New Books in World Affairs

The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE. In Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian(Harvard University Press, 2018), Angelos Chaniotis, Professor of Ancient History and Classics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, examines how his successors reorganized Persian lands to create a new empire stretching from the eastern Mediterranean as far as present-day Afghanistan, while in Greece and Macedonia a fragile balance of power repeatedly dissolved into war. Then, from the late third century BCE to the end of the first, Rome’s military and diplomatic might successively dismantled these post-Alexandrian political structures, one by one.During the Hellenistic period (c. 323–30 BCE), small polities struggled to retain the illusion of their identity and independence, in the face of violent antagonism among large states. With time, trade growth resumed and centers of intellectual and artistic achievement sprang up across a vast network, from Italy to Afghanistan and Russia to Ethiopia. But the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE brought this Hellenistic moment to a close—or so the story goes. In Angelos Chaniotis’s view, however, the Hellenistic world continued to Hadrian’s death in 138 CE. Not only did Hellenistic social structures survive the coming of Rome, Chaniotis shows, but social, economic, and cultural trends that were set in motion between the deaths of Alexander and Cleopatra intensified during this extended period. Age of Conquests provides a compelling narrative of the main events that shaped ancient civilization during five crucial centuries.Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and 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

At a time when trade between China and the outside world is rarely out of the news, it remains important to remember that in centuries past global commerce moved in directions very different from those which dominate the present. This was especially evident during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Western countries and Japan employed a mix of coercive and collaborative mechanisms to foist their wares and business priorities on China, dominating the country’s trade and customs.Anne Reinhardt’s new book Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) focuses on these very dynamics and specifically the place of steam shipping as ‘a means of interrogating China’s experience of Euro-American and Japanese colonialism’ (p.2). Reinhardt's book reveals how trade in China’s coastal and inland waters, and the very vessels via which this was conducted, were sites where myriad grander processes crystallized in physical space. From the closer quarters of boardrooms, government departments and cabins below deck, Reinhardt also takes us to higher levels of elevation, revealing the place of steam shipping within global developments in trade, transport and technology during this crucial period. As well as being a captivating read, the book's fresh and nuanced presentation of China's ‘semi-colonial’ experience is vital for better understanding a history which to this day informs relations between China and the world at large. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Jonathan Fulton and Li-Chen Sim’s edited volume, External Powers and the Gulf Monarchies(Routledge, 2018) is a timely contribution to understanding the increasingly diversified relations between the Gulf’s six oil-rich monarchies and external powers. Traditionally reliant on the United States for their security, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain have become far more assertive in the wake of the 2011 popular Arab revolts and mounting doubts about the reliability of the United States. The newly found assertiveness of the Gulf states, despite the fact that they remain largely dependent for their security on the United States, have forged closer ties with a host of external powers, including China, Russia, India, Turkey, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. Coupled with shifts in the oil market as the United States emerges as the world’s largest producer and exporter, Asian nations topping the Gulf’s oil clients, and OPEC’s need to coordinate with non-OPEC producers like Russia to manipulate prices and production levels, external powers have seen significant business opportunities in the Gulf states’ effort to wean themselves off oil and diversify their economies. In doing so, they have benefitted from the US defence umbrella in the region at no cost to themselves. This volume breaks ground by looking at the Gulf’s expanding relations from the perspective of the various major external powers rather than that of the Gulf states themselves. In doing so, it makes a significant contribution to an understanding not only of the Gulf but also of the nuts and bolts in the global rebalancing of power the potential emergence of a new world order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Having been born into a world in which people knew about anthropogenic global warming, I grew up in the “global environment.” Although the category “global environment” seems normal, if not natural, Perrin Selcer shows just how recent its origins actually are. In his innovative new book, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth(Columbia University Press, 2018), Selcer investigates how cosmopolitan scientists in the post-WWII era attempted and failed to build a social-democratic world community, but, in the process, constructed the category of the “global environment.” Also in that process, they cobbled together a transnational community of experts and a global knowledge infrastructure in specialized UN bodies, such as Unesco and the Food and Agriculture Organization, that helped make the global environment knowable. The book will interest a broad range of scholars, including historians of global institutions, environmental studies scholars, historians of science, and anyone that wants to historicize the categories that are closest to us.Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th-century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Donald Trump in the United States, Brexit vote in the U.K., various anti-EU parties in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, as well as nativist or authoritarian leaders in Turkey, Russia, India, and China—Why has nationalism suddenly returned with a vengeance to the political front stage?  Are we headed back to the type of conflicts between nations that led to two world wars and a Great Depression in the early to mid-20th Century? What are nationalists so angry about concerning free trade and immigration? Why has globalization suddenly become a dirty word for many people? In his new book, The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization (Columbia Global Reports, 2018), author, Talking-Points Memo editor-at-large, and commentator John B. Judis, explores in his usual expert fashion these intricate and complex issues.Based on his own travels in America, Europe, and Asia, Judis found that almost all people hold some degree of nationalist sentiments. That per contra to the usual liberal, bien-pensant nostrums, in fact nationalism can be the basis of vibrant democracies as well as repressive dictatorships. Today’s outbreak of "us vs. them" nationalism is a plausible reaction to the utopian cosmopolitanism, which advocates open borders, free trade, rampant outsourcing, and has branded unfairly nationalist sentiments as bigotry. As he did for populism in The Populist Explosion, Judis looks at nationalism from its modern origins in the 18th and 19th centuries to the present to help try to find answers to these very important questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Kate Fullagar's and Michael A. McDonnell's edited volume Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) reimagines the Age of Revolution from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Rather than treating indigenous peoples as distant and passive players in the political struggles of the time, this book argues that they helped create and exploit the volatility that marked an era while playing a central role in the profound acceleration in encounters and contacts between peoples around the world. Focusing in particular on indigenous peoples’ experiences of the British Empire, this volume takes a unique comparative approach in thinking about how indigenous peoples shaped, influenced, redirected, ignored, and sometimes even forced the course of modern imperialism. The essays demonstrate how indigenous-shaped local exchanges, cultural relations, and warfare provoked discussion and policymaking in London as much as it did in Charleston, Cape Town, or Sydney. Facing Empire charts a fresh way forward for historians of empire, indigenous studies, and the Age of Revolution and shows why scholars can no longer continue to exclude indigenous peoples from histories of the modern world. These past conflicts over land and water, labor and resources, and hearts and minds have left a living legacy of contested relations that continue to resonate in contemporary politics and societies today. Covering the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Australia, and West and South Africa, as well as North America, this book looks at the often misrepresented and underrepresented complexity of the indigenous experience on a global scale.Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and 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

Harkening back to the tribunal on Vietnam once convened by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) emerged in 2003 from the global antiwar movement that had mobilized against the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by a US-led coalition.  This decentralized, transnational network of antiwar activists attempted to document and give grounds for the prosecution of war crimes committed by the allied forces.  Ayça Çubukçu's For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) is a remarkable investigation of the WTI, combining extensive ethnographic fieldwork with close readings of political and legal theory. Çubukçu provides on the ground accounts of the debates and discussions within the WTI, reading them with and as examples of political philosophy in action.  The book engages with urgent questions about the challenges and potentials of horizontal, network forms of political action, transnational politics across differences, and perhaps most fundamentally, with the challenges any anti-imperialist politics faces today.  Through her careful, incisive analysis, Çubukçu convincingly shows that the language of law and global human rights was not merely cynically appropriated by those who pushed for the war on Iraq.  Instead, in complex ways, the ideals of international law and human rights underwrote both the arguments for the war in Iraq and the anti-war praxis of the WTI.  The book thus complicates any attempt to, as the author puts it, simply counterpose “law’s empire” with “empire’s law”, raising critical questions about the relationship between law, human rights, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism.  Required reading for those interested in the contradictions of imperialism and anti-imperialism today, Çubukçu's study attests to the promise and peril captured in the phrase “the love of humanity”.Kamran Moshref is a PhD candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY.  He is a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

On the background of widespread portrayals of China as a monolithic geographical and political entity moving through time, insights into the endlessly contingent, local and contested events which have occurred in this part of East Asia over time are always valuable. This arguably applies all the more the further back in history we look, and so Jinping Wang's In the Wake of the Mongols: The Making of a New Social Order in North China, 1200-1600 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) offers a welcome trove of detail concerning an especially crucial period.Beginning at the conjuncture of two 'foreign' Chinese dynasties – the Jurchen-Jin and Mongol-Yuan – Wang carries us all the way forward into the Ming era, discussing throughout the complex ways in which local people responded to the Mongol invasion of northern China from the 13th century. Radical transformations in local lives emerge through Wang's focus on Shanxi province and a host of evocative characters from wandering nuns to dispossessed literati, canal managers and warlords’ wives. Based on not-previously-studied stele inscriptions and on-the-ground fieldwork, the book charts political, social and religious changes some of which, the author shows, had a long afterlife. It is these sorts of historical continuities which, whilst perhaps not permitting us to talk about ‘China’ in an entirely uncritical and broad-brushed way, certainly make studying the country’s long history a compelling and important pursuit in the present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The story of Bretton Woods has been told by countless historians. We have a good sense of the wartime context, the negotiations themselves, the roles of many of the main actors (especially Great Britain and the United States), and the conference’s meaning for postwar global history. What can another book possibly tell us? Lots, actually.In his new book Forgotten Foundations: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Cornell University Press, 2018), Eric Helleiner, a political economist at Waterloo University, retells this history with fresh, more globally-searching eyes in his book Forgotten Foundations: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Era. He examines the conference’s prehistory, which he locates in the United States’ Good Neighbor Policy towards Latin America in the 1930s. He follows representatives from the Global South in and around the conference, showing how they shaped the negotiations and the final agreements. And, finally, he reveals that the conference participants were very interested in the concept of development, a concept that many historians periodize a few years later.The award-winning book should interest economic historians, historians of finance, global historians, historians of U.S. foreign policy, and anyone wanting a fuller, more inclusive account of how global governance works.Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

For all of the books written about Winston Churchill, much remains to be said about his extensive life and career. In Churchill: Walking With Destiny(Viking, 2018), Andrew Roberts takes advantage of newly available archival holdings – most notably the diaries of King George VI – to add to our understanding of this vitally important figure. Churchill’s life was never short of drama; born in Blenheim Palace, he spent his early years as a correspondent and a soldier in Britain’s imperial wars before embarking on his long political career. Initially a Conservative like his father, he rose rapidly after joining the Liberal Party, though he switched back after the First World War. His period in the political wilderness in the 1930s was the result of his stands on India and the threat posed by Nazi Germany, with his return to office coming only with Great Britain’s entry into the Second World War. As Roberts explains, his successful wartime leadership came in the face of numerous domestic and international challenges, from colleagues plotting his downfall to the eclipse of British power with the rise of the American and Soviet superpowers, all of which had to be addressed for Britain to triumph in the end. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs