New Books in World Affairs
Interviews with Scholars of Global Affairs about their New Books
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- Update frequency
- every day
- Average duration
- 55 minutes
- Episodes
- 1951
- Years Active
- 2008 - 2025
Inés Valdez, "Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
In scholarly and popular discourse, popular sovereignty and self-determination are typically conceived of as the antitheses of imperialism, while histories of the emergence of democracy in Western Eu…
01:00:47 |
Sun 29 Sep 2024
William T. Taylor, "Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History" (U California Press, 2024)
From the Rockies to the Himalayas, the bond between horses and humans has spanned across time and civilizations. In this archaeological journey, William T. Taylor explores how momentous events in the…
01:01:56 |
Sun 29 Sep 2024
Samuel J. Hirst, "Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939" (Oxford UP, 2024)
In the aftermath of the First World War the Western great powers sought to redefine international norms according to their liberal vision. They introduced Western-led multilateral organizations to re…
01:02:45 |
Sat 28 Sep 2024
Jeff Schuhrke, "Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade" (Verso, 2024)
How the CIA used American unions to undermine workers at home and subvert democracy abroad.
Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (Verso, 2024) tells the s…
01:07:00 |
Fri 27 Sep 2024
Ian Williams, "Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (Birlinn, 2024)
State capitalism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics. A socialist market economy. There have been numerous descriptions of the Chinese economy. However, none seems to capture the predatory, at ti…
01:01:06 |
Fri 27 Sep 2024
Jack A. Goldstone, "Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2023)
In their pursuit of social justice, revolutionaries have taken on the assembled might of monarchies, empires, and dictatorships. They have often, though not always, sparked cataclysmic violence, and …
01:03:14 |
Fri 27 Sep 2024
Kerry Brown, "The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power" (Yale UP, 2024)
In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with far…
00:37:29 |
Thu 26 Sep 2024
Ilias Alami and Adam D. Dixon, "The Spectre of State Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
After close to three decades of the hegemony of free market ideas, the state has made a big comeback as an economic actor since the 2008 financial crisis. China’s state-owned companies and internatio…
01:07:35 |
Sun 22 Sep 2024
Jack Margolin, "The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army (Reaktion, 2024) exposes the history and the future of the Wagner Group, Russia’s notorious and secretive mercenary army, revealing details of their o…
00:50:59 |
Thu 19 Sep 2024
Mikhail Zygar, "War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine" (Scribner, 2023)
As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, prominent independent Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar circulated a Facebook petition signed first by hundreds of his cultural and journalistic conta…
01:05:18 |
Sun 15 Sep 2024
Lynn M. Tesser, "Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Why did a nation-state order emerge when nationalist activism was usually an elitist pursuit in the age of empire? Ordinary inhabitants and even most indigenous elites tended to possess religious, et…
00:53:47 |
Fri 13 Sep 2024
Greg Eghigian, "After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Roswell, 1947. Washington, DC, 1952. Quarouble, 1954. New Hampshire, 1961. Pascagoula, 1973. Petrozavodsk, 1977. Copley Woods, 1983. Explore how sightings of UFOs and aliens seized the world's attent…
00:59:45 |
Wed 11 Sep 2024
Terrence G. Peterson, "Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency" (Cornell UP, 2024)
The Algerian War of Independence constituted a major turning point of 20th century history. The conflict exacerbated divisions in French society, culminating in an unsuccessful coup attempt by the OA…
00:49:23 |
Sat 07 Sep 2024
James M. Scott, "Black Snow: Curtis Lemay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb" (Norton, 2024)
In our interview about Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), James M. Scott discusses the principles and personalities in…
00:55:29 |
Fri 06 Sep 2024
David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires" (Norton, 2024)
After reading David Chaffetz’s newest book, you’d think that the horse–not oil–has been humanity’s most important strategic commodity. As David writes in his book Raiders, Rulers and Traders: The Hor…
00:45:25 |
Thu 05 Sep 2024
Sarah Miller-Davenport, "Gateway State: Hawai’i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire" (Princeton UP, 2019)
One of my talking points when hanging out with my fellow diplomatic historians is the painful absence of scholarship on Hawaii. Too many political histories treat Hawaii’s statehood as a kind of hist…
00:57:12 |
Sun 01 Sep 2024
Daniel Todman, "Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947" (Oxford UP, 2020)
The second of Daniel Todman's two sweeping volumes on Great Britain and World War II, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 (Oxford UP, 2020), begins with the event Winston Churchill called the "wors…
00:52:36 |
Sat 31 Aug 2024
Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: : The Horse and the Rise of Empires
No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast E…
01:00:42 |
Fri 30 Aug 2024
Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov, "Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism" (Stanford UP, 2019)
The practice of Partition understood as the physical division of territory along ethno-religious lines into separate nation-states is often regarded as a successful political "solution" to ethnic con…
00:50:11 |
Thu 29 Aug 2024
Christian Bueger and Timothy Edmunds, "Understanding Maritime Security" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Whether it is pirates, smugglers, illicit fishing, or disputes in the South China Sea, the oceans are of increasing importance in international security.
In Understanding Maritime Security (Oxford UP…
00:38:27 |
Wed 28 Aug 2024
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