Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Why do some revolutions fail and succumb to counterrevolutions, whereas others go on to establish durable rule? Marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900 and new evidence from the reversal of Egypt's 2011 revolution, in Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Killian Clarke explains both why counterrevolutions emerge and when they are likely to succeed. He forwards a movement-centric argument that emphasizes the strategies revolutionary leaders embrace both during their opposition campaigns and after they seize power. Movements that wage violent resistance and espouse radical ideologies establish regimes that are very difficult to overthrow. By contrast, democratic revolutions like Egypt's are more vulnerable, though Dr. Clarke also identifies a path by which they too can avoid counterrevolution. By preserving their elite coalitions and broad popular support, these movements can return to mass mobilization to thwart counterrevolutionary threats. In an era of resurgent authoritarianism worldwide, Return of Tyranny sheds light on one particularly violent form of reactionary politics. 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.

Thomas Morel joins Jana Byars to tell the story of subterranean geometry, a forgotten discipline that developed in the silver mines of early modern Europe, talking about his book Underground Mathematics: Craft Culture and Knowledge Production in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2022). Mining and metallurgy were of great significance to the rulers of early modern Europe, required for the silver bullion that fuelled warfare and numerous other uses. Through seven lively case studies, he illustrates how geometry was used in metallic mines by practitioners using esoteric manuscripts. He describes how an original culture of accuracy and measurement paved the way for technical and scientific innovations, and fruitfully brought together the world of artisans, scholars and courts. Based on a variety of original manuscripts, maps and archive material, Morel recounts how knowledge was crafted and circulated among practitioners in the Holy Roman Empire and beyond. Specific chapters deal with the material culture of surveying, map-making, expertise and the political uses of quantification. By carefully reconstructing the religious, economic and cultural context of mining cities, Underground Mathematics contextualizes the rise of numbered information, practical mathematics and quantification in the early modern period.

Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge UP, 2025) tells the story of Patna, in the north Indian region of Bihar, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A century and more earlier, Patna had been an important and populous city, but it came to be seen by many-and is still  seen today-as merely part of the mofussil, the provincial hinterland. Despite Patna's real decline, it continued to nurture a vibrant intellectual culture that linked it with cities and towns across northern India and beyond. Urdu literary gatherings and other Islamicate traditions inherited from Mughal times helped animate the networks sustaining institutions like scholarly libraries and satirical newspapers. Meanwhile, English-educated lawyers sought to bring new prominence to their city and region by making Patna the capital of a new province. They succeeded, but as Patna's political influence grew, its distinctive character was diminished. Ultimately, Provincial Metropolis shows, Patna's intellectual and cultural life thrived not despite its provinciality but because of it. * David Boyk is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University, where he teaches courses in Hindi-Urdu language and literature, and on South Asian literature, film, and history more broadly. My scholarly interests are focused on South Asia and include urban and regional history, film, food studies,and the history of language and literature. You can learn more about him on his website.  * Saumya Dadoo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Her dissertation focuses on the history of law, policing, and punishment in colonial Allahabad. 

How did China’s Nationalists feed their armies during the long war against Japan? In her new book, Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945 (Cambridge UP, 2025), Jennifer Yip (National University of Singapore) looks at China’s military grain systems from field to frontline. Yip examines the bureaucratic processes and deeply human stories of requisitioning, transporting, and storing grain in Nationalist-held China. This forensic look at food helps readers rethink the geographies, timings and burdens of China’s war of resistance – as well as the meanings of total war itself. By uncoupling ‘total war’ from images of industrialised warfare, Grains of Conflict shows how China’s war with Japan mobilized the labor and resources of Chinese society on a total scale. In this interview, Yip explores the achievements and difficulties of Nationalist grain mobilization and discusses how the long conflict in China became a multi-sided ‘struggle for food’ – with devastating results. Grains of Conflict is highly recommended for anyone interested in modern Chinese history and the history of war in the twentieth century. Host: Mark Baker is lecturer (assistant professor) in East Asian history at the University of Manchester, UK.

Political Scientists Jack Greenberg (Yale University) and John Dearborn (Vanderbilt University) have a new book that focuses on the idea of presidential self-restraint and the ways in which the U.S. Congress has tried to design Executive positions with an eye towards making real this dimension of presidential norms. The concept of presidential self-restraint is a component of how the president uses his/her executive powers: that the president has a certain expanse of power and chooses, based on a variety of reasons or outcomes, to husband some of that power, or restrain its use. Because presidential self-restraint is particularly hard to divine, especially in how presidents think about the execution of their powers, Greenberg and Dearborn turned to congressional considerations that essentially take into account this idea. Congress has spent quite a lot of time over the past fifty years (since Watergate) in designing appointed positions within the Executive branch in such a way as to flesh out a kind of restraint on the president’s part. In so doing, Congress has attempted different means to insulate individuals/positions from potential abuse by a president. Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint integrates a number of case studies of congressional action on presidential appointments to examine this push and pull between the legislative and executive branches. As the issue of self-restraint has become more pressing, Greenberg and Dearborn sketch out three foundational shifts that provides the framework for the way that Congress has tried to insulate executive positions, and the ways in which Congress has acknowledged the tension around depending on presidential self-restraint. The issues of political polarization, especially as demonstrated by congressional co-partisans with the president, the Supreme Court’s growing commitment to constitutional formalism and unilateralism in the Executive, and Congress’s unwillingness to defend its own powers and assert those powers all contribute to this conundrum of a reliance on presidential self-restraint that is often caught up in an expansion of the use of executive powers. The case studies provided demonstrate this conundrum and help us to see just how Congress tried to structure self-restraint into a number of different appointments and how presidents have tried to work around those constraints, some more successfully than others. This is a brief but complex analysis of the current dynamic between the president and Article II powers, the U.S. Congress’s evaporating powers, and the Supreme Court’s complicit role in fortifying an expansive understanding of presidential power. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022) and The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is about the reciprocal relationship between cinema and the city as two institutions which co-constitute each other while fashioning the socio-political currents of the region. It interrogates imperial, postcolonial, socio-cultural, and economic imprints as captured, introduced, and left behind by politics of cinema, in the site of Hyderabad. It traverses through the makings and remakings of Hyderabad as princely city, linguistic capital city, and global city, studied through capital, labour, and organization of the film industry. It brings together diverse, and rich historical material to narrate the social history of Hyderabad, over a hundred years.

During the First World War, over 300,000 Italian emigrants returned to Italy from around the world to perform their conscripted military service, a mass mobilisation which was a uniquely Italian phenomenon. But what happened to these men following their arrival and once the war had ended? In Emigrant Soldiers: Mobilising Italians Abroad in the First World War (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Selena Daly reconstructs the lives of these emigrant soldiers before, during and after the First World War, considering their motivations, combat experiences, demobilisation, and lives under Fascism and in the Second World War. Adopting a micro-historical approach, Emigrant Soldiers explores the diverse fates of four men who returned from the United States, Brazil, France, and Britain, interwoven with accounts of other emigrants from across Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Through letters, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, newspapers, and diplomatic reports, Dr. Daly focuses on the experiences and voices of the emigrant soldiers, providing a new global account of Italians during the First World War. 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.

Epic poetry, notably the Iliad and the Odyssey, stands as one of the most enduring legacies of ancient Greece. Although the impact of these epics on Western civilization is widely recognized, their origins remain the subject of heated debate. Were they composed in a single era or over the course of centuries? Were they crafted by one or by many poets? Do they reflect historical reality? These and other important questions are answered in this book. Michael Cosmopoulos, in The World of Homer: Archaeology, Social Memory, and the Emergence of Epic Greek Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2025), reconstructs the world of the Homeric poems and explores the interplay between poetry, social memory, and material culture. By integrating key insights from archaeology, philology, anthropology, and oral tradition, he offers a nuanced perspective of the emergence and early development of Greek epic. His wide-canvas approach enables readers to appreciate the complexity of the Homeric world and gain a deeper understanding of the intricate factors that shaped these magnificent poems.

Legal Knowledge in Organizations: A Source of Strategic and Competitive Advantage (Cambridge UP, 2025) offers a step-by-step guide on how to utilize the law as a source of value in organizations. Robert C. Bird demonstrates how legal knowledge can be a valuable asset for firms, providing them with a sustainable competitive advantage that is difficult for rivals to imitate. Bird presents a five-part framework that outlines how firms can use legal knowledge in competitive markets and how they can avoid misusing it. Chapters also highlight how firms can cultivate legal knowledge and apply novel risk tools to overcome unexpected legal threats. The book emphasizes the importance of ethical values in business decisions and shows how managers and lawyers can build an ethical practice of legal knowledge that benefits both business and society. With the help of numerous visuals, this book makes it easy for readers to leverage legal knowledge and apply it to specific business contexts.

In Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Kalle Kananoja tells the story of how pre-colonial communities throughout the west coast of Africa employed a wide range of medical and spiritual strategies to treat all kinds of diseases. In the sixteenth century, the arrival of European traders and colonists initiated an exchange of healing knowledge that moved across the Atlantic for the next three-hundred years. The initial links in this chain of exchanges were established by European settlers or visitors who, given the limited number of European doctors and medications available, sought the services of African healers whose methods were often seen as more suited and efficacious in the local environments. Missionaries, travelers and botanists also added to these exchanges by collecting and systematizing some of the knowledge they acquired from African informants.By documenting the richness and mobility of African healing knowledge, Kananoja points that even though plants, remedies and practices from the Americas and Asia have been more widely studied, African contributions were equally significant. Africans also sought to learn from the practices, institutions and remedies that travelers brought back from Europe and other parts of the Atlantic world, and incorporated them into what was an already rich and diverse body of healing knowledge. Ultimately the prevalence of these exchanges illustrates not just the differences that existed between European and African understandings of disease and the human body, but also how much common ground there was between them. Kananoja compellingly argues that African healing knowledge should be seen as a rich and dynamic system, which was central to the emergence of an Atlantic world.Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.