Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchPasha 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 …
5 years, 10 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 Encount…
5 years, 10 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 li…
5 years, 10 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 qual…
5 years, 10 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 healt…
5 years, 10 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 p…
5 years, 10 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 expropria…
5 years, 10 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 build…
5 years, 10 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…
5 years, 10 months ago
Maya K. Peterson, "Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Episode 113
The drying up of the Aral Sea - a major environmental catastrophe of the late twentieth century - is deeply rooted in the dreams of the irrigation ag…
5 years, 11 months ago