New Books in Diplomatic History

Ricardo D. Salvatore‘s new book, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 (Duke University Press, 2016) offers an alternative narrative on the origins of Latin American Studies in the United States. Salvatore claims that during the first half of the twentieth century scholars defined the contours of Latin American studies. Scholars did so both in the context of the ‘dollar diplomacy’ and the ‘good neighbor’ policy towards the region. Salvatore argues that, in contrast to the military interventions in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, the approach toward South America was defined by scholarly “disciplinary interventions.” Salvatore follows the life and work of five field-defining scholars who approached the South-American “terra incognita” from the vantage point of the hegemonic hemispheric power. An archaeologist (Hiram Bingham), a historian (Clarence Haring), a political scientist (Leo S. Rowe), a sociologist (Edward A. Ross), and a geographer (Isaiah Bowman), defined spaces of inquiry that were transnational in scope and scale.Salvatore argues that the creation of transnational fields of inquiry intended to render the region “visible” to audiences in the United States. The definition of new disciplinary spaces such as “South-American studies” contrasted with the then-prevalent domestic narratives focused on “national” topics. These new transnational spaces, Salvatore claims, were the product of the “imperiality” of the knowledge produced by the five scholars studied in Disciplinary Conquest. Nonetheless, the narrative proposed by the author defies a simplistic depiction of Haring, Rowe, Bingham, Ross, and Bowman as mere pawns of empire. Salvatore shows how some of them produced works that grappled with “anti-American” sentiment in the region while others tried to create alternatives to official policy designs. Moreover, Salvatore shows how these men approached South America as progressive intellectuals interested in democratic governance, social justice, and progress in the region. Salvatore notes how these concerns led to envisioning two different South Americas. One South America, positively appraised by these scholars, was made up of the “ABC powers” (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and by extension, Uruguay). The ABC countries showed promise, from the scholars point of view, regarding democratic development and social equality. Scholars construed another, less-promising from the U.S. perspective, South America by placing focus on the Andean region. Salvatore thus shows how these early iterations of Latin American studies resulted in the creation of various scholarly-defined, and externally-imposed, transnational fields of inquiry.Alvaro Caso Bello is a Ph.D. Candidate at Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at acasobe1@jhu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Great Britain’s victory in the First World War brought with it the competing challenges of defending an expanded empire while reducing military expenditures. In The Royal Navy in the Age of Austerity, 1919-22: Naval and Foreign Policy under Lloyd George (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Harry Bennett details how British policymakers responded to the quandary that the postwar strategic and political situation posed to them. Though triumphant against the German High Seas Fleet, the British faced the prospect of a new naval arms race against the United States and Japan at a time when the British electorate sought cuts in wartime levels of taxes and spending and the reduction in naval construction threatened to add to the problem of industrial unemployment. With divergent demands on domestic, naval and strategic policy, the Lloyd George government sought to resolve their dilemma with their participation in the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22, which established limits on the tonnage of capital ships that effectively mitigated against construction sprees while maintaining a degree of warship-building capacity. As Bennett demonstrates, the decisions taken during this period not only shaped policy for years afterward but determined events in the Second World War, offering lessons about the intersection of politics, strategy, and policy formulation that remain valuable today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cuba and Mexico have a long history of exchange and interaction. Cubans traveled to Mexico to work, engage in politics from afar, or expand businesses. Dalia Antonia Muller‘s Cuban Emigres and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) restores lost histories of those migrations, focusing... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historically, foreign policy has been seen as a sphere shaped and determined by the concerns of men alone. In ‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Julie Gottlieb demonstrates the fallacy of such a view when applied to understanding how Britain responded to the growing aggressiveness of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. By highlighting the activities of politically-engaged women from across the ideological spectrum, she details the range of efforts they undertook from hosting social engagements with politically prominent individuals to lobbying on key issues in their efforts to sway the development of foreign policy. As she reveals, much of the debate over appeasement was framed in gendered terms, often citing the concerns of women as justification for concessions to avoid war. Gottlieb also assesses the attitudes of British women generally towards appeasement, drawing upon the fledgling efforts of public opinion polling to identify their positions on the issues and the influence they exerted politically. The result is a nuanced reassessment of the development of appeasement and the debates that took place over it, both in the years prior to the war and in the months that followed Britain’s entry into it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his farewell address, President George Washington warned his fellow citizens of the dangers of what has come to be known in American political speech as “foreign entanglements.” Whether Washington’s successors heeded this advice is an open question; the U.S.–at least since World War I–has often been and remains today “entangled” in various ways. But, as Mark P. Bradley points out in his new book The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016), the language in which the U.S. has excused and explained its engagement of other countries changes from time to time. In the 1940s and again in the 1970s, Bradley convincingly argues, American diplomats (and numerous citizens and NGOs) began to talk about foreign engagements in a new way–in the idiom of putatively universal “human right.” This line of foreign policy reasoning, of course, continues have force today. In The World Reimagined, Bradley describes and explains how ‘human rights talk’ entered American political and diplomatic culture, and the direction it’s headed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Modernization dominates development’s historiography. Historians characterize moments in development’s history–from the Tennessee Valley Authority to US-led “nation-building”in the Third World–as high-modernist attempts to industrialize, urbanize, bureaucratize, and centralize. Indeed, modernization and development have almost come to be synonymous in our historical imaginations. Daniel Immerwahr’s Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Harvard University Press, 2015) shows that this is not the whole story.Immerwahr, an assistant professor of history at Northwestern University, writes communitarianism back into the history of development. He traces a troubling history of how social scientists, policymakers, and civil servants were enamored of ideas of community development and how they tested these ideas in Indian villages, counterinsurgency campaigns in Southeast Asia, and the US war on poverty. Daniel makes important arguments about the mid-century ambivalence towards modernity, the global dimensions of domestic policy formation and the problematic appeal of community. Taking this story to the present, Daniel shows the limits of contemporary localist approaches to global inequality and makes his own profound and persuasive policy prescriptions. This fascinating book should be of interest to intellectual historians, diplomatic historians, historians of the global south, as well as development workers and anyone else engaged in debates about global poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Russia’s Securitization of Chechnya: How War Became Acceptable (Routledge, 2017), a study of the transformations of the image of Chechnya in the Russian public sphere, Julie Wilhelmsen performs a post-structuralist revision of the Copenhagen schools concept of securitization a process by which state actors transform subjects into matters of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Victor Taki’s Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empire (I.B. Taurus, 2016) invites the reader to explore the captivating story of the relationship of the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the 19th century, and highlights the role the Oriental world played in the shaping of Russian national idea... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Was the War for American Independence really about American independence? It depends on who you ask.In his new book, Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It (Knopf, 2016), Larrie Ferreiro draws on decades of new research in archives and on battlefields across the US and Europe to detail the smuggling, espionage, gun running, and politicking that wrested the United States from British control. A revision of the national myth that the American colonies rose up and threw off imperial oversight solely by the unity found in the strength of their convictions, this globalist return to the 1760s and 70s weaves together military, economic, diplomatic, and social history with fascinating stories of the European soldiers, sailors, merchants, and ministers who conspired and collaborated to give the north American colonies a fighting chance. In Brothers at Arms, and in this interview, Dr. Ferreiro advances the argument that for the governments of France and Spain, defeating the British in the American colonies was as much about achieving their own interests in the sphere of European power as it was about heeding the call to advance the ideals of liberty and justice across the Atlantic, and that the relationships that developed between France, Spain, and the new United States did more to shape American institutions and ways of life that we often acknowledge.Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carls work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since World War II, the United States has repeatedly posited itself as a defender of democracy, using its military might to promote freedom abroad even as it ascended to the status of the world’s only superpower. The answer to almost every international problem, it seems, has been American military intervention which is always pitched as a disinterested attempt to deal with a crisis. For decades, the world has believed that US foreign policy means well and that Americas motives in spreading democracy are honorable, even noble. According to William Blum’s America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy – the Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else (Zed Books, 2013), nothing could be further from the truth. Discussing his latest book with New Books Network, Blum explains what makes the US the most destructive nation in history and how the exceptionalist goal of spreading democracy is only a cover for a less benign agenda.William Blum is one of the United States leading non-mainstream chroniclers of American foreign policy and author of the popular online newsletter, The Anti-Empire Report, a historian and U.S. foreign policy critic. Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, and other books.Jasun Horsley is the author of Seen & Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist and several other books on extra-consensual perceptions. He has a weekly podcast called The Liminalist: The Podcast Between and a blog. For more info, go to http://auticulture.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices