The Harvard Brief

In The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China (Harvard UP, 2023), Dr. Xin Zhang tells the story of globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as experienced by ordinary people in the Chinese river town of Zhenjiang.

On July 21, 1842, numerous women in the southeastern Chinese city of Zhenjiang chose to end their lives rather than succumb to invading British soldiers. These events, occurring during the First Opium War (1839-42), exemplify the various ways in which global changes encroached upon local Chinese communities in the nineteenth century. Previous historical accounts have primarily depicted this encounter as a European challenge to a submissive China, while others sought to uncover the nation's "authentic" history through native sources. In contrast, this book presents a groundbreaking approach to modern Chinese history, focusing on the intricate negotiations between local societies and global transformations.

This unique "glocal" perspective is developed through three case studies that explore warfare, commerce, and technology in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By avoiding a narrow European or Chinese standpoint, these case studies meticulously illustrate how wider processes of modern imperialism, economic integration, and technological progress reconfigured the fabric of everyday life. The book vividly portrays the experiences of ordinary Chinese individuals as they grapple with forces that reshaped the entire world. Terrified residents of towns resort to self-destruction to evade British soldiers, unscrupulous brokers exploit prostitutes to facilitate their business dealings, and small-scale merchants embrace steam-powered ships for the first time to transport their goods to market.

Ultimately, this book reveals how the forces of globalization in the 1800s were filtered through local idiosyncrasies, with no single region of the world serving as an ultimate "core," including Europe. It challenges the notion of a centralized world and proves that not only is the world flat, but it lacks a defined center.

Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in History at Purdue University. She is interested in the circulation of people, goods, and ideas and how societies in history and today cope with the challenges wrought by increased travel in aspects of culture, politics, commerce, law, science, and technology.

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Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis (Harvard UP, 2023) is a sweeping intellectual history of the concept of economic scarcity—its development across five hundred years of European thought and its decisive role in fostering the climate crisis.

Modern economics presumes a particular view of scarcity, in which human beings are innately possessed of infinite desires and society must therefore facilitate endless growth and consumption irrespective of nature’s limits. Yet as Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind show, this vision of scarcity is historically novel and was not inevitable even in the age of capitalism. Rather, it reflects the costly triumph of infinite-growth ideologies across centuries of European economic thought—at the expense of traditions that sought to live within nature’s constraints.

The dominant conception of scarcity today holds that, rather than master our desires, humans must master nature to meet those desires. Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind argue that this idea was developed by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Samuel Hartlib, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson, who laid the groundwork for today’s hegemonic politics of growth. Yet proponents of infinite growth have long faced resistance from agrarian radicals, romantic poets, revolutionary socialists, ecofeminists, and others. These critics—including the likes of Gerrard Winstanley, Dorothy Wordsworth, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt—embraced conceptions of scarcity in which our desires, rather than nature, must be mastered to achieve the social good. In so doing, they dramatically reenvisioned how humans might interact with both nature and the economy.

Following these conflicts into the twenty-first century, Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind insist that we need new, sustainable models of economic thinking to address the climate crisis. Scarcity is not only a critique of infinite growth, but also a timely invitation to imagine alternative ways of flourishing on Earth.

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is the Associate Professor of British History at the University of Chicago. His current research deals with a set of closely related themes in environmental history, history of science, and political economy. 

Carl Wennerlind is the Professor of History and Chair at Barnard College, Columbia University. He specializes in the history of early modern Europe, with a focus on intellectual history and political economy. He is particularly interested in the historical development of ideas about money and credit; ideas on the relationship between economy and nature; and ideas about "improvement" and "modernization."

Thomas Edward Kingston is a Berkeley Fellow in South and Southeast Asian Studies and PhD Student with a designated emphasis in Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley

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Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the brutal inequities of slave-powered capitalism.

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses—and meager public health infrastructure—a person’s only protection against the scourge was to “get acclimated” by surviving the disease. About half of those who contracted yellow fever died.

Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans’s strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms “immunocapital.” As this highly original analysis shows, white survivors could leverage their immunity as evidence that they had paid their biological dues and could then pursue economic and political advancement. For enslaved Blacks, the story was different. Immunity protected them from yellow fever, but as embodied capital, they saw the social and monetary value of their acclimation accrue to their white owners. Whereas immunity conferred opportunity and privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor.

The question of good health—who has it, who doesn’t, and why—is always in part political. Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard UP, 2022) shows how powerful nineteenth-century white Orleanians—all allegedly immune—pushed this politics to the extreme. They constructed a society that capitalized mortal risk and equated perceived immunity with creditworthiness and reliability. Instead of trying to curb yellow fever through sanitation or quarantines, immune white Orleanians took advantage of the chaos disease caused. Immunological discrimination therefore became one more form of bias in a society premised on inequality, one more channel by which capital disciplined and divided the population.

Kendall Dinniene is an English PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work, revealing the contours of citizenship and paths toward liberation.

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German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Peter Wilson challenges this narrative. Looking beyond Prussia to German-speaking Europe across the last five centuries, Wilson finds little unique or preordained in German militarism or warfighting.

Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 (Harvard UP, 2023) takes as its starting point the consolidation of the Holy Roman Empire, which created new mechanisms for raising troops but also for resolving disputes diplomatically. Both the empire and the Swiss Confederation were largely defensive in orientation, while German participation in foreign wars was most often in partnership with allies. The primary aggressor in Central Europe was not Prussia but the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, yet Austria's strength owed much to its ability to secure allies. Prussia, meanwhile, invested in militarization but maintained a part-time army well into the nineteenth century. Alongside Switzerland, which relied on traditional militia, both states exemplify the longstanding civilian element within German military power.

Only after Prussia's unexpected victory over France in 1871 did Germans and outsiders come to believe in a German gift for warfare--a special capacity for high-speed, high-intensity combat that could overcome numerical disadvantage. It took two world wars to expose the fallacy of German military genius. Yet even today, Wilson argues, Germany's strategic position is misunderstood. The country now seen as a bastion of peace spends heavily on defense in comparison to its peers and is deeply invested in less kinetic contemporary forms of coercive power.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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During the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of diggers, prospectors, merchants, and dealers extracted and shipped over 50 million carats of diamonds from South Africa to London. The primary supplier to the world, South Africa's diamond fields became one of the formative sites of modern capitalist production. At each stage of the diamond's route through the British empire and beyond-from Cape Town to London, from Amsterdam to New York City-carbon gems were primarily mined, processed, appraised, and sold by Jews.

In A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds and Jews in a Modern Setting (Oxford University Press, 2023), historian Dr. Saskia Coenen Snyder traces how once-peripheral Jewish populations became the central architects of a new, global exchange of diamonds that connected African sites of supply, European manufacturing centers, American retailers, and western consumers. Centuries of restrictions had limited Jews to trade and finance, businesses that often heavily relied on internal networks. Jews were well-positioned to become key players in the earliest stage of the diamond trade and its growth into a global industry, a development fueled by technological advancements, a dramatic rise in the demand of luxury goods, and an abundance of rough stones. Relying on mercantile and familial ties across continents, Jews created a highly successful commodity chain that included buyers, brokers, cutters, factory owners, financiers, and retailers.

Working within a diasporic ethnic community that bridged city and countryside, metropole and colony, Jews helped build a flourishing diamond industry, notably Hatton Garden in London and the Diamond District of New York City, and a place for themselves in the modern world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Balkans to prevent a genocide, or would departing from postwar Germany’s pacifist tradition open the door to renewed militarism? In short, when Germans said “never again,” did they mean “never again Auschwitz” or “never again war”?

Looking beyond solemn statements and well-meant monuments, Andrew I. Port examines how the Nazi past shaped German responses to the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda—and further, how these foreign atrocities recast Germans’ understanding of their own horrific history. In the late 1970s, the reign of the Khmer Rouge received relatively little attention from a firmly antiwar public that was just “discovering” the Holocaust. By the 1990s, the genocide of the Jews was squarely at the center of German identity, a tectonic shift that inspired greater involvement in Bosnia and, to a lesser extent, Rwanda. Germany’s increased willingness to use force in defense of others reflected the enthusiastic embrace of human rights by public officials and ordinary citizens. At the same time, conservatives welcomed the opportunity for a more active international role involving military might—to the chagrin of pacifists and progressives at home.

Making the lessons, limits, and liabilities of politics driven by memories of a troubled history harrowingly clear, Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust (Harvard UP, 2023) is a story with deep resonance for any country confronting a dark past.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

Uncertainty about the way a state should be working is not necessarily produced by having multiple voices offering competing ideas about it. As Maura Dykstra’s Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State (Harvard UP, 2022) shows, one relatively uncontested pole of political power is perfectly capable of generating uncertainty on its own including, paradoxically, through the very act of seeking surety.

As Dykstra documents in a fabulously intricate study of administrative and court documents, searches for routinised and carefully monitored ways of running the empire during the Qing dynasty (1636-1911) motivated a range of reforms to the bureaucracy and those that managed it. Over the course of the dynasty’s first centuries these were relatively successful in granting the central authorities in Beijing greater oversight. Yet the imperial centre did not always like what it saw, and the more it got to know about activities in the provinces, the more it came to doubt whether all was well across the realm, a process which eventually culminated in a vast crisis of imperial self-knowledge.

Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia.

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An Indian Theory of Defeasible Reasoning: The Doctrine of upādhi in the Upādhidarpaṇa (Harvard University Press, 2022) is the first translation of this anonymous Navya-Nyāya treatise predating Gaṅgeśa. Eberhard Guhe’s book includes a translation as well as an introduction to the important idea of upādhi, which vitiates inferential reasoning. (Suppose smoke accompanies fire only when the fuel being burnt is wet. This fact would be an upādhi for the inference “There is smoke on the mountain because there is fire on the mountain,” since smoke’s existence doesn’t guarantee fire.) In his quest to define the upādhi as a vitiator of inferential reasoning, the author of the Upādhidarpaṇa takes a controversial position on self-dependence, that the general defining characteristic of an upādhi is property of itself, which Guhe explicates as a non-wellfounded property concept. Beyond the English translation and edition of the Sanskrit text, An Indian Theory of Defeasible Reasoning introduces readers to the basics of Nyāya epistemology and logic, beginning with the idea of inference in early texts and moving through more sophisticated reconstructions by comparison with enumerative induction and set-theoretic approaches to logic.

Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff.

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The ideas of equity and equality are all over the news, yet there seems to be little agreement on what exactly each term means. Political theorist and intellectual historian Teresa Bejan of Oriel College, Oxford discusses the origins of our notions of equality, from the Roman Empire to the present, focusing particularly on Early Modernity and the influence of the French Revolution and English political movements like the Levellers, Diggers, and Quakers. Along the way, she uncovers surprising facts like the relationship between equality and hierarchy, and that Marx was not as pro-equality as is now popularly believed.

Her recent 3-part Charles E. Test lecture series for the Madison Program, “First Among Equals”

Her book Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard UP, 2019).

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves―even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them.

In Privacy's Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies (Harvard UP, 2018), Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information.

Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, Hartzog contends that privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Privacy’s Blueprint aims to correct this by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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