Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

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.

The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State (Cambridge University Press 2020) advances a new understanding of how democratic social movements work with welfare institutions to challenge structures of domination. Steven Klein develops a novel theory that depicts welfare institutions as “worldly mediators,” or sites of democratic world-making fostering political empowerment and participation within the context of capitalist economic forces. Drawing on the writings of Weber, Arendt, and Habermas, and historical episodes that range from the workers' movement in Bismarck's Germany to post-war Swedish feminism, the book challenges us to rethink the distribution of power in society, as well as the fundamental concerns of democratic theory. Ranging across political theory and intellectual history, The Work of Politics provides a vital contribution to contemporary thinking about the future of the welfare state.Tejas Parasher is Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King’s College, University of Cambridge.

Political Scientist Nathan Kalmoe has written a fascinating historical and political exploration of the connections between violence and partisanship before, during, and after the American Civil War. This book brings together work by historians and political scientists and straddles both disciplines in the examination of the way that partisan politics at the time of the Civil War also contributed to the rise and use of violence, and how this violence then fed back into partisan politics during this period. Kalmoe engaged a multi-method approach to the research, examining election returns, especially county-level returns during this time; he also integrated the census data from the time to map where voters lived and where soldiers were coming from when they became part of the military. Kalmoe dug deeply into the records about the soldiers (which have been digitized), learning about what happened to them, where they fought, and where they called home. Finally, in order to get a clear sense of the partisan divisions and the action and rhetoric of the party elite, he integrated content from local newspapers—these newspapers were often the media arms of particular political parties in cities and localities, and thus they directly reflected the thinking of the party leaders in those same cities and localities. Kalmoe noted that literacy rates were quite high during this time, which also makes the case for the usefulness of what these partisan newspapers were writing about and reflecting to their readership.With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2020) examines this violent period of American history, and Kalmoe is able to essentially measure how casualties effected voting and mass political behavior by using all of these historical sources to discern this data. By tracing these related behaviors, Kalmoe highlights some of the changes in attitude and approach that takes place in the two main political parties at the time. He finds that the northern Democrats shifted markedly from a pro-war stance earlier in the war to, in 1864, every northern Democratic newspaper taking an anti-war position. This is a rather dynamic change that takes place over a short time. During this same period, the northern Republican partisans were suffering significantly more losses, and they were even more committed to the war, as reflected in the newspapers and in the public events where speakers addressed the topic of the war. This pattern of war memory also continues in Reconstruction, as Republican states built monuments to remember the fallen, and as the regiments also wrote up their own histories, delineating the heroic deeds of those who were members of the respective regiments. This is a sophisticated and complex analysis of the connection between violence and partisan in an earlier era in the United States, when the Union and the Confederacy were moved to take up arms and to commit to violence in ways that were also directly related to the active political parties and partisan affiliation with those parties. In reading through With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War it hard not to see echoes and images of more recent political violence and the way that this more contemporary violence is also tied to partisanship.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

We live in a networked world. Online social networking platforms and the World Wide Web have changed how society thinks about connectivity. Because of the technological nature of such networks, their study has predominantly taken place within the domains of computer science and related scientific fields. But arts and humanities scholars are increasingly using the same kinds of visual and quantitative analysis to shed light on aspects of culture and society hitherto concealed. Written by Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian Ahnert, Nicole Coleman, and Scott Weingart, The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities (Cambridge UP, 2021) contends that networks are a category of study that cuts across traditional academic barriers, uniting diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of complexity in our world. Moreover, we are at a moment in time when it is crucial that arts and humanities scholars join the critique of how large-scale network data and advanced network analysis are being harnessed for the purposes of power, surveillance, and commercial gain.Ruth Ahnert is Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities, Queen Mary University of London.Sebastian Ahnert is University Lecturer, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge.Nicole Coleman is Digital Research Architect, Stanford University Libraries.Scott Weingart is Director of the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Notre Dame.Katie McDonough is Senior Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute.

Based on sweeping research in six languages, Sebastian N. Page's Black Resettlement and the American Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2021) offers the first comprehensive, comparative account of nineteenth-century America's greatest road not taken: the mass resettlement of African Americans outside the United States. Building on resurgent scholarly interest in the so-called 'colonization' movement, the book goes beyond tired debates about colonization's place in the contest over slavery, and beyond the familiar black destinations of Liberia, Canada, and Haiti. Striding effortlessly from Pittsburgh to Panama, Toronto to Trinidad, and Lagos to Louisiana, it synthesizes a wealth of individual, state-level, and national considerations to reorient the field and set a new standard for Atlantic history. Along the way, it shows that what haunted politicians from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln was not whether it was right to abolish slavery, but whether it was safe to do so unless the races were separated.

Every Sunday, Christians all over the world recite the Nicene Creed as a confession of faith. While most do not know the details of the controversy that led to its composition, they are aware that the Council of Nicaea was a critical moment in the history of Christianity. For scholars, the Council has long been a subject of multi-disciplinary interest and continues to fascinate and inspire research. As we approach the 1700th anniversary of the Council, The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea (Cambridge UP, 2021) provides an opportunity to revisit and reflect on old discussions, propose new approaches and interpretative frameworks, and ultimately revitalize a conversation that remains as important now as it was in the fourth century. The volume offers fifteen original studies by scholars who each examine an aspect of the Council. Informed by interdisciplinary approaches, the essays demonstrate its profound legacy with fresh, sometimes provocative, but always intellectually rich ideas.Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

The connection between local news and political polarization is a hot topic that scholars in political science, journalism, and other fields have explored from multiple angles. It's not often that a real-world experiment presents itself, but that's exactly what happened when a Google alert landed in the inboxes of Joshua P. Darr., Matthew P. Hitt, and Johanna Dunaway. During the month of July 2019, the Palm Springs Desert Sun  dropped national politics from its opinion page and instead filled the space with columns from local writers and letters to the editor about local issues. In Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization (Cambridge UP, 2021), the authors use a show that after this quasi-experiment in Palm Springs, politically engaged people did not feel as far apart from members of the opposing party, compared to those in a similar community whose newspaper did not change. While it may not cure all of the imbalances and inequities in opinion journalism, an opinion page that ignores national politics could help local newspapers push back against political polarization. Darr and Hitt join New Books Network host Jenna Spinelle for this conversation. Joshua P. Darr is assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. Matthew P. Hitt is associate professor of political science at Colorado State University. Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald. P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast.

In The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm (Cambridge UP, 2020), Shushma Malik reconstructs the means by which the emperor Nero came to be identified with the New Testament's antichrist. Malik surveys the first four Christian centuries to show how Nero mythology developed, often in ways that were much more positive than we might expect, and how early Christians appropriated this tradition as an apologetic weapon, to demonstrate that their scriptures had in fact predicted the character of his reign. By the fifth century, this argument was less appealing, and largely dropped out of view among Christian expositors until its revival in the nineteenth century, by, among other writers, Oscar Wilde. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in 1988, when the American drug war was taking its current shape, he led the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), one of the federal government’s largest and most important ongoing health surveys that tracks Americans’ use of illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol and tobacco. War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Cambridge UP, 2018), written after he retired, shows where the survey came from, details how it gathers information, and tracks the impact that the shifting cultural and political climate surrounding drug use played on how these statistics were understood. Gfroerer provides necessary insight on what drug use statistics have meant, how they’ve been used (and misused), and what this means for our understanding of drug use in America today.Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.