Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Despite the fact that many American Muslim families have lived in the United States for generations they are often thought of as foreigners. I have witnessed on several occasions someone asking an African American Muslim when they converted to Islam or what drew them to the religion. Or asking Muslims from Middle Eastern or Asian descent where they are from or when they came to America. These questions are not always intended to be malicious but they do underscore some of the assumptions about Muslims in American discourse: Muslims are new members of the United States, whether through immigration or conversion.Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, professor of religion at Reed College, challenges these preconceptions by thoroughly outlining the long history of Muslims in American. His new book, A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2010) maps the activities of various communities of Muslims from the colonial and antebellum period to the present. His account is rich in detail and offers a vibrant portrait of the encounters and exchanges between Muslim communities and their non-Muslim neighbors. It is by far the most comprehensive historical treatment of the Muslims in America and calls for new approaches in the study of Muslim minority populations more generally. GhaneaBassiri situates Islam within the broad context of the American religious experience and displays the complexity and diversity of American Muslim history. This rigorous and richly documented account also challenges and transcends the flat and monolithic presentation of American Muslims that is typically offered in the current politicized discursive dichotomy between Islam and the West. A History of Islam in America should be essential reading for anyone interested in Muslims in the United States and American religions more generally.

Bombay (Mumbai), India, is a city that has never lacked chroniclers from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie to Suketu Mehta, bards of pluralism have written about Bombay’s divers religions and peoples and the interactions between them. Now here comes a fantastic new book on the much touted ‘cosmopolitan culture,’ as the natives call it, of colonial Bombay- with a twist. Nile Green‘s well received Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) masterfully weaves together the dizzying varieties of Islams current in this port city -Islams that grew up as the Deccan, the Konkan, Gujurat, East Africa, Central, West and Southeast Asia all converged upon the crowded lanes and workshops of Bhendi bazaar, Haji Ali, Mazgaon, Chira Bazaar, Dongri. These neighbourhoods in turn exported systems of belief and practice wherever their denizens went beliefs that were themselves shaped and modified by the time they had spent, and the adherents they had won, in Bombay. Never before has Muslim Bombay been presented as part of a global network – this is a book that traces Muslim life in Bombay and beyond in a framework transcending nationality, race and spatial demarcations- a book, in short, that tells the story of what happened when a global religion came to a global city.

If we are to have a society at all, it seems that we must recognize and abide by certain rules concerning our interactions with others. And in recognizing such rules, we must take ourselves to sometimes be authorized to hold others accountable to them. Perhaps it is also the case that we must recognize that states have the authority to enforce the rules. It has long been the aim of liberal democratic political theory to show that there is a form of social authority which is consistent with the intrinsic freedom and moral equality of all persons. Of course, there is plenty of room for skepticism. In fact, the skepticism goes back at least to Plato’s Republic: Maybe all social norms, all moral prescriptions, and all political rules are simply cases of some (the powerful, the clever, or the experts) pushing others around? In his new book, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Gerald Gaus attempts to dispel the skepticism.Drawing upon empirical and conceptual considerations from a wide range of disciplines, Gaus argues that social rules and the authority to enforce them emerge out of everyday social interactions and are supported by healthy emotional and dispositional states. We treat each other as free and equal moral persons when we recognize only those social rules which each individual has reason to accept and internalize. In this way, authority is consistent with the freedom and equality of all because properly exercised authority is always aimed at reminding individuals what they already have moral reasons to do. If Gaus is right, The Order of Public Reason solves a long-standing and fundamental problem of moral and political philosophy.

The many penniless English servants of the East India Company who landed at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta in the eighteenth-century were not terribly interested in uplifting the natives. They were, however, very keen to enrich themselves. And, by wheeling and dealing in the markets and courts of the subcontinent, a good number of them did just that, going, as we say, from rags to riches.This class of imperial nouveau riche might have gone unnoticed if, like their successors in the Indian Civil Service, they had stayed in India and, at the end of their careers, returned to modest retirements in Cheltenham. But they did nothing of the sort. As Tillman Nechtman‘s new book Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2010) demonstrates, as often as not they waddled back to the British Isles dripping diamonds and proceeded to exchange their new found wealth for positions of power in the British socio-political system. The press dubbed them the “nabobs”–a corruption, or modification, of the Indian nawab, or “governor.” The name was hardly complimentary; they were ruthlessly caricatured for their perceived ambition and arriviste pretensions. Influential though they were, many fell hard–Hastings faced an impeachment trial, Clive, hauled up before Parliament, took his own life, and yet others lost battle after battle with their rapacious colleagues. Listen to Tillman discussing these pioneers and the impact they had on the imaginations of the English speaking world, an impact that lingers to the present day.

Corruption in big-time college sports recently claimed another victim: Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel. Once regarded as a paragon of integrity, Tressel is now seen as one more example of a coach who recruited star players and built a successful program with the benefit of illegal gifts from boosters....

Matthias Strohn‘s The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is an important challenge to the existing literature on interwar German military doctrine. The stunning German victories in 1939 and 1940 have usually been attributed to their practice of “Blitzkrieg” (Lightning War). The inventive use of armored divisions and airpower allowed the Wehrmacht to sweep its enemies from the battlefield with relatively low casualties (on the German side, at least) and with little negative impact on the German homefront or domestic economy. James Corum, Robert Citino (a recent interviewee) and others have traced the roots of this combined arms doctrine in the interwar period, focusing on the “stormtroop” innovations World War One and the advocacy of mobility above all else by planners like Hans von Seeckt.But Strohn believes that this understandable fixation on the roots of Blitzkrieg has blinded us to the practical importance of defensive doctrine in the 100,000 man Reichswehr. With no hope of challenging France (a fact brought painfully to life in the 1923 occupation of the Ruhr) and little prospect for success even against the Polish army, German strategists (Joachim von Stulpnagel more than Seeckt) concentrated on defensive doctrine, hoping to survive an initial attack long enough to organize (perhaps) a guerrilla campaign or to die gloriously in arms.Based on extensive archival research, Strohn’s book should provoke a conversation among scholars of the German army that will refresh the debate about interwar doctrine.

Practically everyone thinks they understand what citizenship means. Yet, there is a great deal of conceptual ambiguity about the term and scholars studying citizenship often disagree about what citizenship actually entails, how it developed, and so on. In Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics (Cambridge UP, 2009), Elizabeth Cohen clarifies the idea of ‘semi-citizenship’ and thus helps clarify the concept. In doing so, she makes a series of provocative arguments.Cohen argues that there are various categories of people who are neither full citizens and nor are they totally excluded from the polity. These semi-citizens, she claims, are present in every democracy and hold some but not all of the essential elements of citizenship. In making this argument, she disaggregates the concept of citizenship into the various kinds of rights it bestows. She goes on to show that every democratic polity includes members who are routinely denied certain rights while continuing to have others, even though these individuals may be recognized as full citizens in the eyes of the state. In addition, she claims that such semi-citizenships are an enduring and inevitable part of all democratic politics.It is common to find in the scholarship on citizenship the tendency to make normative arguments for full inclusion into the polity. Yet, in this carefully and somewhat provocatively argued book, Cohen invites us to recognize that full inclusion for all members of a polity has never been the norm in liberal democracies. Nor is it always warranted. In this interview, Cohen explains to us why this is so.

Most of us live in a world of nations. If you were born and live in the Republic of X, then you probably speak X-ian, are a citizen of X, and would gladly fight and die for your X-ian brothers and sisters. If, however, you were born and live in the Republic of X and you are not–by self-proclaimed identity–X-ian, then you are, well, a problem.But it wasn’t always so. Prior to the nineteenth century, people generally did not live in a world of nations. They lived in a world of empires. Now in hindsight, we say that these empires were “multinational,” that is, they were made up of nations. But the elites who ran the empires didn’t think so. They saw them as made up of territories where the sovereign’s writ ran, not “nations” that the sovereign ruled (though there was some of that as well).As Michael A. Reynolds points out in his fine book Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918 (Cambridge UP, 2011), European imperial elites of the nineteenth century faced a crisis when nations–and the political doctrine that said they should be self-governing, “nationalism”–began to grow in strength. The idea of nations and the program of nationalism were born in Western and Central Europe, where they caused some but not too much difficulty, at least at first (a story we will have to leave aside). When, however, the nation-states of Western and Central Europe began to threaten, territorially speaking, the empires of Eastern Europe, and to export the doctrine of nationalism to those regions, the real trouble began. For Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman elites understood that war and nationalism in the imperial context would likely mean the end of empire. One could not fight external and internal enemies at the same time. They were not wrong in this. As Reynolds shows, they did the best they could, creating alliances with Western and Central European powers to buy time, fostering subversive nationalisms within the borders of their opponents, and, eventually, embracing nationalism and embarking on massive campaigns of ethnic cleansing and killing (most infamously in the case of the Armenians). In one case, they succeeded after a fashion in holding the empire together, at least for a time (Russia); in two others they failed (Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire). But they were all victims of war and nationalism, forces they helped create and could not control.

Hitler caused the Holocaust, that much we know (no Hitler, no Holocaust). But did he directly order it and, if so, how and when? This is one of the many interesting questions posed by Hilary Earl in her outstanding new book The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge UP, 2009). The book is about the trial of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that, in 1941 and 1942, spearheaded the Nazi effort to eradicate the Jewish people. The Einsatzgruppen murdered something on the order of a million people using almost nothing but firearms. In 1947, their commanders were brought to justice in what might be called the “other” (forgotten) Nuremberg Trials. The trial left an enormous body of reasonably fresh-after-the-fact testimony for historians to work with in trying to understand this episode in the Holocaust. Hilary does a masterful job of mining this material. She also points out that the roots of our own understanding of the Holocaust can in large measure be traced to these disturbing trials. The defendants were the first Nazi genocidaires to publicly describe what they had done and why they had done it. To be sure, their testimony was self-serving and is therefore suspect. But–and this is perhaps the most remarkable part–in many instances it was remarkably accurate. They (and Otto Ohlendorf in particular) “told it like it was” because they believed they had not really done anything wrong. Hitler had said that the Jews were the mortal enemies of the Reich; they believed him. Thus when Hitler ordered them to kill the Jews man, woman, and child they were not particularly conflicted–they were simply following orders, orders they believed to be in the objective interest of Germany. Just how they came to hold this completely irrational view is another, and very interesting, question. For those interested in it, I refer you to Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Harvard UP, 2003).Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Americans don’t like “big government” right? Not exactly. In the Early Republic (1789 to the 1820s) folks were quite keen on building up the (you guessed it) republic. As in res publica, the “things held in common.” The “founding fathers”–all “Classical Republicans”–designed a form of government that, though “checked and balanced,” gave the federal government significant powers. And throughout the 19th-century Americans asked the federal government to use those powers to do all kinds of things, many of them profoundly self-interested. But as Brian Balogh points out in his thought-provoking new book A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in 19th-Century America (Cambridge UP, 2009) they–that is, the American people–preferred that the federal government render aid in a certain way, namely, unobtrusively. Americans wanted the federal government to help, but they didn’t want to see any federal officials. This created a system of “associative” government: the center collected money (or incurred debt) and then distributed it to cities, counties, and states to get what it–and they–wanted done. But the federal government didn’t give the money to local governments alone; they also, even in the 19th century, gave it in the forms of subsidies, tax credits, loans and so on to private individuals and entities. It hardly needs to be said that the impact of this traditional American way of “doing” central power can be seen today. From block grants to states for welfare programs, to for-profit military contractors in Iraq, to “public” healthcare administered by the private insurance industry–it’s all part of “associative” government. So do Americans hate “big government”? Only “big government” they can see.Brian and two of his colleagues have a radio history show that you should listen to. You can find it here.Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.