"Bloody Numbers"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality by Pablo F. Gómez.

About the book, from the publisher:

Upends current thinking about how early modern people started to conceptualize human beings in terms of populations.

Bloody Numbers is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, financiers, officials, surgeons, notaries, ship captains, and others began thinking about human bodies as aggregate populations understood through numbers: measurements, averages, and calculations of risk and value assessed through the tabulation of heights, weights, tumors, scars, and other characteristics. Pablo F. Gómez explores how figures within the world of slave trading used this model for understanding human bodies to generalize about behavior and disease in ways that foreshadowed the work of modern epidemiologists and public health officials—though they employed their calculations with the aim of protecting their financial interests rather than of caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks.

A pathbreaking work, Bloody Numbers reveals the historical actions that rendered populations quantifiable. In doing so, it shows that confronting these origins is essential to understanding the violent political, legal, economic, and scientific practices that ascribe numbers to our own bodies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cats: A History"

New from the Johns Hopkins University Press: Cats: A History by Rod Phillips.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping and fascinating history of cat-human relationships.

For more than 10,000 years, cats have prowled at the edges of human life. But, starting only a few decades ago, hundreds of millions of them became pets. In Cats, Rod Phillips shares a sweeping cultural and social history of felines, tracing their shifting place across societies and centuries, from ancient Egypt's revered hunters to Europe's suspected familiars of witches and from shipboard rodent controllers to cherished internet icons.

Phillips illustrates how cats have always occupied spaces both familiar and mysterious and how their perceived independence and disruptive nature―and their associations with women, the supernatural, and outsiders―have shaped humans' attitudes toward these fascinating creatures. Cats have been lauded as companions and vermin-killers, reviled as threats to moral and ecological order, and cherished for the very qualities that make them hard to control. This richly textured portrait of cats explores their significance in religion, politics, gender, literature, warfare, and pop culture. It also provides profound insights into our relationships with other animals, especially dogs and rodents.

The many roles that cats have played throughout history illuminate a variety of contradictions in humans' perceptions of them: as affectionate yet aloof, adorable and evil, ordinary and exceptional. This book is the definitive story of the feline presence in human history―an elegant study of how we live with animals whom we see as living by their own rules.

Visit the website for Phillips's books about wine.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Authoritarian Markets"

New from Cornell University Press: Authoritarian Markets: The Politics of China's Banking Explosion by Adam Y. Liu.

About the book, from the publisher:

Authoritarian Markets explores the political foundations of China's banking boom and its far-reaching impact on the Chinese economy.

In 1978 China had no commercial banks. Today it commands the world's largest banking system, with assets equal to 40 percent of global GDP. Adam Y. Liu argues that this rise was not the product of market reforms but of political bargains and bureaucratic mobilization.

In the 1990s, Beijing issued bank licenses as bargaining chips―securing cooperation from local governments as it pushed through painful reforms. The result was a sprawling, competitive banking market built not in spite of authoritarian rule but because of it.

Drawing on interviews, spatial data, census records, surveys, and experiments, Liu reveals how local state banks became both engines of China's growth and incubators of its current economic risks. Eye-opening and persuasive, Authoritarian Markets offers fresh insight into the political logic of market development in China and authoritarian states worldwide.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Race in Transit"

New from Stanford University Press: Race in Transit: Tracing the Politics of Migration from Ottoman Syria through US Empire by Randa Tawil.

About the book, from the publisher:

At the turn of the twentieth century, life in Ottoman Syria was upended by European and US colonial and capital expansion. Many people responded by migrating to the United States. In doing so, they stepped into the world of international migration, where they had to navigate overlapping states and migration infrastructures―shipping companies and ticketing agents, health inspectors and border police, universities and kinship networks―that each facilitated, restricted, and policed movement.

With this book, Randa Tawil follows the itineraries of the early Syrian diaspora, stitching together migrants' travels across archives from Beirut, Marseille, Liverpool, Manila, Washington, D.C., Michigan, and Texas. She reveals the overlapping and contradicting ways in which race was forged globally in the early twentieth century and its effects on Syrians in the United States. Syrian migrants encountered multiple imperial and national legal regimes during transit, and their varying relationships with different empires set the conditions under which migrants were considered "desirable" or "undesirable" once they reached US borders. Focusing on the experiences of those on the move, Race in Transit makes migrants the agents of a world history that has too often relegated them to the sidelines.

Visit Randa Tawil's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rarities"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Rarities: Conservation Science in a Time of Unintended Consequences by Zoe Nyssa.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping study that reveals how conservation science does more than simply protect by inadvertently making nature valuable in new ways.

Climate change and other environmental transformations are causing species to go extinct at accelerating rates. What, then, should a science of saving nature look like? In Rarities, Zoe Nyssa traces how conservation emerged as a distinct scientific endeavor in the United States over the twentieth century and how this history has shaped environmental research practices and policy today. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research with leading conservation labs and programs, Nyssa explores how conservation science appears to generate contradictory, even counterintuitive, results as scientists, policymakers, and the public all take up, respond to, and repurpose scientists’ ideas about rarity, vulnerability, and endangerment. The designation of new nature reserves can lead to increased poaching and habitat destruction. The listing of a species as endangered fuels their black-market consumption as pets, food, or luxury items. Protection of natural resources can push resource extraction into unprotected areas. Other effects are less simple to calculate; persuading the public to care about one species might siphon support for another, and paying for one kind of conservation behavior can discourage other forms of conservation activity.

The science of saving nature spans a century of work by ecologists and others to develop a scientific basis for conservation. Yet Nyssa shows how their efforts to understand the natural world in terms of endangerment and extinction unleashed new ways for nonscientists to experience and understand nature as well. The scientific values that emerge, she argues, can transform the complex interconnections between human and nonhuman life. Rarities offers a framework for understanding these surprising socio-ecological dynamics and why they matter, both for contemporary science and for the planet.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Under Authoritarian Eyes"

New from Oxford University Press: Under Authoritarian Eyes: Feminist Solidarity and Resistance in Russia and Serbia by Leandra Bias.

About the book, from the publisher:

Theories of transnational feminism often frame feminist knowledge as a project of Western hegemony to move ideas unilaterally from the "emancipated" West to other parts of the world. How does this framework resonate with feminists in times of authoritarianism?

In Under Authoritarian Eyes, Leandra Bias revisits long-held assumptions of West-East power to understand how power relations influence feminists' lived reality in authoritarian times. She argues that the focus on transnational power relations within critical feminist scholarship has overshadowed another emerging aspect of power: the rise of authoritarianism in post-communist Europe, the gender backlash on which it thrives, and, consequently, the risk of co-optability that accompanies it. With a focus on Russia and Serbia, Bias finds that in authoritarian contexts, feminists often reject the view of transnational feminism as merely an extension of Western dominance. In fact, they argue that this view mirrors the rhetoric of their regimes, which claim feminism and "gender ideology" are Western strategies to destroy "traditional values" and undermine national sovereignty. In highlighting these dynamics, Bias centers domestic over transnational power dynamics to illustrate how arguments that were formulated with an emancipatory aim can contribute to the subjugation of feminists across different political contexts.

Drawing on over seventy interviews with four generations of feminist activists and scholars in Russia and Serbia, Bias offers a nuanced perspective on feminist agency, revealing how feminists innovate resistance and subversive approaches without reinforcing authoritarian narratives. By emphasizing the importance of solidarity, shared experience, and mutual support across borders and regimes, Under Authoritarian Eyes fundamentally reshapes the discourse on transnational feminism with important implications for democracy and human rights more broadly.

Visit Leandra Bias's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Strong State, Weak Links"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Strong State, Weak Links: Eugenics and the Southern Politics of Welfare by Anna Krome-Lukens.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the early twentieth century, most US states established eugenics programs to “improve” the human race through selective breeding. North Carolina ran one of the nation’s most aggressive programs; between 1927 and 1977, at least 5,700 people were sterilized and thousands more were committed to institutions. While sterilizations in the 1950s and 1960s disproportionately targeted Black women receiving public assistance, the program’s early focus was on poor white women. These policies were framed as scientific and progressive, yet they were deeply intertwined with racial and class biases, reflecting long-standing social hierarchies in the South.

Anna Krome-Lukens examines those early years and reveals how white reformers such as social workers, politicians, and activists promoted the principles of eugenics while shaping the emerging welfare state before and during the New Deal. By using claims about fitness and mental defects to justify unequal access to public benefits, they defined who was worthy of care. Tracing this history, Strong State, Weak Links illuminates how North Carolina’s eugenics programs influenced the modern welfare state and how their legacy continues to shape debates over social policy today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs"

New from NYU Press: A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs: Housing Chicago's Great Migration by Amani C. Morrison.

About the book, from the publisher:

Uncovers how Chicago's kitchenette apartments shaped housing, race, and urban life in the twentieth century

During the twentieth century’s Great Migration, kitchenette apartments served as the primary homes for Black migrants to Chicago. These small one- and two-room units were often illegally converted from larger apartments and were concentrated on the city’s densely populated, segregated South Side. Typically featuring a communal hallway bathroom, a cooktop tucked into a closet, chronic overcrowding, and exploitative rents, kitchenettes gained widespread fame and notoriety in news reports, housing code campaigns, and the works of celebrated Black artists including Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Richard Wright. They also preceded and paved the way for Chicago’s notorious public housing projects.

A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs offers the first book-length cultural analysis of the kitchenette within Chicago’s history of housing, race, and urban life. Both materially and symbolically significant, the kitchenette existed at the nexus of the Great Migration and the Great Depression, of housing precarity and domestic innovation, of racial capitalism and racial uplift. Drawing on a rich archive of sources from housing court records and documentary photographs to literature, journalism, and visual art, Amani Morrison reveals how Bronzeville’s kitchenettes served residents, landlords, artists, and institutions, accommodating overlapping but often divergent needs.

Through her theory of “Black spatial affordances,” Morrison illuminates how Black Chicagoans transformed constraint into creativity. Blending history, architecture, and cultural analysis, A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs recasts the kitchenette as central to Chicago’s urban modernity and to the making of Black everyday life.

Visit Amani C. Morrison's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Setting Fire to Reason"

New from Princeton University Press: Setting Fire to Reason: The Ethics of Free Speech by Jeffrey W. Howard.

About the book, from the publisher:

The responsibilities of speakers and platforms in a world where content can go viral

The debate over free speech is often marked by two extremes: in one corner, those who think that the right to free speech is nearly absolute; in the other, those who defend sweeping prohibitions on harmful speech. In Setting Fire to Reason, Jeffrey Howard rejects both extremes. He argues that free speech is among our most important moral rights, but—like all rights—it has limits, determined by moral duties we owe to each other. Yet exactly how these moral limits should be translated into law is complex, depending on the particular speech regulation at issue and the risks of government abuse.

Using incitement as his central example of harmful speech, Howard sets out an integrated framework of speakers’ rights and duties, determining when and why speech restrictions can be justified. In developing this original theory, Howard pinpoints the ethical duties of social media platforms, assesses the role of counter-speech as a weapon against harmful communications, and explores how the law and morality of free speech can and should diverge.

Visit Jeffrey Howard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Russia and Iran"

New from Oxford University Press: Russia and Iran: Partners in Defiance from Syria to Ukraine by Nicole Grajewski.

About the book, from the publisher:

Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has cast a spotlight on Russia's burgeoning partnership with Iran. Moscow looked to Tehran for drones and ammunition to fuel its so-called 'special military operation', and Iran's support for Russia's war reflected a decade-long strengthening of Russo-Iranian ties, beginning with the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian Civil War.

Despite a relationship historically marred by mistrust and unmet expectations, the two regimes have worked together to promote their common interests in Syria, where battlefield coordination soon developed into much deeper political alignment. Drawing on extensive Russian and Persian primary sources, and interviews with elites from both countries, Nicole Grajewski uncovers the drivers of ever-closer cooperation between the Kremlin and the Islamic Republic. Detailing the internal structures, shared anxieties and broader ambitions underpinning this alignment, she explores the genesis of Russia and Iran's mutual antagonism towards the Western-led global order; the impact of deep-seated leadership concerns over regime security and domestic protests; and the future trajectory of the partnership within the larger world order.

Examining both military dynamics and economic endeavors, as well as elaborate sanctions evasion schemes and collaboration within international organizations, this is the definitive account of contemporary Russia-Iran relations.

Visit Nicole Grajewski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue