Apprenticeship dominated training and skill formation in early modern Europe. Years spent learning from a skilled master were a nearly universal experience for young workers in crafts and trade. In England, when apprenticeship reached its peak, as many as a third of all teenage males would serve and learn as apprentices. In The Market for Skill: Apprenticeship and Economic Growth in Early Modern England (Princeton University Press, 2025), Dr. Patrick Wallis shows how apprenticeship helped reshape the English economy.Some historians see apprenticeship as a key ingredient in the industrial revolution; others agree with Adam Smith in seeing it as wasteful and conservative. Dr. Wallis shows that neither of these perspectives is entirely accurate. He offers a new account of apprenticeship and the market for skill in England, analyzing the records of hundreds of thousands of individual apprentices to tell the story of how apprenticeship worked and how it contributed to the transformation of England. Wallis details the activities of apprentices and masters, the strategies of ambitious parents, the interventions of guilds and the decisions of town officials. He shows how the system of early modern apprenticeship contributed to the growth of cities, the movement of workers from farms to manufacturing and the spread of new technologies and productive knowledge.In this groundbreaking study, Dr. Wallis argues that apprenticeship succeeded precisely because it was a flexible institution which allowed apprentices to change their minds and exit contracts early. Apprenticeship provided a vital channel for training that families could trust and that was accessible to most young people, whatever their background.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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 episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, built a state that championed Iranian identity and Twelver Shi’ism, it prompted the more established Ottoman Empire to align itself definitively with Sunni legalism. The political, religious, and military conflicts that arose have since been widely studied, but little attention has been paid to their diplomatic relationship.In Gifts in the Age of Empire: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange, 1500–1639 (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Sinem Arcak Casale sets out to explore these two major Muslim empires through a surprising lens: gifts. Countless treasures—such as intricate carpets, gilded silver cups, and ivory-tusk knives—flowed from the Safavid to the Ottoman Empire throughout the sixteenth century. While only a handful now survive, records of these gifts exist in court chronicles, treasury records, poems, epistolary documents, ambassadorial reports, and travel narratives.Tracing this elaborate archive, Dr. Casale treats gifts as representative of the complicated Ottoman-Safavid coexistence, demonstrating how their rivalry was shaped as much by culture and aesthetics as it was by religious or military conflict. Gifts in the Age of Empire explores how gifts were no mere accessories to diplomacy but functioned as a mechanism of competitive interaction between these early modern Muslim courts.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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 episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Those of us who have some background in Jewish history are taught that the Ottoman Empire encouraged Jews, particularly those of the Spanish and Portuguese Expulsions, to settle in Ottoman Lands. In Ottoman Jewry: Leadership, Charity, and Literacy (Brill, 2024), Professor Ayalon debunks what he calls that myth. The Ottomans, according to Yaron, were interested in stability - economic and otherwise. Minorities, with their additional taxes, would bring more financial benefits. Many were merchants who would pay higher taxes. With this premise, we discussed the world of the Ottoman Jews as one of creating community and society. There were Romaniot, Sephardim, Msta'ribun and some Ashkenazim who settled across these lands, and together they created strong communities with Rabbinic and lay leadership and a cultural heritage that can still be seen today in those communities who have survived and relocated around the world.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of us are familiar with the ancient Egyptians’ obsession with immortality and the great efforts they made to secure the quality of their afterlife. But, as Dr. Rune Nyord shows in Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife (University of Chicago Press, 2025), even today, our understanding of the Egyptian afterlife has been formulated to a striking extent in Christian terms. Dr. Nyord argues that this is no accident, but rather the result of a long history of Europeans systematically retelling the religion of ancient Egypt to fit the framework of Christianity. The idea of ancient Egyptians believing in postmortem judgment with rewards and punishments in the afterlife was developed during the early modern period through biased interpretations that were construed without any detailed knowledge of ancient Egyptian religion, hieroglyphs, and sources.As a growing number of Egyptian images and texts became available through the nineteenth century, these materials tended to be incorporated into existing narratives rather than being used to question them. Against this historical background, Dr. Nyord argues that we need to return to the indigenous sources and shake off the Christian expectations that continue to shape scholarly and popular thinking about the ancient Egyptian afterlife.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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 episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c.1100-1620 (Columbia UP, 2024) examines China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean, especially as they relate to the Maldives. By weaving together the accounts of a 14th-century Chinese traveler (Wang Dayuan) to the archipelago, archaeological analysis of shipwrecks, maps by both the imperial court and Jesuits, records about items including cowrie shells and ambergris, and much more, Bin Yang argues that the Maldives — and the Indian Ocean world — shaped the Chinese empire.  Discovered but Forgotten is a far-reaching and ambitious book that showcases both imperial China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean world and how to do maritime history and global history, even when that means working with incomplete records and fragments of porcelain. This book should interest readers curious about East Asian history and global history, as well as anyone who doesn't yet know how important ambergris was to maritime trade and Ming China (spoiler: the answer is very).  In addition to Discovered but Forgotten, interested listeners (and readers!) should also seek out Bin's previous books, especially Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Routledge, 2019).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The small town of Vṛndāvana is today one of the most vibrant places of pilgrimage in northern India. Throngs of pilgrims travel there each year to honour the sacred land of Kṛṣṇa’s youth and to visit many of its temples. The Building of Vṛndāvana: Architecture, Theology, and Practice in an Early Modern Pilgrimage Town (Brill, 2023) explores the complex history of this town’s early modern origins. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines to examine history, architecture, art, ritual, theology, and literature in this pivotal period, the book examines how these various disciplines were used to create, develop, and map Vṛndāvana as the most prominent place of pilgrimage for devotees of Kṛṣṇa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imprisonment was rarely used as punishment in Britain before 1800. The criminal justice system was based on terror and deterrence, sentencing convicts to the gallows at home and transportation overseas, with prisons serving primarily as holding spaces for the accused until the case against them was resolved. A major shift began in the late eighteenth century when imprisonment became an end in itself: a means to reform as well as to discipline criminal offenders.To Detain or to Punish: Magistrates and the Making of the London Prison System, 1750–1840 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) by Dr. Kiran Mehta revisits this revolutionary moment as it played out in the metropolis of London. Dr. Mehta charts how Londoners, through their interactions with police, magistrates, and judges, became prisoners, and then follows them into the prison, revealing how these institutions were managed and experienced. Local authorities’ increased use of imprisonment, for punishment as well as for detention, sparked the wholesale reconstruction and redesign of London’s prison estate. It also spurred the consolidation of the modern notion that prisoners who had not yet been convicted of a crime, or who had not been sentenced to imprisonment, should be held separately from and treated differently to those incarcerated for punishment. Most notably, the requirement to labour became a distinguishing feature of punitive confinement.Challenging traditional ideas about who and what prisons were for and how they operated, To Detain or to Punish offers a radical reappraisal of London’s prison system between 1750 and 1840. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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 episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with scholars about recent books engaging with different aspects of global corporations – with a focus on the role of law and legal forms.Our guest today is Dr. Joshua Ehrlich, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Macau. Josh is a historian of knowledge and political thought with a focus on the East India Company and the British Empire in South and Southeast Asia.We spoke with Josh in a live event as part of a workshop in Hong Kong on the history of companies in Asia about his first book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.The book is a deeply researched and well-written account of how East India Company officials developed and deployed ideas about knowledge to bolster its own authority, and to manage the transition from corporate sovereignty towards unitary state sovereignty. In the process, Josh develops a novel methodological approach that he calls the history of ideas of knowledge – an approach that allows us to recover past meanings and usages of concepts about knowledge to make them available again in the present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand.The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality.In The Age of Revolutions (Basic Books, 2024), historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown-from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun-he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story. The first revolutionary generation, fired by radical ideas, struggled to slip the hierarchical bonds of the old order. Their failures moulded a second generation, more adept at mass organizing but with an illiberal tint. The sweeping political transformations they accomplished after 1800 engrained forms of inequality and racial hierarchy in modern politics that remain with us today.A breath taking history spanning three continents, The Age of Revolutions uncovers how the period's grand political transformations emerged across oceans and, slowly and unevenly, over generations.Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a professor of history at the University of Southern California. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Times.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) uncovers a tradition of women’s utopianism that extends back to medieval women’s monasticism, overturning accounts of utopia that trace its origins solely to Thomas More. As enclosed spaces in which women wielded authority that was unavailable to them in the outside world, medieval and early modern convents were self-consciously engaged in reworking pre-existing cultural heritage to project desired proto-feminist futures. The utopianism developed within the English convent percolated outwards to unenclosed women's spiritual communities such as Mary Ward's Institute of the Blessed Virgin and the Ferrar family at Little Gidding. Convent-based utopianism further acted as an unrecognized influence on the first English women’s literary utopias by authors such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell. Collectively, these female communities forged a mode of utopia that drew on the past to imagine new possibilities for themselves as well as for their larger religious and political communities. Tracking utopianism from the convent to the literary page over a period of 300 years, New Kingdoms writes a new history of medieval and early modern women’s intellectual work and expands the concept of utopia itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices