Summer Reading
Here are five books by friends and colleagues that I am really looking forward to reading in full this summer. While I can’t give them full endorsements yet, I have read and heard enough from each of the projects to offer at least a strong tentative recommendation:
Martha Hodes, My Hijacking. Martha is one of the best historians of the nineteenth-century U.S. working today, and a brilliant writer (I’ve known her since we started graduate school together at Princeton). This book goes in a very different direction for her. It tells the shocking, personal story of how, returning from Israel to the U.S. as a twelve-year-old in the summer of 1970, with her sister but without her parents, her plane was hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. She and the other passengers spent agonizing days in the Jordan desert before being released. The book is three things in one: a memoir of the hijacking; a meditation on memory and childhood trauma; and a brilliant, archivally based history of the event.
Damien Tricoire, Die Aufklärung. This looks to be a genuinely new and provocative history of the Enlightenment by a brilliant and prolific colleague at the University of Trier. It’s impressively concise (especially compared to some other recent histories of the Enlightenment) and I hope it will appear in English. Tricoire takes considerable inspiration from a book published over ninety years ago: Carl Becker’s Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. Like Becker, he emphasizes the deep continuities between the Enlightenment and medieval Christian thought, very much setting himself against those scholars who view the philosophes as the handmaidens of secular liberal modernity. But while Becker made his case in a sprightly book-length essay that relied principally on his own reading of canonical Enlightenment works, Tricoire engages deeply with the historiography and plunges into little-known sources to make a powerful argument. The book should start some interesting debates (including, possibly, with me).
Michael Blaakman, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic. Blaakman, a colleague (and co-teacher) at Princeton, has written what looks to be a fabulous, ambitious study of an episode in American history that was weird and sinister in equal parts: the extraordinary bout of land speculation that occurred after the achievement of American independence. The government initially hoped to sell huge tracts of land confiscated from Native Americans to white farmers in what was then the nation’s northwest. But an astonishing rogue’s gallery of speculators rushed into the breach, often purchasing huge tracts of land for a pittance and then selling them back and forth in a mad capitalist frenzy that culminated in a spectacular collapse of the land business in the 1790’s. It should be an enormously revealing look, both at the form that “settler colonialism” took in the early United States, and at the development of American capitalism.
Arnaud Orain, Les savoirs perdus de l’économie: Contribution à l’équilibre du vivant. Orain, an economic historian newly elected to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (and a former Davis Fellow at Princeton), is best known for his wonderful La politique du merveilleux: Une autre histoire du Système de Law (1695-1795). That book offered a radical new reading of the strange episode in French history known as “Law’s System.” Orain insisted on looking beyond the sources that modern historians had identified as “economic” to reconstruct the broader cultural universe in which Law and his allies developed their ultimately disastrous plans for French finances between 1716 and 1720. The new book continues in the same direction, but on a much larger scale, offering a daring reassessment of the origins of modern economics as a whole. Orain’s basic point is that to understand what economic thought looked like before its transformation into a discipline, we can’t just look at the works that most resemble modern economic ones. We have to look at a wide variety of genres, including fictional and religious ones, and perhaps even take inspiration from them as we confront contemporary challenges, especially environmental ones.
Natasha Wheatley, The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty. Wheatley, also a colleague of mine at Princeton, has fast emerged as one of the most important practitioners of the “new international history.” This book will offer a daring reinterpretation of how key elements of modern international law came into being by training its focus on a seemingly unlikely subject: constitutional struggles in Austria-Hungary between 1848 and 1918. But as Wheatley keenly notes, these struggles highlighted the same issues that would become central at Versailles after World War I, and then on a global scale during decolonization after World War II. Above all: what are the rights of states that had been subsumed, whether by agreement or by force, into larger political units? On what basis could these former states recover new forms of sovereignty? Not coincidentally, it was Austro-Hungarian jurists whose work proved central to the development of international law after 1918. If the discussion at a packed book event at NYU’s Remarque Center a few weeks ago was any indication, this book will make waves, and generate enormous interest.