Advanced search

Pathways to Fascism

Robert O Paxton on Dylan Riley, The Civic Foundations of Fascism. Civil society revealed as handmaiden of fascist rule in Italy, Spain and Romania.

The Sanskrit Ecumene

Alexander Beecroft on Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. South Asia’s shift from holy to vernacular tongues measured against European parallels.

The Old Mole’s Path

Gregory Elliott on Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World. Britain’s foremost Communist historian surveys the Marxist tradition. Implementation, legacies and prospects of the Moor’s ideas.

How the Republic was Lost

Ronald Fraser on Julián Casanova, The Spanish Republic and Civil War. Sober reassessment of the Republic’s brief flowering and embattled fall, as a new generation of scholars wrestles with its contested history.

The Spectre of Analogy

Alberto Toscano on Luciano Canfora, L’uso politico dei paradigmi storici. Dissection of the uses of historical analogy, from Thucydides to Furet.

War, Crash, Slump

Tom Mertes on Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance. Bestselling portrait of the interwar world’s central bankers as originators of the Great Depression—with edifying comparisons to their modern counterparts.

Concepts of Nature

Landscapes of Ausonius, mountain retreats of Xie Tiao, mediaeval paradise-gardens: can underlying similarities of deep structure and social function be traced in the work of classical European and Chinese writers? A panoramic cross-cultural comparison of approaches to the natural world.

Spain’s Invisible Army

Alistair Hennessy on Ronald Fraser, Napoleon’s Cursed War. Masterly close-quarters account of Spanish popular resistance to the Emperor’s designs, from the author of Blood of Spain.

State of the Union

The fate of post-bellum attempts to extend egalitarian impulses across race lines and factory floors, amid the sharpening class struggles of the Gilded Age.

World Distempers

The author of Age of Extremes discusses the major developments since the end of the Cold War. Amid the turbulence of capital’s advance, what larger problems should historians seek to understand?

Converts to Colonizers?

Gabriel Piterberg on Shlomo Sand, When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?. Heterodox attempt to refute Israel’s founding myths of historical exile.

The Moor’s Italian Journeys

Peter Thomas on Cristina Corradi, Storia dei marxismi in Italia. Multiple inheritances of Labriola, Gramsci, operaismo and other currents. Can a pluralized theoretical tradition aspire to outrun reverses in praxis?

Class and Cabal

Tom Hazeldine on John Adamson, The Noble Revolt. The English Civil War re-staged as baronial rebellion, leaving socio-economic forces waiting in the wings.

Revolution to Go: Reordering 68

Alexander Zevin on Serge Audier, La Pensée anti-68. Recasting of Aron, Sartre and Debray in an attempt to make the May événements safe for liberalism.

Freedom’s Triumph?

Reviving its classical definition, ‘rule of the propertyless’, Luciano Canfora recasts the story of democracy in Europe as one of successive defeats, with lessons from Louis Napoleon on the use of suffrage as legitimation for oligarchic rule. Dylan Riley assesses a remarkable historical polemic from the Italian philologist.

The State of India

Sumit Sarkar on Guha, India after Gandhi. The subcontinental giant as ‘unnatural nation’ in the first history of the post-Independence era.

Peninsular Mythologies

Ronald Fraser on Henry Kamen, Imagining Spain. Excavation of the historical myths that have shaped peninsular self-perceptions.

World Literature Without a Hyphen

Literary studies with global ambitions are on the rise. But do they truly embrace the literatures of the world? Alexander Beecroft offers a typology of historically distinct kinds of writing that reaches further into the past and wider across human languages than any hitherto.

Words that Shook the World

Kheya Bag on Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution. The rules of the manifesto as a form, in revolutionary politics and in avant-garde art, and the history of its fortunes.

Plenty beyond Power

Tom Hazeldine on Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty. Selective account of a millennium of global trade, with force as market-maker from the Pax Mongolica to the Cold War.

The Novel: History and Theory

Moretti’s 5-volume Il romanzo recast the field of the novel—historically deeper, geographically wider, morphologically broader. What are the implications for its theory? Prose, adventure and xiaoshuo as explanatory vectors; and prevalence of older power relations in the bourgeoisie’s hegemonic literary form.

Year One in Petrograd

Steve Smith on Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power. The tumultuous first year of Soviet rule in Petrograd, meticulously rendered by a major revisionist historian.

The Philosopher and his Blacks

Robin Blackburn on Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light. Polemical assault on the French Enlightenment’s record on slavery—Condorcet’s contradictions, Diderot’s compromises, Montesquieu’s motivations.

After Rome

Assessing Chris Wickham’s sweeping historical survey, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Brent Shaw questions linear narratives of a transition from Roman Empire to feudalism. What conclusions might derive from alternative analytical categories—markets, wars, modes of belief?

Selling Europe Culture

David Simpson on Donald Sassoon, The Culture of the Europeans. Market mechanisms as makers of genre and arbiters of their survival, in a longue durée account of cultural consumption.

Role of Force in History

Gopal Balakrishnan takes issue with an ambitious attempt to apply evolutionary paradigms to human history, which would locate the wellsprings of conflict in the combative make-up of the species. Azar Gat’s War in Human Civilization as an instance of neo-social darwinism adapted to the multicultural spirit of the age.

Sidelining the West?

Vivek Chibber on C A Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Modernity’s origins sought among Safavid, Ottoman and Mughal crises—with cameo roles for Western capital and labour.

In the Atlantic Mirror

Alistair Hennessy on J H Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 1492–1830. Conquistadors and indigenous peoples, colonists and slaves populate a continental canvas, in a magisterial comparison of British and Spanish imperialism in the Americas.

Light from the Fens?

Christopher Brooke on Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler, eds, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought. Enlightenment thinking in France, Germany, England, Scotland and America, as seen by the heirs of Pocock and Skinner.

From Arras to Thermidor

Christopher Prendergast on Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity. The life, career and death of Robespierre, permeated by tensions between ends and means, terror and virtue; and the polemical furies that have clouded his legacy.

Union on the Rocks?

Tom Nairn on Michael Fry, The Union. Revisiting the circumstances of the UK’s founding pact, amid non-celebrations of the 1707 Treaty of Union and a groundswell of support for Scottish independence.

The End of the Beginning

Franco Moretti responds to criticisms of his quantative approach to literary history, from Christopher Prendergast and Roberto Schwarz. Origins, upshots—and potential limitations?—of the abstract models developed in Graphs, Maps, Trees.

Parisian Impostures

Gregory Elliott on Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left. Pathbreaking revisionist history of French liberalism’s ‘anti-totalitarian’ awakening.

From Buddenbrooks to Babbitt?

Donald Sassoon on Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through 20th-Century Europe. How the US reshaped European ideals of consumption and culture, from the stately world of Thomas Mann to that of McDonald’s and José Bové. All the way from the club to the kitchen, learning from Duluth and San Bernardino.

Soviet Ice-Breaker

Ronald Suny on Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century. The stubborn heterodoxy of a former officer of the Red Army and leading scholar of the USSR.

Imperial Margarine

Robin Blackburn on Niall Ferguson, Colossus and Empire. Rehabilitations of colonial rule for today’s proconsuls in Baghdad and Kabul.

Evolution and Literary History

A landmark engagement with Franco Moretti’s triptych of essays, Graphs, Maps, Trees. What forms of logic underpin the use of evolutionary models to lay bare the survival strategies of the detective story, or trace the mutations of a border-hopping stylistic technique? And what political implications follow from basing an account of literary history on the outcome of the market?

English Atrocities

John Newsinger on David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged and Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag. Complementary accounts of British colonial crimes in Kenya. The throttling of a liberation movement by gallows and gaol, re-examined in the shadow of Abu Ghraib.

Literature as a World

A manifesto for the accurate conjugation of the aesthetic and political, from the author of The World Republic of Letters. What is the nature of the global literary space in which writers must produce their work? The limits of analogies based on Braudel or Wallerstein, and fields as employed by Bourdieu. Hierarchy, inequality and strategies of reversal in ‘the long and merciless war of literature’.

Enigmas of Fascism

Dylan Riley on Michael Mann, Fascists and Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism. Alternative versions of the rise of a paramilitary Right in interwar Europe: were fascist movements ideologically coherent or inchoate, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary?

Exorcizing the Manifesto

Jacob Stevens on Gareth Stedman Jones, Introduction to The Communist Manifesto. Intellectual antecedents of the trumpet blast of 1848. Must today’s critics lower their political horizons?

Graphs, Maps, Trees - 3

After ‘graphs’ and ‘maps’, trees: can evolutionary theory help pattern the transformation of cultural forms and divergence of genres, through time and space? Franco Moretti’s final essay on abstract models for literary history.

The Age of Warring States

Gopal Balakrishnan on Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648. Recasting the origins of the modern state system within the matrix of emerging capitalist relations.

Graphs, Maps, Trees - 2

After ‘Graphs’ (see NLR 24), maps: geography, or social geometry? Literary spaces plotted as competing fields for industrialization, peasant rebellion, state formation. The second of Moretti’s three essays conceptualizing patterns of genre and history, form and force.

Graphs, Maps, Trees - 1

The first of three essays setting out to demonstrate the power of abstract models to revolutionize our understanding of literary history. What do the quantitative curves of novel production tell us about the interplay of markets, politics, sexes, generations, in the life and death of literary forms?

Saffron Gastronomy

Susan Watkins on D. N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow. The gastronomic legends and taboos of India’s modern Hindu chauvinism, as the BJP reshapes the country’s curricula.

Elgin in China

The sacking of the Emperor’s Summer Palace in Beijing by an Anglo-French expeditionary force was one of the high-points of nineteenth-century imperialism. The lucidity of its perpetrator, Elgin, offers a paradoxical contrast with the chorus of apologists for Anglo-American interventions today.

Uses of the Useless

Peter Burke on Françoise Waquet, Latin or the Empire of a Sign. The first comprehensive study of the role of Europe’s dead language in the culture and social structure of the modern age.

Black Acts

The hidden history of mass famines in the time of the Pax Britannica is the object of Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts. What of their post-colonial sequels, and the political lessons to be learnt from both?

The Origins of Atlantic Liberalism

Peter Gowan on Richard Tuck, Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant. The origins of ‘liberal’ interventionism by the NATO powers today in the doctrines of colonial retribution and expropriation of the seventeenth century.