Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old Europe? Weed-smoking drug dealers rolling across Eurasia in a cannabis-induced haze? Or slow-moving but inexorable farmers from Anatolia?These are just some of the many possibilities discussed in the scholarly literature. But in 2012, a New York Times article announced that the problem had been solved, by a team of innovative biologists applying computational tools to language change. In an article published in Science, they claimed to have found decisive support for the Anatolian hypothesis.In their book, The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis make the case that this conclusion is premature, and based on unwarranted assumptions. In this interview, Asya and Martin talk to me about the history of the Indo-European homeland question, the problems they see in the Science article, and the form that a good theory of Indo-European origins needs to take.

Sarah S. Bush is the author of The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Dunn is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Temple University.Bush’s book examines the assortment of strategies countries use to promote democracy abroad. She tracks a change in strategy over the last several decades that are increasingly compatible to existing regimes. Rather than the approaches taken in the 1980s, which often threatened regime change, more recent attempts to spread democracy have become much tamer. The turn to non-governmental organizations to deliver these programs has changed the nature of democracy assistance. The book ends with two interesting illustrative case studies drawn from Tunisia and Jordan.

When the Haitian Revolution abolished slavery in Haiti and established its independence from France, it affected surrounding colonies in profound and unexpected ways. Ada Ferrer‘s new book Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2015) centers on the tension between the abolition of slavery...

Americans believe they have a number of protections on the job, which are common in other democracies (free speech and privacy, defense against capricious firing, etc.). They are wrong. And in her fascinating new book The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the legal historian Sophia Z. Lee wants to understand why.She explores two major campaigns, stretching roughly from the 1920’s to the 1980’s, to establish constitutional safeguards in the workplace, uncovers their remarkable successes, and ultimate failures. It is a story of unlikely bedfellows: black, pro-union labor activists like C.W. Rice and Charles Houston fighting if not quite alongside then at least parallel to anti-union, right-to-work corporate leaders like Cecil B. DeMille and William T. Harrison for a similar goal to contrary ends.Lee finds that, contrary to what many think, civil rights groups like the NAACP were actively pursuing employment safeguards in the postwar era, using the “exclusive representation” granted by the New Deal to unions to make creative arguments for “state action” on the basis of the “duty of fair representation.” At the same time, conservatives sought to roll back the dramatic expansion of organized labor during the late 1930’s and especially World War II (to a third of the non-agricultural workforce) by arguing that “closed shop” rules forced men to join unions and to pay for such things as lobbying.Initially, the courts rejected these latter petitions, during a time when corporations suffered from its Great Depression reputation. But in the late 1950’s, as Congress uncovered corruption in select unions and the civil rights movement steadily grew, businessmen and liberal Republicans had far more success allying themselves with discrimination cases. The Supreme Court, for its part, was caught between not wanting to uphold segregation in labor, or to establish safeguards that would force integration on the entire private sector. Free marketers had nightmares about the racial and economic implications of a workplace Constitution, and unions did, too, for different reasons. With this deadlock, administrative agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Communications Commission became fertile arenas for legal expansions.The result is a tale of absorbing complexity–thankfully, lucidly and beautifully written.

Dealing with moral issues in a fair and balanced way is never easy. This is especially true since many contemporary moral questions are of such a highly personal nature. However, in his book An Introduction to Catholic Ethics Since Vatican II (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Dr. Andrew Kim does an excellent job of sensitively introducing the Catholic Church’s teachings on moral issues and the reasoning behind them. Through his deep knowledge of Catholic moral theology and an ability to explain difficult concepts through easy-to-understand metaphors, Dr. Kim has written a rich and thought-provoking book that will be useful for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of Catholic ethics, as well as for those who have to teach it to undergraduates.

China’s automobile industry has grown considerably over the past two decades. Massive foreign investment and an increased scale and concentration of work spurred the creation of a new generation of autoworkers with increased bargaining power. At the same time, China entered the global competition in mass-producing automobiles at a stage...

Rebecca Earle‘s recent book The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America (Cambridge University Press, 2012) investigates the importance of food during the first two centuries of Spanish imperialism in the Americas. She explores how food took a central place in conceptions of bodily health and composition, both in the Old and New Worlds. Not only did the Spanish come to see themselves as different from Amerindians due to the different foods that they both ate, but missionaries worried about the potential to convert native peoples in the colonial absence of theologically-mandated wheat bread and grape wine. This work adds an important layer of analysis to studies of early Spanish imperialism, as well as to the historical debate on colonial ideas about race and perceptions of bodily difference.

Pedro Machado‘s Ocean of Trade:South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c.1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed and engaging account of Gujarati merchants and their role in the trade of textiles, ivory and slaves across the Indian Ocean. The book not only enhances our understanding of an under researched pan-continental trade network but also, through its sensitive treatment of local markets as drivers of merchants’ patterns, pushes us to re-examine our understanding of trading networks themselves.

Just a few weeks ago, we heard Matthew Green discuss the minority in the House. Green explained that the minority party may not be as powerless as we typically think. In Too Weak to Govern: Majority Party Power and Appropriations in the U.S. Senate (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Peter Hanson offers another side of a similar story. Hanson argues that the majority party in the Senate, more restrained by rule and convention than in the House, has an equally interesting story to tell. Hanson draws on his experience as a staffer for Senator Tom Daschle to explain the evolution of “regular order” and emergence of continuing resolutions as a tool of the majority. Hanson’s analysis may not convince you to love the Senate, but he sheds needed light on what’s behind the maddening procedures of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”Hanson is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Denver.

For almost 100 years, it seemed like a good, even wholesome and optimistic idea to take young, working-class and poor British children and resettle them, quite on their own and apart from their families, in Canada, Australia, and southern Rhodesia. The impulse behind this program was philanthropic: to bring disadvantaged children living in crowded cities a better future by settling them in pristine, wide-open spaces, introducing them to nature, and letting them feel the sun on their backs. Yet the program was shot through with eugenic ideas and the racism of the age. British children were emissaries of the “kith and kin” empire, sent to “whiten” its outposts. But they could also be subject to repatriation–sometimes years after having been sent away in the first place–if their “racial fitness” was called into question.Race, nation, and identity form one of many themes Ellen Boucher examines in her fascinating, and sometimes painful, book Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869-1967 (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Others include the rise and evolution of child psychology, changing ideas about the meaning of family, and the politics of empire. One kind of big picture in Empire’s Children is the shift from a unified British imperial identity to the rise of independent nationalisms throughout the empire. Another kind of big picture, though, comes from the stories told by those who grew up as child migrants and how they later came to perceive those experiences as they reflected back. When you study history you are perennially confronted with the fact that a thing that seemed wonderful not too long ago can later come to appear deplorable. Tracing the influences that produce shifts in moral conscience–whether psychological, social, economic, political, or emotional–is one of history’s chief tasks, and it is a task that Boucher accomplishes with great sensitivity and narrative elegance in Empire’s Children.