New Books in World Affairs

If Sino-Russian relations today sometimes seem bluntly pragmatic, things were not always so, and as imperial dynasties in both countries crumbled one hundred years ago many interactions between these two Eurasian land empires had a decidedly romantic hue. As Elizabeth McGuire relates in the rich, persuasive and utterly engrossing Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2017), more than one generation of young Chinese people was swept up by the romance of the new socialist order taking shape after Russia’s October Revolution. The personal encounters this political event brought about, and the Chinese revolutionaries’ experiences as translators of languages and revolutions, and as lovers of Russian culture, politics and people, had profound consequences which endure to this day. Drawing on memoirs and archives in Chinese, Russian and European languages, and an effortless marshaling of the deeper social histories from which these emerged, McGuire offers riveting accounts of Sino-Russian and Sino-Soviet infatuations, affairs, marriages and heartbreaks – on both personal and political levels. Spell-binding in themselves, these tales of the lives and relationships of Red at Heart’s protagonists offer us an enchanting new lens through which to understand the twentieth-century histories of Russia and China – as well as Taiwan – and their mutual entanglements. This is a book where themes of gender and love, education, literature and popular culture, and indeed ideology and geopolitics are all bound up together, combining to offer us a deeply humanistic account of how political cataclysms may be very personal affairs, and vice versa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Thomas Schmidinger, a scholar specializing in Syrian Kurdistan, shares his extensive insights on the region's history and politics. He discusses the intricate dynamics among Kurdish political factions and their relations with the Syrian government and neighboring states. Schmidinger reflects on his fieldwork experiences in Rojava, emphasizing resilience amidst conflict, particularly in areas like Afrin and Kobani. He also highlights the challenges of multicultural governance and the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis, offering a deeply nuanced perspective on the struggles faced by the Kurdish community.

Paul Bjerk’s compact biography Julius Nyerere, published as part of the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series follows closely on the heels of his monograph on the same subject – Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960-1964 – published in 2015 by the University of Rochester Press, about which Bjerk was interviewed on the New Books in African Studies podcast. Similar to the monograph, in this short work, Bjerk foregrounds Nyere’s political biography – the founding of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU); his leadership of an independent Tanzania; and his eventual consecration as an icon of postcolonial Africa. Additionally however, considerable time is spent on Nyerere’s personal arc from intellectually gifted rural youth, to principled if flawed leader of an independent nation, to, having foregone many of the trappings of political office, elder statesman living the end of his life much as he began it. The podcast conversation delves deeply into these intersections of the personal and political and provides a way into this eminently readable sketch of Nyerere’s life. Mireille Djenno is the African Studies Librarian at Indiana University. She can be reached at mdjenno@indiana.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

How can human rights campaigns function in consumer and celebrity society? In The Mass Appeal of Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Joel Pruce, assistant professor in political science at the University of Dayton, explores this question through the framework of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory. Rich with examples and detailed histories of the evolution of both human rights campaigns and celebrity and consumerist practices, the book challenges us to rethink contemporary political movements. Including critical discussions of Amnesty International, Save Darfur, Paris Hilton, Pussy Riot, and Live8, the book is essential reading for anyone concerned with how to change the world for the better, rather than just for the benefit of celebrity and consumer capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The 1973 oil crisis was an event of world-historic proportions, but the stories we tell about it often center the Global North. For instance, the first images that probably come to mind are of the long gas-station queues of Americans in their cars waiting to fill up at the height of the oil shortage. Christopher Dietrich, in his new book, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) approaches the oil crisis with a different perspective. Instead of focusing on the American consumer’s struggles or the State Department’s outlook, Dietrich foregrounds oil elites from the Global South. Dietrich documents how these elites overcame political and ideological differences to form OPEC, and how they sought to transform the global economy. By exploring, what he calls, “the economic culture of decolonization,” Dietrich shows how the material conditions and shared interests of oil elites facilitated their successful drive to organize and to raise oil prices. It is not an entirely happy story, however, as Dietrich traces the line from “sovereign rights” to the sovereign debt crisis of the 1980s. The book is an impressive feat of scholarship and should reach a wide audience, including scholars of the Global South, resource politics, global governance, intellectual history, and U.S. foreign relations. 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

Today I talked with Brian Stanley, professor of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, about his new book, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (Princeton University Press, 2018). Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, and representing the expansion, assimilation and contraction of Christian religion in a global context, Stanley’s book offers a compelling account of how the Bible became a global book, and of how expectations for the global conquest of Christian missions in the 1910s gave way before the impact of World War One, the end of empire, secularisation, migration, religious pluralism, political change, persecution and genocide, and the constant proliferation of new religious movements. Christianity in the Twentieth Century is at its heart a story of survival – and of constant change. 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

Of all of the departments of the U.S. government you might expect to be implicated in the exercise of imperialism, the Department of the Interior might not be the first one that you would think of. Of course, Interior played a vital role in American empire, as a vehicle of American territorial expansion and settler colonialism, and later in overseeing overseas territories. Megan Black’s The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Harvard University Press, 2018) looks at the role of Interior in shepherding American empire, namely through the acquisition of mineral resources in overseas territories, and later, globally. In doing so, her book reveals another dimension of American empire. Black begins with the “closing” of the frontier and the Department of the Interior’s shift from managing biological resources over to mineral resources. The acquisition of territory in Alaska, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and several other Pacific holdings saw Interior work to develop mining operations, as well as articulating the concept of strategically vital minerals. As the United States began to grow closer to war in the late 1930s, this concern over vital minerals extended to other regions, particularly Latin America, as U.S. planners feared that their own stocks could be exhausted; they also argued that capital investment would develop infrastructure in these countries and help them develop. This fed neatly into the Cold War, which saw the U.S. extend its ambitions globally. Subsequent chapters analyze the role of Interior in developing the Continental Shelf and take a role in space, particularly through the Landsat satellite. Black concludes the book by discussing pushback from Native American tribes on mineral and energy rights, and the weakening of Interior under the Reagan Administration. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. 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 that China’s twenty-first-century ‘rise’ is a much-discussed notion both within the country and globally, it is an increasingly difficult concept to grasp or keep pace with. As a result, books which dissect and analyse developments from a regional perspective are of great value, particularly when they focus on widely-overlooked regions as James M. Dorsey‘s China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) does. Exploring China’s growing and increasingly complex political, economic and security entanglements in the ‘Greater Middle East’ (a region whose extent and diversity is discussed in this podcast), Dorsey argues that this “key global crossroads” (p. 1) is already becoming an arena where Beijing is being forced to reappraise its international strategy and abandon long-cherished principles including ‘non-interference’. In a time of profound transition documented by Dorsey himself, such developments are likely to have implications of not just regional, but global significance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The links between African Americans and the global struggle for decolonization, particularly in Africa are well-documented. Facing similar kinds of repression that were rooted in systemic racism and the denial of political rights, Pan-Africanism became one expression of a transnational fight for equality. The first Pan-African Conference was held in 1900 in London, and in the wake of World War II, the joint struggles for civil rights in the United States and political independence from European powers heated up. Nicholas Grant’s Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) builds on the earlier work of scholars by focusing in closely on the connections between U.S. activists and black South Africans facing dual repression from anticommunism and racist regimes. Grant begins by describing the factors that drove the U.S. government and South African governments together. Increasing financial investment in South Africa by American businessmen created economic linkages and anticommunism pushed the two governments into a Cold War alliance, with the South African government even trying to improve its anticommunist laws by consulting with American lawyers. From there, Grant goes on to describe various ways that African Americans and black South Africans were in conversation with one another. One chapter focuses on the effects of travel, while another focuses on print and musical culture. Grant examines the effect of anticommunist repression on the international black left as well as incarceration and the depictions of imprisonment before concluding with links between African American women and black South African women. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The reason for Great Britain’s war against China in the First Opium War (1839-42) is often taken as a given. British merchants wanted to “open” trade beyond the port of Canton (Guangzhou) and continue dealing in the lucrative commodity, opium. Historian Stephen R. Platt’s book, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (Knopf, 2018) proves that the path to war was not so simple. Internal rebellions weakened the Qing military and stretched resources thin. British themselves debated the merits of the Canton system that restricted all Western foreigners and their trade in China to a single port. Some Qing officials considered opium a wholly domestic issue while others considered how best to resolve opium smuggling–by legalizing opium or ejecting foreigners from Canton. Platt traces the narratives of figures who played significant roles in the mounting conflict and identifies lynchpin moments when the history of China and the West could have turned out much differently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs