Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Hugh Cagle is an exciting analysis of the production of the tropics as an idea and as a dimension of imperialism through the development of the Portuguese empire. The global connections forged by seafaring empires demanded new ways of conceiving a unified world. As the Portuguese were first to discover, the ancient canon provided little guidance, and far-flung colonies all seemed unique and defied coherent categorization. Through efforts to interpret, control, and economize a their outposts in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the Portuguese developed novel and creative methods of producing knowledge within a globalizing world. Late in the 17th century, some of these efforts would coalesce around the idea of the tropics as physicians attempted to consolidate their authority over the health of the empire.  A space of prodigious nature and profuse disease, the tropics soon became an orienting notion of modern race theory and empires.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. 

The failure of democracy during the Weimar Republic is currently at the center of public discussion due to the global populist wave of the last few years. In his new book, Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential Elections and the End of the Weimar Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Larry Eugene Jones examines how the republic’s final presidential election contributed to its dissolution. He synthesizes evidence from a vast number of German archives as well as a career spent as an internationally recognized specialist of Weimar political history. Assessing both Hitler, Hindenburg, and other prominent figures from the era, such as Heinrich Brüning and Alfred Hugenberg, Jones illustrates the fragmentation of the non-Nazi right wing and the triumph of personal charisma over issue-based politics in 1930s Germany. Jones’s new book is essential for anyone interested in Germany’s transformation from democracy to dictatorship. Larry Jones recently retired as Professor of History at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY.Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in the Fall of 2018.

In his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel explores independent India’s attempts to feed itself between the 1940s and 1970s. Following the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, hunger and malnutrition remained key issues for India’s politicians, planners and citizens as a new nation sought to become self-sufficient in food production. Siegel’s book follows debates on land reform, technology and native diets to understand how the food question became an entry point into larger questions of citizenship, rights and welfare, debates that continue to loom large in the battle against agrarian distress and widespread food insecurity in present-day India.Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography of an Indian Resource Frontier” analyzed resource extraction and development as mutually constitutive logics of rule in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here.

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.

We met with Prof. Ulrich Witt to discuss his recent book (co-edited with Andreas Chai), Understanding Economic Change, Advances in Evolutionary Economics (Cambridge University Press, 2018). This collection of essays is divided into five parts: Part I (Introduction), Part II (Conceptual and Methodological Problems), Part III (Perspectives on Evolutionary Macroeconomics), Part IV (Advances in Explaining and Assessing Institutional Evolution), Part V (Evolutionary Perspectives on Welfare and Sustainability).Ulrich Witt, from the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, is a leading figure in the evolutionary approach to economics. He contributed to define the conceptual basis of this approach and he applied it in several fields of economics, focusing on the historical transformations and the endogenous changes.Geoffrey M. Hodgson (University of Hertfordshire, UK) commented that: ‘As Ulrich Witt and Andreas Chai put it in their introduction, it is time for some stocktaking concerning progress in evolutionary economics. This excellent collection of essays performs that task admirably: a number of leading authors review developments in the field with erudition and careful criticism. This is a milestone volume.’Viktor J. Vanberg (University of Freiburg, Germany) contextualizes historically his comment: ‘More than one century after Thorsten Veblen coined the label evolutionary economics there is still no consensus on what constitutes the core of an evolutionary approach in economics. This volume will be welcome by readers interested in learning about the current state of the field and its prospective development. The essays collected represent the principal versions of evolutionary thinking in contemporary economics, covering methodological, theoretical and normative issues. The editors’ Introduction provides helpful guidance in tracing the history of the field, placing the collected essays into a broader context and pointing to prospects for theoretical convergence and integration.’This is definitely an important book, ‘a milestone volume’, for scholars either from within or outside the evolutionary approach.Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.

The Civil War was even more disastrous than we thought. Joan Cashin, already a distinguished scholar of the period, looks afresh at the war through the lens of environmental history and material culture and finds only more terrors and even greater suffering. War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2018) draws from a dizzying cache of research from nearly four dozen archives to capture the brutality and desperation of the wars that raged beyond the battlefield—over food, timber, shelter, and the control of people themselves. Most of these struggles were not between the armies, but between soldiers and civilians. Despite Lost Cause slurs against Sherman and his ilk, Cashin finds both armies fully capable of emptying the stores, robbing the woodlots, and torching the homes of white noncombatants. To have two massive armies with nearly inexhaustible appetites for resources crisscrossing the South ensured widespread devastation. But the destruction was all the greater because soldiers on both sides paid little attention to military codes regulating pillage and plunder, and their commanders were usually unwilling or unable to reign them in. So, Cashin argues, the war caused starvation, deforestation, the razing of villages, and an underappreciated amount of hostage-taking and abuse of civilians. After the war, there was no reckoning, no recompense for the toll both armies took on white southerners, and the scars were bandaged with myths that deceive us still.Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

This week we met Prof. Kurt Dopfer (Universität St Gallen, Switzerland) to talk about Modern Evolutionary Economics: An Overview (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a book he co-authored with eight other economists. Kurt attended in Nice the 30th annual edition of the EAEPE conference, the sponsor of the Economics channel at NBN. The European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy is the scholarly home for the authors of this book. We tried to contextualize evolutionary economics within heterodox economics and to delineate the history of this approach to economics thanks to this book and the great and long career of Prof. Dopfer.The book is described by Joel Mokyr (Northwestern University) as ‘An excellent summary of what has been achieved in the field of evolutionary economics. I would hope that this book would be read by scholars steeped in ‘neoclassical’ economics and make them appreciate the power and potential of this scholarship.’ S. Metcalfe (University of Manchester) commented that ‘The publication of this clear and comprehensive introduction to the evolutionary dynamics of modern capitalism could not be more timely. The nature, causes and consequences of economic change are at the heart of current debates about the nature of capitalism, its virtues and vices locally, nationally and globally. This work draws on a wealth of economic thinking, old and new, to elucidate the primary role of innovation to the economic process and I can think of no better introduction to the pervasive and incessant role of human creativity to the operation of capitalism as an ordered but far from equilibrium system.’Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. 

It has long been a truism that Americans’ disdain for poor people–our collective sense that if they only worked harder or behaved more responsibly they would do well in this land of opportunity–explains, at least in part, why it is we have such a weak and limited public welfare state. But what if that very premise is false? What if, to the contrary, a majority of Americans have sympathy for poor people and disdain for the wealthy? And what if those feelings have demonstrable policy effects? Join us as we speak with Spencer Piston about a provocative new book Class Attitudes in American Politics: Sympathy for the Poor, Resentment of the Rich, and Political Implications (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a work that unsettles some long-held assumptions about American class attitudes.

‘Create two, three—many Freuds!’ That, Dagmar Herzog shows, was the forgotten slogan of the Cold War. With Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Prof. Herzog carries forward the groundbreaking research program into the politics of desire that already brought us Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany and Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and The Future of American Politics. The book offers fresh readings of the work of such titanic (and sadly misunderstood) figures as Karen Horney, Robert Stoller, Félix Guattari and Konrad Lorenz—and it will change the way you think about trauma, libido and the New Left. Our conversation focused primarily on the radical currents in Cold War psychoanalysis and what happens when the world comes crashing through the bedroom window.David Gutherz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research centers on the history of the human sciences and revolutionary politics, with a special interest in Fascist and Post-Fascist Italy.

This spring and summer, the workers of the Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF) staged a series of rolling strikes, slowing and shutting down the country’s major lines of travel and transport. It wasn’t the first time that France’s cheminots (railway workers) have taken a stand, and it certainly won’t be the last. Another major strike is scheduled for early October of this year.In Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Ludivine Broch examines the history of railway worker resistance and collaboration during the Occupation years. The project departs from a fundamental question about the role the national railways (and their personnel) played in the Holocaust in France. The resulting book is an in-depth labour history that considers class struggle and wartime economic pressures, complicating moral questions about what the cheminots did and didn’t do to enable and/or impede persecutions, deportations, and genocide during the Second World War.In the chapters of Ordinary Workers, readers will find a rich history of the social and political consciousness of railway workers in France that reaches back to the nineteenth century. Considering Vichy a turning point for cheminot political engagement and activism, the book accords an important place to the question of the resistance of railway workers to the transport of French Jews and other victims during the war. Ordinary Workers also shows that questions of integrity and commitment were paramount for this distinct labour group of thousands of men (and very few women) whose sense of professional identity was intimately tied up with the trains and rail lines they served. Their increased resistance during the Occupation included theft and protest. Sabotage, however, remained an extreme action for these workers who loved their machines and held colleague and passenger safety as high priorities.Drawing on a range of materials, including company archives, memoirs and postwar testimonies, as well as interviews the author conducted with cheminots throughout France, Ordinary Workers poses serious questions about the beliefs, everyday lives, and actions of a professional group whose experiences, choices, and stories connected French national spaces and politics during a most difficult period of the nation’s history.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.