New Books in World Affairs

The study of Palestine and Israel has been largely shaped by the politics of the conflict and thus, many scholars start with political history, often using Israeli state sources. Maha Nassar, in Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017), looks specifically at the larger context of Palestinian citizens of Israel, those Palestinians who staye...

Despite the British being early abolitionists, a significant slave trade remained in the western Indian Ocean through the mid-1800s, even after the cessation of most imperial slave trading activities in the Atlantic World. The British Royal Navy’s response was to dispatch a squadron to patrol East Africa’s coast. Following what began as a simple policing action, Squadron: Ending the African Slave...

As debates on globalization rage in the twenty-first century, many countries and the people within them have been challenged socially, economically, and legally. At the same time, our world is now more bordered geopolitically than ever before. What effect do these phenomena have on one of the most significant social units: the family? In her new book, Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Glob...

Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: An Ecological Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2016), a multi-authored volume co-edited by Catherine Grant and Huib Schippers, examines a range of musical traditions from cultures around the world. The book deliberately places endangered musical practices alongside vibrant traditions like western opera and Hindustani music, each assessed along five doma...

Mark G. Hanna offers a unique perspective on the roles played by piracy in the formation of the British colonial project. In Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2015), Hanna weaves a fascinating tale from legal and commercial sources to illustrate ways that the English g...

Today we talked to Seth Markle about his book, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism 1964-1974, published by Michigan State University Press in 2017 as part of the Ruth Simms Hamilton African Diaspora Series. Providing extensive insight into the importance of Tanzania in the emergence of a new form of Pan-Africanism in the 1960s, Markle conveys...

The First World War was not limited the trenches on the Western Front. Nor was the system of internment camps it spawned. In his new book, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mahon Murphy looks at the experiences of German colonial settlers interned by the Entente Powers, particularly the British...

Harrod Suarez‘s new book The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2017) focuses on the domestic workers that make up around a third of all overseas Filipino/a workers, and whose remittances back to the Philippines contribute to about 9% of its GDP or around twenty billion dollars. These migrants circulate through the world serving in positions o...

Described upon his death in 1887 as the ideal diplomatist, Richard Lyons served Great Britain in a variety of roles over the course of a long and distinguished career. In Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Age of Nationalism and War (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), Brian Jenkins describes Lyons’s eventful life and the often subtle impact he made in international relations. The son of an officer...

Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful account of the Russian revolutionary era by Laura Engelstein, Professor Emerita at Yale University. Spanning the pre-revolutionary period immediately prior the First World War to the end of the Russian Civil War, Russia in Flames provides a rich and comprehensive view of the whys and the wherefor...

What can be learned about the Soviet Union by viewing it through an environmental lens? What would an environmental history teach us about power in the Soviet system? What lessons can be drawn from the environmental experience of Soviet communism? These are just some of the questions motivating historian Andy Bruno‘s book, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge Univ...

Sir David Cannadine, Professor of History at Princeton University, president of the British Academy, and the general editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, narrates the century of Pax Britannica in the Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 (Viking, 2018). From the successful end of the Napoleonic Wars to the near debacle that was the Boer War, Victorious Century provide...

In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), David Stevenson examines a pivotal chapter of the First World War. Two and a half years of death and destruction had brought the belligerents to new nadirs of attrition and zeniths of strategic calculation. Deeply invested in the war, with unprecedented losses of blood and treasure, and no longer optimistic about their chances of...

In her new book, Histories of Controversy: Bonegilla Migrant Centre (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Alexandra Dellios, a Lecturer in Heritage Studies at the Australian National University, provides a critical reassessment of Bonegilla, which received and temporarily accommodated about 320,000 post-war refugees and migrants from 1947 to 1971. Using a series of four cases studies of controv...

I was in graduate school during Bosnia and Rwanda. Like everyone else, I watched the video footage and journalistic accounts that came from these two zones of atrocity. Like everyone else, I wondered how humans could do such things to each other. And like everyone else, I asked in anguish “why can’t we do something.” Much of the scholarship about Rwanda focuses on this question. Most of it is good...

In Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (UNC Press, 2017), Andrew McKevitt explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. Would Japan’s remarkable post World War II economic success enable the East Asian nation to overtake the United States? Or could Japan’s globe-trotting corporations serve as a model for batt...

The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World (Brookings Institution Press, 2017) is an important and in depth study of American interaction with the intricate concept of Sovereignty, from the Founding Fathers to Donald Trump. Stewart Patrick delineates for the reader the fraught concept of sovereignty, showing how it has changed in both meaning and importance for Americans since the fo...

In a perceptive challenge to longstanding assumptions about Dominican anti-Haitianism, April J. Mayes finds fresh ways to think about the production of race in late 19th and 20th century Dominican Republic. Combining intellectual history with fine-grained social history, The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race and Dominican National Identity (University Press of Florida, 2014) argues that Dominican thin...

The Syrian Revolution, which began in March 2011, has since resulted in what can be described as a civil war, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the forced migrations of millions of Syrians. This story has been told countless times in news media. However, less known is the story of the Syrian artists who have portrayed the revolution with all of its nuances. miriam cooke’s Dancing...

Over the past century, virtually every Iranian—whether living in Iran or in the diaspora—has been exposed, to one degree or another, to certain commonly held nationalistic beliefs about what it means to be Iranian. These beliefs include the idea that Iranians are an “Aryan” race; that pre-Islamic Iran was a sort of golden age, marked by a glorious Persian Empire; and that this pure Iranian “soul”...

Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti employed some questionable, unethical methods to dispossess African communities of their cultural and religious artifacts and artwork. In his capacity as secretary-archivist, Leiris recorded the events, acti...

Kevan Harris is the author of A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran (University of California Press, 2017). Harris is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Much scholarship has focused on understanding the Iranian revolution of 1979, especially in relation to other nations in the Middle East and those further away in the West. The Isla...

Colleen Murphy’s new book, The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2017), argues that attaining some degree of justice is possible in nations transitioning to democratic states. There are many historical instances of nations whose citizens take action to change the nature of their regime from one of authoritarianism to democracy. Whether from France in the 1...

Sheshalatha Reddy’s British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) examines historical and literary texts relating to three rebellions in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 in India, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 in Jamaica, and the Fenian Rebellion of 1867 in Ireland. The book argues that these...

In her new book, Australian Gypsies: Their Secret History (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), award-winning writer Mandy Sayer explores the neglected history of Gypsies, or Romani people, in Australia, from the earliest European settlement until today. Utilizing historical sources and contemporary interviews, Sayer shares the real stories, not stereotypes, of a diverse ethnic group that has found refuge...