New Books in Western European Studies

The sixth season of the Indian Premier League recently concluded, and once again off-field problems cast light on the league’s growing pains. For the fifth year in a row, no Pakistani players were selected for the league’s teams, while other foreign cricketers were withdrawn by their national boards at various points in the tournament for service in international matches. Political and ethnic tensions in the state of Tamil Nadu required a change in host cities, from Chennai to Delhi, for playoff matches. After a dispute over franchise fees and three unsuccessful campaigns on the field, the franchise in Pune folded at the season’s end. And most significantly, the playoff rounds took place under the cloud of a spot-fixing scandal, as three players for the Rajasthan Royals and eleven bookies were arrested in Delhi in May. Following upon previous scandals, the fixing arrests brought another blow to the IPL’s integrity. Observers point to the flood of cash that has overwhelmed Indian cricket in such a short time, rendering franchise owners, administrators, and players unable to withstand its force. The question arises, as the IPL aspires to build a structure that will tower alongside the world’s other great sports brands, will it manage to establish solid footings? Plenty of cricket fans take a good measure of satisfaction in watching the IPL’s problems. In its short life, the league has upended the game from its time-honored traditions. Samir Chopra is among those who lament some of the changes that the IPL and T20 have brought to the sport. But he also recognizes that the Indian Premier League offers a model that can potentially improve cricket. A philosopher at Brooklyn College and a regular contributor to ESPN Cricinfo, Samir is alert to the profound identity crisis in which world cricket finds itself. He plumbs various aspects of this current turmoil in his thoughtful and eloquent book Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket (HarperCollins, 2012). But rather than denouncing the IPL and all its vulgar wealth as the cause of the crisis, he points to a franchise-based form of international cricket, with players treated as professionals rather than servants indentured to national boards, as something that can potentially benefit all forms of the game. 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 a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t go so far as to say that other proposed explanations are flat out wrong, it’s just that they don’t really focus on the narrow forces that, well, forced English business men to innovate in the 18th century. In Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Parthasarathi says that those forces were economic. English textile merchants were getting trounced by imported Indian cotton. They found that they couldn’t produce cotton goods in the same way the Indians did for all kinds of reasons. So, they had to create a new, more efficient, production process. They did. According to Parthasarath, the “Industrial Revolution” was born out of economic competition and innovation (with, of course, a helping hand from the state). That makes a lot of sense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate number of African-American soldiers of rape, Mary Louise Roberts‘ latest book reveals a side of the Liberation of 1944-45 that is typically obscured in histories of the D-Day landings and the months that followed. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (University of Chicago Press, 2013) draws on a wealth of material from French and American archives to show us that the war was an experience saturated with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. Battles were critical, of course, but so too was sex. The American GI in war-torn France was a soldier, a tourist, a liberator, and also a destroyer. Military propaganda represented the Normandy campaign as a soldier’s opportunity for sexual adventure, framing the invasion and occupation of France in terms of the rescue of damsels in distress by heroic tough guys from a manly nation. Convinced of the hyper-sexuality of French women and culture, many American soldiers courted, paid for sex with, and even assaulted women they met in French homes, streets, hotels, and brothels. This is a book about what American GIs thought about France; what they did while they were “over there”; how French women and men received and responded to the “advances” of American troops; and the lasting impact of this complex set of encounters on individual lives, communities, and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

I was a graduate student in the 1990s when Yugoslavia dissolved into violence. Beginning a dissertation on Habsburg history, I probably knew more about the region than most people in the US about the region. Yet I was just as surprised as anyone else at the scale of the hatred and violence that erupted. With the part of the world I studied enduring atrocity after atrocity, I spent quite a bit of time wondering if graduate study in history was really the best profession to pursue. And I spent a lot of time devouring various accounts to try to understand how such violence could come out of what seemed like nowhere. Paul Mojzes‘ new book Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th Century(Rowman and Littlefield, 2011) ably addresses the second concern. A native of the region, Paul brings a deep understanding of the long-term roots of Balkan violence that many of the initial responses lacked. At the same time, he recognizes the significant changes that accompanied the twentieth century.  Moreover, he brings an even-handedness that is rare in discussions of the region. The result is careful, even-handed examination of history of mass violence in the Balkans. It treats widely-discussed incidents with sensitivity and draws attention to other, little-known persecutions. And it does so with a sensitivity drawn from Paul’s long engagement in interfaith dialogue. While the book clearly functions within the norms of a scholarly work, Paul’s ethical sensibility lies behind it and illuminates his discussion. All in all, his book is a fine contribution to the literature on the subject. My interview with Paul was just as interesting as his book. I hope you enjoy it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Yet when it comes to the man behind the ideas, most people know much less. Who was this man – this aristocrat with a Calvinist upbringing who shook the foundations of the linguistic establishment, and whose influence was felt more strongly after his death than it ever was in life? When John Joseph started looking into these questions, he found only scattered information. As a result, he ended up having to write the book that he himself had wanted to read. The result, Saussure (OUP, 2012), is a detailed but nevertheless readable account of the life and works of one of the most respected figures in the history of linguistics. In this interview we discuss some of the questions that arise in connection with Saussure: his major intellectual influences, his remarkable lack of publications during his adult life, the originality (and historical antecedents) of some of his central ideas, and “Calvinist linguistics”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

What can the United States learn from Europe? One good answer, says Steven Hill, is social capitalism, a form of economic management that is responsive to markets and productive of broadly-shared prosperity. First known for his work on electoral reform in the United States, Hill began travelling through Europe in the late 90’s to study the use of proportional representation (PR) in European elections. Once there, his research agenda gradually broadened to include European approaches to healthcare, corporate governance, support for families, transportation, energy, media, and other policies that together constitute what Hill calls “The European Way,” as compared to “The American Way.” This comparison is laid out with clarity and a wealth of examples in Hill’s highly-readable book Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age (University of California Press, 2010). In the first half of this interview, we discuss the compatibility of European healthcare systems with thriving economies, focusing on models from Germany for controlling costs and increasing transparency. Hill explains how Europe manages to maintain more Fortune 500 companies than the U.S. and China combined, while at the same time offering benefits to workers like paid maternity leave, generous vacations, paid sick leave, and low-cost child care. We also discuss CEO perspectives on codetermination–a form of corporate power-sharing among workers and management–in German companies like Deutsche Bank, Mercedes, and Volkswagen. In the second half of the interview, we take up the American side of the question. I ask Steven if European-style policies are only possible in small countries with PR, or if they are also possible in a large country without PR, like the United States. Hill describes what it would it take for U.S. states to enact similar policies and where, if anywhere, that is most likely to happen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2013), Alexandra Hui explores a fascinating chapter of that history in a period when musical aesthetics and natural science came together in the psychophysical study of sound in nineteenth century Germany. Though we tend to consider the performing arts and sciences as occupying different epistemic and disciplinary realms, Hui argues that the scientific study of sound sensation not only was framed in terms of musical aesthetics, but became increasingly so over time. The book traces a series of arguments by practitioners of the study of sound sensation as they sought to uncover universal rules for understanding the sonic world: How much epistemic weight ought to be placed on the experiences of an individual listener? What sorts of expertise were relevant or necessary for a sound scientist’s experimental practice? Did musical training matter? Was there a proper way to listen to music? The Psychophysical Ear follows sound scientists as they grappled with these and other questions, struggling with the consequences of understanding the act of listening as a practice that was fundamentally grounded in particular historical contexts as phonographic technology and the increasing number of performances of non-Western music in Europe were transforming the sonic world of Europe. Hui’s story often involves the reader’s own sensorium in the story, urging us to imagine or play sequences of musical notes that prove crucial to some of the arguments of the actors in the story. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

John Dickie is an historian of Italian organized crime who has a fairly unique perspective as he writes in English but is able to read the Italian sources. This allows him to bring new points of view and information to Anglo-American audiences. His new book is Mafia Brotherhoods: The Rise of the Italian Mafias (Septre, 2012). This book builds on his previous work Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia, by including the other major groups from southern Italy – the ‘Ndrangheta and the Camorra. John points out the surprisingly recent creation of these groups and tracks their rise in their respective localities. The book is both entertaining and very readable. This is not dry history but the stories of real people, both as members of the organized crime groups and, in a much smaller category, those trying to fight the criminality in the region. It is not giving too much away to say that the criminals are winning – especially in the point of history at which this book ends, namely, the arrival of the Allies in World War II. Clearly this is volume one of a larger work and the next volume should be out this year. For those who are interested in the theory of organized crime, I suggest you suspend your assumptions as the data does not match current accepted wisdom. We see ethnocentric groups, hierarchical organizations, and the power of familial relationships. For those who simply enjoy reading about organized crime, you will not be disappointed as this book is full of everything you expect – crime, murder, drama and deceit. Overall it is a book of tragedy – tragedy for a beautiful region of the world overcome by a social disease Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Nicholas Popper‘s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) takes readers into the texture of Walter Ralegh’s masterwork and the textual and epistemic practices through which he used the past to understand and offer counsel on the events of the present. Ralegh passed seven of his many years of incarceration in the Tower of London excerpting, rearranging, editing, and recopying passages from his 500+ volume library to produce a book that has been read and interpreted in many different (and sometimes conflicting) ways in the hundreds of years since its initial printing. Popper’s book uses a very focused account of the texture of this single book as a basis from which to offer a wonderfully expansive account of the practices of history in the Renaissance, and the ways that Ralegh’s work and associated practices of historical analysis ultimately transformed European politics, religion, and scholarship. Along the way, there are fascinating accounts of the origins of the modern archival mode of historiography, the differences between causal and narrative accounts of the past, and the many ways that early modern historical practices were inextricable from scriptural exegesis. Popper’s study is both inspired by the methods and insights of the historiography of science, and offers a way to think about the practices of knowledge-production that help identify what we’re talking about when we talk about early modern “science.” Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are available in life, the choices that comprise a life. Towards the end of Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life(Penguin, 2011) biographer Lisa Chaney allows her subject to speak for herself. Chanel writes: ‘Today, alone in the sunshine and snow… I shall continue, without husband, without children, without grandchildren, without these delightful illusions… I am not a heroine. But I have chosen the person I wanted to be.’ Chanel’s is a life that, all these years later, still reads as radical, which puts into perspective how terribly shocking it must have appeared in the early 20th century. Chaney has chosen an unusually challenging subject. Mired in myths, some of them of her own devising, the image of Chanel that has been passed down to us is clouded at best and, as Chaney acknowledges, quoting L.P. Hartley’s statement in The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’ The story of Chanel’s life emerges in more muted tones than one might expect, with gray areas aplenty, from which it is unreasonable to demand clarity or place judgment. And yet Coco Chanel remains an uncompromising account. Chaney doesn’t ignore Chanel’s capacity for storytelling but, rather, explores the meanings of her stories, their unrealities, and the significance of the details that Chanel chose to omit. She doesn’t side-step the controversies surrounding Chanel’s life during the occupation of Paris, but instead grapples head-on with the moral ambiguities and compromises that occurred during the Occupation and in Vichy France. What emerges is an unflinching portrait of a complex, intelligent, unapologetic, incredibly hard working woman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies