New Books in History

‘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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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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The collapse of the Soviet Union famously opened new venues for the theories of nationalism and the study of processes and actors involved in these new nation-building processes. In Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), Diana T. Kudaibergenova takes the new states and nations of Eurasia that emerged in 1991, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and seeks to better understand the phenomenon of post-Soviet states tapping into nationalism to build legitimacy. What explains this difference in approaching nation-building after the collapse of the Soviet Union? What can a study of two very different trajectories of development tell us about the nature of power, state and nationalizing regimes of the ‘new’ states of Eurasia? Toward Nationalizing Regimes finds surprising similarities in two such apparently different countries—one “western” and democratic, the other “eastern” and dictatorial.

Dr. Kudaibergenova is a political sociologist who studies different intersections of power relations through concepts of state, nationalizing regimes and different ideologies. Trained as sociologist at Cambridge, she is currently a Research Associate on the leading UK Global Challenges Research Fund grant COMPASS that is based at the Centre of Development Studies (Department of Politics and International Studies) at the University of Cambridge.

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

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An original, rigorously researched volume that questions long-accepted paradigms concerning land ownership and its use in Africa.

Islam, Power, and Dependency in the Gambia River Basin (Rochester University Press, 2016) draws on new sources to offer an original approach to the study of land in African history. Documenting the impact of Islamization, the development of peanut production, and the institution of colonial rule on people living along the middle and lower Gambia River, the book shows how these waves of changes sweeping the region after 1850 altered local political and social arrangements, with important implications for the ability of elites to control land.

Assan Sarr argues for a nuanced understanding of land and its historic value in Africa. Moving beyond a recognition of the material value of land, Sarr's analysis highlights its cultural and social worth, pointing out the spiritual associations the land generated and the ways that certain people gained privileged access to those spiritual powers. By emphasizing that the land around the Gambia River both inspired and gave form to a cosmology of ritual and belief, the book points to what might be considered an indigenous tradition of ecological preservation and protection.

Madina Thiam is a PhD candidate in history at UCLA.

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Amanda L. Scott’s book, The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800 (Cornell University Press, 2020), focuses on the Basque seroras, a category of uncloistered religious women that were employed by parishes to perform a wide variety of functions. Somewhat like other religious laywomen like Belgian beguines, Italian tertiaries, or Castilian beatas, they occupied an intermediate zone of honorable possibility for women between marriage and the convent. Unlike women in those other categories, however, the serora enjoyed financial security and respectability in her community in part because of her protection by local communities and church authorities.

By situating the seroras within these social dynamics, The Basque Seroras broadens the way we conceive of female religious life and the opportunities it could provide. It also crucially revises our understanding of reform and consumption of legal resources at the local level. Following the Council of Trent, uncloistered religious women were broadly condemned and forced to join established religious orders; these directives notwithstanding, the seroras managed to survive well into the eighteenth century. Scott contends that even though the Counter Reformation program of centralization and standardization is often characterized as an immediate – and repressive – success, the seroras demonstrate the variability of local enforcement and the ways parishes could successfully press for leniency or reach tacit compromise with authorities. These devout laywomen, who straddled secular and religious spheres, were instrumental in this process of negotiated reform.

Elizabeth Spragins is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. Her current book project is on corpses in early modern Mediterranean narrative. You can follow her on Twitter @elspragins.

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Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States 1750–1850 (Palgrave MacMillian, 2019) offers a pioneering study of slavery in the Italian states. Documenting previously unstudied cases of slavery in six Italian cities—Naples, Caserta, Rome, Palermo, Livorno and Genoa—Giulia Bonazza investigates why slavery survived into the middle of the nineteenth century, even as the abolitionist debate raged internationally and most states had abolished it. She contextualizes these cases of residual slavery from 1750–1850, focusing on two juridical and political watersheds: after the Napoleonic period, when the Italian states (with the exception of the Papal States) adopted constitutions outlawing slavery; and after the Congress of Vienna, when diplomatic relations between the Italian states, France and Great Britain intensified and slavery was condemned in terms that covered only the Atlantic slave trade. By excavating the lives of men and women who remained in slavery after abolition, this book sheds new light on the broader Mediterranean and transatlantic dimensions of slavery in the Italian states.

Giulia Bonazza is currently a post-doctoral researcher on the international project Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (CIRESC-CNRS Paris).

Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London.

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The Cold War, the on again and off again confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union is one of the most famous historical episodes of the short twentieth century. Accordingly, it is not surprising that the Cold War was an event which has divided historians since the beginnings of serious historiography on the subject began in the mid-1960s. With the chief points of contention being: who commenced it and why? When did it begin? How did the parameters of the confrontation between the two Super-powers, the United States and the Soviet Union evolve if at all? And why did the seemingly interminable struggle between the two power blocs suddenly end in the Fall of 1989? To help explore these questions and to hopefully provide some answers, will be the topic of the next episode of Arguing History, where Professor Jeremy Black of Exeter University and Dr. Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society explore these questions and more.

Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Exeter. And a Senior Associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge with a First, he is the author of well over one-hundred & fifty books. In 2008 he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.

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 for Chatham House’s International Affairs, and the University of Rouen’s online periodical Cercles.

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The collapse of the Soviet Union famously opened new venues for the theories of nationalism and the study of processes and actors involved in these new nation-building processes. In Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), Diana T. Kudaibergenova takes the new states and nations of Eurasia that emerged in 1991, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and seeks to better understand the phenomenon of post-Soviet states tapping into nationalism to build legitimacy. What explains this difference in approaching nation-building after the collapse of the Soviet Union? What can a study of two very different trajectories of development tell us about the nature of power, state and nationalizing regimes of the ‘new’ states of Eurasia? Toward Nationalizing Regimes finds surprising similarities in two such apparently different countries—one “western” and democratic, the other “eastern” and dictatorial.

Dr. Kudaibergenova is a political sociologist who studies different intersections of power relations through concepts of state, nationalizing regimes and different ideologies. Trained as sociologist at Cambridge, she is currently a Research Associate on the leading UK Global Challenges Research Fund grant COMPASS that is based at the Centre of Development Studies (Department of Politics and International Studies) at the University of Cambridge.

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

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Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States 1750–1850 (Palgrave MacMillian, 2019) offers a pioneering study of slavery in the Italian states. Documenting previously unstudied cases of slavery in six Italian cities—Naples, Caserta, Rome, Palermo, Livorno and Genoa—Giulia Bonazza investigates why slavery survived into the middle of the nineteenth century, even as the abolitionist debate raged internationally and most states had abolished it. She contextualizes these cases of residual slavery from 1750–1850, focusing on two juridical and political watersheds: after the Napoleonic period, when the Italian states (with the exception of the Papal States) adopted constitutions outlawing slavery; and after the Congress of Vienna, when diplomatic relations between the Italian states, France and Great Britain intensified and slavery was condemned in terms that covered only the Atlantic slave trade. By excavating the lives of men and women who remained in slavery after abolition, this book sheds new light on the broader Mediterranean and transatlantic dimensions of slavery in the Italian states.

Giulia Bonazza is currently a post-doctoral researcher on the international project Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (CIRESC-CNRS Paris).

Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London.

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

Amanda L. Scott’s book, The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800 (Cornell University Press, 2020), focuses on the Basque seroras, a category of uncloistered religious women that were employed by parishes to perform a wide variety of functions. Somewhat like other religious laywomen like Belgian beguines, Italian tertiaries, or Castilian beatas, they occupied an intermediate zone of honorable possibility for women between marriage and the convent. Unlike women in those other categories, however, the serora enjoyed financial security and respectability in her community in part because of her protection by local communities and church authorities.

By situating the seroras within these social dynamics, The Basque Seroras broadens the way we conceive of female religious life and the opportunities it could provide. It also crucially revises our understanding of reform and consumption of legal resources at the local level. Following the Council of Trent, uncloistered religious women were broadly condemned and forced to join established religious orders; these directives notwithstanding, the seroras managed to survive well into the eighteenth century. Scott contends that even though the Counter Reformation program of centralization and standardization is often characterized as an immediate – and repressive – success, the seroras demonstrate the variability of local enforcement and the ways parishes could successfully press for leniency or reach tacit compromise with authorities. These devout laywomen, who straddled secular and religious spheres, were instrumental in this process of negotiated reform.

Elizabeth Spragins is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. Her current book project is on corpses in early modern Mediterranean narrative. You can follow her on Twitter @elspragins.

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