"Democracy in Default"

Coming soon from Columbia University Press: Democracy in Default: Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America by Brian Judge.

About the book, from the publisher:

How did neoliberalism arise? Faced with the crises of the 1970s, a coalition of neoliberal intellectuals, conservative politicians, and business interests carried out a vast project of walling off the economy from democracy, ensuring the dominance of finance―or so the conventional story goes. Democracy in Default offers a new perspective on the birth of neoliberalism, showing that this common narrative confuses cause and effect. Financialization was not the offspring of deregulation but the mechanism that allowed neoliberalism to take root.

Brian Judge argues that financialization was a nearly spontaneous response to a crisis within liberalism. He examines how liberalism disavows the problem of distributive conflict, leaving it vulnerable when those conflicts erupt. When the postwar growth engine began to slow, finance promised a way out of the resulting political impasse, allowing liberal democracies to depoliticize questions of distribution and sustain the existing social and economic order. Elected officials were not simply captured or co-opted but willingly embraced financial solutions to their political problems. Unleashing the financial imperative to generate monetary returns, however, ushered in an all-encompassing transformation. Vivid case studies―the bankruptcy of Stockton, California; the investment strategy of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System; and the 2008 financial crisis―illustrate how the priorities of financial markets radically altered liberal democratic governance. Recasting the political and economic transformations of the past half century, Democracy in Default offers a bracing new account of the relationship between neoliberalism and financialization.

Visit Brian Judge's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Rich Earth between Us"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The Rich Earth between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World, 1770–1840 by Shelby Johnson.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this theory-rich study, Shelby Johnson analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World, examining how their literary production informs "modes of being" that confronted violent colonial times. Johnson particularly assesses how these authors connected to places—whether real or imagined—and how those connections enabled them to make worlds in spite of the violence of slavery and settler colonialism. Johnson engages with works written in a period engulfed by the extraordinary political and social upheavals of the Age of Revolution and Indian Removal, and these texts—which include not only sermons, life writing, and periodicals but also descriptions of embodied and oral knowledge, as well as material objects—register defiance to land removal and other forms of violence.

In studying writers of color during this era, Johnson probes the histories of their lived environment and of the earth itself—its limits, its finite resources, and its metaphoric mortality—in a way that offers new insights on what it means to imagine sustainable connections to the ground on which we walk.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Estranged Pioneers"

New from Oxford University Press: Estranged Pioneers: Race, Faith, and Leadership in a Diverse World by Korie Little Edwards and Rebecca Y. Kim.

About the book, from the publisher:

Churches remain some of the most segregated spaces in the United States. In congregations that are multiracial, leadership can be a source of conflict. What does it mean for pastors of color to lead in multiracial spaces? Who are the pastors of color that serve as head clergy of multiracial congregations? What advantages do they have and what challenges do they encounter? How do they manage their role? How do their experiences compare to their white pastor counterparts who also head multiracial congregations?

Drawing on data from a nationally representative comparative study of multiracial congregations across the United States, including more than 100 in-depth interviews, Estranged Pioneers both answers these questions and discusses the broader implications for community leaders in multiracial contexts.

Korie Little Edwards and Rebecca Y. Kim make three primary arguments. First, pastors of color who lead multiracial congregations are estranged pioneers-they leave their familiar home churches to lead multiracial congregations, but often find themselves estranged from their old religious community as well as their new one. Second, compared to their white counterparts, they are better able to recognize pervasive white hegemony and also more easily cross cultural and racial boundaries, allowing them to reconcile norms from at least two cultures. Finally, Edwards and Kim argue that leaders of color can function as indispensable brokers who can bridge segregated racial networks. In a society that is increasingly diverse yet where segregation persists, they have the unique power and ability to function as bridges that connect otherwise segregated communities. Estranged Pioneers reveals how pastors of color are leading the way towards a more united multiracial future.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Age of Revolutions"

New from Basic Books: The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal.

About the book, from the publisher:

A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand

The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality.

In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown—from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun—he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story. The first revolutionary generation, fired by radical ideas, struggled to slip the hierarchical bonds of the old order. Their failures molded a second generation, more adept at mass organizing but with an illiberal tint. The sweeping political transformations they accomplished after 1800 etched social and racial inequalities into the foundations of modern democracy.

A breathtaking history spanning three continents, The Age of Revolutions uncovers how the period’s grand political transformations emerged across oceans and, slowly and unevenly, over generations.

Learn more about The Age of Revolutions at the Basic Books website.

The Page 99 Test: The Age of Revolutions.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Seeking News, Making China"

Coming soon from Stanford University Press: Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society by John Alekna.

About the book, from the publisher:

Contemporary developments in communications technologies have overturned key aspects of the global political system and transformed the media landscape. Yet interlocking technological, informational, and political revolutions have occurred many times in the past. In China, radio first arrived in the winter of 1922-23, bursting into a world where communication was slow, disjointed, or non-existent. Less than ten percent of the population ever read newspapers. Just fifty years later, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, news broadcasts reached hundreds of millions of people instantaneously, every day. How did Chinese citizens experience the rapid changes in information practices and political organization that occurred in this period? What was it like to live through a news revolution? John Alekna traces the history of news in twentieth century China to demonstrate how large structural changes in technology and politics were heard and felt. Scrutinizing the flow of news can reveal much about society and politics—illustrating who has power and why, and uncovering the connections between different regions, peoples, and social classes. Taking an innovative, holistic view of information practices, Alekna weaves together both rural and urban history to tell the story of rise of mass society through the lens of communication techniques and technology, showing how the news revolution fundamentally reordered the political geography of China.

Visit John Alekna's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Empire of Rags and Bones"

New from Oxford University Press: Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany by Anne Berg.

About the book, from the publisher:

Paper, bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rubber, hair, fat, rags, and bones--the Nazi empire demanded its population obsessively collect anything that could be reused or recycled. Entrepreneurs, policy makers, and ordinary citizens conjured up countless schemes to squeeze value from waste or invent new purposes for defunct or spent material, no matter the cost to people or the environment. As World War II dragged on, rescued loot--much of it waste--clogged transport routes and piled up in warehouses across Europe.

Historicizing the much-championed ideal of zero waste, Anne Berg shows that the management of waste was central to the politics of war and to the genesis of genocide in the Nazi Germany. Destruction and recycling were part of an overarching strategy to redress raw material shortages, procure lebensraum, and cleanse the continent of Jews and others considered undesirable. Fostering cooperation between the administration, the party, the German Army, the SS, and industry, resource extending schemes obscured the crucial political role played by virtually all German citizens to whom salvaging, scrapping, and recycling were promoted as inherently virtuous and orderly behaviors. Throughout Nazi occupied-Europe, Jews, POWs, concentration camp inmates, and enemy civilians were forced to recycle the loot, discards, and debris of the Nazi race war. In the end, the materials that were fully exploited and the people who had been bled dry were cast aside, buried, burned, or left to rot. Nonetheless, waste reclamation did not have the power to win the war.

Illuminating how the Nazis inverted the economy of value, rescuing discards and murdering people, Empire of Rags and Bones offers an original perspective on genocide, racial ideology, and World War II.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Across the Green Sea"

Coming soon from the University of Texas Press: Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 by Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

About the book, from the publisher:

A history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa.

Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultural exchange and transformation. Using a variety of texts and documents in multiple Asian and European languages, Across the Green Sea looks at the history of the ocean from a variety of shifting viewpoints: western India; the Red Sea and Mecca; the Persian Gulf; East Africa; and Kerala.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam sets the scene for this region starting with the withdrawal of China's Ming Dynasty and explores how the western Indian Ocean was transformed by the growth and increasing prominence of the Ottoman Empire and the continued spread of Islam into East Africa. He examines how several cities, including Mecca and the vital Indian port of Surat, grew and changed during these centuries, when various powers interacted until famines and other disturbances upended the region in the seventeenth century. Rather than proposing an artificial model of a dominant center and its dominated peripheries, Across the Green Sea demonstrates the complexity of a truly dynamic and polycentric system through the use of connected histories, a method pioneered by Subrahmanyam himself.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Missionary Diplomacy"

Coming soon from Cornell University Press: Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations by Emily Conroy-Krutz.

About the book, from the publisher:

Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems?

As Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US entered the first world war, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.

Visit Emily Conroy-Krutz's website.

The Page 99 Test: Christian Imperialism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wuhan"

New from Oxford University Press: Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control by Dali L. Yang.

About the book, from the publisher:

The definitive account of the Chinese government's response to the initial Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan.

The Covid-19 pandemic, which began as an outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019, has claimed millions of lives and caused unprecedented disruptions. Despite its generation-defining significance, there has been a surprising lack of independent research examining the decisions and measures implemented in the weeks leading up to the Wuhan lockdown, as well as the missteps and shortcomings that allowed the novel coronavirus to spread with minimal hindrance.

In Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control, Dali L. Yang scrutinizes China's emergency response to the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, delving into the government's handling of epidemic information and the decisions that influenced the scale and scope of the outbreak. Yang's research reveals that China's health decision-makers and experts had an excellent head start when they implemented a health emergency action program to respond to the outbreak at the end of December 2019. With granular detail and compelling immediacy, Yang investigates the political and bureaucratic processes that hindered information flows and sharing, as well as the cognitive framework that limited understanding of the virus's contagiousness and hampered effective decisions.

Yang's research uncovers that urgent warnings from sources outside Wuhan helped shift the Chinese health leadership's focus towards epidemic control. Once this shift occurred, China's party-state mobilized resources and enforced a lockdown in Wuhan. This lockdown was divided into two phases: providing additional medical resources and enforcing community-level lockdowns and home confinement. The 76-day lockdown contained the virus within China's borders, but the leadership and public later faced the challenge of reopening China in a world still grappling with SARS-CoV-2.

Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control also critiques the Chinese authorities for prioritizing dominance and control in their response to the Wuhan outbreak. This preoccupation led to the suppression, distortion, and neglect of crucial disease information, fostering an atmosphere of organized silence. The punishment of whistleblowers and the banning of the immediate release of research findings on the novel coronavirus further contributed to this silencing. Yang emphasizes the importance of retaining public trust during a pandemic and underscores the need for transparency, openness to new information, and direct communication of risk with the public.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Political Outsider"

New from Stanford University Press: The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism by Srirupa Roy.

About the book, from the publisher:

Defying the dire predictions that attended its birth as an independent nation-state in 1947, the Indian republic is more than seventy-five years old. And yet, it is a place where criticisms of actually existing democracy are intense and strident. In recent years, the trope of victimized people suffering at the hands of a predatory elite and political dysfunction has reaped rewards. The populist language of redemptive outsiders pledging to combat a corrupt system has been harnessed in successful electoral campaigns, like the majoritarian regime of Narendra Modi.

Tracking the shift from postcolonial nation-building to democracy-rebuilding, Srirupa Roy shows how the political outsider came to be a valorized figure of late-twentieth century Indian democracy, tasked with the urgent mission of curing a broken democratic system―what Roy terms "curative democracy." Drawing attention to an ambivalent political field that folds together authoritarian and democratic forms and ideas, Roy argues that the long 1970s were a crucial turning point in Indian politics, when democracy was suspended by the declaration of a national emergency and then subsequently restored. By tracing the crooked line that connects the ideals of curative democracy and the political outsider to the populist antipolitics and strongman authoritarian rule in present times, this book revisits democracy from India, and asks what the Indian experience tells us about the trajectory of global democratic politics.

--Marshal Zeringue