New Books in History

King of Britain for sixty years and the last king of what would become the United States, George III inspired both hatred and loyalty and is now best known for two reasons: as a villainous tyrant for America's Founding Fathers, and for his madness, both of which have been portrayed on stage and screen.

In George III: Madness and Majesty (Penguin, 2020), Jeremy Black turns away from the image-making and back to the archives, and instead locates George's life within his age: as a king who faced the loss of key colonies, rebellion in Ireland, insurrection in London, constitutional crisis in Britain and an existential threat from Revolutionary France as part of modern Britain's longest period of war.

Black shows how George III rose to these challenges with fortitude and helped settle parliamentary monarchy as an effective governmental system, eventually becoming the most popular monarch for well over a century. He also shows us a talented and curious individual, committed to music, art, architecture and science, who took the duties of monarchy seriously, from reviewing death penalties to trying to control his often wayward children even as his own mental health failed, and became Britain's longest reigning king.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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For centuries Southeast Asia has enjoyed a relatively pleasant relationship with China, its massive neighbor to the north. While Chinese merchants and laborers were common throughout the region, with exception of a 1,000-year occupation of northern Vietnam, China has rarely attempted to exercise control over Southeast Asia. However, in the past two decades, as the Chinese economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the People’s Republic of China has begun to play an increasingly assertive role in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative and Maritime Silkroad project seek to build infrastructure throughout the region; Chinese investors have built casinos in Cambodia and Laos, drawing gamblers south; China’s navy has been building bases on tiny islands, shoals, and reefs in the disputed South China Sea; and citizens from the People’s Republic of China have started to move to Malaysia and Singapore to escape east China’s infamous pollution. Meanwhile, Sinophobia remains a potent force in Indonesian and Malaysian politics; Thai and Khmer social media is full of reports and rumors of bad behavior by Chinese tourists; nationalist mobs in Vietnam have attacked Chinese owned businesses; and Chinese dams are creating an environmental disaster for the lower Mekong Basin. Sebastian Strangio’s In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century (Yale UP, 2020) carefully dissects the People’s Republic of China’s complicated relationships with its southern neighbors.

Sebastian Strangio is the Southeast Asia editor for The Diplomat. Since 2008, his work has been published in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Economist, The New Republic, Forbes, Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The Phnom Penh Post, and many other publications. In addition to living and working in Cambodia, he has reported from the various ASEAN nations, Russia, South Korea, and Bangladesh. His first book, Hun Sen’s Cambodia was first published by Yale University Press and Silkworm Books in 2014. It was named as one of the 2015 Books of the Year by Foreign Affairs. Yale University Press has just issued a revised and updated paperback edition of the book under the title Cambodia: From Pol Pot to Hun Sen And Beyond.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization.

In History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000 (University of Washington Press, 2019), Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel

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The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of vernacular literary culture, scientific thinking and regional geopolitics.

In The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland (D.S. Brewer, 2020), Dale Kedwards explores the plethora of meanings that medieval Icelandic mapmakers invested into their works, from political statements about national origin, to diagrammatic expressions of cosmological theories. The mappae mundi provided a medium for medieval Icelanders to imagine their place in relation to the wider world, and even the physical universe.

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In 1930s Bucharest, some of the country's most brilliant young intellectuals converged to form the Criterion Association. Bound by friendship and the dream of a new, modern Romania, their members included historian Mircea Eliade, critic Petru Comarnescu, Jewish playwright Mihail Sebastian and a host of other philosophers and artists. Together, they built a vibrant cultural scene that flourished for a few short years, before fascism and scandal splintered their ranks.

In Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association (Palgrave, 2019), Cristina A. Bejan asks how the far-right Iron Guard came to eclipse the appeal of liberalism for so many of Romania's intellectual elite, drawing on diaries, memoirs and other writings to examine the collision of culture and extremism in the interwar years. The first English-language study of Criterion and the most thorough to date in any language, this book grapples with the complexities of Romanian intellectual life in the moments before collapse.

Cristina A. Bejan is a historian, theatre artist, and poet. A Rhodes and Fulbright scholar, she has had fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Wilson Center and Georgetown University. A playwright and spoken word artist, her creative work has appeared in the US, UK, Romania and Vanuatu. Bejan runs the arts and culture collective Bucharest Inside the Beltway (BiB), based in Denver, CO. Please visit www.cristinaabejan.com for more info. You can also follow her on social media: Cristina A. Bejan (Facebook); @CristinaABejan (Twitter); Cristina A. Bejan PhD (LinkedIn); & BiB at @BiBDenver (Facebook) and @bucharestinsidethebeltway (Instagram).

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For centuries Southeast Asia has enjoyed a relatively pleasant relationship with China, its massive neighbor to the north. While Chinese merchants and laborers were common throughout the region, with exception of a 1,000-year occupation of northern Vietnam, China has rarely attempted to exercise control over Southeast Asia. However, in the past two decades, as the Chinese economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the People’s Republic of China has begun to play an increasingly assertive role in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative and Maritime Silkroad project seek to build infrastructure throughout the region; Chinese investors have built casinos in Cambodia and Laos, drawing gamblers south; China’s navy has been building bases on tiny islands, shoals, and reefs in the disputed South China Sea; and citizens from the People’s Republic of China have started to move to Malaysia and Singapore to escape east China’s infamous pollution. Meanwhile, Sinophobia remains a potent force in Indonesian and Malaysian politics; Thai and Khmer social media is full of reports and rumors of bad behavior by Chinese tourists; nationalist mobs in Vietnam have attacked Chinese owned businesses; and Chinese dams are creating an environmental disaster for the lower Mekong Basin. Sebastian Strangio’s In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century (Yale UP, 2020) carefully dissects the People’s Republic of China’s complicated relationships with its southern neighbors.

Sebastian Strangio is the Southeast Asia editor for The Diplomat. Since 2008, his work has been published in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Economist, The New Republic, Forbes, Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The Phnom Penh Post, and many other publications. In addition to living and working in Cambodia, he has reported from the various ASEAN nations, Russia, South Korea, and Bangladesh. His first book, Hun Sen’s Cambodia was first published by Yale University Press and Silkworm Books in 2014. It was named as one of the 2015 Books of the Year by Foreign Affairs. Yale University Press has just issued a revised and updated paperback edition of the book under the title Cambodia: From Pol Pot to Hun Sen And Beyond.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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King of Britain for sixty years and the last king of what would become the United States, George III inspired both hatred and loyalty and is now best known for two reasons: as a villainous tyrant for America's Founding Fathers, and for his madness, both of which have been portrayed on stage and screen.

In George III: Madness and Majesty (Penguin, 2020), Jeremy Black turns away from the image-making and back to the archives, and instead locates George's life within his age: as a king who faced the loss of key colonies, rebellion in Ireland, insurrection in London, constitutional crisis in Britain and an existential threat from Revolutionary France as part of modern Britain's longest period of war.

Black shows how George III rose to these challenges with fortitude and helped settle parliamentary monarchy as an effective governmental system, eventually becoming the most popular monarch for well over a century. He also shows us a talented and curious individual, committed to music, art, architecture and science, who took the duties of monarchy seriously, from reviewing death penalties to trying to control his often wayward children even as his own mental health failed, and became Britain's longest reigning king.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization.

In History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000 (University of Washington Press, 2019), Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel

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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of vernacular literary culture, scientific thinking and regional geopolitics.

In The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland (D.S. Brewer, 2020), Dale Kedwards explores the plethora of meanings that medieval Icelandic mapmakers invested into their works, from political statements about national origin, to diagrammatic expressions of cosmological theories. The mappae mundi provided a medium for medieval Icelanders to imagine their place in relation to the wider world, and even the physical universe.

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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Emergence of the Gulf States: Studies in Modern History (Bloomsbury, 2016) offers an overview of the history of Saudi Arabia and the five Persian/Arabian Gulf states that emerged from British rule between 1961 and 1971--including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.

The book synthesized the works of many academics, all experts in their field to bring forward a book that is as comprehensive as possible about the history of the region. It has 11 chapter and all but one chapter are organized into two sections. The first section provides a narrative of the the topic and the second a bibliographic overview.

The scope of the book is vast but predominantly focus on the the history of the gulf from the 1800s to roughly the 1970s and in some cases the 80s. A general theme that the book centers around is that historically speaking, the gulf was interconnected within itself, as Arabs and Persians and other respective ethnic groups, intermixed, traded, fought and married within themselves. Hence the creation of the nation states politically, economically, socially and academically disconnected the region, changing the way people interacted with each other and the outside world as well as shaping the way in which academics studies them.

J. E. Peterson is affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, USA. He has been a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (Philadelphia) and the Middle East Institute (Washington, D.C.), and an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Washington, D.C.). Until 1999, he served as the Historian of the Sultan's Armed Forces in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for Security and Defence in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, and spent 2000-2001 at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Yasmine Al Bastaki is a Masters Student at the Emirates Diplomatic Academy studying International Affairs and Diplomacy. She has a general interest in M.E.N.A studies and issues of Identity. She can be reached at [email protected]. Listener’s feedback, questions and book suggestions are most welcome.

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