New Books in Western European Studies

Mafia Republic: Italy’s Criminal Curse (Sceptre, 2013) is the second book by John Dickie on the history of the three organized crime groups from Southern Italy: the Sicilian Mafia or Cosa Nostra, the ‘Ndrangheta from Calabria and the Camorra from Naples. Dickie has an advantage over other researchers in organized crime by being able to read the Italian sources in the original. This puts him in a position to provide an English language book that has more detail and local characters than other authors. The book sets out the history of the three groups from the Second World War to today. It shows how they integrated themselves into the normal social and political life of state; a political alliance that was tied up with the fight against Communism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Italian state has tried to recognize and respond to the threat these three groups present to the power of the government to control southern Italy. This is a fascinating look into the reality of these mafia organizations, the horrors and depravations they impose on society and their threat to democracy. It is difficult to overstate the danger they have presented to the Italian nation including the real chance that they would displace the government in certain regions. Dickie’s book puts the power of organized crime into perspective. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in organized crime and its influence on society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

What processes must take place in order for countries to radically redefine who is a citizen? Why was Russia able to finally remove ethnicity from internal passports after failing to do so during seven decades of Soviet rule? What led German leaders to finally grant guest workers from Southern and Eastern Europe the path to citizenship after nearly five decades? How was Turkey able to move beyond the assimilation-based model that had guided the Turkish republic for eight decades and move toward a multi-cultural society? In his book Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, Sener Akturk makes a carefully constructed argument for how states can redefine “regimes of ethnicity” through the confluence of three key processes – the rise of new counter-elites, the development of new discourses, and the emergence of hegemonic majorities, which together can give governments the power to change laws on citizenship. His argument not only explains processes that took place at the dawn of the 21st century in Germany, Turkey, and Russia, but offers a glimpse of how other states can address questions of integration in an increasingly globalized world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

I imagine one of the greatest compliments an author of an historical monograph can receive is to hear that his or her book changed the way a subject is taught. I will do just that after reading Mark Levene‘s new two volume work The Crisis of Genocide (2 Vols. Devastation:  The European Rimlands, 1912-1938; Annihilation and The European Rimlands, 1938-1953) (Oxford University Press, 2014).  These books, a continuation of Mark’s earlier volumes titled Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, offer a rich and thought-provoking analysis of the ways in which the changing expectations and culture of the international system interacted with local events and personalities to drive mass violence.  The work is more analytical than narrative.  It is complex and requires careful attention to argument and evidence.  But it amply repays this effort with a reading of modern European history that made me rethink how I understood the period.  I learned much from the book about the details of violence in Anatolia and the Balkans.  But it was his broader treatment of the changing norms  of international relations that really made me think hard. Levene’s earlier volume established his work as a must-read for historians of genocide and mass violence.  His new volumes deserve equal praise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines the history of observation of celestial nebulae in the nineteenth century, exploring the relationships among the acts of seeing, drawing, and knowing in producing visual knowledge about the heavens and its bodies. Observing by Hand treats not just published images, but also argues for the centrality of “working images” to the histories of science and observation, paying special attention to personal drawings in private notebooks as instruments of individual and collective observation. Nasim’s approach blends the history and philosophy of science in a study that informs the histories of astronomy, images, and paperwork, and that emphasizes the importance of the philosophy of mind and its history in shaping this heavenly narrative. His transdisciplinary approach spans several media that include maps and portraits, oil paintings and etchings, private drawings and collectively-produced published images. The book helped me see Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and the starry night above, with new eyes and a new appreciation for the vision and visioning of nineteenth century astronomical observers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capital au XXIe siecle) knows how a la mode the economy is at the moment. Contemporary ideas and debates about capital, debt, and austerity are only part of what makes Clare Crowston‘s Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Duke University Press, 2013) such an interesting read in 2014. In this detailed study of the varied economic, political, social, and cultural meanings and practices of “credit” from the seventeenth through the eighteenth century, Crowston draws our attention to mutually constitutive worlds and systems of circulation. At once a genealogy of credit; an economic, social, and cultural history of fashion; and an examination of the roles of gender and desire in Old Regime France, Credit, Fashion, Sex makes an important contribution to our understanding of the origins of the French Revolution while respecting the historical integrity of the period that came before. In addition to its conceptual and historiographical insights regarding credit and the complexities of Old Regime society, the book offers readers a fascinating and extensively-researched analysis of the everyday practices and systems of exchange that operated “behind the scenes” of more familiar stories. For example, the book illuminates the mythology and critiques surrounding Marie Antoinette, the queen who embodied like no one else the intersection between ideas about credit, fashion, and sexuality in the era before 1789. At the same time, Crowston gives us a glimpse of other figures and social actors who played vital roles in the society of the period: Rose Bertin, the queen’s dressmaker; the fashion merchants who made so much luxury and refinement possible, as well as all those wives not married to Louis XVI who traded on/in their husbands’ credit, participating in multiple economic and cultural systems of circulation and power.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

When I was in graduate school, those of us who studied World War One commented regularly on the degree to which historians concentrated their attention on the Western front at the expense of the other aspects of the war. In the years since then (I won’t say how many), historians have worked hard to remedy this neglect.  Nevertheless, we still know much less about the Eastern Front than we do about events in France or even the homefronts of Western and Central Europe. Geoffrey Wawro‘s new book A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire (Basic Books, 2014), fills in an important part of this gap.  Wawro is most interested in understanding why the Empire chose to go to war despite (or perhaps because of) its many challenges and why it failed so immediately and drastically.  Decisions made by diplomats, soldiers and politicians in Vienna played a critical role in starting the war.  And decisions made by the leaders of the Monarchy’s army’s played just as important a role in leading an admittedly flawed instrument to defeat. Wawro tells this story with verve and insight.  His characterizations are compelling and his prose stimulating.  It’s a book that reads like a novel yet answers crucial questions about the course of the war.  It helps us understand a collapse that set the stage for decades of death and destruction.  For that reason alone, Wawro’s analysis of that collapse is a great addition to our understanding of the war and of Central Europe 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

Thirty years after a trip to the GDR, Soviet cardiologist V.I. Metelitsa still remembered mistakenly trying to buy a dress for a ten-year-old daughter in a maternity shop: ‘In our country I couldn’t even imagine that such a specialized shop could exist’.” Well-stocked shops, attractive cafes, and medieval streets were among the many discoveries that Soviet citizens made in their trips abroad. After decades of closed borders and rumors of life abroad, the 1950s ushered in a new era — an era in which Soviet citizens would be able to participate in the transnational circulation of people, ideas, and items. In All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin (Oxford University Press, 2011), Anne Gorsuch discusses the varied experiences of Soviet citizens traveling at home, to the “near abroad” of Estonia, and to Eastern and Western Europe, in the Khrushchev era. For many, this travel was no holiday but a purposeful excursion. Tourists were to learn about other parts of the world, but most importantly, they were to represent the Soviet Union in a Cold War struggle over culture. The Soviet tourist was an actor and the world his stage. If tourism was an olive branch and propaganda tool, however, it was also an opportunity for personal encounter and pleasure, including shopping on Oxford Street in London and enjoying the French Riviera. These experiences did not inevitably lead to anti-Soviet opinions or actions. For many elite travelers in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was possible for them to admire, purchase, and envy Western consumer goods, and still believe in the future of Soviet socialism. Dr. Gorsuch examines new opportunities for cultural exchange and transnational encounter, exploring the meaning of travel and exploration for a country breaking the chains of Stalinization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the buildings and streets of his city were licked and then consumed by flames. We know this thanks to a diary in which he recorded these burnings and burials. In his new book, Richard Yeo contextualizes the diary-keeping and document-organizing practices of men like Pepys within a rich, detailed account of notes and note-taking among early modern English virtuosi. Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a fascinating glimpse into practices of information management as they allowed English scholars to bridge text and memory, print media and manuscripts, journals and commonplace books, reading and observation, the individual and the collective. Yeo’s book explores the relationship between early modern methods of collecting and storing information and the larger project of Baconian natural history, paying special attention to the ways that Bacon and several Fellows of the Royal Society used notebooks and other note-keeping technologies. Beyond this, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science is also deeply embedded in the history of memory and its (dis)contents, and engages (especially in a chapter on Samuel Hartlib and his circle) the historiography of epistolary networks and early modern histories of correspondence. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

This book tells a remarkable and–to me at least–little known but very important story. In Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East(Yale UP, 2014), Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz trace the many connections between Germany–Imperial and Nazi–and the Arab world. Their particular focus is on a fellow named Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem between from 1921 to 1948. Both Al-Husseini and, a bit later, Hitler inherited a project hatched by the German officials in World War I, namely, to start an Islamist Jihad against the Western Powers in the Middle East. The two found common cause in this project: al Husseini wanted the French and British out and Hitler wanted to Germany to dominate the region. But they were also united by another cause: eliminationist Jew-hatred. Al-Husseini and Hitler worked together throughout the war to murder and plan the murder of as many Jews as they could get their hands on. After the war al-Husseini denied any connection with Hitler, yet he continued their common anti-Western, anti-Jewish project. Al-Husseini enlisted many former Nazis for just this purpose. In the late 1940s al-Husseini remained influential, not only among Palestinian Arabs, but widely in the Middle East. That influence, so Rubin and Schwanitz show, can be seen in the actions of many post-war Arab nationalist and Islamist leader–right down to today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

For many years now, historians have wondered whether Hitler had any sort of consistent ideology. His writings are rambling and confusing. His speeches are full of plain lies. His “table talk” reflects a wandering, impulsive mind distinguished by a remarkable disconnection from reality. There are obvious themes: strident German nationalism, radical racialism, vicious anti-semitism, and militarism. Do these themes add up to an internally consistent “worldview”? Richard Weikart argues that they do. In his excellent book Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), Weickart points out that Hitler, like so many of his generation, was powerfully influenced by a particular reading of Darwin’s theory of evolution. By this interpretation, human “races” were seen as species and, as such, deemed to be in eternal struggle for life itself. “Nature,” according to these theorists (usually called “Social Darwinists”), selected the most fit races and destroyed the less fit. Weikart shows that Hitler held very fast to this idea, as can be seen both in his pronouncements and actions. He also shows that Hitler–in contrast to many other Social Darwinists–had no trouble leaping over the distinction between “is” and “ought.” According to the Fuhrer, the “fact” that the “races” were subject to evolutionary process meant that they should struggle with all their might. Here, might was ethically right by what Hitler believed was irrefutable “natural law.” It was a recipe for madness and, of course, immense tragedy. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies