New Books in World Affairs

Jeremy Black, one of the most prolific and punchy of historians of modern Britain, has written a new account of a period on which he has previously published. A Brief History of Britain 1851-2021: From World Power to ? (Robinson, 2021) traces an arc of decline and opportunity, from the confidence that was reflected in the Crystal Palace’s Great Exhibition of 1851 to the uncertainty about national...

This is a reassessment of British and Italian grand strategies during the First World War. Dr. Stefano Marcuzzi, Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, tries to shed new light on a hitherto overlooked but central aspect of Britain and Italy's war experiences: the uneasy and only partial overlap between Britain's strategy for imperial defense and Italy's ambition for imperial expans...

Technology is breaking politics - what can be done about it? Artificially intelligent "bot" accounts attack politicians and public figures on social media. Conspiracy theorists publish junk news sites to promote their outlandish beliefs. Campaigners create fake dating profiles to attract young voters. We live in a world of technologies that misdirect our attention, poison our political conversatio...

The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) arrives at an extraordinarily consequential moment for the future of asylum protections. Even as more and more people around the world find themselves displaced and endangered by violent conflict, climate change, and material deprivation, the small set of countries that once welcomed refuge...

The field of US foreign-relations history is not what it used to be, and that’s a good thing. Earlier historians narrowly defined the field as diplomatic history­­ and kept vast swathes of the United States’ interactions with the world from being explored. In the middle of the 1990s, for example, even the very consideration of gender in the history of US foreign policy could cause controversy (as...

Faced with a major terrorist threat, states seem to reach instinctively for the most coercive tools in their arsenal and, in doing so, risk exacerbating the situation. This policy response seems to be driven in equal parts by a lack of understanding of the true nature of the threat, an exaggerated faith in the use of force, and a lack of faith that democratic values are sufficiently flexible to al...

What role did culture play in the British Empire? In Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire Caroline Ritter, an Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University, explores the importance of culture in maintaining Imperial domination, and then in supporting post-Imperial British influence. Using core case studies of key institutions- the British Council, the BBC, an...

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....

The middle decades of the 19th century witnessed the expansion of slavery and white settlement and dispossession of Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi River, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire followed by the importation of indentured laborers from India and China into the West Indies, the consolidation of British rule in India followed by the so-called Indian Mutiny, and the exp...

As we mark the one-year anniversary of the COIVD-19 pandemic, take the time to listen to this discussion of previous efforts to fight yellow fever, cholera, and plague pandemics. Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris’s Sulfuric Utopias: A History Maritime Fumigation (MIT Press, 2020) tells the story of the international dream of stopping the spread of infectious disease in global shipping networks...

In the decade after World War I, German-American relations improved swiftly. While resentment and bitterness ran high on both sides in 1919, Weimar Germany and the United States managed to forge a strong transatlantic partnership by 1929. But how did Weimar Germany overcome its post-war isolation so rapidly? How did it regain the trust of its former adversary? And how did it secure U.S. support fo...

Winston Churchill was no stranger to storms. They had engulfed him in various ways throughout his long career and he had always turned to face them with jutting jaw and indomitable spirit. Dark clouds had hovered over him from the moment he became Britain’s Prime Minister in May 1940. Now, fifteen harrowing months later, he was setting out to meet President Franklin Roosevelt, the one man who coul...

Disorienting Neoliberalism: Global Justice and the Outer Limit of Freedom (Oxford UP, 2020) takes on a number of different dimensions of neoliberalism to help readers consider not only how this ideological framework structures our lives, but also to lead us towards the capacity to reorient our thinking and understanding of the world, and politics. Benjamin McKean explores the way that we can try t...

Normally we write blogposts that try to convince you to listen to a conversation with an author about their fascinating book. In the time of COVID-19, it doesn't seem necessary to have to sell you on why you should listen to this podcast. Suffice it to say that Mitchell Hammond’s excellent survey of a dozen deadly diseases is a must-read primer to make sense of epidemic history. In Epidemics and t...

What is the difference between Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president? Why should we understand Trump as part of a dangerous “fourth wave” of radical right politicians? Dr. Cas Mudde’s new book The Far Right Today (Polity, 2019) argues that politicians like Le Pen represented a 20th-century marginalized populist radical right party but Trump (and others ac...

This ambitious work explores the literary and cultural production about Russian peasants and African Americans in the post-emancipation period. Brickell Bellows draws on visual images from advertisements to oil paintings as well as novellas, novels, pamphlets, and reports in English and Russian.  The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russ...

'The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time.' The words of Sir Edward Grey, looking out from the windows of the Foreign Office in early August 1914, are amongst the most famous in European history, and encapsulate the impending end of the nineteenth-century world. The man who spoke them was Britain's longest-ever serving Foreign Secretary (in a single...

A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy (US Naval Institute Press, 2019), is a readable introduction to the world of maritime strategy. While Prof Holmes bases his narrative on the writings of Mahan and Corbett, he weaves in a wide-range of naval, political and philosophical thinkers who describe the universal importance of maritime strategy. His book guides junior officers and sailors in the art of st...

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...

When John Foster Dulles died in 1959, he was given the largest American state funeral since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s in 1945. President Eisenhower called Dulles—his longtime secretary of state—“one of the truly great men of our time,” and a few years later the new commercial airport outside Washington, DC, was christened the Dulles International Airport in his honor. His star has fallen signifi...

If we wish to understand the role of China in today’s global society, we would do well to remind ourselves of the tragic, titanic struggle which that country waged in the 1930s and 1940s not just for its own national dignity and survival, but for the victory of all the Allies, west and east, against some of the darkest forces that history has ever produced. – Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s W...

For years, cybersecurity experts have debated whether cyber-weapons represent a destabilizing new military technology or merely the newest tool in the spies’ arsenal. In This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends (Bloomsbury, 2021), Nicole Perlroth makes a compelling case that cyber-conflict is quickly spiraling out of control. Worse, the United States set us down the precarious path we’re now on. A...

Much of the world's politics revolve around questions about the development of the international market for drugs; the roles merchants, government officials, and drug manufacturers played in shaping this market over time and space; and the process of globalization. There are no easy answers to these questions, but the decisions that all of us make about them will have tremendous consequences for i...

From 2002 to 2013, China’s rapid economic growth caused a boom in the prices of commodities—particularly of metals, fuel, and soybeans. According to political economist Dr. Nick Jepson, the commodity boom offered resource exporters in the Global South the financial resources and thus the opportunity to break away from international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and se...

Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) by Torsten Weber examines how Asianism became a key concept in mainstream political discourse between China and Japan and how it was used both domestically and internationally in the contest for political hegemony. It argues that, from the early 1910s to the early 1930s, this contest cha...