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Pathbreakers High and Low

A decade ago, Christopher Clark upended conventional accounts of the origins of the First World War; he has now rewritten the history of the European revolutions of 1848–1849, and proposed a new way of considering their outcomes. Analytically, what differentiates and what connects these two outstanding achievements?

What to Do With the Past?

Above the fray of mediatized controversy, a classicist situates the heritage of the ‘West’ in the long view. A culture forged by the interplay of ecclesiastical, capitalist and emancipatory forces; the catastrophes of European world conquest and their weight on the present. Does Benjamin offer a way through the impasse?

Pierre Vilar

“The interview with Pierre Vilar published here for the first time in English was conducted in March 1987. Vilar may be best known in the Anglophone world today for his tightly conceptualized epic, A History of Gold and Money, 1450–1929, and for his landmark ‘Marxist History, a . . .” read more

History in the Making

In a 1987 conversation with Peter Schöttler, the eminent historian of Spain reflects on the politics and historiography of the Civil War, the trajectory of the Annales School, the role of theory and his famous dialogue with Althusser.

Petrochemical Empire

A materialist history of capital and empire, through the lens of the German-American petrochemical industry. What does it mean to see oil, not just as an energy source or transport fuel, but as primary material for contemporary commodity culture—the chemical basis for a synthetic world of things?

Meanings of June Fourth

J. X. Zhang on Wang Chaohua, Conglai jiu meiyou jiushizhu. A participant’s clear-eyed reflections on China’s 1989 pro-democracy movement, three decades on.

Church Militant

Daniel Finn on Giuliana Chamedes, A Twentieth-Century Crusade. Unsparing account of the Vatican's political role in the European age of catastrophe.

Red Hands

If the new iconoclasm has summoned objections about erasure of the past, what sort of history does statuary impose on public spaces? An examination of the Congolese predations memorialized in Brussels’s effigy to Leopold II.

Irish Questions

Agnès Maillot on Daniel Finn, One Man’s Terrorist. Complex relations between republican-nationalist guerrillas and socialist campaigners fighting military occupation in Britain’s oldest colony.

Explaining Modi

Alpa Shah on K. S. Komireddi, Malevolent Republic. A polemic against the corruptions of India’s once-hegemonic Congress Party, charged with paving the way for Hindutva’s rise.

Machiavelli, Galileo and The Censors

Under the Inquisition, twin defences against the challenge of natural and political science, hinging on the distinction of reasoning simpliciter and sub conditione. A striking commonality in the cases of Machiavelli and Galileo, targets of the censors and progenitors of upheaval in Renaissance thought.

Gilding Postwar Britain

John Merrick on David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation. Reversing accepted narratives of 20th-century decline, a revisionist account of the 1950s as the UK’s golden age.

Impeachment as a Social Form

How to account for the recurrent forms of populism, from Bonaparte to Trump? Components of a theory in Marx’s account of variant ‘lesser’ modes of exploitation—rent, tax, interest­—and their necessary forms of appearance.

Reflections of the Rhine

Jacob Collins on Peter Schöttler, Du Rhin à la Manche. Historio­graphical treatments of the Rhine as reflective of Franco-German nationalist imaginaries.

Situationism à L’envers?

Building on the extended review by Cédric Durand in NLR 116/117, Perry Anderson seeks clues to the politics and method behind Adam Tooze’s Crashed in the author’s wider oeuvre. From the Peace of 1919 to the dollar swap-lines of 2008, the oft-heralded rise of a beneficent American hegemon.

Mesoamerican Pathways

Tony Wood on John Tutino, The Mexican Heartland. Historic struggles of central Mexico’s campesinos postulated as relay-switch for capitalism’s expansion in Latin America and beyond.

Metaphysicking the West

Dylan Riley on Heinrich August Winkler, The Age of Catastrophe. ‘The West’ as normative construct—and narrative telos—in a moralizing account from Berlin of the 20th century’s wars and revolutions.

Taking the Temperature of History

From Vichy-era rural conservatism, via communism and Furet, to a grand synthesis in ecological history, culminating decades of empirical research. Portrait of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, historical materialist and quasi-reactionary, founder of historical climatology and last outpost of Annales-school historiography.

Totentanz

Pivotal to Aby Warburg’s enigmatic Atlas Mnemosyne—which attempted to track morphological similarity from classical art down through the Renaissance—was the idea that there may be formulae for pathos. If so, what can quantitative analysis tell us about them?

Eastern Light on Western Marxism

David Broder on Domenico Losurdo, Il marxismo occidentale: Come nacque, come morì, come può rinascere. Western Marxism in the light of an ‘Eastern Marxism’ staged as its political remedy by Italy’s leading historian of liberalism.

Civilization: A Grammar

Cameos from the motley, tangled lives of history’s major spatial divisions are woven with reflections on the Americanization of French culture, revealing the grammar of hegemony—imprint, impress, imperium—behind the rise, rule and fall of civilizations.

China’s First Revolution

Wang Chaohua on Qin Hui, Zou chu dizhi. Sources and consequences of the Revolution of 1911 for China’s history, in the telling of one of its most original political thinkers. Could changes of state ever be separated from transformations of culture?

Secrets of the Ancients?

Peter Rose on Josiah Ober, Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Athenian culture attributed to the ‘democracy and growth package’ of the polis.

Pierre Bourdieu

A warm but critical appreciation of Bourdieu’s corpus, focusing on his engagement with the work of historians and asking what the latter can draw from his ambitious social theorizing and the conceptual tool-box it supplies.

A Guide to Successful Defiance

Daniel Finn on Diarmaid Ferriter, A Nation and Not a Rabble. History of the Irish revolution, between popular struggle and conservative nationalism.

Afterlives of the Commune

Francis Mulhern on Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury. Political imaginary and afterlives of the Paris Commune.

White Gold, Black Labour

Robin Blackburn on Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton. Can the history of a commodity supply a new perspective on the emergence of global capitalism?

Property Leading the People?

Dylan Riley on Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? Genealogy and idiosyncratic extension of the Marxian concept.

Incommensurate Russia

With the collisions over Ukraine, the contradictions in Russia’s relations with the West have been sharpened by sanctions and economic crisis. Perry Anderson on the spectre of Great Power status that still informs the post-multinational nation—and why, despite all the Kremlin’s attempts at integration with the US–EU, the country remains indigestible.

After Waterloo

Why the Restoration of 1815, sealed in Vienna by Emperor, Tsar and King, brought not the longed-for return to the past but the arrival of a novel form of inter-state relations—presaging the birth of the ‘international community’.

The Snuffer of Lamps

Alexander Zevin on Douglas Newton, The Darkest Days. Exploding the myth of Britain’s restraint during the countdown to war in 1914.

The Absent Double

What images arise when representation reaches its limits? Two cultural historians explore the emergence since classical antiquity of a series of visual devices for depicting massacres: from hunting scenes and martyrdoms to infernos and Doppelgänger.

Gunboat Abolitionism

Robin Blackburn on Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning. Victorian Britain’s anti-slavery crusade as accomplice of imperial expansion.

Riddles of the Book

A scholar of Islamic history discusses the formation and trajectory of the last great Abrahamic religion. Tensions between ecumenicism and jihad, pan-Islamism and division of the umma, and a bleak present of recrudescent sectarianism.

Southern Questions

Dylan Riley on Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself. Historical reframing of the New Deal for the age of Obama.

Crash of 1837

Tom Mertes on Alasdair Roberts, America’s First Great Depression. Political outcomes of economic crisis in the antebellum United States.

Projecting Empire

Esther Leslie on John Phillip Short, Magic Lantern Empire. What role did popular visions play in fin-de-siècle German colonialism?

Grandeur and Misery of the Social State

Kafka’s day job, defending injured factory workers, as starting point for an illuminating study of the West’s social-protection mechanisms. Mixed legacies and uncertain future of a system built to mitigate the tensions of industrialization.

Homo Legens

Is the book-reader an endangered species? Bolívar Echeverría traces the emergence of the individual reading subject within the maelstrom of capitalist modernity, linking their fates to argue against Homo legens’s imminent demise.

A Liberal Geoculture?

Jennifer Pitts on Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914. A seminal multi-volume account of the ‘capitalist world-economy’ reaches the long 19th century.

The Reckoning

Unlike its neighbours, Brazil has yet to confront the crimes of its military dictatorship. As a Truth Commission sifts evidence of torture, killings and disappearances—many of whose survivors are now in high office—what will be the upshot of a belated accounting with the past?

Eric Hobsbawm, 1917–2012

Appreciation of the historian as unrepentant Communist. Donald Sassoon recalls Hobsbawm’s relations with the global movement he joined in Berlin during the Popular Front era, and his contributions as scholar and panoramic comparativist.

The Black and the Red

Bryan Palmer on Steven Hirsch & Lucien van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World. Panorama of libertarian left rebels, from Latin America to Ukraine, Cairo to Korea.

Cultures of Empire: Greece and Rome

How was Roman imperial rule over Greece legitimated in the minds of conquerors and subjects alike? The mutual reverberations of an Augustan cultural revolution that brought Hellenism to the empire’s core and diverted Greeks to the glories of the past.

Bernstein’s Heirs

Dylan Riley on Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics and Ashley Lavelle, The Death of Social Democracy. Conflicting assessments of Bernstein’s legatees and the future of a reformist left.

Dispatches

Reports from Paris and Moscow on the bicentenary of 1789 and dissolution of the USSR—mitterandistes hailing the Girondins as forerunners of themselves, while Yeltsin thanks George Bush for his support—and lethal advice for Western foreign correspondents.

Ronald Fraser, 1930–2012

Tribute to the author of Blood of Spain, locating the impulse behind his oeuvre in a commitment to explore lived experience. Reconstructions of work, war, politics and subjectivity, from Napoleonic era to post-Fordist present.

Parti Pris

Gregory Elliott on Lucio Magri, The Tailor of Ulm. The trajectory of Italian communism, analysed by an unillusioned participant-observer.

The Family Firm

Tom Hazeldine on D R Thorpe, Supermac. Lengthy apologia for Harold Macmillan from a serial Tory biographer.

Politics As Daily Life

How are collective mobilizations refracted through the prism of personal experience—and in what conditions can individual histories be constituted as history? Ronald Fraser reflects on memory, method and militancy.