New Books in 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

Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,” “instincts,” or “motivations.” The reason we hew to the “blank slate” notion perhaps has to do with the fact–and it is a fact–that we see remarkable diversity in the historical record. The past, we say, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. But there are also political reasons to hold to the idea that we have no essence, that everything is “socially constructed.” Where, for example, would modern liberalism be without this concept? If our natures are fixed in some way, then what should we do to improve our lot? Given the strength and utility of the “blank slate” doctrine, anyone hoping to question it successfully must possess considerable political savvy and, more importantly, an overwhelming mass of evidence. When the first modern challenge was issued–by the Sociobiologists of the 1970s–they had the latter (I would say), but not the former. Happily, their successors–principally the practitioners of “evolutionary psychology”–have both (again, in my opinion). Azar Gat is a good example. In his pathbreaking War in Human Civilization (Oxford UP, 2006), he explains in politically palatable and empirically convincing terms just why, evolutionarily speaking, our evolved natures guided the way we have fought over the past 200,000 years. He rejects the notion that we have anything like a “violence instinct.” Rather, we have a kind of “violence tool,” given to us by natural selection. In certain circumstances, we are psychologically inclined to use it; in others, not. In this way we are no different than many of our fellow species, the primates in particular. Of course, unlike them, our use of collective violence has an (extra-genetic) history. Azar does a masterful job of describing and explaining how, even while our nature has remained the same, the way we fight has changed. And here the news is good: believe it or not, we–humanity as a whole–have been becoming more peaceful over the past 10,000 years, and radically more peaceful (at least in the developed world) over the past 200 years. Azar can explain this too, and does in the interview. I cannot emphasizeenough how important this book is, both as a model of what I would call “scientifically-informed” history and a sort of guide to those of us who, despite having abandoned the “blank slate,” believe that we have the capacity to create a better 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

Long ago, historians more or less gave up on “theories of history.” They determined that human nature was too unpredictable, cultures too various, and developmental patterns too evanescent for any really scientific theory of history to be possible. Human history, they said, was chaos. The problem is that human history isn’t chaos at all. The “hard” human sciences–evolutionary biology and anthropology in particular–have shown that human nature is quite predictable, cultural variability is strictly constrained, and ongoing patterns of social development have ancient roots. Historians can ignore these facts all they like, but that doesn’t make them any the less true. It does, however, impoverish their discipline by ceding the search for a satisfying theory of history to scientists. Neither Paul Bingham nor Joanne Souza are historians. The former is a molecular biologist and the latter an evolutionary psychologist. But they have formulated an elegant theory of human history in Death From a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe (2009). Like any good theory, it explains a lot with a little. To put it briefly, human society has gone from simple/small to massive/complex because humans alone among animals were/are able to suppress intra-group conflicts of interest by means of low-cost coercion. Bingham and Souza point out that the big “jumps” in social size and complexity–the neolithic revolution, the growth of archaic states, the birth of the nation-state, the rise of globalization–have all been associated with the evolution/introduction of new, more powerful coercive abilities. Paradoxically, it was new weapons that created more and better lives over the course of the last several hundred thousand years. This brief summary cannot do justice to the richness of Bingham’s and Souza’s theory. You need to read it for yourself. When you do, I guarantee you will see the past and present in a new way. 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

Africans were the first migrants because they were the first people. Some 60,000 years ago they left their homeland and in a relatively short period of time (by geological and evolutionary standards) moved to nearly every habitable place on the globe. We are their descendants. The Africans never stopped migrating, but they began to do so with particular vigor beginning about 1400 AD. Patrick Manning tells the story of their movements in his remarkable new book The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (Columbia UP, 2010). The tale Pat tells might well be divided into three phases: before slavery, during slavery, and after slavery. The middle period usually gets the most attention, but happily Pat well covers the “before” and “after” phases as well. This is an excellent corrective to the standard story because it shows us that for most of modern history African migrants were not really victims, but agents. Prior to the emergence of the international slave trade, they travelled and migrated to North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Near East in large numbers. Slavery of course violently brought millions of them to the Americas. But once it was officially ended (slavery continues to exist today…), the Africans in the diaspora set about considering their rightful place in the world. Should they build lives for themselves “abroad”? Or should they return to their African homeland? Should they integrate? Or should they remain apart? These questions–which are asked by every large diaspora community–were hotly debated in the cultural and political efflorescence of the 20th century. To some extent the debate still goes on; and to an even greater extent the African diaspora continues to grow both in numbers and in power. This is an important and neglected topic, and we should all thank professor Manning for shedding light on it. 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

Chimps, our closest relatives, kill each other. But chimps do not engage in anything close to mass slaughter of their own kind. Why is this? There are two possible explanations for the difference. The first is this: chimps are not programmed, so to say, to commit mass slaughter, while humans are so programmed. The second is this: chimps do not make their own history and therefore cannot make the conditions conducive to genocide, while humans do, can, and repeatedly have. In the former case, human genocidal behavior is part of our evolved “nature”; in the latter case, it is a historical artifact. After reading Ben Kiernan’s sobering (Yale UP, 2007) I’ve come to believe that it is a bit of both. Much of what we know about the evolution of human psychology and the history of human genocide suggest that we have an ingrained, genetically-encoded, largely unalterable drive to want to kill one another in large numbers. That drive, however, seems to be triggered by particular historical circumstances, these being largely of our own making. In Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Yale UP, 2007), Ben explores the nature of these triggering circumstances by looking at the history of genocide over the past five or so centuries. He finds unmistakable commonalities among modern genocides, primarily in the world of ideology. When modern people begin to believe that there is something sacred about their “blood”–that is, their own kind–and “soil”–that is, the plowed fields that sustain their kind–they have taken the first step toward the creation of the above-mentioned triggering conditions. When they believe, further, that their “blood and soil” are threatened by another “kind,” or they see an opportunity to extend the reach of their “blood and soil,” the conditions are almost complete. All that remains is for elites in the community to mobilize the force necessary to launch a genocidal attack. At this point what was merely necessary for genocide becomes, with the addition of a will and a way, sufficient and our innate genocidal tendencies are enacted. The challenge, of course, is to avoid creating the conditions that foster “blood and soil” ideologies and set us on the road to ruin. Alas, thus far we have not been able to accomplish that important task. 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

