New Books in History

Starting after the Second World War and taking the story through to the Brezhnev era, Yoram Gorlizski and Oleg Khlevniuk's Substate Dictatorship Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union (Yale University Press, 2020) charts the strategies of Soviet regional leaders, paying particular attention to the forging and evolution of local trust networks.

Beginning with the late Stalinist period, Gorlizki and Khlevniuk describe and evaluates the relatively successful mechanisms Stalin used to keep regional networks and bosses (usually Obkom First Secretaries) in check while simultaneously devolving power to the regional governments. When Khrushchev came to power, following Stalin’s death, he removed many of these mechanisms which included oversight bodies such as the Party Control Commission and delegations from the Central Committee in an effort to reform the bureaucracy. This led to an unprecedented level of bureaucratic fraud, perpetrated primarily through family circle trust networks of regional bureaucrats who covered up each other’s malfeasance. The culmination of this trend was the Riazan scandal when the Obkom First Secretary engaged in a number of shady practices such as buying meat from markets in other regions, counting slaughtered animals twice and straight up fabrication to meet the massively unrealistic quotas Khrushchev had set as part of his Seven Year Plan. The resulting scandal undermined Khrushchev’s political capital and contributed to his downfall. Brezhnev took a different tact to managing regional governments by reducing the insane pressures to fulfill quotas they had faced under Stalin and Khurshchev and ending the rotational scheme Stalin had put in to place to try to make sure regional bosses could not develop their own nepotistic networks. Listen in to learn about how authoritarian regimes delegated power and how successful or unsuccessful these methods were and how they fundamentally shaped Soviet history.

Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here.

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The Sonderkommando--the "special squad" of enslaved Jewish laborers who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau--comprise one of the most fascinating and troubling topics within Holocaust history. As eyewitnesses to and unwilling abettors of the murder of their fellow Jews, they are the object of fierce condemnation even today. Yet it was a group of these seemingly compromised men who carried out the revolt of October 7, 1944, one of the most celebrated acts of Holocaust resistance. Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando (Berghahn Books, 2019), edited by Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams, assembles careful investigations into how the Sonderkommando have been represented-by themselves and by others-both during and after the Holocaust.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: [email protected]

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Today we are joined by Grégory Quin, maître d’enseignement et de recherche à l’Institut des sciences du sport de l’Université de Lausanne, and he is the author and editor of Des Réseaux et des Hommes: Participation et Contribution de la Suisse à l’Internationalisation du Sport (1912-1972) (Éditions Alphil-Presses universitaires suisses, 2019). Thanks to funding from the Swiss government, this volume is available as an e-livre for free. https://www.alphil.com/index.php/auteurs/vonnard-philippe/des-reseaux-et-des-hommes.html

In our conversation we discussed Switzerland’s particular role in world sport, the sportification of skiing in Switzerland, and Ernst Thommen’s position as FIFA mediator, bringing Germany back into global football after World War II.

In Des Réseaux et des Hommes, Quin joins nine other scholars in a critical examination of Switzerland’s sports history. While Switzerland plays host to many international sports organizations and while Swiss people have been overrepresented in the ranks of international sportocrats, there is still much to know about how Switzerland and Swiss people came to play such an important role in the sports world. This book is divided into two sections. The first part investigates the role of networks (réseau) that helped to shape Swiss sports. These networks included a range of domestic organizations: sporting, commercial (such as hoteliers), and governmental. They also included international networks, but especially with neighbouring Italy, France, and Germany.

The second half of the book looks at Swiss individuals (hommes) and their role in what Barbara Keys called the international sporting community (and what Quin et al. call the communauté internationale sportive.) They uncover a host of Swiss men – inevitably men – who worked in international organizations. Their language skills and their experience negotiating the different levels of Swiss government made them ideal sports bureaucrats. They served groups like the IOC and FIFA for a variety of motives, but also predictably in the service of Swiss notions of diplomacy and soft power.

Each one of these essays in this volume offers enticing insights into the growth of international sport and its ongoing and particular Swiss character.

Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. It will come out with Manchester University Press in 2021. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at [email protected].

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Renaissance humanists and the Holy Roman Empire haven’t mixed well in most scholarship. Humanists were supposed to be learned exponents of liberty. Often employed by Italian city-states, their civic pride and positive valuation of the ancient Roman Republic meant, it was claimed, that empire was anathema to them.

