New Books In World Affairs

Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do they happen so differently in different places? In Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China (University of California Press, 2013), Michael J. Hathaway explores these questions in a rich study of Yunnan’s engagement with environmentalism and the World Wildlife Fund. As celebrated in the book’s title, Hathaway introduces the notion of changing “environmental winds” as a tool for understanding the transformative power of social formations in Yunnan and beyond. The narrative emphasizes the agency of many different kinds of actors in the co-creation of environmentalism in Yunnan, from humans to elephants, and pays special attention to the importance of Chinese intellectuals and local Yunnan people in incorporating China into a global conservation circuit. The story ranges from the global 1960s, touching on China’s role in the anticolonial movement in

This is a very timely book, coming as it does in the midst of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 — the war that gave birth to the maroon community of Prospect Bluff, Florida. In his book The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World (UP of Florida, 2013), Nathaniel Millett shows how an assortment of free African-Americans, escaped slaves, Africans, and Afro-Indians created a thriving, highly organized community in the shadow of the expanding slave empire of the southwestern United States. Inspired by the singular figure of Edward Nichols, and Irish-born British officer of staunch anti-slavery convictions, the men and women of Prospect Bluff forged a community that realized their deepest understandings of freedom in the midst of the era of Atlantic revolutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity, Melissa Aronczyk locates the rise of nation branding as a response to the perceived need to sculpt national identity in the face of a fiercely competitive global economy. In tracking the history of the nation-branding phenomenon, Aronczyk recounts the rise and spread of the very idea of national “competitiveness,” a discourse that, in effect, created a market that branding specialists then tapped. The book engages with the large scholarly literature on nations and nationalism, arguing that nation branding should not be dismissed as merely the invasion of business practices into the national imaginary–though it has this character, undeniably–but that the practice should also be read as a discourse that maintains, extends, and reconstitutes the nation. Based on dozens of interviews with nation-branding specialist over a five-year period, Aronczyk develops major case studies of Poland and Canada in particular, and substantial treatments of a numbe

The Atlantic magazine recently asked its readers to name the greatest athlete of all time. The usual suspects were present among the nominees: Jesse Owens, Pele, Wayne Gretzky, Don Bradman. Given that these were readers of The Atlantic, there were some more thoughtful answers as well: Canadian athlete and cancer-research activist Terry Fox, Czech distance runner Emil Zapotek, and Milos of Croton, the six-time wrestling champion of the ancient Olympics. If we put that question to historians Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul, their likely response would be someone who rarely gets a mention on best-athlete lists, but certainly deserves a place: Duke Kahanamoku. A five-time Olympic medalist in swimming, Duke traveled the world to give swimming exhibitions, drawing thousands at each stop. And wherever there was a beach and a break, Duke also demonstrated the sport he had mastered at Waikiki Beach, where he had grown up. The surfing cultures of Southern California and Australia have their origins in visits by Duke K

We tend to understand the nuclear age as a historical break, a geopolitical and technological rupture. In Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2012), Gabrielle Hecht transforms this understanding by arguing instead that nuclearity is a process, a phenomenon, a property distributed among and across objects. In this multi-sited study of several localities in Africa, Hecht weaves together narratives of atomic history, African history, and the histories of mining, economies, and health. Part I of the book looks carefully at the invention of a global market in uranium, exploring the place of African ores in a worldwide uranium trade in a series of accounts of the market and technopolitics in areas that include Niger, Gabon, Namibia, Europe, and the US. Part II focuses on the bodies and work of African mine workers and the production of nuclearity in the context of occupational health in locations that include Madagascar, Gabon, South Africa, and Namibia. Being Nuclear is grounded on sev

While it has become typical to see Filipina/o migrants working in nursing or domestic work in the United States, many are surprised to see Filipina/os doing the same work in Hong Kong, Israel, and Dubai. Indeed, Filipina/o workers are ubiquitous around the globe, and may be the world’s first truly global labor force. In Robyn Rodriguez‘s new book, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2010),Rodriguez explores labor brokerage as a global capitalist strategy wherein the Philippine state mobilizes its citizens and sends them abroad to work for employers throughout the world while generating profit from the remittances that migrants send back to their families and loved ones remaining in the Philippines. Rodriguez traces this trend in Filipina/o overseas workers, which has become one of the largest labor export systems in the world. Ultimately, she questions how and why citizens from the Philippines have come to be the most globalized workforce on

There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). In his impressive study, Jennings explores more than one hundred years in the history of this colonial and now postcolonial city. Over the course of fourteen chapters, the book examines issues of space and place; disease and health; colonial violence and injustice; culture and leisure; the impacts of war, race and ethnicity, class, gender, memory, and nostalgia. Using Dalat’s past and present as a way into some of the deep contradictions and anxieties of French colonialism,

There are 13 million Jews in the world today. There are also 13 million Senegalese, 13 million Zambians, 13 million Zimbabweans, and 13 million Chadians. These are tiny–a realist might say “insignificant”–nations. But here’s the funny–though that doesn’t seem like the right world–thing. One of them is the focus of a persistent, virulent, worldwide prejudice, an intense hostility that is totally out of proportion with its size and, the realist would add, significance. And you know exactly which one it is. In his eye-opening book The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism (Little, Brown and Co., 2013), Daniel Jonah Goldhagen explores the historical origins of anti-semitism in Europe and its remarkable spread after the Second World War. It is, at least to me, a bizarre and discouraging story. There is, of course, no rational basis for anti-semitism per se. Yet it is everywhere, part of national cultures and discourses throughout the world. This is true where there are Jews (always i

It takes two to tango, right? Indeed it does. But it’s also true that someone has got to ask someone else to dance before any tangoing is done. Beginning in the 1960s, the American intellectual elite argued–and seemed to really believe–that the United States either started the Cold War full stop or played a very important (and knowing) role in setting it in motion. That consensus (if it was a consensus) has been destroyed by the work of a raft of historians who, having gotten fresh access to materials from the Soviet side, are now offering fresh–and revisionist–interpretations of the beginnings of the Cold War. One such historian is Robert Gellately. In his new book Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (Knopf, 2013), Gellately argues that Stalin saw the world in binary terms: there were capitalists and communists. ALL the capitalists were bad. This was obviously true of the Nazi Germans. But it was also true of his wartime allies, the Democratic Americans, British, and French. So when

What exactly is genocide? Is there a fundamental difference between episodes of genocide and how we go about our daily life? Or can it be said that the roots of the modern world, or civilization itself, has the potential to produce genocide? If the latter is true, then what does is say about us and the society we have constructed for ourselves? Christopher Powell, in his illuminating new book Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011) provides new insights into these and related questions. For Powell, the idea that genocide is something that happens when civilization fails, or is something that should be understood as fundamentally different or wholly alien or outside of our day-to-day life, is suspect. Rather, he links genocide and the human potential for atrocity to civilization itself. In other words, there are clues present in the modern world, as well as the modern state structure, that can help us better understand the process of genocide and what mak

Thanks in no small part to John K. Thornton, professor of history at Boston University, the field of Atlantic history has emerged as one of the most exciting fields of historical research over the past quarter century. Thornton has long insisted that the the age of discovery fostered linkages between the Americas, Europe, and Africa that transformed the diverse peoples of all three regions. Europeans did not simply impose their will upon Africans and Native Americans. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) showcases Thornton’s deep research in the primary source material of multiple nationalities — and languages — to provide the most comprehensive interpretation we have of how the first era of globalization transformed the cultures of all the peoples of the Atlantic basin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

This cat has a complicated history. In addition to filling stationery stores across the globe with cute objects festooned with little whiskers and bowties, Hello Kitty has inspired tributes from Lisa Loeb and Lady Gaga, and artistic renderings from Hello Kitty Nativity to Hello (Sex) Kitty: Mad Asian Bitch on Wheels. In Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific (Duke University Press, 2013), Christine Yano offers a fascinating study of Hello Kitty as a global commodity and “world idol.” Focusing on the period from 1998-present, the book considers the iconic spread and transformation of Sanrio’s character in the context of marketing strategies based on creating an ideal of “happiness” sustained through gift-mediated sociality and the production of nostalgia. Yano considers the Hello Kitty phenomenon as a process of “pink globalization” in which Kitty becomes a cultural “wink,” an invitation to play, a friend, a mediator of the realms of childhood and adult desire. The narrative is grounded in a

Joseph Nye‘s latest book is Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era (Princeton University Press, 2013). Professor Nye is University Distinguished Professor and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy. Nye’s long career and major contributions to scholarship on international relations and American foreign policy make this new book a welcome new publication. He reaches some surprising conclusions about how to judge the leadership of former US presidents in the international arena. He writes “I conclude below that some presidents matter, but not always the ones who are most dramatic or inspiring” and continues “I found to my surprise that while transformational presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan changed how Americans see the world, transactional presidents like Dwight Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush were sometimes more effective an

Throughout the centuries, in cultures around the world, people have played games. But it has only been in the modern age, in the last 250 years or so, that people have competed in and watched sports. Modern sports are distinct in practice and purpose from the ball games of Mayan Central America or the chaotic scrums of medieval European villages. Historians have specified these traits and plumbed their origins, typically finding the hearth in England of the 18th and 19th centuries. What was it about England that gave rise to modern sport? Was it the emerging political liberty and notions of rights? The freedom of men to join clubs and associations, or the expansion of the popular press? Was it the decline of feudalism after the revolutionary events of the 1600s, or even the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who posited that all of life is competition? Tony Collins points to all of these factors as significant for the birth of modern sport in England. But at the root of all this, the fundamental driver of sport’s d

Two guys are watching Premier League highlights, when onto the TV screen comes Rory Delap, then with Stoke City, doing one of his renowned throw-ins from the touchline directly into the box. One guy, a native of the American Midwest who’d been raised on baseball, basketball, and hockey, is amazed by the throw and the havoc it creates in front of the opponent’s goal. “Why don’t other teams do that?” he asks. The other guy, who grew up with soccer in Germany, explains that Delap is an unusual player, having been trained as a javelin thrower. “But can’t teams train a guy to make throws like that?” asks the first guy. “It’s not what you do unless you have to,” answers the second guy, who had played semi-pro soccer in his younger days. “Well, why not? It seems to work for them.” The former footballer is stymied for an answer. All he can say is: “Because.” In most cases, a debate like this would have ended here, with the guy with superior sports credentials having the final word. But these guys were Ivy Leagu

At the end of the 20th century, it looked like history was being made. After a century that had seen Europe dissolve into an orgy of bloody conflict not once but twice, the continent seemed to have changed its ways. It had spent the second half of the century building a system of shared sovereignty that was set to expand not just into the countries of the former Soviet bloc, but into what used to be the USSR itself. In the words of one author, Europe (or at least its model) was about to run the  21st century. Things look different now, of course, thanks to the impact of the financial crisis on the single currency, the euro. However  the European Union (as the project is currently named) has managed to burnish its image in some areas – for instance it now on the verge of covering 28 countries, and even managed to pick up a Nobel Peace Prize (somewhat controversially, although after the first half of the 20th century its role in keeping Europe largely at peace is certainly laudable). The project that lies at

It’s getting warmer, there ain’t no doubt about it. What are we going to do? Most folks say we should cut back on bad things like carbon emissions. That would probably be a good idea. The trouble is we would have to cut back on all the good things that carbon emissions produce, like big houses, cool cars, and tasty food imported from far-away places. We don’t want to do that. So what’s a global citizen to do? One idea is to take control of the environment, engineering-wise. Why cut back when we can simply manage the carbon-cycle a bit like we manage the climate in hothouses? In Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering(Yale UP, 2013), Clive Hamilton surveys the proposals big-thinking engineers have dreamed up to control the carbon-cycle on a truly massive scale. Some are wacky, others less so, but all are, well, very bold. Does any of it make sense? Can any of it be done? Hamilton investigates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premi

It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t go so far as to say that other proposed explanations are flat out wrong, it’s just that they don’t really focus on the narrow forces that, well, forced English business men to innovate in the 18th century. In Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Parthasarathi says that those forces were economic. English textile merchants were getting trounced by imported Indian cotton. They found that they couldn’t produce cotton goods in the same way the Indians did for all kinds of reasons. So, they had to create a new, more efficient, production process. They did. According to Parthasarath, the “Industrial Revolution” was born out of economic competition and innovation (with, of course, a helping hand from the state). That makes a lot of sense. Learn mor

Terrorism seems like the kind of thing that has existed since the beginning of states some 5,000 years ago. Understood in one, narrow way–as what we call “insurgency”–it probably has. But modern terrorism is, well, modern as Martin A. Miller explains in The Foundations of Modern Terrorism: State, Society, and the Dynamics of Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Miller traces our kind of terrorism to the French Revolution or thereabouts, and specifically to the formation of the idea that “citizens” have a right (and indeed duty) to rebel against their wayward governments “by any means necessary.” Take that notion and another–that there are several different “legitimate” ways to organize governments–and you have modern terrorism: campaigns designed to change or overthrow governments that are deemed by political radicals to be acting illegitimately or to be wholly illegitimate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https:

What do Margaret Thatcher, Ayatollah Khomeini, Deng Xiaoping, and Pope John Paul II have in common? At first thought, you wouldn’t think much. But according to Christian Caryl, they were all radicals who began to change the world in 1979. In Strange Rebels:1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (Basic Books, 2013), Caryl argues that these very different people from these very different places were brought together by one thing: a belief that the future would not be secular and socialist (as most of the old-line socialist and liberal establishment thought), but rather religious and capitalist. The Marxist project in all its forms, they said, had failed. People did not abandon their faiths, nor did they accept socialist economies. They wanted to worship and they wanted to be free. Thatcher, Khomeini, Xiaoping, and John Paul’s reactionary revolution, as it turned out, was successful. We live in the world they helped create. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by beco