, Self-Determination and Nationalism (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a systematic examination of the international processes that have enabled a wide range of actors to imagine and create the cartographic image of greater Kurdistan that is in use today.

Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women who loved them. Female husbands - people assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women - were true queer pioneers. Moving deftly from the colonial era to just before the First World War, Jen Manion uncovers the riveting and very personal stories of ordinary people who lived as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and threat of punishment. Female Husbands weaves the story of their lives in relation to broader social, economic, and political developments in the United States and the United Kingdom, while also exploring how attitudes towards female husbands shifted in relation to transformations in gender politics and women's rights, ultimately leading to the demise of the category of 'female husband' in the early twentieth century. Groundbreaking and influential, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge UP, 2020) offers a dynamic, varied, and complex history of the LGBTQ past. Jen Manion is Associate Professor of History at Amherst College. Leo Valdes is a graduate student in the History Department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century African American, Latinx, and LGBTQ history with special interest in carceral, labor, and trans studies. In addition to being a host for the LGBTQ Studies channel on the New Books Network, they are an oral historian with the Latino New Jersey Oral History Project at Rutgers University and Voces of the Pandemic, a collaborative oral history project with Voces Oral History Center at UT Austin. Their dissertation explores the social history of the trans movement by centering black and latinx trans people in the 20th century.

We are here today with Jesse Spohnholz, Professor of History and Director of The Roots of Contemporary Issues World History Program at Washington State University in beautiful Pullman, Washington, to talk about his penultimate book, The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never Was and the Invention of Tradition first published n 2017 by Cambridge University Press and out 2020 in paperback. The Convent of Wesel was long believed to be a clandestine assembly of Protestant leaders in 1568 that helped establish foundations for Reformed churches in the Dutch Republic and northwest Germany. However, Jesse Spohnholz shows that that event did not happen, but was an idea created and perpetuated by historians and record keepers since the 1600s. Appropriately, this book offers not just a fascinating snapshot of Reformation history but a reflection on the nature of historical inquiry itself. The Convent of Wesel begins with a detailed microhistory that unravels the mystery and then traces knowledge about the document at the centre of the mystery over four and a half centuries, through historical writing, archiving and centenary commemorations. Spohnholz reveals how historians can inadvertently align themselves with protagonists in the debates they study and thus replicate errors that conceal the dynamic complexity of the past. The conversation covers the book, of course, with a good discussion about how history is done. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution: Slavery and the Spirit of the American Founding (Cambridge University Press, 2020) argues that conflicts over slavery and abolition in the early American Republic generated a mode of constitutional interpretation that remains powerful today: the belief that the historical spirit of founding holds authority over the current moment. Simon J. Gilhooley traces how debates around the existence of slavery in the District of Columbia gave rise to the articulation of this constitutional interpretation, which constrained the radical potential of the constitutional text. To reconstruct the origins of this interpretation, Gilhooley draws on rich sources that include historical newspapers, pamphlets, and congressional debates. Examining free black activism in the North, abolitionism in the 1830s, and the evolution of pro-slavery thought, this book shows how in navigating the existence of slavery in the District and the fundamental constitutional issue of the enslaved's personhood, antebellum opponents of abolition came to promote an enduring but constraining constitutional imaginary.

In this episode I talked to Russell T. Warne about his book In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence (Cambridge UP, 2020). Warne takes on the “nature versus nurture” debate regarding the source of intelligence. It also looks at a host of other angles related to IQ: from the failures of the No Child Left Behind act to what are the disadvantages to society are of an emerging intellectual meritocracy. Along the way it explores differences in scores based on ethnic/racial origins, plus how well EQ holds up as a separate form of intelligence. Russell T. Warne is an associate professor of psychology at Utah Valley University. He earned his PhD in education psychology from Texas A&M University in 2011. Dr. Warne has published two books and nearly 60 scholarly articles. He teaches classes on statistics, psychology, research methods, psychological testing, and intelligence. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

Today we speak to Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London about her 2020 Cambridge University Press publication, Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020) Professor Rubin is the author of many books, among them Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews, and Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary. Cities of Strangers illuminates life in European towns and cities as it was for the settled, and for the 'strangers' or newcomers who joined them between 1000 and 1500. Some city-states enjoyed considerable autonomy which allowed them to legislate on how newcomers might settle and become citizens in support of a common good. Such communities invited bankers, merchants, physicians, notaries and judges to settle and help produce good urban living. Dynastic rulers also shaped immigration, often inviting groups from afar to settle and help their cities flourish. All cities accommodated a great deal of difference - of language, religion, occupation - in shared spaces, regulated by law. But when, from around 1350, plague began regularly to occur within European cities, this benign cycle began to break down. High mortality rates led eventually to demographic crises and, as a result, less tolerant and more authoritarian attitudes emerged, resulting in violent expulsions of even long-settled groups. Tracing the development of urban institutions and using a wide range of sources from across Europe, Miri Rubin recreates a complex picture of urban life for settled and migrant communities over the course of five centuries and offers an innovative vantage point on Europe's past with insights for its present. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.