New Books in Western European Studies

By the third century BC, the once-modest settlement of Rome had conquered most of Italy and was poised to build an empire throughout the Mediterranean basin. What transformed a humble city into the preeminent power of the region? In The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars(Harvard University Press, 2018), the Durham University historian and archaeologist Kathryn Lomas reconstructs diplomatic ploys, political stratagems, and cultural exchanges whereby Rome established itself as a dominant player in a region already brimming with competitors. The Latin world, she argues, was not so much subjugated by Rome as unified by it. This new type of society that emerged from Rome’s conquest and unification of Italy would serve as a political model for centuries to come.Archaic Italy was home to a vast range of ethnic communities, each with its own language and customs. Some such as the Etruscans, and later the Samnites, were major rivals of Rome. From the late Iron Age onward, these groups interacted in increasingly dynamic ways within Italy and beyond, expanding trade and influencing religion, dress, architecture, weaponry, and government throughout the region. Rome manipulated preexisting social and political structures in the conquered territories with great care, extending strategic invitations to citizenship and thereby allowing a degree of local independence while also fostering a sense of imperial belonging.In the story of Rome’s rise, Lomas identifies nascent political structures that unified the empire’s diverse populations, and finds the beginnings of Italian peoplehood.Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

John Witte, Jr.'s The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is an extensively researched book showcasing the author's deep knowledge and experience in the field of family and religious law. It traces the legal origins of European monogamy from the classical period to the present. Originally conceived as a brief for an advisory opinion to a Canadian court, Witte transformed this assignment into a work that not only explores the history of European marital law, but argues that monogamy is positive for society. It considers not just the legal, but also the moral and religious arguments for this institution. He joins us from Atlanta.Jeffrey Bristol is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Boston University and a JD candidate at the University of Michigan Law School.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

After years of being overlooked, there has been a growing interest among academic historians in the history of Turkish Guest Workers in West Germany. In her new book, Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Sarah Thomsen Vierra examines the experience of Turkish immigrants in Berlin. Focused on social history, she synthesized evidence from oral histories, archives, memoirs, and newspapers. Building upon research from a dissertation that won the German Historical Institute’s Fritz Stern Prize, the book analyzes how the first and second generations of Turkish Germans created local spaces where they belonged despite feelings of disillusionment with nationalist xenophobia. It also includes much analysis about the role of women in the guest worker program and its aftermath. Thomsen’s book is essential for anyone interested in the modern history of European migration. Sarah Thomsen Vierra teaches at New England College.Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE. In Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian(Harvard University Press, 2018), Angelos Chaniotis, Professor of Ancient History and Classics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, examines how his successors reorganized Persian lands to create a new empire stretching from the eastern Mediterranean as far as present-day Afghanistan, while in Greece and Macedonia a fragile balance of power repeatedly dissolved into war. Then, from the late third century BCE to the end of the first, Rome’s military and diplomatic might successively dismantled these post-Alexandrian political structures, one by one.During the Hellenistic period (c. 323–30 BCE), small polities struggled to retain the illusion of their identity and independence, in the face of violent antagonism among large states. With time, trade growth resumed and centers of intellectual and artistic achievement sprang up across a vast network, from Italy to Afghanistan and Russia to Ethiopia. But the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE brought this Hellenistic moment to a close—or so the story goes. In Angelos Chaniotis’s view, however, the Hellenistic world continued to Hadrian’s death in 138 CE. Not only did Hellenistic social structures survive the coming of Rome, Chaniotis shows, but social, economic, and cultural trends that were set in motion between the deaths of Alexander and Cleopatra intensified during this extended period. Age of Conquests provides a compelling narrative of the main events that shaped ancient civilization during five crucial centuries.Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Lumbering late Tsarist Russia and international finance? Is there anything there?  The Bolsheviks and finance? How can there be anything there?   It turns out that the answer to both questions is yes.  In Dr. Hassan Malik's meticulously researched new book, Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2018), the Tsarist government's relationship to foreign investors, mostly French bondholders, becomes a lens to judge the efficacy of Sergei Witte, Russia's reformist finance minister and, briefly, prime minister, in the early 20th century.  The same approach is applied on the eve of World War I where the state of international investment in Russia provides a perspective on the existing debate as to whether Russia was on the road to recovery or revolution when World War I broke out. During the war and in 1917, Western bankers generally seem indifferent to the risks that are emerging from Russia. Indeed, an American bank, the forerunner to Citibank, was opening up branches in Russia in late 1917 as the Bolsheviks were taking power. Soviet Russia's repudiation of its Western debts now seems like an obvious and inevitable outcome, but Malik documents how it came about and the debates among the Bolsheviks as to how to handle Russia's government debt. Beyond students of Russian history, readers interested in how governments can fail, and how risk can appear in a financial system thought stable and safe will find this book of great interest.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Just when you thought that you knew everything and anything pertaining to the Cold War and the ending of it, along comes University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Michael Cotey Morgan to tell you that you are profoundly wrong. Based upon voluminous archival research in eight countries and in five languages, his book, The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War(Princeton University Press, 2018) provides the reader with the first in-depth account of the historic diplomatic agreement that served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War.The Helsinki Final Act was a watershed of the Cold War. Signed by thirty-five European and North American leaders at a summit in Finland in the summer of 1975, the agreement presented a vision for peace based on common principles and cooperation on both sides of the the Iron Curtain. This gripping book explains the Final Act’s emergence from the parallel crises of the Soviet bloc and the West during the 1960s, the strategies of the major figures, and the conflicting designs for international order that animated the negotiations.The definitive history of the origins and legacy of this important agreement, The Final Act shows how it served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War, and how, when that conflict finally came to a close, the great powers established a new international order based on Helsinki’s enduring principles.Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

At a time when trade between China and the outside world is rarely out of the news, it remains important to remember that in centuries past global commerce moved in directions very different from those which dominate the present. This was especially evident during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Western countries and Japan employed a mix of coercive and collaborative mechanisms to foist their wares and business priorities on China, dominating the country’s trade and customs.Anne Reinhardt’s new book Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) focuses on these very dynamics and specifically the place of steam shipping as ‘a means of interrogating China’s experience of Euro-American and Japanese colonialism’ (p.2). Reinhardt's book reveals how trade in China’s coastal and inland waters, and the very vessels via which this was conducted, were sites where myriad grander processes crystallized in physical space. From the closer quarters of boardrooms, government departments and cabins below deck, Reinhardt also takes us to higher levels of elevation, revealing the place of steam shipping within global developments in trade, transport and technology during this crucial period. As well as being a captivating read, the book's fresh and nuanced presentation of China's ‘semi-colonial’ experience is vital for better understanding a history which to this day informs relations between China and the world at large. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

How has European culture changed since the 1960s? In Enter Culture, Exit Arts? The Transformation of Cultural Hierarchies in European Newspaper Culture Sections, 1960–2010 (Routledge, 2018), Dr. Irmak Karademir Hazir and her co-authors, explore this important question by looking at newspaper coverage of culture across Europe over the last 50 years. The book has an incredibly rich and detailed dataset of newspaper articles from Spain, UK, France, Turkey, Sweden and Finland, and covers a range of cultural forms. The book grapples with the classic tensions in the study of culture, between aesthetics and commercialisation, hierarchies, and globalisation, along with changes in the format, style, and production conditions for cultural journalism. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in culture in Europe, and you can find out more about the project and read some of the papers here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2018) is a rich, comparative study, drawing on the scholarship of eleven authors who discuss topics in medieval cultural, intellectual, and ecclesial history. Matthew Gabriele is co-editor of and contributor to this volume; he joins the podcast today to talk about everything from medieval apocalyptic thought—theology and teleology—to zombie movies, to present-day race politics and how history is pressed into the service of polemics. Professor Gabriele also talks about how much—and how little—has changed in a thousand years in the way we think about history and human agency.Matthew Gabriele is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. He has written The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade, and An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages (which won the best first book award from the Southeastern Medieval Association) and edited a half-dozen volumes and many articles on medieval history, especially cultural, intellectual, and imperial, including prophecy and apocalypse.Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

I had the opportunity to catch up with Harry O. Maier, professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Vancouver School of Theology, to discuss his new book, New Testament Christianity in the Roman World(Oxford University Press, 2018) which is one of the first titles to appear in Oxford University Press’s new series, Essentials of Biblical Studies. Maier’s study steps away from debates about the formation of early Christian belief to reconstruct the social world in which the new religious movement emerged and began to take shape. Drawing on some recent interventions in cultural geographical theory, he moves in six chapters to consider contexts from Roman cosmology to the individual person. Who were the first followers of Jesus? How did they relate to the social worlds of the empire in which they lived? And how is that experience reflected in the writings that became the New Testament?Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies