Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future (2025)

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 (1987)

This book, by one of the preeminent historians of Iberian exploration and colonization, significantly deepened my understanding of the centuries-long background to Columbus and da Gama. The process was multi-sided and dynamic - first the Catalans took the lead in conquering Majorca in 1229; later Castile, in concert with Genoese financiers and navigators, came to the fore, especially with the slow conquest of the Canaries from the mid-fourteenth to late fifteenth centuries, which became the key launching pad for Columbus. As with the English domination and conquest of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland at about the same time (see the previous review), this process also involved many different actors - nobles, royal houses, Popes, Catholic orders - and motives. The book describes the "spectacular" emergence of sugar plantations on Madeira and some of the Canaries in the 1450s, and the further innovation, from the 1460s on the Cape Verde islands, of plantations worked by slave labor. One of the most fascinating aspects was the European struggle to understand and categorize the indigenous "primitive" Canarians - whether they were noble innocents or barbaric savages. In many ways, then, the European encounter with the peoples of the Americas were prefigured on this East Atlantic archipelago more than a century before Columbus. Reading this book made me want to read much more about Europe's dynamism of the high middle ages and reread books such as Thomas Ertman's The Rise of Leviathan (1997) and Robert Bartlett's seminal The Making of Europe (1994). I'd be curious to learn more, for example, about the state-building of Aragon-Catalan and of Castile. This book mentions the Reconquista but doesn't leave the impression that it played a predominant role in these states' dynamism.

R.R. Davies, Domination & Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, 1100-1300 (1990)

This slim volume is a masterpiece. It's tightly argued and clearly written, using apt quotations from many primary sources to support its case. Davies deftly combines observations about basic trends with acknowledgement of complexities and countervailing trends. His basic argument is contained in the title, which initially puzzled me. I had assumed that conquest came first, followed by domination. However, the reality was the other way around: first came domination - a slow, sometimes invisible process, by which the Welsh and Irish (and to a lesser extent the Scottish) adapted themselves to "Anglo-Norman" patterns of thought, economic relations, acknowledgement of a diffuse feudal "overlordship," Church practices, etc. Domination was not limited to soft power, however. Anglo-Norman "conquistadores" were its sharp cutting edge, as they claimed small islands of direct control, extending outwards from their castles, though rarely very far. The English kings only intermittently took an active role in this aristocratically driven enterprise. The lack of written records and the predominance of customary relations, for one thing, limited the reach and power of the English colonizers. Only in the thirteenth century did domination take on a harder edge, part of the growth of centralized, bureaucratic state power across Latin Europe. The book fits well with Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe, which was published just a few years later and probably draws on Davies. Both books are helpful for understanding Europe's growing vitality and drive to expand in this pivotal period. Domination & Conquest is also invaluable for its convincing portrait of the varieties and subtelties of colonization.

Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds.), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (1989)

I read this with an eye to my upcoming course on capitalism(s) since 1945. I'd read Gerstle's book on The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, which was excellent and which I'll use extensively in the class. The book under review here is a different beast. By no means do I mean that it's bad, only that it's an edited volume, so the chapters don't fit together seamlessly. And in many cases, they're written for an academic audience, which means they just won't work in my classes. My main impressions about the New Deal were the following: 1) the experimentation and lack of coherent plan, at least in the first few years of the ND, was something I knew about, but several chapters drive this home. 2) the ascendance of the labor movement - how much influence and prominence it enjoyed - was something I hadn't fully appreciated. That influence waxed from the late 19th century and probably peaked in the war years. 3) I had been unaware of the widespread sense, even before the Depression, that American capitalism had "matured" and hence lost its vitality. This sense helped to sustain the idea that planning - of some kind - was necessary to manage the sluggish economy. The booming war economy put paid to the belief in stasis and, along with other factors, took the wind out of the sails of labor's most ambitious hopes.

Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023)

Written in an informal, engaging style (Varoufakis frames the book as a long letter to his beloved, and morally and intellectually inspiring, Marxist father, and he frequently makes pop-culture references, for example to Don Draper from Mad Men), Technofeudalism is thought- and discussion-provoking (my Zoom book club read it). It's also - ultimately - unpersuasive. Varoufakis is an unorthodox Marxist, who is willing to concede forthrightly that Marxism failed in many ways. He also parts with orthodoxy in his assessment that capitalism is currently being eclipsed, not by a bright socialist replacement, but but a technofeudal one that will be and already is much worse. Varoufakis's central claim is that what he calls the two pillars of capitalism - markets and profits - are no longer operative in an economy increasingly dominated by digital-tech behemoths, whom Varoufakis refers to as "cloudalists." The idea is that Amazon, Google and Facebook have created monopolies of one kind or another, eliminating competitive markets. As a result, their income is due not to profits, but "rents" in the technical sense of the term. We have been turned into cloud serfs (and also cloud prols, if we work for or by means of tech - think the gig economy). The comparison to feudal lords is stimulating, but a closer look reveals that competition is not really dead. Amazon competes ferociously, for example, with Walmart's e-commerce side. Social media platforms increasingly resemble each other (so I've heard) and hence abandoning one for another happens all the time.

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020)

This is a quietly impassioned, but simultaneously extremely cogently argued, account of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Though I can't claim deep knowledge about this issue, I found the book quite plausible and compelling. Though Khalidi's main critiques are reserved for the Zionist project and its great-power enablers (first Britain, and then the US), he hardly shies from criticism of Palestinian leadership and the autocratic rulers of Arab states. Khalidi's most basic contention is that Zionism was a settler colonial project from the start. Given that in 1895, when Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat launched Zionism, hundreds of thousands of people already lived in Palestine/Zion, nearly 100% of whom were not Jewish, it's hard for me to imagine a credible counter-argument. Perhaps Adam Kirsch's description in his chapter on Herzl in The People and the Books (see earlier review) offers the most charitable case: Herzl wrote in his book that the current residents of Palestine would benefit from an influx of enlightened, motivated Jewish settlers. In short, the indigenous would be uplifted - a Jewish "civilizing mission." On this view, then, early Zionists like Herzl were at most ingenuous. Khalidi challenges this charitable view, using an entry in Herzl's diary to show that he was quite conscious that hundreds of thousands of indigenous inhabitants would have to be displaced. Revisionist Zionists like Yabotinsky, of course, were unabashed in calling for what later would come to be known as ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. I would be interested in reading more about how early Zionists spoke - both publicly and privately - about this issue. For me what was most eye-opening about this book was Khalidi's commentary on the Mandate system (1921-1948) and the Oslo peace process of the 1990s. I hadn't realized that the British Mandate for Palestine had stacked the deck so decisively in favor of the Zionists and against the Palestinians. Basically, it accepted the British commitment in the Balfour declaration and failed even to mention the Palestinians as a people deserving of self-determination. Khalidi himself was involved in talks in Washington that preceded Oslo. (He's from a politically and academically prominent Palestinian family, with members serving in various political offices in Ottoman times and later in Mandate Palestine; his father was a respected historian in the US, as is the author himself, now at Columbia. Khalidi integrates his family history and autobiography here and there, but it's not a main strand in the book, as I had hoped it might be - as Ari Shavit had done so brilliantly in My Promised Land) Though Khalidi participated in some of the negotiations, he became increasingly skeptical of the US's role as an ostensibly honest broker and also of the PLO's woeful ineptitude in negotiation and desperation to reach a deal, any deal. In Khalidi's view, Oslo only appeared to recognize Palestinian wishes and to dangle the prospect of Palestinian statehood, which however, was never on the cards. Though he's arguing a brief, Khalidi's tone remains sober, measured, and humane throughout, adding to his persuasiveness.

Adam Kirsch, The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature (2016)

Alex Star recommended this to me, as he did the books by Halbertal reviewed below, when I asked him about books on Jewish thought and history. Kirsch's book was superb, each of its chapters a gem about a different classic. I came away feeling that my understanding of the tradition had been both broadened and deepened. In many cases - as with the medieval Zohar, the source of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, or the Tsenerne, the early modern Yiddish-language digest of Biblical stories and lessons for the shallowly literate - I had simply not been aware of these works at all. In other cases, as with Deuteronomy, Philo of Alexandria, Spinoza, and Herzl, Kirsch significantly deepened my understanding and appreciation of the texts and authors. Next I plan to read Kirsch's book about the Talmud, based on his own seven-plus year reading of it.