Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas are the authors of Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press 2015). Heaney is assistant professor organizational studies and political science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Rojas is associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Heaney and Rojas take on the interdisciplinary challenge at the heart of studies of political parties and social movements, two related subjects that political scientists and sociologists have tended to examine separately from one another. What results is a needed effort to synthesize the two social science traditions and advance a common interest in studying how people come together to influence policy outcomes. The particular focus of this work is on how the antiwar movement that grew in the mid-2000s interacted with the Democratic Party. They ponder a paradox of activism that just as activists are most successful – in this case supporting a new Democrat controlled House and Senate in 2006 – the energy and dynamism of the movement often fades away. Heaney and Rojas look to the relationship between antiwar activists and the Democratic Party for answers. They find that in a highly polarized partisan environment, party affiliations come first and social movement affiliations second, thereby slowing the momentum movements generate in their ascendency.

Liran Razinsky’s book, titled Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Death (Cambridge University Press, 2014) came out of a decade’s long attempt to reconcile Liran’s personal search for meaning within two areas of professional inquiry: philosophy, and psychology.These two fields are intimately related in that each asks essential questions about what it means to be a human subject that lives always in the face of death. However divergent in their systems of logic, each runs the risk of loosing its subject to its own ethos.Psychoanalysis is more functional theoretically when thought of as a philosophical system, but its applications were intended to be clinical.For Razinsky, psychoanalysis succumbs to the split in these two fields in its conception of death. Those who lived to be intellectually killed by Freud as he claimed their ideas as his own, knew that Freud had no limits in refusing the limit of his life.He would destroy individual egos–and entire careers–in building a legacy that would outlast him.He got what he wanted but at what cost?Where is death to be found in a system structured by a man who refused loss?Those psychoanalytic thinkers who have survived him have had to live with his legacy and its confusing logic. Razinsky reads Freud’s conceptualizations of death against themselves, at different places in his body of work, and against those that came after him. He argues that there is an essential problematic in the way Freud considers death which, for psychoanalysis to survive as a philosophical system with clinical applications must be addressed. Beyond this, however, the book raises a discussion about the limits of subjectivity: both literal, as in the case of death, and symbolic, as in the ways in which we imagine ourselves in relationship to it. Liran Razinsky is a lecturer at The Program for Hermeneutics and Culture at Bar Ilan University in Israel where he conducts research at the disjuncture between philosophy, and psychoanalysis, life and death.

In Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Jothie Rajah tells a compelling story of the rule of law as discourse and praxis serving illiberal ends. Through a series of case studies on legislation criminalizing vandalism and regulating the print media, legal profession, and religion in Singapore, Rajah raises critical questions about the meaning and place of law in a postcolony that celebrates colonialism as a cause of its modernity, prosperity and plurality. Terrence Halliday describes Rajah’s work as “theoretically innovative, empirically compelling, and gracefully written”, adding that it “has far-reaching consequences for national leaders who seek ‘third ways’ in which economic development is partitioned from political liberalism”. As Halliday suggests, the contents of Authoritarian Rule of Law transcend the confines of the small city-state with which it is primarily concerned, and go to global debates about legislation, discourse and legitimacy, as well as to the inherent tensions in the rule-of-law ideal itself.

Scott Mainwaring and Anibal Perez-Linan are the authors of Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Mainwaring is the Eugene and Helen Conley Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Perez-Linan is an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh. Why do authoritarian regimes survive or fall? Mainwaring and Perez-Linan’s answer that question with a comprehensive examination of decades of data on Latin America (1945-2005). They argue that normative pressures from domestic actors provide the most statistically significant answer. The book investigates the quantitative findings further with case study examinations of transitions from authoritarian regimes in Argentina and El Salvador.

If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ness” would seem to be the modern essence of the word. If a government is secular, it can’t be religious. If a court is secular, it can’t be religious. If a party is secular, it can’t be religious. But, as Todd H. Weir points out in his fascinating book Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the origins of what we might call “secularism”–the faith with no faith–were profoundly religious. To understand how this could be so, Weir takes us back to an age and place–the nineteenth-century German Lands–in which belonging to a church was a matter of state. The question then and there wasn’t whether you were going to adhere to a faith, but which one. Yet, in the wake of the Enlightenment, there were those who did not want to belong to one of the “established” (as in “establishment clause”) religions. They–“dissenters”–were seeking their own path to God and they petitioned the state to allow them to do so. Sometimes the lords of the land (and often heads of the church) granted this wish; sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they did, reversed themselves, and then reversed themselves again. Given the novelty of “free religion” and “free thinking,” it was hard to know what to do. In any case, the back and forth between officials and religious dissenters opened a space–narrow at first and then gradually widening–in which the faithful could be not only different but, well, not very faithful at all. Listen in.

The media system in the United States could have developed into something very different than what it is today. In fact, there was an era in which significant media reform was considered. This was a time when media consumers were tired of constant advertising, bias, and control by corporate entities, and instead wanted more “public-oriented” content. Sound at all familiar? In his new book, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Victor Pickard, an assistant professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the debates on media reform and policy from the early 20th century, focusing, in particular, on radio. Pickard revisits the significant media policy conflicts to analyze why the American media is the way it is, and how it could have been. In so doing, he considers what the current American media system means for the Web and other new media.

In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moderns talked about sex has been a central concern of cultural and intellectual historians. Foucault linked a number of nineteenth-century phenomena, such as the growth of sexology as a discipline and the pathologization of homosexuality, to the formation of new sexual subjectivities and the emergence of biopolitical strategies of population management. Taking a cue from Foucault, some historians of modern Germany have interpreted the talk about sex and reproduction in the Kaiserreich as the foundational stage of a discourse about eugenics that would ultimately contribute to National Socialism and its racial state. In his book Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany 1880-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dickinson challenges this view. He likens German sex talk to a barroom brawl that started at one table and spread across a crowded room. Sex was as a field of contestation, involving Christian moralists, sex reformers and sexologists, each tied to social and political interests. In this interview, we discuss the different anthropologies that undergirded the respective positions. Christian (and some Jewish) morality activists argued that sex had to be overcome through the moral virtue, while sex reformers and sexologists understood sex in a monist vein, as a natural drive and the engine of creative production and human biological and social evolution.

The Rani of Jhansi was and is many things to many people. In her beautifully written book The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Harleen Singh explores four representations of the famous warrior queen who led her troops into battle against the British. Analysing her various representations – as a sexually promiscuous Indian whore, a heroic Aryan, a great nationalist and a folk symbol of indigenous resistance – the book critically discusses what wider issues are stake in these depictions of such a mythical and marginal woman.

Few books on Southeast Asia cover as much geographic, historical and theoretical ground as Dan Slater’s Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Working across seven case studies, the book argues that existing theories of institutionalization don’t account for regional variation in regime type. Tracing causal processes from the colonial period to the present day, it shows how internal conflicts occurring at critical moments of state building encouraged the formation of elite “protection pacts” with a high degree of durability. Along the way, it engages with an expansive and diverse array of literature on Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Burma, Singapore, South Vietnam, and Thailand. Ordering Power is an ambitious and demanding study, but also a highly accessible one that appeals to a range of audiences. Above all, it is a book that demands the attention of anyone interested in Southeast Asian politics. As John Sidel puts it, “Slater has single-handedly raised the standards–and the stakes–of cross-national comparative analysis” of the region.

Sarah Bowen Savant, Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations at the Aga Khan University in London, addresses important questions about conversion among Persian peoples from the ninth to eleventh century CE in her work The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Memory is the centerpiece of her study. In the first half of her work, Savant’s analysis of memory, known as mnemohistory, coalesces around certain “sites of memory” which can include people, such as Salman al-Farisi, places, and events, with particular attention paid to conquest (futuh) narratives. These cases demonstrate how Persian identity was woven into the framework of pre-Islamic history and early Islam. However, remembering is not the only aspect that helped shape Persian, Muslim identity; forgetting is an equally important element according to Savant. Forgetting allowed irreconcilable features of Persian identity and history to be limited. The second half of her work highlights important strategies of forgetting, such as the replacing one past with an alternative account or the use of unfavorable elements of pre-Islamic Persia. Savant’s exploration of memory and its impact upon Persian, Muslim identify helps to answer important questions about conversion in early Islam. Readers, both scholars of Islam and historians in general, will find Savant’s work illuminating.

Prior to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, the United States did not have a national system of taxation–it had a regional system, a system linked to political parties, and a system that, in many instances, preserved and protected trade. In his superbly written and thoughtful book Making the Modern American Fiscal State (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Ajay K. Mehrotra argues that “the rise of direct and graduated taxation in the early twentieth century signaled the start of a more complex and sophisticated system of fiscal governance.” Indeed, the introduction of a federal income did not merely create a completely new and soon dominate stream of revenue for the federal government, but created new institutions for the collection, accounting and distribution of revenue, and, most importantly, changed the way Americans viewed and related to each other. Drawing fascinating portraits of economists and legal scholars and pulling together intellectual threads from economics, institutional and political histories, Mehrotra has produced a work at the leading edge of new U.S. intellectual history. Ajay K. Mehrotra is Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Law, and Louis F. Niezer Faculty Fellow Adjunct Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He is the co-editor (with Isaac William Martin and Monica Prasad) of The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). His writings have also appeared in student-edited law reviews and interdisciplinary journals including Law & Social Inquiry, Law & History Review, and Law & Society Review. His scholarship and teaching have been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.

The towering Indian Muslim poet and intellectual Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) is among the most contested figures in the intellectual and political history of modern Islam. Heralded by some as the father of Pakistan and by others as a champion of pan-Islam, Iqbal’s legacy is as keenly debated as it is celebrated and appropriated. In his fascinating new book The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Iqbal Sevea, Assistant Professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill, explores Iqbal’s political and religious thought in a remarkably nuanced and dazzling fashion. Bringing into question the tendency to approach Iqbal through the prism of constraining categories like nationalist, modernist, and pan-Islamic, Sevea convincingly shows that the dynamism of Iqbal’s thought lay precisely in how he traversed multiple intellectual and ideological registers. Iqbal’s view of the nation did not correspond to the modern notion of nationalism, Sevea argues. Through a carefully historicized and conceptually invigorating analysis of a range of Iqbal’s writings, Sevea brings into view the palimpsest of discursive reservoirs that animated Iqbal’s thought as an intellectual and as a poet. Sevea brilliantly examines and displays the complexity of Iqbal’s project of comprehensively reimagining Islam in the conditions of colonial modernity, one that contrapuntally engaged Western philosophical traditions and the canon of Muslim intellectual traditions. Carefully researched and wonderfully written, this book will be of much interest to scholars and students of Islam, South Asia, politics, and colonialism. In our conversation we talked about the problem of nationalist historiographies in the study of Iqbal and South Asian Islam, intra-Muslim debates on the interaction of religion and nationalism in colonial India, Iqbal’s agonistic relationship with modernism, his understanding of Islam and nationalism, and the political stakes of this book.

Our legal systems are rooted in rules and procedures concerning the burden of proof, the weighing of evidence, the reliability and admissibility of testimony, among much else. It seems obvious, then, that the law is in large part an epistemological enterprise. And yet when one looks at the ways in which judges have wielded epistemological concepts, there is plenty of room for concern. In Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Susan Haack brings her skill as an epistemologist to bear on a series of tangles concerning the legal concepts of proof, evidence, and reliability, especially as they apply in a series of notorious toxic tort cases. Along the way, she exposes several philosophical confusions in the law’s current understanding of the epistemological concepts it wields, and shows how her own distinctive epistemology–Foundherentism–can be useful to the law.

Language change is like a river. When people tell you how to use language, and how not to use it, they’re attempting to build a dam that will put a stop to linguistic change. But all such efforts are bound to fail, and the river will sweep away anything that’s put in its path. At least, that’s the standard story among linguists. But in her book Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Anne Curzan makes the case that the dam-builders, or linguistic prescriptivists, may have more of an influence on the language than usually acknowledged. The dam that gets washed away may still have an effect on the river’s flow, even if not the one that the builders intended – and prescriptivism may similarly have consequences for change in language, even if those consequences are sometimes subtle and often unpredictable. In this interview we discuss the place of prescriptivism in telling the story of the English language, as well as the many guises that prescriptivism can take, from gender-neutral language reform to the red and green squiggly lines that Microsoft Word shows millions of users every day.

A few years back, Frank Jackson articulated a thought experiment about a brilliant neuroscientist who knew everything there was to know about the physical world, but who had never seen colors. When she sees a red tomato for the first time, she learns something new: what it’s like to experience red. The Knowledge Argument has been a key move in philosophical debates about whether the mind is just the brain. In Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Richard Fumerton argues that the most motivated defense of the dualist position stems from a commitment to an internalist foundationalist epistemology – in much the way that Descartes argued for dualism centuries ago. Fumerton, F. Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, weaves together discussion of core debates in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language to show how critical choices in these areas affect the force of the knowledge argument.

In Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ovamir Anjum explores a timely topic, even though his focus is hundreds of years in the past. In order to present his topic Professor Anjum asks a series of foundational questions, such as: How have Muslims understood ideal government and political theology? What is the role of rulers in those politics? And what does it even mean to talk about “politics” as a category? In Anjum’s words “the relationship between Islam and politics in the classical age can neither be described as a formal divorce nor a honeymoon, but rather a tenuous and unstable separation of spheres of religious authority from political power that was neither justified in theory nor wholeheartedly accepted” (136). The “Taymiyyan Moment,” a rephrasing of the “Machiavellian Moment” comes during the life of the prodigious author, theologian, and jurist Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328). By honing in on Ibn Taymiyya’s magnum opus, Dar’ Ta’arud al-‘aql wa-l-naql (The Repulsion of Opposing Reason and Revelation)–not a political work, per se, but a theological one–Anjum reflects on, among other things, tensions between “community-centered” and “ruler-centered” visions of politics, and how scholars before Ibn Taymiyya had understood these ideas. Based on meticulous research of primary and secondary sources, Anjum’s monograph will likely encourage new scholarship on the post-classical era, including the impact of Ibn Taymiyya’s ideas on later generations, as well as interest among scholars from a variety of disciplines, ranging from History and Religious Studies, to Political Science and Law.

As linguists, we’re wont to get protective about languages, whether we see them as data points in a typological analysis or a mass of different ways of seeing the world. Given a free choice, we’d always like to see them survive. Which is fine for us, because we don’t necessarily have to speak them. But for a language to survive and thrive, someone has to be speaking it, and encouraging them to do so is no straightforward matter. In Attitudes to Endangered Languages: Identities and Policies (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Julia Sallabank discusses some of the issues that arise among (actual or potential) endangered-language speech communities. She focuses on the languages of Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, and discusses how speakers relate to those languages and to the revitalisation efforts that are currently underway. She argues persuasively that we cannot treat these communities as homogeneous groups: in fact, the attitudes of the established speakers to the future of their language are potentially complex and equivocal, as revitalisation preserves the language for future generations but risks alienating the current generation from it. In this interview, we discuss this situation, and look at the efficacy of language revitalisation measures. We explore the questions of what it means for a language to survive, to what extent change is inevitable, and the challenge of remaining objective when confronted with competing and sometimes entrenched linguistic interests.

Works in the field of genocide studies tend to fall into one of a few camps. Some are emotional and personal. Others are historical and narrative. Still others are intentionally activist and aimed at changing policy or decisions. Martin Shaw‘s works fit into a fourth category. A historical sociologist, Shaw brings the very best of the social sciences to bear on the subject. His work is carefully reasoned, theoretically informed and intensely analytical. He’s driven to understand how the incidents of mass violence fit together into particular categories and into the broader context of a changing world. His thinking about genocide studies has influenced the field immensely. A decade ago, he began considering the question of the relationship between war and genocide. Four years later, he provided a theoretically rich discussion of the nature of genocide as a term and as an event. Now he moves on to consider the way in which the changes in the organization of the modern world have shaped the prevalence and nature of mass killing. In Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Shaw surveys centuries of world history to understand the patterns and relationships that drive genocide and mass violence. Packed with observations and insight, the book demands and rewards attentive reading and reflection. It’s a short book, but one that lingers long after you’ve finished reading.

I occasionally teach Western Civilization and you may have taken it in college. We all know the drill: Greeks-Romans-Dark Ages-Middle Ages-Renaissance-Reformation-Scientific Revolution-Enlightenment-Romanticism-Modernity. Or something like that. I teach Western Civilization as a “march of ideas”: Reason, Beauty, Freedom, Equality, Justice (caps intended) and the like. This way of telling the tale is sort of Whiggish, as historians like to say. It takes the liberal democratic present as its starting point and goes looking for the origins of a familiar now in an unfamiliar then. Flawed though it is, the “march of ideas” way of telling the story of the West works, at least for me, and I imagine it works for many of my colleagues. It did not work for Nazis, for they did not believe ideas–liberal-democratic or otherwise–move history; rather, they believed races moved history, and more particularly the all-conquering Aryan race. Beginning from this premise, the Nazis re-imagined Western Civilization through a racist lense. The results, as David B. Dennis shows in his detailed, thoroughly-researched, and eye-opening book Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012), were simply bizarre. Nazi writers–including many very learned academics–cast reason aside and “Aryanized” a past that was obviously not “Aryan” (whatever that means) in any way. The question, of course, is not whether any of it was true–it’s all the purest bunk. The question, rather, is whether anyone really believed it, a question David and I discuss at some length. Listen in.

Slavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the Byzantine Empire and Muslim lands, yet it all but disappeared in Medieval Western and Central Europe. Then, rather suddenly, slavery reappeared in the West, or rather in Western empires. By the early sixteenth century, Portuguese traders had laid the foundations of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They bought or captured slaves in West Africa and then transported and sold those slaves to plantation owners in European-controlled regions in the New World (especially Brazil, the Caribbean Basin, and Mexico). How, one might well ask, did the trans-Atlantic slave trade emerge so quickly, seemingly from nothing? In his fascinating book The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), historian Toby Green addresses this question. His answer is subtle and multi-faceted, but it might be boiled down to this: the Portuguese traders didn’t build the slave trade, they joined it, expanded it and, ultimately, transformed it. Listen in.

At the close of the Second World War, the Allies expelled several million Germans from the eastern portion of the former Reich. Thanks to the work of many historians, we know quite a bit about Allied planning for the expulsion, when and how it took place, and the multitude of deaths that occurred as a result of it. We know much less about what happened to the expellees after the expulsion. Where did they go? What did they do? And, perhaps most interestingly, what did they think about their former Heimat? In The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Andrew Demshuk answers many of these questions and thereby sheds considerable light on post-war German history. He shows that though most of the expellees made good in West Germany, they still thought often about the “lost East.” Not surprisingly given the twists and turns of nostalgia, they created an idealized image of these territories, one without Nazis. Yet they also created a kind of counter-image–equally mythical–of an East thoroughly and irrevocably corrupted by Polish administration. Naturally, the idealized East of the past was far preferable to the (putatively) spoiled East of the present, so most of them had no desire to go back. Simply remembering what supposedly had been was enough to satisfy their homesickness.

In the current political climate it might be easy to assume that Muslims in the ‘West’ have always been viewed in a negative light. However, when we examine the historical relationship between Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors we find a much more complicated picture. In Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050-1614 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Brian A. Catlos, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, offers the first comprehensive overview of Muslim minorities in Latin Christian lands during the Middle Ages. The book provides a narrative history of regional Muslim subjects in the Latin west, including Islamic Sicily, Al-Andalus, expansion in the Near East, the Muslim communities of Medieval Hungary, and portraits of travelers, merchants, and slaves in Western Europe. Here we find that Muslims often had great deal of agency in structuring the subject/ruler relationship due to the material and economic contributions they made to local communities. The second half of the book explores thematic issues that were shared across Muslims communities of the Mediterranean world. Catlos surveys ideological, administrative, and practical matters, including Muslim concern about legitimacy and assimilation, legal culture, and everyday social life in these multi-confessional communities. In our conversation we discussed the reign of Christian Spains, Norman rule, the adoption of Arabo-Islamic culture, Morisco hybridity, Islam in Christian imagination, the role of Muslim women, and everyday public religious life.

Most people say “I’m sorry” a lot. After all, we make a lot of mistakes, most of them minor, so we don’t mind apologizing and expect our apologies to be accepted or at least acknowledged. But how many of our apologies are what might be called “strategic,” that is, designed to do nothing more than placate the person we have wronged and essentially exonerate ourselves? In other word, how many of our apologies are genuine? It’s a good question, but it raises another: what is a genuine apology? Does it involve an admission of guilt, remorse, a promise never to do it (whatever it is) again, compensation for the wrong? That’s a good question too, but it, too, raises a question: how can we tell a strategic apology from a genuine one? Gnashing of teeth? Wailing? Weeping? Statements against interest? As Nick Smith points out in his insightful Justice through Apologies: Remorse, Reform, and Punishment (Cambridge University Press, 2014), we don’t usually ask any of these questions when giving and taking apologies, and even when we do, our answers don’t make much sense. This thoughtlessness is particularly troublesome when apologies are used or required in high-stakes legal contexts. What can an apology mean when a judge compels a criminal to give one in exchange for a lesser sentence? What can an apology mean when a huge corporation issues one in a civil case knowing full well that doing so will likely reduce the damages it will have to pay? How can an apology be genuine–or even distinguished from a strategic apology–when the apologizer has so much to gain if they apologize and so much to lose if they don’t? All good questions. Listen in.

For over three years, from June 1941 to late 1944, the German Army and related Nazi forces (the SS, occupation troops, administrative organizations) conducted a Vernichtungskrieg–a war of annihilation–against the Soviet Union on Soviet soil. The Germans killed millions upon millions of Red Army soldiers, Communist Party officials, and ordinary Soviet citizens. As the Germans were pushed back by the Soviets, they conducted a ruthless scorched-earth policy. Stalin’s propaganda organs made much of German atrocities and encouraged Soviet soldiers to punish Germans wherever they found them. It’s little wonder, then, that Soviet troops sought a kind of wild, indiscriminate revenge against the Germans as they crossed into German territory. They murdered, raped, and pillaged on an incredible scale. But, as Filip Slaveski shows in his remarkable new book The Soviet Occupation of Germany: Hunger, Mass Violence and the Struggle for Peace, 1945-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), the Soviet authorities did not turn a blind-eye to this sort of retribution. Though they wanted to demilitarize Germany and to strip it of industry, they did not plan or condone mass violence against Germans. Moscow quickly replaced the Red Army as an occupying force with SVAG, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany. It’s task was to end the wild violence and govern (indeed, protect) the German population. Slaveski demonstrates that SVAG’s task was very difficult or, perhaps, impossible. It neither had the political support from the top (Stalin pitted it against the army) nor the resources to both police the million plus vengeful Soviet troops in occupied Germany nor manage the impoverished German population. Ultimately, the violence only ended when most of the Soviet troops left. Listen in.

Luke E. Harlow, Religion, Race and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) examines the role of religion, and more specifically, conservative evangelical Protestant theology, in the struggle over slavery and abolition in a crucial period of American history. The book makes an impressive case that we cannot really understand that struggle or the war that grew out of it without fully appreciating the political, cultural, and intellectual history of conservative evangelical theology. Harlow describes a profoundly religious period in American history, where people claimed religious motives for all kinds of political positions, in a slave-holding border state that remained part of the Union. Kentucky was home to a diverse theological climate that nonetheless seemed always to break toward finding a Biblical warrant for slavery. Politically, however, gradualist emancipationists and pro-slavery advocates were often far apart. When the Civil War came, thousands of black Kentuckians joined Union ranks, profoundly shaping how their emancipation unfolded. Former gradualists, in response, fled to the pro-slavery side. While white Kentuckians had not overwhelmingly embraced the Confederate cause in the war, after it ended, they did so – fully and vigorously. The result, as Harlow shows, was that Kentucky arguably became the least reconstructed former slave state, and that development held profound implications for the shape of the society the Civil War made.

What processes must take place in order for countries to radically redefine who is a citizen? Why was Russia able to finally remove ethnicity from internal passports after failing to do so during seven decades of Soviet rule? What led German leaders to finally grant guest workers from Southern and...

Why do we feel guilty–and sometimes hurt ourselves–when we harm someone? Why do we become angry–and sometimes violent–when we see other people being harmed? Why do we forgive ourselves and others after a transgression even though “the rules” say we really shouldn’t? In his fascinating book The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Judge Morris B. Hoffman attempts to answer these questions with reference to evolutionary psychology. As a working judge, Hoffman is in an excellent position to explore the dynamics of our instincts to punish and forgive. We are, he says, evolved to punish “cheaters”–ourselves and others–so as to maintain all-important bonds of trust and cooperation. But we are also evolved not to take punishment too far. When correction becomes too costly, we forgive so as to maintain social solidarity. Listen in to our fascinating discussion.

The constitution guarantees Americans freedom of religious practice and freedom from government interference in the same same. But what does religious liberty mean in practice? Does it mean that the government must permit any religious practice, even one that’s nominally illegal? Clearly not. You can’t shoot someone even if God tells you to. Does it mean, then, that religious liberty is a sort of fiction and that the government can actually closely circumscribe religious practice? Clearly not. The government can’t ban a putatively religious practice just because it’s expedient to do so. So where’s the line? In God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, Second Edition, 2014), Marci A. Hamilton argues that it’s shifting rapidly. Traditionally, the government, congress, and courts agreed that though Americans should enjoy extensive religious freedom, that freedom did not include license to do anything the religious might like. A sensible accommodation between church and state had to be made so that both the church and state could do their important work. According to Hamilton, in recent decades radical religious reformers have mounted a successful campaign to throw the idea of a sensible accommodation out the window. They have expanded the scope of religious liberty and thereby limited the ability of the government to protect citizens generally. In this sense, she says, religion–a force for great social good, in her mind–has been made into an instrument of harm for many Americans. Listen in.

Lincoln was very clear–at least in public–that the Civil War was not fought over slavery: it was, he said, for the preservation of the Union first and foremost. So it’s not surprising that when the conflict started he had no firm plan to emancipate the slaves in the borderland or Southern states. He also knew that such a move might prove very unpopular in the North. So why did he issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863? There are many reasons. According to David Williams‘ fascinating new book I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era (Cambridge University Press, 2014), an important and neglected one has to do with African American self-emancipation. After the war began, masses of slaves began to leave the South and head for the Northern lines. The Union forces received them as “contraband” seized from the enemy during wartime. As such, their status was uncertain. Many wanted to fight or at least serve as auxiliaries in the Union armies like freemen, but they were still seen as property. As Williams points out, the North certainly needed their manpower–as Lincoln knew better than anyone. Bearing this in mind, the President felt the time was propitious to do what he thought was right all along–free the slaves. Listen in.

Climate change is in the news a lot today. There seems to be little doubt that it’s getting warmer and that, should present trends continue, the warming trend will have “historical” consequences. Things are going to change. Ever thus. As John L. Brooke shows in his remarkable Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge University Press, 2014), what we might colloquially call “the weather” has been nudging, pushing, and dramatically altering the course of World history for eons. Sometimes it’s dry; sometimes it’s wet. Sometimes it’s hot; sometimes it’s cold. Sometimes the air is good; sometimes it’s bad. There are patterns, as John points out, but there’s also a good degree of unpredictability–it is, after all, the weather. What’s happening right now, though, is not in the slightest unpredictable: if we keep dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it’s going to get hot; if it gets hot, things are going to change–again.

Hans Noel is the author of Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Noel is an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University. He is also the co-author of The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform. To most casual observers of politics ideology and party affiliation are synonymous. Noel argues that, while that may largely be the case today, it wasn’t always so. He employs a novel method to trace the articulation of ideology over the 19th and 20th centuries, to explore the way liberalism and conservatism evolved. He writes: “The clear pattern is that in the 19th century, ideology was not unidimensional, but it became increasingly so over the 20th century.”

