Podcast Episodes

Brendan McGeever, "Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Episode 183

In Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Dr Brendan McGeever,  Lecturer in Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, traces the complex history of the Antisem…

Published on 5 years, 7 months ago

Pasha Mahdavi, "Power Grab: Political Survival through Extractive Resource Mobilization" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Episode 427

Why did Muammar Qaddafi and Hugo Chavez nationalize the oil industries in Libya and Venezuela? Machiavelli urged princes to attend to both acquiring and sustaining power. In Power Grab: Political Sur…

Published on 5 years, 7 months ago

David Ambaras, "Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Episode 319

Through a series of provocative case studies on mobility, transgression, and intimacy, David Ambaras’s Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge University…

Published on 5 years, 7 months ago

Julia Stephens, “Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Episode 178

As British colonial rulers expanded their control in South Asia legal resolutions were increasingly shaped by the English classification of social life. The definitional divide that structured the ro…

Published on 5 years, 7 months ago

David A. Bateman, "Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the US, the UK, and France" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Episode 426

David A. Bateman’s fascinating new book opens with a puzzle. In 19th-century America, why was mass democratization – abolishing property and tax qualifications – accompanied by the mass disenfranchis…

Published on 5 years, 7 months ago

Laurence Monnais, "The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Episode 19

Situated at the crossroads between the history of colonialism, of modern Southeast Asia, and of medical pluralism, this history of medicine and health traces the life of pharmaceuticals in Vietnam un…

Published on 5 years, 7 months ago

Lucia Rubinelli, "Constituent Power: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Episode 63

"The intellectual historian has to start with the words." – Richard Whatmore, What is Intellectual History?

When political theorists write about the principle of popular power, that is, who are the pe…

Published on 5 years, 7 months ago

Yue Hou, "The Private Sector in Public Office: Selective Property Rights in China" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Episode 424

In China, roughly 60% of GDP and 80% of employment comes from the private sector – yet half of private entrepreneurs report that they faced expropriation of property by local governments. Yue Hou’s r…

Published on 5 years, 8 months ago

Alex Jeffrey, "The Edge of Law: Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Episode 25

What happens when a court tries to become a “new” court? What happens to the many artifacts of its history—previous laws and jurisprudence, the building that it inhabits, the people who weave in and …

Published on 5 years, 8 months ago

Chris Courtney, "The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Episode 318

For somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of 2020. But most of these likely remai…

Published on 5 years, 8 months ago