New Books in Diplomatic History

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarization, and the rise of other great powers—especially China—threaten to unravel today’s Western-led world order. Many fear this would lead to global chaos. But the West has never had a monopoly on order.Surveying five thousand years of global history, political scientist Amitav Acharya reveals that world order—the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations—existed long before the rise of the West. Moving from ancient Sumer, India, Greece, and Mesoamerica, through medieval caliphates and Eurasian empires into the present, Acharya shows that humanitarian values, economic interdependence, and rules of inter-state conduct emerged across the globe over millennia. History suggests order will endure even as the West retreats. In fact, the end of Western dominance offers us the opportunity to build a better world, where non-Western nations find more voice, power, and prosperity. Instead of fearing the future, the West should learn from history and cooperate with the Rest to forge a more equitable order. Amitav Acharya is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Midura joins Jana Byars to talk about Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cornell UP, 2025) connects and situates histories of the post and government intelligence alongside print technology and state power in the wider context of the early modern communications revolution. In the sixteenth century, postal services became central to domestic governance and foreign policy enterprises, extended government reach and surveillance, and offered new control over the public sphere. Rachel Midura focuses on the Tassis family, members of which served as official postmasters to the dukes of Milan, the pope, Spanish kings, and Holy Roman emperors. Using administrative records and family correspondence, she follows the Tassis family, their agents, and their rivals as their influence expanded from northern Italy across Europe. Postal Intelligence shows how postmasters and postmistresses were key players in early modern diplomacy, commerce, and journalism, whose ultimate success depended on both administrative ingenuity and strategic ambiguity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How has China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs transformed itself into one of the most assertive diplomatic actors on the global stage? What explains the rise of “wolf warrior” practices, and how should we interpret Beijing’s evolving diplomatic identity? In this episode, Duncan McCargo speaks with Dylan Loh, an Associate Professor in the Public Policy and Global Affairs programme at Nanyang Technological University (Dr. Dylan M.H. Loh - Associate Professor | International Relations Scholar | Chinese Foreign Policy), about his award-winning new book China’s Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dylan Loh unpacks how Chinese diplomats craft narratives and balance assertiveness with professionalism, touching on institutional habitus, ritualised loyalty, and China’s bid for discourse power on platforms like X. This conversation offers timely insights for anyone interested in Chinese foreign policy, diplomacy, and the future of great-power relations. Host: Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University. Podcast Editing: Ishaan Krishnan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyond. In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan shocked the world when he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derisively known as “Star Wars,” a space-based missile defense program aimed at protecting the US from nuclear attack. In Weapons in Space, Aaron Bateman draws on recently declassified American, European, and Soviet documents to provide an insightful account of SDI, situating it within a new phase in the militarization of space following the collapse of superpower détente in the 1970s. In doing so, Bateman reveals the largely secret role of military space technologies in late–Cold War US defense strategy and foreign relations.In contrast to existing narratives, Weapons in Space shows how tension over the role of military space technologies in American statecraft was a central source of SDI's controversy, even more so than questions of technical feasibility. By detailing the participation of Western European countries in SDI research and development, Bateman reframes the militarization of space in the 1970s and 1980s as an international phenomenon. He further reveals that even though SDI did not come to fruition, it obstructed diplomatic efforts to create new arms control limits in space. Consequently, Weapons in Space carries the legacy of SDI into the post–Cold War era and shows how this controversial program continues to shape the global discourse about instability in space—and the growing anxieties about a twenty-first-century space arms race. Our guest is Aaron Bateman, an Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at GWU. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Stern places the corporation―more than the Crown―at the heart of British colonialism, arguing that companies built and governed global empire, raising questions about public and private power that were just as troubling four hundred years ago as they are today.Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan―a legal fiction with very real power.Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard UP, 2023) makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation.Thomas Kingston is an early career scholar and a voracious reader (183 books in 2021). You can find his website at www.thomasekingston.com or reach him on twitter @thomasekingston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived.It’s an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry’s book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After nearly four decades of negotiations, sanctions, summits, threats, and backdoor channels, the United States has failed to stop North Korea's nuclear program which now has the capability to strike American cities with weapons of mass destruction. In Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea (Yale UP, 2025), Joel S. Wit explains why US efforts to contain North Korea have not worked and gives readers a front-row seat to the policy debates, diplomatic deals, and secret talks between Washington and Pyongyang. Wit, a former State Department official, takes readers to the front lines of nuclear negotiations and recounts how perilously close the United States and North Korea have come, on various occasions, to nuclear confrontation. Based on more than three hundred interviews with officials in Washington, Beijing, and Seoul, as well as with the author’s contacts in Pyongyang, this book chronicles how six American presidents have approached the problem of North Korea.Wit points to Barack Obama and Donald Trump as the two presidents most responsible for the failure to halt North Korea’s march to build a nuclear arsenal, since it was under their successive tenures that Pyongyang acquired the ability to threaten every city in North America. Wit also offers an unparalleled portrait of Kim Jong Un that refutes his caricature as impulsive and illogical. Like his father and his grandfather, Kim is a ruthless despot but also a canny and informed negotiator determined to secure his dictatorship’s future by exploring diplomacy or, failing that, by building a nuclear arsenal. Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on his first book which examines the high price that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were willing to pay in order to achieve total victory in World War II. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via his website. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

American wars in Iraq were a defining feature of global politics for almost thirty years. The Gulf War of 1991, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the campaign against the Islamic State beginning in 2014 each had their own logic. Each occurrence was a distinct conflict; however they must not only be considered in isolation. The United States spent the 1990s trying but failing to implement the Gulf War's cease fire agreement. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American leaders decided to settle the open-ended aftermath of the Gulf War by launching the Iraq War of 2003. The Iraq War unleashed resistance, civil war, insurgency and eventually the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Thus, following the Gulf War, each war was fought to finish the previous conflict. The Iraq Wars, therefore, are perhaps best understood as a chain of events.Academics, journalists, statesmen, and soldiers have produced many library shelves of books on the Iraq Wars. Yet, no short, easily digestible volume exists to synthesize this vast literature of both English and Arabic sources. The Iraq Wars: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Samuel Helfont covers this series of important conflicts as a whole, in a highly succinct and uniquely readable way. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Japan sent its first diplomatic delegations to visit the popes and dignitaries of Europe. European artists portrayed these historic ambassadors—the Tenshō embassy (1582–90) and the Keichō embassy (1613–20)—in numerous oil paintings, frescoes, drawings, and prints. Envisioning Diplomacy: Japanese Ambassadors in Early Modern Europe (Pennsylvania State UP, 2025) by Dr. Mayu Fujikawa analyzes these images—including newly discovered and lost works—within their cross-cultural and diplomatic contexts. Drawing on extensive and geographically expansive archival research, art historian Dr. Fujikawa investigates how the embassies were received and either assimilated or differentiated at European courts. She demonstrates how delegates’ gifts to their hosts, their Europeanized kimonos, and the Western clothes they wore while traveling functioned as tools of soft diplomacy. Dr. Fujikawa also shows how printed materials functioned much as news does today, promoting the embassies widely and conveying information about the guests and their striking physical appearance. Envisioning Diplomacy offers a fascinating look at the political, social, and cultural meanings of visual materials created around the embassies and should be of great interest to scholars, students, and general readers interested in early modern European art and history, costume history, diplomatic history, and Japanese and global studies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is often assumed that only sovereign states can join the United Nations. But this was not always the case. At the founding of the United Nations, a loophole drafted by British statesmen in its predecessor organisation, the League of Nations, was carried forward, allowing colonies to accede as member-states. Colonies such as India, Ireland, Egypt, and many more were afforded a tokenistic representation at the League in Geneva during the interwar years, decades before their independence. Thomas Gidney’s An International Anomaly unites three geographically distinct case studies to demonstrate the evolution of Britain's policy from a range of different viewpoints, exploring how this policy came into being, and why it was only exploited by the British Empire. He argues that this membership shaped colonial norms around sovereignty and international recognition in the interwar period and to the present day. Thomas Gidney is a postdoctoral researcher in international history and politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Lucas Tse is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices