New Books in Early Modern History

Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter University, is one of the most insightful historians of military strategy from early modernity to the present day. In his most recent book, Military Strategy: A Global History (Yale University Press, 2020), he sets out to demonstrate the ways in which strategic thinking has changed over time, paying attention to the changes in technology, ideology and ambition by which it has been shaped. This is a compelling account of a complex and various subject.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the Sultan’s Realm: Two Venetian Reports on the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2018) is Professor Eric Dursteler’s translation of two final diplomatic reports (relazione) that Venetian ambassadors delivered upon their return to that Most Serene Republic at the turn of the seventeenth century—Lorenzo Bernardo in 1590 and Ottaviano Bon in 1609. These were polished and summative works performed before the assembled government of Venice detailing the politics and culture of the Ottoman Empire and its dealings with other powers. They offer insight about the work—and sometimes game—of early modern diplomacy; they aspire to a explain the character and spirit of the Sultan and his empire, in the process revealing even more about Venice and her agents.In this discussion, Professor Dursteler describes the early modern Mediterranean world, its arrangement and political issues, and its changes in the wake of the Battle of Lepanto (1571). He also talks about slavery, corsairs and piracy, and the Ottoman devşirme system (“blood tax” or “child levy”) that enslaved children from tributary states into its imperial administration, military, and harem. At the same time, this integration of cultures contributed to the multi-national and cosmopolitan empire (or ‘composite state’) unlike any other in the Mediterranean. Dursteler discusses gender and sex in the imagination of Early Modern Venice and in the cultural memory of both the West and East, and how it has changed. Finally, Dr. Dursteler invites us to think comparatively about early modern fears of the plague, and our current crisis—this was recorded in April of 2020—of pandemic.Eric Dursteler is Professor of History at Brigham Young University.Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended the domain of capitalist agriculture, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled continuously to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica (then called Coromantees) organized to throw off that yoke by violence. Their uprising—which became known as Tacky’s Revolt—featured a style of fighting increasingly familiar today: scattered militias opposing great powers, with fighters hard to distinguish from noncombatants. It was also part of a more extended borderless conflict that spread from Africa to the Americas and across the island. Even after it was put down, the insurgency rumbled throughout the British Empire at a time when slavery seemed the dependable bedrock of its dominion. That certitude would never be the same, nor would the views of black lives, which came to inspire both more fear and more sympathy than before.Tracing the roots, routes, and reverberations of this event across disparate parts of the Atlantic world, Vincent Brown offers us a superb geopolitical thriller. Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Harvard University Press, 2020) expands our understanding of the relationship between European, African, and American history, as it speaks to our understanding of wars of terror today.Adam McNeil is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of the many thousands who participated in the American and French revolutions in the late 18th century, only a handful played roles in both events. Among that select number were Thomas Jefferson and Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, two men who enjoyed a friendship that stretched across five decades.In Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations (St. Martins, 2019), Tom Chaffin describes the shared views and experiences that bonded them together. As Chaffin describes, the two men first met during the American Revolution after the young Lafayette crossed the Atlantic to participate in the fighting. Though their initial association was brief, the two men grew close during the five years Jefferson served as minister to France in the 1780s, with Jefferson providing the marquis with advice during the early stages of the French Revolution. Though Jefferson and Lafayette were soon parted by the course of events, they would be reunited one final time in 1824 when the marquis visited the former president at Monticello as part of his grand tour of the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Latvia's elegant capital, Riga, is one of Europe's best-kept secrets. Strategically located on the Eastern Baltic coast at the mouth of the River Daugava, Riga was founded in the early 13th century as a trading hub, a military outpost of the Holy Roman Empire, and a base for Roman Catholic prelates to convert both the pagan natives and the Orthodox Christians of Rus.Kevin O'Connor's new book, The House of Hemp and Butter: A History of Old Riga (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019) charts the fascinating history of Riga from the earliest days to Peter the Great's conquest of the much-coveted trading port in the early 18th century.O'Connor's book recounts in fascinating detail the personalities who shaped and dominated Riga's political and economic history. For six centuries, Riga's fortunes rose and fell in step with major political events of Europe, as the uneasy triumvirate of the church, military, and merchants balanced control and power over the city, ever hopeful to keep goods such as furs, timber, resin, and beeswax flowing from the vast Russian forest lands, through Riga and onto the rest of the known world. O'Connor introduces us to the infamous Livonian Brotherhood of the Sword — a military order of knights based in the city, canny and diplomatic prelates, and the notorious Brotherhood of the Blackfaces, one of the city's professional associations.From the outset, Riga was a multi-national and polyglot city, much as it remains today. Her membership in the Hanseatic League — the European economic fraternity, which enjoyed a virtual monopoly on trade — greatly enhanced the city's prestige and economic influence, as Germans, Poles, and other Hansa members established successful trading relationships with Riga's guilds. Riga's rapid adoption of Protestantism in the 16th century forged other strong links with her neighbors and separated her even further culturally from the growing might of Russia.Though Rigans cherished their independence, the history of their city is one of almost constant occupation or rule of a foreign power, as the larger players in the Baltic constantly fought to gain the prize that was the city on the Daugava. O’Connor’s accounts of German, Polish, and later Swedish occupations help readers understand why the city developed in the way it did.O'Connor leaves us at Riga’s nadir. As plague ravishes the war-torn city, Tsar Peter the Great captures Riga as part of his conquest of the Eastern Baltic in the Great Northern War, which established the Russian Empire as the preeminent naval power in the Baltic Sea, but relegates Riga to a second-tier trading hub. Moreover, O'Conner suggests, Russia's conquest of the city forces Riga to adopt "Eastern," which never sits comfortably with the centuries of Riga's primarily "Western" culture and nature. We are left hoping that perhaps now, as Riga sloughs off the Soviet occupation, she will once more take her rightful place in the Baltic’s panoply of prosperous ports.The House of Hemp and Butter is an impeccably-researched and very engagingly written account of Riga's fascinating social, economic, and political history.Kevin O'Connor is the Chair of History at Gonzaga University.Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair (Oxford University Press, 2019), Maurice Finocchiaro shows that there were (and are) really two Galileo “affairs.” Galileo’s original trial and condemnation forms the first affair, the cultural history of controversies about the meaning of the original trial, forms the second. With scrupulous attention to evidence and the argumentation employed by various participants, Dr. Finocchiaro’s book is at once an accessible primer on a key event in the 16th- and 17th-century Scientific Revolution, and a thought provoking look at how the subsequent controversies resonate down to the present day.Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicholas R. Jones’s book, Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, 2019), analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, when performing habla de negros—how Africanized Castilian was commonly referred to—was in fashion. Jones problematizes long-held beliefs among literary critics and linguists that habla de negros as represented in dominant Spanish literature was exclusively racist stereotypes, and instead seeks to theorize habla de negros as a radical performance that “allow[s] black expression and black sensibilities to emerge whether there are black bodies present or not.” This elegant book demonstrates that black voices, speakers, bodies, subjects, were visible, present, and constitutive parts of the early modern Castilian soundscape and society and succeeds in drawing modern readers’ attention to their importance. By centering black historical and literary figures, Jones shows how black populations of early modern Spain participated in the formation of Black experience beyond Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States.Elizabeth Spragins is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. Her current book project is on corpses in early modern Mediterranean narrative. You can follow her on Twitter @elspragins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Scott is one of the most original interpreters of the early modern world. How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800 (Yale University Press, 2019) is a deft and cogent synthesis in which Scott returns to the turbulent seventeenth century in Britain, and examines how a period of political upheaval in its middle decade laid the foundations for a process of state-formation across the Anglo-Dutch-American world. While it tracks across the familiar ground of revolution, empire, commerce, and republicanism, this is a book with broad horizons. It is about movement, water, the interchange of ideas, peoples, and cultures. At its centre is the Anglo-Dutch relationship and, at its many peripheries, Scott reveals the transformative effects of this unique republican pulse.Jonathan Scott is Professor of History at the University of Auckland, and the author of seminal studies of the early modern British world, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (2004), and When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500-1800 (2011).Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen (Yale University Press, 2019), acclaimed historian of 18th-century French history and the biographer of Louis XVI, John Hardman redresses the balance, corrects and tears away the smears and calumny and sheds fresh light and understanding on Marie-Antoinette’s story.Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the last years of the ancien regime. Drawing on new and or rarely used sources, he describes how, from the outset, Marie-Antoinette refused to prioritize the foreign policy of her mother, the Queen-Empress Maria-Theresa, bravely took over the helm from Louis XVI after the collapse of his morale, and, when revolution broke out, listened to the Third Estate and worked closely with repentant radicals to give the constitutional monarchy a fighting chance. For the first time, Hardman demonstrates exactly what influence Marie-Antoinette had and when and how she exerted it. In short Hardman, whose biography is only the second by an academic in the past one-hundred years, provides the reader with a valuable insight into the world and the thought of Marie-Antoinette. Accordingly to historian, Monroe Price, writing in the Literary Review, Hardman has written a "fascinating biography", which is "major contribution to the subject." In short, Hardman's book is one that any serious scholar or student of 18th-century French History cannot go without.Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration (Harvard Asia Center, 2019) is the first monograph published in English on the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has inhabited northeast Asia for centuries. Since the seventeenth century, the Orochen has settled in the region of Manchuria that became the eastern borderland between China and Russia after the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk. In this book, Loretta E. Kim shows that the Orochen, while sandwiched between these two empires and later republics, reinforced the legal division of the territories and served as human markers that substantiated the demographic demarcation outlined in treaties and other legally binding agreements. Through detailed analysis of Qing official documents, Ethnic Chrysalis reveals that the Orochen, like Manchuria’s other natives, played important roles in the development and maintenance of the Qing borderland not just as its inhabitants but also as economic and cultural intermediaries between officials and commoners on both sides of the interstate border. What emerges is a clear agency in these indigenous people and their capacities to instigate changes that they needed in policies and institutions to preserve their economic, social, and cultural interests.Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational/transregional networks of Buddhism centered in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria that connected to Republican China, Tibet, and imperial Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices