New Books in Diplomatic History

Simon Mills' book A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760 (Oxford UP, 2020) tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Syria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, Simon Mills investigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and English scholarly and missionary interests: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. Early modern Orientalism is usually conceived as an episode in the history of scholarship.By shifting the focus to Aleppo, A Commerce of Knowledge brings to light the connections between the seemingly separate worlds, tracing the emergence of new kinds of philological and archaeological enquiry in England back to a series of real-world encounters between the chaplains and the scribes, booksellers, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs they encountered in the Ottoman Empire. Setting the careers of its protagonists against a background of broader developments across Protestant and Catholic Europe, Mills shows how the institutionalization of English scholarship, and the later English attempt to influence the Eastern Christian churches, were bound up with the international struggle to establish a commercial foothold in the Levant. He argues that these connections would endure until the shift of British commercial and imperial interests to the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the eighteenth century fostered new currents of intellectual life at home.Simon Mills is a senior lecturer in British and European History at Newcastle UniversityMorteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How much of US power is underground? We hear a lot about the US military assets used on land, on the sea, and in the air - but not much about what’s going on underground and on the sea bed. It turns out what goes on down there is a significant source of US power – which has been documented by Henry Farrell in his co-authored book (with Abraham Newman), Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Henry Holt, 2023). Listen to him describe it all with Owen Bennett-Jones.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1811, Napoleon stood at his zenith. He had defeated all his continental rivals, come to an entente with Russia, and his blockade of Britain seemed, at long last, to be a success. The emperor had an heir on the way with his new wife, Marie-Louise, the young daughter of the Emperor of Austria. His personal life, too, was calm and secure for the first time in many years. It was a moment of unprecedented peace and hope, built on the foundations of emphatic military victories.But in less than two years, all of this was in peril. In four years, it was gone, swept away by the tides of war against the most powerful alliance in European history. The rest of his life was passed on a barren island. This is not a story any novelist could create; it is reality as epic.Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire: 1811-1821 (Pegasus Books, 2023) traces this story through the dramatic narrative of the years 1811-1821 and explores the ever-bloodier conflicts, the disintegration and reforging of the bonds among the Bonaparte family, and the serpentine diplomacy that shaped the fate of Europe. At the heart of the story is Napoleon's own sense of history, the tensions in his own character, and the shared vision of a family dynasty to rule Europe.Drawing on the remarkable resource of the new edition of Napoleon's personal correspondence produced by the Fondation Napoleon in Paris, Michael Broers dynamic new history follows Napoleon's thoughts and feelings, his hopes and ambitions, as he fought to preserve the world he had created. Much of this turns on his relationship with Tsar Alexander of Russia, in so many respects his alter ego, and eventual nemesis. His inability to understand this complex man, the only person with the power to destroy him, is key to tracing the roots of his disastrous decision to invade Russia--and his inability to face diplomatic and military reality thereafter.Even his defeat in Russia was not the end. The last years of the Napoleonic Empire reveal its innate strength, but it now faced hopeless odds. The last phase of the Napoleonic Wars saw the convergence of the most powerful of forces in European history to date: Russian manpower and British money. The sheer determination of Tsar Alexander and the British to bring Napoleon down is a story of compromise and sacrifice. The horrors and heroism of war are omnipresent in these years, from Lisbon to Moscow, in the life of the common solider. The core of this new book reveals how these men pushed Napoleon back from Moscow to St. Helena.Among this generation, there was no more remarkable persona than Napoleon. His defeat forged his myth--as well as his living tomb on St. Helena. The audacious enterprise of the 100 Days, reaching its crescendo at the Battle of Waterloo, marked the spectacular end of an unprecedented public life. From the ruins of a life--and an empire--came a new continent and a legend that haunts Europe still. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Atlantic-Pacific Central American sea-level canal is generally regarded as a spectacular failure. However, Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal (U Georgia Press, 2020) examines the canal in an alternative context, as an anticipated infrastructure project that captured attention from the nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Its advocates included naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, physicist Edward Teller, and U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. The waterway did not come to fruition, but as a proposal it served important political and scientific purposes during different eras, especially the years spanning the Cold War and the "environmental decade" of the 1970s.Historian Christine Keiner shows how the evolving plans for the sea-level ship canal performed distinct kinds of work for diverse historical actors in light of shifting scientific, environmental, and diplomatic values. Dismissing it as a failed scheme prevents us from considering the political, cultural, and epistemological processes that went into constructing the seaway as an innovative diplomatic solution to rising U.S.-Panama tensions, an exciting research opportunity for evolutionary biologists, a superior hydrocarbon highway for the oil industry, or a serious ecological threat to marine biodiversity.Invoking past dreams and nightmares of peaceful nuclear explosives, invasive sea snakes, and the 1970s energy crisis, Deep Cut uses the Central American seaway proposal to examine the changing roles of environmental diplomacy and state-sponsored environmental impact assessment. More broadly, Keiner amplifies an emerging conversation around the environmental, scientific, and political histories and legacies of unrealized megaprojects.This book is available open access here. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War (Simon and Schuster, 2023) is a character-driven account of the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, an Anglo-American clash over military strategy that produced a winning plan when World War II could have gone either way. Churchill called it the most important Allied conclave of the war. Until now, it has never been explored in a full-length book.In a secret, no-holds-barred, ten-day debate in a Moroccan warzone, protected by British marines and elite American troops, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton Jr., Sir Alan Brooke, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Sir Harold Alexander, and their military peers questioned each other's competence, doubted each other's vision, and argued their way through choices that could win or lose the war. You will be treated to a master class in strategy by the legendary statesmen, generals, and admirals who overcame their differences, transformed their alliance from a necessity to a bond, forged a war-winning plan, and glimpsed the postwar world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Halfway through the twentieth century, the United States towered over the world in industrial might. After winning the 1948 election, Harry Truman hoped to use this economic strength to build on FDR's achievements with new liberal reforms. But then, in just ten months between September 1949 and June 1950, the president's ambitions were overtaken by events that left the country gripped by rage and fear. The Soviets tested an atomic bomb, Mao's army swept through China, and at home Truman faced labor unrest and a Republican Party desperate for power.In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World In 1950 (Basic Books, 2023) is an innovative and gripping history of this pivotal moment. Recounting the launch of Senator Joe McCarthy's anti-communist crusade, the defeat of Truman's liberal program, and the start of the Korean War, prizewinning historian Nick Bunker shows us a polarized nation facing crises at home and abroad--a story with deep resonances today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Liberal internationalism has been the West's foreign policy agenda since the Cold War, and the West has long occupied the top rung of a hierarchical system. In Dynamics Among Nations, Hilton Root argues that international relations, like other complex ecosystems, exists in a constantly shifting landscape, in which hierarchical structures are giving way to systems of networked interdependence, changing every facet of global interaction. Accordingly, policymakers will need a new way to understand the process of change. Root suggests that the science of complex systems offers an analytical framework to explain the unforeseen development failures, governance trends, and alliance shifts in today's global political economy.Root examines both the networked systems that make up modern states and the larger, interdependent landscapes they share. Using systems analysis--in which institutional change and economic development are understood as self-organizing complexities--he offers an alternative view of institutional resilience and persistence. From this perspective, Root considers the divergence of East and West; the emergence of the European state, its contrast with the rise of China, and the network properties of their respective innovation systems; the trajectory of democracy in developing regions; and the systemic impact of China on the liberal world order. Complexity science, Root argues, will not explain historical change processes with algorithmic precision, but it may offer explanations that match the messy richness of those processes.Hilton L. Root, an expert on international political economy and development, is Professor at the George Mason University School of Public Policy. He is the author of Alliance Curse: How the U.S. Lost the Third World, Capital and Collusion: Political Logic of Global Economic Development, and other books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian Buruma is the author, co-author and editor of over a dozen books. He has been an editor at the Far Eastern Economic Review and The New York Review of Books. In this talk, he discusses Year Zero: A History of 1945 (Penguin, 2014).Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it.In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political "reeducation" was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective.A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma's own father's story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war's end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into "normalcy" stand in many ways for his generation's experience.A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.Since 1977, the New York Institute for the Humanities has brought together distinguished scholars, writers, artists, and publishing professionals to foster crucial discussions around the public humanities. For more information and to support the NYIH, visit nyihumanities.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Kenneth King (University of Edinburgh) & Meera Venkatachalam (University of Mumbai), discuss their recently co-edited volume, India's Development Diplomacy and Soft Power in Africa, published by Boydell and Brewer in 2021.India has understood its relations with Africa within the framework of South-South cooperation, where postcolonial states collaborated for scientific and technological exchanges, as well as to craft common political positions against the hegemony of 'northern' powers. However, following economic liberalisation and the rise of the political right, India's relationship with Africa has changed. Kenneth & Meera discuss some of the main themes in their book, including how the nature of Indian aid to Africa has changed over the decades; how symbols such as Gandhi have been used by the Indian government as part of its soft power strategy; how mantras of post-colonial solidarity and South-South Cooperation have been replaced by a growing sense of Indian exceptionalism in recent years, and, most importantly, what Africans make of India's growing footprint on the continent.Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there.Yet the war merely ended in a truce, not a proper peace agreement. The specter of conflict have loomed over the Korean Peninsula in the five decades since, changing development in both North and South Korea as each tries to secure their own future in a conflict that–in theory–could return at any point.We’re joined by Michael J. Seth, who joins the show to talk about this development and his latest book, Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World (Tuttle, 2023). The book is about much more than just the war itself, as Seth looks at Korea’s pre- and post-war history, and how South Korea is unique in charting its own development while still, technically, in a state of war.Michael J. Seth is Professor of History at James Madison University. He has authored several books on Korean history including A Concise History of Modern Korea: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield: 2010), A Concise History of Korea: From the Neolithic to the Nineteenth Century (Rowman & Littlefield: 2006), and Education Fever: Politics, Society and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press: 2002).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Korea at War. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate 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