New Books in History

Historians have long treated the Atlantic and Indian Ocean routes of early modern French empire separately. But, early modern people understood France as a bi-oceanic empire, connected by vast but strong pathways of commercial, intellectual, and legal exchange. Laurie M. Wood’s Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire (Yale UP, 2020) recasts our view of France’s empire by evaluating the interwoven trajectories of the people, like itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France’s first empire in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the long eighteenth century. Imperial subjects like these sought political and legal influence via law courts, with strategies that reflected local and regional priorities, especially in regards to slavery, war, and trade. Courts became liaisons between France and new colonial possessions.

Byline: Dr. Julia M. Gossard is assistant professor of history and distinguished assistant professor of honor’s education at Utah State University. A historian of 18th-century France, Julia’s manuscript, Young Subjects, examines children as important actors in social reform, state-building, and imperial projects across the early modern French world. Dr. Gossard is active on Twitter. To learn more about her teaching, research, and experience in digital humanities, visit her website.

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Historians have long treated the Atlantic and Indian Ocean routes of early modern French empire separately. But, early modern people understood France as a bi-oceanic empire, connected by vast but strong pathways of commercial, intellectual, and legal exchange. Laurie M. Wood’s Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire (Yale UP, 2020) recasts our view of France’s empire by evaluating the interwoven trajectories of the people, like itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France’s first empire in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the long eighteenth century. Imperial subjects like these sought political and legal influence via law courts, with strategies that reflected local and regional priorities, especially in regards to slavery, war, and trade. Courts became liaisons between France and new colonial possessions.

Byline: Dr. Julia M. Gossard is assistant professor of history and distinguished assistant professor of honor’s education at Utah State University. A historian of 18th-century France, Julia’s manuscript, Young Subjects, examines children as important actors in social reform, state-building, and imperial projects across the early modern French world. Dr. Gossard is active on Twitter. To learn more about her teaching, research, and experience in digital humanities, visit her website.

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In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of Chicago police officers routinely tortured criminal suspects in their custody, while fellow cops, state attorneys and elected officials looked the other way. In his book, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements For Police Accountability in Chicago (University of Chicago Press), Andrew Baer explains how the eponymous detective and others hid their violence, and the arduous struggle to get Burge fired and win reparations for survivors.

He blends legal and social history with ethnography to chronicle the labyrinthine legal system that concealed this torture, and the challenges of political coalition-building across class, race, and prison walls. The result is a history of the fraying reform discourse with which we live.

Andrew S. Baer is assistant professor of history with a secondary appointment in African American studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Patrick Reilly studies US history, race, and civilian cooperation with police at Vanderbilt University.

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Elizabeth Shesko’s Conscript Nation: Coercion and Citizenship in the Bolivian Barracks (University of Pittsburgh Press) is an intimate and rich history of the militarization of Bolivia over the course of the twentieth century through the lives of the men conscripted to serve.

Beginning with the Civil War of 1899 and elite fears of Aymara military might and autonomy and ending with the military coup of René Barrientos in 1964, Shesko shows how compulsory male conscription emerged out of desires to modernize the country and assimilate rural indigenous communities.

Only nominally universal, conscription was in fact deeply unequal and disproportionately affected poor urban and rural men, most of whom were not eligible to vote because of property and literacy requirements before the Revolution of 1952. Over the course of the book, however, Shesko shows how some men turned their service and the networks they developed in the barracks into a means of demanding citizenship and the right to make claims on the patria.

This new generation of conscripts would go on to transform the political and cultural life of the nation, especially in the wake of the disastrous Chaco War against Paraguay in the 1930s and in the development of political coalitions that took power in the National Revolution of 1952.

Conscript Nation ends in 1964 as Cold War politics, US intervention, and transnational counterinsurgency networks were transforming military culture yet again, in Bolivia as well as Latin America. However, Shesko suggests that even in this period, service to the nation formed a template that subsequent generations, up to and including former President Evo Morales could mobilize to assert their right to belong and to lead in a country riven by racial and economic inequalities.

This book will be of value for Bolivianists, military historians, as well as students of citizenship and race in Latin America, as it offers a window into the everyday lives and social worlds of Bolivian men who made up the armed forces.

Elizabeth Shesko is an Assistant Professor of History at Oakland University in Michigan

Elena McGrath is an Assistant Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, NY.

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Edward Alpers’s The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a concise yet an immensely informative introduction to the Indian Ocean world, which remains the least studied of the world's geographic regions. Yet there have been major cultural exchanges across its waters and around its shores from the third millennium B.C.E. to the present day. Historian Edward Alpers explores the complex issues involved in cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean Rim region over the course of this long period of time by combining a historical approach with the insights of anthropology, art history, ethnomusicology, and geography.

The Indian Ocean witnessed several significant diasporas during the past two millennia, including migrations of traders, indentured laborers, civil servants, sailors, and slaves throughout the entire basin. The Indian Ocean in World History also discusses issues of trade and production that show the long history of exchange throughout the Indian Ocean world; politics and empire-building by both regional and European powers; and the role of religion and religious conversion, focusing mainly on Islam, but also mentioning Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. Using a broad geographic perspective, the book includes references to connections between the Indian Ocean world and the Americas. Moving into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Alpers looks at issues including the new configuration of colonial territorial boundaries after World War I, and the search for oil reserves.

Edward Alpers is a professor of history at UCLA.

Kelvin Ng, co-hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

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‘THOSE THAT DENY THEIR HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT!’ So Tweeted the 45th President of the United States to his 80 million followers in June, as American streets once again were transformed into spaces of protest. It turns out that the President prefers one particular route between the American past and present, and has vowed to defend both it and its symbols against all comers. The once unifying power of the national narrative is now one of many of points of sharp and often violent division.

This is also true of the United Kingdom as it seeks to balance its historical self-image with the realities of its colonizing past. Central to all of this is the question of how we rewrite and debate our constructions of the past, a collective human activity as hardwired into our cultures as music, dance, or art.

Daniel Woolf is Professor of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He is the author and editor of many essays and books on history and historical thought in early modern Britain, including the prize-winning The Social Circulation of the Past. Woolf has also served as general editor of the 5 volume Oxford History of Historical Writing, and has published The Global History of History in 2012.

All the while, he has held a number of senior administrative posts, most recently serving a ten year term as the 20th Principal and Vice Chancellor of Queen’s University. His A Concise History of History: Global Historiography from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press) provides a cogent and compact survey of historical practice from ancient times to the present. Its point of departure is that those of us in ‘the west’ could do with some consideration of historical traditions from other parts of the globe.

Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster.

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Historian and academic Roger Moorhouse, revisits the opening campaign of World War II, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939., in his new book Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (Basic Book, 2020). Although the German invasion was the cause of the outbreak of World War II, oddly there has not been much by way of English language treatments of this pivotal historical episode. With this fine and highly readable narrative history, Moorhouse more than makes up for this omission. Combing English, German and crucially Polish language sources, Moorhouse reveals to the reader the German campaign from start to finish. Along the way showing that stereotypical Western images of the Polish army: cavalry charging tanks, are mythological in nature and inaccurate. Moorhouse also details for the reader the shameful refusal of the British and French governments to assist their Polish ally. Equally well illustrated is the Soviet Union’s invasion of Eastern Poland. With the Soviet mythology that the invasion was mostly ‘peaceful’ and well-received, just that: a myth. In short, Roger Moorhouse presents to the reader a highly interesting narrative history of an important historical episode. All from the author of Berlin at War and The Devil’s Alliance.

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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To many observers, European law seems like the endpoint of a mostly random walk through history. Certainly the trajectory of legal systems in the West over the past 2,500 years is far from self-evident. In A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia (Harvard UP, 2019), Tamar Herzog offers a new road map that reveals underlying patterns and unexpected connections. By identifying what European law was, where its iterations could be found, who was allowed to make and implement it, and what the results were, she ties legal norms to their historical circumstances, and allows readers to grasp their malleability and fragility.

Herzog describes how successive European legal systems built upon one another, from ancient times through the establishment and growth of the European Union. Roman law formed the backbone of each configuration, though the way it was understood, used, and reshaped varied dramatically from one century and place to the next. Only by considering Continental civil law and English common law together do we see how they drew from and enriched this shared tradition.

Expanding the definition of Europe to include its colonial domains, Herzog explains that British and Spanish empires in the New World were not only recipients of European legal traditions but also incubators of new ideas. Their experiences, as well as the constant tension between overreaching ideas and naive localism, explain how European law refashioned itself as the epitome of reason and as a system with potentially global applications.

Tamar Herzog is Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor in the History Department at Harvard University, and Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Historian and academic Roger Moorhouse, revisits the opening campaign of World War II, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939., in his new book Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (Basic Book, 2020). Although the German invasion was the cause of the outbreak of World War II, oddly there has not been much by way of English language treatments of this pivotal historical episode. With this fine and highly readable narrative history, Moorhouse more than makes up for this omission. Combing English, German and crucially Polish language sources, Moorhouse reveals to the reader the German campaign from start to finish. Along the way showing that stereotypical Western images of the Polish army: cavalry charging tanks, are mythological in nature and inaccurate. Moorhouse also details for the reader the shameful refusal of the British and French governments to assist their Polish ally. Equally well illustrated is the Soviet Union’s invasion of Eastern Poland. With the Soviet mythology that the invasion was mostly ‘peaceful’ and well-received, just that: a myth. In short, Roger Moorhouse presents to the reader a highly interesting narrative history of an important historical episode. All from the author of Berlin at War and The Devil’s Alliance.

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

To many observers, European law seems like the endpoint of a mostly random walk through history. Certainly the trajectory of legal systems in the West over the past 2,500 years is far from self-evident. In A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia (Harvard UP, 2019), Tamar Herzog offers a new road map that reveals underlying patterns and unexpected connections. By identifying what European law was, where its iterations could be found, who was allowed to make and implement it, and what the results were, she ties legal norms to their historical circumstances, and allows readers to grasp their malleability and fragility.

Herzog describes how successive European legal systems built upon one another, from ancient times through the establishment and growth of the European Union. Roman law formed the backbone of each configuration, though the way it was understood, used, and reshaped varied dramatically from one century and place to the next. Only by considering Continental civil law and English common law together do we see how they drew from and enriched this shared tradition.

Expanding the definition of Europe to include its colonial domains, Herzog explains that British and Spanish empires in the New World were not only recipients of European legal traditions but also incubators of new ideas. Their experiences, as well as the constant tension between overreaching ideas and naive localism, explain how European law refashioned itself as the epitome of reason and as a system with potentially global applications.

Tamar Herzog is Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor in the History Department at Harvard University, and Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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