New Books in Western European Studies

Sir John Elliott, Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Oxford University, one of the premier historians writing in English on Spanish and European History in the Early Modern period, has now delighted his many ardent readers and admirers by writing a superb book dealing with the comparative histories of Scottish and Catalan nationalism. Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion (Yale Univer...

The relationship between neoliberals and the state is one that has been endlessly debated. Are neoliberals anti-statist? Or are they advocates of a strong state? The seeming vagueness of neoliberalism has led some to even call for the word’s abolition. However, Quinn Slobodian, in his new book, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018) shakes thi...

Joseph Ben Prestel talks with us about Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 (Oxford University Press, 2017), blending together history of emotions, urban history, global history,  and comparative history to produce a monograph on the similar effects urban change had on Cairo and Berlin: ordinary citizens, between 1860 and 1910, negotiated between how the city wa...

The downfall of the Weimar Republic in Germany has long fascinated historians, but this catastrophe gained increasing prominence as a touchstone for contemporary political commentators in recent years. In his new book, The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (Henry Holt, 2018), Benjamin Carter Hett provides a new narrative about end of the first Germa...

In the 6th century CE, the Roman emperor Justinian embarked upon a series of wars that seemed to herald the restoration of the Roman empire in the western Mediterranean. In his book Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian (Oxford University Press, 2018), Peter Heather recounts the campaigns of Justinian’s armies and the factors that made them possible. As Heather explains, the Roman...

Artificial intelligence and Victorian literature: these two notions seem incompatible. AI brings us to the age of information and technology, whereas Victorian literature invites us to the world of lengthy novels, to the world of the written word. In spite of seeming incongruity the AI and Victorian literature evoke, the two notions do establish a contact zone: the mind. AI and characters created...

In his speech delivered to the National Convention on 18 Floréal (May 7, 1794), Maximilien Robespierre shocked his listeners as he attacked the proponents of atheism and dechristianization in the government: “Who nominated you to tell the people that God does not exist anymore?  What do you hope to gain by persuading Man…that his soul is nothing but a puff of wind, blown away at the gates of the t...

In his new book, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Simon Levis Sullam, associate professor of modern history at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, examines how ordinary Italians became willing perpetrators and actively participated in the deportation of Italian Jews between 1943 and 1945. Levis Sullam challenges long held notions that It...

Beginning in the mid-1800s, Paris experienced an unprecedented growth in the development of parks, squares, and gardens. This greenspace was part of Napoleon III’s plan for a new, modern Paris and a France restored to glory on the international stage.  Adolphe Alphand, as director of the newly established park service, brought his own democratic and egalitarian vision to urban planning.  In Planni...

A sharply observed study of the representations of education found in Anglo-Saxon texts, Irina Dumitrescu’s The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge University Press 2018) invites readers to recognize just how often educational encounters crop up throughout the Anglo-Saxon corpus. By attending to the ways that violence, deceit, suspicion, sexual desire, concealed identities...

Ever go backpacking through Europe? In Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Richard Ivan Jobs traces the postwar cultural history of the making of Europe through the stories and perspectives of the young people who moved across the continent’s borders. A history of European integration from the end of the Second World War to the 1992 Treaty...

In Werner Scholem: A German Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Mirjam Zadoff, Director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, presents a biography of an individual, a family chronicle, and the story of an entire era. This biography suggests that the ‘non-Jewish’ Communist Jew was not as irreconcilably opposed to the ‘Jewish’ Jew as has previously been...

This entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority and contemporary thinking—sometimes risking excommunication, prison, and even death—to lay the foundations of modern philosophy and science and help usher in a new world. This unique book by dynamic father-son duo Steve and Ben Nadler is titled Heret...

In his new book, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, 2018), Konrad Jarausch, the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examines the lives of ordinary Germans throughout the 20th century. Drawing on six dozen memoirs of Germans born in the 1920s he demonstrates how these individuals experie...

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Austria established itself as one of the dominant powers of Europe, despite possessing much more limited fiscal resources when compared to its counterparts. In The Sinews of Habsburg Power: Lower Austria in a Fiscal-Military State, 1650-1820 (Oxford University Press, 2018), William D. Godsey uses the financial support provided by one region of the Habsburg’s emp...

In The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2018), Alexander Bevilacqua uncovers a different side of the European Enlightenment, at least with regards to its engagement with Arabic and Islam. Instead of polemics, he tells the story of how books and ideas moved across continents and were studied in Europe, where they were considered a serious o...

Most studies of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander III focus on the military aspects of his life and reign. Yet Alexander’s campaigns would not have been possible had it not been for the enormous plunder his armies seized in their conquests. In The Treasures of Alexander the Great: How One Man’s Wealth Shaped the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), Frank L. Holt sifts through the ancient source...

In his new book, Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (Oxford University Press, 2017), Gary Bruce, professor of history at the University of Waterloo, provides the first English-language history of the Berlin Zoo from its inception in 1844 until German reunification in 1990. Bruce demonstrates how the Berlin Zoo was a critical facet of Berlin’s social and cultural life. The zoo was a...

Within the space of only six months in 1990, the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) managed to win the majority of the Serb vote in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In his new book, Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect: The Serb Democratic Party and the Bosnian War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Adis Maksić traces the rise of the SDS and the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia. Combining discourse ana...

During the 1960s, West Germany eagerly courted workers from Turkey to manage a labor shortage during the country’s Economic Miracle. This program caused one of the most consequential migrations in Cold War Germany. In her new book, Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s (University of Toronto Press, 2018), Jennifer A. Miller revises several assumptions...

In her new book, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (University of California Press, 2016), Pamela M. Potter, Professor of Germany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, carefully examines why historians and the general public have clung to a problematic narrative, which argued that the Nazi government had total control over the visual and...

I was joined in Oxford by Ben Clift, Professor of Political Economy, Deputy Head of Department and Director of Research at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of Warwick. Ben has just published a very important, timely and interesting book on the IMF: The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis by Ben Clift (Oxford University...

In his thrilling and sparkling new book, Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Samuel England, Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, analyzes with remarkable nimbleness the interaction of literature, politics, and power in medieval imperial settings. Effortlessly traversin...

How can political modernization reinforce authoritarianism? What brought middle-class liberals and conservative monarchists to make common cause in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany? How did a political culture defined by anti-socialism and anti-semitism emerge? In his new book Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860 to 1918 (Oxford University Press, 2017...

What sounds like the title of a Hollywood movie is actually a result of meticulous historical research. Frances Courtney Kneupper‘s new book The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy (Oxford University Press, 2016) analyzes apocalyptic prophecies of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire in terms of their genesis, perception, authorship and individual impacts...