According to a longstanding tradition in ethical theory, the primary subject of moral evaluation is the person, or, more specifically, the person’s character. Aristotle stands at the head of this tradition, and he held that moral theory must take as its center a theory of the good man; he hence devised an elaborate conception of the virtues–those dispositions and traits constitutive of the good life for human beings. Virtue ethics thrives to this day. In fact, virtue theorizing has been applied to other normative domains, including especially epistemology. In Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Mark Alfano investigates the ways in which virtue ethics and epistemology are affected by recent results from behavioral sciences that call into question the idea that humans sustain stable and robust character traits. Drawing on a range of empirical data, Alfano suggests a reinterpretation of the virtues. Rather than seeing them as steady and fixed dispositions to act across a broad range of situations, Alfano argues that virtue attributions be seen more as self-fulfilling prophecies: when we properly attribute courage to a person, we heighten her tendency to behave in courageous ways. Alfano then extends this account to the intellectual virtues discussed by virtue epistemologists.

When did groups in Kufa begin forming unique identities leading to the development of Shiism? Najam Haider, professor of Religion at Barnard College of Columbia University, answers this question in his book, The Origins of Shia: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century Kufa (Cambridge University Press, 2011). This study is a boon for those with research interests in early Shiism, or the history of Islam prior to the ninth century. In the first section of his book, Haider announces his intention to test literary narratives of the origins of Shiism: namely, if Shiism did, in fact, develop during the early 8th century and if it was the product of the merging of two distinct groups. To answer those questions he proposes to analyze the 8th-century Kufa traditions. Haider examines these traditions on the basis of their legal authorities and the composition of their narrative styles.He applies this method to three cases studies in the second section of his book: (1) the basmala in ritual prayer, (2) the use of qunÅ«t, a blessing or curse, in prayer, and (3) the prohibition of intoxicants. Each case study centers on ritual which Haider argues is a more determinative means of ascribing identity then an individual or group’s theology. Based on the results of these three case studies, Haider proposes a revised history of Shiism in his third section. Haider’s work stands out for the clarity of the questions he seeks to answer and the method he employs in doing so. Every chapter concludes with a concise summary of the major points and the entire work is filled with charts of data to help readers understand how the massive corpus of information he utilized was organized and categorized. Scholars will obviously benefit from its proposed revised history, but its readability makes it useful for undergraduates and laypersons.

Americans are very politically divided. Democrats say we need a more powerful welfare state while Republicans say we need to maintain the free market. The struggle, we are constantly informed, is one of ideas. And that it is in the worst possible sense, for neither the Democrats nor Republicans seem interested in evidence. They don’t want the facts to get in the way of their arguments. In his remarkable book The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Benjamin Radcliff provides facts that should help both Democrats and Republicans, despite their many differences, decide how to proceed. He asks a simple, compelling question: do conservative or liberal public policies make people happier? After an extensive and sophisticated analysis of the data, he reaches an equally simple, compelling answer: liberal policies do. Radcliff is a great friend of the free market; it is obvious, he says, that capitalism is the best economic system we have at our disposal. But he is also pragmatic: all the evidence shows that free markets alone don’t make people as happy as markets combined with robust welfare and labor-protection programs. There is a lesson here for both Democrats and Republicans. Listen up.

It seems that everyone in Hollywood is on the political Left. “Seems” is the operative word here, because there are actually Republicans in pictures, at least according to this website. (NB: I have no idea whether the folks who created this list know what they’re talking about, so beware.) Nonetheless, it’s pretty certain that most–the vast majority?– of Hollywood-types are on the Left. But it wasn’t always so, as Donald T. Critchlow shows in his fascinating book When Hollywood Was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio Moguls, and Big Business Remade American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2013). There was a time–the 1940s and 1950s–when Conservatives were an important and very vocal faction in Hollywood. This group emerged out of opposition to the New Deal and found their issue in anti-Communism. They were, truth be told, never terribly numerous. But they made up for their small numbers by their political savvy and, ultimately, their ability to produce skillful, viable political candidates. One of them, of course, was Ronald Reagan, who proved to be very skillful and very viable indeed. It’s a remarkable and largely forgotten story. Listen in. This interview is brought to you by Cambridge University Press.

Big ideas about language often ignore, or abstract away from, the individual’s capacity to learn more than one language. In a world where the majority of human beings are bilingual, is this kind of idealization desirable? Is it useful, or necessary? Aneta Pavlenko‘s book The Bilingual Mind And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2014), covers a range of issues in the relationship between language and cognition, and its core thesis is that study of the monolingual mind in isolation is simply not enough to shed light on all aspects of the human mind. Drawing on a variety of sources, from traditional psycholinguistic experimental work to literary case studies and her own experience growing up as a bilingual, Professor Pavlenko debunks myths surrounding the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and argues that even the coldly rational edifice of linguistic theory is shaped by the language backgrounds of the individual theorists involved. In this interview we discuss all of this and more, including some of the big questions that face twenty-first-century research into linguistic cognition.

We tend to take for granted that much of the innovation in the technology that we use today, in particular the communication technology, is made possible because of standards. In his book Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dr. Andrew L. Russell examines standards and the standardization process in technology with an emphasis on standards in information networks. In particular, Russell examines the interdisciplinary historical foundations of openness and open standards by exploring the movement toward standardization in engineering, as well as the communication industry. Paying careful attention to the politics of standardization, Russell’s book considers the ideological foundations of openness, as well as the rhetoric surrounding this ideology. Notable also is the consideration of standardization as a critique of previous ideology and a rejection of centralized control.

Americans talk a lot about the flow of Mexican immigrants across their southern border. To some that flow is seen as patently illegal and dangerous. To others it’s seen as unstoppable and essential for the functioning of the U.S. economy. Everyone agrees that something must be done about it though, in fact, little is ever done. It’s an American problem that seems to have no American solution. But, as Jose Angel Hernandez points out in his pathbreaking book Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century: A History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands(Cambridge University Press, 2012) , it’s not just an American problem: it’s also a Mexican one and always has been. In the wake of the Mexican American War (1846-48), the United States appropriated a huge chunk of what was Northern Mexico. This act of–what else can you call it?–naked imperialism left a lot of Mexican citizens stranded across the new border. The Mexican authorities might not have been able to get their territory back, but they were quite interested in getting their countrymen back. In pursuit of this objective, they mounted repatriation campaigns designed to do just this. They were largely unsuccessful. The reason had less to do with the attractiveness of returning to Mexico–the Americans were not doing a terribly good job of protecting the Mexicans against the Native Americans who basically controlled the region–than it did with the corruption of the Mexican officials who ran the campaign. It’s a fascinating and largely forgotten story. Listen in.

Neoplatonists, including the 11th century Jewish philosopher-poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol, are often saddled with a cosmology considered either as outdated science or a kind of “invisible floating Kansas” in which spatiotemporal talk isn’t really about space or time. Sarah Pessin, Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Emil and Eva Hecht Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, is committed to upending these traditional readings. In Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Pessin begins her reappraisal from the ground up, interpreting neoplatonist cosmo-ontology as a response to the Paradox of Divine Unity: of how God can be both complete yet also give way to that which is other than Himself. Pessin argues that Ibn Gabirol saw being and beings as emanating from God via a process of divine desire – a kind of pre-cognitive, essential yearning to share His goodness forward. This desire infuses the initial Grounding Element, a positive conception of matter that (contrary to standard views) is prior to and superior to soul and intellect and utterly distinct from Aristotle’s notion of Prime Matter. Pessin’s provocative book is full of surprising insights that reveal the richness of the ideas of a “completely mischaracterized” figure and period.

In his brilliant new book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge UP, 2013), Ahmed El Shamsy, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago, explores the question of how the discursive tradition of Islamic law was canonized during the eighth and ninth centuries CE. While focusing on the religious thought of the towering Muslim jurist Muhammad b. Idris al-Shafi’i (d. 820) and the intellectual and social milieu in which he wrote, El Shamsy presents a fascinating narrative of the transformation of the Muslim legal tradition in early Islam. He convincingly argues that through al-Shafi’i’s intervention, a previously mimetic model of Islamic law inseparable from communal practice made way for a more systematic hermeneutical enterprise enshrined in a clearly defined scriptural canon. Through a rich and multilayered analysis, El Shamsy shiningly demonstrates how and why this process of canonization came about. Written in a remarkably lucid fashion, this groundbreaking study will delight and benefit specialists and non-specialists alike. In our conversation, we talked about the shift from oral to written culture in early Islam, the contrast between the normative projects of Malik and al-Shafi’i, al-Shafi’i’s theory of language, the social and political reasons for the success of his legal theory, and the transmission of al-Shafi’i’s thought by his students.

In Emergencies and Politics: A Sober Hobbesian Approach (Cambridge UP, 2013), Tom Sorell argues that emergencies can justify types of action that would normally be regarded as wrong. Beginning with the ethics of emergencies facing individuals, he explores the range of effective and legitimate private emergency response and its relation to public institutions, such as national governments. He develops a theory of the response of governments to public emergencies which indicates the possibility of a democratic politics that is liberal but that takes seriously threats to life and limb from public disorder, crime or terrorism. Informed by Hobbes, Schmitt and Walzer, but substantially different from them, the book widens the justification for recourse to normally forbidden measures, without resorting to illiberal politics. This book will interest students of politics, philosophy, international relations and law.

In West Germany in September and October of 1977, a group of self-described urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction (RAF) kidnapped industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. In exchange for Schleyer, the RAF demanded the release of its imprisoned leaders, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. Those months in 1977 following the abduction of Schleyer are often referred to as the German Autumn, and they represent a crescendo of leftist political violence that had its origins, in some ways, almost a decade before. Terror prompted a crisis in the 70s for the West German government and German democracy. Of course, 1977 was not the first time in history that a German republic had been tested by a group of radicals intending to bring it down. That had already happened in the 1930s. But 1977 turned out very differently than 1933–when the Nazis “captured” power in a profoundly embattled and dysfunctional democracy. In fact, as Karrin Hanshew argues in her fascinating book, “West Germany’s terrorist crisis helped to usher in the relatively stable civil society that still defines Germany today. Karrin Hanshew‘s new book Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is, at once, a political history of the FRG, a history of democracy, a history of political theory in the abstract and in action, and a history of social movements, among many other things. I learned so much from it and I think that you will too.

The division between natural kinds – the kinds that ‘cut nature at its joints’ – and those that simply reflect human interests and values has a long history. The natural kinds are often thought to have certain essential characteristics that are fixed by nature, such as a particular atomic number, while other kinds, of which a commonly cited example is race, are contentious precisely because they appear to group things, in this case people, by features that reflect social mores and not real essences. That natural versus socially constructed difference, of course, depends on what an essence is as well as whether having an essence is the mark of a natural kind. In Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Muhammad Ali Khalidi, associate professor of philosophy at York University, argues for what he calls an “epistemic” view of natural kinds, in which they are the kinds that correspond to our best scientific categories and satisfy various epistemic virtues. On his view, natural kinds do not have essences, often have fuzzy boundaries, can satisfy the relevant epistemic virtues to differing degrees, and can be mind-dependent in a way that does not impugn their objectivity. The result is a challenging view of natural kinds that avoids problems associated with essentialist views, but also widens the scope of what may be a natural kind to include potentially many of those often considered to be socially-constructed.

It’s getting harder and harder to trailblaze in the field of American Studies. More and more, writers have to follow paths created by others, imposing new interpretations on old ones in never-ending cycles of revision. But Jonathan Daniel Wells did find something new: Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge UP, 2011; paperback, 2013) is the first to focus in on women journalists, both black and white, in the nineteenth-century American South. The South had a vital periodical marketplace where curious women could engage with politics, belles lettres, science, diplomacy, and other allegedly unfeminine subjects. Examining evidence from both writers and readers, Wells’s book asks questions about literary culture, celebrity, the limits of dissent, and North-South differences that readers will find refreshing and engaging.

One of the most exciting approaches in the contemporary study of China is emerging from work that brings together archaeological and historical modes of reading texts and material objects to tell a story about the past. In Ancient Central China: Centers and Peripheries Along the Yangzi River (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Rowan...

In her book Animals in the Qur’an (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Sarra Tlili carefully addresses a complex issue. What does the Qur’an say about non-human animals? And their relationship to humans? Tlili begins her study by discussing conceptions of animals in various religions, in addition to Islam, and not just “Abrahamic” traditions. The remainder of the book focuses on the Qur’an, its presentation of animals, and a range of exegetical literature that treats the topic of animals in the Islamic holy text. Tlili also ventures into Arabic literature more broadly. She adroitly demonstrates that classical Muslim scholars did not understand non-human animals as existentially inferior, and notes societal shifts in the modern world with reference to anthropocentrism and privileging human existence. Tlili also provides a comprehensive appendix that lists a host of qur’anic names for animals, demonstrating the significance of her topic as well as the lexical challenge that scholars face. Sarra Tlili’s articulate prose reads smoothly, moreover, and gives the reader an incentive to explore this fascinating text. The monograph should interest specialists and non-specialists alike as it provides an accessible window into the rich world of Animals in the Qur’an.

Stella M. Rouse is the author of Latinos in the Legislative Process: Interests and Influence (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Rouse is assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland and a research fellow at the Center for American Politics and Citizenship. Commentators lauded Latino voters in 2012, but it is Latino elected-officials that increasingly hold power at the national and state-levels. In 2009, 242 Latino served in state legislatures and 27 Latinos were in the House of Representatives. While these numbers are not proportionate to the size of the Latino population, they are record highs. Rouse links together this descriptive representation to the ways those Latino officials make policy and vote on issues important to Latinos, what she labels substantive representation. She finds that education, healthcare, and jobs were the top priorities for Latino legislators – immigration was named by only 8% of respondents. She concludes that “Immigration is important, but it is not at the forefront of priorities for either the Latino public or for Latino elites.” Rouse extends this analysis to the agenda setting and voting behavior of Latinos. She finds that Latino legislators are more likely to introduce Latino-interest legislation when the percentage of Latinos in the party is smaller. At the roll call stage of the legislative process, though, Latino legislators behave no differently than others. Overall, Rouse’s new book has a lot to offer scholars of Congress, agenda setting, and ethnic studies. Her analysis is timely and advances what we know about Latinos and politics.

Brumaire. Germinal. Thermidor. There is nothing more evocative of the French Revolutionary imaginary than the names of the months of the republican calendar that became official in 1793 (the calendar was back-dated to 1792, or Year I). In The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Sanja Perovic explores the history and meanings of the republican calendar as a representation of the complexities of revolutionaries' understandings of past, present, and future. As she examines the tensions between linear and cyclical visions of time during this pivotal period in French and world history, Perovic considers the calendar as both an object and an ideological project. The book is a history of the calendar itself and also a literary, intellectual, and political biography of Sylvain Maréchal, a revolutionary who played a pivotal role in the development of the new temporal order. Anyone who has ever wanted to know more about the massive cultural and political shifts of the French Revolution will be interested in reading this book. Perovic's narrative and arguments speak to a wide range of scholarship on republican values and culture, as well as to the broader periodization and historiography of the French Revolution. At the same time, the book reaches further, reading the republican calendar as exemplary of the bigger picture of modern temporality, offering the reader much to think about in terms of the time structures and habits we use to understand our daily lives and our places in history.

The recognition of speech acts – classically, things like stating, requesting, promising, and so on – sometimes seems like a curiously neglected topic in the psychology of language. This is odd for several reasons. For one, there’s a rich philosophical tradition devoted to the topic. For another, it’s in many ways a really classic linguistic problem: one of those things that speakers can do effortlessly, but for which it’s extremely hard to explain how. With his new book From Utterances to Speech Acts (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Mikhail Kissine offers a stimulating contribution to the debate. His approach aims to identify certain broad classes of speech act with communicative processes that are genuinely fundamental to human interaction (not merely cultural creations). Moreover, it aims to account for the recognition of speech acts in a way that obviates the need for the classically Gricean process of multi-layered intention attribution: which, as we discuss, has the potential to explain how individuals with deficits in ‘mind-reading’ can nevertheless grasp the intended purpose of ambiguous utterances. In this interview, we also discuss the major philosophical and practical contributions of this approach, and explore the consequences of it for our views of the nature of human-human communication.

Thanks in no small part to John K. Thornton, professor of history at Boston University, the field of Atlantic history has emerged as one of the most exciting fields of historical research over the past quarter century. Thornton has long insisted that the the age of discovery fostered linkages between the Americas, Europe, and Africa that transformed the diverse peoples of all three regions. Europeans did not simply impose their will upon Africans and Native Americans. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) showcases Thornton’s deep research in the primary source material of multiple nationalities — and languages — to provide the most comprehensive interpretation we have of how the first era of globalization transformed the cultures of all the peoples of the Atlantic basin.