New Books in World Affairs

On this episode of the Economic and Business History channel I spoke with Dr. Chinmay Tumbe, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management. He was Alfred D Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar in Business History, Harvard Business School in 2018. Dr, Tumbe has published academic articles in Management and Organizational History and in the Journal of Management Histo...

Russia’s position between Europe and Asia has led to differing conceptions of “what Russia is” to its leaders. Russia’s vast holdings east of the Urals have often inspired those who led Russia to look eastward for national glory, whether through trade, soft power, or outright force. Yet these Russian “pivots to Asia” often ended soon after they began, with outcomes far more limited than what those...

This is an important, revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. In The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), David Veevers uncovers a hidden world of transcultural interactions between servants of the English East India Company and the Asian communities and states they came into contact with, revealin...

Many American Christians have come to understand their relationship to other Christian denominations and traditions through the lens of religious persecution. Jason Bruner's Imagining Persecution: Why American Christians Believe There Is a Global War Against Their Faith (Rutgers UP, 2021) provides a historical account of these developments, showing the global, theological, and political changes th...

Constitutional Investigations is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Linda Colley, the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. Linda Colley is a leading expert on British, imperial and global history since 1700. After inspiring insights about Linda Colley’s teachers and professors who had a strong impact on her future career as a historia...

In Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity (U Nebraska Press, 2019), Simon Ferdinand analyzes diverse map-based works of painting, collage, film, walking performance, and digital drawing, made in Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, arguing that together they challenge the dominant modern view of the world as...

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is often invoked, but usually as a means of cultural critique and analysis. However, my guest Lorenzo Fusaro argues in his recent book Crises and Hegemonic Transitions: From Gramsci's Quaderni to the Contemporary World Economy (Haymarket Books, 2020) that Gramsci’s work is permeated by Marx’s economic critique and his theories of value. Split into two parts, the book...

The image most of us have of whalers includes harpoons and intentional trauma. Yet eating commercially caught seafood leads to whales' entanglement and slow death in rope and nets, and the global shipping routes that bring us readily available goods often lead to death by collision. We--all of us--are whalers, marine scientist and veterinarian Michael J. Moore contends. But we do not have to be. D...

In Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health (MIT Press, 2020), physician-anthropologist Eugene T. Richardson explores how public health practices—from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment—help perpetuate global inequities. This book questions the Global North's "monopoly on truth" in global public health science, making a provocative claim: that public health scie...

Why has the United States, the world’s premier military and economic power, struggled recently to achieve its foreign policy desiderata? How might America’s leaders reconsider the application of power for a world of asymmetric and unconventional threats? In his new book, Power and Complacency: American Survival in an Age of International Competition (Potomac Books, 2021), American Enterprise Insti...

Through various international case studies presented by both practitioners and scholars, Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures (Routledge, 2021) explores how an environmental justice approach is necessary for reflections on inequality in the Anthropocene and for forging societal transitions toward a more just and sustainable future. Environmental justice...

In 1961, it was famously declared that the “fight for education is too important to be left solely to the educators.” Enter the OECD. In The OECD’s Historical Rise in Education: The Formation of a Global Governing Complex (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Christian Ydesen offers a well-edited volume that illuminates how the OECD normalized its influence over global education policy from its Cold War ori...

In Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific (Apollo, 2020), the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas tells the story of the peopling of the Pacific. In clear, accessible language Thomas shows us that most Pacific Islanders are in fact 'inter-islanders', or people defined by their movement across the ocean and between islands, rather than 'trapped' in islands in a far sea. Thomas also descri...

In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2020) dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers de...

Music from East Asia has recently been making its way round the world on waves created and mediated by new technologies and global interconnections. This may seem like something very novel, but as Andrew Jones shows in Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s (U Minnesota Press, 2020), popular music from this region – and here specifically varieties of Chinese music – has been...

It might seem somewhat paradoxical that in the Wars of 1898 and their aftermath—the era in which the United States expanded its imperial reach deep into the Caribbean and Pacific—international law became a feature of US foreign policy. In the midst of all of the militarism (think of Teddy Roosevelt’s roughriders storming Cuba), colonial conquest, and the use of torture to quash Philippine resistan...

Early 20th century Southeast Asia was arguably home to the once of the most vibrant and diverse caldrons of revolutionary ferment in world history. Revolts against Western imperialism and traditional socio-economic structures developed into a range of utopian experiments. In Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cornell UP, 2021), John T. Sidel argu...

In The Economics of Sustainable Food: Smart Policies for Health and the Planet (Island Press, 2021), Dr. Nicoletta Batini, and co-authors, unpack the true cost of food production. While the Green Revolution served a purpose, Dr. Batini makes the case that the industrial food complex continues to cause tremendous global economic losses in terms of malnutrition, diseases, and environmental degradati...

Nicholas Harrison's Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education (Liverpool UP, 2019) is a fascinating examination of colonial education not just as a facet of colonialism, but as an "example" of education in a broader sense, albeit an "extreme" one. At once a historical study, a series of close readings of texts, ideas, and authors, and a set of intellectual, professional, and politi...

Today we are joined by Alan McDougall, Professor of History at the University of Guelph, and the author of Contested Fields: A Global History of Modern Football (University of Toronto Press, 2020). In our conversation we discussed football’s role in global migrations from the 19th to the 21st century, global football’s changing economic conditions from grassroots pastime to neo-liberal ‘big busine...

"The point of studying the world – including the past and other’s writings – is not just to understand it but to use that understanding to change it." – Harry Cleaver (33 Lessons from Capital – On Reading Marx Politically) Listening to Robert Ovetz explain the origins of his interest in the study of labor and his academic influences I was reminded of the title of the late A.O. Hirschman’s book A P...

Based on sweeping research in six languages, Sebastian N. Page's Black Resettlement and the American Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2021) offers the first comprehensive, comparative account of nineteenth-century America's greatest road not taken: the mass resettlement of African Americans outside the United States. Building on resurgent scholarly interest in the so-called 'colonization' movement, the bo...

World Christianity publications proliferate but the issue of methodology has received little attention. World Christianity: Methodological Considerations (Brill, 2020) addresses this lacuna and explores the methodological ramifications of the World Christianity turn. In twelve chapters scholars from various academic backgrounds (anthropology, religious studies, history, missiology, intercultural s...

Most of our understanding of the Mongol Empire begins and ends with Chinggis Khan and his sweep across Asia. His name is now included among conquerors whose efforts burn bright and burn out quick: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and so on. Except the story doesn’t end with Chinggis’s death. As Professor Marie Favereau notes in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Harvard University Press:...

Would there have been a Third World without the Second? Perhaps, but it would have looked very different. Although most histories of these geopolitical blocs and their constituent societies and cultures are written in reference to the West, the interdependence of the Second and Third Worlds is evident not only from a common nomenclature but also from their near-simultaneous disappearance around 19...