New Books In World Affairs

Today I was joined by Seamus Grimes from Ireland where he is Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. With Yutao Sun (Dalian University of Technology), he just published a very interesting and timely book China and Global Value Chains: Globalization and the Information and Communications Technology Sector (Routledge, 2018). President Trump has raised the intriguing question of bringing the manufacturing of companies like Apple back from China to the U.S. This book, however, argues that in this age of the knowledge-based economy and increased globalization, that value creation and distribution based on knowledge and innovation activities are at the core of economic development. The double-edged sword of globalization has transformed China’s economic development in the past few decades. Although China has benefitted from globalization and is now the second largest economy in the world, having become a global manufacturing power and the biggest exporter of high-tech products, it continu

The title of Lisa A. Lindsay’s book Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa (University of North Carolina Press, 2017),  invokes enduring family ties, as well as the connections between slavery, migration, and colonization in the Atlantic world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book returns, again and again, to the theme of vulnerability as a consequence of the fragile freedoms of African Americans and Africans of the period, and charts the unusual story of two families – one African American and the other Nigerian – connected by a common ancestor, who have managed against significant odds, to keep in touch over many generations. The life story of one of the sons of Scipio Vaughan (the common ancestor), Churchwill Vaughan, forms the arc of Atlantic Bonds and traces, among other things, a “reverse migration” from South Carolina to West Africa. In the interview, Lisa Lindsay, discusses the ways in which this family was both typical and exceptional. Mireille Djenno i

In Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy (Crown Forum, 2018), conservative Jonah Goldberg argues that America’s foundation of democracy and capitalism is a “Miracle” which has saved us from chronic violence and crushing poverty, but now is threatened by rising populist forces on the left and the right. Goldberg contends that human nature is inherently tribal, and democracy and capitalism are unnatural. Therefore, maintaining those institutions requires effort. Goldberg’s narrative begins more than 10,000 years ago, before the agricultural revolution, and traces how Enlightenment principles were formed and eventually embraced by America’s founders. From there he argues that American ideals, including capitalism, defeated slavery and sparked an industrial revolution that alleviated poverty. He heavily criticizes early twentieth-century progressivism as antithetical to America’s founding principles, and sees twenty-first c

Modeled on Bad Girls of Japan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press, 2017), edited by Nadia Yaqub and the late Rula Quawas stands apart from the edited volume crowd. It includes, not only academic entries, but personal essays and reflections on art by their artists, all centered on the theme of transgression, or to put it in the language of Bad Girls of the Arab World itself, bad girls. And there is no one bad girl. Some bad girls of the Arab world use their linguistic and cultural heritage to empower them, some rail against them. Some ally themselves with the West, some don’t think about the West and the East as binaries, but rather, apply a complicated, nuanced worldview to their universes. However, all are allotted their agency. Bad Girls of the Arab World will be a resource for students of the Middle East and the general public on gender and the Arab world. Nadia Yaqub is an associate professor at the Department of Asian Studies at the University of North Caro

In Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal role of coal in the Royal Navy, during the short-lived but crucial “age of steam.” Drawing on British government and military records, ships’ logs and mariners memoirs, Gray examines coal from multiple, intersecting perspectives. Beginning with its geopolitical importance, Gray shows that steam powered ships significantly increased the nature and frequency of material supplies needed to maintain a navy at sea. Unlike the relatively self-sufficient sailing ship, steam-powered vessels had an almost insatiable appetite for coal, requiring resupply much more frequently. Further, not just any coal would do: after extensive tests on the quality of coals from across the globe, engineers found that Welsh steam coal was the essential fuel for Britain’s steam-powered navy, and there were precious few suitable alternatives. These facts, then, shaped the construction and ma

Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North (Yale University Press, 2018) is an ambitious attempt to cover, in one volume, the entire history of the relationship between the ‘Global North’—China, Russia, Europe, Britain, and America—and the Muslim world from Southeast Asia to West Africa. With more than a half a century of experience as a historian, policy maker, diplomat, peace negotiator, and businessman, William R. Polk endeavors to explain the deep hostilities between the Muslim world and the Global North and show how they grew over the centuries. Polk demonstrates how Islam, from its origins in the Arabian Peninsula, spread across North Africa into Europe, Central Asia, the Indian sub-continent, and Southeast Asia. But following the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Islamic civilization entered a decline while Europe began its overseas expansion. Defeated at every turn, Muslims tried adopting Western dress, organizing Westerns-style a

What’s not to like about economic growth, you might ask? Well, quite a lot, it turns out, once we begin to examine how GDP and other measures of the economy are constructed, and once we see what they leave out (and perhaps just as troubling, what they leave in). Join us as we speak with David Pilling about his new book, The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations (Tim Duggan Books/Bloomsbury, 2018), which helps us understand the problems with how we typically evaluate national economies and offers some alternative approaches even though each of those options presents their own challenges. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford

Since the 1990s, vast sums of money and time have been invested in training and resources to hold elections around the world, including in parts of Southeast Asia. The conventional wisdom is that elections either enable or consolidate democracy. Where they do not have either of these effects, the reasoning goes, it’s because the design of elections is not yet right, or conditions in which they have been held are not yet sufficiently matured as to make democracy possible. In Behind the Facade: Elections under Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia (SUNY Press, 2016), Lee Morgenbesser departs from these positions and seeks to explain why and how dictators also hold elections. Through close comparative study of Cambodia, Myanmar, and Singapore, Morgenbesser argues that even when held competitively, elections can be pliable instruments for dictators to obtain information, manage subordinates, distribute largesse and claim legitimacy. Lee Morgenbesser joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about the funct

In an expansive, engrossing, voluminously in depth analysis of the subject, Professor A. G. Hopkins, Professor Emeritus of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, one of the foremost historians of the 19th- and 20th-century British Empire, engages in the fraught, but little studied subject of why and how the ‘American Empire’ differs if at all, from its British progenitor. In American Empire: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2018)—a book of enormous sweep, ranging widely from the mid-18th century to the present day—Professor Hopkins introduces the reader into an exploration as to the issues of continuity versus discontinuity in British, Imperial and American history, as well as the intersection of empire with Globalization in its various incarnations historically. This is a book which demolishes the time-worn and artificial separation of American history post-1783 from British and indeed Global History. In short, Professor Hopkins’ study is an extremely important book; every historia

A leading doctor offers answers on the one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we prevent the next global pandemic? The 2014 Ebola epidemic in Liberia terrified the world―and revealed how unprepared we are for the next outbreak of an infectious disease. Somewhere in nature, a killer virus is boiling up in the bloodstream of a bird, bat, monkey, or pig, preparing to jump to a human being. This not-yet-detected germ has the potential to wipe out millions of lives over a matter of weeks or months. That risk makes the threat posed by ISIS, a ground war, a massive climate event, or even the dropping of a nuclear bomb on a major city pale in comparison. In The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It (St. Martin’s Press, 2018), Harvard Medical School faculty member and Chair of the Global Health Council Dr. Jonathan D. Quick examines the eradication of smallpox and devastating effects of influenza, AIDS, SARS, and Ebola. Analyzing local and global efforts to contain these d

Many were wealthy, but others were destitute. Many traveled to Britain to be educated, some returned to Jamaica, others went to India to seek careers and fortunes. They were members of families, with all of the struggle, drama, intimacy and ambition that that entails. In his new book Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (UNC Press, 2018), Dan Livesay tells the stories of Jamaicans of mixed-race backgrounds as embedded in the broader processes that shaped the 18th- and 19th-century Atlantic World, including revolt, revolution, and the changing contours of slavery and the slave trade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Names can be deceiving. Americans call the area where Moscow’s writ runs “Russia.” But the official name of this place is the “Russian Federation.” Federation of what, you ask? Well, there are a lot of people who live in “Russia” who are in important senses not Russians. There are Ingush, Buryats, Chechens, Mordvinians, Tatars, and many others. Russia, then, is a “Federation” of Russians and non-Russians. But even that’s not quite right. As Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny point out in their excellent book Russia’s Empires (Oxford University Press, 2016), Russia is really an empire, and has long been. Since the 16th century, Moscow has gathered, conquered, colonized, assimilated, or otherwise brought to heel a great number of places occupied by people who were not Russians. Russians built this empire for different reasons at different times; it grew and (especially recently) it shrank. But it was always there, and still is. Kivelson and Suny convincingly argue that nothing about Russia—past or present—can re

Richard Candida Smith’s new book Improvised Continent: Pan-American and Cultural Exchange (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), offers a richly detailed cultural history of pan-Americanism and how it was propagated among elites and popular audiences. Elihu Root, a major architect of U.S. international power, and a vision of liberal global governance were the initial drivers for pan-Americanism. Carrying the vision were civic leaders, philanthropists, artists, writers and publishers acting as cultural ambassadors with different political, cultural, and personal agendas often at odds with official policy. In fostering a utopian vision of hemispheric solidarity, both U.S. and Latin American cultural leaders were faced with overcoming preconceived ideas and misconceptions of the other, but World War II and the Cold War increasingly turned a project of mutual cultural exchange into an accelerated U.S. propaganda campaign that resulted in political intervention in Latin America. U.S. domestic policies came unde

In Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shape Political Developments (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the contributors challenge the argument that African states lack effective political institutions as these have been undermined by neo-patrimonialism and clientelism. Scholars such as Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz have argued that Africa’s political culture is inherently different from the West and that African political system is actually working through what they term “instrumentalization of disorder.” While acknowledging some of the contributions that Chabal and Daloz have made to the understanding of Africa institutions, the contributions in this volume challenge this notion that political life in Africa is shaped primarily by social customs and not by formal rules. The contributions examine formal institutions such as the legislature, judiciary, and political parties and they show the impact of these institutions on socio-political and economic developments in the con

In The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs (Cornell University Press, 2017), Sarah S. Stroup and Wendy H. Wong argue that a small set of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have acquired an unusually large amount of authority. These are the leading INGOs that have become household names across the world, such as Amnesty International or Oxfam. Yet, Stroup and Wong make the case for the tenuous nature of this position as leaders: in order to hold on to the position, INGOs avoid radical opinions in favor of more incremental approaches to global social change. Leading INGOs are in many ways trapped. Using detailed case studies and hundreds of interviews, Stroup and Wong show that INGOs must temper their behavior to maintain a delicate equilibrium and preserve their status. (Note: during the interview, the organization Wendy Wong mentions is called Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC.) Stroup is Associate Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College and Wong is Associat

Civil wars are among the most intractable conflicts in the world. Yet exactly distinguishes civil war from other types of armed struggle? In his book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Vintage Books, 2017), David Armitage examines the evolution of the concept over the centuries while explaining the relevance of that debate for today. As Armitage demonstrates, the Romans were the first to define civil wars as we understand them, giving us the name we use today. Their efforts were reflected in the works of authors in early modern Europe, who drew upon the classical tradition in order to comprehend the conflicts of their own day. Precision in defining war became increasingly relevant, both to distinguish civil wars from the newly recognized phenomenon of revolutions and with the emergence of efforts in the nineteenth century to regulate war through treaties and legal codes. This effort continues down to the present day, with the question of whether a conflict is or is not a civil war often determining how the inter

In his new book, Human Rights in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Bonny Ibhawoh examines the discourse of human rights in Africa. He challenges some of the dominant narratives that focus on ruthless violators and benevolent activists. Crafting the longue duree history of human rights in Africa, he argues that these rights were neither invented during the enlightenment period, nor with the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the postwar period. In his analysis, he draws from African rights tradition that was central in the anti-slavery and anti-colonial struggles. He sees these struggles as human rights histories and challenges the idea that these were merely humanitarian acts. He argues that Africans in the continent and abroad during the abolition, emancipation, colonization, and decolonization processes framed and linked their activism to human rights. The discourse of human rights is so important that it should not be relegated to experts. Ibhawoh’s book is written in a scho

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 stayed behind after the 1948 war simultaneously created the state of Israel and created refugees out of thousands of Palestinians. Brothers Apart looks at their position within Israeli society, their intellectual production, and their relationship to the greater Arab world. Nassar also examines the relationship between different ideologies amongst these Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as the issue of Palestinian resistance. She thus tells the story of a people who are caught between different intellectual and political commitments, yet who are also dedicated to fighting for their rights within Israeli society and

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 Trade (Overlook Duckworth Press, 2017) is the story of four Royal Naval officers who witnessed and wrote about the rampant slave trading in this region, while attempting to capture slaving vessels and recover enslaved peoples. The book grew from historian John Broich’s passion to hunt down firsthand accounts of these untold stories. Through research at archives throughout the U.K., Broich tells a tale of defiance in the face of political corruption, while delivering thrills in the tradition of high seas heroism. John Broich is the author of London: Water and the Making of a Modern British City, for which he received

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 Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Daphna Hacker argues that the family is entering an important period of transition and instability in our bordered, global society. Families have been a legalized social category, but now competing legal doctrines and interpretations complicate the existence of this social category given the movement of people in a globalized society. How does secular law and family law impact families in multicultural countries with inhabitants from around the globe? Are pre-nups a good idea or a bad one? How does globalization influence reproduction in the family unit? How are current i