The existence of two Chinese states—one controlling mainland China, the other controlling the island of Taiwan—is often understood as a seemingly inevitable outcome of the Chinese civil war. Defeated by Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan to establish a rival state, thereby creating the “Two Chinas” dilemma that vexes international diplomacy to this day. Accidental State challenges this conventional narrative to offer a new perspective on the founding of modern Taiwan.

Hsiao-ting Lin marshals extensive research in recently declassified archives to show that the creation of a Taiwanese state in the early 1950s owed more to serendipity than careful geostrategic planning. It was the cumulative outcome of ad hoc half-measures and imperfect compromises, particularly when it came to the Nationalists’ often contentious relationship with the United States.

Taiwan’s political status was fraught from the start. The island had been formally ceded to Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War, and during World War II the Allies promised Chiang that Taiwan would revert to Chinese rule after Japan’s defeat. But as the Chinese civil war turned against the Nationalists, U.S. policymakers reassessed the wisdom of backing Chiang. The idea of placing Taiwan under United Nations trusteeship gained traction. Cold War realities, and the fear of Taiwan falling into Communist hands, led Washington to recalibrate U.S. policy. Yet American support of a Taiwan-based Republic of China remained ambivalent, and Taiwan had to eke out a place for itself in international affairs as a de facto, if not fully sovereign, state.

The story of how everyday nineteenth-century clerks helped to articulate modern capitalism.

The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In Accounting for Capitalism, Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the “bottom line” became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of absolutes, grafted onto our very sense of reason and trust.

This is a big story, told through an ostensibly marginal event: the birth of a class of “merchant clerks” in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The personal trajectory of these young men from farm to metropolis, homestead to boarding house, and, most significantly, from growing things to selling them exemplified the enormous social effort required to domesticate the profit motive and turn it into the practical foundation of civic life. As Zakim reveals in his highly original study, there was nothing natural or preordained about the stunning ascendance of this capitalism and its radical transformation of the relationship between “Man and Mammon.” 
 

Although overshadowed by his contemporaries Adam Smith and David Hume, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson strongly influenced eighteenth-century currents of political thought. A major reassessment of this neglected figure, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future sheds new light on Ferguson as a serious critic, rather than an advocate, of the Enlightenment belief in liberal progress. Unlike the philosophes who looked upon Europe’s growing prosperity and saw confirmation of a utopian future, Ferguson saw something else: a reminder of Rome’s lesson that egalitarian democracy could become a self-undermining path to dictatorship.

Ferguson viewed the intrinsic power struggle between civil and military authorities as the central dilemma of modern constitutional governments. He believed that the key to understanding the forces that propel nations toward tyranny lay in analysis of ancient Roman history. It was the alliance between popular and militaristic factions within the Roman republic, Ferguson believed, which ultimately precipitated its downfall. Democratic forces, intended as a means of liberation from tyranny, could all too easily become the engine of political oppression—a fear that proved prescient when the French Revolution spawned the expansionist wars of Napoleon.

As Iain McDaniel makes clear, Ferguson’s skepticism about the ability of constitutional states to weather pervasive conditions of warfare and emergency has particular relevance for twenty-first-century geopolitics. This revelatory study will resonate with debates over the troubling tendency of powerful democracies to curtail civil liberties and pursue imperial ambitions.

At the Second World War’s end, it was clear that business as usual in colonized Africa would not resume. W. E. B. Du Bois’s The World and Africa, published in 1946, recognized the depth of the crisis that the war had brought to Europe, and hence to Europe’s domination over much of the globe. Du Bois believed that Africa’s past provided lessons for its future, for international statecraft, and for humanity’s mastery of social relations and commerce. Frederick Cooper revisits a history in which Africans were both empire-builders and the objects of colonization, and participants in the events that gave rise to global capitalism.

Of the many pathways out of empire that African leaders envisioned in the 1940s and 1950s, Cooper asks why they ultimately followed the one that led to the nation-state, a political form whose limitations and dangers were recognized by influential Africans at the time. Cooper takes account of the central fact of Africa’s situation—extreme inequality between Africa and the western world, and extreme inequality within African societies—and considers the implications of this past trajectory for the future. Reflecting on the vast body of research on Africa since Du Bois’s time, Cooper corrects outdated perceptions of a continent often relegated to the margins of world history and integrates its experience into the mainstream of global affairs.

The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring addresses the often unspoken connection between the powerful call for a political-cultural renaissance that emerged with the end of South African apartheid and the popular revolts of 2011 that dramatically remade the landscape in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. Looking between southern and northern Africa, the transcontinental line from Cape to Cairo that for so long supported colonialism, its chapters explore the deep roots of these two decisive events and demonstrate how they are linked by shared opposition to legacies of political, economic, and cultural subjugation. As they work from African, Islamic, and Western perspectives, the book’s contributors shed important light on a continent’s difficult history and undertake a critical conversation about whether and how the desire for radical change holds the possibility of a new beginning for Africa, a beginning that may well reshape the contours of global affairs.

The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, and its toll in lives damaged or destroyed is incalculable. Most of those stories are lost to history, making the few that can be reconstructed critical to understanding the trade in all its breadth and variety. Randy J. Sparks examines the experiences of a range of West Africans who lived in the American South between 1740 and 1860. Their stories highlight the diversity of struggles that confronted every African who arrived on American shores.

The subjects of Africans in the Old South include Elizabeth Cleveland Hardcastle, the mixed-race daughter of an African slave-trading family who invested in South Carolina rice plantations and slaves, passed as white, and integrated herself into the Lowcountry planter elite; Robert Johnson, kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery in Georgia, who later learned English, won his freedom, and joined the abolition movement in the North; Dimmock Charlton, who bought his freedom after being illegally enslaved in Savannah; and a group of unidentified Africans who were picked up by a British ship in the Caribbean, escaped in Mobile’s port, and were recaptured and eventually returned to their homeland.

These exceptional lives challenge long-held assumptions about how the slave trade operated and who was involved. The African Atlantic was a complex world characterized by constant movement, intricate hierarchies, and shifting identities. Not all Africans who crossed the Atlantic were enslaved, nor was the voyage always one-way.

Offering a compelling call to arms while challenging the pervasive grip of colonialism on the Black psyche, this manifesto charts a course toward a future defined by autonomy, dignity, and radical liberation. 

Delving into the historical currents of resistance—from Negritude to Black nationalism to pan-Africanism—this manifesto unapologetically confronts the insidious nature of modern colonialism. In a world where the very presence of the Black body incites fear and insecurity among white supremacists, Afro-Decolonial Manifesto exposes the fallacy of equating Black existence with reverse colonialism. It challenges the prevailing narratives of gratitude and guilt, asserting the right of the Black diaspora to reclaim its autonomy and dignity, and also examines the effectiveness of movements like Black Lives Matter, advocating for a renewed Black internationalism rooted in Africa’s unity and autonomy.  

In a stirring call to arms, Afro-Decolonial Manifesto heralds a new era of resistance, where reparation becomes not just a demand for restitution, but a catalyst for radical change. This volume emboldens Black people to reclaim their narrative, their agency, and their future. It is a testament to the enduring spirit of liberation and the indomitable resilience of Black lives.

Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution (1979-1990) initiated a broad program of social transformation to improve the situation of the working class and poor, women, and other non-elite groups through agrarian reform, restructured urban employment, and wide access to health care, education, and social services. This book explores how Nicaragua's least powerful citizens have fared in the years since the Sandinista revolution, as neoliberal governments have rolled back these state-supported reforms and introduced measures to promote the development of a market-driven economy.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted throughout the 1990s, Florence Babb describes the negative consequences that have followed the return to a capitalist path, especially for women and low-income citizens. In addition, she charts the growth of women's and other social movements (neighborhood, lesbian and gay, indigenous, youth, peace, and environmental) that have taken advantage of new openings for political mobilization. Her ethnographic portraits of a low-income barrio and of women's craft cooperatives powerfully link local, cultural responses to national and global processes.

“A mind-blowing tour de force that unwraps the myriad objects of addiction that surround us…Intelligent, incisive, and sometimes grimly entertaining.”
—Rod Phillips, author of Alcohol: A History

“A fascinating history of corporate America’s efforts to shape our habits and desires.”
—Vox

We live in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and shopping to binge eating and opioid abuse. Sugar can be as habit-forming as cocaine, researchers tell us, and social media apps are deliberately hooking our kids. But what can we do to resist temptations that insidiously rewire our brains? A renowned expert on addiction, David Courtwright reveals how global enterprises have both created and catered to our addictions. The Age of Addiction chronicles the triumph of what he calls “limbic capitalism,” the growing network of competitive businesses targeting the brain pathways responsible for feeling, motivation, and long-term memory.

“Compulsively readable…In crisp and playful prose and with plenty of needed humor, Courtwright has written a fascinating history of what we like and why we like it, from the first taste of beer in the ancient Middle East to opioids in West Virginia.”
—American Conservative

“A sweeping, ambitious account of the evolution of addiction…This bold, thought-provoking synthesis will appeal to fans of ‘big history’ in the tradition of Guns, Germs, and Steel.”
—Publishers Weekly

The impact of the AIDS pandemic on health systems and entire societies in the 1990s will be much more severe than it was in the last decade; up-to-date information about the disease is now crucial. Yet even though readers are deluged by technical publications and popularizations, no single book tracks, on an annual basis, the evolution of the pandemic, its effects, and the worldwide response.

To fill this gap, Jonathan Mann, founding director of the World Health Organization's Global Progam on AIDS and currently director of the International AIDS Center at Harvard University, has assembled a team of experts to produce an unprecedented document for our time. AIDS in the World will synthesize the best possible information, data, and thinking about AIDS into a volume that is destined to become a landmark publication. AIDS in the World will provide a vital guide to rekindling the worldwide assault on AIDS. To ensure that AIDS in the World 1992 is both timely and authoritative, the editors have enlisted the support of an extensive team of researchers, specialists, scientists, writers, and experts to provide a solid basis for new and original thinking on a wide range of topics.

This book reviews the status of the disease, including numbers of AIDS cases and deaths; AIDS and HIV prevalence; mortality rates; links between other infections and HlV breakthroughs in biomedical, clinical, and behavioral areas; prevention and care; legislation and human rights issues; and economic and demographic aspects. AIDS in the World 1992 provides a global assessment for where we are now and where we are headed; it spotlights critical issues and highlights communities and countries that may be especially vulnerable to the dissemination of HIV. With publication scheduled before the VIIIth International Conference on AIDS in July 1992, this work will be indispensable for governments, policymakers, scientists, health care workers, and journalists around the world who will rely on this book to make the crucial decisions of this decade and the next.

On television, the Arab Spring took place in Cairo, Tunis, and the city-states of the Persian Gulf. Yet the drama of 2010, and the decade of subsequent activism, extended beyond the cities—indeed, beyond Arabs. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman brings to light the sustained post–Arab Spring political movement of North Africa’s Amazigh people.

The Amazigh movement did not begin with the Arab Spring, but it has changed significantly since then. Amazigh Politics in the Wake of the Arab Spring details the increasingly material goals of Amazigh activism, as protest has shifted from the arena of ethnocultural recognition to that of legal and socioeconomic equality. Amazigh communities responded to the struggles for freedom around them by pressing territorial and constitutional claims while rejecting official discrimination and neglect. Arab activists, steeped in postcolonial nationalism and protective of their hegemonic position, largely refused their support, yet flailing regimes were forced to respond to sharpening Amazigh demands or else jeopardize their threadbare legitimacy. Today the Amazigh question looms larger than ever, as North African governments find they can no longer ignore the movement’s interests.

This is the rollicking, never-before-published memoir of a fascinating woman with an uncanny knack for being in the right place in the most interesting times. Of racially mixed heritage, Anita Reynolds was proudly African American but often passed for Indian, Mexican, or Creole. Actress, dancer, model, literary critic, psychologist, but above all free-spirited provocateur, she was, as her Parisian friends nicknamed her, an “American cocktail.”

One of the first black stars of the silent era, she appeared in Hollywood movies with Rudolph Valentino, attended Charlie Chaplin’s anarchist meetings, and studied dance with Ruth St. Denis. She moved to New York in the 1920s and made a splash with both Harlem Renaissance elites and Greenwich Village bohemians. An émigré in Paris, she fell in with the Left Bank avant-garde, befriending Antonin Artaud, Man Ray, and Pablo Picasso. Next, she took up residence as a journalist in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and witnessed firsthand the growing menace of fascism. In 1940, as the Nazi panzers closed in on Paris, Reynolds spent the final days before the French capitulation as a Red Cross nurse, afterward making a mad dash for Lisbon to escape on the last ship departing Europe.

In prose that perfectly captures the globetrotting nonchalance of its author, American Cocktail presents a stimulating, unforgettable self-portrait of a truly extraordinary woman.

In this notable collection of essays, written in the middle of the twentieth century, a towering Mexican thinker discusses both Latin America's internal problems and its relations with the United States, Russia, and the rest of the world. This perceptive examination of many political and economic topics will be of interest to all readers concerned with what our southern neighbors think on subjects important to us.

The author brings into particularly sharp focus the relationship of Mexico and other Latin American countries to the United States. Cosío Villegas bluntly tells the reader how much remains to be accomplished: " . . . I believe that Mexico and the United States are so far from resolving their problems that, in truth, it can be said that the process of understanding has not yet even begun." He then impartially analyzes the problems that stand in the way of improved relations, and he looks at these difficulties from an altogether fresh perspective.

Another major theme is the Mexican Revolution, what it did, and what it became. In many important ways, the author feels, the Revolution failed. For the rejuvenation that Mexico needs, should it look toward the United States or toward Russia? And what resources within itself does it need to develop in order to provide the leadership that Latin America requires? Cosío Villegas evaluates the permanent impact of the Cuban Revolution on our hemisphere. He considers where Latin American interests lie in the cold war and suggests how that area may use its voice most effectively in global decisions.

With the increase in world tensions and the decrease in world size, this book will be extremely valuable for every thinking citizen.

Commentators frequently call the United States an empire: occasionally a benign empire, sometimes an empire in denial, and often a destructive empire. Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman asserts instead that, because of its unusual federal structure, America has performed the role of umpire since 1776, compelling adherence to rules that gradually earned collective approval.

This provocative reinterpretation traces America’s role in the world from the days of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt to the present. Cobbs Hoffman argues that the United States has been the pivot of a transformation that began outside its borders and before its founding, in which nation-states replaced the empires that had dominated history. The “Western” values that America is often accused of imposing were, in fact, the result of this global shift. American Umpire explores the rise of three values—access to opportunity, arbitration of disputes, and transparency in government and business—and finds that the United States is distinctive not in its embrace of these practices but in its willingness to persuade and even coerce others to comply. But America’s leadership is problematic as well as potent. The nation has both upheld and violated the rules. Taking sides in explosive disputes imposes significant financial and psychic costs. By definition, umpires cannot win.

American Umpire offers a powerful new framework for reassessing the country’s role over the past 250 years. Amid urgent questions about future choices, this book asks who, if not the United States, might enforce these new rules of world order?

A challenge to long-held assumptions about the costs and benefits of America’s allies.

Since the Revolutionary War, the United States has entered into dozens of alliances with international powers to protect its assets and advance its security interests. America’s Entangling Alliances offers a corrective to long-held assumptions about US foreign policy and is relevant to current public and academic debates about the costs and benefits of America’s allies.

Author Jason W. Davidson examines these alliances to shed light on their nature and what they reveal about the evolution of American power. He challenges the belief that the nation resists international alliances, showing that this has been true in practice only when using a narrow definition of alliance. While there have been more alliances since World War II than before it, US presidents and Congress have viewed it in the country’s best interest to enter into a variety of security arrangements over virtually the entire course of the country’s history. By documenting thirty-four alliances—categorized as defense pacts, military coalitions, or security partnerships—Davidson finds that the US demand for allies is best explained by looking at variance in its relative power and the threats it has faced.

The anarchist movement had a crucial impact upon the Mexican working class between 1860 and 1931. John M. Hart destroys some old myths and brings new information to light as he explores anarchism's effect on the development of the Mexican urban working-class and agrarian movements.

Hart shows how the ideas of European anarchist thinkers took root in Mexico, how they influenced revolutionary tendencies there, and why anarchism was ultimately unsuccessful in producing real social change in Mexico. He explains the role of the working classes during the Mexican Revolution, the conflict between urban revolutionary groups and peasants, and the ensuing confrontation between the new revolutionary elite and the urban working class.

The anarchist tradition traced in this study is extremely complex. It involves various social classes, including intellectuals, artisans, and ordinary workers; changing social conditions; and political and revolutionary events which reshaped ideologies. During the nineteenth century the anarchists could be distinguished from their various working- class socialist and trade unionist counterparts by their singular opposition to government. In the twentieth century the lines became even clearer because of hardening anarchosyndicalist, anarchistcommunist, trade unionist, and Marxist doctrines. In charting the rise and fall of anarchism, Hart gives full credit to the roles of other forms of socialism and Marxism in Mexican working-class history.

Mexican anarchists whose contributions are examined here include nineteenth-century leaders Plotino Rhodakanaty, Santiago Villanueva, Francisco Zalacosta, and José María Gonzales; the twentieth-century revolutionary precursor Ricardo Flores Magón; the Casa del Obrero founders Amadeo Ferrés, Juan Francisco Moncaleano, and Rafael Quintero; and the majority of the Centro Sindicalista Ubertario, leaders of the General Confederation of Workers.

This work is based largely on primary sources, and the bibliography contains a definitive listing of anarchist and radical working-class newspapers for the period.

In providing a detailed account of the leftist opposition and its bloody repression in Brazil during the Old Republic and the early years of the Vargas regime, John W. F. Dulles gives considerable attention to the labor movement, generally neglected by historians. This study focuses on the formation and activities of anarchists and Communists, the two most important radical groups working within Brazilian labor. Relying on a wide variety of sources, including interviews and personal papers, Dulles supplies information that for the most part is unavailable in English and not easily accessible in Portuguese.

The struggles of Brazilian workers—usually against an alliance of company owners, state and federal troops, and state and federal governments—suffered reverses in 1920 and 1921. These setbacks were cited by Astrogildo Pereira and other admirers of Bolshevism as reasons for the proletariat to forsake anarchism and adhere to the Communist Party, Brazilian Section of the Communist International.

Anarchists and Communists, struggling against each other in the labor unions in the mid 1920’s, joined opposition journalists and politicians in supporting military rebels in a romantic uprising marked by adventure and suffering, jailbreaks and long marches, and death in the backlands.

Slowly, Brazilian Communism gained strength during the latter part of the 1920’s, but 1930 brought the beginnings of failure. Worse for the Party than the government crackdown and the Trotskyite dissidence was the growing attraction of the Aliança Liberal, the oppositionist political movement that brought Getúlio Vargas to power. While workers and Party members flocked to the Aliança in defiance of Party orders, sectarian edicts from Moscow resulted in the expulsion or demotion of the Party’s former leaders and in the condemnation of intellectuals.

Luís Carlos Prestes, “the Cavalier of Hope” who had led the military rebels in the mid-1920’s, turned to Communism—only to find himself not welcome in the Party. Taken to Russia by the Communist International in 1931, he was finally accepted into the Brazilian Party in absentia in 1934. Later that year, misled in Moscow by optimistic reports brought by Brazilian Communists, he agreed to lead a rebellion in Brazil. That decision and its consequences in 1935 were disastrous to Brazilian Communism.

The struggles among anarchists, Stalinists, and Trotskyites in Brazil were reflections of a worldwide struggle. This study discloses and assesses the effects of Moscow policy changes on Communism in Brazil and contributes to an understanding of Moscow’s policies throughout Latin America during this period.

For more than two millennia prior to the Spanish conquest, the southern region of the central Andes was home to dozens of societies, ranging from modest chiefdoms to imperial states. Attempts to understand the political and economic dynamics of this complex region have included at least two major theories in Andean anthropology. In this pathfinding study, Charles Stanish shows that they are not exclusive and competing models, but rather can be understood as variations within a larger theoretical framework.

Stanish builds his arguments around a case study from the Moquequa region of Peru, augmented with data from Puno. He uses the "archaeological household" as his basic unit of analysis. This approach allows him to reconcile the now-classic model of zonal complementarity proposed by John Murra with the model of craft specialization and exchange offered by Maria Rostworowski de Diez Canseco. These models of political economy are analyzed with the concepts of economic anthropology in the tradition of Karl Polanyi.

For students of archaeology, Andean studies, anthropology, and economic history, Ancient Andean Political Economy will be important reading.

Animals at the End of the World begins with an explosion, which six-year-old Inés mistakes for the end of the world that she has long feared. In the midst of the chaos, she meets the maid’s granddaughter, Mariá, who becomes her best friend and with whom she navigates the adult world in her grandparents’ confined house. Together, they escape the house and confront the “animals” that populate Bogotá in the 1980s. But Inés soon realizes she cannot count on either María or her preoccupied and conflicted parents. Alone, she must learn to decipher her outer and inner worlds, confronting both armies of beasts and episodes of domestic chaos. In the process, she also learns what it means to test boundaries, break rules, and cope with the consequences.

The first novel by Colombian author Gloria Susana Esquivel, Animals at the End of the World is a poetic and moving coming-of-age story that lingers long after its final page.

Never before translated into English, this official history of the reign of King T’aejo—founder of Korea’s long, illustrious Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910 CE)—is a unique resource for reconstructing life in late-fourteenth-century Korea. Its narrative of a ruler’s rise to power includes a wealth of detail not just about politics and war but also about religion, astronomy, and the arts.

The military general Yi Sŏnggye, posthumously named T’aejo, assumed the throne in 1392. During his seven-year reign, T’aejo instituted reforms and established traditions that would carry down through the centuries. These included service to Korea’s overlord, China, and other practices reflecting China’s influence over the peninsula: creation of a bureaucracy based on civil service examinations, a shift from Buddhism to Confucianism, and official records of the deeds of kings, which in the Confucian tradition were an important means of educating succeeding generations. A remarkable compilation process for the sillok, or “veritable records,” was instituted to ensure the authority of the annals. Historiographers were present for every royal audience and wrote down each word that was uttered. They were strictly forbidden to divulge the contents of their daily drafts, however—even the king himself could not view the records with impunity.

Choi Byonghyon’s translation of the first of Korea’s dynastic histories, The Annals of King T’aejo, includes an introduction and annotations.

Between 1914 and 1918, German anthropologists conducted their work in the midst of full-scale war. The discipline was relatively new in German academia when World War I broke out, and, as Andrew D. Evans reveals in this illuminating book, its development was profoundly altered by the conflict. As the war shaped the institutional, ideological, and physical environment for anthropological work, the discipline turned its back on its liberal roots and became a nationalist endeavor primarily concerned with scientific studies of race.

Combining intellectual and cultural history with the history of science, Anthropology at War examines both the origins and consequences of this shift. Evans locates its roots in the decision to allow scientists access to prisoner-of-war camps, which prompted them to focus their research on racial studies of the captives. Caught up in wartime nationalism, a new generation of anthropologists began to portray the country’s political enemies as racially different. After the war ended, the importance placed on racial conceptions and categories persisted, paving the way for the politicization of scientific inquiry in the years of the ascendancy of National Socialism.

What America’s intervention in Cambodia during the Vietnam War reveals about Cold War–era U.S. national security strategy
 

The Apathy of Empire reveals just how significant Cambodia was to U.S. policy in Indochina during the Vietnam War, broadening the lens to include more than the often-cited incursion in 1970 or the illegal bombing after the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. This theoretically informed and thoroughly documented case study argues that U.S. military intervention in Cambodia revealed America’s efforts to construct a hegemonic spatial world order. 

James Tyner documents the shift of America’s post-1945 focus from national defense to national security. He demonstrates that America’s expansionist policies abroad, often bolstered by military power, were not so much about occupying territory but instead constituted the construction of a new normal for the exercise of state power. During the Cold War, Vietnam became the geopolitical lodestar of this unfolding spatial order. And yet America’s grand strategy was one of contradiction: to build a sovereign state (South Vietnam) based on democratic liberalism, it was necessary to protect its boundaries—in effect, to isolate it—through both covert and overt operations in violation of Cambodia’s sovereignty. The latter was deemed necessary for the former. 

Questioning reductionist geopolitical understandings of states as central or peripheral, Tyner explores this paradox to rethink the formulation of the Cambodian war as sideshow, revealing it instead as a crucial site for the formation of this new normal.

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Apocalyptic visions and prophecies from Zarathustra to yesterday form the luxuriant panorama in Eugen Weber's profound and elegant book. Beginning with the ancients of the West and the Orient and, especially, with those from whom we received our religions, the Jews and earliest Christians, Weber finds that an absolute belief in the end of time, when good would do final battle with evil, was omnipresent. Within centuries, apocalyptic beliefs inspired Crusades, scientific discoveries, works of art, voyages such as those of Columbus, rebellions and reforms. In the new world, American abolitionists, who were so critical to the movement to end slavery, believed in a final reckoning. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries' apocalyptic movements veered toward a lunatic fringe, and Weber rescues them from obloquy. From this more than two millennia history, he redresses the historical and religious amnesia that has consigned the study of apocalypses and millennial thought to the ash heap of thought and belief.

Weber, a master storyteller, turns detective in this latest book as he finds these alternative rationalities in the West, Asia, Africa, and South America. He writes with profound respect for the millennial pulse in history while never losing his urbane and witty style of writing. As we approach our second millennium beset by a host of apocalyptic predictions and cults, this book offers a map of understanding of the creeds we ignore at our peril.

How did Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood win power so quickly after the dramatic “Arab Spring” uprising that ended President Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year reign in February 2011? And why did the Brotherhood fall from power even more quickly, culminating with the popular “rebellion” and military coup that toppled Egypt’s first elected president, Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, in July 2013? In Arab Fall, Eric Trager examines the Brotherhood’s decision making throughout this critical period, explaining its reasons for joining the 2011 uprising, running for a majority of the seats in the 2011–2012 parliamentary elections, and nominating a presidential candidate despite its initial promise not to do so. Based on extensive research in Egypt and interviews with dozens of Brotherhood leaders and cadres including Morsi, Trager argues that the very organizational characteristics that helped the Brotherhood win power also contributed to its rapid downfall. The Brotherhood’s intensive process for recruiting members and its rigid nationwide command-chain meant that it possessed unparalleled mobilizing capabilities for winning the first post-Mubarak parliamentary and presidential elections.

Yet the Brotherhood’s hierarchical organizational culture, in which dissenters are banished and critics are viewed as enemies of Islam, bred exclusivism. This alienated many Egyptians, including many within Egypt’s state institutions. The Brotherhood’s insularity also prevented its leaders from recognizing how quickly the country was slipping from their grasp, leaving hundreds of thousands of Muslim Brothers entirely unprepared for the brutal crackdown that followed Morsi’s overthrow. Trager concludes with an assessment of the current state of Egyptian politics and examines the Brotherhood’s prospects for reemerging.

The first book to present an analysis of Arab response to fascism and Nazism from the perspectives of both individual countries and the Arab world at large, this collection problematizes and ultimately deconstructs the established narratives that assume most Arabs supported fascism and Nazism leading up to and during World War II. Using new source materials taken largely from Arab memoirs, archives, and print media, the articles reexamine Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi responses in the 1930s and throughout the war.

While acknowledging the individuals, forces, and organizations that did support and collaborate with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism focuses on the many other Arab voices that identified with Britain and France and with the Allied cause during the war. The authors argue that many groups within Arab societies—elites and non-elites, governing forces, and civilians—rejected Nazism and fascism as totalitarian, racist, and, most important, as new, more oppressive forms of European imperialism. The essays in this volume argue that, in contrast to prevailing beliefs that Arabs were de facto supporters of Italy and Germany—since “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”—mainstream Arab forces and currents opposed the Axis powers and supported the Allies during the war. They played a significant role in the battles for control over the Middle East.

Arijana Lekić-Fridrih: All Art is a Political Statement introduces audiences to the work of Croatian artist Arijana Lekić-Fridrih and, in particular, to her Silent Mass, a performance resisting the “Be Manly” movement, a series of mass prayer events held in Croatian public squares by a battalion of men who pray for the abolition of women’s rights, for women’s “chastity,” and for men’s “masculine authority.” All Art is a Political Statement links the erosion of women’s rights across intercontinental boundaries and offers Lekić-Fridrih’s multimedia art as a guide for activism against retrograde restrictions on the freedom of women.

Arijana Lekić-Fridrih: Svaka umjetnost je politička izjava upoznaje publiku s radom hrvatske umjetnice Arijane Lekić-Fridrih, a posebno s njezinom Tihom misom, performansom otpora pokretu “Budi muško”, nizu masovnih molitvenih događanja koje na hrvatskim javnim trgovima održava bataljun muškaraca moleći za ukidanje ženskih prava, za žensku “čednost”, a za muškarce “muški autoritet”. Svaka umjetnost je politička izjava spaja eroziju ženskih prava preko interkontinentalnih granica i nudi multimedijsku umjetnost Lekić-Fridrih kao vodič za aktivizam protiv nazadnih ograničenja slobode žena.

Since Pakistan gained independence in 1947, only once has an elected government completed its tenure and peacefully transferred power to another elected government. In sharp contrast to neighboring India, the Muslim nation has been ruled by its military for over three decades. Even when they were not directly in control of the government, the armed forces maintained a firm grip on national politics. How the military became Pakistan’s foremost power elite and what its unchecked authority means for the future of this nuclear-armed nation are among the crucial questions Aqil Shah takes up in The Army and Democracy.

Pakistan’s and India’s armies inherited their organization, training, and doctrines from their British predecessor, along with an ethic that regarded politics as outside the military domain. But Pakistan’s weak national solidarity, exacerbated by a mentality that saw war with India looming around every corner, empowered the military to take national security and ultimately government into its own hands. As the military’s habit of disrupting the natural course of politics gained strength over time, it arrested the development of democratic institutions.

Based on archival materials, internal military documents, and over 100 interviews with politicians, civil servants, and Pakistani officers, including four service chiefs and three heads of the clandestine Inter-Services Intelligence, The Army and Democracy provides insight into the military’s contentious relationship with Pakistan’s civilian government. Shah identifies steps for reforming Pakistan’s armed forces and reducing its interference in politics, and sees lessons for fragile democracies striving to bring the military under civilian control.

At Indian independence in 1947, the country’s founders worried that the army India inherited—conservative and dominated by officers and troops drawn disproportionately from a few “martial” groups—posed a real threat to democracy. They also saw the structure of the army, with its recruitment on the basis of caste and religion, as incompatible with their hopes for a new secular nation.

India has successfully preserved its democracy, however, unlike many other colonial states that inherited imperial “divide and rule” armies, and unlike its neighbor Pakistan, which inherited part of the same Indian army in 1947. As Steven I. Wilkinson shows, the puzzle of how this happened is even more surprising when we realize that the Indian Army has kept, and even expanded, many of its traditional “martial class” units, despite promising at independence to gradually phase them out.

Army and Nation draws on uniquely comprehensive data to explore how and why India has succeeded in keeping the military out of politics, when so many other countries have failed. It uncovers the command and control strategies, the careful ethnic balancing, and the political, foreign policy, and strategic decisions that have made the army safe for Indian democracy. Wilkinson goes further to ask whether, in a rapidly changing society, these structures will survive the current national conflicts over caste and regional representation in New Delhi, as well as India’s external and strategic challenges.

When Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to go somewhere, there was no stopping him. This dynamic president called for Air Force One as others summon a taxi—at a moment's notice, whatever the hour or the weather. And the man who made sure that LBJ got his ride was General James U. Cross, the president's hand-picked pilot, top military assistant, and personal confidante. One of the few Air Force One pilots to have a position, simultaneously, in the White House, General Cross is also the only member of LBJ's inner circle who has not publicly offered his recollections of the president. In this book, he goes on the record, creating a fascinating, behind-the-scenes portrait of America's complex, often contradictory, always larger-than-life thirty-sixth president.

General Cross tells an engrossing story. In addition to piloting Air Force One around the globe, he served President Johnson in multiple capacities, including directing the Military Office in the White House; managing a secret two-million-dollar presidential emergency fund; supervising the presidential retreat at Camp David, the president's entire transportation fleet, and the presidential bomb shelters; running the White House Mess; hiring White House social aides, including the president's future son-in-law, Charles Robb; and writing condolence letters to the families of soldiers killed in Vietnam. This wide-ranging, around-the-clock access to President Johnson allowed Cross to witness events and share moments that add color and depth to our understanding of America's arguably most demanding and unpredictable president.

Sanchez argues that the seemingly hopeless cycle of violence experienced by Mexico in the 20th century, as reflected in its "crime genre," reveals a broader intrinsic cultural and political failure that suggests grave implications for the current state of crisis. Tracing the development of a national Mexican identity from the 1910 Mexican Revolution onward, Sanchez focuses on the indelible presence of violence and crime underlying the major works that contributed to a larger communal narrative.

Artful Assassins ultimately offers a panoramic overview of the evolution of Mexican arts and letters, as well as nationalism, by claiming murder and assassination as literary and cinematic motifs. The collapse of post-revolutionary political unity was presaged all along in Mexican culture, Sanchez argues. It need only to have been sought in the art of the nation.

This new textbook gathers an international roster of top security studies scholars to provide an overview of Asia-Pacific’s international relations and pressing contemporary security issues. It is a suitable introduction for undergraduate and masters students' use in international relations and security studies courses. Merging a strong theoretical component with rich contemporary and historical empirical examples, Asia-Pacific Security examines the region's key players and challenges as well as a spectrum of proposed solutions for improving regional stability. Major topics include in-depth looks at the United States' relationship with China; Security concerns presented by small and microstates, the region's largest group of nations; threats posed by terrorism and insurgency; the region's accelerating arms race and the potential for an Asian war; the possible roles of multilateralism, security communities, and human security as part of solutions to regional problems.

From every quarter we hear of a new global culture, postcolonial, hybrid, announcing the death of nationalism, the arrival of cosmopolitanism. But under the drumbeat attending this trend, Timothy Brennan detects another, altogether different sound. Polemical, passionate, certain to provoke, his book exposes the drama being played out under the guise of globalism. A bracing critique of the critical self-indulgence that calls itself cosmopolitanism, it also takes note of the many countervailing forces acting against globalism in its facile, homogenizing sense.

The developments Brennan traces occur in many places--editorial pages, policy journals, corporate training manuals, and, primarily, in the arts. His subject takes him from George Orwell to Julia Kristeva, from Subcommandante Marcos to Julio Cortázar, from Ernst Bloch to contemporary apologists for transnational capitalism and "liberation management," from "third world" writing to the Nobel Prize, with little of critical theory or cultural studies left untouched in between. Brennan gives extended treatment to two exemplary figures: the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, whose work suggests an alternative approach to cultural studies; and the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, whose appreciation of Cuban popular music cuts through the usual distinctions between mass and elite culture.

A critical call to arms, At Home in the World summons intellectuals and scholars to reinvigorate critical cultural studies. In stripping the false and heedless from the new cosmopolitanism, Brennan revitalizes the idea.

This dazzling book takes us on a voyage of discovery around the world at the turn of the last millennium, when for the first time the world was in essence a unity. Islam bridged Eurasia, western Europe, and North Africa. Vikings, with links to Scandinavia and Russia, had just arrived in North America. These and other peoples reached out to create links and put isolated cultures unwittingly in touch. John Man vividly captures these epochal events, and depicts the colorful peoples that defined the world’s mix of stability and change, of isolation and contact. In an immensely learned portrayal, he traces enduring cultural strands that became part of the world as we know it today.

In text, maps, and pictures, most in color, and drawing on the expertise of two dozen consultants, John Man has created a concise compendium of all the major cultures of the lost millennial world of 1000. In some cultures—Europe, Islam, China, and Japan—written records contain a vast range of materials, often revealing sharply focused details of life and personality. Here lie startling contrasts with today’s world, and even foreshadowing of the future that are equally astonishing in their familiarity. For nonliterate cultures—in the United States, Southeast Asia, Polynesia, Africa—this book draws on a wealth of archeological research, some of it made available to nonspecialists for the first time.