New Books in Early Modern History

At the Battle of Saratoga, the tide of the Revolutionary War turned in favor of unlikely victors: the American patriots. What were the major strategy elements at play in the Saratoga Campaign, and why did it prove so crucial? Where did England misstep, and what did the Americans get right? To find out, we chat with Kevin Weddle *03, Professor of Military Theory and Strategy at the Army War College.A graduate of West Point and veteran of operations Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom, Dr. Weddle received his PhD here at Princeton, and was the 2019 William L. Garwood visiting professor with the Madison Program. He is the author of The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution, winner of the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I was joined by Nicholas Scott Baker to discuss his book, In Fortune’s Theater: Financial Risk and the Future in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Professor Baker is an Associate Professor of history at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia interested in the political and economic cultures of early modern Europe and the Mediterranean, with a particular focus on Renaissance Italy.In this fascinating new book, Professor Baker reveals how Renaissance Italians developed a new concept of the future as unknown time-yet-to-come. As In Fortune’s Theater makes clear, nearly everyone in Renaissance Italy seemingly had the future on their minds. Authorities in important commercial hubs such as Genoa, Venice, Rome, and Florence legislated against overzealous betting on the future. Merchants filled their commercial correspondence with a lexicon of futurity. Famed painters such as Caravaggio, Giorgio Vasari, and Paolo Veronese manipulated the existing iconography of the figure of Fortuna into a moral allegory about unseized opportunity. And seemingly every important Renaissance Italian intellectual including Petrarch, Dante, Christine de Pizan, Poggio Bracciolini, Leon Battista Alberti, Laura Cereta, Giovanni Pontano, Niccolò Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, and Baldassare Castiglione cared deeply about time-yet-to-come.Baker’s book is a rich, multilayered examination of the problems of risk, fortune, and the future in the Renaissance, and it should have broad appeal to anyone interested in the economic and political culture of early modern Europeans.Michael Paul Martoccio is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in the economic and military historian of the early modern Mediterranean. I am especially interested in how early modern economic practices – consumerism, market culture, and the commercialization of war – shaped notions of sovereignty, territoriality, and political geography. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at martoccio@wisc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur: War, Diplomacy, and Knowledge in Habsburg Europe (Cornell UP, 2022), Suzanne Sutherland explores the role of the military entrepreneur and explains how these international military figures emerged from, and exploited, the seventeenth century's momentous political, military, commercial, and scientific changes. During the Thirty Years' War, these figures traveled rapidly and frequently across Europe using private wealth, credit, and connections to raise and command the armies that rulers desperately needed. Using the individual of Raimondo Montecuccoli (1609–80), a middling nobleman from the Duchy of Modena, who became one of the most powerful men in the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, Sutherland uncovers the influence of military entrepreneurs not only commanders but also diplomats, natural philosophers, information brokers, clients, and subjects on the battlefield. The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur explains how Montecuccoli addressed battlefield, court, and family responsibilities while contributing to the world of scholarship on an often violent, fragmented political-military landscape. As a result, Sutherland shifts the perspective on war away from the ruler and his court to instead examine the figures supplying force, along with their methods, networks, and reflections on those experiences.Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alan Marshall's book Intelligence and Espionage in the English Republic C. 1600-60 (Manchester UP, 2023) is a richly detailed account of the ideas and activities in the early-modern 'secret state' and its agencies, spies, informers and intelligencers, under the English Republic and the Cromwellian protectorate.The book investigates the meanings this early-modern Republican state acquired to express itself, by exploring its espionage actions, the moral conundrums, and the philosophical background of secret government in the era. It considers in detail the culture and language of plots, conspiracies, and intrigues and it also exposes how the intelligence activities of the Three Kingdoms began to be situated within early-modern government from the Civil Wars to the rule of Oliver Cromwell. It introduces the reader to some of the personalities who were caught up in this world of espionage, from intelligencers like Thomas Scot and John Thurloe to the men and women who became its secret agents and spies. The book includes stories of activities not just in England, but also in Ireland and Scotland, and it especially investigates intelligence and espionage during the critical periods of the British Civil Wars and the important developments which took place under the English Republic and Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Buddhist cosmological history of the universe, history of Chinggis Khan, history of China, and history of the Mongols — The Precious Summary, written in 1662 by Sagang Sechen, is many things. As a whole, it is the most important work of Mongolian history on the period before the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty.The Precious Summary: A History of the Mongols from Chinggis Khan to the Qing Dynasty (Columbia University Press 2023), translated by Johan Elverskog, is not only a fluid and lucid translation, but by adding extensive annotations and helpful introductions, Elverskog has made this epic history approachable to readers today. Whether you are well-versed in the Mongol-Oirat wars or if the name Altan Khan doesn’t (yet) mean anything to you, this is a fabulous introduction to Mongolian historiography that should be of interest to anyone looking to learn more about Mongolian sources, Inner Asian history, and the history of Buddhism in Asia.Johan Elverskog is Dedman Family Distinguished Professor, Professor of Religious Studies, and, by courtesy, Professor of History at Southern Methodist University. This is his second time on New Books, and you can hear a conversation about one of his other books, The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020) here.Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

India in the Indian Ocean World: From the Earliest Times to 1800 CE (Springer, 2022) integrates the latest scholarly literature on the entire Indian Ocean region, from East Africa to China. Issues such as India's history, India’s changing status in the region, and India's cross-cultural networking over a long period are explored in this book. It is organized into specific themes in thirteen chapters. It incorporates a wealth of research on India’s strategic significance in the Indian Ocean arena throughout history. It enriches the reader's understanding of the emergence of the Indian Ocean basin as a global arena for cross-cultural networking and nation-building. It discusses issues of trade and commerce, the circulation of ideas, peoples, and objects, and social and religious themes, focusing on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. The book provides a refreshingly different survey of India’s connected history in the Indian Ocean region starting from the archaeological record and ending with the coming of empire. The author’s unique experience, combined with an engaging writing style, makes the book highly readable. The book contributes to the field of global history and is of great interest to researchers, policymakers, teachers, and students across the fields of political, cultural, and economic history and strategic studies.Rila Mukherjee is a Professor of History at the University of Hyderabad, India. She did her doctoral dissertation at the EHESS, Paris. She specializes in the history of the extended Indian Ocean world, more particularly the networked economic and cultural histories of the Bay of Bengal realm. Historical cartography, network theory, and spatial concepts are focal to her interests. Chief Editor of the Brill journal Asian Review of World Histories, she has held Visiting Professorships in Paris, Aixen Provence, Shanghai, and Uppsala, and has been Visiting Scholar in Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid. She has partnered with international interdisciplinary projects funded by European Science Foundation; Agence Nationale de Recherche, France; the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK; the Australian Research Council. She has authored six monographs, singly and jointly edited nine volumes, contributed 46 chapters to national and international publications, guest-edited themed issues in two international journals, and published 28 articles on oceanic histories in national and international journals.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, fighting with dagger versus dagger, or with knife versus knife, is not a common scenario that people might expect to face. However, it was more common in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, when it was normal for people to wear a dagger on their belt. Arguments or fights with daggers could break out; and while duels were more often fought with swords, combatants could also agree to do so with daggers.Carlo Parisi's Dagger Fencing: The Italian School (Fallen Rook, 2016)is not a book on modern knife fighting; rather, it is a book dealing with the historical knife fighting of Renaissance Italy. The modern blade aficionado will also find material of interest. The book offers several views of short bladed weapons that were developed and tested when cold steel was the king of weaponcraft and when duels were more common than today.Carlo Parisi was born in Northern Italy in 1974. He has always been interested in weapons and martial arts, and the two met in Historical Fencing, which he began practising in roughly 1998. A few years later, he started doing his own research, and became a member of HEMAC in 2003. Since then, he's been teaching classes at various events in Europe, and set up his own club in 2011. His main interests are sabres and daggers, but he studies a variety of weapons and methods. This is his first book on fencing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When students gathered in a London coffeehouse and smoked tobacco; when Yorkshire women sipped sugar-infused tea; or when a Glasgow family ate a bowl of Indian curry, were they aware of the mechanisms of imperial rule and trade that made such goods readily available? In Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Reaktion Books, 2020), Troy Bickham unfolds the extraordinary role that food played in shaping Britain during the long eighteenth century (circa 1660–1837), when such foreign goods as coffee, tea, and sugar went from rare luxuries to some of the most ubiquitous commodities in Britain—reaching even the poorest and remotest of households. Bickham reveals how trade in the empire’s edibles underpinned the emerging consumer economy, fomenting the rise of modern retailing, visual advertising, and consumer credit, and, via taxes, financed the military and civil bureaucracy that secured, governed, and spread the British Empire.Troy Bickham is professor of history at Texas A & M University. He is the author of The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812; Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press; and Savages within the Empire.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2023) explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of "Hindu," setting it in contrast to "Untouchable" in a process that reconfigured Hinduism in caste terms. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, Cherian establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others.This book is available open access here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

America’s religious and political public forum is no longer confined to debates between liberals (be they Catholics or Protestants) and socially conservative evangelicals and traditional Catholics—with atheists condemning all of the above. There is now among some Catholic intellectuals and academics a movement called integralism that calls for the United States to move towards an integration of church (the Catholic Church) and state. This movement in turn, is opposed by other conservative Catholics who regard integralism as not only unworkable but also undesirable, especially in the robustly pluralistic America of our day.Meanwhile, on both the Woke left and the alt-right there are essentially neo-Pagan movements which reject the American founding’s identification of ethical monotheism as the foundation of fundamental rights and political and personal moral obligations.Enter scholars with a call to rediscover and revivify the classical and Christian sources of the founding. In The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding (Cambridge UP, 2022), Justin Buckley Dyer and Kody W. Cooper argue that this political philosophy, pre-dating Aristotle and continuing through thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas to Lincoln to Martin Luther King to scholars of our own day, offers a way forward towards a just society built on a strong, rich, easily grasped moral framework.The book we will discuss today with one of its coauthors, Professor Cooper, shows that many of the leaders of the American founding were steeped in the natural law tradition and that this tradition, while often developed and nurtured by Catholic thinkers, was also drawn upon and embodied by Protestants of the period of the American Revolution and the earliest days of the Republic such as John Jay, James Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, James Otis and John Dickinson.The authors write that many of the founders, imbued with the tenets of classical and Christian natural law thinking, believed in, “a moralistic God of justice who favored the side of liberty such that the revolutionary actors saw themselves carrying out the divine will on the world historic stage in obedience to the dictates of right reason.” The emphasis on reason is a key component of natural law thinking of all types and Cooper and Dyer argue in their book that a reexamination of the writings and belief system of the founding generation shows that far from being religious skeptics bent on creating a new world order that discarded faith in God, many the founders were in fact motivated in their rebellion against the British by their belief that revolt was called for when their ability to move their society in a moral direction based on the idea of natural rights bestowed by God was being hampered by diktats of the British king and parliament.Let’s hear from one of the two authors of this study, Kody W. Cooper.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices