New Books In European Studies

Please listen to the fascinating conversation I had with Susan Byrne, Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish at Yale University, about her new work, Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Byrne leads us through a close reading of Cervantes’ most famous work, revealing an overwhelming amount of legal details, all of which tie into early modern Spanish debates.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the political left and right first arose during the French Revolution, Catholics have been categorized as either conservatives or liberals, and most Catholics of the French nineteenth century are assumed to have been conservatives. In Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith (Cornell University Press, 2014), Carol E. Harrison goes beyond this familiar dichotomy to unveil a tradition of lay Catholicism that refused to go to either side, remaining in the political middle and marrying traditional Catholicism with a progressive social consciousness. Many of these people were the companions and heirs of the all-too-ill-known Félicité de Lamennais, whose condemnation by the pope in the 1830s did not prevent his social and religious vision from continuing to flourish throughout the century. I spoke with Harrison to hear her perspective on her Catholics, who range from the celebrated daughter of Victor Hugo Léopoldine, to a totally forgotten best-selling nov

Jan Lemnitzer‘s new book Power, Law and the End of Privateering (Palgrave, 2014) offers an exciting new take on the relationship between law and power, exposing the delicate balance between great powers and small states that is necessary to create and enforce norms across the globe. The 1856 Declaration of Paris marks the precise moment when international law became universal, and is the template for creating new norms until today. Moreover, the treaty was an aggressive and successful British move to end privateering forever – then the United States’ main weapon in case of war with Britain. Based on previously untapped archival sources, Jan Lemnitzer shows why Britain granted generous neutral rights in the Crimean War, how the Europeans forced the United States to respect international law during the American Civil War, and why Bismarck threatened violent redemption during the Franco-German War of 1870/71. The powerful conclusion exposes the 19th century roots of our present international sy

Michael Kwass‘s new book, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground is much more than an exciting biography of the notorious eighteenth-century smuggler whose name remains legendary in contemporary France. Focusing on the rise and fall of a mythic, early-modern French bandit, Kwass’s study moves between the micro- and the macro-historical, revealing the crucial role that smuggling played in a French economic and political landscape that must be understood in global perspective. The book shows how the underground economy that emerged during the ancien regime developed in close relationship to the trade practices and regulation attempts of the French state. The opposite was also true. State efforts to regulate trade in tobacco and calico from the reign of Louis XIV onwards contributed to the development of illicit activity and networks, and the desire to quash the economic underground, in turn, provoked changes in economic policy, legislation, and perceptions of the need for r

In the decades after the Second World War, France became the foremost nudist site in Europe. Stephen L. Harp‘s new book, Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France (Louisiana State University Press, 2014) explains how this came to be. A study of nudist ideas, activity, and sites from the interwar years to the mid-1970s, the book is a fascinating history of the people (the Durville brothers, Kienne de Mongeot, and Albert Lecocq) and places (the Ile du Levant, Montalivet, and Cap d’Agde) that made nude tourism and leisure a major phenomenon in France. Building on previous scholarship that has explored nudism in different national contexts, Au Naturel is a transnational history that illuminates the movement of bodies, beliefs, and practices across political borders, and the emergence of a postwar European community from a unique perspective. Drawing on a rich archive of materials from the local to the international, Harp reveals that nudism was both cultural and political i

As a teenager, I heard or read or saw (in films or on television) story after story about the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Despite the occasional ‘corrective’ offered by Hogan’s Heroes, the impression given was that the Gestapo were all knowing and ever present. We now know differently, of course. But knowing that the Nazi state functioned as much or more through consensus as coercion has led historians to think again about the way in which this consensus was created and sustained. And it has produced a series of books addressing the question of what this consensus meant for policy making and execution. Thomas Kuehne‘s fabulous new book has contributed greatly to this discussion. Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945 (Yale University Press, 2013), looks hard at the role belonging played in the emergence and success of the Nazi Party. He tells us how important the desire for a sense of community was in the way people responded to the the crises of the 20s and 3

How did a golden age of cultural funding in UK turn to lead? This is the subject of a new cultural history by Robert Hewison. Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (Verso, 2014) charts the New Labour era of cultural policy, detailing the shift from the optimism of the late 1990s to the eventual crisis of funding and policy currently confronting culture in the UK. The book identifies the faustian pact between government and cultural sector, as increased funding came at the price of delivering economic and social policy agendas and responding to bureaucratic forms of management. The book uses a range of examples to illustrate this problematic bargain, from the disasters of the Millennium Dome and The Public, through an analysis of the 2012 Olympic Games. Alongside the range of cultural policy projects discussed is an exploration of the infrastructure, in particular the government departments and public bodies, which are at the root of the failure of British cultural policy between 1997 and

Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age shaped anatomy and natural history as commercial practices. Margocsy argues that commercialization stimulated “a debate over the epistemological status of visual facts in natural history & anatomy,” transforming the concept of visual representation in the process. While learning about these debates and transformations, readers are guided on a tour through a world of seashells, forgeries, and wax-filled cadavers, evidence of a commercially-driven proliferation

Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is associate professor in the School of International Service at American University. Timeliness is not something that every scholarly book can claim, but Cathy Schneider has published a book of the moment. With protests occurring across the country in response to recent police-related deaths (Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Eric Garner in New York City), Schneider explains why some of these protests have resulted in rioting in the past and others in peaceful protest. Why, she ponders, has Paris burned while New York City has not had significant rioting in decades, despite similar sociopolitical conditions? New York, Schneider argues, has effective social movement organizations in place to channel frustration surrounding past police violence toward organized protest. For anyone trying to make sense of what recent events, this book is a must read.Learn more about

How those within the Brussels Beltway in the EU institutions must pine for the simple days of the past. Not only was the European project in itself far less contested, but the nature of the journalism surrounding the EU was also far more accommodating. One of the main lessons of John Lloyd and Cristina Marconi‘s fascinating book Reporting the EU: News, Media and the European Institutions (I. B. Tauris, 2014) is how much it has mirrored the evolution of the European project itself. In the first couple of decades the journalists were as likely to be true believers as the Eurocrats in the corridors of power, even if their reports tended to reflect the concerns and interests of the individual countries that they served. That started to change as the EU (under various names) grew and changed. In the 1980s the British press developed a real streak of Euroscepticism, and journalists in general began to ask more questions than the Eurocrats were used to. Big developments such as the Maastricht Treaty and the ex

In her imaginative and scrupulous book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014), historian Michelle Moyd writes about theaskari, Africans soldiers recruited in the ranks of the German East African colonial army. Praised by Germans for their loyalty and courage, the askari were reviled by Tanzanians for the violence and disruptions the askari caused in their service to the colonial state. Moyd questions the starkness of these characterizations. By linking askari micro-histories with wider nineteenth-century African historical processes, she shows how the askari, as soldiers and colonial intermediaries, not only helped to build the colonial state but also sought to carve out paths to respectability and influence within their own local African contexts. Moyd offers a truly fresh perspective on African colonial troops as state-making agents and critiques the mythologies surrounding the askari by focusing on the nature and con

If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ness” would seem to be the modern essence of the word. If a government is secular, it can’t be religious. If a court is secular, it can’t be religious. If a party is secular, it can’t be religious. But, as Todd H. Weir points out in his fascinating book Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the origins of what we might call “secularism”–the faith with no faith–were profoundly religious. To understand how this could be so, Weir takes us back to an age and place–the nineteenth-century German Lands–in which belonging to a church was a matter of state. The question then and there wasn’t whether you were going to adhere to a faith, but which one. Ye

From London to Rome, Paris to Stockholm, there is no other contemporary issue that can move the general public’s political needle quite so quickly as immigration. In the seas between Libya and Malta, Tunisia and Italy, hundreds risk the crossing to a presumably new and better life, and many of those hundreds lose their lives in doing so. Many more try to enter from Turkey to Greece and Bulgaria, from Belarus and Ukraine to Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Latvia, and from Morocco up across the treacherous waters of the Gates of Hercules to Spain. Others crowd into internal pinch points within the EU, such as the port of Calais, just a few watery miles from the white cliffs of Dover. Matthew Carr‘s excellent book – Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent (New Press/Hurst, 2012) – is an attempt to make sense of this gigantic issue. He is a journalist, so there are compelling human stories involving those making the hopeful and often fateful journeys. There is also a comprehensive

In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moderns talked about sex has been a central concern of cultural and intellectual historians. Foucault linked a number of nineteenth-century phenomena, such as the growth of sexology as a discipline and the pathologization of homosexuality, to the formation of new sexual subjectivities and the emergence of biopolitical strategies of population management. Taking a cue from Foucault, some historians of modern Germany have interpreted the talk about sex and reproduction in the Kaiserreich as the foundational stage of a discourse about eugenics that would ultimately contribute to National Socialism and its racial state. In his book Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany 1880-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dickinson challenges this view. He likens German sex talk to a barroom brawl that started at one tabl

After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged struggle between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment is generally valorized as identical with rationality, mechanism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, progress, optimism, and secularism, while Romanticism is often connected to holism, irrationality, conservatism, nationalism, myth, pessimism and, eventually, fascism. John Tresch (University of Pennsylvania) questions these dichotomies in his new book The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In our interview we discuss what made steam engines Romantic, which technical illusions awaited early nineteenth-century Parisian theatergoers and how Saint-Simonians could envisage future society as a Romantic machine.Learn more about your

Who are the Clash? How did they become the “only band that matters”? In this podcast, Randal Doane, the author of Stealing All Transmissions: A Secret History of the Clash (PM Press, 2014), discusses the American context of the Clash’s popularity and their generally positive reception by FM free form deejays and rock critics. The podcast covers a lot of ground, including what Lou Reed was like as a FM deejay in the 1970s to the effect of Sandy Pearlman on recording the Clash’s second album. Randal Doane is an Assistant Dean of Studies at Oberlin College and earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published essays and articles on music and aesthetics, illegal file-sharing, and Bruce Springsteen, and blogs and tweetsabout music and culture. He recently published an essay about U2’s “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)”.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some say it should be a loose collection of sovereign nation states; others say it should aspire to be a kind of super-nation state itself. Or is it, in truth, a messy but workable mixture of a number of extremes, ideals and concepts? These are the type of questions that Mark Corner‘s new book The European Union: An Introduction (I. B. Tauris, 2014) seeks to both ask about the EU and tentatively answer. This is not just another routine tour around the institutions and functions of the European Union – instead, it’s a sharply written introduction to the EU that makes the reader understand it beyond the constraints of terms such as ‘nation state’. It’s also a very timely book, as the 28 member bloc is under scrutiny as never before, especially in the wake of both the euro crisis and the continent-wide rise of Eurosceptic parties. It’s a recommended read for anybody trying to make sense of one of the grandest twentieth-century projects that is still evolving and adapting

Daniel Lee‘s new book, Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942 (Oxford University Press, 2014) is highly compelling in its breadth, depth of research, and analysis. Focused on the social relationship between French Jews and the state during this critical period of French history, the book emphasizes the notion of a “Plural Vichy,” a regime that was complex rather than homogenous in its ideology and aims, including its antisemitism. Finding evidence of cooperation and accommodation between French Jewish young people and organizations and the state, the author shows the ways in which Vichy was uneven in its policies and practices, particularly in the two years immediately following the defeat of 1940. Drawing on a wealth of local and national archival sources, Petain’s Jewish Children examines Vichy’s inclusion of Jewish youth in the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, as well as responses of a range of Jewish youth organizations (including the Jew

Germans belonging to the generation born at the turn of the twentieth century endured staggering losses, many of which became difficult to mourn or even acknowledge: their parents in World War I, financial and physical security during the Weimar Republic, the racially pure utopian promise of the Third Reich, and likely several loved ones in the catastrophic final throes of World War II and the privation of the immediate postwar period. Thomas Kohut, in his provocative and moving book, A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2012), argues that the Weimar-youth generation’s inability to work through these losses informed its members’ particular brand of anti-Semitism, enabling them to look away from the Holocaust and leading them to seek comfort in the collective, the Volksgemeinschaft – initially in the Youth Movement, then the Reich Work Service, and finally the Free German Circle in their twilight years. The turn to the collective n

In the early 1830s, the French school teacher Eugénie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only were women entitled to quality education, but that women’s education served a fundamental role in the French mission in the colonies. “Woman is the most powerful of all influences in Africa as in Europe,” she wrote in 1846, the year after she founded a school for the instruction of indigenous Muslim girls. In A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria, Rebecca Rogers (Stanford University Press, 2013), a Professor at the Université Paris Descartes and an expert in the history of the French educational system, lucidly explores Luce’s work in the field, bringing  a wealth of precise details– everything from what the lessons in the school room were like to prize-giving ceremonies and hygiene inspections. But Rogers also lets the reader in on the questions