Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Karl Gerth’s new book, Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) details how the state created brands, promoted and advertised particular products, set up department stores, and facilitated the promotion of certain luxury consumer products (notably wristwatches, bicycles, and sewing machines)—all in the Mao era. Though not typically considered to be a period of Chinese history driven by consumerism, Gerth’s beautifully researched book shows how, in the early People’s Republic, the Communist Party expanded consumerism and built ‘state capitalism’, and the ferocity of consumer impulses and behaviors that followed.Challenging, provocative, and precisely written, Unending Capitalism is sure to appeal to anyone interested in modern Chinese history and histories of capitalism, as well as any readers looking for a book that uses some really fascinating sources to complicate the dominant narrative of China’s ‘socialist’ history.Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. She works on Manchu language books and book history and loves anything with a good kesike in it. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu  

What was the Cold War that shook world politics for the second half of the twentieth century? Standard narratives focus on Soviet-American rivalry as if the superpowers were the exclusive driving forces of the international system. Lorenz M. Lüthi, Associate Professor of History at McGill University in his new book Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020), offers a radically different account, restoring agency to regional powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe and revealing how regional and national developments shaped the course of the global Cold War. Despite their elevated position in 1945, the United States, Soviet Union and United Kingdom quickly realized that their political, economic, and military power had surprisingly tight limits given the challenges of decolonization, Asian-African internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab–Israeli antagonism, and European economic developments. A series of Cold Wars ebbed and flowed as the three world regions underwent structural changes that weakened or even severed their links to the global ideological clash, leaving the superpower Cold War as the only major conflict that remained by the 1980s. While not everyone will necessarily agree with all aspects of this at times hyper-revisionist account of the conflict that we call the Cold War, scholars and lay person alike will be ultra-impressed by the wide range of this narrative history, as well as the breath of research displayed by Professor Luthi. In short this is a book that is required reading for anyone interested in, or specializing in the Cold War.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 recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

Anais Angelo, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Vienna has written an exceptional book entitled Power and the Presidency in Kenya: The Jomo Kenyatta Years (Cambridge University Press) in CUP's prestigious African Studies Series.Angelo’s book analyses the little-studied institution of the Office of the President by studying its first postcolonial office-holder in Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta.Angelo’s book is also a study of postcolonial statebuilding, told through the process of negotiations that transformed Kenya into a presidential republic. Using extensive archival records, she finds that neither the Brits nor Kenyan political elites intended to create a presidential regime with near limitless executive power. The result is a political biography of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta. It’s a story of distant and discrete politician that also narrates Kenya’s colonial and postcolonial history.Susan Thomson is associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate University.

Although Latinos are now the largest non-majority group in the United States, existing research on white attitudes toward Latinos has focused almost exclusively on attitudes toward immigration. Ignored Racism: White Animus Toward Latinos (Cambridge University Press) changes that.It argues that such accounts fundamentally underestimate the political power of whites' animus toward Latinos and thus miss how conflict extends well beyond immigration to issues such as voting rights, criminal punishment, policing, and which candidates to support.Providing historical and cultural context and drawing on rich survey and experimental evidence, Mark Ramirez and David Peterson show that Latino racism-ethnicism (LRE) is a coherent belief system about Latinos that is conceptually and empirically distinct from other forms of out-group hostility, and from partisanship and ideology. Moreover, animus toward Latinos has become a powerful force in contemporary American politics, shaping white public opinion in elections and across a number of important issue areas - and resulting in policies that harm Latinos disproportionately.Mark D. Ramirez is Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University.David A. M. Peterson is Professor and Whitaker-Lindgren Faculty Fellow in Political Science at Iowa State University.David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD.

In Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire (Cambridge UP, 2019), Kris Alexanderson offers a revealing portrait of the Dutch Empire repositions our understanding of modern empires from the terrestrial to the oceanic. It highlights the importance of shipping, port cities, and maritime culture to the political struggles of the 1920s and 30s. Port cities such as Jeddah, Shanghai, and Batavia were hotbeds for the spread of nationalism, communism, pan-Islamism, and pan-Asianism, and became important centers of opposition to Dutch imperialism through the circulation of passengers, laborers, and religious pilgrims. In response to growing maritime threats, the Dutch government and shipping companies attempted to secure oceanic spaces and maintain hegemony abroad through a web of control. Techniques included maritime policing networks, close collaboration with British and French surveillance entities ashore, and maintaining segregation on ships, which was meant to 'teach' those on board their position within imperial hierarchies. This innovative study exposes how anti-colonialism was shaped not only within the terrestrial confines of metropole and colony, but across the transoceanic spaces in between.

In her new book, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802 (Cambridge UP, 2020), Dr. Pernille Røge charts the confluence and reciprocal impacts of ideas and policies espoused by political economists, colonial administrators, planters, and entrepreneurs to reform the French empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. Due to this diffusion of observations and ideas, French economic philosophers who called themselves “economistes” and later “physiocrats” were able to formulate and advocated for new French colonial doctrines that emphasized agricultural development, free labor, commercial liberalization, and colonial economic and legal integration during and after the Seven Years War (1756-1763). While meeting initial resistance, such reform efforts inspired many imperial agendas enacted by French Revolutionary leaders as well as those by subsequent French imperialists. Deeply researched from records from three continents, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire offers an enlightening perspective on critical French Atlantic political-economic development and imperial reformulation, with intellectual, economic, and political relevance that last till this day.Dr. Pernille Røge is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and the convener of Pitt’s Early Modern Worlds Initiative.Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic word. 

Prior to the 1960s, Democrats were seen as having a lock on the South in national and local electoral politics, while Republicans had strengths in other parts of the country. While this was the case for some time, Boris Heersink and Jeffrey A. Jenkins, in their new book,Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), look a bit more deeply into the role of the Republican Party in the Southern states following the Civil War, and they find some interesting dynamics at play across the next hundred years. Heersink and Jenkins argue that the overly simplified view of the “solid Democratic South” creates an incomplete narrative. Outlining the role of the Republican Party in the former states of the Confederacy, they explain how Southern Republicans had meaningful roles in selecting Republican presidential candidates even if few of those candidates carried any electoral college votes from Southern states.Heersink and Jenkins describe how Southern Republicans, despite their unpopularity in the South, remained nationally important through their regular participation at the Republican national conventions. They explain that Southern delegates made up a sizable portion of the conventions, and candidates often vied for support from these delegates. Southern delegates were so valuable that candidates often turned to corrupt practices, including bribery, to win over these delegates. As a result, many GOP delegates were able to leverage their support for candidates for patronage appointments back home, even if they couldn’t produce broad-based state support for Republican presidential candidates. Heersink and Jenkins created a complex data set that came from census records, delegate rosters, local newspaper articles from the time, and information about patronage appointments. This is a fascinating multi-methods analysis, and they are continuing to expand the analysis to look more closely at these questions of patronage appointments.Additionally, Heersink and Jenkins discuss electoral strategies of the Republican Party over the century that followed the Civil War. They recount the different ways that the GOP, in different states, approached party building and political engagement. This dimension of the research and the book is particularly rich since it dives into how the parties operated at the state level and how the approach of those operations also changed and shifted over time. As Reconstruction ended and as Southern states began to institute laws and regulations that would come to form the Jim Crow era, the various state-level Republican parties (and Democratic Parties) pursued support among voters, especially white voters as Black voters were pushed out of active political participation in the South. This hundred-year span is both nuanced and complex, and Heersink and Jenkins guide the reader through the evolution of the Republican Party, how this paved the way for Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy and partisan realignment of the South in the latter part of the 20th century.Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast.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).

What do all these have in common: Disneyland and the Dreamtime, the shopping mall and the planned economy, Chomsky's Syntactic Structures and Halliday's Functional Grammar, Unicode and door handles? All mean something.The companion volumes Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning (Cambridge University Press) and Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning (Cambridge University Press), by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, are about being about: the topic is meaning, the activity in our lives which happens to us and which we make happen. Meaning is an inescapable fact of the universe, and though meaning may not be a defining trait of our species, we humans make meaning and add meaning everywhere and all the time.Cope and Kalantzis are at the top of their fields: intellectual history, education, communication studies, linguistics. In this two-volume set, though, Cope and Kalantzis bring everything they have achieved to another level. All of meaning––which is everything there is and has been and ever will be––all of meaning becomes, in their handling, six forms (text, image, space, object, body, sound, speech) and five functions (reference, agency, structure, context, interest).This is not reductive, and the reason it's not reductive is transposition. All five functions are switched on always, in all meaning; the form a meaning takes, on the other hand, is indeed quite often limited to just one. However, this limitation is, through a sweeping move in their theory, shown to be no limitation at all. Every form immanently and imminently becomes other forms, or in the terms of their multimodal grammar, things transpose.Cope and Kalantzis are good writers. Books of such informational and theoretical density do not normally read like your favorite biography or novel. Making Sense and Adding Sense, though, do read like that, thanks to clear prose on complex matter, to orienting tables and boxed definitions, and to the storylines of thinkers and doers whose lives relate in all manner of ways to multimodal theory. The text is expanded online (meaningpatterns.net) by images and videos, where Cope and Kalantzis make good on their point of just how naturally meaning exceeds any given form. The user's experience of Making Sense and Adding Sense is complete.Bill Cope is a Professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.Mary Kalantzis was from 2006 to 2016 Dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads the podcast series Scholarly Communication, where the world of research publishing is brought to your ears. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de

When most Westerners think of the Gulf, the first thing that comes to mind is often oil. However, as Adam Hanieh demonstrates in Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2018), the economies of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait are about more than just the “black gold.” Conglomerates and state-owned firms from this region have become major players throughout the Middle East and the broader global economies in sectors like agribusiness, finance, real estate, and logistics. In the process, processes of class and state formation in the Gulf have become inextricably tied up with political and economic developments in the broader Middle East, as the valorization of Gulf oil surpluses has come to depend on access to markets for land (both urban and rural) throughout the region. Hanieh analyzes how the Gulf states’ quest for food security in the wake of the food price increases of the late 2000s has affected agrarian class relations in Egypt and other countries, how Gulf capital has contributed to market-led remaking of cities throughout the region, and how Gulf control of Arab state financial reserves has given GCC countries tremendous geopolitical and economic leverage over their neighbors.Furthermore, Hanieh shows that the boundary between public and private interests in the Gulf states is blurred by the close relationships between wealthy private businesses and patrimonial monarchies, and capital accumulation in the region depends on the hyper-exploitation of foreign guest workers, who can easily be deported if they demand higher wages or go on strike. Money, Markets, and Monarchies dispels widespread myths about the political economies of the Gulf while providing a distinct vantage point for exploring the complex geographies of global capitalism.

States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge University Press, 2020) theorizes the ways in which states that are presumed to be weaker in the international system use the International Criminal Court (ICC) to advance their security and political interests. Ultimately, the book contends that African states have managed to instrumentally and strategically use the international justice system to their advantage, a theoretical framework that challenges the “justice cascade” argument. The empirical work of this study focuses on four major themes around the intersection of power, states’ interests, and the global governance of atrocity crimes: first, the strategic use of self-referrals to the ICC; second, complementarity between the national and the international justice systems; third, the limits of state cooperation with international courts; and fourth, the use of international courts in domestic political conflicts.Oumar Ba is an assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College. The draft manuscript on which his book was based was the 2019 International Studies Association (ISA) Northeast Scholars’ Circle honoree. In 2020, Opinio Juris hosted a symposium on States of Justice, and Africa is a Country hosted a discussion on race and international relations with Oumar Ba and Samar al-Bulushi.Madina Thiam is a PhD candidate in history at UCLA.