New Books in Western European Studies

Historians, writes Dagomar Degroot, rarely feature in discussions about global warming. With his new book, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Degroot seeks to remedy this significant omission. The book asks what past cooling, in the form of the Little Ice Age—a variable but overall cold climatic regime that affected much of the world and endured from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries—can teach us about future warming. Focused on the Dutch Republic from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, The Frigid Golden Age examines how and why this particular society prospered during a time of climatic upheaval. What was it about the Dutch Republic that allowed its citizens to thrive during the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age? Through detailed analysis of the commerce, military and culture of the Republic, The Frigid Golden Age examines the resilience and adaptability of a society in the face of climate change, and what it might teach us about our own predicament. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Described upon his death in 1887 as the ideal diplomatist, Richard Lyons served Great Britain in a variety of roles over the course of a long and distinguished career. In Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Age of Nationalism and War (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), Brian Jenkins describes Lyons’s eventful life and the often subtle impact he made in international relations. The son of an officer in the Royal Navy, Lyons was long drawn to diplomatic service. Sent to Greece as an aide soon after finishing his education, he rose steadily through the ranks over the course of a series of postings in Europe. Named minister to the United States in 1858, Lyons arrived to witness the emergence of secession, and he spent much of his tenure in America grappling with the challenges posed by the war that resulted. His success in such extraordinary circumstances cemented his reputation and led to his appointment as ambassador, first to the Ottoman Empire, then to France, where he served during the fall of Napoleon III’s Second Empire and the establishment of the Third Republic. Throughout it all, as Jenkins shows, Lyons set a standard of conduct as a hard-working nonpartisan defender of Britain’s interests that his successors strove to emulate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

What does it mean to be a citizen? Every country has its own legal codes that confer a set of rights on official members. But full citizenship is often more than what the law says. A better question is: what does it mean to be an accepted member of one’s society? According to France’s Republicanism, national and civic terms determine identity, and basic citizenship, “being French,” trumps all other group affiliations. Race, ethnicity—those common and powerful sources of identity and symbols of belonging—simply do not exist within this model. Not so for everyone in France, according to sociologist Jean Beaman in her new book Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017). In this work, Beaman focuses on a group of people in France who have ostensibly “made it”—children of maghrebin immigrants who have obtained university (and sometimes post-graduate) degrees, work professional jobs, and entered the middle class—and who mostly embrace French culture and the country’s sense of Republicanism, but who are not accepted as French by their country. They feel French, but are not regarded as French. Driven by the question of “what does it mean to be a minority in a society that does not recognize minorities?” Beaman lets her participants’ lives and experiences shine, and her analyses reveal the unfortunate conditions and realities of their everyday existence as “citizen outsiders”: both an ordinary member of their society, and a total foreigner at the same time. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Benjamin R. Gampel‘s award winning volume Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is the first total history of a lesser known period in Jewish history, overshadowed by the Spanish expulsion of 1492 which it would come to foreshadow. Over the course of ten months, Jews across large parts of the Iberian peninsula were murdered or forced to convert to Christianity, and entire communities were decimated—the intensity and duration of this period mark it as the most devastating attack on the Jews of pre-modern Christian Europe. While many historians have written studies about 1391-92 from isolated perspectives, in the face of an overwhelming number of local archives found throughout the peninsula, and the complexity of those sources, a unified narrative has, until now, remained a desideratum. In this methodological tour-de-force, Professor Gampel tells the story of Spanish Jewry and their relationship to royal power by reading state records and the almost daily correspondence of the royal family against the grain, telling the story of the subjects of these sources imbedded in the thick context of their composers. The book is divided into two sections that mirror its title. The first is a detailed study of the violence of 1391-92 arranged according to the geographic regions of the peninsula—the Kingdoms of Castile, Valencia, and Aragon, Catalonia and the island of Majorca. Using a rich array of archival sources and in dialogue with contemporary historiography, Professor Gampel painstakingly sets out the limits of what we can know about the riots, both of the victims and the perpetrators, detailing each episode chronologically, in order to form a picture of the period as a whole. Central to the book is the question of how and why those tasked with protecting the Jewish communities failed to do so. To this end the second section is centered around three members of the Aragonese royal family—King Joan, Queen Iolant, and Duke Marti—and their response to the violence as it unfolded. Here we see the Jewish community as one of many competing interests the royal family faced, and thereby can better appreciate the contingencies of history. The two sections together provide both a deep macro and micro study of this crucial time in Jewish and Spanish history, exposing us not only to the story and context of the too often voiceless victims, but the lives of those in power as well. Its a narrative of tragic violence and the failure of the Royal Alliance, grounded in extensive historical research stripped of none of its drama. Professor Benjamin R. Gampel is the the Dina and Eli Field Family Chair in Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. You can hear more from him in his video lecture series on the history, society, and culture of medieval Sephardic Jewry. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; his friends call him young Farabi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In his new book, The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of German-Czech Borderlands after World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), David Gerlach, Associate Professor of History at Saint Peter’s University, examines the expulsion of nearly 3 million Germans from the Czech-German borderlands. Dr. Gerlach looks extensively at the economic factors that led to the expulsion of Germans from this area. He argues convincingly how the promise of property and social mobility contributed to the course and outcomes of ethnic cleansing. Ultimately, he demonstrates how the conflict between Czechs and Germans helped to facilitate the rise of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In his work, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mark Sedgwick maps the ideational processes that have led to the development of contemporary western Sufism. Sedgwick showcases how Neoplatonism influenced Arab philosophy and subsequently Sufism. Pre-modern Sufism then appealed to Jewish and Christian mystics, who framed Sufism as a non-Islamic tradition, in effect emphasizing its universalism. With this historical mapping Sedgwick masterfully showcases how, even in its earliest period, Sufism was engaged with by Muslims and non-Muslims, and thus the fluidities noted in western Sufism in the contemporary context is by no means unique, but rather reflective of an age-old process of textual, philosophical and mystical transmissions. Moving between questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, universal and Islamic, this study naturally challenges how we think and frame Sufism. This book is a must read for anyone interested in Sufism, especially in modern western Sufism. M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Ithaca College. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at mxavier@ithaca.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Sir David Cannadine, Professor of History at Princeton University, president of the British Academy, and the general editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, narrates the century of Pax Britannica in the Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 (Viking, 2018). From the successful end of the Napoleonic Wars to the near debacle that was the Boer War, Victorious Century provides a comprehensive view of 19th-century British history in all its aspects: politics, society, art and culture. From Pitt the Younger to the young Winston Churchill, Victorious Century expertly delineates a story of continuity and change in nineteenth-century Britain. All by one of the leading historians writing in the English language today. 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

The French-Algerian War that erupted in 1954 ended with the emergence of an independent Algeria in 1962, but it was not until decades later that a broader French public turned its attention with vigor to the violence and pain of that conflict. Indeed, the French state only officially recognized the war as a war in 1999. Claire Eldridge‘s From Empire to Exile: History and Memory Within the Pied-noir and Harki Communities, 1962-2012 (Manchester University Press, 2016) interrogates the war’s legacies by focusing on the French settlers and the native military and civilian auxiliaries who fled Algeria in the thousands as French colonialism there came to an end. Examining pied-noir and harki grassroots collective mobilization and memory activism in France after 1962, From Exile to Empire shows that, while the war may have been repressed and silenced in a variety of ways in French society, the conflict was far from “forgotten” for these communities. Addressing material concerns including housing, poverty, and forms of indemnity, and attempting to preserve their cultures and histories, community associations forged new identities in France while advocating for the recognition of their suffering and their positive contributions to the nation and its (former) empire. Divided into two parts, the book covers the memory work of these communities from 1962 to 1991, and then from the early 1990s up to the 50th anniversary of the end of the conflict in 2012. Drawing on a wide range of pied-noir and harki sources, From Empire to Exile has much to offer those interested in the history of the war and its aftermaths. It will also make fascinating reading for anyone concerned with popular and community memory in the wake of traumatic and violent pasts more generally. 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/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Music is frequently connected to leftist politics and seen as the soundtrack to social protest movements, most notably the civil rights movement. But the far right groups use music too. Benjamin Teitelbaum‘s Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores how Swedish and Nordic far right parties deployed music in the 2000’s to expand the reach of their ideas. Consciously rejecting the sounds of White Power music and the image of skinheads in favor of pop music, hip-hop, and reggae, leaders of Sweden’s far right parties used the change in music to make in-roads into mainstream political discourse. In this podcast Teitelbaum discusses the shifting theoretical landscape that undergirds the radical nationalism and how this led to a variety of approaches toward music by far right parties. We explore how far right musicians and audiences came to use African-inspired musical forms in their effort to spread their ideas about Swedish nationalism. In addition to exploring questions of race, the conversation also examines the changing role of women in far right music and the vexed position of folk music. The podcast concludes with drawing some comparisons and contrasts between far right movements in the United States and Sweden. Benjamin R. Teitelbaum is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado. Teitelbaum’s commentary on music and politics has appeared in major European and American media outlets, in addition to scholarly venues. He has contributed as an expert for NPR, Swedish Radio, Norwegian Radio, the BBC, Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Helsinge Sanomat and Berlingske, and he has authored op-eds in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Dagbladet and the Wall Street Journal. Teitelbaum is also a musician who specializes in Swedish folk music and Sweden’s unofficial national instrument, the nyckelharpa. More information about him can be found on his website. The host for this episode is Richard Schur, Professor of English at Drury University. He is the author of Parodies of Ownership: Hip Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law and the co-editor of African American Culture and Legal Discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In December of 1937, four men robbed a representative of the diamond company Cartier of eight diamond rings in the Hyde Park Hotel. What made this crime unique was the identity of the perpetrators: all four men were from well-respected, wealthy London families. The trial and eventual punishment of these four men sent the London presses into a frenzy. In his brilliant historical analysis, Professor Angus McLaren (Professor Emeritus, University of Victoria) documents the crime, trial, and tribulations of these four Mayfair men. In this analysis Playboys and Mayfair Men: Crime, Class, Masculinity, and Fascism in 1930s London (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), McLaren discusses how this particular crime and the perpetrators involved intersected with larger societal forces of 1930s Britain such as appropriate sex roles, class differences and anxieties, crime and punishment as well as growing fascistic ideas. Significantly, these men and others like them were referred to as “playboys” decades before the 1950s—which is largely regarded as the era that the playboy emerged onto the social scene. Anyone interested in masculinity and gender studies generally will be fascinated by the crimes of these playboys. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies