Books for 2023: History & Politics
A bunch of books that I’ll have under my radar for the coming year. I’m going to read, skim or have a glance at them.
Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century by Sergei Guriev & Daniel Treisman.
If I wanted to organise a bookclub, I would definitely choose this book to kickstart; very prescient for our political time.
“Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world. In place of overt, mass repression, rulers such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Viktor Orbán control their citizens by distorting information and simulating democratic procedures. Like spin doctors in democracies, they spin the news to engineer support. Uncovering this new brand of authoritarianism, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman explain the rise of such “spin dictators,” describing how they emerge and operate, the new threats they pose, and how democracies should respond”.
Links: Princeton University Press, Amazon.
Popular Politics and the Path to Durable Democracy by Mohammad Ali Kadivar.
Again, speaks very much to our time: why do some social movements lead to democratisation while others don’t?
“When protests swept through the Middle East at the height of the Arab Spring, the world appeared to be on the verge of a wave of democratization. Yet with the failure of many of these uprisings, it has become clearer than ever that the path to democracy is strewn with obstacles. Mohammad Ali Kadivar examines the conditions leading to the success or failure of democratization, shedding vital new light on how prodemocracy mobilization affects the fate of new democracies”.
Links: Princeton University Press, Amazon.
Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger
“Henry Kissinger, consummate diplomat and statesman, examines the strategies of six great twentieth-century figures and brings to life a unifying theory of leadership and diplomacy”. Those figures are Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew and Margaret Thatcher.
The Shortest History of Democracy by John Keane
“A bold new history of democracy from the popular assemblies of Syria-Mesopotamia and the Indian subcontinent to present-day challenges around the world. In this vigorous, illuminating history, acclaimed political thinker John Keane traces its byzantine history, from the age of assembly democracy in Athens, to European-inspired electoral democracy and the birth of representative government, to our age of monitory democracy. He gives new reasons why democracy is a precious global ideal, and shows that as the world has come to be shaped by democracy, it has grown more worldly”.
Links: Amazon.
When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Because I hate the corporate world. “McKinsey earns billions advising almost every major corporation as well as countless governments, including Britain's, the USA's and China's. It boasts of its ability to maximise efficiency while making the world a better place. Its millionaire partners and network of alumni go on to top jobs in the world's most powerful organisations. And yet, shielded by non-disclosure agreements, its work remains largely secret - until now.
In this propulsive investigation, two prize-winning journalists reveal the reality. McKinsey's work includes ruthless cost-cutting in the NHS, incentivising the prescription of opioids and executing Trump's immigration policies (the ones that put children in cages). Meanwhile its vast profits derive from a client roster that has included the coal and tobacco industries, as well as some of the world's most unsavoury despots”.
Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State by Cass R. Sunstein & Adrian Vermeule.
Cass Sunstein (Harvard Law professor) never disappoints. The book is about the ancient trade-off between technocracy (rule of experts) and democracy. It addresses the debates around the Deep State; ‘‘Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions’’.
Links: Harvard University Press, Amazon
Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s by Julian Gewirtz
The book tells a revisionist history of China’s critical economic and political reforms in the 1980s’. It argues that these reforms were much more contingent than what we think today in a sense that China could have easily gone another way.
The book “recovers the debates of the 1980s, tracing the Communist Party’s diverse attitudes toward markets, state control, and sweeping technological change, as well as freewheeling public argument over political liberalization. The administration considered bold proposals from within the party and without, including separation between the party and the state, empowering the private sector, and establishing an independent judiciary. After Tiananmen, however, Beijing systematically erased these discussions of alternative directions. Using newly available Chinese sources, Gewirtz details how the leadership purged the key reformist politician Zhao Ziyang, quashed the student movement, recast the transformations of the 1980s as the inevitable products of consensus, and indoctrinated China and the international community in the new official narrative”.
Links: Harvard University Press, Amazon.
Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe by Ian Kershaw
An insightful series of essays about 12 exceptional leaders who stood at the centre of Europe's 20th century, including Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, de Gaulle, Tito, Franco, , Adenauer, Gorbachev, Thatcher and Kohl.
The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World by Karl Schlögel
Presents the history of everyday life in the Soviet Union; a history from below. Soviet nostalgia to the max!
“The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization”.
Links: Princeton University Press, Amazon.
Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper
Well, the title says it all. “Eleven of the fifteen postwar British prime ministers went to Oxford. In Chums, Simon Kuper traces how the rarefied and privileged atmosphere of this narrowest of talent pools - and the friendships and worldviews it created - shaped modern Britain”.
Link: Amazon.
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller
“Power in the modern world - military, economic, geopolitical - is built on a foundation of computer chips. America has maintained its lead as a superpower because it has dominated advances in computer chips and all the technology that chips have enabled. (Virtually everything runs on chips: cars, phones, the stock market, even the electric grid.) Now that edge is in danger of slipping, undermined by the naïve assumption that globalising the chip industry and letting players in Taiwan, Korea and Europe take over manufacturing serves America's interests. Currently, as Chip War reveals, China, which spends more on chips than any other product, is pouring billions into a chip-building Manhattan Project to catch up to the US”.
Abolitionism: A Very Short Introduction by Richard S. Newman.
I’m keen to learn more about the role of religious activists in abolishing slavery in the UK and the US, especially the Quakers in Britain in the 18th century. The book provides “a short narrative of antislavery struggles in the 18th and 19th century world and surveys key activists and moments in the antislavery struggle”.
Links: Oxford University Press, Amazon.
On a Pedestal: A Trip around Britain's Statues by Roger Lytollis.
Speaks to the current culture wars. It’s “the first book to examine public statues around the nation. It looks at their emergence into our culture wars; the trend for portraying musicians, sports stars and comedians rather than monarchs, politicians and generals; the amazing tales of many of those commemorated on our streets”.
Links: Amazon.
Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China by William C. Kirby
“The modern university was born in Germany. In the twentieth century, the United States leapfrogged Germany to become the global leader in higher education. Will China challenge its position in the twenty-first?”
Links: Harvard University Press, Amazon.
America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present by John Ghazvinian
“In this rich, fascinating history, John Ghazvinian traces the complex story of the relations between these two nations back to the Persian Empire of the eighteenth century—the subject of great admiration by Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams—and an America seen by Iranians as an ideal to emulate for their own government”.
Petroleum and Progress in Iran: Oil, Development, and the Cold War by Gregory Brew
“From the 1940s to 1960s, Iran developed into the world's first 'petro-state', where oil represented the bulk of state revenue and supported an industrializing economy, expanding middle class, and powerful administrative and military apparatus. Drawing on both American and Iranian sources, Gregory Brew outlines how the Pahlavi petro-state emerged from a confluence of forces – some global, some local”.
Links: Cambridge University Press, Amazon.
