New Books in History

In China, chiles are everywhere. From dried peppers hanging from eaves to Mao’s boast that revolution would be impossible without chiles, Chinese culture and the chile pepper have been intertwined for centuries. Yet, this was not always the case.

In The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography (Columbia University Press, 2020), Brian Dott explores the evolution of the chile pepper from an obscure foreign import to a ubiquitous plant regarded by most Chinese as native to the land. He details the myriad uses of chile peppers in late imperial China, not just as a central ingredient in Sichuanese cuisine, but also as a miraculous cure for (get this…) hemorrhoids. By the turn of the 20th century, the chile pepper had transformed itself into a powerful symbol of prosperity, virility, and passion.

Brian joins us to discuss, among other things, the challenges of translating classical Chinese, the difficulty of locating primary sources and what the chile pepper meant to Mao Ze Dong.

Brian R. Dott is associate professor of history at Whitman College. He is the author of Identity Reflections: Pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China (2004).

Joshua Tham is an undergraduate reading History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His interests include economic history, sociolinguistics, and the "linguistic turn" in historiography.

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Shanghai’s status as a bustling, international place both now and in the past hardly needs much introduction, although the centrality of horse racing to the earlier incarnation of the city’s cosmopolitanism is less known. Taking activities at the erstwhile Shanghai Race Club as a lens through which to examine life in the city, Jay Carter’s Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai (W W Norton) offers a rich and revealing portrait of multiple colourful lives lived in ‘Old Shanghai’, and their demises.

Carter’s narrative moves elegantly between trackside life and events and characters in the wider city, depicting the colourful lives of Shanghai’s colonial settlers, Chinese residents and the dynamics of racism and exclusion as well as hybridisation which existed between them.

The Champions Day races, it turns out are also not the only landmark event to transport us into worlds of these people, and by focusing our attention on a single day –12 November 1941 – Carter also gleans a wealth of detail from a posthumous birthday celebration for the founding father of Chinese nationalism, and a funeral procession for china’s wealthiest woman. Occurring on the same day as the marquee races, all these events in the author’s deft hands are windows into a world soon to disappear in a maelstrom of global events.

James Carter, professor of history at Saint Joseph’s University, is the author of two previous books on Chinese history and is a Fellow of the National Committee on US-China Relations.

Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

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In China, chiles are everywhere. From dried peppers hanging from eaves to Mao’s boast that revolution would be impossible without chiles, Chinese culture and the chile pepper have been intertwined for centuries. Yet, this was not always the case.

In The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography (Columbia University Press, 2020), Brian Dott explores the evolution of the chile pepper from an obscure foreign import to a ubiquitous plant regarded by most Chinese as native to the land. He details the myriad uses of chile peppers in late imperial China, not just as a central ingredient in Sichuanese cuisine, but also as a miraculous cure for (get this…) hemorrhoids. By the turn of the 20th century, the chile pepper had transformed itself into a powerful symbol of prosperity, virility, and passion.

Brian joins us to discuss, among other things, the challenges of translating classical Chinese, the difficulty of locating primary sources and what the chile pepper meant to Mao Ze Dong.

Brian R. Dott is associate professor of history at Whitman College. He is the author of Identity Reflections: Pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China (2004).

Joshua Tham is an undergraduate reading History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His interests include economic history, sociolinguistics, and the "linguistic turn" in historiography.

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We tend to think of freedom as something that is best protected by carefully circumscribing the boundaries of legitimate state activity. But who came up with this understanding of freedom, and for what purposes?

In a reappraisal of more than two thousand years of thinking about freedom in the West, Annelien de Dijn argues in her Freedom: An Unruly History (Harvard University Press) that we owe our view of freedom not to the liberty lovers of the Age of Revolution but to the enemies of democracy.

The conception of freedom most prevalent today—that it depends on the limitation of state power—is a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking about liberty. For centuries people in the West identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. They had what might best be described as a democratic conception of liberty.

Understanding the long history of freedom underscores how recently it has come to be identified with limited government. It also reveals something crucial about the genealogy of current ways of thinking about freedom.

Annelien de Dijn is a professor of political History at Utrecht University

Yorgos Giannakopoulos is a historian of Modern Britain and Europe. He has recently guest edited the special issue “Britain, European Civilization and the idea of Liberty” for the History of European Ideas (2020)

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Anais Angelo, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Vienna has written an exceptional book entitled Power and the Presidency in Kenya: The Jomo Kenyatta Years (Cambridge University Press) in CUP's prestigious African Studies Series.

Angelo’s book analyses the little-studied institution of the Office of the President by studying its first postcolonial office-holder in Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta.

Angelo’s book is also a study of postcolonial statebuilding, told through the process of negotiations that transformed Kenya into a presidential republic. Using extensive archival records, she finds that neither the Brits nor Kenyan political elites intended to create a presidential regime with near limitless executive power. The result is a political biography of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta. It’s a story of distant and discrete politician that also narrates Kenya’s colonial and postcolonial history.

Susan Thomson is associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate University.

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In No Limits to Their Sway: Cartagena’s Privateers and the Masterless Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions (Vanderbilt UP, 2018), Edgardo Pérez Morales investigates the hemispheric connections between the Spanish American colony of New Granada (or Colombia) and the greater Caribbean in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. Residents in the port city of Cartagena enjoyed independence from Spain creating a radically egalitarian revolutionary state in the years 1812 to 1815. Seeking to maintain their tenuous liberty while building diplomatic contact with the Republic of Haiti, the port attracted hundreds of Haitians, men of full or partial African ancestry, where they enlisted as privateers and obtained citizenship. Joined by other masterless crew from ports throughout the Atlantic world, these privateers traversed the Caribbean, attacking Spanish ships outside of Cuba to weaken Spanish power. In doing so, these men helped to construct a radical vision of the revolutionary Atlantic where mostly Afro-Caribbean privateers established supranational networks and communities, which supported and disrupted elite political visions. This work offers a perspective of the maritime dimensions of Latin American sovereignty in the age of revolutions.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy. 

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The complicated situation which led to the American entry into the First World War in 1917 is often explained from the perspective of public opinion, US domestic politics, or financial and economic opportunity. In this new book, The United States' Entry into the First World War: The Role of British and German Diplomacy (Boydell Press, 2019), by Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Oklahoma, Justin Quinn Olmstead, however, reasserts the importance of diplomats and diplomacy. Based on original research, the book provides a look at British, German, and American diplomacy in the period 1914-17. It argues that British and German diplomacy in this period followed the same patterns as had been established in the preceding decades. It goes on to consider key issues which concerned diplomats, including the international legality of Britain's economic blockade of Germany, Germany's use of unrestricted submarine warfare, peace initiatives, and Germany's attempt to manipulate in its favour the long history of distrust in Mexican-American relations. Overall, the book demonstrates that diplomats and diplomacy played a key role, thereby providing a fresh and original approach to this crucially important subject. To top it off, the author finishes the text with a truly splendid bibliographic essay on the historical literature dealing with this ultra-important subject.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Spanning three hundred years and the colonial regimes of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, Maurice S. Crandall’s These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912 (UNC Press, 2019) demonstrates how Indigenous communities implemented, subverted, rejected, and indigenized colonial ideologies of democracy, both to accommodate and to oppose colonial power.

Focusing on four groups--Pueblos in New Mexico, Hopis in northern Arizona, and Tohono O'odhams and Yaquis in Arizona/Sonora--Crandall reveals the ways Indigenous peoples absorbed and adapted colonially imposed forms of politics to exercise sovereignty based on localized political, economic, and social needs. Using sources that include oral histories and multinational archives, this book allows us to compare Spanish, Mexican, and American conceptions of Indian citizenship, and adds to our understanding of the centuries-long struggle of Indigenous groups to assert their sovereignty in the face of settler colonial rule.

David Dry is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Spanning three hundred years and the colonial regimes of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, Maurice S. Crandall’s These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912 (UNC Press, 2019) demonstrates how Indigenous communities implemented, subverted, rejected, and indigenized colonial ideologies of democracy, both to accommodate and to oppose colonial power.

Focusing on four groups--Pueblos in New Mexico, Hopis in northern Arizona, and Tohono O'odhams and Yaquis in Arizona/Sonora--Crandall reveals the ways Indigenous peoples absorbed and adapted colonially imposed forms of politics to exercise sovereignty based on localized political, economic, and social needs. Using sources that include oral histories and multinational archives, this book allows us to compare Spanish, Mexican, and American conceptions of Indian citizenship, and adds to our understanding of the centuries-long struggle of Indigenous groups to assert their sovereignty in the face of settler colonial rule.

David Dry is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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The complicated situation which led to the American entry into the First World War in 1917 is often explained from the perspective of public opinion, US domestic politics, or financial and economic opportunity. In this new book, The United States' Entry into the First World War: The Role of British and German Diplomacy (Boydell Press, 2019), by Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Oklahoma, Justin Quinn Olmstead, however, reasserts the importance of diplomats and diplomacy. Based on original research, the book provides a look at British, German, and American diplomacy in the period 1914-17. It argues that British and German diplomacy in this period followed the same patterns as had been established in the preceding decades. It goes on to consider key issues which concerned diplomats, including the international legality of Britain's economic blockade of Germany, Germany's use of unrestricted submarine warfare, peace initiatives, and Germany's attempt to manipulate in its favour the long history of distrust in Mexican-American relations. Overall, the book demonstrates that diplomats and diplomacy played a key role, thereby providing a fresh and original approach to this crucially important subject. To top it off, the author finishes the text with a truly splendid bibliographic essay on the historical literature dealing with this ultra-important subject.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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