In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

This is a powerful new account of a chapter in history that is crucial to understand, yet often overlooked. For 150 years, from the reign of Louis XIV to the downfall of Napoleon, France was an aggressive imperial power in South Asia, driven by the pursuit of greatness and riches. Through their East India company and state, the French established a far-reaching empire in India, only to see their dominant position undermined by conflict with Indian rulers, competition from other European nations, and a series of fatal strategic errors. Exploding the myth of a benign French presence on the subcontinent, Robert Ivermee's extensive research reveals how France's Indian empire relied on war-making, conquest, opportunistic alliances, regime change and slavery to pursue its ambitions. He considers influential French figures' reactions to the collapse of the imperial project, not least their deployment of new ideas, like freedom and the rights of man, to justify fresh ventures of domination--even as colonial authorities failed to acknowledge the equality of French India's diverse indigenous peoples, both before and after the French Revolution. From great power rivalry to informal empire and entrenched inequalities, Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India (Oxford UP, 2025) tackles topics that remain vital and urgent in today's world.

Historians have well described how US immigration policy increasingly fell under the purview of federal law and national politics in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It is far less understood that the rights of noncitizen immigrants in the country remained primarily contested in the realms of state politics and law until the mid-to-late twentieth century. Such state-level political debates often centered on whether noncitizen immigrants should vote, count as part of the polity for the purposes of state legislative representation, work in public and publicly funded employment, or obtain professional licensure.Enacted state alienage laws were rarely self-executing, and immigrants and their allies regularly challenged nativist restrictions in court, on the job, by appealing to lawmakers and the public, and even via diplomacy. Battles over the passage, implementation, and constitutionality of such policies at times aligned with and sometimes clashed against contemporaneous efforts to expand rights to marginalized Americans, particularly US-born women.  Often considered separately or treated as topics of marginal importance, Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965 (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Brendan A. Shanahan underscores the centrality of nativist state politics and alienage policies to the history of American immigration and citizenship from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that the proliferation of these debates and laws produced veritable disparate regimes of citizenship rights in the American political economy on a state-by-state basis. It further illustrates how nativist state politics and alienage policies helped to invent and concretize the idea that citizenship rights meant citizen-only rights in law, practice, and popular perception in the United States. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Oceanic Studies. An interdisciplinary podcast that examines the past, present, and future of ocean governance  In 1609, the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius rejected the idea that even powerful rulers could own the oceans. "A ship sailing through the sea," he wrote, "leaves behind it no more legal right than it does a track." A philosophical and legal battle ensued, but Grotius's view ultimately prevailed. To this day, "freedom of the seas" remains an important legal principle and a powerful rhetorical tool.Yet in recent decades, freedom of the seas has eroded in multiple ways and for a variety of reasons. During the world wars of the 20th century, combatants imposed unprecedented restrictions on maritime commerce, leaving international rules in tatters. National governments have steadily expanded their reach into the oceans. More recently, environmental concerns have led to new international restrictions on high seas fishing. Today's most dangerous maritime disputes-including China's push for control of the South China Sea-are occurring against the backdrop of major changes in the way the world treats the oceans. As David Bosco shows in The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World's Oceans (Oxford UP, 2021), the history of humanity's attempt to create rules for the oceans is alive and relevant. Tracing the roots of the law of the sea and the background to current maritime disputes, he shows that building effective ocean rules while preserving maritime freedoms remains a daunting task. Bosco analyzes how fragile international institutions and determined activists are struggling for relevance in a world still dominated by national governments. As maritime tensions develop, The Poseidon Project will serve as an essential guide to the continuing challenge of ocean governance.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought a tragic close to a thirty-year period of history that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reopening of Russia to the West after six decades of Soviet isolation. The opening lasted for three tumultuous decades and ended with a new closing, driven by the Ukrainian war, the imposition of Western sanctions, and the Russian responses to them. In Perfect Storm: Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future (Oxford University Press, 2025), Russia analyst Thane Gustafson reinterprets the story of Russia's failed opening to the West, focusing on its economic, technological, and social aspects, and the role they played in its ultimate failure. These parallel events are essential for understanding what happened and what went wrong. Yet they have received much less attention than the military and geopolitical aspects of the current conflict. Gustafson tells the story of the West's entry into Russia, the arrival of Russians into the West, and the conflicting emotions and responses these aroused on both sides, contributing to the ultimate breakdown of relations and the unprecedented hurricane of Western sanctions. The book concludes with an examination of possible futures under a new generation of leaders. A measured and nuanced account of the evolution of Russia's economic relations with the world, Perfect Storm illuminates the longer history of Russia's opening to the West, from its achievements and disappointments to the complexity of the post-invasion sanctions regime and Russia's responses to them. Thane Gustafson is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author of many books, including Klimat (2021), The Bridge (2020), and Wheel of Fortune (2012). Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

For generations of Americans, the purse has been an essential and highly adaptable object, used to achieve a host of social, cultural, and political objectives. In the early 1800s, when the slim fit of neoclassical dresses made interior pockets impractical, upper-class women began to carry small purses called reticules, which provided them with a private place in a world where they did not have equal access to public space. Although many items of apparel have long expressed their wearer's aspirations, only the purse has offered carriers privacy, pride, and pleasure. This privacy has been particularly important for those who have faced discrimination because of their gender, class, race, citizenship, or sexuality. The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America (Oxford University Press, 2025) reveals how bags, sacks, and purses provided the methods and materials for Americans' activism, allowing carriers to transgress critical boundaries at key moments. It explores how enslaved people used purses and bags when attempting to escape and immigrant factory workers fought to protect their purses in the workplace. It also probes the purse's nuanced functions for Black women in the civil rights movement and explores how LGBTQ people used purses to defend their bodies and make declarations about their sexuality. Kathleen Casey closely examines a variety of sources--from vintage purses found in abandoned buildings and museum collections to advertisements, photograph albums, trade journals, newspaper columns, and trial transcripts. She finds purses in use at fraught historical moments, where they served strategic and symbolic functions for their users. The result is a thorough and surprising examination of an object that both ordinary and extraordinary Americans used to influence social, cultural, economic, and political change. Kathleen B. Casey is Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Professor of History at Furman University in South Carolina. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Lindsey N. Kingston’s new book, Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights (Oxford UP, 2019) interrogates the idea of citizenship itself, what it means, how it works, how it is applied and understood, and where there are clear gaps in that application. This is a wide-ranging, rigorously researched examination of citizenship, statelessness, and human movement. And it is vitally relevant to contemporary discussions of immigration, supranationalism, understandings of national borders, and concepts of belonging. Not only does Kingston delve into theoretical concepts of citizenship and statelessness, she also integrates analyses of various kinds of hierarchies of personhood in context of these broader issues. The research also includes explorations of nomadic people, indigenous nations, and "second class" citizens in the United States within this theoretical framework of citizenship and statelessness. This careful and broad analysis defines the novel idea of ‘functional citizenship’, which is both theoretical and practical in considering citizenship and statelessness in our modern world. Fully Human focuses on the promises and protections that are outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, unpacking the protection gaps and difficulties that have become clearer and more acute in this era of globalization and security concerns, and highlighting some of the key problems with the current human rights regimes that are in place.

South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law (Oxford UP, 2024) considers the legal history of colonial rule in South Asia from 1757 to the early 20th century. It traces a shift in the conceptualization of sovereignty, land control, and adjudicatory rectification, arguing that under the East India Company the focus was on 'the laws' factoring into the administration of justice more than 'the law' as an infinitely generative norm system. This accompanied a discourse about rendering property 'absolute' defined in terms of a certainty of controlling land's rent-and made administrable mainly as a duty of revenue payment--rather than any right of ostensibly physical dominion. Leaving property external to its ontology of 'the laws, ' the Company's regime thus differed significantly from its counterparts in the Anglo-common-law mainstream, where an ostensibly unitary, physical, and disaggregable notion of the property right was becoming a stand in for a notion of legal right in general already by the late 18th century. Only after 1858, under Crown rule, did conditions in the subcontinent ripen for 'the law' to emerge as a purportedly free-standing institutional fact. A key but neglected factor in this transformation was the rise of classical legal thought, which finally enabled property's internalization into 'the law' and underwrote status and contract becoming the other key elements of the Raj's new legal ontology. Formulating a historical ontological approach to jurisprudence, the book deploys a running distinction between the doctrinal discourse of (the) law and ordinary-language discourse about (the) law that carries implications for legal theory well beyond South Asia. Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh.

The vast majority of the world's countries are experiencing a demographic revolution: dramatic, sustained, and likely irreversible population aging. States' median ages are steadily increasing as the number of people ages 65 and older skyrockets. Analysts and policymakers frequently decry population aging's domestic costs, especially likely slowing economic growth and massive new public expenditures for elderly welfare. But aging has a major yet largely unrecognized international benefit: it significantly reduces the likelihood of international war. Although wars continue to rage in parts of the world, almost none involve aged countries. This book provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking argument why population aging will be a powerful force for peace. Aging will significantly reduce states' military capabilities available for war while also boosting leaders’ and citizens' preferences for peaceful foreign policies. At the same time, the effects of aging will help prevent the emergence of a power transition between the United States and China, which would be a development that is particularly likely to devolve into armed hostilities. If an aged country does initiate war, the effects of aging will create major barriers to military success. The more aging reduces the probability of victory, the greater the disincentives to aggressing. Detailed case studies show how aging has affected the capabilities and preferences in Japan, China, the United States, and Russia. Guest: Mark L. Haas is a Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University. He is the author of The Geriatric Peace: Population Aging and the Decline of War (Oxford University Press, 2025); Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally (Cornell University Press, 2022); The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security (Oxford University Press, 2012); The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789-1989 (Cornell University Press, 2005), and co-editor of Ideologies and International Relations (Routledge Press); The Middle East and the United States: History, Politics, and Ideologies (Routledge, 2018, sixth edition) and The Arab Spring: The Hope and Reality of the Uprisings (Routledge, 2017). Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

A history of the dandy from below, from Beau Brummell and Baudelaire to Bowie and Bolan... and beyond. The historical figure of the dandy has commonly been described as an upper-class gentleman, often exemplified by well-known men such as Beau Brummell, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Max Beerbohm. But there is a broader history to be told about the dandy - one that incorporates unknown men from the lower strata of society. The Dandy: A People's History of Sartorial Splendour (Oxford UP, 2025) constitutes the first ever history of those dandies who emanated from the less privileged layers of the populace - the lowly clerks, shop assistants, domestic servants, and labourers who increasingly during the modern age have emerged as style-conscious men about town. Peter Andersson shows that dandyism is far from just an elite phenomenon represented by famous poets and artists. He shows how dandyism as a popular youth subculture grew into an influential cultural movement, from the days of Beau Brummell in the early 19th century to the age of mods in the 1960s. A series of fascinating in-depth studies of the wide variety of dandy subcultures that have surfaced around the world in the last two centuries tell the story of how the shaping of fashions and the image of men became increasingly democratized, with the arbiters of taste increasingly coming from the other end of the social spectrum. Along the way, we encounter such long-forgotten groups as the mashers, the knuts, the Paris gandins and the Berlin transgender dandies, alongside more well-known but unexplored figures like the zoot suiter, the teddy boy, and the New Romantic. Above all, this is a story of how fundamental aspects of modern culture such as fashion, style, and conduct have been shaped from below just as much as from above. It is a story that shows how the problematic business of young men trying to find an identity is an enduring phenomenon - and one sadly often accompanied by innocent victims along the way. Peter K. Andersson is a historian and writer, with a PhD in History from Lund University in Sweden. He has been a visiting scholar at the universities of London, Oxford, and Bologna, and has written extensively on Victorian cultural history, urban history, and popular culture. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

In a groundbreaking reassessment of the long Cold War era, historian Gregory A. Daddis argues that ever since the Second World War's fateful conclusion, faith in and fear of war became central to Americans' thinking about the world around them. With war pervading nearly all aspects of American society, an interplay between blind faith and existential fear framed US policymaking and grand strategy, often with tragic results. A sweeping history, Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2025) makes a forceful argument by examining the tensions between Americans' overreaching faith in war as a foreign policy tool and their overwhelming fear of war as a destructive force. Gregory A. Daddis is Professor of History and holds the Melbern G. Glasscock Endowed Chair in American History at Texas A&M University. A retired US Army colonel, he deployed to both Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.