I remember telling my wife, the mathematician, that historians typically work on one time and place their entire careers. If you begin, say, as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (as I did), you are likely to end as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (I didn’t, but that’s another story). “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “Don’t historians get bored with their little time and place?” “Yes,” I replied. “Don’t they exhaust the topic and begin to work in circles?” “Yes, quite often” I replied. “Don’t they want to compare what they’ve learned about time/place X with time/place Y in order to better understand both X and Y?” “Probably,” I replied. “Then why,” she asked, “do historians continue to work the way they do?” It’s a good question, and one that deserves to be answered. On the one hand, ‘more and more about less and less’ has certainly enabled us–that is, the historical profession–to uncover a lot of the past that might have been forgotten. But, on the other hand, we’ve gone so far ‘inside baseball’ that we can’t and don’t talk to one another, let alone talk to colleagues in other disciplines or the public at large. There are exceptions, but they only improve the rule. In their very readable new book Natural Experiments of History (Harvard, 2010), Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson point out that this way of going about history is a lost opportunity. If historians would pull up for a moment and look around, they would discover a world of “natural experiments” that could both shed light on their particular time/place and speak to larger patterns in world history. More specifically, “natural experiments”–what historians usually call the “comparative method”–would permit them to speak about the general causes of the specific events they study. To my mind, that is a laudable goal and one that we should pursue. Knowledge, as we know, is difference. If all you know is Russia in the 1600s, then you won’t really know Russia in the 1600s. We should do what we tell our undergraduates to do: compare and contrast. 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

Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well, the public. Alas, many historians seem to forget the “public” part and concentrate on the “intellectual” part. Our guest today–sponsored by the National History Center–is not among them. Julian Zelizer has used his historical research and writing to inform the public and public debate in a great variety of fora: magazines, newspapers, online outlets, radio, TV–and now New Books in History. Today we’ll be talking about his efforts to bring the historian’s voice to the public and his most recent book Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security From WWII to the War on Terrorism (Basic Books, 2010) (which itself is a contribution to that effort). The book proves that in the U.S. politics does not “stop at the water’s edge”–not now, not ever. From the very beginning of the Republic, American foreign policy has been informed by a subtle mix of electoral politics, ideology, and institutional infighting. Julian’s book focuses on the most recent episode in this long story–the period from the Second World War to the present. He shows that politics plain and simple had a powerful effect on the major foreign policy decisions of the era: Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Reagan’s volte-face on disarmament, the First Gulf War, and the Second. It is, Julian says, in the nature of our political culture to cross swords and break lances over issues of foreign policy. Never truer words… We also discuss the History News Network and the History News Service. Their webpages can be found here and here. 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

Why the heck is “America” called “America” and not, say, “Columbia?” You’ll find the answer to that question and many more in Toby Lester‘s fascinating and terrifically readable new book The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name (Free Press, 2009). As Toby points out, medieval Europeans thought the earth had three parts–Europe, Asia and Africa, with Jerusalem at the dead center and water all around. (And no, they didn’t think the earth was flat…). But in 1507 a peculiar item appeared–the Waldseemuller map— that outlined a fourth part of the world called “America,” with the Atlantic Ocean on the one side and an unnamed ocean on the other. Here’s the really curious thing though: at that time no European had ever seen what we now call the “Pacific Ocean.” Balboa was the first to see it, and he didn’t do so until 1513. So where did Waldseemuller and his colleagues get the idea that there was a continent between Europe and Asia and that an undiscovered ocean separated Asia from it? Was it just a good (educated) guess, or did the mapmakers have information that has not come down to us? You want the answer? Well you can listen to the interview and then go buy the book. All will be reveled! 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

This is the first in a series of podcasts that New Books in History is offering in conjunction with the National History Center. The NHC and Oxford University Press have initiated a book series called “Reinterpreting History.”The volumes in the series aim to convey to readers how and why historians revise and reinterpret their understanding of the past, and they do so by focusing on a particular historical topic, event, or idea that has long gained the attention of historians. The first contribution to the “Reinterpreting History” series is Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2008). Today we’ll be talking to the editors of the volume, Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan. You may think that historians normally study states or nations, like France and China. But they also study areas of international or imperial interaction. The most famous example of this sort of “international” history is Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), but there are many others. Among them one finds contributions to “Atlantic History,” itself a relatively new field. Its object is the “Atlantic World,” roughly, the history of the interaction of four continents (Africa, Europe, North America, and South America) from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. In this podcast, Greene and Morgan talk about the origin of the field, its work to date, and its prospects. For an introduction to Atlantic history, see Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History. Concepts and Contours (Harvard University Press, 2005) andJ. H. Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2006).There is also a lively Atlantic history discussion list. See H-Atlantic. 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