New Books in Western European Studies

Even without the loss of the City of London from its jurisdiction, the EU has gone through a decade-long revolution in financial supervision and regulation since Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in 2008.The directives and regulations introduced in the wake of the crisis took years to negotiate, implement and stress-test against political reality in the last five years. The second wave of the crisis, which exposed the “doom loop” between fiscally weak states and their pet banks, spawned the European Banking Union but left some crucial remedial work undone.In this update of their 2015 edition of European Banking and Financial Law (Routledge, 2020), Matthias Haentjens and Pierre de Gioia Carabellese provide a comprehensive description and analysis of this growing body of new law, its origins, and policy implications.Matthias Haentjens is professor of law, director of the Hazelhoff Centre for Financial Law at the University of Leiden, and a deputy judge in the district court of Amsterdam.*His book recommendations are Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman (1952 – translated by Robert Chandler – Harvill Secker, 2019) and Made at Home by Giorgio Locatelli (Fourth Estate, 2017).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Charles Hirschkind’s lyrical and majestic new book The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (University of Chicago Press, 2020) represents a profound work of retrieval that launches and executes a stinging rebuke of an ontology of Europe that presumes its exceptionalism. The central focus of Hirschkind’s study is Andalucismo, or a discursive, aesthetic, and political tradition that seeks to disrupt the alleged cleavage between medieval and modern Spain by recovering the deep and penetrating imprints of Muslim Iberia on contemporary Spanish society. To engage Spain’s Muslim and Jewish past not as a bygone and irrelevant relic but as indelibly entwined to the present requires a form of attunement to the past that is activated by the sensoria and suspicious of historicist rigor. In the course of this poetically charged book, one meets a range of thinkers from across the political spectrum, and travels in unexpected avenues of inquiry such as the centrality of Flamenco to Andalucismo. The Feeling of History combines piercing attention to the productive importance of the sensoria in encountering the past with an astonishingly lucid critique of dominant strands of the discipline of history. What emerges from this exercise is not only a richly textured interrogation of a hugely important though often lampooned tradition of Andalucismo, but also a politically urgent reconsideration of modern secular conceptions of how the past must engage and make claims on the present.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 book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The arrival in 1532 of a small group of Spanish conquistadores at the Andean town of Cajamarca launched one of the most dramatic – and often misunderstood – events in world history. In Inca Apocalypse: The Spanish Conquest and the Transformation of the Andean World (Oxford UP, 2020), R. Alan Covey draws upon a wealth of new archaeological and archival discoveries to detail the remarkable events that ended one empire and transformed another. From this he builds a new narrative that highlights the apocalyptic mindsets of the two empires and how these shaped the interactions between the Spanish and the Inca. As Covey explains, the Spaniards arrived at a point when the Incan empire was coping with the disruptions caused by a civil war and a devastating pandemic. To the Inca and their neighbors, the Spaniards were yet another disruptive force, one that different groups in the region sought to exploit for their own purposes. The result was twenty years of political infighting and warfare, culminating in the defeat of insurrectionary Spaniards by a force of Incans fighting on behalf of the king of Spain. Though such maneuvering helped preserve a degree of status for the Inca elite, it opened the way for the gradual absorption of the Inca into the Spanish empire in a process that played out over the following century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The debate about the origins of Enlightenment haven’t paid as much attention as they should have done to the radical religious cultures of the Dutch Republic in the mid-17th century, which are the subject of Francesco Quatrini’s new book. Adam Boreel (1602-1665): A Collegiant's Attempt to Reform Christianity (Brill, 2020) is a biographical and thematic study of one of the most enigmatic – and perhaps one of the most important – of the period’s religious and scientific thinkers. In the first major biography of this figure, and in almost two hundred thousand words, Quatrini reconstructs from complex and often ambiguous sources Boreel’s childhood in the Dutch Reformed church, the intellectual agendas and travels by which he was exposed to more radical forms of Christianity, the friendship networks in which he worked on projects that seem to have designed the conversation of the Jews, and most significantly of all the unofficial institutions that fostered the wide-ranging and open-ended conversations on religious subjects that marked the communal life of the Collegiants. Quatrini’s outstanding new book opens up new windows in our understanding of early modern religion and science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Understanding how people cope with large-scale traumatic events has become more urgent as we continue to cope with the effects of the pandemic. In Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 2021), Jillian Rogers examines France in the aftermath of World War I, which left its residents mourning a lost generation and many soldiers suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Through analysis of French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, as well as music and archival materials, Rogers argues that music was a significant method that French people used to manage and perform trauma. Employing innovative analytical techniques, Rogers shows that stylistic developments in post-war French music may have been responses to trauma suffered by the composers. As a consolatory practice, French performers used music to remember loved ones but also to sooth themselves through the repetitive bodily movements required to play neoclassical music. By interpreting French modernist music as a therapeutic medium Rogers demonstrates the importance of addressing trauma, mourning, and people's emotional lives in music scholarship.Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Anthony A. J. Williams is a political scientist who has taught at the University of Liverpool and at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Anthony is the author of an outstanding new account of Christian Socialism as Political Ideology: The Formation of the British Christian Left, 1877-1945 (I. B. Tauris, 2020) While other scholars have reconstructed the history of the Christian socialist tradition, few have investigated the ideas, and the sources of the ideas, that shaped it. Anthony shows how members of several quite different denominations came together to develop a distinct political platform, which was sometimes in tension with the values of their religious backgrounds. In a period when a great deal of media attention is being given to the religious right, Anthony's new book will remind readers that there has long been an alternative - and very influential - Christian left. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In the 1980s and 1990s, Black German women began to play significant roles in challenging the discrimination in their own nation and abroad. Their grassroots organizing, writings, and political and cultural activities nurtured innovative traditions, ideas, and practices. These strategies facilitated new, often radical bonds between people from disparate backgrounds across the Black Diaspora.In Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of Illinois Press 2020), Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde's role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism.Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists' politics, intellectualism, and internationalism.Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil is an Associate Professor of 20th-century European Women’s and Gender History at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the histories of post-1945 Europe, the African/Black diaspora, social movements, feminism, Black internationalism, gender and sexuality, and emotions. Follow her on Twitter @tnflorvil. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

As Hungary's opposition parties form themselves into an unlikely pre-electoral coalition, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán faces the first genuine challenge to his "illiberal" rule since 2010.This is the second of three interviews with authors of new books in English about Orbánism. In The Orbán Regime: Plebiscitary Leader Democracy in the Making (Routledge, 2020), András Körösényi uses Max Weber's Plebiscitary Leader Democracy model to explain how this charismatic nationalist-conservative has not only held on to power for so long but come to dominate the domestic political culture. “The Orbán regime has turned out to be a natural laboratory for studying PLD", say the authors.Körösényi is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Corvinus University in Budapest.*The author's own book recommendation is Men on Horseback: the Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution by David A. Bell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Steven Press is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. His marvelous first book, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa (Harvard University Press, 2017), is an incredibly well-documented monograph that follows a paper trail of questionable treaties to discover the rogues or confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s. Dr. Press shows in captivating detail how private European businessmen and firms produced hundreds of deeds purporting to buy political rights from indigenous African leaders whose understanding of these agreements was usually deemed irrelevant. A system of privately governed empires, some spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles, promptly sprang up in the heart of Africa. These experiments in governance quickly attracted notice in European capitals. The book portrays how the whole dubious enterprise came to a head at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when international diplomacy embraced rogue empires as legal precedents for new colonial agendas, opening up a host of dilemmas about the nature of modern statehood and sovereignty. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African slavery, Native American genocide, and systematic racial discrimination. White Freedom traces the complex relationship between freedom and race from the eighteenth century to today, revealing how being free has meant being white.Tyler Stovall explores the intertwined histories of racism and freedom in France and the United States, the two leading nations that have claimed liberty as the heart of their national identities. He explores how French and American thinkers defined freedom in racial terms and conceived of liberty as an aspect and privilege of whiteness. He discusses how the Statue of Liberty—a gift from France to the United States and perhaps the most famous symbol of freedom on Earth—promised both freedom and whiteness to European immigrants. Taking readers from the Age of Revolution to today, Stovall challenges the notion that racism is somehow a paradox or contradiction within the democratic tradition, demonstrating how white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty. Throughout the history of modern Western liberal democracy, freedom has long been white freedom.A major work of scholarship that is certain to draw a wide readership and transform contemporary debates, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2021) provides vital new perspectives on the inherent racism behind our most cherished beliefs about freedom, liberty, and human rights.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies