GENERAL ISSUES
SOCIAL THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
Gittlitz, A.M. I Want to Believe. Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism. Pluto Press, London 2020. xi, 249 pp. Ill. £75.00. (Paper: £17.99; E-book: £9.99.)
Named after the Argentine Trotskyist J. Posadas, the movement of Posadism appealed for socialism throughout the galaxy and took great interest in the paranormal. Drawing on considerable archival research and numerous interviews with former and current Posadists, the journalist Gittlitz tells how this unusual socialist movement has journeyed through the twentieth-century socialist experiences of guerrilla war, the nuclear missile crisis, the 1968 rebellions, and anti-communist dictatorships and reveals why Posadism continues to capture the imaginations of leftists today, uncovering both cynicism towards the past and nostalgia for the earnest belief that a better world is possible. See also Lucas Poy's review in this volume, pp. 138–141.
Gregson, John. Marxism, Ethics and Politics. The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre. [Marx, Engels, and Marxisms.] Palgrave Macmillan, Cham 2019. xv, 224 pp. € 76.29. (Paper: € 54.49; E-book: € 42.79.)
This book is about Alasdair MacIntyre's engagement with Marxism from the early 1950s to the present, from his early writings on Marxism and Christianity through his period in the New Left and the Socialist Labour League and International Socialism in the late 1950s and 1960s. Dr Gregson discusses MacIntyre's break with Marxism, when he elaborated the five-point critique of Marxism in After Virtue (1981). In his contemporary project, MacIntyre responds to what he now sees as the inadequacies of Marxism, particularly Marxist politics. Examining the place of Marxism in the contemporary MacIntyrean debate, the author notes the contested nature of the claims about Marxism by MacIntyre.
Hinkelammert, Franz J. Die Dialektik und der Humanismus der Praxis. Mit Marx gegen den neoliberalen kollektiven Selbstmord. VSA, Hamburg 2020. 254 pp. € 16.80.
In his criticism of capitalism, Karl Marx shows how the market triumphs over human life. This market-religious view was radicalized in neoliberalism, in part through counter-criticism of Marx. Illustrating how the concept of historical materialism developed in Marxian thought, Dr Hinkelammert analyses this critique, aiming to counter market religion with a new humanism of practice. The analysis of Marx's critique of capitalism, combined with a presentation and discussion of Max Weber's criticism, is followed by an examination of criticism of Nietzsche, Hayek, and Popper. In the final chapters, the author gives a synthesis of Marx criticisms of bourgeois provenance and a critical evaluation of defending all human rights.
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. Is Socialism Feasible? Towards an Alternative Future. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham [etc.] 2019. x, 272 pp. £85.00. (Paper: £24.95; E-book: £19.96.)
The revival of socialist ideology in the West raises questions as to what socialism really means, and how we can make it work. Dr Hodgson shows that socialism is inextricably linked with common ownership and examines the failures of socialist states, scrutinizing the impact and outcomes of a centralized politico-economic system and offering insight into the twentieth-century experience of comprehensive national planning, deploying less-well-known criticism from Albert Schäffle and Michael Polanyi. According to the author, the alternative socialist option of worker-owned cooperatives must accept a major role for markets. Further experiments in that direction must be subordinate to higher principles of liberal solidarity, combining a mixed market economy with a welfare state.
Kangal, Kaan. Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature. [Marx, Engels, and Marxisms.] Palgrave Macmillan, Cham 2020. xvi, 213 pp. € 38.14. (E-book: € 28.88.)
Questioning the elements that structure the debate on Engels's Dialectics of Nature, in this book, Professor Kangal considers how different layers of the standard text relate to one another, analyses the different political and philosophical functions, and relocates the meaning of the term “dialectics” to a more precise context. Arguing that Engels's dialectics are less complete than we usually think, but that he achieved more than most scholars would like to admit, Kaan documents and critiques the intentions and concerns of Engels in the Dialectics of Nature, the process of writing, and its reception and publication history to reconstruct the solved and unsolved philosophical problems in this unfinished work.
The Marx Revival. Concepts and New Critical Interpretations. Ed. by Marcello Musto. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2020. xxi, 408 pp. £74.99. (Paper: £26.99; E-book: $28.00.)
Karl Marx is being rediscovered around the world as the thinker who provided the most insightful critique on capitalism. This edited volume brings together lively and thought-provoking interpretations of his work, accessible to a wider public, presenting what he actually wrote in respect of twenty-two key concepts, each in a separate chapter. Marx's ideas are reconsidered in relation to changes that have occurred since his death and shed light on the failure of socialist experiments in the twentieth century. Contrary to the equation of communism with dictatorship of the proletariat, his definition of communist society needs to be revisited as an association of free human beings.
HISTORY
Boix, Carles. Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads. Technological Change and the Future of Politics. Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) [etc.] 2019. ix, 256 pp. $27.95; £22.00. (Paper: $19.95; £16.99.)
The twentieth century witnessed the triumph of democratic capitalism in the industrialized West, with widespread popular support for both free markets and representative elections. Today, that political consensus is breaking down, disrupted by polarization and income inequality. Tracing the history of democratic capitalism over the past two centuries, Professor Boix looks at three defining stages. Beginning in nineteenth-century Manchester, where factory owners employed unskilled labourers at low wages, he then moves to Detroit in the early 1900s, where the invention of the assembly line shifted labour demand to skilled blue-collar workers, ending today, with the information revolution that began in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, benefitting the highly educated at the expense of the traditional working class.
Brown, Vincent. Tacky's Revolt. The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 2020. viii, 320 pp. Ill. Maps. $35.00; £28.95; € 31.50.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, masters struggled continuously to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. A movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica (called Coromantees at the time) organized to discard that yoke by violence. Their uprising, known as Tacky's Revolt, featured a combat style increasingly familiar today: scattered militias opposing great powers, with fighters hard to distinguish from non-combatants. Even after it was put down, the insurgency rumbled throughout the British Empire at a time when slavery seemed the dependable bedrock of its dominion. That certitude would never return, nor would the views of black lives, which came to inspire both more fear and more sympathy than before.
Grossman, Victor (Wechsler, Stephen). A Socialist Defector. From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee. Monthly Review Press, New York 2019. 352 pp. $95.00. (Paper: $23.00; E-book: $18.50.)
Grossman, a.k.a. Steve Wechsler, a committed leftist since his years at Harvard University, left his barracks as a U.S. Army draftee in Bavaria in 1952 and swam across the Danube from the U.S. Zone in Austria to the Soviet Zone. Soviets landed him in East Germany, where he watched the rise and successes, the travails, and the eventual demise of the GDR socialist experiment. Having been a freelance journalist and travelling lecturer, Grossman offers insightful reflections and reminiscences, comparing the benefits and drawbacks of life in the three societies he has known, focusing especially on the socialism he saw and lived, the goals and achievements of the GDR, and its repressive measures and stupidities.
Holcomb, Julie L. Moral Commerce. Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy. Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY) 2020 (2016). xiii, 252 pp. Ill. $39.95. (Paper: $27.95; E-book: $13.99.)
Quaker anti-slavery rhetoric began with protests against the slave trade before expanding to include boycotts of the use and products of slave labour. In this book, Professor Holcomb traces the genealogy of the boycott of slave labour from its seventeenth-century Quaker origins through its late nineteenth-century decline. The men and women who boycotted slave labour created diverse biracial networks that worked to reorganize the transatlantic economy according to ethical principles and embracing a global vision to transform the marketplace, mobilizing the boycott as a powerful force. Although the boycott failed to overcome the power structures, supporters experienced the abolition of slavery as a step toward a broader goal of a just and humane economy.
The League Against Imperialism. Lives and Afterlives. Ed. by Louro, Michele (et al.). Leiden University Press, Leiden 2020. 412 pp. Ill. € 39.50.
The League Against Imperialism (LAI) brought activists together across geographical and political borders with the aim of eradicating colonial rule worldwide, drawing anti-colonial activists such as Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Sukarno (Indonesia), and Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), as well as prominent figures such as Albert Einstein, Ernst Toller, Romain Rolland, Upton Sinclair, Mohandas Gandhi, and Madame Sun Yat-Sen. This volume captures the global history of the LAI by bringing together fifteen contributions from various regions, languages, and archives. Adopting the perspectives of the peripheries of empires, contributors argue that interwar anti-imperialism was central to the story of transnational activism and remained inspirational for many who took on leadership roles during decolonization across the global South.
Pistor, Katharina. The Code of Capital. How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) [etc.] 2019. xiii, 297 pp. £25.00; $29.95. (Paper: $19.95; £16.99.)
In this book, Professor Pistor identifies the core modules of our complex financial system and traces it back in time. Investigating the evolution of property rights, debt instruments, various forms of pledges and gages, the use and the trust, the corporate form and bankruptcy, she explains how capital is created, behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, arguing that this activity is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else. Adopting this approach to one of the most pernicious problems of our time, she explores the various ways that complex financial products are selectively coded to protect and reproduce private wealth.
Sharma, Nandita. Home Rule. National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants. Duke University Press, Durham (NC) [etc.] 2020. xi, 372 pp. $109.95. (Paper: $29.95.)
In this book, Professor Sharma traces the historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present, through a critical analysis of both imperial and national forms of state sovereignty, their specific projects of territorialization, and how each constrained people's freedom to move in a different way. The imperial-state category of Native, initially a mark of colonized status, has been revitalized in what the author terms the Postcolonial New World Order of nation states. The turn to autochthony has led to a hardening of nationalism(s). Criteria for political membership have dwindled, immigration controls have intensified, all while practices of expropriation and exploitation have expanded.
Sharman, J.C. Empires of the Weak. The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order. Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) 2019. xii, 196 pp. $27.95; £22.00.
The first global system and the dominance of the West have emerged from a European expansion process that weaved together previously separate regional systems. Professor Sharman argues that Europeans had no military superiority in the early modern era, showing that European expansion from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries is better explained by deference to strong Asian and African polities, disease in the Americas and maritime supremacy. He counters the view that Europeans won for all time by contending that imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a relatively transient and anomalous development in world politics, culminating in western defeats in various insurgencies. See also Kaveh Yazdani's review in this volume, pp. 135–138.
Siegelberg, Mira L. Statelessness. A Modern History. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 2020. 318 pp. $35.00; £28.95; € 31.50.
The collapse of empires and the rise of independent states in the twentieth century produced unprecedented numbers lacking a national identity. In the years following World War I, the legal category of statelessness challenged efforts to limit the boundaries of national membership and international authority. Yet, as Dr Siegelberg shows, the emergence of mass statelessness ultimately gave rise to the regimes established after World War II, which empowered the territorial state as the fundamental source of protection and rights, against alternative political configurations. By uncovering the ideological origins of the international agreements that define categories of citizenship and non-citizenship, this book unfolds the current dilemmas of political organization and authority at the global level.
Sorkin, David. Jewish Emancipation. A History Across Five Centuries. Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) 2019. x, 511 pp. Ill. Maps. £30.00; $35.00.
In this book, Professor Sorkin examines the process by which Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world. Analysing the complex and multidirectional process by which Jews acquired civil and political rights and came to exercise citizenship prerogatives. Though concerned primarily with Europe, the author also examines North Africa and the Middle East, the United States and Israel, assessing the transition from late medieval institutions and the ways in which rights were acquired, curtailments of right, as well as continuing forms of state and non-state discrimination and, in some cases, the revocation and subsequent restoration of rights.
Stasavage, David. The Decline and Rise of Democracy. A Global History from Antiquity to Today. [The Princeton Economic History of the Western World.] Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) [etc.] 2020. xii, 406 pp. £30.00; $35.00.
Historical accounts of the rise of democracy tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. In this book, democratic practices are revealed in many places and times. Drawing from examples spanning several millennia, Professor Stasavage considers why states developed democratic or autocratic governance styles and argues that early democracy was more common in small places with a weak state and simple technologies. Exploring the transition from early to modern democracy, which first took shape in England and then appeared the United States, he illustrates how modern democracy arose as an effort to combine popular control with a strong state over a large territory.
Van Rossum, Matthias (et al.). Testimonies of Enslavement. Sources on Slavery from the Indian Ocean World. Bloomsbury Academic, London [etc.] 2020. 320 pp. $103.50. (E-book: $82.80.)
Drawing on the archives of the Court of Justice of Cochin, a main settlement of the Dutch East India Company, the ten court cases presented in this book deal with themes of enslavement. Using detailed insights into interrogations and testimonies, they demonstrate the complex historical realities in which processes of enslavement and slavery relations took shape. Each original Dutch transcript is followed by an English translation, shedding light on the interactions between local systems of bondage and global systems of commodified slavery, and providing a new perspective on the global history of slavery. Analysing slavery in South Asia, these case studies offset the traditional focus on Atlantic slavery.
COMPARATIVE HISTORY
The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization. Colonial Returnees in the National Imagination. Ed. by Ron Eyerman and Giuseppe Sciortino. [Cultural Sociology.] Palgrave Macmillan, Cham 2020. xv, 231 pp. € 98.09. (Paper: € 70.84; E-book: € 74.89.)
This volume is an analysis of the features and consequences of colonial repatriation of returnees in six former colonial powers (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal). Examining these cases through a shared cultural sociology and harmonizing the historical and sociological analyses in the collection, the contributors consider how such traumatic experiences were narrated, ignored, debated, and contested in the former colonial metropoles, and how they interacted with shaping new postcolonial identity and collective memory. Learning from these various cases of colonial returnees, the authors devise a new theoretical framework to explain why seemingly similar claims of collective trauma and victimhood garner respect and recognition in certain contexts but fail in others.
Henkes, Barbara, Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family. Transnational Histories Touched by National Socialism and Apartheid. [Egodocuments and History Series.] Brill, Leiden [etc.] 2020. xiv, 274 pp. Ill. € 105.00; $126.00. (E-book: € 105.00; $126.00.)
In this book, Dr Henkes examines various responsibilities and loyalties towards family and nation, as well as other major ethical obligations to society and humanity, when historical subjects face a repressive political regime. In Section One, the author follows pre-war German immigrants in the Netherlands and their German affiliation during the era of National Socialism. In Part Two, she explores the positions of Dutch emigrants who settled in Apartheid South Africa after World War II. The narratives of these transnational agents and their relatives provide a lens for observing changing constructions of national identities and acceptance or rejection of a nationalist policy on racial grounds in everyday practice.
Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896. Ed. by Richard Anderson and Henry B. Lovejoy. [Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora.] University of Rochester Press [etc.], Rochester (NY) [etc.] 2020. xiv, 465 pp. Ill. Maps. £95.00. (E-book: £19.99.)
In 1807, Britain and the United States adopted legislation limiting and ultimately prohibiting the transoceanic slave trade. The judicial processes in these first international courts of humanitarian justice resulted not only in the “liberation” of thousands, but also generated an extensive archive of documents. This volume, bringing together regional experts from around the world, uses these records to illuminate the fates of former slaves, many of whom were released from bondage only to be conscripted into extended periods of indentured servitude. The nineteen contributions are deeply comparative, looking at conditions in British colonies such as Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and the Cape Colony, as well as at slave-plantation economies such as Brazil, Cuba, and Mauritius.
Nowak, Jörg. Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India. Popular Mobilisation in the Long Depression. [Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy.] Palgrave Macmillan, Cham 2019. xi, 319 pp. Maps. € 76.29. (E-book: € 58.84.)
In this book, Dr Nowak investigates mass strikes and social movements in India and Brazil, focusing on forms of organization and cross-movement cooperation that emerged between 2010 and 2014. Based on four case studies, Dr Nowak traces the alliances and relations that strikers formed during their mobilizations with other popular actors such as students, indigenous peoples, and people displaced by dam projects. The study situates the mass strikes in Brazil's construction industry and India's automobile industry in a global conjuncture of protest movements and elaborates a new theory of strikes that takes into account the manifold ways in which labour unrest is embedded in local communities and regional networks.
O'Brien, Karen. Petitioning for Land. The Petitions of First Peoples of Modern British Colonies. Bloomsbury, New York [etc.] 2018. vi, 222 pp. $162.00. (E-book: $129.60.)
First Nations challenged British colonial authority from the earliest days of colonization through the act of petitioning. Dr O'Brien examines the extent of political participation by First Peoples through the use of petitions, tracing the activism of First Peoples and showing how they reformed discourse to disseminate a self-determined reality through the act of petitioning. Through a combination of historical and socio-legal methodologies and qualitative chronological evaluation of petitioning, the author sets out a socio-legal thematic framework of requests and appeals for the legal recognition of prior land ownership across a broad comparative area in a geopolitical assessment of petitioning in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and America.
Phillips, Andrew and Sharman, J.C.. Outsourcing Empire. How Company-States Made the Modern World. Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) 2020. viii, 253 pp. Maps. $29.95; £25.00.
From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, company-states drove European expansion, building the world's first genuinely international system. Company-states were hybrid ventures: multinational trading firms, with founding charters that granted them sovereign powers of war, peace, and rule. Emerging as improvised solutions to bridge the gap between the expansive geopolitical ambitions and scarce means of European rulers, company-states were most successful when they managed to strike a balance between power and profit. As European states strengthened from the late eighteenth century onwards, the company-states lost their usefulness and legitimacy. In this comparative exploration, Professors Phillips and Sharman explain the rise and fall of company-states, why some succeeded while others failed, and their role as vanguards of capitalism and imperialism.
Shackel, Paul A. An Archaeology of Unchecked Capitalism. From the American Rust Belt to the Developing World. Berghahn Books, New York 2020. Ill. Maps. $135.00; £99.00. (E-book: $27.95.)
The racialization of immigrant labour and the labour strife in the coal and textile communities in northeast Pennsylvania serve as a backdrop, connecting the history of the exploited labourers to today's labour in the global economy. In the first part of the book, Professor Shackel focuses on the heritage and social justice issues of northeast Pennsylvania. In the second part, the link to some of the broader issues of labour exploitation in other regions of the world is discussed, associating the history of the anthracite coal mining industry with the continuation of labour tragedies in developing countries, in particular with the textile industry in Bangladesh and the mining industry in South Africa and Turkey.
CONTEMPORARY ISSUES
Agostine-Wilson, Faith. Enough Already! A Socialist Feminist Response to the Re-emergence of Right-Wing Populism and Fascism in Media. [Critical Media Literacies Series, Vol. 4.] Brill Sense, Leiden [etc.] 2020. vi, 223 pp. € 110.00; $132.00. (Paper: € 35.00; $42.00.)
This text explores the re-assertion of right-wing populist ideologies as presented in the media. Attacks on immigrants, women, minorities, and LGBTQI people are increasing, instigated by the election of politicians who openly support authoritarian discourse and scapegoating. The Left has been unable to respond effectively to these events. Professor Agostine-Wilson argues that a socialist-Marxist feminist analysis is necessary to understand how racism, sexism, and homophobia are conduits for capitalism. After giving an overview of dialectical materialist feminism and reviewing characteristics of authoritarian populism and fascism, she critiques the insistence on a colour-blind conceptualization of the working class, with its detrimental effects on moving resistance and activism forward.
Hirschel, Dierk. Das Gift der Ungleichheit. Wie wir die Gesellschaft vor einem sozial und ökologisch zerstörerischen Kapitalismus schützen können. Dietz, Bonn 2020. 256 pp. € 22.00.
The twenty-first century threatens to become a century of extreme inequality, given the current problems with overexploitation of nature, climate change, poverty, and war. According to the author, the cause is socially unrestrained and ecologically blind capitalism. Trade unions, social democrats, and the Left seem powerless, but an increasing number of people are resisting wage dumping, insecure jobs, and destruction of their natural livelihoods and are demanding a socially and ecologically just society, higher wages, better working conditions, a functioning public infrastructure, affordable housing, and climate protection. In his book, Dr Hirschel sketches the contours of a progressive policy for the twenty-first century.
Humanisierung der Arbeit 4.0. Prävention und Demokratie in der digitalisierten Arbeitsgesellschaft. Arno Georg, Kerstin Guhlemann und Gerd Peter (Hrsg.). VSA, Hamburg 2020. 238 pp. € 19.80.
Bringing results of the debate on the humanization of work (HdA) from the 1970s into the present day means dealing with discourses of two separate worlds: a largely analogue national world and an increasingly digital, global world of work. The seven chapters by authors from the Dortmund Research Office for Work, Prevention and Politics (DoFAPP) describe developments in various fields of the workplace to identify trends and provide guidelines. Plural themes reflect the open view of the world of work. The contributions in this volume use insights from the humanization debate for a better design of digitalized work, examine occupational safety in a world of flexible work and elaborate on the international problem of psychosocial risks in the world of work.
Huws, Ursula. Reinventing the Welfare State. Digital Platforms and Public Policies. [Fire Works.] Pluto Press, London 2020. xvii, 209 pp. £75.00. (Paper: £16.99; E-book: £9.99.)
The British welfare state was established seventy years ago to provide economic redistribution, universality of entitlement, and collectively provided public services for all. In this book, Professor Huws argues that to succeed in the twenty-first century, the welfare state must be redesigned. Criticizing the current state of welfare based on some of the key issues of our time (the gig economy, Universal Credit, and gendered and domestic labour), she proposes new and original policy ideas, including the Universal Basic Income and new legislation for universal workers' rights. She also outlines a “digital welfare state” for the twenty-first century: online platform technologies under public control to modernize and expand public services and improve accessibility.
Kaltmeier, Olaf. Refeudalisierung und Rechtsruck. Soziale Ungleichheit und Politische Kultur in Lateinamerika. Transcript, Bielefeld 2020. 160 pp. Ill. € 20.00. (Open Access.)
The trend of refeudalization is perceptible worldwide: billionaires are becoming presidents; luxury consumption is rising as dramatically as social inequalities; and a culture of political and socio-economic isolation is emerging. In Latin America, this tendency is associated with a political shift to the right, symbolized by the rise of white, rich men defaming indigenous people, the poor, and women. Using his refeudalization hypothesis, Professor Kaltmeier discusses several dimensions adapted to the specific regional context in Latin America, such as the dramatic change of social structure, distancing from democracy, changes in social norms, values, and identities and the progressively dominant segregation of the monetary aristocracy in politics.
Midgley, James. Inequality, Social Protection and Social Justice. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham [etc.] 2020. ix, 188 pp. £75.00. (E-book: £25.00.)
In this book, the extent and impact of social protection are considered, including social assistance, social insurance, universal allowances, and mandates, in reducing inequality and enhancing social justice in different parts of the world. Professor Midgley demonstrates that if carefully designed, adequately funded, and effectively implemented, social protection can significantly reduce income and gender inequality, and other forms of inequality, thereby promoting egalitarian ideals and enhancing social justice. The book is divided into three parts, offering an overview of the concept of inequality, the nature and features of social protection, and social protection, redistribution, and social justice.
Migration at Work. Aspirations, Imaginaries and Structures of Mobility. Ed. by Fiona-Katharina Seiger (et al.) [CeMIS Migration and Intercultural Studies, 5.] Leuven University Press, Leuven 2020. 210 pp. € 19.50. (Open Access.)
The dynamics of labour mobility are heavily influenced by the opportunities perceived and the imaginaries held by both employers and regulating authorities in relation to migrant labour. This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the structures and imaginaries underlying various forms of mobility. Based on research conducted in different geographical contexts, including the European Union, Turkey, and South Africa, and tackling the experiences and aspirations of migrants from various parts of the globe, the eight contributions comprised in this volume aim to draw cross-contextual parallels by addressing the role played by opportunities in mobilizing people, how structures enable, sustain, and change different forms of mobility, and how imaginaries fuel labour migration and vice versa.
Tamames, Jorge. For the People. Left Populism in Spain and the US. Lawrence & Wishart, London 2020. vii, 268 pp. Ill. £17.00.
Focusing on left populist movements in the contrasting political landscapes of Spain and the U.S., this book brings together insights from Polanyi, Laclau, and Mouffe to offer a new explanatory framework for the rise of left populism today. Dr Tamames examines how economic transformations led left populist movements to emerge simultaneously in two different political contexts, arguing that they are a reaction to market forces detaching the economy from vital social needs and structures. Combining the discursive approach, which understands populism as the construction of a political frontier, with the Polanyi framework of the “double movement”, he explains the nature and growing success of populist movements in the past ten years.
CONTINENTS AND COUNTRIES
AFRICA
Bashir Salau, Mohammed. Plantation Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate. A Historical and Comparative Study. [Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora.] University of Rochester Press, Rochester (NY) [etc.] 2018. ix, 236 pp. Maps. £80.00.
This synthesis on plantation slavery in the nineteenth-century Sokoto caliphate (West Africa) engages with major debates on internal African slavery and offers new views on various issues, including definition of blackness, the meaning of the term “plantation”, the significance of plantation slavery in the caliphal state and the role of slavery in African states compared with those in the New World. Professor Bashir Salau analyses plantation management and the acquisition, treatment, and control of slaves, describing how the caliphal state developed serfdom and arguing that while social and economic factors played a role, conscious political choice was the major factor in the rise and maintenance of plantation slavery.
Rethinking and Unthinking Development. Perspectives on Inequality and Poverty in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Ed. by Busani Mpofu and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni. Berghahn Books, New York 2019. x, 278 pp. $135.00; £99.00. (E-book: $34.95.)
Development has remained elusive in Africa. Through theoretical contributions and case studies focusing on Southern Africa's former white-settler states, South Africa and Zimbabwe, this volume responds to the current need to rethink (and unthink) development in the region. The eleven essays explore how Africa can adapt Western development models suited to its political, economic, social, and cultural circumstances, while rejecting development practices and discourses based on exploitative capitalist and colonial tendencies. Beyond the legacies of colonialism, the volume also explores other factors impacting development, including regional politics, corruption, poor policies on empowerment and indigenization, and socio-economic and cultural barriers.
Ghana
Coyle Rosen, Lauren. Fires of Gold. Law, Spirit, and Sacrificial Labor in Ghana. [Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century, 4.] University of California Press, Oakland (CA) 2020. ix, 213 pp. Maps. $85.00; £70.00. (Paper, E-book: $29.95; £25.00.)
This book is an ethnography of the cultural, legal, political, and spiritual forces governing the gold mining industry in Ghana, one of Africa's most celebrated democracies. Professor Rosen argues that significant sources of power have emerged outside the formal legal system. These authorities or shadow sovereigns include the transnational mining company, collectivized artisanal miners, civil society advocacy groups, and significant religious figures and spiritual forces. Often more salient than official bodies of government, the shadow sovereigns reveal a reconstitution of sovereign power. The author also contends that spiritual forces are central in anchoring and animating shadow sovereigns, as well as key forms of legal authority, economic value, and political contestation.
AMERICA
Helg, Aline. Slave No More. Self-Liberation before Abolitionism in the Americas. Transl. from the French by Lara Vergnaud. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill (NC) 2019 (2016). 353 pp. Ill. $90.00. (Paper: $29.95; E-book: $22.99.)
Significant numbers of enslaved Africans across the entire Western hemisphere managed to free themselves hundreds of years before the formation of white-run abolitionist movements. Reviewing over three centuries of resistance and struggle, from early colonization to the American and Haitian revolutions, Spanish American independence and abolition in the British Caribbean, Professor Helg assesses in detail the specific strategies slaves devised and utilized, articulating four primary liberation strategies: flight and marronage; manumission by legal document; military service; and revolt, and considers such actions at both individual and community levels, and in the context of national and international political movements.
Mulich, Jeppe. In a Sea of Empires. Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean. [Cambridge Oceanic Histories.] Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2020. xii, 204 pp. Maps. £75.00. (E-book: $80.00.)
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Caribbean was rife with revolutionary fervour and political turmoil. Yet, with such upheaval came unparalleled opportunities. In this study, Dr Mulich explores how imperial politics were interconnected with colonial law in the maritime borderlands of the Leeward Islands, where British, Danish, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Swedish colonies both competed and cooperated. By exploring the transnational networks involved in trade, slavery, smuggling, privateering, and marronage, he offers a new account of the age of revolutions in the Caribbean, emphasizing the border-crossing nature of life in the region and the emergence of early-nineteenth-century globalization.
Ponce Vázquez, Juan José. Islanders and Empire. Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690. [Cambridge Latin American Studies, 121.] Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2020. xv, 303 pp. Ill. Maps. £75.00. (E-book: $80.00.)
This book examines the role of smuggling in the cultural, economic, and socio-political transformation of Hispaniola from the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Focusing on local peoples and communities, Professor Ponce Vázquez analyses how residents of Hispaniola actively negotiated and transformed the meaning and reach of imperial bureaucracies and institutions for their own benefit. Co-opting the governing and judicial powers of local and imperial institutions on the island enabled residents to take advantage of the contraband trade that reached the island's shores. In doing so, they limited, redirected, or suppressed the policies of the Spanish crown, thereby controlling their destinies and those of other Spanish Caribbean territories and the Spanish empire in the region.
Brazil
Mollona, Massimiliano. Brazilian Steel Town. Machines, Land, Money and Commoning in the Making of the Working Class. [Dislocations, Vol. 27.] Berghahn, New York [etc.] 2020. xiii, 319 pp. Ill. $135.00; £99.00. (E-book: $34.95.)
Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getúlio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. The city's economy, and consequently the lives of its citizen, revolves around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest industrial complex in Latin America. Although the CSN peaked long ago, the company still controls life in Volta Redonda today, creating as much dispossession as wealth for the community. Dr Mollona combines Marx's theory of political economy, especially the critique of capitalist value, with an anthropological orientation to the cultural and phenomenological forms through which struggles between capital and labour take place.
United States of America
As If She Were Free. A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas. Ed. by Erica L Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2020. xxv, 501 pp. Ill. Maps. £74.99. (Paper: £22.99; E-book: $24.00.)
This volume brings together the biographies of twenty-four women of African descent to reveal how enslaved and recently freed women sought, imagined, and found freedom from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries in the Americas. The biographical approach describes expansive social processes, such as migration, trade, enslavement, and emancipation, from the perspective of individual women. For some women, freedom meant liberation and legal protection from slavery, while others focused on gaining economic, personal, political, and social rights. Emancipation was not just a legal status, as these life stories demonstrate that women were agents of emancipation, claiming free status in the courts, fighting for liberty, and defining and experiencing freedom in a range of ways.
García-Colon, Ismael. Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire. Puerto Rican Workers on U.S. Farms. [American Crossroads, 57.] University of California Press, Oakland (CA) 2020. xvii, 326 pp. Ill. $85.00; £70.00. (Paper, E-book: $29.95; £25.00.)
The Farm Labor Program, established by the government of Puerto Rico in 1947, placed thousands of migrant workers on U.S. farms and gave rise to stateside Puerto Rican communities. Investigating the origins and development of this programme, Professor García-Colón uncovers the challenges faced by its participants. He evokes the violence, fieldwork, food, lodging, surveillance, and coercion that these workers experienced and conveys their hopes and struggles to overcome poverty. Island farmworkers encountered a unique form of prejudice and racism arising from their dual status as both US citizens and “foreign others”. Despite these challenges, many Puerto Rican farmworkers chose to settle in rural American communities, contributing to the Latinization of the U.S. farm labour force.
Hoffnung-Garskof, Jesse E. Racial Migrations. New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean, 1850–1902. Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) 2019. xv, 369 pp. Ill. Maps. $35.00; £30.00. (Paper: $24.95; £22.00.)
In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled in the segregated tenements of New York City, where they built a political network and articulated an ideal of revolutionary nationalism centred on racial and social justice. In this book, Professor Hoffnung-Garskof vividly portrays these migrant revolutionaries, weaving together their experiences of migrating while black, their relationships with African American civil rights leaders, and their evolving participation in nationalist political movements. Placing Afro-Latino New Yorkers at the centre of the story, the author offers a new interpretation of the revolutionary politics of the Spanish Caribbean, including the idea that Cuba could become a nation without racial divisions.
Holdren, Nate. Injury Impoverished. Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era. [Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society.] Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2020. xvii, 292 pp. £47.99. (E-book: $48.00.)
In the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century U.S. economy, large numbers of workers were maimed and killed, while the legal system left the injured and their families with little recourse. In the 1910s, U.S. states enacted workers' compensation laws, requiring employers to pay a portion of the financial costs of workplace injuries. Based on his PhD thesis, the author uses a range of archival materials, interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives, and compelling narration to criticize the shortcomings of these laws. While compensation laws brought only modest economic improvement for workers, Dr Holdren argues that these laws created new forms of inequality, causing people with disabilities to lose their jobs, while also resulting in new forms of inhumanity.
Lange, Alison K. Picturing Political Power. Images in the Women's Suffrage Movement. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (IL) 2020. 324 pp. Ill. $45.00. (E-book: $10.00– $45.00.)
This book demonstrates the centrality of visual politics to American women's campaigns throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing the power of images to change history. While some pictures have been flattering, many have been condescending or incendiary. Analysing the connection between images, gender, and power, Professor Lange explores how suffragists used images, from photographs to colourful posters, to pioneer in one the first extensive visual campaigns in the United States. In seeking to transform notions of womanhood and obtain the right to vote, white suffragists emphasized that voting was compatible with motherhood, while leading suffragists of colour employed pictures to secure respect and authority.
Paik, A. Naomi. Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary. Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century. [American Studies Now: Critical Studies of the Present, 12.] University Of California Press, Oakland (CA) 2020. x, 173 pp. $85.00; £70.00. (Paper, E-book: $18.95; £15.99.)
Days after he entered the White House as president, Donald Trump signed three executive orders, authorizing the Muslim Ban, the border wall, and ICE raids, defining his administration's approach toward non-citizens. In this essential primer on how we got here, Professor Paik shows that such barriers to immigration are embedded in the very foundation of the United States. The author reveals that the forty-fifth president's xenophobic, racist, ableist, patriarchal ascendancy is no aberration, but rather the consequence of two centuries of U.S. political, economic, and social culture. She demonstrates that attacks against migrants are closely linked to assaults against women, people of colour, workers, the ill and the disabled, and queer and gender non-conforming people.
Richman, Shaun. Tell the Bosses We're Coming. A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century. Monthly Review Press, New York 2020. 246 pp. $26.00. (E-book: $17.00.)
Longer hours, decreasing pay, no job security … In an age of rampant inequality, increasing social protest, and strikes, does union membership continue to decline? Based on historical research and legal analysis, as well as on his own experience as a union organizing director, Richman lays out an action plan for U.S. workers in the twenty-first century, enabling us to internalize the concept that workers are equal human beings, entitled to healthcare, dignity, job security, and the right to strike. The book describes what it would take, some changes that are within reach for activists, and some that require meaningful legal reform, to put unions in workplaces across America.
Specht, Joshua. Red Meat Republic. A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America. [Histories of Economic Life.] Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) [etc.] 2019. xv, 368 pp. Ill. $27.95; £22.00. (Paper: $18.95; £15.99.)
By the late nineteenth century, beef production in the United States had gone from small-scale, localized operations to a highly centralized industry spanning the country, with cattle bred on ranches in the rural West, slaughtered in Chicago, and consumed in the nation's rapidly growing cities. Dr Specht tells the story of the violent conflict over who would reap the benefits of this new industry, and who would bear its heavy costs, showing how the enduring success of the cattle-beef complex resulted from the ability of the meatpackers to make their interests overlap with those of a hungry public, while the interests of struggling ranchers, desperate workers, and bankrupt butchers were secondary.
Tuffnell, Stephen. Made in Britain. Nation and Emigration in Nineteenth-Century America. University of California Press, Oakland (CA) 2020. xiii, 302 pp. Ill. $49.95; £41.00. (E-book: $49.95; £41.00.)
For over a hundred years following independence, emigrant Americans left the United States for Britain. From Liverpool and London, they produced Atlantic capitalism and managed transfers of goods, culture, and capital that were integral to U.S. nation-building. In British social clubs, emigrants forged relationships with elite Britons essential not only for peaceful transatlantic connections, but also for the struggle against southern slavery. As the United States descended into civil war, emigrant Americans decisively shaped the Atlantic-wide battle for public opinion. Blending the histories of foreign relations, capitalism, nation-formation, and transnational connection, Professor Tuffnell demonstrates that the quest for independent nationhood by the United States was entangled at every step with the world's most powerful empire of the time.
Vidal, Cécile. Caribbean New Orleans. Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society. The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture [etc.], Williamsburg (VA) [etc.] 2019. xv, 533 pp. Ill. Maps. $49.95. (E-book: $29.99.)
Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire, rather than as a North American frontier town, Professor Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles (especially Saint-Domingue), which shaped urban development through the eighteenth century. Drawing on New Orleans court records, the author explores the streets, market, taverns, churches, and hospitals, elaborating on the challenges that slowed economic development, such as Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the social order that was predicated on slave labour and racial hierarchy. Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, this book portrays the city of the French colonists who established racial slavery there, as well as the African slaves forced to toil for them.
Virginia 1619. Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America. Ed. by Paul Musselwhite, Peter C. Mancall, and James Horn. The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture [etc.], Williamsburg (VA) [etc.] 2019. v, 320 pp. Ill. Maps. $90.00. (Paper: $25.00; E-book: $19.99.)
This edited volume reflects on the origins of English colonialism around the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic world. As the fourteen essays here demonstrate, Anglo-Americans have been simultaneously experimenting with representative government and struggling with the legacy of racial thinking. Virginia was not the product of thoughtless, greedy English colonists. Instead, the emergence of stable English-Atlantic colonies reflected deliberate efforts to establish new societies based on ideas about commonwealth, commerce, and colonialism. Slavery and freedom were born together, as migrants and English officials figured out how to make this colony succeed. As this collection demonstrates, the ferment of ideas and events surrounding 1619 were controversial and contested, even within the Virginia Company.
White, Sophie. Voices of the Enslaved. Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana. The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture [etc.], Williamsburg (VA) [etc.] 2019. xviii, 286 pp. $32.50. (E-book: $25.99.)
In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses, they answered with stories about themselves. Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, this book draws readers into Louisiana courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to reveal how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labour, violence, and the romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect.
ASIA
China
Bartlett, Nicholas. Recovering Histories. Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China. [Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.] University of California Press, Oakland (CA) 2020. xv, 204 pp. Ill. $85.00; £70.00. (Paper, E-book: $29.95; £25.00.)
Heroin first reached Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as Tin Capital, in the 1980s. Widespread use of the drug coincided with radical changes in the local economy caused by the marketization of the mining industry. Based on fieldwork, Professor Bartlett met middle-aged, long-term heroin users who complained they felt stuck in the country's rapid reforms, navigating a world that no longer resembles the tightly knit Maoist work units of their childhood or the disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos of their early careers. The author explores how overcoming addiction in Gejiu has become inseparable from broader attempts to reimagine labouring lives in a rapidly shifting social world.
New Economy and Innovation in Employment. Ed. by Zhang Juwei, Yang Weiguo, and Gao Wenshu. [Chinese Research Perspectives on Population and Labor, Vol. 6.] Brill, Leiden 2020. ix, 134 pp. € 99.00; $119.00. (E-book: € 99.00; $119.00.)
In this translated volume, based on the Chinese publication Green Book of Population and Labor (No. 18), the main focus is the new era of economic growth fuelled primarily by innovation and entrepreneurship and corresponding developments in the employment landscape in China. Chapter One offers an overview of China's new economy, while, in Chapter Two, emerging trends in both the labour and the job markets are examined. Changes to labour relations under the new economy are discussed in Chapter Three, followed by two chapters in which the role of China's largest online ride-hailing service provider in shaping the workforce and creating jobs is considered. The final chapter reports on current policy support for innovative industries.
India
Bhattacharya, Neeladri. The Great Agrarian Conquest. The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World. Permanent Black, Rhaniket 2018. xix, 522 pp. Ill. Maps. Rs. 1195.
This book examines how throughout colonial times the diverse practices and customs of an existing rural universe, with its many forms of livelihood, were reshaped to devise a new agrarian world of settled farming. Professor Bhattacharya distinguishes two distinct but related forms of agrarian conquests: one that operates from below, slowly and silently transforming the world of peasants, and another that is implanted from above, forcibly displacing earlier life worlds. Colonialism, the author suggests, has the power to reorder social relations and community bonds, altering the world radically, even when the objective is to preserve elements of the old. The changes brought about are simultaneously cultural, discursive, legal, linguistic, spatial, social, and economic.
Iran
Aligmagham, Pouya. Contesting the Iranian Revolution. The Green Uprisings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2020. xvii, 315 pp. Ill. £74.99. (Paper: £24.99; E-book: $26.00.)
Most observers of Iran viewed the Green Uprisings of 2009 as a failed revolution, with many Iranians and those in neighbouring Arab countries agreeing. In this book, Dr Alimagham deconstructs the conventional win-lose binary interpretations in a way that underscores the subtle but important victories on the ground. Focusing on everyday men and women in this “history from below”, he highlights the post-Islamist discursive assault on government symbols of legitimation. From symbols rooted in Shi'ite Islam, Palestinian liberation, and the Iranian Revolution, the author harnesses the wider history of Iran and the Middle East, revealing how activists contested the Islamic Republic's legitimacy to its very core. See also Paola Rivetti's review in this volume, pp. 147–150.
Japan
Koch, Gabriele. Healing Labor. Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy. Stanford University Press, Stanford (CA) 2020. xv, 230 pp. $90.00. (Paper: $28.00.)
The sex industry in Japan operates and recruits openly and is staffed by a diverse group of women attracted by high pay and the promise of autonomy, although their work remains stigmatized and unmentionable. Based on fieldwork, Professor Koch explores the relationship between how sex workers think about sex (revealing that Japanese sex workers regard sex as a healing labour, a deeply feminized care necessary for the well-being and productivity of men) and the political-economic roles and opportunities they envisage for themselves. In this nuanced ethnography that approaches sex as a social practice with political and economic effects, the author illustrates the linkages between women's work, sex, and the gendered economy.
Linkhoeva, Tatiana. Revolution Goes East. Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism. [Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.] Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY) [etc.] 2020. x, 281 pp. $27.95. (Open Access.)
After the collapse of tsarist Russia, Japan took advantage of the power vacuum in East Asia. In this book, Professor Linhoeva explores attitudes towards the Soviet Union and the communist movement among the Japanese military and politicians, as well as among interwar leftist and rightist intellectuals and activists. Drawing on archival documents, including memoirs, newspaper and journal articles, political pamphlets, and Comintern archives, she argues that both Japanese political and military policymakers responded not simply to the events in Russia but to the revolutionary ferment they caused in colonial Korea and China, and that Japanese imperial anti-communism was based on geopolitical interests for the stability of the empire rather than on fear of communist ideology. See also Yufei Zhou's review in this volume, pp. 144–147.
The Transnational Redress Movement for the Victims of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery. Ed. by Pyong Gap Min, Thomas Chung, Sejung Sage Yim. [Genocide and Mass Violence in the Age of Extremes, Vol. 2.] De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin [etc.] 2020. x, 341 pp. Ill. € 81.95. (E-book: € 81.95.)
This book is about the redress movement for the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery in South Korea, Japan, and the United States. The Japanese military forced about 80,000–200,000 Asian women into sexual slavery in Japanese military brothels during the Asian-Pacific War (1932–1945). Korean “comfort women” are believed to have been the largest group because of Korea's colonial status. The redress movement started in South Korea in the late 1980s, aimed at making the Japanese government acknowledge its predecessor's crime and take measures to bring justice to the victims. Though the movement has received strong support from UN human rights bodies, the Japanese government has not accepted any of the movement's demands.
Middle East
Barak, On. Powering Empire. How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization. University of California Press, Oakland (CA) 2020. xvi, 321 pp. Ill. Maps. $34.95; £29.00. (E-book: $34.95; £29.00.)
Fossil fuels and Western imperialism are widely seen as key elements that shaped the modern world. The Age of Empire was driven by coal, and the Middle East (now associated with oil), was turned into a coherent region by British coal and imperial interventionism. Focusing on this British carbon flow to the Middle East, Dr Barak excavates the historic nexus between coal and empire to reveal the political and military motives behind what is conventionally seen as a technological innovation. He recounts the carbon-intensive entanglements of Western and non-Western powers provocatively and reveals unfamiliar resources, such as Islamic risk-aversion and Gandhian vegetarianism, for a climate justice that relies on more diverse and ethical solutions worldwide.
Hagedorn, Jan Hinrich. Domestic Slavery in Syria and Egypt, 1200–1500. [Mamluk Studies, Vol. 21.] V&R Unipress [etc.], Göttingen 2020. 245 pp. € 32.99.
In this study, Dr Hagedorn explores domestic slavery in Syrian and Egyptian society from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, focusing on the agency of slaves in the context of master-slave relationships within households and in wider society, attributing the ability of slaves to shape the world around them to constant negotiation within the master-slave relationship and arguing that intermediaries such as the court system channelled the agency of slaves. The principal sources for this study, partly presented in the appendices, are purchase contracts, listening certificates, marriage contracts and estate inventories, combined with scribal, market inspection, and slave purchase manuals and chronicles.
Philippines
Charbonneau, Oliver. Civilizational Imperatives. Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World. Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY) 2020. xiii, 282 pp. Ill. Maps. $45.00. (E-book: $21.99.)
Often referred to as Moroland, the Sulu Archipelago and the island of Mindanao in the Philippines Muslim South were sites of intense U.S. engagement and laboratories of colonial modernity in the early twentieth century. Exploring the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized, Dr Charbonneau argues that American power in the Islamic Philippines derived from a transformative vision of colonial rule. Civilization, protection, and instruction became watchwords for U.S. military officers and civilian administrators, who enacted fantasies of racial reform among the diverse societies of the region. Violence saturated their efforts to remake indigenous politics and culture, becoming embedded in governance strategies used across four decades.
AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA
Bischoff, Eva. Benevolent Colonizers in Nineteenth-Century Australia. Quaker Lives and Ideals. [Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series.] Palgrave Macmillan, Cham 2020. xvii, 404 pp. Ill. € 81.74. (E-book: € 64.19.)
This book reconstructs the history of a group of British Quaker families and their involvement in the process of settler colonialism in early nineteenth-century Australia. Their everyday actions contributed to the multiplicity of practices that displaced and annihilated Aboriginal communities. Simultaneously, early nineteenth-century Friends were members of a translocal, transatlantic community characterized by pacifism and involvement in transnational humanitarian efforts, such as abolitionist and prison reform movements, as well as the Aborigines Protection Society. Based on records of the colonial administration and of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain and private papers from Quaker families, Professor Bischoff examines how Quakers negotiated the violence of the frontier, considering their pacifist ideals.
EUROPE
Germany
Bänzinger, Peter-Paul. Die Moderne als Erlebnis. Eine Geschichte der Konsum- und Arbeitsgesellschaft, 1840–1940. Wallstein, Göttingen 2020. 452 pp. Ill. € 35.90.
In the decades around 1900, daily life changed profoundly for large sections of the population, affecting both work and consumption. Based on approximately one hundred diaries from German-speaking countries, Dr Bänzinger examines how people perceived their everyday lives and demonstrates that, in their view, life should be fun and offer variety, during leisure time and at work alike. Bourgeois values of general hard work became less important. During their leisure time people focused on the intensity of the moment and on pleasant conversations, rather than on valuable art appreciation. By providing insights into the thoughts, actions, and feelings of people from a wide variety of population groups, the author draws the attention of readers to the “small” historical actors.
Hübner, Jonas. Gemein und Ungleich. Ländliches Gemeingut und ständische Gesellschaft in einem frühneuzeitlichen Markenverband. Die Essener Mark bei Osnabrück. [Veröffentlichen der historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, Bd. 307.] Wallstein, Göttingen 2020. 402 pp. Maps. € 35.00. (E-book: € 26.99.)
Community land played an important role the rural society in north-west Germany. These Marken were common property, in which the appropriation of natural resources was organized by social collectives. In the Osnabrück Marken, rulers, manors, and farmers jointly managed and used forest, pasture, and heather. In this case study on the Essen Mark, Dr Hübner uses archival sources to examine this collective management by unequal actors, analysing the cooperation and conflicts in the area and the tensions between sovereignty, landlords, and rural self-government from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century and the process of agricultural reform, which ultimately led to the dissolution of the Marken.
Great Britain
Fulton, Richard. Warrior Generation 1865–1885. Militarism and British Working-Class Boys. Bloomsbury Academic, London [etc.] 2020. vii, 331 pp. Ill. £59.50. (E-book: £45.90.)
In this book, Professor Fulton rethinks the efficacy of an institutional drive among influential middle-class opinion leaders to militarize lower-class boys in Victorian Britain. Contending that instead of engendering the desired cultural militarism, their efforts merely contributed to a fast-developing culture of adventure and masculinity, he explores a range of themes from the propagation of the military message in school curricula and its glorification in student textbooks to heroic depictions and ubiquitous presence of the military in the entertainment and popular media of these boys and shows that education, leisure and even membership of the Boys' Brigade seldom led to more favourable opinions of the armed forces.
Kennedy, Liam. Who Was Responsible for the Troubles? The Northern Ireland Conflict. McGill Queen's University Press, Montreal [etc.] 2020. xvi, 274 pp. Ill. CAD $34.95.
The Troubles in Northern Ireland are a world-class problem in miniature. The combustible mix of national, ethnic, and sectarian passions that went into the making of the conflict is paralleled in other parts of the world today. Relative to population size, this conflict was the most intense in Western Europe since the end of World War II. After years of reflection and research, Professor Kennedy has brought together elements of history, politics, sociology, and social psychology to identify the collective actors who drove the conflict onwards for more than three decades, from the days of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Leng, Thomas. Fellowship and Freedom. The Merchant Adventurers and the Restructuring of English Commerce, 1582–1700. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2020. xi, 343 pp. £65.00.
The Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers was England's most important trading company of the sixteenth century. Over this period, the Company's main trade (export of cloth to northwest Europe) was overshadowed by rising traffic with the wider world, whilst its privileges were subject to constant criticism. Using thousands of private merchant papers, Dr Leng examines the complex social worlds of early modern merchants. For members, “freedom” meant the right not just to access a privileged market, but also to trade independently, which could conflict with the “fellowship” of corporate affiliation and the responsibilities to the collective The main theme in this study is the challenge of maintaining corporate unity in the face of pressures that the Company faced.
Moores, Chris. Civil Liberties and Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2020 (2017). xv, 330 pp. £78.99. (£24.99; E-book: $84.00.)
The National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) was formed in the 1930s against a backdrop of fascism, aiming to ensure that civil liberties were a central component of political discourse. The NCCL had to balance the interests of extremist allies with the desire for respect as a force in campaigning for human rights and civil liberties. From new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s to the adoption of the Human Rights Act in 1998, Dr Moores traces the course of the NCCL over the last eighty years, showing its shifts and continuities in political mobilization, changes in discourse about extension and curtailment of freedoms, as well as the theoretical conceptualization and practical protection of rights and liberties.
Greece
De Waal, Clarissa. Beyond the Bailouts. The Anthropology and History of the Greek Crisis. I.B. Tauris, London [etc.] 2018. 184 pp. £67.50. (Paper: £26.09; E-book: £20.87.)
Greek financial and economic crises have been an enduring problem since the nineteenth century. In this ethnography, Dr De Waal combines historical material from before and after the nineteenth-century War of Independence with extensive longitudinal ethnographic research, covering two distinct periods (the 1980s and the current crisis beginning in 2010) and comparing two villages in southern Greece (Mystras and Kefala), each responding quite differently to economic circumstances. Analysis of this divergence highlights the central point in the book that the ideology of aspiring to work in the public sector, pervasive in Greek society since the nineteenth century, has contributed significantly to economic development problems in Greece.
Hungary
Valuch, Tibor. Die ungarische Gesellschaft im Wandel. Soziale Veränderungen in Ungarn 1989–2019. [Studia Hungarica, 55.] Pustet, Regensburg 2020. 325 pp. Ill. Maps. € 34.95.
The change in the Hungarian system in 1989/1990 created new possibilities for a hitherto unimaginable social and economic transition. In this volume, Dr Valuch analyses the processes and consequences of this change by examining which factors influenced the social position of individuals and groups, and how privatization affected income levels and social inequality, looking at mind-set, public opinion and everyday life to explore which habits, values and mindsets have endured, which elements of social restructuring emerged in Hungary before the 1990s, which life and survival strategies arose since the change of system, and who benefitted from the privatization and renewed prosperity.
Italy
Natoli, Aldo. Lettere dal carcere (1939–1942). Storia corale di una famiglia antifascista. A cura di Claudio Natoli con la collaborazione di Enzo Collotti. [La storia. Temi, 72.] Viella, Roma 2020. lvi, 357 pp. Ill. € 39.00.
Arrested in December 1939, Aldo Natoli was convicted for participating in the organization of the Roman Communist Group. Embracing anti-fascism in prison, he joined the Resistance and became a member of the Partida Communista Italia, until he was expelled from the party in 1969 together with the “manifesto” group. During his years of captivity, Natoli maintained a frequent correspondence with his family, exceptionally well-preserved, revealing glimpses of the harsh moral and material conditions and the daily prison regimen. Illustrated by many photographs, this unique correspondence introduces us to the human and existential dimension and to the experience of an anti-fascist family in the final phase of the regime.
The Netherlands
Dekker, Cor. Uit de Spaanse hel ontvlucht. De ervaringen van een zeeman uit Den Helder bij de Internationale Brigade. Publ. by Rik Vuurmans. Panchaud, Amsterdam 2020. 164 pp. Ill. € 17.90.
In 1936, a young sailor from Den Helder travelled to Spain to join the International Brigades. For over a year, Cor Dekker fought the fascist troops of General Franco, surviving shelling and bombing and witnessing the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. After his return in 1938, he published his adventures, experiences at the front, and contacts with fellow soldiers and the Spanish population. In his lively personal narrative, Dekker gives colour to existing images. Vuurmans has reissued this ego document and added a biography of Cor Dekker and an introduction to the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades. An interview with Dekker in the Heldersche Courant from 1938 is included.
Noorlander, D.L. Heaven's Wrath. The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World. Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY) [etc.] 2019. viii, 289 pp. Ill. $45.00. (E-book: $21.99.)
This book explores religious thoughts and rites of the early Dutch Atlantic world. Professor Noorlander argues that the Reformed Church and the West India Company forged and maintained a close union across the seventeenth century. The West India Company supported the Reformed Church financially and helped spread Calvinism to other continents, while Calvinist employees and colonists benefitted from the familiar aspects of religious instruction and public worship. The author argues that the church-company union also encouraged destructive military operations, resulting in an anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish, and anti-Portuguese tool, imposing financial and demographic costs that the small Dutch Republic and its colonies could not afford.
Russia – Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Kolonitskii, Boris. Comrade Kerensky. The Revolution Against the Monarchy and the Formation of the Cult of the Leader of the People (March–June 1917). Transl. [from Russian] by Arch Tait. [New Russian Thought.] Polity Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2021 (2017). x, 374 pp. Ill. £25.00; € 28.30. (E-book: £17.99; € 30.90.)
As one of the heroes of the 1917 February Revolution and then Prime Minister at the head of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky was passionately lauded as a leader. By October, Kerensky had been unceremoniously dethroned in the Bolshevik takeover and had fled to the U.S., where he remained exiled until his death. The trajectory of his rise and fall and the intensity of his popularity were symptomatic of a broad historical phenomenon: the cult of the leader. In this book, Professor Kolonitskii uses the figure of Kerensky to show how popular engagement with the idea of the leader became a key component of a cultural re-imagining of the political landscape after the fall of the monarchy.
Zmiejewski, Weronika. Zwischen Tadschikistan und Moskau. Erfahrungswege junger Arbeitsmigranten. [ANOR Central Asia Studies, Bd. 20.] De Gruyter, Berlin, 2020. viii, 116 pp. € 29.95. (E-book: € 29.95.)
This ethnological study describes the situation of Tajiki men migrating to Russia for economic reasons. “Going to Moscow”, in this case, is synonymous with becoming a migrant worker. Up to a million Tajiks, ninety-five per cent of them male, reside in Russia for brief or extended periods, most of them as seasonal workers on large construction sites. Based on interviews and participant observation in 2010 and 2011, Dr Zmiejewski examines the migration path of young Tajiki men and the gap between their expectations and the reality of migrant life, relating this to their personal maturity as well as to their family status.
Spain
Gráfica Anarquista. Fotografía y revolución social 1936–1939. Andrés Antebi Arnó (et al.). Ajuntament de Barcelona, Barcelona 2020. 207 pp. Ill. € 19.00.
This book presents the images recovered seventy-five years after the anarchist social revolution of 1936–1939 in Barcelona. The photo collection of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) was transferred in haste in 1939 to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, where it remains to this day, containing 5,590 negatives, 2,288 photographs, and 250 glass plates, taken by both amateur photographers and professionals, such as Kati Horna, Margaret Michaelis, Antoni Campañá, and Pérez de Rozas. This book comprises propaganda posters but mainly covers daily life during the revolt that affected the militiamen and women in the streets of Barcelona.
Romero Salvadó, Francisco J. Political Comedy and Social Tragedy. Spain, a Laboratory of Social Conflict, 1892–1921. [The Cañada Blanch/ Sussex Academic Studies on Contemporary Spain.] Sussex Academic Press [etc.], Eastbourne [etc.] 2020. xxiii, 340 pp. Ill. £85.00; $99.95. (Paper: £34.95; $49.95.)
Romero Salvadó, Francisco J. ¿Quién mató a Eduardo Dato? Comedia política y tragedia social en España, 1892–1921. Editorial Comares. Granada 2020. xv + 444 pp. Ill. €33.00.
The troubled and often violent path of Spain to modernity is analysed in this book. In the 1890s, Spain was trapped by an ill-fated colonial adventure and a spiral of anarchist terrorism and praetorian-led repression, which culminated in the murder of the Conservative prime minister. The other part of the chronological framework shows a similar set of circumstances, and highlights the crisis, as well as the resilience of the ruling Restoration Monarchy. Dr Romero Salvadó claims that this crisis could be explained by focusing on the correlation between two apparently contradictory concepts, which, in fact, proved to be supplementary: the extent to which the persistence of the political comedy embodied by an unreformed liberal but oligarchic order perpetuated a social tragedy. See also Chris Ealham's review in this volume, pp. 150–152.
