Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

In the wake of the so-called war on terror we’ve become accustomed to racialized portrayals of the Arab as an inflexible and threatening other to the mores and ways of the non-Arab world. Although these portrayals are new in their historical contingencies and sociological particulars, the manner in which Arabs are represented today recalls an earlier period in Southeast Asia, when European colonizers cast Arabs they encountered there, and Arab men especially, as provocateurs of otherwise peaceable non-Arab Muslims. Yet as Sumit K. Mandal discusses in Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World (Cambridge University Press, 2018) this representation jars with the fluidity and hybridity of Arab identities in Southeast Asia, before and under colonial rule, and with histories of commerce and pacific relations that national historiographies have elided or effaced.Sumit Mandal joins us for this New Books in Southeast Asian Studies interview, to talk about the power and limits of colonial racial categories; Hadramis, Sayyids and Sharifas in maritime Southeast Asia; modernity and cultural hybridity; the descendants of Arabs in the Malay world today; and, to share some ideas on how to succeed in rethinking, rewriting and publishing a longstanding research project.Our congratulations to Sumit on learning that Becoming Arab is the winner of the 2020 Harry J Benda Prize of the Association for Asian Studies: to find out more about the prize, visit the AAS website.Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.

Should we understand the rise of Trump or the success of Brexit in terms of populism? Culture? Xenophobia? Do the same political forces produce Sanders and Trump? In his new book Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Jonathan Hopkin provides case studies of Spain, Italy, Greece, the US, and UK to argue that the election results in rich Western democracies are not the result of populism or hostility to migration – but opposition to the inequalities brought on by the economic policy of neo-liberalism. Hopkin’s finely grained qualitative study emphasizes the ways in which economics fuels movements from both left and right. Anti-systems candidates attack the ways in which neo-liberal institutions and politics distribute benefits and risks. For Hopkin, the greater the impact of economic inequality and hardship, the higher the vote share for anti-systems candidates and policies.Hopkin looks back to look forward. As nations abandoned the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s, they triggered an erosion of democratic process in favor of technocratic government that left little room for voters – or their leaders – to influence policy. After the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, voters rejected candidates associated with an economic system that favored bailing out banks yet imposed austerity on citizens. Anti-Systems Politics provides clear and compelling case studies that provide insights on contemporary politics from Europe to the US.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

Though the story of emancipation is well known in American history, the roles of many of the key figures involved in it are often overlooked. Among them is James Mitchell Ashley, the Ohio congressman who shepherded the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives. In The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Rebecca E. Zietlow recounts the intellectual development of Ashley as an abolitionist and how he sought to turn freedom into a reality for millions of African Americans. As Zietlow explains, an important strain in Ashley’s thinking was his commitment to the free labor ideas prominent in the Democratic Party in the antebellum era. As a committed abolitionist, he played a prominent role in the emergence of the Republican Party in Ohio in the 1850s culminating in his election to Congress in 1858. As a representative during one of the critical period in the nation’s history, Ashley was at the forefront of Congress’ response to the issue of slavery during the Civil War, working not just to pass the amendment that ended the “peculiar institution” but to craft legislation designed to ensure that the freedom won by African Americans was real and not undermined by the unreconstructed Southern governments in power in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

Learning, innovation and adaptation are not concepts that we necessarily associate with the British Army of the First World War. Yet the need to learn from mistakes, to exploit new opportunities and to adapt to complex and novel situations are always necessary.Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), by Dr. Aimée Fox, Lecturer in Defence Studies at King's College London, grapples with this most intriguing of topic, particular for academics with their generally less than positive views of the mental capacities of the armed forces. Dr. Fox's book is the first institutional examination of the army's process for learning during the First World War. Drawing on organizational and management theories. Dr. Fox critiques existing approaches to military learning in wartime. Focused on a series of case studies, the book ranges across multiple theatres and positions the army within a broader context in terms of relationships with allies and civilians to reveal that learning was more complex than initially thought. The book also grapples with the army's failings and shortcomings, explores and acknowledges the inherent difficulties in a desperate and lethally competitive environment.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.

In her intimidatingly brilliant new book Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Sohaira Siddiqui conducts a masterful analysis of how conditions of political change and fragmentation generate intellectual debates and fermentation on the often-conflictual interaction of certainty, continuity, and community in Muslim thought and practice. Focused on the thought and career of the prominent 11th-century Muslim scholar al-Juwayni (d. 1085), Siddiqui examines the hermeneutical choices, operations, and conundrums that go into the negotiation of epistemic certainty in the realms of law and theology with the imperative of historical change and dynamism. The distinguishing hallmark of this book is the way it conducts a thoroughly interdisciplinary examination of early Muslim intellectual thought by putting Islamic law, theology, and politics into a productive and rather profound conversation. The outcome is a study that combines philological prowess, analytical sophistication, and astonishing lucidity. Sure to spark important conversations in Islamic Studies and beyond, this book deserves to be taught in wide ranging undergraduate and graduate seminars as well.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

How did de-colonialization impact the United Kingdom itself? That is a topic that Professor of Imperial & Commonwealth History at King’s College, London, Sarah Stockwell aims to tackle in her latest book: The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Looking at the process of de-colonialization and its domestic impact via four sets of institutions: Oxbridge, The Bank of England, The Royal Mint and the Royal military academy at Sandhurst, Stockwell aims to show how in each instance, the institution in question was affected by the end of Empire. Stockwell’s approach is a novel and revisionist one, in contradiction to Bernard Porter’s more wildly held thesis on the subject. And, while Stockwell’s argument both well researched and well written, will not convince everyone; it is certainly a highly interesting and imaginative one, which everyone interested in the topic should peruse and read. 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.

Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2018) examines the emergence of self-knowledge as a determining legal consideration among the rabbis of Late Antiquity, from the third to the seventh centuries CE. Based on close readings of rabbinic texts from Palestine and Babylonia, Ayelet Hoffmann Libson highlights a unique and surprising development in Talmudic jurisprudence, whereby legal decision-making incorporated personal and subjective information, a process that included the rabbis’ willingness to limit their own power.Hoffmann Libson examines the central legal role accorded to individuals' knowledge of their bodies and mental states in areas of law as diverse as purity laws, family law and the laws of Sabbath. By focusing on subjectivity and self-reflection, the Babylonian rabbis transformed earlier legal practices in a way that cohered with the cultural concerns of other religious groups in Late Antiquity. They developed sophisticated ideas about the inner self and incorporated these notions into their distinctive discourse of law.Renee Garfinkel is a clinical psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

For the author of the fourth Gospel, there is neither a Christless church nor a churchless Christ. In his book Ecclesiology and Theosis in the Gospel of John (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Andrew J. Byers argues that ecclesiology is as central a Johannine concern as Christology. Rather than focusing on the community behind the text, John's Gospel directs attention to the vision of community prescribed within the text, which is presented as a 'narrative ecclesiology' by which the concept of 'church' gradually unfolds throughout the Gospel's sequence. The theme of oneness functions within this script and draws on the theological language of the Shema, a centerpiece of early Jewish theology and social identity. To be 'one' with this 'one God' and his 'one Shepherd' involves the believers' corporate participation within the divine family. Such participation requires an ontological transformation that warrants an ecclesial identity expressed by the bold assertion found in Jesus' citation of Psalm 82: 'you are gods'.Dr. Andrew J. Byers is The Director of the Free Church Track & Lecturer in New Testament at Cranmer Hall at St John’s College at Durham University. He has served for 13 years in pastoral ministry both in the US and in the UK, and is the author of Theomedia: The Media of God and the Digital Age, and Faith Without Illusions: Following Jesus as a Cynic-Saint. His other writings have appeared in academic journals such as New Testament Studies and Novum Testamentum, and also in more popular-level publications such as Christianity Today and Relevant Magazine. He blogs (occasionally) at hopefulrealism.com.Jonathan Wright is a PhD student in New Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He holds an MDiv from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a ThM from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and can be reached at jonrichwright@gmail.com, on Twitter @jonrichwright, or jonathanrichardwright.com. 

Dispositionalism is the view that there are irreducible causal powers in nature that explain why objects behave as they do. To say salt is soluble in water, for example, is to say that salt has the disposition to dissolve in water, and this disposition is understood as a real causal power of salt. In Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Travis Dumsday articulates a novel version of dispositionalism – nomic dispositionalism – and considers its relation to a cross-section of fundamental debates and positions in the metaphysics of science, such as nature of scientific laws, the possibility of knowledge about unobservable entities, and whether there is any fundamental material stuff. Dumsday, who is associate professor of philosophy at Concordia University of Edmonton, provides a concise and easily accessible introduction to many of these core debates in the metaphysics of science as well as a defense of his intriguing new view of dispositionalism.

Tocqueville and Putnam insist that civil society helps individuals flourish and resist authority, but Daniel C. Mattingly’s decade of research in rural China leads him to conclude that civil society offers officials leverage over citizens that strengthens the state’s coercive capacity. In his book The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Mattingly argues that civil society can encourage contributions to public goods like roads, schools, and charities, civil associations increase the prestige and authority of local elites who can help insure political compliance. Civil society groups help officials in rural China tamp down protest, requisite land, and enforce mandatory birth quotas. Instead of focusing on oppressive formal institutions such secret police or the military, Mattingly looks to the ways in which civic associations may be used to apply hidden pressure on citizens through informal institutions.Mattingly’s extensive field work, experiments embedded in face-to-face surveys, and datasets from villages point to three ways in which the state uses civil society to coerce. First, the state collects information and tracks behavior – such that the presence of a temple or lineage associations leads to more land requisitions and few protests. Second, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) coopts local elites by including them in political bodies. These local officials understand which citzens have grievances and are the most likely to mobilize against the state. Last, the state creates infiltrating institutions with street level agents are able to spy, coax, or snitch. This rich book combines detailed qualitative case studies with clear prose. Mattingly provides details for those well-versed in Chinese political systems and translates for political scientists seeking a more nuanced understanding of authoritarianism and civil society.Mattingly is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).