New Books in Western European Studies

Published in October 2015, Caroline Shaw‘s timely new book, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford University Press, 2015), traces the intertwined development of the category of refugee and of the moral commitment of Britons to providing refuge for persecuted foreigners. By confidently working across a range of methods and geopolitical contexts, Shaw shows how the refugee category became “potentially universal in scope,” thanks to the depth of this moral commitment. Yet the attendant challenges of providing relief and resettlement for a potentially endless stream of people fleeing slavery in the US and East Africa, political persecution in continental Europe, and Russian pogroms raised a number of questions, not least where these refugees would live and work. Here, the British Empire provided an important safety valve: resettling refugees abroad made the work of relief seem feasible, despite real problems on the ground. By the later nineteenth century, however, this moral commitment ran up against tightened resources and the increasingly violent radical politics of many who sought relief, leading both to the enshrinement of a “right to refuge” in law and the simultaneous narrowing of who exactly counted as a persecuted foreigner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Carin Berkowitz‘s new book takes readers into the world of nineteenth century London to explore the landscape of medicine and surgery along with Charles Bell, artist-anatomist-teacher-natural philosopher. Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2015) looks closely at the involvement of Bell and others in a project of conservative reform in nineteenth century British medical education. We follow Berkowitz not only into the pages of the works that made Bell famous, but also into the classrooms in which Bell advocated a pedagogy that trained hand and eye together and developed his interest in systems of all sorts, including the nerves, education, and display. Readers will learn about the growth of a new genre of medical weeklies that changed the public face of medicine, the founding of new institutions that changed the teaching of medicine, and the controversy over motor and sensory nerves that accompanied major transformations in the medical science of Bell’s lifetime. It is a fascinating story that honors the importance of the history of education in shaping the histories of science and medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

It’s rare when an academic historian breaks through and becomes a central part of the contemporary cultural conversation. Timothy Snyder does just this with his book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015). He does so by boldly arguing that we don’t really understand what happened during the Holocaust. He argues in favor of an emphasis on ideology with Adolf Hitler at the center. But he also stresses the importance of the experience of occupation and the role of state structures, incentives and punishments. It was, he suggests, the persistence or disappearance of states that made all the difference in the way the Holocaust emerged over time. Because of our misunderstanding of the nature of the Holocaust, we’ve misunderstood the lessons that it should teach us. Because the world of our time rhymes with that of the Holocaust, this misunderstanding poses real threats to our world. It’s a tremendous book, fully worth of the extensive praise it has received. It will no doubt lead to many conversations among holocaust and genocide scholars alike. We only had time to touch on the big themes of the book in this interview. Hopefully you’ll get a feel for the flavor of his argument and why it’s so challenging to the discipline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Italians have a reputation for being rather, well, ineffectual. Everyone ‘knows’ that Italian trains don’t run on time unless Italy is ruled by a bald, bombastic, bully. And of course historians will tell youthat they didn’t even run on time then. The food is excellent, the scenery marvelous, the weather wonderful. Italians know how to live and they’ve got a great place to do it. But they just aren’t very tough, or so the story goes. Except for the Genoese. As Nicholas Walton points out in his page-turning, story-filled history Genoa, ‘La Superba’: The Rise and Fall of a Merchant Pirate Superpower (Hurst, 2015), the residents of this hard-scrabble Mediterranean port evolved a sort of un-Italian, hard-scrabble character. The Genoese are tough, hard as the rocks that make up the Genoese landscape. This isn’t to say they aren’t generous, kind and loving. That they are. But they are also tough-minded and perhaps a little cunning. The Genoese will get it done, find a way, make it work, and might just take your lunch money if you’re not careful. As Walton shows, they always have. His terrific history suggests they always will. Read the book! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016), Erik Linstrum examines how the field of psychology was employed in the service of empire. Linstrum explores the careers of scientists sent to the South Pacific, India, and Africa to verify and define characteristics of white racial superiority. Far from confirming the inferiority of the colonized, psychologists exposed flaws in Britain’s civilizing mission, often doubting or subverting its underlying assumptions. Linstrum exposes a fundamental tension between the authoritarian goals of state and the role of science, showing how expert knowledge could be adapted as a tool of colonization just as it could be undermined by scientific discovery. Despite its critics, Linstrum shows how psychology mobilized to take part in Britain’s counter-insurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya. Colonial administrators borrowed tools from psychology to conduct interrogations and suppress dissent. The colonial state attempted to cast doubt on the psychological maturity of the colonized, articulating Third World nationalism itself as a kind of pathology. Britain’s representatives aimed to actively reshape thoughts and feelings in their quest to win “hearts and minds.” Linstrum’s book challenges rigid definitions of scientists in the service of empire, complicating earlier narratives which portrayed psychologists as powerful supporters of colonial discourse. Psychology’s intended role was to aid the technocratic administration of a waning empire. While attempting to make the colonized knowable and predictable, British psychologists unintentionally exposed the dysfunctions inherent in European society, challenging the notion of an irrational, inferior “other.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In 1951 a West-Indian seaman was killed in Cape Town by two white policemen. His murder had initiated protests and demonstrations in the Caribbean and in London. This, tells us Dr. Elizabeth M. Williams, was the beginning of the international Anti-apartheid movement. In The Politics of Race in Britain and South Africa: Black British Solidarity and the Anti-Apartheid Movement (I.B.Tauris, 2015), Williams marries two histories that are usually treated separately, the history of the British anti-apartheid movement (AAM) and the history of black activism in Britain to reveal a hidden history of black anti-apartheid activism in Britain. The book argues that black individuals rejected the AAM because it did not engage with domestic forms of racism and discrimination. The predominantly white constituency of the AAM as an organization, and its close ties to the African National Congress rather than the Pan Africanist Congress, added further discomfort. Williams ushers in evidence from a variety of published and unpublished documents from official state, organizational and newspaper archives. She enriches the narrative and her argument by weaving in oral interviews conducted with leading figures of the black anti-apartheid struggle in Britain and politicians involved with British foreign policy in South Africa. Elizabeth M. Williams is a historian of modern British history, Africa and the African diaspora. She is an academic Librarian and is based at Goldsmith’s University of London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

