In her new book, The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand Writers and the Colonial World (Otago University Press, 2018), Helen Bones, a Research Associate in Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University, presents a new look at late nineteenth and early twen...

There have been many histories and treatments of the Cold War, few however have the breath, range and definitiveness of Harvard Professor Odd Arne Westad’s new take on the subject: The Cold War: A World History (Basic Books, 2017).

For decades the implementation of a single European currency was seen by its advocates as a vital step in the post-World War II movement toward greater European integration. As Ashoka Mody details in Eurotragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts (Oxford University...

Is there a difference between the Communist Party as an idea and the Communist Party in practice? A. James McAdams thinks so and takes the global approach to history to write a political and intellectual history of the Communist party.

Yoav Di-Capua‘s new book, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is narrative intellectual history at its best: a tale of friendship and betrayal,

For anyone with an interest in Korean studies, the study of diaspora and globalization, and indeed in broader questions around transnational identities and encounters in East Asia and beyond, Homing will prove an invaluable text. In it Ji-Yeon Jo,

In 1957 Ghana achieved its independence from Great Britain under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. In Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2017), Jeffrey Ahlman uses a wide range of archival and prin...

John Munro’s new book, The Anticolonial Front: The African-American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a transnational study that traces the persistence and continuities of Black radicalism from the end of ...

Toufoul Abou-Hodeib‘s A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the urban history of Beirut precisely because it exceeds the disciplinary boundaries of urba...

Most people know that slavery was foundational to the economic development of the United States in the antebellum period. Fewer people are aware that slavery was also important for American foreign policy in the period.

The Western concept of democracy has a lineage dating back to the classical world. Paul Cartledge’s book Democracy: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2016) details its origins in ancient Greece and its evolution of it as a theory over the course of the ...

Benjamin Bryce, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern British Columbia, has written a history of belonging within a culturally plural Argentina. To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines,

Space Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2018) a recently published history of Arab exploration of space, offers a fascinating insight into fundamental issues shaping the contemporary...

The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson.

As any scholar of the Vietnam War can tell you, the field doesn’t lack for study: it’s one of the most-studied fields for both military and diplomatic historians. And yet, for all of the scholarly attention it has received,

In Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Harvard University Press, 2018), Nathan Marcus, analyzes the events that took place around the financial crisis in Austria after World War I.

Ji-Young Lee’s book investigates the changing nature of tribute relations during the Ming and High Qing between a dominant China and its less powerful neighbors, Korea and Japan. China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (Columbia U...

Today I was joined by Seamus Grimes from Ireland where he is Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. With Yutao Sun (Dalian University of Technology), he just published a very interesting and timely book China and Global Value...

The title of Lisa A. Lindsay’s book Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa (University of North Carolina Press, 2017),  invokes enduring family ties, as well as the connections between slavery, migration,

In Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy (Crown Forum, 2018), conservative Jonah Goldberg argues that America’s foundation of democracy and capitalism is a “Mira...

Modeled on Bad Girls of Japan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press, 2017), edited by Nadia Yaqub and the late Rula Quawas stands apart from the edited volume crowd. It includes, not only academic entries,

In Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal role of coal in the Royal Navy, during the short-lived but crucial “age of steam.

Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North (Yale University Press, 2018) is an ambitious attempt to cover, in one volume, the entire history of the relationship between the ‘Global North’—China, Russia,

What’s not to like about economic growth, you might ask? Well, quite a lot, it turns out, once we begin to examine how GDP and other measures of the economy are constructed, and once we see what they leave out (and perhaps just as troubling,

Since the 1990s, vast sums of money and time have been invested in training and resources to hold elections around the world, including in parts of Southeast Asia. The conventional wisdom is that elections either enable or consolidate democracy.