But in a lucidly written and penetrating study of the early Renaissance, Dr. Alexander Lee turns these narratives on their heads. Humanism and Empire: The Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Oxford University Press, 2018) looks at the relationship between humanists of northern Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. It finds, for example, that humanists working for both republican and autocratic cities could fit their politics onto an imperial landscape drafted on a classicizing canvass. They debated the universality of imperial dominion, the spheres of authority between pope and emperor, and much besides. Impressively, this study is grounded in the frenetic politics of the fourteenth century, and Dr. Lee demonstrates the extent to which humanist assessments of empire responded in lockstep with the shifting sands of Italian affairs.

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Reading the petitions that resident of colonial Nigeria submitted to the government during World War II, Marquette University historian, Prof. Chima J. Korieh found a unique source for African political voices as they renegotiated their status as something more than colonial subjects. What emerged was a wider social history of Nigeria during World War II. The colonial state intensified its attention to economic extraction, and many Nigerians responded positively because they believed in the British cause against Nazi Germany. But this societal contribution to the war, Nigerians then began to make broader claims for citizenship, self-determination, and independence.

Prof. Korieh’s new book extends Frederick Cooper’s portrait of decolonization as a process centered on the restructuring of labor relations in African colonial societies. He argues that the colonial intensification of extractive policies pushed Nigerian society towards a new evaluation of its own status. The post-war period brought almost immediate demands for political reform from newspapers like Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot that had been highly support of Britain during the war.

Nigeria and World War II: Colonialism, Empire, and Global Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2020) offers a multi-faceted portrait of a society in flux, and adds to our understanding of World War II as a global experience.

Chima J. Korieh is a professor of history and director of Africana Studies at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Paul Bjerk is an associate professor of African history at Texas Tech University and the author of Building Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960-1964 (Rochester University Press, 2015)

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Historians often portray the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as a conservative force in debates over free enterprise, battles against unions and government regulation, and the rise of capitalism in the United States. In The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism (Princeton UP, 2020), Jennifer Delton (Professor of History at Skidmore College) provides a comprehensive and nuanced political history. Delton focuses on the conservative policy goals of the organization but also its surprisingly progressive tactics and internal conflicts such as welcoming women and workers with disabilities, supporting the UN, embracing aspects of cosmopolitanism, and supporting the ERA, Civil Rights Act, and aspects of affirmative action. Delton deftly identifies the wider economic, ideological, and institutional concerns that drove NAM actors. As the book interrogates how the National Association of Manufacturing did – and did not – work, NAM emerges as a capitalist modernizer. She examines 125 years of massive change in American economic policy with the NAM at its center in order to interrogate manufacturing’s role in the development of capitalism at home and abroad – with implications for how we understand neoliberalism – especially liberal internationalist tendencies. Delton argues that liberal internationalism (associated often with Woodrow Wilson) can be seen as a crucial step toward the international institutions favored by post World War II European neoliberals.

The book is divided into three parts. Part one traces the ascent and reorganization of industrial manufacturing from the 1890s to 1940. Part two highlights manufacturing’s dominance in US society and the world (1941-1980) as the US lowered tariffs and pursued free trade. The share of GDP peaked in 1953 when manufacturing represented 25.8% of domestic production. Part three treats the decline in manufacturing (beginning in 1960) and emphasizes deindustrialization, globalization, and the disintegration of the large multidivisional corporations in the 1990s.

The book investigates how the globalizing impulse of neoliberalism played out historically in 20th century US politics – more specifically, how liberal internationalist ideas that were promoted by Democrats and antithetical to traditional political conservativism came to be espoused by the Republican party. Delton writes that “this is especially relevant now, as the current head of the Republican party [President Donald Trump, Republican] seems to be undoing the work of neoliberalism and liberal internationalists alike.” NAM’s history helps explain the bipartisan support for economic internationalism, freer trade, and what would later be called neoliberalism, even before the Cold War and Reagan, and even as voters (and Congress) remain extremely divided about these issues. The story of the NAM is full of contradictions, but The Industrialists deftly tracks them all, contextualizing the impacts on the national and global economy.

In the podcast, Dr. Delton describes how the NAM archive was shaped by professional staff members – particularly one woman – whose views departed from NAM leaders. The referenced article, “Who Tells Your Story: Contested History at the NAM” is here.

Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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Erin McCarthy, who teaches digital humanities at Newcastle University, Australia, has just published a fabulous new book about the ways in which the printing of poetry impacted upon the reading and imagination of poetry in early modern England. Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry and the Reading Public in Early Modern England (Oxford UP, 2020) offers readings of work by Shakespeare, Lanyer, Donne and many other poets to show that early printings of their work organised their texts in order to make specific points about both poetry and poets. Why do most anthologies of work by Donne begin with “The Flea”? Tune in to find out more about how poetry was transformed in and sometimes by the move to print.

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 Survival and Resistance in evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford UP, 2021).

 

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For two hundred years, conservatism has defied its reputation as a backward-looking creed by confronting and adapting to liberal modernity. By doing so, the Right has won long periods of power and effectively become the dominant tradition in politics. Yet, despite their success, conservatives have continued to fight with each other about how far to compromise with liberalism and democracy—or which values to defend and how. In Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2020), Edmund Fawcett provides a gripping account of this conflicted history, clarifies key ideas, and illuminates quarrels within the Right today.

Focusing on the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, Fawcett’s vivid narrative covers thinkers and politicians. They include the forerunners James Madison, Edmund Burke, and Joseph de Maistre; early friends and foes of capitalism; defenders of religion; and builders of modern parties, such as William McKinley and Lord Salisbury. The book chronicles the cultural critics and radical disruptors of the 1920s and 1930s, recounts how advocates of laissez-faire economics broke the post 1945 consensus, and describes how Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and their European counterparts are pushing conservatism toward a nation-first, hard Right.

An absorbing, original history of the Right, Conservatism portrays a tradition as much at war with itself as with its opponents.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]

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In Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany (ca. 1520-1720) (Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh, 2019), Paolo Astorri shows how the Protestant Reformation influence European law. Martin Luther and his successors led European Christianity away from medieval ideas of penance and the careful accounting that went with it toward theology of grace. Human salvation was thence justified by faith alone, and holy scripture the supreme authority. For the law, this meant that love (charity) and not complicated rules would guide jurists. For the poor, debts were to be forgiven freely, while a rich debtor could now be charged interest by his creditor.

In this conversation, Paolo Astorri discusses these changes and other legal – and also political and social – consequences of the Lutheran Reformation. He also speaks about the origins of western law and remarks about other changes in it over the last few centuries. He discusses other developments in the Catholic and Protestant confessions.

Dr. Astorri is a Post-Doc at the Center of Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen and a member of the faculty at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he completed his doctorate in 2018. He studied law at the University of Macerata and canon law at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Early Modern Europe, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. He has also written about Germany in the early 1500s.

 

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As one of the most monumental and recognisable landmarks from Zanzibar’s years as a British Protectorate, the distinctive domed building of the Zanzibar Museum (also known as the Beit al-Amani or Peace Memorial Museum) is widely known and familiar to Zanzibaris and visitors alike. Yet the complicated and compelling history behind its construction and collection has been overlooked by historians until now. Drawing on a rich and wide range of hitherto unexplored archival, photographic, architectural and material evidence, this book is the first serious investigation of this remarkable institution.

Although the museum was not opened until 1925, Cracks in the Dome: Fractured Histories of Empire in the Zanzibar Museum, 1897-1964 (Routledge, 2015) traces the longer history of colonial display which culminated in the establishment of the Zanzibar Museum. It reveals the complexity of colonial knowledge production in the changing political context of the twentieth century British Empire and explores the broad spectrum of people from diverse communities who shaped its existence as staff, informants, collectors and teachers. Through vivid narratives involving people, objects and exhibits, this book exposes the fractures, contradictions and tensions in creating and maintaining a colonial museum, and casts light on the conflicted character of the ’colonial mission’ in eastern Africa.

Sarah Longair a Senior Lecturer at the School of History and Heritage at the University of Lincoln.

Ali Bennett is a recent PhD graduate from UCL and postdoctoral fellow from the Paul Mellon Centre in London. Her research focuses on the material and visual histories of British colonialism in eastern Africa. She also has interests in global and colonial art and architecture, and the histories of collecting and museums. She can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @alibeenet.

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