New Books in History

In his new book Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge University Press), Matthew Romaniello examines the workings of the British Russia Company and the commercial entanglements of the British and Russian empires in the long eighteenth century.

This innovative and highly readable monograph challenges the long-held views of Russian economic backwardness in the early modern period and stresses the importance of personal histories and individual agency in global economic dynamics. By focusing on diplomatic and commercial careers of a fascinating set of characters, Romaniello charts vibrant knowledge and information-sharing networks that were essential for the success of both empires in the Eurasian economic and geopolitical arenas.

A non-conventional economic history, Enterprising Empires traverses the micro-historical and the macro-economic to reevaluate Russian commercial prowess before 1800 and illuminate an overlooked area of Anglo-Russian cooperation and rivalry.

Matthew Romaniello is an Associate Professor of History at Weber State University and a historian of the Russian empire, commodities, and medicine. He is currently the editor of The Journal of World History and the former editor of Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies.

Vladislav Lilić is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the place and persistence of quasi-sovereignty in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Vladislav’s other fields of interest include the socio-legal history of empire, global history of statehood, and the history of international thought. You can reach him at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Philip Thai about his book, China's War on Smuggling: Law, Illicit Markets, and State Power on the China Coast (Columbia University Press, 2018). Thai is Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University. He is a historian of Modern China with research and teaching interests that include legal history, economic history, and diplomatic history.

Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority.

Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.

Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores legal history at Princeton University

 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Teaching world history surveys can be a nightmare! How on Earth is anyone supposed to cover so much information from all over the world and from so many different time periods? It can be nothing short of overwhelming.

But fear not, listeners! Professor David Eaton has a strategy to stay sane and make the class more accessible to your students. Instead of following the “laundry list” approach of covering everything under the sun, he suggests using selected case studies to illustrate key concepts. In his World History through Case Studies: Historical Skills in Practice (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), he holds that mastering these concepts will build the critical thinking skills essential to a historian. While World History through Case Studies could be used in the classroom, the real target audience is world history teachers who wanted to make their courses more successful.

In our conversation, Dr. Eaton discusses the book and offers his thoughts on the field of world history. We also get into some of his case studies, which range from the history of yoga to the domestication of cattle and from human sacrifice in Mesoamerica to genocide in Poland. There is something for everyone in this discussion.

Dr. David Eaton is an Associate Professor at Grand Valley State University. Along with Matt Drwenski, Dr. Eaton hosts “On Top of the World”

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

In his new book Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge University Press), Matthew Romaniello examines the workings of the British Russia Company and the commercial entanglements of the British and Russian empires in the long eighteenth century.

This innovative and highly readable monograph challenges the long-held views of Russian economic backwardness in the early modern period and stresses the importance of personal histories and individual agency in global economic dynamics. By focusing on diplomatic and commercial careers of a fascinating set of characters, Romaniello charts vibrant knowledge and information-sharing networks that were essential for the success of both empires in the Eurasian economic and geopolitical arenas.

A non-conventional economic history, Enterprising Empires traverses the micro-historical and the macro-economic to reevaluate Russian commercial prowess before 1800 and illuminate an overlooked area of Anglo-Russian cooperation and rivalry.

Matthew Romaniello is an Associate Professor of History at Weber State University and a historian of the Russian empire, commodities, and medicine. He is currently the editor of The Journal of World History and the former editor of Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies.

Vladislav Lilić is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the place and persistence of quasi-sovereignty in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Vladislav’s other fields of interest include the socio-legal history of empire, global history of statehood, and the history of international thought. You can reach him at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Guy Raffa, Associate Professor of Italian Studies at UT Austin, about his new book, Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy (Harvard University Press, 2020).

Dante’s Bones is an academic mystery story, the “graveyard history” of Dante Alighieri, the master poet of what has come to be called The Divine Comedy. This book is about Dante’s literal remains and the where and how they’ve been kept.

But in tracing that story, Guy Raffa tells a much broader tale about what Dante comes to mean over the past 700 years. Interview topics include thieving Franciscans, Lord Byron, Mussolini, and Longfellow, as we consider Dante the father of Italy and the Italian language, Dante the liberator, and Dante the secular saint. Discussion covers the author’s personal digital accompaniment to the Comedy, Danteworlds.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press), Uzma Quraishi (Sam Houston State University) follows the Cold War-era journeys of South Asian international students from U.S. Information Service reading rooms in India and Pakistan, to the halls of the University of Houston, to the suburban subdivisions of Alief and Sugar Land.

This student migration between 1960 and 1980 shows how public diplomacy programs overseas catalyzed the arrival of highly educated, middle-class Asians in the U.S. before the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. Drawing on archival documents, GIS data, and oral interviews, Quraishi investigates how Indian and Pakistani immigrants forged an “interethnic” identity in Houston and located themselves—both socially and geographically—in the midst of a booming yet segregated Sunbelt city.

She conceptualizes their mobility as “brown flight,” a process that simultaneously strengthened ethnic bonds even as it reinforced racial and class barriers. By exploring the links between international and local scales, Redefining the Immigrant South will interest scholars from many fields, including Asian American history; histories of the U.S. South, immigration, and U.S. foreign relations; and sub/urban studies.

Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beginning in the 1870s, migrant groups from Russia's steppes settled in the similar environment of the Great Plains. Many were Mennonites. They brought plants, in particular grain and fodder crops, trees and shrubs, as well as weeds. Following their example, and drawing on the expertise of émigré Russian-Jewish scientists, the US Department of Agriculture introduced more plants, agricultural sciences, especially soil science; and methods of planting trees to shelter the land from the wind. By the 1930s, many of the grain varieties in the Great Plains had been imported from the steppes. The fertile soil was classified using the Russian term 'chernozem'. The US Forest Service was planting shelterbelts using techniques pioneered in the steppes. And, tumbling across the plains was an invasive weed from the steppes: tumbleweed. Based on archival research in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, this book explores the unexpected Russian roots of Great Plains agriculture.

David Moon is a history professor at the University of York in the UK and holds an honorary professorship at University College London. He is a specialist on Russian, Eurasian, and transnational environmental history. He began his career as a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, at the southern end of the Great Plains, and completed his new book as a visiting professor at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, in the heart of the Eurasian steppes.The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which explores connections between these two regions, is his fifth book. He would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for supporting his work.

Steven Seegel is Professor of History at University of Northern Colorado.

 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence the human psyche through form, or elicit desired behaviors with environmental incentives, implementing what Joy Knoblauch calls “psychological functionalism.”

Recruited by federal construction and research programs for institutional reform and expansion—which included hospitals, mental health centers, prisons, and public housing—architects theorized new ways to control behavior and make it more functional by exercising soft power, or power through persuasion, with their designs.

In the 1960s –1970s era of anti-institutional sentiment, they hoped to offer an enlightened, palatable, more humane solution to larger social problems related to health, mental health, justice, and security of the population by applying psychological expertise to institutional design.

In turn, Knoblauch argues, architects gained new roles as researchers, organizers, and writers while theories of confinement, territory, and surveillance proliferated. The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America (University of Pittsburgh Press) explores psychological functionalism as a political tool and the architectural projects funded by a postwar nation in its efforts to govern, exert control over, and ultimately pacify its patients, prisoners, and residents.

Joy Knoblauch is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, where she teaches history and theory of architecture as an exploration of architecture's engagement with politics and science.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World (The University of North Carolina Press 2020) by Zachary Valentine Wright (Associate Professor in Residence in History and Religious Studies at Northwestern University in Qatar) maps the intellectual history of the largest Sufi order in West and North Africa, the Tijaniyya. Using diverse primary and archival sources, Wright locates the life, teachings, and legacies of Ahmad al-Tijani (d. 1815) within broader 18th century Islamic scholarly milieu of jurisprudence and theology and reformist and revivalist discourses, as well as the social and political climate of European colonialism and Ottoman control. Here, it was the methodology of tahqiq, or verification, as it was formulated through visionary encounters of the Prophet Muhammad and al-Tijani, that led to the formative epistemologies that defined the Muhammadan Path (tariqa Muhammadiyya) of the Tijaniyya. This path which is centered on the living legacy of Prophet Muhammad then defined Tijaniyya conceptualizations of the human condition and the shaykh-murid (master-disciple relationship), but also metaphysical, esoteric, and theological ideas and practices, such as notions of sainthood. Overall, the book offers fresh insights into the wide intellectual and networked traditions that led to the development of Tijaniyya, Sufism, and Islam in North Africa. The book will be of interest to those who work and think on Islam in West and North Africa, but also scholars of Sufism generally. The book is open-access and available online, and so will be a useful and accessible resource for courses on Islam and Sufism.

Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press), Uzma Quraishi (Sam Houston State University) follows the Cold War-era journeys of South Asian international students from U.S. Information Service reading rooms in India and Pakistan, to the halls of the University of Houston, to the suburban subdivisions of Alief and Sugar Land.

This student migration between 1960 and 1980 shows how public diplomacy programs overseas catalyzed the arrival of highly educated, middle-class Asians in the U.S. before the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. Drawing on archival documents, GIS data, and oral interviews, Quraishi investigates how Indian and Pakistani immigrants forged an “interethnic” identity in Houston and located themselves—both socially and geographically—in the midst of a booming yet segregated Sunbelt city.

She conceptualizes their mobility as “brown flight,” a process that simultaneously strengthened ethnic bonds even as it reinforced racial and class barriers. By exploring the links between international and local scales, Redefining the Immigrant South will interest scholars from many fields, including Asian American history; histories of the U.S. South, immigration, and U.S. foreign relations; and sub/urban studies.

Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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