New Books in Western European Studies

Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022) is an original study of Black politics and varieties of political mobilization in Italy. Although there is extensive research on first-generation immigrants and refugees who traveled from Africa to Italy, there is little scholarship about the experiences of Black people who were born and raised in Italy. Camilla Hawthorne focuses on the ways Italians of African descent have become entangled with processes of redefining the legal, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of Italy and by extension, of Europe itself.Contesting Race and Citizenship opens discussions of the so-called migrant "crisis" by focusing on a generation of Black people who, although born or raised in Italy, have been thrust into the same racist, xenophobic political climate as the immigrants and refugees who are arriving in Europe from the African continent. Hawthorne traces not only mobilizations for national citizenship but also the more capacious, transnational Black diasporic possibilities that emerge when activists confront the ethical and political limits of citizenship as a means for securing meaningful, lasting racial justice—possibilities that are based on shared critiques of the racial state and shared histories of racial capitalism and colonialism.Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is coeditor of The Black Mediterranean.Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Southern California.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England: Gender, Law and Political Culture (Boydell Press, 2020) by Dr. E. Amanda McVitty presents a groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender.Conflicts over treason tormented English political society in the later Middle Ages. As legal and political historians have shown, treason was always a constitutional matter as well as a legal one because it was pivotal in mediating the relationship between English kings, their political subjects and the abstraction of the crown. However, despite renewed interest in constitutional history, there has been no extended examination of treason in medieval England since the 1970s.This pioneering study presents a new interpretation of treason, not only as a legal construct, a political weapon and a tool for constitutional thinking, but also as a cultural category, aligning it with questions of gender, vernacularity and national identity. It examines cases from the 1380s to the 1420s, revealing how kings defended their claims to sovereign authority by using the laws of treason to bind their mortal male bodies to the enduring body politic of the realm, and explains how that body politic was masculinised through its entanglement in contests over manly honour and homosocial loyalties.Drawing on evidence from trial records, legislation and chronicles, Dr. McVitty illuminates the ways in which cultural ideals of manhood reinforced or subverted government responses to crises of legitimacy, and demonstrates that gender conditioned understandings of treason in the political arena as well as the definitions embedded in statutes and case law. At the same time, it explores the varied ways men defended themselves from accusations of treason by invoking, and in the process helping to transform, shared beliefs about what it meant to be a man in medieval England.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Dining out used to be considered exceptional. However, the Food Standards Authority reported that in 2014, one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain. Previously considered a necessary substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out has become a popular recreational activity for a majority of the population, offering pleasure as well as refreshment.The Social Significance of Dining Out: A Study of Continuity and Change (Manchester UP, 2020) draws on a major mixed-methods research project by Dr. Alan Warde, Dr. Jessica Paddock and Dr. Jennifer Whillans about dining out in England. The book offers a unique comparison of the social differences between London, Bristol and Preston from 1995 to 2015, charting the dynamic relationship between eating in and eating out. Addressing topics such as the changing domestic divisions of labour around food preparation, the variety of culinary experience for different sections of the population, and class differences in taste and the pleasures and satisfactions associated with dining out, the authors explore how the practice has evolved across the three cities.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

You may know the term “Machiavellian,” but where does the word really come from? Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat who worked firsthand with Italy’s most powerful politicians. He wrote his famous book, The Prince, as a sort of instruction manual for the Medici princes of Florence. And while Machiavelli’s ideas were shocking to many—and repugnant to some—the influence of his ideas has been profound. James Hankins is a professor at Harvard University where he teaches History, focusing particularly on Renaissance intellectual history and political thought. He is the author of Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Given that we live in an era roiled by concerns about how democratic supposedly democratic countries actually are and when skepticism abounds about how truly representative our electoral systems are, a scholarly study of debates on many of these issues among leading theorists of democracy in Victorian Britain is just the ticket.That is what is on offer in Gregory Conti's book Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain (Cambridge UP, 2019).Conti employs the tools of the fields of political theory and political and intellectual history to render vivid and touching the fierce debates among such well-known figures as John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot, as well as “in-between” figures such as Thomas Hare (1806–1891). Fierce in terms of the sometimes cruel lampooning of their respective opponents and touching in that many of the proponents of these proposed reforms (e.g., proportional representation and the single transferable vote) were convinced that their nostrums would usher in a golden age for Britain’s parliament and, thereby, the nation.Note, though, that for many of the figures in this book it was the proper workings of Parliament and its capacity for reasoned deliberation that they cared about, not so much democratic processes per se in terms of how representatives got elected to it. Indeed, much of what was advocated was designed to keep certain groups out of Parliament and government generally.For many of the thinkers discussed in this book, Parliament in its member makeup should mirror the composition of the nation at large. This was particularly true of adherents of the variety-of-suffrages theory who pined for the hodgepodge of electoral constituencies (especially those in the countryside that were controlled by aristocrats and which were derisively referred to as “rotten boroughs” or “pocket boroughs”) that prevailed before passage of the Reform Act of 1832. Bagehot was of this school.Others, like Mill and Hare, were enamored of the rather complex system of proportional representation, believing that it would militate against what they saw as the evil of too much power devolving to political parties, which they feared would be dominated by intellectually inferior plebians. The word “swamped” was often used.Finally, there were straight-up democrats such as the future leader of the Labour Party and future prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who opposed proportional representation as fundamentally elitist and a hindrance to robust debate and effective government.Conti’s book is a fascinating exploration of a relatively neglected period in the history of discourse on what democracies need to thrive, who should be allowed to vote, how voting should be done and whether votes mattered so much as seats in Parliament. There were even arguments that if some people did not get to vote but their interests were represented, that was good enough.Let’s hear from Professor Conti himself about this lively period of democracy talk.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The EU, writes Loukas Tsoukalis, is “a strange vehicle … unlike any others on the roads of the world, surely not a flashy vehicle – rather slow and not easy to drive. However, it has been able to accommodate ever-increasing numbers of passengers and covered a remarkably long distance – often in adverse conditions and with accidents on the way”.However, while the union has shown itself to be resilient, the new economic, societal and geopolitical challenges it faces mean it has to be much more than that. It has to project as well as protect. It has to grow up. In Europe's Coming of Age (Polity, 2022), Tsoukalis explains why and how.Born in Athens, Loukas Tsoukalis studied economics and international relations in Manchester, Bruges, and Oxford where he also taught for many years, followed by chairs at the University of Athens and the London School of Economics, and visiting professorships at Harvard and the College of Europe. Today, he is a professor at Sciences Po in Paris. This is the latest of his many books on the EU including The Politics and Economics of European Monetary Integration, What Kind of Europe? and In Defence of Europe: Can the European Project Be Saved?*The authors' own book recommendations are: The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States, and Democracy Can't Coexist by Dani Rodrik (Oxford University Press, 2012), and Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic (Belknap Press, 2019).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors and writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Watching our favorite TV shows and movies today, it’s easy to take the relatable characters and familiar settings for granted. But when Henrik Ibsen debuted his play A Doll’s House, realism was a shocking, new approach. Professor Derek Miller discusses what realism can teach us about our reality and how A Doll’s House rocked the 19th century theatre scene. Derek Miller is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He teaches in the English department as well as courses in theater, dance, and media. He is the author of Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911 and is currently working on a project titled Visualizing Broadway. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Today I spoke with Carles Prado-Fonts on his recently published book Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation (Northwestern UP, 2022). This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. He argues that Orientalism became an instrument of hegemony not only between “the West and the rest” but also within the West itself, where Spanish writers used representations of China to connect themselves to Europe, hone a national voice, or forward ideas of political and cultural modernity.Uncovering an eclectic and surprising archive, Prado-Fonts draws on diverse cultural artifacts from popular literature, journalism, and early cinema to offer a rich account of how China was seen across the West between 1880 and 1930. Enrique Gaspar, Luis de Oteyza, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and lesser-known authors writing in Spanish and Catalan put themselves in dialogue with Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, W. Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Pearl Buck, and André Malraux, as well as stereotypical figures from popular culture like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Throughout, Prado-Fonts exposes translation as a technology of cultural hegemony and China as an appealing object for representation. A timely contribution to our understanding of how we create and consume knowledge about the world, Secondhand China is essential reading for scholars and students of Orientalism, postcolonial studies, translation studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies.Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, 2022. She reigned for 70 years, longer than any other British sovereign. In this interview, Charles Coutinho discusses her life and legacy with historian Jeremy Black.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Edward Chancellor's just published history of interest rates could not be better timed. As the world adjusts to rising rates after decades of falling ones, Chancellor's historical and sometimes polemical account of rates kept too low for too long seems all too prescient. Chancellor's The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022) is a surprisingly relevant and accessible tool, not only investors but also everyone touched by interest rates. That's all of us.  Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies