New Books In World Affairs

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors

Count Sergey Semyonovich Uvarov, once proclaimed by Aleksandr Herzen as a ‘Prometheus of our day’, has in the past 160 years become something of an also-ran in Russian History. Notwithstanding his manifold contributions to the Russian education system as Minister of Education for more than fifteen years. And of course his invention of the holy trinity of 19th-century Russian conservatism: ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality’. Uvarov’s time in the shadows of Russian history is now however over thanks to the veteran writer and journalist, Lesley Chamberlain’s biography. In the Ministry of Darkness: How Sergei Uvarov Created Conservative Modern Russia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Chamberlain delineates Uvarov's career and shows how one of the most cosmopolitan of men, became in the course of his official career the inventor of much that can be seen in to-day's xenophobic and nationalistic Russia of Vladimir Putin. How a celebrated men of letters and correspondent of Goethe, became in due course the opponent an

The British Empire at its greatest extent covered approximately twenty-five percent of the surface of the globe with the same percentage of the world so population under its rule, directly or indirectly. And, yet a little over one-hundred years after its apogee, with its fall made absolute by the process of de-colonization, the British Empire is still the subject of sharp debate. From those who argue that the empire was a ‘evil thing’, to those like Harvard Professor, Niall Ferguson who argue that on the contrary the empire was an instrument of liberty and commerce world-wide. In short an early harbinger of the late-twentieth century process that we call ‘globalization’. Hoping to shed some light on this most hazardous of subjects is Professor of History at Exeter University Jeremy Black and Dr. Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society, in this episode of Arguing History, "What should we think of the British Empire?" Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A gr

Waste is one of the planet’s last great resource frontiers. From furniture made from up-cycled wood to gold extracted from computer circuit boards, artisans and multinational corporations alike are finding ways to profit from waste while diverting materials from overcrowded landfills. Yet beyond these benefits, this “new” resource still poses serious risks to human health and the environment. In her new book Waste (Polity, 2019), Kate O’Neill traces the emergence of the global political economy of wastes over the past two decades. She explains how the emergence of waste governance initiatives and mechanisms can help us deal with both the risks and the opportunities associated with the hundreds of millions – possibly billions – of tons of waste we generate each year. Drawing on a range of fascinating case studies to develop her arguments, including China’s role as the primary recipient of recyclable plastics and scrap paper from the Western world, “Zero-Waste” initiatives, the emergence of transnational waste-

Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth Bernstein, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College about her newest book, Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking and the Politics of Freedom (University of Chicago, 2018). This book provides an overview of feminist discourse on sex trafficking from its earliest incarnations, through its present form, noting the ongoing, and occasionally uneasy partnership between radical feminists and evangelical Christians. This lively discussion, the author explains the capitalist, neo-liberal, often religious groups spearheading the global anti-trafficking movement. We talk about “carceral feminism,” reality tourism, and the corporations who make money through the women they “save.” Bernstein’s book, in her own words, reveals, “the complex intertwining of gender and sexuality with state and metastate interests.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dissecting and digesting the history of the Soviet "experiment" can be a frustrating exercise for academics and a Sisphyan task for laymen; the endeavor demands scrutiny of the facts — and they are legion — but we must also grapple with the dystopian atmosphere and cruel indifference to human life, which characterizes the period. These challenges make the triumph of Professor Michael Khodarkovsky's new book, Russia's 20th Century: A Journey in 100 Histories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), all the more impressive. Khodarkovsky has taken a novel approach to charting the century by crafting one hundred vignettes, one for each year of the century. Each vignette plunges us into a moment of history, art, politics, science, or international relations, and in each, we add a building block to the tower of interpretation Khodarkovsky constructs in this slim but incredibly impactful book. Even seasoned historians will find Russia's 20th Century a compelling lens through which to consider the entire arc of the Soviet centur

Do we need another book on the Vietnam War? Pierre Asselin, Dwight E. Stanford Chair in the History of US Foreign Relations at San Diego State University, thinks that we do. While he has already published A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (2002) and Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (2013), he argues that far too much of the English language scholarship on the war has failed to explain the Vietnamese Communists’ perspective. He holds that a number of myths about Hanoi’s war with America continue to circulate. However, with Vietnam’s American War: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Asselin addresses this shortcoming and offers a fresh and challenging narrative of the war. Based on extensive research in Vietnamese archives not previously accessed by foreigners, Vietnam’s American War is an iconoclastic revision of the history of the war. Amongst the various topics Asselin considers are the secret power struggle between the moderate Ho Chi Minh and the h

According to one dictionary definition, the term means: “to yield or concede to the belligerent demands of (a nation, group, person, etc.) in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of justice or other principles”. Of course when one employs this term in a historical context, it is usually taken to refer to the ‘Appeasement’ by Great Britain of the Fascist powers during the 1930s. In this latest edition of ‘Arguing History’, Professor of History Jeremy Black and Dr. Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society, discuss the historical nature of appeasement and endeavor to go beyond the reductionist and ahistorical picture so popular with some historians and much of the reading public. Going beyond the sloganeering that originated with Michael Foot’s The Guilty Men, and more recent tomes like Tim Bouverie’s Appeasement, this discussion of the topic endeavors to examine at length the underlying variables which factored into British policy in the 1930s. Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of Hist

Helen Rozwadowski talks about the history of the oceans and how these oceans have shaped human history in profound ways. Rozwadowski is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, Avery Point. She is the author of many books including Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans (Reaktion Books, 2018). Much of human experience can be distilled to saltwater: tears, sweat, and an enduring connection to the sea. In Vast Expanses, Rozwadowski weaves a cultural, environmental, and geopolitical history of that relationship, a journey of tides and titanic forces reaching around the globe and across geological and evolutionary time. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a

You hear a lot about "empires," but what are they? Do they still exist? And why does it matter? Today I talked to Jeremy Black about empires, historical and present. Jeremy has thought deeply about empires, and written a lot about them. We discussed them from, if not every angle, at least a good number of them. It turns out (as you might expect) that there are empires and there are empires... Listen in. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Standards are crucial to the way we live—just look around you. A no. 2 pencil, perhaps? That arrived in an 8x8.5x20 shipping container? Standards allow your computer and smart phone to connect seamlessly with others. While it is clear that standards shape the material world we live in, someone decided that they should be that way. In a word, standards have a social life of their own. In Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy look at the pervasive practice of private, voluntary standard setting as it grew out of a social movement of engineers. From the International Organization for Standards (ISO) to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Yates and Murphy provide an engaging narrative about the people and processes responsible for making the technologies we have today work with one another. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how peopl

Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks, and instruments to teach the new mathematical techniques to sailors. As these experts debated the value of theory and practice, memory and mathematics, they created hybrid models that would have a lasting impact on applied science. In Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), a richly illustrated comparative study of this transformative period, Margaret E. Schotte charts more than two hundred years of navigational history as she investigates how mariners solved the challenges of navigating beyond sight of land. She begins by outlining the influential sixteenth-century Iberian model for training and certifying nautical practitioners. She takes us into a Dutch bookshop stocked with maritime manuals and a French trigonometry lesson devoted to the idea that "navigat

Why don’t governments do more to prevent genocide? What role does the public have in compelling their governments to take an active stand in the face of genocide? In Reluctant Interveners: America's Failed Responses to Genocide from Bosnia to Darfur (Rutgers University Press, 2019), Eyal Mayroz approaches these questions and more through an interdisciplinary lens that includes history, political science, rhetorical studies, and media studies. In doing so, Mayroz focuses on the United States and the complex relationships between political elites, including those who reside in the executive office; political and media communication, including the flow of information upward and downward; and the citizenry, including public opinion, political engagement, and political action. In Reluctant Interveners, Mayroz offers a critical, but not pessimistic account of the relationship between the U.S. government and its citizens when it comes to genocide recognition and prevention. Importantly, Mayroz’s research illustrates

There is perhaps no more iconic symbol of the Cold War than the Berlin Wall, the 96-mile-long barrier erected around West Berlin in 1961 to stem the flow of refugees from Eastern Europe. In Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth (Scribner, 2019), Iain MacGregor draws upon interviews with a wide range of people to recount the history of the wall and how it affected the lives of the people on either side of it. Through their firsthand experiences he recounts the tension-filled hours when East German workers began constructing the first elements of what became an elaborate series of obstacles that restricted access to the two sides of the partitioned city. As Berliners gradually adapted to the presence of the wall, thousands of people on the eastern side risked their lives in their search for ways around, above, and below the barriers to gain their freedom in the West. As MacGregor explains, underlying much of this was the assumption by nearly all sides of the pe

As Dr. Sara Lorenzini points out in her new book Global Development: A Cold War History (Princeton UP, 2019), the idea of economic development was a relatively novel one even as late as the 1940s. Much of the language of development was still being invented or refined by experts and policymakers. And yet, within a few decades, the idea of foreign aid for development had become a critical soft power tool for the United States, the Soviet Union, and the European powers during the Cold War. Newly independent states, meanwhile, articulated a need for development aid to help them overcome the impoverishing legacy of colonialism. Dr. Lorenzini’s book charts the development of this idea beginning in the early middle of the twentieth century until the late 1980s, when the end of the Cold War took some of the impetus away from demands for development aid. In addition to showing how the superpowers and Europeans participated in development schemes, she pays close attention to the role of multinational organizations in

Following World War II, in the midst of global decolonization and intensifying freedom struggles within its borders, the United States developed a worldwide police assistance program that aimed to crush left radicalism and extend its racial imperium. Although policing had long been part of the US colonial project, this new roving cadre of advisors funded, supplied, and trained foreign counterinsurgency forces on an unprecedented scale, developing a global cop-consciousness that spanned from Los Angeles to Saigon. In ​Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing​ (University of California Press, 2019), Stuart Schrader makes the compelling case that the growth of carceral state is just one front of a “discretionary empire” that persists today. Badges Without Borders​ traces the tangled routes of police bureaucrats as they brought their munitions, methods, and money to precincts at home and abroad, and obviates the divide between “foreign” and “domestic” policy. Ultimately,

In Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke UP, 2019), Cara New Daggett suggests that reassessing our relationships with fossil fuels in the face of climate change also requires that we rethink the concept of energy itself. Although a seemingly self-evident and natural scientific object, the idea of energy that informed the development of fossil fueled capitalism is a surprisingly modern invention. In the 19th century, as tinkerers sought to explain mystical steam power, they rehashed this ancient word to conceptualize limitless potential and ceaseless expansion. Daggett demonstrates that not only did this new abstraction explain and empower novel technologies and fields of physics, but also became an ideological fulcrum with which to describe and proscribe the emerging societies of industrial capitalism. The harnessing of energy and maximizing its efficiency became not only the principles of mechanical engineering, but also of workplace organization and worker discipline.

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to

Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871-1885 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), is the first comprehensive account of French revolutionary thought in the years between the crushing of France's last nineteenth-century revolution and the re-emergence of socialism as a meaningful electoral force, offering new interpretations of the French revolutionary tradition. Drawing together material from Europe, North America, and the South Pacific, Julia Nicholls, Lecturer in French and European Studies at King’s College, London, pieces together the nature and content of French revolutionary thought in this often overlooked era. She shows that this was an important and creative period, in which activists drew upon fresh ideas they encountered in exile across the world to rebuild a revolutionary movement that was both united and politically viable in the changed circumstances of France's new Third Republic. The relative success of these efforts, moreover, has significant implications for the ways in which we u

There is little documented mapping of conflict prior to the Renaissance period, but, from the 17th century onward, military commanders and strategists began to document the wars in which they were involved and, later, to use mapping to actually plan the progress of a conflict. Using contemporary maps, Jeremy Black's Maps of War: Mapping Conflict through the Centuries (Conway, 2016) covers the history of the mapping of land wars, and shows the way in which maps provide a guide to the history of war. You might also be interested in Black's Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (Yale University Press, 2000) Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. You can reach him here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices