New Books In World Affairs

Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter University, is one of the most insightful historians of military strategy from early modernity to the present day. In his most recent book, Military Strategy: A Global History (Yale University Press, 2020), he sets out to demonstrate the ways in which strategic thinking has changed over time, paying attention to the changes in technology, ideology and ambition by which it has been shaped. This is a compelling account of a complex and various subject. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations - Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time Thomas Piketty, the French economist, was dubbed the modern Marx by The Economist in the wake of his bestselling Capital in the 21st Century, which presented historical data reaching back to the eighteenth century and focused on the dynamics of the distribution of wealth and income and the destabilizing force represented by: r > g – that is, the private rate of return on capital over time can be much higher than the rate of growth of income and output. Readers noted however, in addition to pointing out this ‘central contradiction of capitalism’ Professor Piketty was also clear that the purpose of social science is not to produce mathematical certainties that substitute for inclusive democratic debate. More importantly, he made the case for the progressive taxation of capital, and a

In The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (Verso, 2019), Max Blumenthal excavates the real, connected story behind the rise of Donald Trump, international jihad, Western ultra-nationalism and the many extremist forces that threaten peace across the globe: American imperialism. Washington’s secret funding of the mujahedin provoked the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. With guns and money, the United States has ever since sustained the extremists, including Osama Bin Laden, who have become its enemies. The Pentagon has trained and armed jihadist elements in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya; it has launched military interventions to change regimes in the Middle East. In doing so, it created fertile ground for the Islamic State and brought foreign conflicts home to American soil. These failed wars abroad have made the United States more vulnerable to both terrorism as well as native ultra-nationalism. The Trump presidency is the in

If you haven’t been able to tell by the way I pronounce the word “about,” I should probably let you know that I’m from Canada. And I have to make a confession––growing up in Vancouver, I was fed the line that Canadian history was dull, that it lacked drama (i.e. no revolutionary war against England), and so my historical attention was always drawn to the US. It wasn’t until I was deep into college that I began to think otherwise. And, as a result, I know far too little about my country’s history. Asa McKercher’s superb new book, Canada and the World since 1867 (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2019), is a strong rebuttal to the Canadian-history-is-boring thesis. Surveying the history of Canada’s relations with the rest of the world, the book tracks Canada long decolonization from Britain, its ugly campaign against First Nations communities to take territory and move settlers westward, and how it dealt with having a superpower for a neighbour. The book should not be read, however, just by Canadians or Canadian histo

Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the battles most closely associated with the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this period of nearly continuous warfare affect the world beyond Europe? The immensity of the fighting waged by France against England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and the immediate consequences of the tremors that spread from France as a result, overshadow the profound repercussions that the Napoleonic Wars had throughout the world. In his new book The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (Oxford University Press, 2020), Professor Alexander Mikaberidze of the department of History at Louisiana State University, argues that the Napoleonic Wars can only be fully understood with an international context in mind. France struggled for dominance not only on the plains of Europe but also in the Americas, West and South Africa, Ottoman Empire, Iran, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Taking specific regions in turn, Profe

So what is Western Civilization, anyway? The term itself is under assault from progressives, as if the very notion is somehow passé and is not inclusive enough in a globalized world. But, the fact is, our daily lives in the U.S and throughout much of the world are governed by core values and concepts that grow out of two inextricably linked aspects of the human condition: faith and reason. You don’t have to be a religious person to benefit from gaining an understanding of how the pairing of reason and faith is one of the hallmarks of Western Civilization and is unique to it. In his illuminating 2019 work of intellectual history, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (Gateway, 2019), Samuel Gregg demonstrates that key features of what we call the West--from the market economy to scientific advancement and the quest for human freedom and justice--are rooted in the relationship between faith and reason. He shows, for example, that the Enlightenment has been misleadingly portrayed as almost who

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its diffe

Americans since the beginning of their history, have constantly made moral judgments about presidents and foreign policy. Unfortunately, many of these assessments are poorly thought through and assessed. An American President is either praised for the moral clarity of his statements or judged solely on the results of their actions. In Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump (Oxford UP, 2020), Joseph S. Nye, Jr., one of the world's leading scholars of international relations, as well as someone who has served in prominent positions in both the Carter and the Clinton Administrations provides a concise yet penetrating analysis of the role of ethics in American foreign policy during the post 1945 era. Nye works through each presidency from FDR to Trump and scores their foreign policy on three ethical dimensions of their intentions, the means they used, and the consequences of their decisions. Alongside this, he also evaluates their leadership qualities, elaborating on which approaches w

Jonathan Scott is one of the most original interpreters of the early modern world. How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800 (Yale University Press, 2019) is a deft and cogent synthesis in which Scott returns to the turbulent seventeenth century in Britain, and examines how a period of political upheaval in its middle decade laid the foundations for a process of state-formation across the Anglo-Dutch-American world. While it tracks across the familiar ground of revolution, empire, commerce, and republicanism, this is a book with broad horizons. It is about movement, water, the interchange of ideas, peoples, and cultures. At its centre is the Anglo-Dutch relationship and, at its many peripheries, Scott reveals the transformative effects of this unique republican pulse. Jonathan Scott is Professor of History at the University of Auckland, and the author of seminal studies of the early modern British world, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (2004)

Is a rising power – like China – a threat to the world order? The conventional wisdom in international relations says that power transitions – particularly increases in military power – are intrinsically destabilizing to the international order. In her new book The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers (Oxford UP, 2020), Michelle Murray counters that political actors and scholars of politics should focus on how the actions of rising powers are interpreted or perceived by other nations. Murray encourages us to see power transitions as struggles for recognition: social constructs aimed at forming identities. Social uncertainty shapes the struggle for recognition – especially misrecognition by other nations. Murray contrasts two case studies – Germany’s naval build-up before WWI and the United States’s expansion of power after the Spanish-American War of 1898 – to argue that military capabilities do not adequately account for why Germany was viewed as a threa

Who or what originated and/or caused the Great War from breaking out in July 1914? Was it Serbia with its expansionist and aggressive designs on Austria-Hungary? Was it Austria-Hungary itself, unnecessarily plunging itself and the rest of Europe in a futile effort to keep together its tottering Monarchy? Was it Tsarist Russia? Attempting to both expand its influence in the Balkans at the expense of both Austria and Germany and at the very same time, seeking to bolster its own tottering monarchy by showing its aggrieved public that Mother Russia was backing the cause of its down-trodden, Slavic brothers. Was it Kaiserreich Germany? Aiming in the famous thesis of 20th-century German historian Fritz Fischer, to launch a Great War to establish itself as the hegemonic power on the European continent? A war which its military leaders stated repeatedly, Germany could only win if war occurred in the next few years. Was it France? Aiming in conjunction with its Russian ally to start a war with the aim of regaining the

In his paradigm shifting book, Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order (Hurst, 2014), which was recently translated into Arabic as Isti‘adat al-Khilafa Tafkik al-Isti‘mar wa al-Nizam al-‘Alimi, Salman Sayyid offers a breathtakingly brilliant meditation on the problem of decolonization through Muslim thought and politics. What are the foundational modern Western political and conceptual categories that inhibit and frustrate the project of decolonial thought? And through what resources and strategies might one stage and imagine alternate horizons of the political? These are among the questions that anchor this truly multivalent study that offers critical insights and theoretical dividends into a range of questions, problems, and conceptual registers. Written with exceptional clarity, Recalling the Caliphate especially raises and addresses crucial questions about the role and possibilities offered by Islamist thought in imagining a decolonial world order. This monumental book should be read and t

In his brilliant, category-smashing book, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford University Press, 2016), Jeffrey James Byrne places Algeria at the center of many of the twentieth-century’s international dynamics: decolonization, the Cold War, détente, Third Worldism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and postcolonial state-making. The book is a challenge to the very geography of international history. Byrne, an associate professor at UBC and one of my MA advisors, packs a lot into this book. Tracing the history of the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962 and the creation of an independent Algerian state in the 1960s and 1970s, Byrne shows how anticolonial revolutionaries and postcolonial statesmen harnessed the interstate system to advance their cause. The book should be read by anyone interested in the Cold War, South-South diplomacy, and how decolonization both remade and strengthened the interstate system. Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history a

America's war on terror is widely defined by the Afghanistan and Iraq fronts. Yet, as this book demonstrates, both the international campaign and the new ways of fighting that grew out of it played out across multiple fronts beyond the Middle East. Maria Ryan explores how secondary fronts in the Philippines, sub-Saharan Africa, Georgia, and the Caspian Sea Basin became key test sites for developing what the Department of Defense called "full spectrum dominance": mastery across the entire range of possible conflict, from conventional through irregular warfare. Full Spectrum Dominance: Irregular Warfare and the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2019) is the first sustained historical examination of the secondary fronts in the war on terror. It explores whether irregular warfare has been effective in creating global stability or if new terrorist groups have emerged in response to the intervention. As the U.S. military, Department of Defense, White House, and State Department have increasingly turned to i

Since the 1940s, America’s relations with the rest of the world have been guided by the idea of promoting the free flow of information. It’s an idea that seems benign, perhaps even difficult to argue against—who could possibly oppose the freedom of information? But, as Diana Lemberg shows in her exciting new book, Barriers Down: How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media (Columbia University Press, 2019), the idea wasn’t always benign and many fought against its implementation. In the book, Lemberg, an associate professor at Lingnan University, examines how American businessmen, statesmen, and social scientists sought to tear down barriers to transnational flows of information in the post-WWII era, and, in the process, maximize the spread of American content abroad. Barriers Down is an innovative study that shows just how central information politics were to the US’ vision of the global order. The book deserves a wide audience. Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Nort

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Ariella Aisha Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while trying to destroy what came before, and voraciously sought out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas to the Congo ruled by Belgium s brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), Azoulay travels alongside historical companions - an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-rav

How did de-colonialization impact the United Kingdom itself? That is a topic that Professor of Imperial & Commonwealth History at King’s College, London, Sarah Stockwell aims to tackle in her latest book: The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Looking at the process of de-colonialization and its domestic impact via four sets of institutions: Oxbridge, The Bank of England, The Royal Mint and the Royal military academy at Sandhurst, Stockwell aims to show how in each instance, the institution in question was affected by the end of Empire. Stockwell’s approach is a novel and revisionist one, in contradiction to Bernard Porter’s more wildly held thesis on the subject. And, while Stockwell’s argument both well researched and well written, will not convince everyone; it is certainly a highly interesting and imaginative one, which everyone interested in the topic should peruse and read.  Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York U

Notwithstanding the fact that slavery is almost as old if not older than human civilization itself, involving almost every country and continent on the face of the planet, the vast majority of scholarly attention tends to be focused on the North American continent and for less than two-hundred years. In an endeavor to bring a wider and historically more accurate view of this utterly human institution, University of Exeter, Professor of History Jeremy Black discusses various aspects of the subject at length with Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society in this new episode of 'Arguing History: Slavery in World History'. Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.” Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 1

How should we understand humanitarian NGOs? In Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Shai M. Dromi, a lecturer in sociology at Harvard University, uses insights from cultural sociology to reframe the history of the Red Cross. The book blends a detailed historical analysis with field theory and the strong programme in cultural sociology to show the longstanding influence of key individuals and texts, as well as accounting for influences of nationalism and Christianity. The historical analysis of the Red Cross presents crucial lessons for our current context, as well as providing the basis for comparisons with other approaches to humanitarian interventions. The book is both an excellent example of the strengths of the strong programme, along with a fascinating analysis of a key element of our modern world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices