New Books in Early Modern History

Analyzing the spread and survival of Islamic legal ideas and commentaries in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean littorals, Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi'i Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2022) focuses on Shāfiʿīsm, one of the four Sunnī schools of Islamic law. It explores how certain texts shaped, transformed and influenced the juridical thoughts and lives of a significant community over a millennium in and between Asia, Africa and Europe. By examining the processes of the spread of legal texts and their roles in society, as well as thinking about how Afrasian Muslims responded to these new arrivals of thoughts and texts, Mahmood Kooria weaves together a narrative with the textual descendants from places such as Damascus, Mecca, Cairo, Malabar, Java, Aceh and Zanzibar to tell a compelling story of how Islam contributed to the global history of law from the thirteenth to the twentieth century.Mahmood Kooria is a researcher at Leiden University (the Netherlands) and a visiting faculty of history at Ashoka University (India). Earlier, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Dutch Institute in Morocco (NIMAR); International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS); and African Studies Centre, Leiden (ASCL). He received his PhD in Global History from Leiden University in 2016. Before this, he studied at the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, India) for his M.A. and M.Phil. in Ancient Indian History, and at Darul Huda Islamic University and the University of Calicut (both in Kerala, India) for Bachelors. In addition to numerous academic journal articles and book chapters, he has co-edited Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (2018) and Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean World: Texts, Ideas and Practices (2022). Currently he is writing a book on the matriarchal Muslim communities in East Africa and South and Southeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No matter what people call them today the northwestern Great Plains have been and continue to be Blackfoot country, argues Colgate University assistant professor Ryan Hall in Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720-1877 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). By maintaining their boundaries and enforcing power between both European empires and Indigenous neighbors, the Blackfoot were able to carve out a lasting niche in the contested borderlands of the early North American West of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although disease, resource depletion, and colonization would eventually be visited upon the Blackfoot, along with American settler colonialism, this outcome was never preordained. Nor was that the entire story, as Blackfoot history carries on well after such well known events as the Montana gold rush and the Marias Massacre. Beneath the Backbone of the World is an example of Native history's power to force a rethinking of North American history's arc.Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s copyright laws are predicated on the idea that music is intellectual property; a commodity that has value to its creator and to its publisher. But, how did that concept originate and why? From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2022) by Rebecca Geoffroy Schwinden tackles this question with an insightful examination of the years around the French Revolution when the legal protections for music moved from a system of monopolies granted by the sovereign that regulated music as an activity to a framework that assumed music was a kind of property. Before the French Revolution, making music was an activity that required permission. After the revolution, music was an object that could be possessed.In Geoffroy-Schwinden’s analysis, this is far from a simple history of commodification, it is, instead, a process entwined with the political, ideological, and cultural agendas of the French Revolutionaries. It is also a history of the development of new institutions, and how the Paris Conservatory, founded in the fluid and sometimes violent aftermath of the French Revolution, became the conservator and arbiter of French musical traditions and pedagogy. Musicians capitalized on new kinds of legal protections to guard their professionalization within new laws and institutions, while excluding those without credentials from their elite echelon.Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Paul Conrad brings to life the stories of displaced Apaches and the kin from whom they were separated. Conrad uses the lens of “diaspora” to analyze four centuries of Ndé/Apache history, from their initial interactions with Europeans in the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century, when several dozen Apaches returned to the Southwest –if not to their ancestral lands, after decades of forced exile. The case for an Apache diaspora is persuasively demonstrated throughout with illustrative examples drawn from a wide array of secondary and primary sources, including original documents from repositories in the U.S., Mexico, and Spain. Conrad charts Apaches' efforts to survive or return home from places as far-flung as Cuba and Pennsylvania, Mexico City and Montreal. While deeply analytical, Conrad enlivens his narrative with meaningful stories, such as the arrival of the first shipment of Apaches to Havana in 1784, and evocative vignettes, for instance, of life on the reservations in the 1870s.Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez es profesor de Historia en Texas State University. Sus intereses académicos incluyen la etnohistoria, los pueblos indígenas de las Grandes Llanuras y el Suroeste de EE.UU., la frontera México-EE.UU. y la América hispánica. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2019 marked the five-hundred year anniversary of the launch of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage around the world–a milestone marked by commemorative sailings, museum exhibitions, and a joint submission from Spain and Portugal to UNESCO.Two years later, the Philippines marked their own commemoration of Magellan’s voyage: the 500th anniversary of his death at the hands of local leader Lapu-Lapu.A master voyager in Spain and Portugal, a defeated imperialist in the Philippines–these are just two of the ways that Magellan’s image has evolved and changed over the past five centuries. But what was the man actually like?Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tries to get at who Magellan was in his latest book Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan (University of California Press: 2022). Relying on first-hand accounts of Magellan’s voyage, Felipe portrays Magellan as a self-promoter, devious over-promiser, lover of chivalric literature, ruthless authoritarian and, at the end, a believer in his own hype.In this interview, Felipe and I talk about Magellan: the man, his voyage (and what it was actually supposed to do), and the legacy of his expedition.Felipe holds the William P. Reynolds Chair of Mission in Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a professor in the Departments of History and Classics and the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science. His most recent books are Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It (University of California Press: 2019) and, as editor, The Oxford Illustrated History of the World (Oxford University Press: 2021)You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Straits. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maria Theresa (1717–1780) was once the most powerful woman in Europe. At the age of twenty-three, she ascended to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, a far-flung realm composed of diverse ethnicities and languages, beset on all sides by enemies and rivals. Master historian, Professor Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger provides the definitive biography of Maria Theresa, in her outstanding biography, Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in her Time (Princeton University Press, 2022). Situating this exceptional empress within her time while dispelling the myths surrounding her.Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Professor Stollberg-Rilinger examines all facets of eighteenth-century society, from piety and patronage to sexuality and childcare, ceremonial life at court, diplomacy, and the everyday indignities of warfare. She challenges the idealized image of Maria Theresa as an enlightened reformer and mother of her lands who embodied both feminine beauty and virile bellicosity, showing how she despised the ideas of the Enlightenment, treated her children with relentless austerity, and mercilessly persecuted Protestants and Jews. Work, consistent physical and mental discipline, and fear of God were the principles Maria Theresa lived by, and she demanded the same from her family, her court, and her subjects.A panoramic work of scholarship that brings Europe’s age of empire spectacularly to life, Maria Theresa paints an unforgettable portrait of the uncompromising yet singularly charismatic woman who left her enduring mark on the era in which she lived and reigned. In the words of John Adamson in the Literary Review, Professor Stollberg-Rilinger’s treatment of the Habsburg ruler will stand "as the basic reference point for studies of Maria Theresa for decades to come".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 for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea (U Hawaii Press, 2019) is the first book in any language to describe and analyze the history of all Japanese teas from the plant’s introduction to the archipelago around 750 to the present day. To understand the triumph of the tea plant in Japan, William Wayne Farris begins with its cultivation and goes on to describe the myriad ways in which the herb was processed into a palatable beverage, ultimately resulting in the wide variety of teas we enjoy today. Along the way, he traces in fascinating detail the shift in tea’s status from exotic gift item from China, tied to Heian (794–1185) court ritual and medicinal uses, to tax and commodity for exchange in the 1350s, to its complete nativization in Edo (1603–1868) art and literature and its eventual place on the table of every Japanese household. Farris maintains that the increasing sophistication of Japanese agriculture after 1350 is exemplified by tea farming, which became so advanced that Meiji (1868–1912) entrepreneurs were able to export significant amounts of Japanese tea to Euro-American markets. This in turn provided the much-needed foreign capital necessary to help secure Japan a place among the world’s industrialized nations. Tea also had a hand in initiating Japan’s “industrious revolution”: From 1400, tea was being drunk in larger quantities by commoners as well as elites, and the stimulating, habit-forming beverage made it possible for laborers to apply handicraft skills in a meticulous, efficient, and prolonged manner. In addition to aiding in the protoindustrialization of Japan by 1800, tea had by that time become a central commodity in the formation of a burgeoning consumer society. The demand-pull of tea consumption necessitated even greater production into the postwar period—and this despite challenges posed to the industry by consumers’ growing taste for coffee. A Bowl for a Coin makes a convincing case for how tea—an age-old drink that continues to adapt itself to changing tastes in Japan and the world—can serve as a broad lens through which to view the development of Japanese society over many centuries.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. It was loaded with urgently needed goods for the fledgling French colony, but its principal commodity was a new kind of export: women.Falsely accused of sex crimes, these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship's hold. Of the 132 women who were sent this way, only 62 survived. But these women carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi.Drawing on an impressive range of sources to restore the voices of these women to the historical record, Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast (Basic, 2022) introduces us to the Gulf South's Founding Mothers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Margaret Arnold is the Associate Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Medford, Massachusetts. She received her PhD in Religious and Theological Studies from Boston University. Her new book, The Magdalene in the Reformation, is out now from The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Medicine and slavery went hand-in-hand. But what was the nature of this vile partnership? In Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (UNC Press, 2017), Rana Hogarth shows that familiar histories, though excellent, fail to explain how and why medicine and slavery became fused in the first place.No doubt, defenders of slavery used medicine to justify the corrupt practice once it was under threat. But Hogarth shows how science and medicine grafted during times and in places where slavery was secure—where white elites had no need to justify the violent practice with medical ideas because slavery was taken for granted. How and why did medicine and slavery fuse, Hogarth asks, in the Atlantic World of the newly invented United States and ascendant imperial Britain? Understanding the answer helps us grasp the valences and impacts of racialized national and social identities, then as well as today.White physicians inflated their value—financial as well as reputational—by locating medical reasons for already existing racist tropes. Circa 1800, white physicians were a disreputable and loosely aligned lot. They had many rivals (Black healers), rich skeptics (plantation owners), and no professional organization until the mid-nineteenth century under which they could rally. Before then, a wide-spread, active white belief in an innate difference between Black and white bodies was the foregone conclusion that white physicians worked to explain in order to appear of use. White physicians in the English-speaking Caribbean developed medical theories of innate difference in the etiology, progress and experience of illness in Black and white bodies—evidence to the contrary be damned. As a consequence, they ignored immense Black suffering, exposed Black workers to deadly diseases, and policed Black people through the hospital system, all the while seeing Black people as appropriate for service in the military and as objects for teaching dissection, that is to say, in projects of imperial and professional expansion.Medicalizing Blackness broadens the story of medicine in the Atlantic World with a lens that perceives more than the institution of slavery. It also demonstrates the emergence of the Caribbean as a locus—not an outpost—of trustworthy medical knowledge circulated through an array of genres, including journals articles, plantation guides, hospital advertisements, and other media of “textual subjugation” that Hogarth reads with great insight. In short, medicine needed the racist logics of slavery in order to gain power before slavery needed racist medicine to defend its own might.July 2022 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the exposure of the abusive and unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments in the US media. Engaging the roots of white supremacist ideas and practices is essential for better understanding and for stronger political action against racism, as important fifty years ago as it is in our ongoing racialized pandemic.This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark  and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices