New Books in World Affairs

“We live in the age of globalization, with the interconnection of markets, technology, and cultures making the world a smaller place.” Sure.Tell that to the guys on my local sports radio show. For them, the world is bounded by the Big Ten and the North Division of the National Football Conference, the groupings to which our state’s college and pro football teams belong. Other teams? Other games? Conferences in other parts of the country? Those barely rate a mention.And different sports, in other parts of the world? They don’t even exist. Tune to your local sports radio station or open the sports page and you’ll find the same, whether you’re in America or Europe: the average fan remains intensely regional–maybe even tribal–in his sports interests. But as Andrei Markovits argues, globalization is creeping into sports. At the University of Michigan, where Andy is an Arthur Thurnau Professor and Karl Deutsch Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies, European students follow their countrymen in the NBA, Korean students talk Major League Baseball, and white Americans, dressed in Barcelona and AS Roma shirts, debate whether Arsene Wenger should be fired. The world of sports is getting smaller. However, just as economic globalization has met resistance, so does the interweaving of sports cultures spur opposition. In Europe, ordinary football fans protest the takeover of their clubs by American owners, while my local sports radio guys scoff at the suggestion that soccer could ever rival baseball and real football. In his co-authored book Gaming the World: How Sports Are Shaping Global Politics and Culture (Princeton University Press, 2010) Andy looks the diffusion of sports cultures across the Atlantic, in both directions, and this hostility of fans to the changes brought by sports globalization. He takes the creative approach of viewing particular sports as languages. A native speaker of Hungarian, who was raised in Romania, schooled in Austria, and then came to the US, Andy is adept in several languages. Likewise, he is a speaker of many sports languages. But he acknowledges that sports polyglots are just as rare as the linguistic variety.Since learning even a few phrases of someone else’s language can be potentially embarrassing, we stick to the safety of our native tongue. It is the same in sports. This is a wide-ranging and lively interview about contemporary sports in America and Europe, with someone who is both a scholar and a true fan. How are sports fans similar to nerds? Why were the crowds at last summer’s Women’s World Cup so polite? How is it that being a fan ruins our appreciation of the actual games? And why does the ultimate success of soccer in the US require the conversion of average fans–in other words, fans like my local sports radio guys? We cover it all in an interview that will be ideal listening for your Thanksgiving travels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

There are beautiful sports photos, and dramatic sports photos. There are sports photos that are funny, and others that are poignant. There are photos that capture athletic brilliance, and tenacity, and passion. But there are few images from the modern history of sports that have transcended the games, photos that have inspired and provoked those with little interest in athletics. Perhaps the only image to have had such a far-reaching effect is that of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medal stand at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. But some would object–and many did in 1968–that what Smith and Carlos did on the medal stand after the 200-meter finals was not a sports moment. It was a political moment, a protest, and therefore it was outside the boundary of athletics. Smith and Carlos had violated a fundamental principle of sport by mixing it with politics. But those who made that criticism in 1968 likely did not denounce George Foreman ten days later, when he waved the American flag in the ring after winning the boxing gold medal. Likewise, fans who objected to NBA player Steve Nash’s criticism of Arizona’s law on illegal immigrants likely did not oppose the prominent military presence in NFL commemorations of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or the contributions that sports owners make to political parties and candidates. As sports journalist Dave Zirin notes in our interview, politics are always present in sports. People get upset, though, when their sports are mixed with somebody else’s politics. And in 1968–and the years that followed–people were furious with the politics of Smith and Carlos. Dave Zirin has written a number of books on sports in U.S. history and contemporary society, and he comments regularly on sports and politics for The Nation and the weekly Sirius XM program, Edge of Sports Radio. As co-author of The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World (Haymarket Books, 2011), he helps tell the story of an extraordinary athlete and activist. In the interview, we talk of Carlos’ youth in Harlem, the events that led him and teammate Tommie Smith to make their shocking protest, and the burdens that Carlos endured after 1968. And we talk about the hard work of telling another man’s life, of trying to convey not only his experiences but also his motivations, his commitments, and the way he understands the legacy of one transcendent act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

It takes a brave historian to take on the orthodoxy regarding the rise and fall of lynching in the United States. That orthodoxy holds that lynching in the South was a ‘system of social control’ in which whites used organized terror to oppress blacks. You can find this thesis in numerous monographs, textbooks, and in the popular press. It’s one of those things “everybody knows.” But according to Robert Thurston’s provocative new book Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective (Ashgate, 2011) the standard ‘social control’ line is inadequate. It cannot explain when lynching started or when it ended; why lynching occurred in some places often and others never; and why the period in question witnessed a considerable amount of intra-racial lynching. The ‘social control’ thesis fails because it tries to put a square peg (the evidence) in a round hole (the concept of systematic oppression through terror). Thurston shows that lynching, though hardly accidental, was simply too occasional and too random to be called ‘systemic.’ He argues that lynching was–and remains where we find it today–a collective response to political instability, especially instability caused by a lack of legitimate and effective authority. When people don’t trust the sheriff or there is no sheriff, they are going to take matters into their own hands. This sort of ‘rough justice’ is wildly imperfect: the mob often gets the wrong man. And it is not only about justice: the mob often cynically takes the chaos provided by ‘rough justice’ to settle old scores, some of which may be racist (Post-Reconstruction America) or classist (Revolutionary Russia) or both. But there is no ‘system’ here, except in the sense of a widespread pattern of collective action triggered by a reasonably common political situation, namely the lack of legitimate, effective authority. Thurston’s emphasis on authority (or the lack of it) in explaining lynching enables him to present a new thesis as to why lynching abated considerably in the U.S. after 1892. The primary reason, he says, is that Whites succeed in creating a true system of social control, namely, Jim Crow. What was chaotic and unstable became structured and steady, though in a manner that to us (rightly) seems manifestly unjust. Thurston also points to other factors that contributed to the decline of lynching, for example the rising status of blacks in the South and changing international attitudes about race. These factors–Jim Crow, black advancement, anti-racism–did not destroy a ‘system of social control.’ They simply made ‘rough justice’ impracticable for and  unacceptable to most white and black citizens. This is an important book and should be widely read and discussed. I hope that Ashgate will bring out a paperback edition, or that the author will be persuaded to write and publish a shorter, popularly-oriented version. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

One of the most disturbing insights made by practitioners of “Big History” is that the distinction between geologic time and human time has collapsed in our era. The forces that drove geologic time–plate tectonics, the orientation of the Earth’s axis relative to the sun, volcanic activity–were distinct from the forces that drove human time–evolution, technological change, population growth. To be sure, they interacted. But the causal arrow always went from geologic change to human change. As Anthony Penna rightly points out in The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), the causal arrow now goes in both directions. Not only do we adapt to the environment, but the environment is adapting to us, and mightily. We are ushering in a new geological period sometimes called the Anthropocene–the era defined by human activity. It’s important to point out that this is not the first time biology has shaped geology: we have good evidence, for example, that 2.4 billion years ago cyanobacteria radically altered the Earth’s atmosphere by releasing enormous quantities of free oxygen (“The Great Oxygenization Event“). This time, however, it’s different. Cyanobacteria are essentially dumb machines. They could not choose whether they would oxygenate the atmosphere or not. In contrast, we are smart machines. We can choose how we want to alter the environment. Penna tells the story of how we have been altering the environment–and choosing to alter the environment–for the past 50,000 years, and with particular vigor in the past several hundred. We are now masters not only of our own fate, but the fate of the Earth and all life on it. We need to wake up to that fact, and we should thank Anthony Penna for helping to stir us from our slumbers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

One of the standard assumptions of modern Western social science (history included) is that material conditions drive historical development. All of the “Great Transitions” in world history–the origins of agriculture, the birth of cities, the rise of high culture, the industrial revolution–can, so most Western social scientists claim, be associated with some condition that compelled otherwise conservative humans to act in new ways. This premise is of course most closely linked to Marx, but it is found throughout post-Marxist big picture scholarship (including my own humble contribution to that literature). Ricardo Duchesne argues in his new The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Brill, 2011) that we have it all wrong. History, he claims, is driven by creative people and their ideas, not by the conditions they find themselves in. If you see a bit of Hegel and Nietzsche here, you are not wrong: Duchesne embraces them both (and throws in a considerable amount of Weber to boot). But he goes much further. He trys to demonstrate using the best literature available on a wide variety of topics that the Hegelian-Nietzschian view of historical development is correct. This is not a book of theory alone; it’s an attempt to empirically demonstrate a theory. Even more radically, Duchesne uses the Hegelian-Nietzschian view to argue that since the invasion of the Indo-Europeans, a pastoral people who were imbued with unique aristocratic-warrior ethos, the West has been more creative than other world historical civilizations, and that this creativity explains in large measure the “Great Divergence” that we have seen in modern time. This is a challenging book, and one that requires study. It is not light reading. But anyone who is brave enough to try to understand what it says will be greatly rewarded. I know I was. PS: Brill, could you please put out an affordable paperback edition of this book, or perhaps release it in electronic version once it’s been sold to all the libraries that will buy it? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

When I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In the book Montesquieu reduces a set of disparate, seemingly unconnected facts arrayed over centuries and continents into a single, coherent theory of remarkable explanitory power. Alas, grand theoretical books like Spirit of the Laws are out of fashion today, not only because the human sciences are gripped by particularism (“more and more about less and less), but also because we don’t train students to think like Montesqueiu any more. In his excellent The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), Francis Fukuyama bucks the trend. Of course, he’s done it before with elegant and persuasive books about the fall of communism, state-building, trust, and biotechnology among other big topics. Here he takes on the emergence of modern political institutions, or rather three modern political institutions: the state, the rule of law, and accountable government. He begins with human nature, takes us through a massive comparison of the political trajectories of world-historical civilizations (Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, European), and, in so doing, tells us why the world political order looks the way it does today. His answers are surprising, and not directly in line with what might be called the “conventional thinking” about these things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

International theorists like to game out every possible scenario. What would happen if you applied their methodology to dealing with the fictional public policy challenge of a zombie infestation? In Dan Drezner’s Theories of International Politics and Zombies (Princeton UP, 2011), he looks at each of the major international relations schools–realism, liberalism, neoconservatism, etc.–to determine how they would react to a zombie attack. In the book, Drezner combines a strong understanding of international-relations theory with a comprehensive knowledge of the zombies. He also uses charts, cartoons, and humor to make his points. In the podcast, I ask Drezner to apply his approach to the question of how President Obama would cope with a zombie attack. We discuss all of these things, and have our share of laughs, along the way. Read all about it, and more, in Drezner’s humorous new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

People will often say that “this land”–wherever this land happens to be–is theirs because their ancestors “have always lived there.” But you can be pretty sure that’s not true. It’s probably the case that somebody else’s ancestors once lived on “this land,” and somebody else’s before that. From the very earliest moments of human history, people have been taking each other’s territory. This seemingly endless cycle is the subject of David Day’s excellent new book Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (Oxford UP, 2008). Day points out that the process of “supplanting” has a kind of deep structure, no matter when or where it occurs. Claims are made, territories are mapped, colonists settled, soil is tilled, natives are moved about or exterminated, and comforting stories are told, often about how “our ancestors have always lived here.” It’s a rather sad spectacle, though we should thank David for holding this mirror up to us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is “natural,” that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting to pop out. There is some truth to this notion: humans are the most cooperative species on earth, and one of the most common ways we cooperate is through trade. Some form of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” lies at the heart of almost every human relationship. We are built for reciprocation, and we do it remarkably well. But, as Joyce Appleby shows in her provocative, readable, and thoroughly entertaining The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (Norton, 2010), the natural impulse for reciprocal back-scratching did not capitalism make. A set of very unusual historical forces did. These historical forces were not everywhere and always. On the contrary, they came together in one place at one time: Northwestern Europe in what we might call the “long modern period,” roughly the 15th though 18th centuries. Of course people in other places and other times traded, and even traded a lot. But they did not develop the culture of capitalism, that is, a set of values that suggested making money was good not only for the money-maker but for everyone else. Alexander Pope, one of the early apologists of capitalism, put the capitalist ethic this way: “Thus God and Nature link’d the gen’ral frame, and bade self-love and social be the same.” (An Essay on Man, 1733) Gordon Gekko, in the (anti-capitalist) film Wall Street (1987), put it more crudely: “Greed…is good.” Neither, it should be said, did pre-capitalist traders develop the institutions that make capitalism operate, that is, things like investment banks, credits, stock markets, insurance, and a whole host of government regulations (yes, government regulations) without which “free trade” could not be “free” at all. Caesar was not concerned about in the federal reserve. He didn’t even have a federal reserve to be concerned about. All of which leads to a single and startling conclusion: the culture and institutions of capitalism are Western. Thus when we in the West promote capitalism as the “best” way of going about things economic, we are engaging in a subtle form of cross-cultural persuasion. We may be right, capitalism may indeed be the best way to provision goods and services to the masses (I think it obviously is). But that doesn’t make capitalist culture any the less foreign to most of the world. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

My son Isaiah likes to play the “why” game. Isaiah: “Why is my ice cream gone?” Me: “Because you ate it.” Isaiah: “Why did I eat it?” Me: “Because you need food.” Isaiah: “Why do I need food?” And so on. Isaiah naturally wants to know why things are the way they are. We all do. Most of us, however, are taught that seeking these ultimate answers is quixotic. We say either that there are no ultimate answers or that you’d have to know too many to answer them. In this conception, there either is no story of everything or, if there is, no one can tell it. Thankfully, Fred Spier disagrees. His path-breaking Big History and the Future of Humanity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) succeeds in sketching the story of everything from the origins of the universe to the reason my son’s ice cream is gone. In around two-hundred lucidly written pages he takes us from the Big Bang, to the separation of matter and energy, to the rise of elementary particles, to the formation of galaxies, solar systems, stars, and planets, to the creation of elements, to the origin of life, to the evolution of biotic complexity, to the emergence of humans, to the origin of society, to the invention of ice cream. What enables him to do this is a simple, unifying theory, namely, that all forms of complexity are the result of energy flowing through matter within certain boundaries (“Goldilocks” conditions). Everything with edges, a shape, parts, or an internal structure is the result of energy flowing through matter within certain boundaries and is only maintained so long as the energy keeps flowing and the boundaries don’t change. Historiographically, this book takes us into new and promising territory. But even more than that it is timely, for the energy and conditions that maintain our complexity–that is, modern industrial life–are both in jeopardy. We consume much more energy than we produce, and the kind of energy we consume is moving us out of the Goldilocks zone. If unchecked, the result of these two processes is inevitable: a loss of complexity, which is to say the destruction of modern industrial society. That’s something to think about, and maybe even do something about. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs