Library
This library is a record of books that I’ve read, with a written response to each. There are no ratings here. I limit recommendations, and I do not write with the aim of reviewing. A book might make me think about something else, I may engage extensively with one passage, or I might evaluate the argument of the text as a whole. The texture of my responses will shift depending on the text.
One caveat: the write-ups from before 2024 read more like book reviews, because that’s what they were. Most started life on Goodreads, a few in graduate seminars, back before this site existed.
Some of my responses are short (perhaps a few paragraphs) while others may be entire essays. The amount written is a reflection not of the quality of the book, but of my own thinking.
My books are listed in reverse-chronological order by when I completed them. Each entry is listed in full bibliographic form, with a short annotation below. Some of these I own, others I do not.
2018
Zhang, Weiwei. The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State. Hackensack, NJ: World Century, 2012.
Zhang’s one powerful insight: China as a civilizational state, not a nation-state. We historians are critical of “civilization,” but he may be onto something, though he waxes poetic and offers little space to criticism; my main question is why China and not India.
Robertson, John. Iraq: A History. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.
Emphasizes Iraq’s history up to the fall of the Abbasids; I would have liked more on the modern period, but Robertson’s point is that Iraq has as illustrious a past as the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and Persians, a reasonable decision he handles well.
Lee, Min Jin. Pachinko. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2017.
A really important book everyone will take something different from; most striking to me is that Solomon saw himself as Japanese, as Japanese as the people who discriminate against him for being Korean. One star off for dialogue that fell flat and, frankly, felt fake.
An interesting look at North Africa from a mid-80s foreign policy perspective: profoundly dated, though some of its tensions (the western Sahara) continue. Best for research on end-of-Cold-War American policy in MENA; too dated for the layperson.
Roth, Joseph. The Radetzky March. New York: The Overlook Press, 2002.
A beautiful rumination on the demise of the Habsburgs: the Trottas ardently defend the Kaiser, yet the Hero of Solferino’s peasant origins suggest the whole affair is a sham. A magisterial piece that makes the decline tangible; highest recommendation.
Potter, David Stone. Ancient Rome: A New History. Thames & Hudson, 2009.
A decent summary from Rome’s formation on the Tiber to the loss of Alexandria, at its height between Sulla and Constantine; the chapter on “fall” felt inadequate, and I wanted more on continuities and how the Eastern Empire became the “Byzantine” one. Still worth thumbing through.
El Akkad, Omar. American War. New York: Picador, 2017.
A bizarre book that isn’t really about the United States at all: El Akkad takes the Middle East’s civil wars (above all Syria’s) and inverts them onto America to instruct Americans. The plot feels ham-fisted and the characters are caricatures, with everything beyond them driving the story; perhaps that’s the point.
Ortega y Gasset, José. The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993.
Ortega’s “mass man” diagnosis of the 1930s crisis: morality disappearing, nationalists a dying breed, Bolshevism and fascism both despised. He reads almost as the pinnacle of progressivism, a liberal, universalist vision worth remembering in these times of nationalist populism, even where I don’t quite agree.
Slezkine, Yuri. The Jewish Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Fascinating, whatever discipline it is: Slezkine divides the world into Apollonians and Mercurians, with modernity meaning everyone is becoming Jewish. At times he leans on stereotypes, but the overarching analysis is convincing, even if the categories are too generalized.
LeBor, Adam. A Heart Turned East: Among the Muslims of Europe and America. Thomas Dunne Books, 2001.
Really good in the first half, on Islamic history in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Iberia; LeBor loses his way a bit when interviewing Muslims in western Europe and the United States, partly because it already feels dated. Not a bad book, but there are surely better things to read.
Kumar opens with a question I stupidly never thought to ask: why is there no English nationalist (except on the far right)? His answer: English identity never emerged, overshadowed by imperial Britain. Reading it amid Brexit makes it seem more relevant now than ever before.
A must-read: the lost kingdom of the title is the Kyivan Rus, and the book is ultimately about how integral Ukraine is to Russian self-identity and how both countries have managed this relationship.
A book that shows its age: written two years after the Euro, Reid is outright optimistic about the EU and spends little time on Euroskeptics. I felt inspired by his detailed discussion, but a version written today, even a friendly one, would come at it from a very different angle.
“Multicultural” is a descriptor; “multiculturalism” is something states do, and European states haven’t done it. Chin shows multicultural Europe long predates 1945 and blames the “New Racism” (cultural notions of race replacing biological ones) for the claim that multiculturalism failed when there’s been so little policy to even manage it.
Buruma’s real contribution is reframing the debate: not Western liberal universalism against a localist, traditional Islam, but two modern, universalist ideologies fighting for dominance. Incredibly nuanced, respectful to everybody (including Hirsi Ali, whom he criticizes); I’d offer Tunisia as a possible model.
A fascinating monograph arguing that “human rights” did not exist until the 1970s: rights protected by states are not human rights, which require transcending the state. I don’t entirely agree (nineteenth-century interventions on behalf of Ottoman subjects complicate the case), but there’s a lot here worth mulling over.
I always love reading Joan Scott, and this sequel to Only Paradoxes to Offer is no different: the paritaristes argued the abstract citizen of French republicanism was a sexed, male-coded being, and won equal party lists. The logic is convoluted (no way around that) but persuasive, and distinctly French.
Frankly, a remarkably weak book: a superficial “world history since 1945” with a few paragraphs per theme, tied together by chapter titles and little beyond that. There are far better books on this subject; read those instead.
Ultimately disappointing: more a travelogue reflecting on the Communist experience as the fall was taking place than a serious piece on the “afterlife of totalitarianism.” Shore never grapples with whether that afterlife exists at all; I’m inclined to say it does, but I just don’t know.
An interesting little pamphlet preceding Eisenhower’s call to reject the military-industrial complex by some 20 years: the cost of war falls on taxpayers and on dead, wounded, or psychologically injured soldiers. It should be common knowledge by now, and it resonates as much today as 80 years ago.
Edwards’s real contribution: Khmer nationalism emerged not in anticolonial journals but through the French administration, which saw in Angkor Wat a powerful civilization and articulated an ideal type of the Khmer that nationalists and the Cambodian state later took up. I’m left wondering if the Khmer Rouge was fascist rather than Communist.
Letters between a soldier and his peasant wife in Dordogne: Hanna shows civilians and soldiers shared a Venn diagram with a large center, not separate spheres, and that wartime letter-writing made rural France a truly literate society. Highly recommend.
Veracini, L. The Settler Colonial Present. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Most of the theory is quite good: settler colonialism as bacteria rather than virus, defined by motion plus domination. But the book ends quite badly; Veracini’s two ways out (turning settlers into sojourners, embracing exile) just raise more questions once you ask at what point anyone becomes indigenous.
Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New York: Penguin Books, 1956.
An outstanding work of South Asian fiction on partition and communal violence. The real main character is the village of Mano Majra as a whole; who cut the rope matters less than how India wound up in a position where refugees needed protecting in the first place.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Random House, 2011.
I enjoyed it immensely, but that doesn’t necessarily make it good: the cognitive and agricultural revolutions are the interesting parts; the later sections keep arguing against critics of capitalism and empire, and the footnotes lean on dated sources, surprising for a historian by training.
Written squarely in the tradition of Said’s Orientalism: the “colonial present” of the War on Terror, examined less as systems of domination than as the postcolonial rhetoric that makes those systems feasible.
A monumental work of environmental history: yellow fever and malaria conserved the Caribbean political status quo for centuries, since locals carried childhood immunity and invading outsiders perished. Crucial to understanding why the Spanish empire lasted so long, and the environmental side of the American and Haitian revolutions.
Keay, John. India: A History. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
Kinda terrible: the beginning was ok and the end decent, but everything after Harappa and before the Mughals was brutal to read, a series of disjointed figures and events linked only by their Indian-ness. I recommend staying away from this one.
Clancy-Smith reads the Jasmine Revolution through longue duree patterns of “coastalization”: power and wealth migrating to a cosmopolitan coast while the interior, where the revolt began, came to function as Tunisia’s “other.” I’m not sure she’s entirely correct, but her arguments are certainly worth thinking about.
Guha, Ramachandra. Environmentalism: A Global History. New York: Longman, 2000.
Short and fairly superficial, but I quite enjoyed it: Guha traces two waves of environmentalism as responses to industrialization, and his treatment of the Third World, where the global poor are most deeply affected by pollution, is the most interesting part.
An interesting introduction to Europe’s relationship with “indigenous peoples,” but sloppy: Cocker takes a bit too much at face value (the Borgia incest myth stated as fact) and slips into anachronism. Still worth a look if you aren’t already familiar with the formation of European empires.
My first piece of Libyan (let alone Saharan) literature, and it blew me away: at the material level a work about conservation and the balance of desert life, deeper down a text about Sufi spirituality. Al-Koni belongs alongside Coelho and García Márquez in American bookstores.
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.
Browning shows the men of a reserve police battalion committed genocide out of mundane concerns (pride, career advancement, peer pressure), not National Socialist indoctrination; the implication is that anyone is capable under pressure. A harrowing work that needs reading.
I agree in principle about contextualizing eliminationist anti-Semitism, but Goldhagen treats it as uniquely German when it swept much of Europe, and he cannot explain how “eliminationism” became “elimination”: the choice to pull the trigger. Better written than its critics allow, though.
Really important: our problem with eurocentrism can’t be overcome until we accept that European philosophies and political movements are not fundamentally universal. The downside is that it’s littered with post-Marxist jargon and dense continental philosophy; even so, most discussion of how to do non-Western history relies on it as bedrock.
Hašek, Jaroslav. The Good Soldier Švejk. London: Penguin Books, 1974.
A parody of the wartime Habsburg Empire, its bureaucracy and nationalities policy; the good material is in part 1, after which Svejk gets de-centered and the humor turns forced. I’ll teach the early chapters alongside lectures on the Habsburgs. High recommend.
Perhaps the only complete English-language biography of Tunisia’s founding father: balanced on the achievement, harsh on the narcissism, and sharpest on the mother who defined everything. The Napoleon and Hitler comparisons are unjust; Nehru, Nkrumah, and Senghor were the right company.
Less a monograph than a collection of Gentile’s articles, and the title is a bit misleading: later chapters veer from modernity into the party, Mussolini’s charisma, and fascist theatrics. Worth reading as an introduction to Gentile and a view past fascism-as-monolith.
Morgan, Philip. Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945. London: Routledge, 2003.
Good, albeit contradictory: against Allardyce (who is outright wrong), Morgan insists fascism does exist, united by hypernationalism. That can’t be the whole explanation; I’d add the dream of national rebirth mixed with populist support of authoritarianism. Best paired with Paxton, Eatwell, and Payne.
Masri, Safwan M. Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
Masri argues Tunisia’s secularism, feminism, and education made it the Arab Spring’s success story, but the argument seems short-sighted: the economy is in shambles and distrust of the police is widespread (I saw both when I was in Tunisia), so liberal democracy is no foregone conclusion. Easy reading; serious readers should look elsewhere.
A goofy book: a political scientist’s attempt to fit 500 years of European colonization into a tight, neat theory. I thought the attempt senseless going in and finished more convinced; the theorizing strips away the idiosyncrasies of diverse places and periods until European empires look quite different than they were.
Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War. Desperta Ferro, 1987.
For anyone looking to learn about the Russian Civil War, skip this: sparse sourcing, dropped impartiality, and a Reds-versus-Whites scheme that ignores how un-discrete those groupings really were (the same individual might fight on both sides). The closing casualty count misses the point for the same reason.
A well-written, nuanced history built on the fundamental tension between Islam and democracy in Iranian governance; Axworthy’s most striking finding is that the Sepah, not principlism or the ulama, is the real threat to Iranian democracy. Highly recommend.
Kent argues that Britons rejected fascist parties because the establishment, vilifying groups “outside the nation,” had already accomplished what fascism set out to do. Really interesting, but I don’t think it’s accurate: she never dissects what fascism is, and Britain was stable enough that there was no need to overturn the order.
Figes argues the Revolution wasn’t betrayed but doomed: Russians couldn’t come to terms with democratic institutions, and the leaders’ goals were unattainable. I disagree on both counts (the first reeks of Western chauvinism), though his closing paragraph on authoritarian nationalism, written before Putin, seems almost prophetic.
Best read as a criticism of early-1990s scholarship: Blaut sets out to pierce the super-ideology of Eurocentric, diffusionist history, in which an “inner” Europe innovates and everyone else imitates. He does it admirably, though the writing can be a bit grating; an important advance in world history, and for that reason invaluable.
A sweeping history of the Soviet Union that spends most of its space on the Revolution and the Stalinist period; I wish the post-1953 decades got more than a fifth of the text. Glad I read it: it lets me place other books on the USSR temporally and thematically.
Veritable junk: no multidimensional characters, nothing driving the plot, POC characters labeled and dropped, and basic facts botched (an American base in Iran, a four-hour drive that takes eighteen). Absolutely do not pay money to read this; lowest recommendation.
A mammoth introduction to the modern Balkans whose argument, if there is one at all, is that the Great Powers view the region with apathy until they intervene, and every intervention has hurt more than it helped. I learned a great deal; recommend.
Yurchak’s argument, as I gathered it: the Soviet Union eliminated metadiscourse around ideology, and perestroika reintroduced it, which is why nobody knew the collapse was coming and nobody was surprised when it came. Deeply theoretical early on, fascinating anecdotes throughout (the West’s great shock: its mundanity). Highest recommendation.
Fascinating and quite readable: Grossmann responsibly covers rape and “fraternization,” displaced persons camps, the Jewish baby boom, and the quickly-taboo debates over complicity and retribution in occupied Germany, 1945-1947. Highly recommend.
It didn’t live up to the hype. The middle third, on postwar counter-cultures right and left, is quite decent, but Andersen spends far too much time on religion and preaches to his own choir; this won’t persuade anyone who doesn’t already agree. One book I do not recommend.
Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
A great piece uniting African American history with French history: Stovall argues that African Americans in Paris from 1914 on were not isolated individuals but part of a much larger, cohesive community.
Douagi, Ali. Sleepless Nights. Translated by William Granara. Carthage: Beit al-Hikma, 1991.
Du’aji, the Father of the Tunisian Short Story, wrote in Darija even most Arabs struggle to understand; these stories are a window into early twentieth-century Tunisian life. Some made little sense to me (culture or language lost in translation, I’m not sure which), but this early foray into Tunisian fiction was a pleasure.
Interesting subject, not well executed: it reads more like a dissertation than a book, leaning on critical theory and discourse analysis where attention to the material realities of Communards and Kanaks in New Caledonia would have grounded it.
MacMaster asks how the French went from suppressing Algerians to demanding Muslim women’s emancipation: a “state feminism” meant to recruit women as informers against the FLN, and forced unveiling turned them against France instead. Sometimes dry, but the research is excellent; the chapter on unveiling women for ID cards is the standout.
Memmi, Albert. The Pillar of Salt. Translated by Edouard Roditi. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
A remarkable novel (really a semi-autobiographical memoir): Benillouche sheds his Jewish and North African background to fit into the West, is rejected by it, and ends fitting nowhere in colonial society. Memmi renders the psychological toll of colonialism astoundingly well; read it as colonialism lived, not as adventure.
An introduction in broad strokes: since the Iranian Revolution, Shia communities have been empowered, and much Sunni extremism stems from fear of losing dominance. Nasr is unapologetically pro-Shia and the analysis seems unbalanced; a good way into the subject, but far more reading is needed to work out the details.
A rehabilitation of the utopianism of the Soviet Union’s “roaring 20s”: science fiction, public housing, peasant communes, alternative modernities outside strict Bolshevik rule. Stites is critical enough not to treat these as good things in themselves; I learned a considerable amount. Highly recommend.
Chafer attacks the popular view that France “gave” independence to West Africa: a massive nationalist movement was capable of bringing down French rule, and decolonization was “successful” only in not becoming another Indochina or Algeria; imperial institutions were replaced with private ones, continuing the neo-colonial present.
An ambitious synthetic evaluation of French Indochina: the authors call the colonization “ambiguous,” but their assessment reads far more pessimistic, closing with Jaurès’s warning of reaping nothing from these lands but hatred and disappointment. A must-read on Southeast Asia or French colonialism.
Heavily reliant on continental philosophy, almost to the point of reading as pseudo-science. There may be a decent argument here about modern notions of attention having roots in late nineteenth-century visual experience, but the book is impenetrable to me; I’ll have to pick it up again later.
Davidoff and Hall’s intervention: class is an inherently gendered analytical category, and middle-class men and women of early nineteenth-century England experienced their position in completely different ways. Their concept of “family” as an analytical category deserves to be taken up more often than it is.
A good popular history of nineteenth-century “homosexuality”: less the state of being LGBT than the culture, discourses, and attitudes around it. Robb is at his best probing Foucault on the “birth” of homosexuality; I agree it was a state of being by then, but I’m less sure it always was.
A thematic edited collection on how mobilization played out across political systems: the French and British fared best, while the more authoritarian German and Italian cases let the stabbed-in-the-back narrative take hold. Eastern Europe is mostly neglected; the Ottoman Empire would make a fascinating case study.
Labor history is always difficult for me, especially tied together with gender, and this wasn’t much better: dense, difficult, and at times dry. Still, Canning is an important historian of German labor and gender, and it’s a necessary read for the full picture of late nineteenth-century German industrialization.
Quite a good book on a rarely examined subject: the Habsburg homefront in World War I. Healy argues war shortages pushed German-Austrians to frame everyone else as outsiders and enemies to be removed from the community, a framing realized in postwar expulsions and the empire’s collapse.
Most of this is received wisdom by now, but it remains a decent summary of “masculinity” as a concept since the mid-eighteenth century. Mosse is at his best on “degeneracy” and the new fascist man; if you only read short parts, make it those two.
Too economically focused, and outdated: the Algerian War gets hardly five pages while statistical tables on Maghrebin development abound. Ultimately a book about the settler economy, and even then it only scratches at the surface; I recommend finding something else to read.
A good book, but not for a general overview of World War I: its main use is teaching readers to think about the war in different ways and ask new questions (pain, grief, mobilization). For a general history, look somewhere else.
Doerr, Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner, 2014.
The plot reads like a lot of World War II resistance novels, but Marie-Laure’s blindness forces Doerr to forego visual imagery for tactile, auditory, and olfactory, and that vividness is the charm. Cartoonish villains aside, the writing is powerful enough for five stars and a pilgrimage to Saint Malo.
Not the book about Prague 1968 I expected: a scathing critique of Communism and all sweeping ideology, where all ideology is kitsch and all decisions are equally pointless in the long term, liberating or oppressive depending on how you see it.
A fantastic book on the Habsburgs’ strategies of rule, arguing the empire was no anachronism and could have lasted well beyond 1918. Judson demystifies it by stressing its similarities to other European powers; I still cannot shake its utter strangeness, and I have a great deal of affection for this maligned empire.
Kerr, Ian J. Building the Railways of the Raj, 1850-1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Less about the railroad itself than its construction: a Marxist approach to the labor behind British India’s railways, analyzing workers, managers, the colonial government, and intermediaries. Unfortunately it’s more difficult to read than it needs to be.
I personally could not make sense of it: one inadequate map, no glossary or chronology, and an assumed familiarity with Indian geography and Mughal terminology I don’t have. A mix of the authors’ fault and my own; I’ll revisit after reading other pieces on Indian history.
Gaspar, Zsuzsa. The Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. New Holland Publishers, 2009.
A strange but useful book: it looks like a glossy coffee-table volume, but it functions as an anatomy of the Habsburg Empire (body, soul, religion), with unusual attention to Hungary and the non-German territories. Not rigorous, but great for the empire’s internal dynamics.
Johnson, Lonnie R. Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends. Replica Books, 1996.
A solid if awkward primer on a thousand-plus years of Central European history: the medieval and early modern chapters are really good, but the later two-thirds get lost in great-power politics, abandoning the on-the-ground Central Europeans the introduction promised.
I wasn’t looking forward to this one, but it surprised me: anti-Catholicism was integral to nineteenth-century German liberalism, a canvas for liberal attitudes toward the “premodern” and “irrational,” and it parallels the French anticlericalism I work on. Perhaps a European phenomenon?
Gilmour, David. The Pursuit of Italy. London: Allen Lane, 2011.
Solid popular Italian history whose greatest appeal is accentuating the “many Italies”; it makes me wish for a similar work on Germany or France. At times, though, it reads as hagiography, downplaying the country’s problems before the fascist period (Venice especially).
MacMaster, Neil. Racism in Europe: 1870-2000. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
An outstanding history that breaks European racism into two not-quite-discrete categories: colonial racism and anti-Semitism. Central and eastern Europe gets thin coverage, though, and the book is dated; I’d sincerely appreciate a second edition covering 2008, the 2015 refugee crisis, and the profoundly overstated “crisis” of multiculturalism.
Perkins, Kenneth. A History of Modern Tunisia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
The best synthetic work on Tunisian history to date, and worth reading, though it makes the anticolonial movement the teleological center of everything after 1912 and eschews social and cultural history in favor of a strictly political history.
Rapport, Mike. 1848: Year of Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
A remarkable work that surveys (and analyzes!) the 1848 revolutions all over Europe, Palermo to Paris, Ireland to Poland: a must-read for anyone interested in those crucial years of liberalism and republicanism between 1830 and 1848.
Schroeder, Paul W. The Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Schroeder argues the Congress of Vienna transformed European diplomacy from a zero-sum game into a genuine balance of power; my problem is the transformation wasn’t as permanent as he suggests (Crimea, the Franco-Prussian War, both World Wars). Still a very good, well-argued book; highly recommended.
A vivid, highly readable narrative of 1813 to 1815, with paranoia driving the new order. Zamoyski’s case against the Kissinger-style Pax Europaea isn’t thoroughly convincing, and his sources are rooted in high politics; best read as general European history rather than a study of Napoleon.
Venturi reads Enlightenment Europe through Italian periodicals, and the “real deal” of political reform turns up in eastern Europe and Scandinavia, not France or Britain. His weakness is the flip side of his strength: he mines sources others neglect but won’t argue his own case forcefully.
Wolff, drawing on Said, shows the Enlightenment moving civilization’s boundary from north-south to east-west, producing Eastern Europe (the “orient of Europe”) as a space Western Europeans could compare themselves against. He succeeds: Eastern Europe is not something that exists naturally; it was invented.
Israel splits the Enlightenment into moderate and radical strains and credits the radical with the Atlantic Revolutions; he overstates the divide, and the French Revolution was less an ideological struggle than an attempt at better conditions. Worth reading, but the argument is less useful than it could be.
Rothschild argues against the cold, mechanical Enlightenment: for Smith, Condorcet, and Turgot, political economy was deeply political and moral, aiming to liberate the poor and safeguard individual rights. Dense at times, but well worth reading for the history of liberalism.
Goldberg ignores the New Consensus on fascism, lies through omission, and conflates everyone who ever supported social welfare: the same taxonomic sleight of hand as Stalin’s “social fascists.” Worth skipping; it adds nothing for those who know fascism and will mislead those who sincerely want to learn.
Great narrative history of the Rwandan Civil War and Genocide, the two Congo Wars, and the region’s politics, centered on Rwanda, Burundi, and Kivu; I would have liked to see more on Angola, but this is nonetheless a great piece.
Gribbin, Robert E. In the Aftermath of Genocide: The U.S. Role in Rwanda. iUniverse, 2005.
Decent memoir from the perspective of the Ambassador to Rwanda in the late 1990s; Gribbin seems far more optimistic about the future of Rwandan ethnic tensions than other political scientists and historians. Worth a read.
Cahill argues the Jews were the first to break out of the ancient Near East’s cyclical universe and develop the arrow of time. Quite frankly, unconvincing: all cultures mix cyclical and progressive time, and the argument only holds if worldviews are simplified excessively.
Really weird read, fortunately bound for the proverbial “dustbin of history”: the dichotomy between Modernism and (Neo)Reaction is nonsense, the history is armchair history without nuance or clarity, and NRx is incoherent. Worth passing by.
A fascinating and sweeping history of the French right over a 75-year period, nuanced and built on a wealth of literature from the past fifty years: a must-read for those working on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French history.
Allen, Robert C. Global Economic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
An excellent introduction to the subject, with an especially illuminating chapter on the Americas, though Allen’s “one size fits all” approach isn’t a good way of seeing the history of economic “development”: decent beginning, excellent middle, lacking end.
A 1938 assessment that finds fascist economic policy adequate for the moment but fears for the future: limited freedom of expression will choke off useful solutions in coming crises, and the incredibly costly colonial campaign is likely to drastically harm Italy’s finances.
Completely disingenuous and contradictory: sweeping claims without sources, numbers without context, and head-scratching examples (Chinese ownership of the national debt applied to an American household). Can’t understand why anybody reads this when there are perfectly valid books by American conservatives.
An interesting little screed that needed far more reading behind it: the Islam and immigration chapters are barely researched, the history of nationalism has gaps, and Hitler can hardly be called a socialist. Nobody outside a specific segment of the Right will find her convincing.
I feel conflicted: it reads suspiciously like memoirs of Chinese communism, takes for granted that South Korea was always freer and richer, and lacks the depth that makes memoirs meaningful. Still absolutely worth the read as a window into North Korea between 1960 and 1995.
Guérin, Daniel. Fascism and Big Business. Pathfinder Press, 1994.
A solid distillation of the Marxist understanding of fascism (“capitalism in decay”), though it seems incorrect to me: fascism is better viewed as an offshoot of ultranationalism, and Roger Griffin understands it better than Guérin does here.
Designed as a book on methodology in African history, but the methods apply to any field where writing is scarce. Most of it is now commonly accepted; it must have been eye-opening when it was published in 1964.
Great reference text for further research, with a wide range of secondary sources on fascism (especially Germany, Italy, France, and Spain) and long lists of authors who have worked on the subject; unfortunately the major themes discussed are a bit weak in their text.
Blinkhorn, Martin. Fascism and the Right in Europe 1919-1945. Harlow: Longman, 2000.
Surprisingly well-researched for its size: I expected just Germany, Italy, and maybe Spain, but most fascist governments and a wide number of fascist movements can be found here. Not immense detail, but this book does its job.
Somewhere between modernization theory and Marxist theory, attacking the New Consensus by tying it to Weberian ideal types that don’t exist; but New Consensus theorists know that, and find an ideal “generic” fascism useful to imagine anyway. Ultimately I found it unconvincing.
A short piece that doesn’t offer much new: mostly brief biography of Marx and Bakunin rather than any reconciling of their thought. Maybe of interest to those new to the Marxist-Anarchist debate at the First International; reading anything before this makes the pamphlet essentially useless.
Popular medieval history is a novelty for me, and Jones brings the order to life as narrative while avoiding the mythologizing that surrounds the Templars. I’d have liked deeper analysis of the order’s structure beyond warfare, but even the battlefield chronicles are vivid, and the fall is gripping. Highly recommend.
An interesting look at the discipline of fascist studies as it existed in 1969; it has less utility today, as other theories have eclipsed those from fifty years ago and there’s now much more of a consensus, albeit not entirely.
Nobes, Christopher. Accounting: A Very Short Introduction. FT Prentice Hall, 2004.
Brutally difficult, and I don’t think I understood much of it; my eyes glazed over on some pages. The chapter on the history of accounting interested me most (no surprise given my training), and I came away with more respect for accountants.