New Books in Diplomatic History

Donald Maclean was one of the most treacherous and productive – for Moscow spies of the Cold War era and a key member of the infamous “Cambridge Five” spy ring, yet the complete extent of this shy, intelligent, and secretive man’s betrayal of his country and his friends, family and colleagues, has never been explored—until now. Drawing on a wealth of previously classified files and unseen family papers, A Spy Named Orphan: the Enigma of Donald Maclean (W.W. Norton, 2018) meticulously documents this extraordinary story. In the first full biography of Maclean, author and publisher, Roland Philipps unravels Maclean’s character and contradictions. Like many members of his generation, Maclean became infatuated with Communism during his school days, even before his time at Cambridge. The very model of a perfect diplomat, he rose through the ranks of the diplomatic service rapidly, never arousing suspicion of his treasonous double life. He married an American woman despite his sexual ambivalence and increasing antipathy to the United States. He was prone to alcoholic binges and general erratic behavior, that should have blown his cover, yet they never found their way onto his record. A sworn enemy of capitalism, he had access to some of the greatest secrets of the time, transmitting invaluable intelligence to his Soviet handlers on the atom bomb and the shape of the postwar world. In a brazen escapade, he successfully eluded the British authorities to defect to the Soviet Union, where he worked and lived unrepentantly for the next thirty years.Philipps offers memorable portraits of Maclean’s and his coconspirators—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt—as well as the gifted Russian spymasters of the period. A gripping tale of blind faith and fierce loyalty alongside dangerous duplicity and human vulnerability, Philipps’s narrative will stand as the definitive account of the mysterious and elusive man first codenamed “Orphan” for many years to come. A must read for anyone interested in this tales of spying, intrigue and treason.Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Zinoviev Affair is a story of one of the most long-lasting and enduring conspiracy theories in modern British politics, an intrigue that still resonates nearly one-hundred years after it was written. Almost certainly a forgery, the so-called Zinoviev Letter, had no original and has never been traced. Notwithstanding, the Letter still haunts British politics. It was the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and it even cropped up in the British media as recently as during the Referendum campaign of 2016 and the 2017 general election.The Letter, addressed to the leadership of the British Communist Party, encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary fervor, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Communist International in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret Intelligence Service channels, the Letter’s publication by the Daily Mail on October 25th 1924 just before the General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a “Red Scare” in the media. Labour blamed (erroneously) the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been an establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it.The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol of political dirty tricks and what we would now call “fake news”. Now, former Chief Historian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Dr. Gill Bennett, who headed up an official inquiry into the Zinoviev Affair in the late 1990s, takes another look at this matter in a fascinating book, The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies (Oxford University Press, 2018). Employing research skills honed by forty-years work at the Foreign Office, Dr. Bennett entrances the reader with this still fascinating detective story of spies and secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism.Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Teddy Roosevelt had one of the most colorful lives in the American history, but few have deeply explored his final years. Historian David Pietrusza does just that in TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy (Lyons Press, 2018), taking us through a period in which Roosevelt exhorts an America prone to isolationism to join the war against Germany, only for the war to take the life of one of his sons. Pietrusza tracks how Roosevelt’s alters America’s political history, abandoning his “Bull Moose” party and re-uniting the Republicans in hopes of strengthening American foreign policy. And the author chronicles Roosevelt’s heartbreak, unable to die a glorious death on the battlefield himself, but bereaved to see his son die from a policy he advocated. Pietrusza also offers evidence of a controversial theory: that a depressed Roosevelt ultimately took his own life with an overdose of morphine.Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you are tired of reading the same, Washington-based, consensus, 'realist' and or 'neo-conservative', critiques of American foreign policy, here is something to salivate on: Jeffrey D. Sachs', A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (Columbia University Press, 2018). By turns, noted author Jeffrey Sachs' book is unorthodox, iconoclastic, novel and indeed at times eccentric. A New Foreign Policy provides a road map for a U.S. foreign policy that embraces globalism, cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity---not nationalism and illusory dreams of empty and past glory. You may not agree with him, indeed you may believe that he is completely wrong and his facts do not add up. Regardless, Sachs' book is the one that foreign policy experts will be discussing this Fall.Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sir John Elliott, Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Oxford University, one of the premier historians writing in English on Spanish and European History in the Early Modern period, has now delighted his many ardent readers and admirers by writing a superb book dealing with the comparative histories of Scottish and Catalan nationalism. Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion (Yale University Press, 2018) is by turns both erudite and easily informative. Sir John’s book entrances the reader and provides a way for the lay educated public as well as the academic audience to make sense of these two differing and yet at crucial times similar nationalist movements. Another splendid book by the prize-winning author of The Revolt of the Catalans, Richelieu & Olivares, The Count-Duke Olivares and The Empires of the Atlantic. The podcast was done from Sir John’s quarters at Oriel College at Oxford.Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Histories of banking and finance aren’t particularly well-known for being riveting, adventurous reads: they tend to be technical at the expense of being strongly narrative-driven. Peter James Hudson’s Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (University of Chicago Press, 2017) defies this stereotype. An examination of private lending in the Caribbean by North American bankers between the 1890s and the 1930s, Hudson tells a colorful, albeit at-times disturbing tale of a few American bankers who were able to operate virtually without restriction or regulation. Acting almost as freebooters, they dreamt up new practices to try out on Latin American governments, usually not to their benefit, while reinforcing many North American attitudes and stereotypes about Latin Americans, most of all racially.The result of this imperial lending was traumatic for Caribbean and Latin American governments. For much of this period, bankers enjoyed the official backing of the U.S. government, allowing them to operate with immunity and total security. Through President Taft’s policy of “Dollar Diplomacy,” they were able to operate as an arm of U.S. foreign policy. By making funds available to repressive governments, they helped to cement their place in power at the expense of their subjects, while the amount owed by these governments soon left them under the de facto control of banks and by extension the U.S. government. Ultimately, much of this system came crashing down with the Great Depression, which helped to expose these lending practices as dangerous and ill-regulated. Nevertheless, the effect on the region outlived these practices.Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The study of Christianity, international relations, and the United States is going through something of a boom period at the moment. Scholars are working to understand how Christians looked at the outside world at various moments in U.S. history, how they understood their actions to be in line with their faith, and their actions shaped both domestic politics and foreign policy. Heather Curtis’ Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid, published by Harvard University Press in 2018 contributes to this burgeoning field by analyzing what motivated evangelical humanitarian aid in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.To tell this story, Dr. Curtis focuses on one intra-denominational Christian newspaper, the Christian Herald. Founded in 1878, the Christian Herald was founded in part out of concern that the American Protestant community was becoming divided over doctrinal disputes and an underlying fear that the Christian identity of the United States was being undermined. International aid for humanitarian causes was one way to evangelize while also uniting American Protestants around a specific issue. The Christian Herald raised funds for famine relief in India and Russia, humanitarian relief in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and to support Armenians being persecuted in the Ottoman Empire. Curtis also notes the tension between the Christian Herald and the American Red Cross as both organizations sought to become the premier relief organizations in the U.S.By focusing on the Herald, Curtis sheds light on the occasionally contradictory motives that informed this aid, unveiling a tension between cosmopolitan charity that sought to provide help to anybody, and a kind of “tribal charity” that went to people who were similar to the benefactors. She highlights how techniques of publicizing catastrophes were refined, particularly the emphasis on suffering victims (as well as criticisms of those techniques coming from afflicted regions). Lastly, she exposes ongoing debates as to what it meant to be an American and a Christian.Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A respected authority on 19th- and 20th-century Latin American and Caribbean History as well as a past Director at Chatham House, Victor Bulmer‑Thomas, CMG, OBE provides the reader with a most unusual survey and view of the United States as an ‘empire’ in his book: Empire in Retreat: the Past, Present and Future of the United States (Yale University Press, 2018).  From its territorial conquests after its foundation, through its acquisition of hegemonic rule after 1945, to its current imperial ‘retreat’, the United States, Bulmer-Thomas argues has had a difficult relationship with the idea of itself as an ‘empire’. In this novel argument, Bulmer‑Thomas offers three definitions of empire—’territorial, informal, and institutional’ that he contends explains America’s past, present and he argues for a future in which the United States will no longer play an imperial role. Something that Bulmer-Thomas states does not necessarily mean national decline and may indeed ultimately strengthen the American nation‑state. At this crucial time in American history, Bulmer‑Thomas’s uniquely unorthodox perspective will be sure to garner wide attention from those looking for unusual perspectives on American history.Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008), Pekka Hämäläinen refutes the traditional story that Indians were bit players or unfortunate victims of the white man’s conquest of the American West. Old maps that divided America into Spanish, French, and British territories, Hämäläinen argues, are “fictions” insofar as they entirely miss great indigenous contenders of military, economic, and political power. Such a one were the Comanches who fought, traded, and cooperated—often simultaneously—with European and Native American rivals, and rose to be a dominating power in the Great Plains for almost 200 years. The Comanche Empire brings a riveting narrative in a dialectical spirit to the fields of American, American Indian, Spanish and Mexican Imperial, and Borderlands histories.Professor Hämäläinen is Rhodes Professor at the University of Oxford, specializing in early and nineteenth-century North American history especially in indigenous, colonial, imperial, borderlands, and environmental history—all topics that invite comparative discussion and a global view. His first book was When Disease Makes History: Epidemics and Great Historical Turning Points (2006); The Comanche Empire is his second book; he is currently working on a history of the Lakota-Sioux that will be published next year.Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The title of Guy Laron’s The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (Yale University Press, 2017) says it all. As Laron notes in this interview, the fact that the war led to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East is an accepted interpretation of the war’s meaning. However, through his research Laron has provided a new lens by which to understand the war. Using a holistic perspective that situates the war in the context of the Cold War and the economic development of the non-western world, Laron argues that several broader trends pushed the Israeli and Arab states into conflict in 1967. As developmental aid disappeared, Arab and Israeli governments alike were facing crises of confidence from their own populations. Reliance on the military became a way to earn legitimacy with a public that was becoming disenchanted, though it also fed into a number of increasingly belligerent moves that ultimately led to war on June 5, 1967.Laron’s research shows as well the role of the superpowers in this conflict. As development aid gave way to military aid, they fueled the rise of militarism in these countries, and their often-contradictory diplomacy only muddied an already difficult situation. The legacy of the war, in addition to the ongoing conflicts that Israel faces in Palestine and its issues with neighbors such as Syria, was an erosion of civil-military relations that gave outsized roles to generals in the region. To write this history, Laron drew on archival research in the archives of former Soviet states and the literature that already existed on the topic. In doing so, he moves the study of the war from being a strictly regional issue to a global one.Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices