Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

In the wake of the First World War and Russian Revolutions, Central Europeans in 1919 faced a world of possibilities, threats, and extreme contrasts. Dramatic events since the end of the world war seemed poised to transform the world, but the form of that transformation was unclear and violently contested in the streets and societies of Munich and Budapest in 1919. The political perceptions of contemporaries, framed by gender stereotypes and antisemitism, reveal the sense of living history, of 'fighting the world revolution', which was shared by residents of the two cities. In 1919, both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries were focused on shaping the emerging new order according to their own worldview. In Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe: The Deluge of 1919 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Eliza Ablovatski helps answer the question of why so many Germans and Hungarians chose to use their new political power for violence and repression.Eliza Ablovatski is Associate Professor of History at Kenyon College (Ohio), where she has just completed her term as chair of the History department. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

Why has secularism faced such challenges in the Middle East and in Lebanon in particular? In light of dominating headlines about the spread of sectarianism and the so-called death of Arab secularism, Mark Farha addresses the need for a thorough examination of the history of secular thought and practice in the region. In Lebanon: The Rise and Fall of a Secular State under Siege (Cambridge UP, 2019), Farha provides a new understanding of the historical roots of secularism as well as the potential causes for the continued resistance a fully deconfessionalized state faces both in Lebanon and in the region at large. Drawing on a vast corpus of primary and secondary sources to examine the varying political parties and ideologies involved, this book provides a fresh approach to the study of religion and politics in the Arab world and beyond.Mark Farha is currently in the Department of Sociology at the University of Zurich; he also teaches a masterclass for Macat.com. Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.

When trying to understand how to help countries escape poverty, economists initially focused on macro topics like inflation, government deficits, trade balances, and capital inflows. Later there was a shift in focus to institutions, looking at whether and how competitive elections, strong legal systems, and other features facilitated investment and growth. More recently micro policy has become a new focus, with experimentalists conducting randomized trials to figure out whether or how much specific policies like de-worming, malaria bednets, or clean cooking stoves helped or why they might fail.But regardless of whether a country is a democracy or dictatorship and regardless of whether the policies have been evaluated by a randomized controlled trial, someone has to carry them out. How are government personnel selected, assigned, and incentivized? How does this affect policy implementation? In her book, Regime Threats and State Solutions: Bureaucratic Loyalty and Embeddedness in Kenya, Professor Mai Hassan explores these issues. She shows how bureaucratic assignments to different areas balance competing political and policy concerns, with a focus as much on maintaining power as on achieving development.In our conversation, Professor Hassan mentioned a new working paper on the grudging and gradual formalization of property rights in Kenya, with my colleague at the University of San Francisco, Kathleen Klaus. She has also co-authored an article setting out a new agenda for the study of public administration in developing countries. Recently, she has begun studying Sudan, the country of her birth. One early product of this research is here.Mai Hassan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on the state, autocracy, and regime change. She received her PhD from Harvard University.Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China.

Julia Jarcho's Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama (Cambridge UP, 2017) is a fascinating argument for the centrality of writing in experimental theater from Gertrude Stein to Suzan-Lori Parks. Countering arguments that locate the theatrical avant-garde solely in the live event, Jarcho focuses on playwrights and theatre makers whose theater insists on and even revels in language. This book will be of interest to fans of experimental theatre, or to playwrights and theatre makers interested in reconceptualizing the work that writing does on stage.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

Property rights are important for economic exchange, but many governments don't protect them. Private market organizations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort group members. Under what circumstances, then, will private organizations provide a stable environment for economic activity? Based on market case studies and a representative survey of traders in Lagos, Nigeria, this book argues that threats from the government can force an association to behave in ways that promote trade. The findings challenge the conventional wisdom that private good governance in developing countries thrives when the government keeps its hands off private group affairs. Instead, the author argues, leaders among traders behave in ways that promote trade primarily because of the threat of government intrusion.Shelby Grossman is a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Dr. Grossman's primary research interests are in comparative politics and sub-Saharan Africa. She was previously an assistant professor of political science at the University of Memphis and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Dr. Grossman earned her PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2016.Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. His primary research interest is in the political economy of governance and development, particularly in China.

Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge University Press, 2021) is the first cross-disciplinary history of women's international thought. Bringing together some of the foremost historians and scholars of international relations working today, this book recovers and analyzes the path-breaking work of eighteen leading thinkers of international politics from the early to mid-twentieth century. Recovering and analyzing this important work, the essays offer revisionist accounts of IR's intellectual and disciplinary history and expand the locations, genres, and practices of international thinking. Systematically structured, and focusing in particular on Black diasporic, Anglo-American, and European historical women, it does more than 'add women' to the existing intellectual and disciplinary histories from which they were erased. Instead, it raises fundamental questions about which kinds of subjects and what kind of thinking constitutes international thought, opening new vistas to scholars and students of international history and theory, intellectual history and women's and gender studies.Patricia Owens is Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include twentieth-century international history and theory, historical and contemporary practices of Anglo-American counterinsurgency and military intervention, and disciplinary history and the history of international and political thought. Her most recent book, Economy of Force, published by Cambridge University Press, won, among others, the 2016 Susan Strange Prize for the Best Book in international studies and the 2016 International Studies Association Theory Section Best Book Award. Owens’s first book was Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt, published by Oxford University Press in 2007.Katharina Rietzler teaches American, women's and international history at the University of Sussex, UK. Her work has appeared in journals such as Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of Global History, Diplomatic History, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Global Society and in several edited collections. Rietzler’s main research interest is the history of international thought and internationalism in its social, political, economic and legal dimensions from the 1910s to the 1960s. She is currently completing a book on 20th-century US philanthropy, international thought and the "problem of the public."Zifeng Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. His dissertation examines Black left feminism and Mao’s China.Kelvin Ng is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit.

How are peoples' ideas about languages, ways of speaking and expressive styles shaped by their social positions and values? How is difference, in language and in social life, made - and unmade? How and why are some differences persuasive as the basis for action, while other differences are ignored or erased? Written by two recognised authorities on language and culture, Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life (Cambridge UP, 2019) argues that ideological work of all kinds is fundamentally communicative, and that social positions, projects and historical moments influence, and are influenced by, people's ideas about communicative practices. Neither true nor false, ideologies are positioned and partial visions of the world, relying on comparison and perspective; they exploit differences in expressive features - linguistic and otherwise - to construct convincing stereotypes of people, spaces and activities. Using detailed ethnographic, historical and contemporary examples, this outstanding book shows readers how to analyse ideological work semiotically.Amir Lehman is an MA student in linguistics at UCL.

Political parties are taken for granted today, but how was the idea of party viewed in the eighteenth century, when core components of modern, representative politics were trialled? From Bolingbroke to Burke, political thinkers regarded party as a fundamental concept of politics, especially in the parliamentary system of Great Britain. The paradox of party was best formulated by David Hume: while parties often threatened the total dissolution of the government, they were also the source of life and vigor in modern politics. In the eighteenth century, party was usually understood as a set of flexible and evolving principles, associated with names and traditions, which categorized and managed political actors, voters, and commentators. In The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Max Skjönsberg demonstrates that the idea of party as ideological unity is not purely a nineteenth- or twentieth-century phenomenon but can be traced to the eighteenth century.

This is an important, revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. In The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), David Veevers uncovers a hidden world of transcultural interactions between servants of the English East India Company and the Asian communities and states they came into contact with, revealing how it was this integration of Europeans into non-European economies, states and societies which was central to British imperial and commercial success rather than national or mercantilist enterprise. As their servants skillfully adapted to this rich and complex environment, the East India Company became enfranchised by the eighteenth century with a breadth of privileges and rights – from governing sprawling metropolises to trading customs-free. In emphasizing the Asian genesis of the British Empire, this book sheds new light on the foreign frameworks of power which fueled the expansion of Global Britain in the early modern world.David Veevers is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He has published articles in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of Global History, and won the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize in 2014. He is co-editor of The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c.1550 to 1750 (2018).Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83

In Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Theodore Cohen examines the ways in which different protagonists sought to incorporate Blackness into Mexican national identity. After the Revolution in 1910, a group of intellectuals, researchers, and cultural producers elaborated on the meanings of Blackness as an important component through which to unite Mexico as a democratic society. These figures focused on creating music, images, ethnographic accounts, and performances to render Blackness spatially, socially, culturally, and physically in the Mexican imagination. Yet, the book moves beyond national boundaries by tying Mexico to larger transnational networks of the African Diaspora. Overall, Finding Afro-Mexico moves beyond a narrative of Black disappearance or invisibility to illuminate the many figures who sought to unearth, articulate, and insist on the presence of Black people, history, and culture in Mexico and its national identity.Theodore W. Cohen is an Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Southern Illinois University.Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.