Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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’s interview on New Books in History is with Dr. Marta Vicente, Professor of History at the University of Kansas to talk about her 2017 Cambridge University Press release, Debating Sex and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Spain. Eighteenth-century debates continue to set the terms of modern-day discussions on how ‘nature and nurture’ shape sex and gender. Current dialogs – from the tension between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ bodies, to how nature and society shape sexual difference – date back to the early modern period. Debating Sex and Gender is an innovative study of the creation of a two=sex modern of human sexuality based on different genitalia within Spain, reflecting the enlightened quest to promote social reproduction and stability. Drawing on primary sources such as medical treatises and legal literature, Vicente traces the lives of individuals whose ambiguous sex and gender made them examples for physicians, legislators, and educators for how nature, family upbringing, education, and the social environment shaped an individual’s sex. This book brings together insights form the histories of sexuality, medicine, and the law to shed new light on this timely and important field of study. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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.

Joseph E. David, Professor of Law at Sapir Academic College in Israel, has written an intellectual history of the concept of belonging. David reviews the ancient Greek, Christian Biblical, Talmudic and Islamic conceptions of belonging and how such ideas have affected understandings of familial relations, marriage, and the political role of the family at different points in Western political history. His case studies range from the earliest Christian and, Jewish and Islamic discussions of legally appropriate family relations to the modern concerns with the public versus private status of the family in the liberal state. David also presents us with the options the modern liberal state has provided policy-makers who are concerned with autonomy and equality in the family. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University.

Today I talked to Yuen Yuen Ang, a Professor of political science and China expert at the University of Michigan. We spoke already in summer 2019 to discuss her previous book: How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. In that book she anticipated the theme of this book: corruption. She explains that 'contrary to conventional wisdom, rich nations became rich by first eliminating corruption, the real history is that corruption was never eliminated, it changes in form and structure as an economy becomes richer.' We started our conversation with a definition of corruption and her typologies: petty theft, grand theft, speed money, access money. The argument in China's Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption (Cambridge University Press, 2020) has been widely taken out of context, as ‘corruption is good for growth’. I asked Yuen to clarify. She believes that not all types of corruption carry the same harm and have the same impact on growth. She explained this with the analogy of types of drugs. Corruption is a complex phenomenon. She argues that we fail to understand it when we adopt one-dimensional measures. Some countries appear free of corruption but instead they are just characterized by more sophisticated forms of corruption. Yuen gave us a short outlook on the state of research in the field of corruption and her contribution. The book, 150 pages organized in seven chapters, is rich of tables and pictures. Yuen created a database with hundreds of party leaders and bureaucrats, and their fate. We learn about tigers and flies, in the terminology of Xi’s campaign against corruption. In your previous book, she described the strange case of China’s meritocracy. Despite absence of democracy and freedom of press, since Deng, in most cases, the Chinese Communist Party has been selecting a good ruling elite. Overall, the promotion of local cadres and their careers from village level to Zhongnanhai has been based on their ability to meet objective, measurable targets. To some extent, corruption is the opposite of the ideal of meritocracy. I have asked what is the interplay between the two in China. In the section Chinese Bureaucracy 101, Yuen argues that we commonly use public administration theories that are based on ahistorical and wester-centred principles. This is not helpful to understand China she concludes. The book ends with conclusions in the form of five questions. In fact, the very end is a final, timely, note on the risk of a new cold war between the USA and China. Yuen argues that stereotypes and misunderstandings are dangerously fueling commercial and political confrontation. Her study on corruption, and the parallel between China’s and the American Gilded age, is an example of how perhaps China is not that exceptional, exotic and hence dangerous to us. This is a great new book that contributes to the study of corruption in two ways: with a methodological innovation and with a comparative historical analysis. It is a must have for the libraries of economists, sociologists, political scientists and much more. It is also accessible to non specialists and a pleasure to read.

Today I talked to Steven W. Webster about his book American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics (Cambridge UP, 2020). We discuss the behavioral implications of anger in American politics, from increased intolerance, blame, and aggression, to an ever-deepening lack of trust in government’s efficacy. Among the topics addressed was the role of the media and internet in stoking anger, and how democratic norms are threatened by partisan taunting and the way anger invites narrow loyalty to party over country. Steven W. Webster is an assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research and writings focus on the role of anger in American politics, including the growth of “negative partisanship” in our country, and the ever greater polarization separating Democrats and Republicans. 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.

In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac, out this year, 2020, with Cambridge University Press. The practice of weather forecasting underwent a crucial transformation in the Middle Ages. Exploring how scientifically-based meteorology spread and flourished from c.700-c.1600, this study reveals the dramatic changes in forecasting and how the new science of 'astro-meteorology' developed. Both narrower and more practical in its approach than earlier forms of meteorology, this new science claimed to deliver weather forecasts for months and even years ahead, on the premise that weather is caused by the atmospheric effects of the planets and stars, and mediated by local and seasonal climatic conditions. Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores how these forecasts were made and explains the growing practice of recording actual weather. These records were used to support forecasting practices, and their popularity grew from the fourteenth century onwards. Essential reading for anyone interested in medieval science, Medieval Meteorology demonstrates that the roots of scientific forecasting are much deeper than is usually recognized. Professor Lawrence-Mathers is the author of The True History of Merlin the Magician and Magic and Medieval Society,(along with Carolina Escobar-Vargas) as well as a host of articles and reviews about Medieval magic and religion. With this book the author continues her examination of spiritual practice – licit and illicit, clerical and lay – as it was culturally understood in the medieval era. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Project Europe made waves when it was published in German in 2018 (CH Beck) and was soon translated into English as Project Europe: A History (Cambridge UP, 2020). A clue to its crossover appeal can be found in its original subtitle: "A Critical History." Avoiding the traps of euro-'Whig' or eurosceptical histories, Patel rethinks the development of the European Communities and the European Union from first principles. He concludes that they were just one model among many postwar associations but proved the most evolutionarily fit; that they benefited from peace more than they contributed to it; and that "disintegration and dysfunctionality" were embedded in their design. Having taught at Maastricht University and at the European University Institute in Florence, Kiran Klaus Patel is now professor of European history at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. *Patel's book recommendation is The Capital by Robert Menasse (MacLehose Press, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.

During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most creative and successful challengers in this effort was Ernst Fraenkel, who as an attorney sought to use the law as a means of opposing Nazi oppression. In Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Douglas G. Morris describes the ways in which Frankel stood up to the Nazis and what understandings he drew from that experience. As a veteran of the First World War, Fraenkel survived the initial purge resulting from the implementation of measures designed to bar Jews from practicing law in the Third Reich. Though his legal practice suffered, Fraenkel persisted in defending people prosecuted by the Nazis, and enjoyed success in a number of cases. While the increased restrictions and growing reach of the police state ultimately forced Fraenkel to emigrate in 1938, his experiences as a lawyer played a major role in the development of the “dual state” theory of dictatorship, the only analysis of totalitarianism written from within Nazi Germany and the cornerstone of Fraenkel’s contributions to the field of political science.

What is the status of Muslim Americans in American democracy? Dr. Nazita Lajevardi’s superb new study concludes they are ‘outsiders at home.’ In Outsiders at Homes: The Politics of American Islamophobia published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, Dr. Lajevardi uses a combination of quantitative methods – including survey experiments, field experiments, and textual analysis of media transcripts – to find that the citizenship and inclusion of American Muslims is inhibited because Muslim Americans are viewed negatively by the public, portrayed negatively by the media, and treated negatively by political elites. The book portrays Muslim American citizenship as grudgingly bestowed and remarkably insecure – and highlights the extent to which American Muslims are aware of their exclusion and precarity and how that awareness affects their political behavior. Dr. Nazita Lajevardi is an attorney and assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University. Her research has been featured in The Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, and the Huffington Post. The book combines sophisticated quantitative methods with forceful prose accessible to all. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Her Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and her “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.

Situated at a crossroads of trade in the late nineteenth century, and later the economic capital of German East Africa, the thriving caravan and port town of Bagamoyo, Tanzania is one of many diverse communities on the East African coast which has been characterized as 'Swahili'. In Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo (Cambridge UP, 2019), Steven Fabian combines extensive archival sources from African and European archives alongside fieldwork in Bagamoyo to move beyond the category of 'Swahili' as it has been traditionally understood. Revealing how townspeople - Africans, Arabs, Indians, and Europeans alike - created a local vocabulary which referenced aspects of everyday town life and bound them together as members of a shared community, this first extensive examination of Bagamoyo's history from the pre-colonial era to independence uses a new lens of historical analysis to emphasize the importance of place in creating local, urban identities and suggests a broader understanding of these concepts historically along the Swahili Coast in the Indian Ocean World. Dr. Steven Fabian is a former associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Fredonia. He was President of the Tanzania Studies Association from 2015 to 2017 and currently serves as co-chair of Radical History Review. Dr. Fabian is currently a teacher of African and world history at Horace Mann School in New York City. His book Making Identity on the Swahili Coast is a 2020 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize finalist, awarded by the African Studies Association. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

An estimated 80 million people live with a neurodegenerative disease, with this number expected to double by 2050. Despite decades of research and billions in funding, there are no medications that can slow, much less stop, the progress of these diseases. The time to rethink degenerative brain disorders has come. With no biological boundaries between neurodegenerative diseases, illnesses such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's result from a large spectrum of biological abnormalities, hampering effective treatment. In Brain Fables: The Hidden History of Neurodegenerative Diseases and a Blueprint to Conquer Them (Cambridge UP, 2020), acclaimed neurologist Dr Alberto Espay and Parkinson's advocate Benjamin Stecher present compelling evidence that these diseases should be targeted according to genetic and molecular signatures rather than clinical diagnoses. There is no Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, simply people with Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. An incredibly important story never before told, Brain Fables is a wakeup call to the scientific community and society, explaining why we have no effective disease-modifying treatments, and how we can get back on track. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. You can reach her at [email protected].

In 1964, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union, a top-secret massive military industrial complex in the mountains of inland China was built, which the CCP hoped to keep hidden from enemy bombers. Mao named this the Third Front. The Third Front received more government investment than any other developmental initiative of the Mao era, and yet this huge industrial war machine, which saw the mobilization of fifteen million people, was not officially acknowledged for over a decade and a half. In Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China (Cambridge UP, 2020), Covell Meyskens provides the first history of the Third Front campaign. He shows how the militarization of Chinese industrialization linked millions of everyday lives to the global Cold War, merging global geopolitics with local change.

In his new book Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars, and the Battle for the Future of Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020), Kaius Tuori examines the inherent unity of European legal traditions that extend to ancient Rome. This book explores the invention of this tradition, tracing it to a group of legal scholars divided by the onslaught of Nazi terror and totalitarianism in Europe. As exiles in Britain and the US, its formulators worked to build bridges between the Continental and the Atlantic legal traditions, incorporating ideas such as rule of law, liberty, and equality to the European heritage. Others joined the Nazi revolution, which promoted its own idea of European unity. At the end of World War Two, natural law and human rights were incorporated into the European project. The resulting narrative of Europe, one that outlined human rights, rule of law, and equality, became consequently a unifying factor during the Cold War as the self-definition against the challenge of communism. Kaius Tuori is Professor of European Intellectual History at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Helsinki. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @craig_sorvillo.

The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 changed the lives of English republicans for good. Despite the Declaration of Breda, where Charles II promised to forgive those who had acted against his father and the monarchy during the Civil War and Interregnum, opponents of the Stuart regime felt unsafe, and many were actively persecuted. Nevertheless, their ideas lived on in the political underground of England and in the exile networks they created abroad. While much of the historiography of English republicanism has focused on the British Isles and the legacy of the English Revolution in the American colonies, this study traces the lives, ideas and networks of three seventeenth-century English republicans who left England for the European continent after the Restoration. Based on sources from a range of English and continental European archives, Gaby Mahlberg’s The English Republican Exiles in Europe during the Restoration (Cambridge University Press, 2020) explores the lived experiences of these three exiles - Edmund Ludlow in Switzerland, Henry Neville in Italy, and Algernon Sidney - for a truly transnational perspective on early modern English republicanism. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct for universities and California community colleges.

In his new book, Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2020), David Newheiser argues that hope is the indispensable precondition of religious practice and secular politics. Against dogmatic complacency and despairing resignation, he argues that hope sustains commitments that remain vulnerable to disappointment. The line of thinking goes that, since the discipline of hope is shared by believers and unbelievers alike, its persistence indicates that faith has a future in a secular age. Drawing on premodern theology and postmodern theory, Newheiser shows that atheism and Christianity have more in common than they often acknowledge. Writing in a clear and engaging style, he develops a new reading of deconstruction and negative theology, arguing that (despite their differences) they share a self-critical hope. By retrieving texts and traditions that are rarely read together, this book offers a major intervention in debates over the place of religion in public life. David Newheiser is a research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. His research draws on Christian thought and continental philosophy to address topics such as neoliberalism, sexuality, atheism, and the arts. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

Jeppe Mulich's new book, In A Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean (Cambridge University Press, 2020) highlights the revolutionary fervor, political turmoil, conflict, and chaos in the Leeward Island region of the Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These tense dynamics created opportunities for interconnected politics, laws, and networks in this "microregion" as British, Danish, French, Spanish, and Swedish actors both competed and cooperated with one another. By exploring the transnational networks involved in trade, slavery, smuggling, privateering, and marronage, he emphasizes the border-crossing nature of life in the Leeward Islands that fostered conflicts between local interests and imperial policy and subverted formal imperial boundaries and claims to sovereignty. All-in-all, Dr. Mulich argues that this early period of "globalization" was in-part initiated from the bottom-up, with local peoples, local concerns, and various cross-border networks encouraging regional integration.

Greater interest in what is happening in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang in recent years has generated a proportional need for context, and especially insights into the politics and policies being enacted there and how these interface with local perspectives. For this reason and many others, David Tobin’s Securing China's Northwest Frontier: (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a vital contribution to our understanding of the PRC state-building and narrative-creation efforts which justify projects like the region’s vast network of detention camps. More than this, the book also delves into the lives of ordinary residents of Urumqi, the region’s capital, and how they respond to state efforts to craft a hegemonic vision of Chinese state- and nationhood. Moving smoothly from the promotion and performance of discourses of ethnic unity, to discussion of how Xinjiang’s Uyghur population is officially constructed simultaneously as integral to a process of ethnic “fusion” and irreconcilably “Other”, the book draws on textual analysis and fieldwork in the region to reveal a textured picture of a place and populations under immense stress. Urumqi residents of different backgrounds, Tobin shows, have differential abilities to voice alternative views of what identity and security mean, which in turn cut to the very heart of what “China” means and represents for its own citizens and, perhaps, for those beyond its borders too.