On August 21, 1933, the teenaged Violette Noziere attempted to kill both her parents. At first, seemingly so clearcut, the case ultimately came to be characterized by a “troubling ambiguity” that unsettled Paris for years. Were the Nozieresan upstanding middle-class family? Was Violette a victim of sexual assault, her father a heinous predator? Was Violette a sexual degenerate? In an age of unprecedented social mobility, had the family tragically overstepped, with the parents granting a wild daughter too much freedom? No one knew. It was the perfect cautionary tale of the time- giving voice to concerns of contemporary France’s, fears of changing attitudes towards gender, class, industry, economics, art, everything. In Violette Noziere: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris, Sarah Maza weaves together social history with an astute analysis of the times to paint a vivid portrait of Noziere’s society, her circumstances and her crime. It’s a gripping tale that provides an intimate glimpse into a period that is often overshadowed: Paris of the 1930s, transfixed by a story of parricide and incest, tensed for the war that is about to come.       Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press 2015), Peter Thorsheim explores the role of waste and recycling in Britain under conditions of total war. Thorsheim argues wartime salvage efforts linked civilians socially as well as materially to the war. Salvage drives served to focus people’s efforts and helped them make sense of the events around them and their role in the conflict. The ebb and flow of resource scarcity served as a metric in which to measure changing military and strategic concerns against the Axis, but also complicated the wartime alliance between the British Empire and the United States. Although essential for national survival, Thorsheim shows how wartime salvage tended to alienate as much as unite the British public. Vigorous, but often ill-conceived, salvage efforts led to infringements of civil liberties, destroyed historical artifacts, and damaged private property. Some materials were never recycled and left to languish in enormous dumps long after the end of the war. The national salvage effort angered thousands and left many without compensation for their losses, souring a generation on recycling. Unlike the environmental movement of the 1970s, Waste into Weapons shows recycling was a means to further destruction rather than conservation. Thorsheim’s book sheds light on a little known episode in environmental history and provides alternative genealogy of recycling in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the philosopher’s stone, and for Robert Boyle to have urged the British Parliament to repeal a ban on transmuting base metals into silver and gold? In Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Brian P. Copenhaver shows that for millenia magic was taken seriously by the learned classes, sustained by a philosophical foundation drawn from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In this fascinating account of the historical conceptual framework of magic, Copenhaver, who is distinguished professor of philosophy and history at UCLA, explains the difference between good and bad magic, why Catholic Church fathers endorsed some magical beliefs (but drew the line at amulets and talismans), and how the rise of mechanistic philosophy transformed magic from being reputable to being a joke. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), Kim Wunschmann, DAAD Lecturer in Modern European History and a Member of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, tells the relatively unknown story of the Nazi pre-war concentration camps. From 1933 to 1939, these sites of terror isolated, ostracized, and excluded Jews from German society. Drawing on a range of unexplored archives, Wunschmann explores the evolution and systematization of the concentration camp system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies