New Books in World Affairs

Beginning in the mid-1850s, a number of people in Europe and the United States undertook a range of efforts in response to the horrors of war. In his book War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853-1914 (Bloomsbury, 2018) James Crossland describes the emergence of various movements in the second half of the 19th century designed to address the suffering caused by military conflict. Though such suffering has been a part of warfare since time immemorial, as Crossland explains the emergence of the popular press in the early 19th century brought awareness of the battlefield experience to a greater part of the population. In response, several motivated volunteers embarked upon a variety of activities to address the effects of war, from providing better treatment for wounded soldiers to spearheading efforts to establish mutually-agreed-upon limits on the conduct of warfare. Within a decade, organizations such as the United States Sanitary Commission and the Red Cross emerged to coordinate and regularize these efforts, often with official support from warring governments. Yet these attempts to moderate misery were opposed by another product of the reaction to the warfare of the era – the peacemakers who wanted to end war altogether and who viewed the efforts to regulate it as an enabling of inter-state conflict. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

It was the passionate amateur painter, Winston Churchill, who introduced one of the Cold War’s key metaphors: The Iron Curtain. As John J. Curley argues in Global Art and the Cold War (Laurence King Publishers, 2019), this provocative image defined the binary logic of the Cold War and speaks to the larger importance of visuals in both the deployment of contemporary propaganda and in political resistance. A meticulously-researched and accessible monograph, Global Art and the Cold War demonstrates the crucial role of art in the greatest geopolitical conflict of the 20th century. Presenting a nuanced investigation of how the Cold War shaped major art movements including Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Conceptualism in the West and Socialism realism in the Eastern Bloc, Curley also challenging the traditional history of American Abstract painting in opposition to Soviet Socialist Realism by integrating other regions including Asia, Africa, and Latin America in to the study. Art from the “Cold War peripheries”, writes Curley in his introduction, reveals that the dominant narrative of modernism was a Western construction, simultaneously expressing transnational modernity and nationalism to counter American and Soviet imperialism. Positioning all 20th century art as engaged in an inevitable conflict between two opposed models for modernity, Curley makes a compelling case for broadening the narrative of artistic creation in the period of the Cold War and its aftermath.John J. Curley is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Wake Forest University, where he teaches classes on modern and contemporary art history, as well as photographic history.Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Her work focuses on religion and sexuality in Russian cultural history, and she is currently working on a monograph about Russian religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov. Diana tweets about contemporary events in the Russian religious landscape at https://twitter.com/RussRLGNWatch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter, is well-known as one of the most prolific of publishing historians. His latest book, War and its Causes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), returns to a subject upon which he has already published several ground-breaking contributions. With an argument that reflects recent work in the field, and a breadth of reference that stretches from the beginnings of human culture to the present day, War and its Causes argues for an important new typology of conflict between and within civilisations, cultures and states, and, while addressing the limitations of commentary and analysis, observes patterns across history that make sense of recent conflicts – and those that may be about to begin.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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

It’s easy to take for granted that one can pick up a cell phone and call someone on the other side of the planet. But, until very recently, this had been a mere dream. Martin Collins’ A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) explores how Motorola tried—and eventually failed—to turn this dream into a reality. Collins, curator of the civilian applications satellite collection at the Smithsonian Institution, tells a remarkable story, one that is deeply relevant to our interconnected present.Using Motorola as a case study, A Telephone for the World tracks how U.S. businesses navigated the end of the twentieth century, a moment marked by the rise of neoliberalism, the economic challenge of Japan, and the end of the Cold War. Most significantly, the book shows how businesspeople at Motorola responded to global conditions, sought to create a global firm, and even constructed “the global as a way of life.” The book is therefore a deep dive into the mechanics of globalization, as seen from the inside of a global company. A Telephone for the World will interest historians of technology, communications scholars, business historians, and anyone who wants to know more about globalization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Daniel Ziblatt has done a lot of interviews since the release of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018) the bestselling book he co-wrote with Steven Levitsky. But we asked him a question he’d never gotten before — about a line toward the end of the book when he refers to democracy as “grinding work.”The idea that democracy isn’t easy is a central theme of this podcast. As How Democracies Die illustrates, it’s much easier to succumb to the power of an autocratic leader than it is to stand up and protect the institutions that serve as the guardrails of democracy. Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard, talks about how the book came about and the impact it’s had since it was released earlier this year.Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Today I spoke with Francesco Grillo (co-authored with Raffaella Nanetti) about his latest book, Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Despite the title, it is not strictly a book on China or Italy. It is a visionary contribution to both economics and political theory that reflects on the crisis of the West and the paradoxical success of China.Is democracy still the best political regime for countries to adapt to economic and technological pressures and increase their level of prosperity? While the West seems to have stagnated in an environment of political mistrust, increasing inequality and low growth, the rise of the East has shown that it may not be liberal democracy that is best at accommodating the social mutations that technologies have triggered.The cases of China and Italy form the research focus as two extremes in growth performance. China is the star of globalisation in the East, while Italy is the laggard of globalisation in the West and a laboratory of creeping political meltdown now shared by other major Western economies. But is this forever? Introducing the ‘innovation paradox’ as the main challenge to the West and the notion of ‘knowledge democracy’ as key to sustainable growth, this book presents a new side to the debate on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or fifth as the authors argue). It is a vital reading for all those questioning what kind of democracy positively impacts innovation as the force whose speed and direction transforms societies and economies.Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, if not indeed on the entire planet, explores the forty-one years from the beginning of the Great War in August 1914 to the surrender of Japan in August 1945. This book provides the reader with an innovative global military history that joins three periods—World War I, the interwar years, and World War II. Professor Black, offers a comprehensive survey of both wars, comparing continuities and differences. He traces the causes of each war and assesses land, sea, and air warfare as separate dimension in each period. A must read for anyone interested in this time period of military and indeed global history.Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In 1545, a native Andean prospector hit pay dirt on a desolate red mountain in highland Bolivia. There followed the world's greatest silver bonanza, making the Cerro Rico or "Rich Hill" and the Imperial Villa of Potosí instant legends, famous from Istanbul to Beijing. The Cerro Rico alone provided over half of the world's silver for a century, and even in decline, it remained the single richest source on earth. Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World(University of California Press, 2019), is the first interpretive history of the fabled mining city’s rise and fall. It tells the story of global economic transformation and the environmental and social impact of rampant colonial exploitation from Potosí’s startling emergence in the 16th century to its collapse in the 19th. Kris Lane, France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University, provides an invigorating narrative and rare details of this thriving city as well as its promise of prosperity. A new world of native workers, market women, African slaves, and other ordinary residents who lived alongside the elite merchants, refinery owners, wealthy widows, and crown officials, emerge in lively, riveting stories from the original sources. An engrossing depiction of excess and devastation, Potosí reveals the relentless human tradition in boom times and bust.Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

What do management consultants do, and how do they do it? These two deceptively simple questions are at the centre of Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China (Duke University Press, 2018), the new book by Kimberly Chong, a lecturer in anthropology at University College London. The book uses an in depth and immersive ethnography of a global management consulting firm to explore the rise of management consultancy in China, engaging with key issues- financialization and commensuration- that are at the heart of understanding contemporary global capitalism. The book is rich with fascinating, and at times hilarious, examples of the contradictions and ambivalences, along with successes, of management consulting systems adapted to and applied in China. It will be essential reading across the social sciences and area studies, as well as for anyone interested in our globalised economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

When we think of the history of the British empire we tend to think big: oceans were crossed; colonies grew from small settlements to territories many times larger than England; entire Continents, each with substantial indigenous populations, were brought under British rule. Maps were an important part of rule in America, but from the point of view of the Board of Trade, the lack of ‘exact Surveys’ meant that a new approach to mapping Britain’s American dominions was needed.Max Edelson is a Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and in The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Harvard University Press, 2017) he shows how the Crown and the Board of Trade initiated the mapping of every new corner of Britain’s American dominions – places that were also the ancestral homes of Native Americans and the site of emerging settler republics. The book has an accompanying website, includes a bibliography of 257 maps, which is only a selection of what was produced. Yet virtually every acre of ground shown in these maps was contested by colonists, settlers, indigenous people, land speculators, and servants of the Crown. Britain claimed vast territory which it could not effectively rule.Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs