Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 24 Dec 2011 09:12

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 29 Dec 2011 08:35

Gerry Kearns, "Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder (Oxford Geographical and Environmental Studies)"
Publisher: Oxford University Press | ISBN: 0199230110 | edition 2009 | 320 pages

Geopolitics and Empire examines the relations between two phenomena that are central to modern conceptions of international relations. Geopolitics is the understanding of the inter-relations between empires, states, individuals, private companies, NGOs and multilateral agencies as these are expressed and shaped spatially. This view of the world achieved notoriety as the scientific basis claimed by Nazi ideologists of global conquest. However, under this or another name, similar sets of ideas were important on both sides of the Cold War and now have a renewed resonance in debates over the New World Order of the so-called Global War on Terror. Geopolitics is a way of describing the conflicts between states as constrained by both physical and economic space. It makes such conflicts seem inevitable.
The argument of the book is that this view of the world continues to appear salient because it serves to make the projection of force overseas seem an inevitable aspect of the foreign policy of states. This quasi-Darwinian view of international relations makes the pursuit of Empire appear a responsibility of larger and more powerful states. Powerful states must become Empires or submit to others seeking something similar. In its associations with Empire, the study of Geopolitics returns continually to the ideas of a British geographer who never himself used the term. Halford Mackinder is the source of many of the ideas of Geopolitics and by examining his ideas both in their original context and as they have been repeatedly rediscovered and reinvented this book contributes to current discussions of the ideology and practices of the US Empire today.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 04 Jan 2012 08:20

Richard Toye, "Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made"

Henry Holt and Co | 2010 | ISBN: 0805087958, 0312577133 | 448 pages |

The imperial aspect of Churchill's career tends to be airbrushed out, while the battles against Nazism are heavily foregrounded.

A charmer and a bully, Winston Churchill was driven by a belief that the English were a superior race, whose goals went beyond individual interests to offer an enduring good to the entire world. No better example exists than Churchill's resolve to stand alone against a more powerful Hitler in 1940 while the world's democracies fell to their knees. But there is also the Churchill who frequently inveighed against human rights, nationalism, and constitutional progress—the imperialist who could celebrate racism and believed India was unsuited to democracy. Drawing on newly released documents and an uncanny ability to separate the facts from the overblown reputation (by mid-career Churchill had become a global brand), Richard Toye provides the first comprehensive analysis of Churchill's relationship with the empire.

Instead of locating Churchill's position on a simple left/right spectrum, Toye demonstrates how the statesman evolved and challenges the reader to understand his need to reconcile the demands of conscience with those of political conformity.

Murugan · Post by **Murugan** » 06 Jan 2012 10:35

Rajiv Malhotra about finding sponsors for his 12 volume series on Indian Contribution to Science and Technology.
(in Q & A session with Indian corporates - last few minutes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29-xoooHPaw

Murugan · Post by **Murugan** » 06 Jan 2012 14:30

Rajiv Malhotra's latest book 'Being Different' has now been selected as a syllabus text in Delhi University.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 11 Jan 2012 09:16

On China and the US

Emma Rothschild on Economic History

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 11 Jan 2012 09:45

Best International Relations Books of 2011: Foreign Affairs' Reviewers Make Their Picks

Sushupti · Post by **Sushupti** » 11 Jan 2012 11:50

Breaking India: New endorsements for next print run

Amaryllis will use the foll. endorsements on the back cover of the next print run, which will be the sixth print run in less than a year. These endorsers are much more important public intellectuals than the prior ones we used in the first edition. They will also add "National Best-seller" on the front cover.

Note that the first endorsement gives the book a whole new positioning, i.e. foreign policy circles, and it is the result of a closed-door seminar and discussion on the book that I was invited to.

Endorsements:

`During my diplomatic tenure in some countries, I have had occasion to see operations on the ground of the kind that this book throws light on. But I did not have the data of the kind that this book presents for interpreting things clearly'.

-- Kanwal Sibal, former Foreign Secretary, Government of India

`This is a very important book. Full of well-documented facts, it outlines a problem seldom realized even by professional India-watchers, viz. the synergy of anti-India forces that have India in a stranglehold at the political, and to a far greater extent even at the intellectual level. Whereas Edward Said's hugely influential book Orientalism (apart from being riddled with factual errors) focused on the Muslim world, Malhotra and Neelakandan do the same job for India: they prove the profound political corruptedness of Orientalism ("India-watching", "South Asia Studies"), not just in the colonial age but even more so today. Of course established India-watchers will try to ignore or belittle its achievements, because it is their biased efforts that get exposed here, alongside the intrigues of the Churches, the State Department, the "secularist" chattering classes in Delhi and other forces interested in breaking India'.
-- Koenraad Elst, Belgian scholar and writer

`It is high time, that right thinking persons set right the history and the cultural thinking of the people of this country, particularly people from the south, because here much of the damage is being done. Fortunately, people who have been decrying Hinduism, who have been in the name of secularism, have been denigrating Hinduism, those people are exposing themselves now in a very big way. I do not want to enter into politics, but I cannot help comment it, that the recent happenings in the political world have exposed the dishonesty, the hypocrisy of those people who have been opposing Hinduism, Hindu ideas, Hindu thoughts, and Hindu Dharma. The concept of Dharma is unique to Hinduism, and those who have had the benefit of reading the commentary and reading of the Bhagavad Gita by revered Swamiji, would understand what great thinking this great land has cherished and nourished'.

-- Cho Ramaswamy, Editor, Tughlak

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RajivMalh ... ssage/1994

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 12 Jan 2012 17:46

5 Books on History

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 13 Jan 2012 08:10

Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India
Duke University Press Books | December 24, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0822342685 | 360 pages |

In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla brings research on nonwestern capitalisms into conversation with postcolonial studies to illuminate the historical roots of India’s market society. Between 1870 and 1930, the British regime in India implemented a barrage of commercial and contract laws directed at the “free” circulation of capital, including measures regulating companies, income tax, charitable gifting, and pension funds, and procedures distinguishing gambling from speculation and futures trading. Birla argues that this understudied legal infrastructure institutionalized a new object of sovereign management, the market, and along with it, a colonial concept of the public. In jurisprudence, case law, and statutes, colonial market governance enforced an abstract vision of modern society as a public of exchanging, contracting actors free from the anachronistic constraints of indigenous culture.

Birla reveals how the categories of public and private infiltrated colonial commercial law, establishing distinct worlds for economic and cultural practice. This bifurcation was especially apparent in legal dilemmas concerning indigenous or “vernacular” capitalists, crucial engines of credit and production that operated through networks of extended kinship. Focusing on the story of the Marwaris, a powerful business group renowned as a key sector of India’s capitalist class, Birla demonstrates how colonial law governed vernacular capitalists as rarefied cultural actors, so rendering them illegitimate as economic agents. Birla’s innovative attention to the negotiations between vernacular and colonial systems of valuation illustrates how kinship-based commercial groups asserted their legitimacy by challenging and inhabiting the public/private mapping. Highlighting the cultural politics of market governance, Stages of Capital is an unprecedented history of colonial commercial law, its legal fictions, and the formation of the modern economic subject in India.

Wonder if she is GD's grand daughter.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 13 Jan 2012 08:12

M.R. Haberfeld, "Police Organization and Training: Innovations in Research and Practice"
Spri ger | 2011 | ISBN: 1461407443 | 227 pages |

Criminal enterprises are growing in sophistication. Terrorism is an ongoing security threat. The general public is more knowledgeable about legal matters. These developments, among others, necessitate new methods in police work--and in training new recruits and in-service officers. Given these challenges, improvements in training are a vital means of both staying ahead of lawbreakers and delivering the most effective services to the community. Police Organization and Training surveys innovations in law enforcement training in its evolution from military-style models toward continuing professional development, improved investigation methods, and overall best practices. International dispatches by training practitioners, academics, and other experts from the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, and elsewhere emphasize blended education methods, competency-building curricula, program and policy development, and leadership concepts. These emerging paradigms and technologies, coupled with a clear focus on ethical issues, provide a lucid picture of the future of police training in both educational and law enforcement contexts.

In addition, the book's training templates are not only instructive but also adaptable to different locales. Featured in the coverage: Simulation technology as a training tool, the Investigation Skill Education Program and the Professionalizing Investigation Program, redesigning specialized advanced criminal investigation and training, a situation-oriented approach to addressing potentially dangerous situations, developments in United Nations peacekeeping training and combating modern piracy Police Organization and Training is a key resource for researcher sand policymakers in comparative criminal justice, police and public administration, and police training academies. It also has considerable utility as a classroom text in courses on policing and police administration. Includes a forward by Ronald K Noble, Secretary General of INTERPOL.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 13 Jan 2012 09:48

John Lewis Gaddis on his book "George F. Kennan: An American Life" (Video)

From wiki

John Lewis Gaddis is a noted historian of the Cold War and grand strategy, who has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 13 Jan 2012 09:56

JL Gaddis has been quite busy.

Murugan · Post by **Murugan** » 14 Jan 2012 10:59

Encyclopedia of Hinduism - 11 Volumes - Editor-in-Chief Kapil Kapoor Ex Pro-vice chancellor JNU!

Rupa

Rs. 21,000=00 for 11 volumes

Review by Non-practising Hindu Atheist - Indrajit Hazra of HT

On HT READ section page 17 Mumbai edition

http://epaper.hindustantimes.com/Public ... NDEX.SHTML

The proof of the pudding, of course, is in the eating. So it is to the encyclopedia that I, a non-practising Hindu atheist, go to. The format is straightforward and along the lines of Encyclopedia Britannica. Starting from `Abadhita-Jñana' in Volume 1 (“noncontradictable knowledge...“) to `Zoroaster (Zarathustra)', ten volumes later, the entries are crisp, provide background and foreground, and come with a bibliography (the entry on Abadhita-Jñana includes JF Staal's 1961 book, Advaita and Neoplatonism.

The production is excellent, as is the quality of images scattered across the volumes. With entries that include the `Dhammapada' (the main text of Theravada Buddhism), the `Chipko movement' (the organised environmental movement to resist the destruction of forests in India), as well as the `Saura Mandala' (solar system), clearly, this is an encyclopedia that doesn't define `Hinduism'in any narrow, proselytising way.

Encyclopedia of Hinduism fills a gap that was there for readers in English who wish to pursue knowing about one of the most prevalent thought and social systems. Despite the initial fears I had, it is a startingly good treasure trunk for any one interested in the history of ideas to dip into.

Rony · Post by **Rony** » 16 Jan 2012 06:24

China's Nightmare, America's Dream: India as the next Global Power by William H. Avery

Coming soon from a leading Indian Publishing House…

China's Nightmare, America's Dream: India as the next Global Power is a call to action:
India, awake from your slumber and grasp the greatness that is within your reach!

From the Introduction...

This is India’s moment. Like the United States a century ago and China thirty years ago,
it is clear that India is on the verge of achieving great power status. But the world will not
grant India that role simply because of its size and economic potential; India has to reach
out and grab it. The problem, however, is that India has not yet demonstrated the will to
do so.

This book is about what India needs to do in the coming decades become a great power.
It tells the story of where India has come from (great wealth over much of the last two
millennia), how far it has declined (hitting rock bottom in 1991), where it is today (still an
emerging power, but full of natural advantages), and what it must do now to reclaim its
rightful place in the world (convert those advantages into raw power).

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 22 Jan 2012 01:58

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, "A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism"
Columbia Uty Press | 2011-05-17 | ISBN: 0231702124 | 288 pages |

Beginning with the wars of ancient Persia and Greece, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam searches for the theoretical underpinnings of the "clash of civilizations" that has determined so much of our political and cultural discourse. He revisits the Crusades, colonialism, the Enlightenment, and our contemporary war on terror, and he engages with both eastern and western thinkers, such as Adorno, Derrida, Farabi, Foucault, Hegel, Khayyam, Marcuse, Marx, Said, Ibn Sina, and Weber.

Adib-Moghaddam's investigation explains the conceptual genesis of the clash of civilizations and the influence of western and Islamic representations of the other. He highlights the discontinuities between Islamism and the canon of Islamic philosophy, which distinguishes between Avicennian and Qutbian discourses of Islam, and he reveals how violence became inscribed in western ideas, especially during the Enlightenment. Expanding critical theory to include Islamic philosophy and poetry, this metahistory refuses to treat Muslims and Europeans, Americans and Arabs, and the Orient and the Occident as separate entities.

'This passionate and elegant work is a vigorous antidote to a constellation of discourses steeped in the Weltanschauung that the title of Samuel Huntington's infamous book encapsulates so well. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam's reflections are a stimulating contribution to Edward Said's legacy of radical critique of all essentialist constructions of otherness.'

(Gilbert Achcar, author (with Noam Chomsky) of Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy )

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 22 Jan 2012 02:33

Peter Heather, "Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe"
Publisher: Oxford University Press | ISBN: 0199735603 | 2010 ,752 pages |

Here is a fresh, provocative look at how a recognizable Europe came into being in the first millennium AD. With sharp analytic insight, Peter Heather explores the dynamics of migration and social and economic interaction that changed two vastly different worlds--the undeveloped barbarian world and the sophisticated Roman Empire--into remarkably similar societies and states.

The book's vivid narrative begins at the time of Christ, when the Mediterranean circle, newly united under the Romans, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced, and culturally developed civilization--one with philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture, even garbage collection. The rest of Europe, meanwhile, was home to subsistence farmers living in small groups, dominated largely by Germanic speakers. Although having some iron tools and weapons, these mostly illiterate peoples worked mainly in wood and never built in stone. The farther east one went, the simpler it became: fewer iron tools and ever less productive economies. And yet ten centuries later, from the Atlantic to the Urals, the European world had turned. Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread, and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was broken. The emergence of larger and stronger states in the north and east had, by the year 1000, brought patterns of human organization into much greater homogeneity across the continent. Barbarian Europe was barbarian no longer.

Bringing the whole of first millennium European history together for the first time, and challenging current arguments that migration played but a tiny role in this unfolding narrative, Empires and Barbarians views the destruction of the ancient world order in the light of modern migration and globalization patterns. The result is a compelling, nuanced, and integrated view of how the foundations of modern Europe were laid.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 22 Jan 2012 08:15

Foreign Affairs Archive

Making Modernity Work - Gideon Rose

Lenin and Mussolini - Harold J. Laski
Lenin - Victor Chernov
Stalin’s Power - Paul Scheffer
Making the Collective Man in Soviet Russia - William Henry Chamberlin
The Philosophic Basis of Fascism - Giovanni Gentile
Radical Forces in Germany - Erich Koch-Weser
Hitler: Phenomenon and Portent - Paul Scheffer
Hitler’s Reich: The First Phase - Hamilton Fish Armstrong
Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century - Isaiah Berlin
Of Liberty - Benedetto Croce
The Position and Prospects of Communism - Harold J. Laski
Nationalism and Economic Life - Leon Trotsky
The Reconstruction of Liberalism - C. H. McIlwain
The Economic Tasks of the Postwar World - Alvin H. Hansen and C. P. Kindleberger
Freedom and Control - Geoffrey Crowther
The Split Between Asian and Western Socialism - David J. Saposs
The Myth of Post–Cold War Chaos - G. John Ikenberry
The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers - Azar Gat
How Development Leads to Democracy - Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel
The Post-Washington Consensus - Nancy Birdsall and Francis Fukuyama

The Future of History - Francis Fukuyama
The Democratic Malaise - Charles A. Kupchan
The Strange Triumph of Liberal Democracy - Shlomo Avineri

A few paragraphs are free for each of these articles.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 25 Jan 2012 00:59

Pioneer Review: God's Soldiers

I would have used a different title for the review. God implies some divine sanction for their terrorism.

The Caliphate’s Soldiers: The Lashkar-e-Tayyeba’s Long War

Author: Wilson John

Publisher: Amaryllis

Price: 450

Wilson John’s book takes a close look at Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and exposes its links with the ruling establishment in Islamabad, writes Ved Marwah

Today, Islamist terrorists pose the most serious threat to world peace. The September 11 attacks shook the US out of its complacent belief that Al Qaeda and other jihadi outfits had a limited agenda and the Western world was safe from their barbarous brand of terrorism.

Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) is one such group. Its devious role in spreading its tentacles across the world has been carefully hidden by its public posturing of focusing only on India. The US conveniently indulged in doublespeak and invited Pakistan, the epicentre of terrorism, to be the frontline ally in its war on terror. It intentionally ignored the fact that LeT was the creation of Pakistan.

It also chose to disregard all evidences regarding the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) supporting the jihadi network in Pakistan. This delusion was shattered after the killing of Osama bin Laden by the US Navy Seals in Abbottabad, the garrison town near Islamabad, in May 2011. Pakistan is a problem and not the solution.

Wilson John, a Senior Fellow with the Observer Research Foundation, a public policy think tank in New Delhi, has written this well-researched, well-argued and timely book to give authentic information about how LeT and its sponsors — the ISI and, in fact, the entire ruling establishment in Islamabad — is nurturing these jihadi groups to re-establishing the Caliphate and the domination of Islam in the world. Their main targets “include, beside India, the Southeast Asian countries in the Indian Ocean, across the Pacific to the US and ultimately Pakistan itself”. The book has been rightly called “a primer in the best sense of the word” by Ashley J Tellis, a well-known security expert.

John has given facts and figures to underline LeT’s role as the strategic ally of the Pakistan Army, its deep anchorage in the society, and its power to influence public opinion and events in the subcontinent. The book exposes the clandestine but extensive network of terror that runs through the corridors of power and politics in Pakistan. It reveals how LeT shares more than ideological affinity with Al Qaeda. Hafiz Saeed, the founder of LeT, was greatly influenced by Laden. LeT’s links with Al Qaeda have largely remained obscure, but the author has given enough tell-tale details about its genetic links and its strategic posture to keep a low profile while focusing on India. There is no other terrorist group that is so popular among the Pakistani people and enjoys total support of the army and the ruling establishment.

According to the author, LeT has trained more than 500,000 men and women since the late 1990s. It is deeply involved in strengthening its ideological base. Besides schools, colleges, madarsas and technical institutes, “it produces graduates and technically-skilled personnel in hundreds every year who find employment in government, private sector and self-owned business”. It has been especially targeting the military by getting many of its cadres recruited in the armed forces. It has also strengthened its role in the politico-administrative system of Pakistan.

LeT has been quite successful in building a network of recruitment centre across the world. And, its training camps are openly run in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, West Punjab, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan. A number of retired Pakistani military officers are among its trainers.

LeT, the armed wing of Markaz Dawat ul-Irshad, was formed in 1990. It is “more nuanced, layered and hidden deep within the moorings of the group, its beliefs, its strategic objectives, tactical goals and its leadership”. While Al Qaeda derives ideological inspiration from the Sunni Wahhabi movement, LeT is closer to Ahl-e-Hadith that is today active in spreading extremism and communal divide in Jammu & Kashmir. LeT’s primary focus is to free Kashmir and Palestine from the ‘non-believers’. But let there be no mistake that, like Al Qaeda, the Muslim domination in the world is its ultimate objective.

After the Markaz was banned in 2001, except the change in its name to Jamat-ud Dawa, nothing else was changed. The LeT network is as active as before the ban. The terror footprints revealed in the David Headley case give a glimpse of the group’s evolution from a local organisation to transnational one, with capacity to network with disparate elements across the world. It continues to be the most active jihadi group in India. It has successfully created a number of home-grown Islamist outfits in various parts of the country to hide its footprints. Its strong links with Indian Mujahideen (IM) have been revealed in more than one recent terrorist incident. Amir Raza of LeT is one the key masterminds behind IM. The author has given details about how it has spread its tentacles in Bangladesh. It is close to HuJI, and has base in Nepal. Its recent forays into the Maldives have sounded alarm bells in both Male and New Delhi.

According to John, LeT is today the most potent force in Asia, capable of destabilising the region and pushing the world into a nuclear confrontation. He fears “great possibility of Al Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons” sooner rather than later through the help of groups like LeT and their sponsors. The world should prepare for any such eventuality even if some security experts do not take the possibility too seriously. The chapters — ‘Command and Control’, ‘Commando Training Centre’, ‘Recruitment and Terror as Strategy’ — give a lot of useful information about the outfit and its operations, but the one on the ‘Business of Jihad’ is the most revealing as well as interesting.The activities of LeT in view of what is happening in Pakistan today should be of special interest in India, not only to the security experts and policy-makers but also lay readers interested in knowing about the region. My only criticism is that the book should have had stricter editing to avoid a few repetitions.

The reviewer, a retired IPS officer, is former Governor of Manipur and Jharkhand

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 27 Jan 2012 07:44

On Dissent

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 29 Jan 2012 21:28

Afghanistan: The Best Way to Peace

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 02 Feb 2012 10:34

The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures. In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the mistaken belief that the regime of the Shah in Iran was secure and stable in 1978, and the claim that Iraq had active WMD programs in 2002.

The Iran case is based on a recently declassified report Jervis was commissioned to undertake by CIA thirty years ago and includes memoranda written by CIA officials in response to Jervis's findings. The Iraq case, also grounded in a review of the intelligence community's performance, is based on close readings of both classified and declassified documents, though Jervis's conclusions are entirely supported by evidence that has been declassified.

In both cases, Jervis finds not only that intelligence was badly flawed but also that later explanations analysts were bowing to political pressure and telling the White House what it wanted to hear or were willfully blind were also incorrect. Proponents of these explanations claimed that initial errors were compounded by groupthink, lack of coordination within the government, and failure to share information. Policy prescriptions, including the recent establishment of a Director of National Intelligence, were supposed to remedy the situation.

In Jervis's estimation, neither the explanations nor the prescriptions are adequate. The inferences that intelligence drew were actually quite plausible given the information available. Errors arose, he concludes, from insufficient attention to the ways in which information should be gathered and interpreted, a lack of self-awareness about the factors that led to the judgments, and an organizational culture that failed to probe for weaknesses and explore alternatives. Evaluating the inherent tensions between the methods and aims of intelligence personnel and policymakers from a unique insider's perspective, Jervis forcefully criticizes recent proposals for improving the performance of the intelligence community and discusses ways in which future analysis can be improved.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 02 Feb 2012 10:43

Books on Tibet

Agnimitra · Post by **Agnimitra** » 03 Feb 2012 20:43

The Caliphate's Soldiers: The Lashkar-e-Tayyeba's Long War by Wilson John

With thousands of recruitment and training centers across Pakistan, funds pouring in from the Gulf and links from Nepal to Sri Lanka, Lashkar-e-Toiba has flourished since the Mumbai attacks of November 2008. Detailing LeT's growth into "the world's most powerful and resourceful terror consultancy firm" - including a Department of Martyrs - this book offers an excellent primer on LeT's global ambitions.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 04 Feb 2012 07:27

Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 05 Feb 2012 01:24

Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama (First Chapter)

On Unusual Histories

Interview: Zbigniew Brzezinski (Video)

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 09 Feb 2012 09:30

On French Attitudes to America

On Public Finance

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 10 Feb 2012 08:35

On Legacies of World War One

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 12 Feb 2012 22:05

Jim Baggott, "The First War of Physics: The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb, 1939-1949"
Publisher: P.ga..s | ISBN: 1605980846 | 2010 | 584 pages

An epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding: the monumental race to build the first atomic weapons.
Rich in personality, action, confrontation, and deception, The First War of Physics is the first fully realized popular account of the race to build humankind's most destructive weapon. The book draws on declassified material, such as MI6's Farm Hall transcripts, coded soviet messages cracked by American cryptographers in the Venona project, and interpretations by Russian scholars of documents from the soviet archives.

Jim Baggott weaves these threads into a dramatic narrative that spans ten historic years, from the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 to the aftermath of 'Joe-1,' August 1949's first Soviet atomic bomb test. Why did physicists persist in developing the atomic bomb, despite the devastation that it could bring? Why, despite having a clear head start, did Hitler's physicists fail? Could the soviets have developed the bomb without spies like Klaus Fuchs or Donald Maclean? Did the allies really plot to assassinate a key member of the German bomb program? Did the physicists knowingly inspire the arms race? The First War of Physics is a grand and frightening story of scientific ambition, intrigue, and genius: a tale barely believable as fiction, which just happens to be historical fact. 32 black-and-white illustrations

Read this book to understand the West's drive to blame scientists and eliminate them in other societies.

By getting the scientists, they remove the capabilities.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 13 Feb 2012 01:27

Alex Bellos, "Here's Looking at Euclid: A Surprising Excursion Through the Astonishing World of Math"
Fre e Pr ess | ISBN: 1416588256 | 2011 | 336 pages |

Too often math gets a bad rap, characterized as dry and difficult. But, Alex Bellos says, "math can be inspiring and brilliantly creative. Mathematical thought is one of the great achievements of the human race, and arguably the foundation of all human progress. The world of mathematics is a remarkable place."Bellos has traveled all around the globe and has plunged into history to uncover fascinating stories of mathematical achievement, from the breakthroughs of Euclid, the greatest mathematician of all time, to the creations of the Zen master of origami, one of the hottest areas of mathematical work today. Taking us into the wilds of the Amazon, he tells the story of a tribe there who can count only to five and reports on the latest findings about the math instinct—including the revelation that ants can actually count how many steps they’ve taken. Journeying to the Bay of Bengal, he interviews a Hindu sage about the brilliant mathematical insights of the Buddha, while in Japan he visits the godfather of Sudoku and introduces the brainteasing delights of mathematical games.Exploring the mysteries of randomness, he explains why it is impossible for our iPods to truly randomly select songs. In probing the many intrigues of that most beloved of numbers, pi, he visits with two brothers so obsessed with the elusive number that they built a supercomputer in their Manhattan apartment to study it. Throughout, the journey is enhanced with a wealth of intriguing illustrations, such as of the clever puzzles known as tangrams and the crochet creation of an American math professor who suddenly realized one day that she could knit a representation of higher dimensional space that no one had been able to visualize. Whether writing about how algebra solved Swedish traffic problems, visiting the Mental Calculation World Cup to disclose the secrets of lightning calculation, or exploring the links between pineapples and beautiful teeth, Bellos is a wonderfully engaging guide who never fails to delight even as he edifies. Here’s Looking at Euclid is a rare gem that brings the beauty of math to life.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 14 Feb 2012 09:35

On Travelling in the Muslim World

Prem · Post by **Prem** » 14 Feb 2012 10:34

Salman Khurshid’s amateurish & deeply biased play - 'Sons of Babur'
http://dharmanext.blogspot.in/2012/01/b ... urish.html

Despite the power vacuum during times when Utopian Idealism reached its pinnacle under Buddhism’s influence, a definite politico-cultural identity prevailed within India before Islam’s advent. These values were revived through Saint Shankara in 8th Century and Bhakti movements that galvanized the entire nation wherefore indigenous leaders emerged.
It is this Indian identity that Indian Muslims have repeatedly denied.The author’s dilemma is two pronged. On one hand is a resurgent Hindu majority, while on the other a Muslim community that resists Renaissance and acceptance of pre-Mughal influences.The former is easy to resolve since Hindus increasingly show preference for secularism and good governance, rejecting religious dogmatism. Distrust of polity continues over the latter’s opportunism in using Muslims as vote banks, Partition’s trauma, infiltration, etc.The play handles challenges facing the Muslim community vaguely even as the same resists attacks from imported Salafism, while desperately needing to look within and deal with its Indian heritage. He concedes that Muslims need to accept that modern laws have outpaced manmade Sharia and that Muslims are yet to come to terms with the fact that their rule over Hindus is over.Khurshid repeatedly invokes Sufism to legitimize Islam’s mystical aspect but forgets that the hordes that invaded India did not come here as philosophers, rather with swords to run their writ. They were bigoted medieval barbarians, attempting to assimilate a people far beyond their sensibilities. Moreover, all Indian Muslims are not Sufi.Immigrant Americans apologize to Native Americans; Germans for the wars; Modern India denounces casteism, yet we do not see any such bold introspection in this play.The protagonist’s defense of democracy is a moral sham; the play being dedicated to the political toy, Sonia Gandhi

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 16 Feb 2012 08:10

B.S. Yadav, Man Mohan, "Ancient Indian Leaps into Mathematics"
| 2011 | ISBN: 0817646949 | 233 pages |

This book presents contributions of mathematicians covering topics from ancient India, placing them in the broader context of the history of mathematics. Although the translations of some Sanskrit mathematical texts are available in the literature, Indian contributions are rarely presented in major Western historical works. Yet some of the well-known and universally-accepted discoveries from India, including the concept of zero and the decimal representation of numbers, have made lasting contributions to the foundation of modern mathematics. Through a systematic approach, this book examines these ancient mathematical ideas that were spread throughout India, China, the Islamic world, and Western Europe.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 16 Feb 2012 08:14

Books on World War II

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 17 Feb 2012 09:05

A book for understanding British society in interwar years between WWI and WWII.

Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men After the First World War By Virginia Nicholson
Publisher: OUP 2008 | 328 Pages | ISBN: 0195378229 |

Almost three-quarters of a million British soldiers lost their lives during the First World War, and many more were incapacitated by their wounds, leaving behind a generation of women who, raised to see marriage as "the crown and joy of woman's life," suddenly discovered that they were left without an escort to life's great feast.
Drawing upon a wealth of moving memoirs, Singled Out tells the inspiring stories of these women: the student weeping for a lost world as the Armistice bells pealed, the socialite who dedicated her life to resurrecting the ancient past after her soldier love was killed, the Bradford mill girl whose campaign to better the lot of the "War spinsters" was to make her a public figure--and many others who, deprived of their traditional roles, reinvented themselves into something better. Tracing their fates, Nicholson shows that these women did indeed harbor secret sadness, and many of them yearned for the comforts forever denied them--physical intimacy, the closeness of a loving relationship, and children. Some just endured, but others challenged the conventions, fought the system, and found fulfillment outside of marriage. From the mill-girl turned activist to the debutante turned archeologist, from the first woman stockbroker to the "business girls" and the Miss Jean Brodies, this book memorializes a generation of young women who were forced, by four of the bloodiest years in human history, to stop depending on men for their income, their identity, and their future happiness. Indeed, Singled Out pays homage to this remarkable generation of women who, changed by war, in turn would change society.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 18 Feb 2012 07:18

Revolutionary reading lists

Balik Terrorism: The Return of the Abu Sayyaf by Zachary Abuza (PDF)

A technical treatise that provides great insight into the origins, organization, and operations of a primary terrorist group opposing the Philippine government.

Murugan · Post by **Murugan** » 21 Feb 2012 11:29

X posted

Ashoka
By Charles Allen

(The book has its own misunderstandings because of author's biases as it is written with a Britsh mindset, still a good read about Ashok and about spread of Buddhism and how India was re-introduced to her pre-islamic past. It is a painstaking work, though sometimes it looks like Sir William Jones's biography)

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 22 Feb 2012 08:26

On Immigration and Multiculturalism in Britain

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 22 Feb 2012 08:59

Poker Lessons From Richelieu: A Portrait of the Statesman as Gamble

By David A. Bell

Armand-Jean du Plessis, better known to history as Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), spent most of his career contending for and then exercising control over a deeply divided, indebted, and dysfunctional superpower. His country’s politics were vicious, and its government paralyzingly complex. In short, if he were dropped into Washington today, he might feel right at home.

French historians have long hailed Richelieu as the architect of the absolute monarchy that dominated Europe throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Henry Kissinger, in Diplomacy, dubbed him “the father of the modern European state system.” Even critics, such as Alexandre Dumas, who made him the villain of The Three Musketeers, often cannot help admiring Richelieu’s icy savoir-faire, which is captured in the famous portrait by Philippe de Champaigne that adorns the cover of Jean-Vincent Blanchard’s new biography. As Richelieu intended, it shows a master political player with the ruthlessness necessary to achieve his goals, chief among them raising France to greatness.

Richelieu was indeed a model statesman, but not for the reasons usually given. Despite his long-standing reputation (which Blanchard largely endorses), the cardinal was not really a great institution builder, still less someone bent on making France what Blanchard calls “a modern administrative state.” Nor do Kissinger’s claims about Richelieu inaugurating an international order based on raison d’état hold up. The cardinal was hardly the first European statesman to place national interest above moral or religious imperatives, and the modern European state system, with its power balancing and alliances, did not really take firm shape until the Peace of Westphalia, six years after Richelieu’s death. Richelieu was, however, one of the greatest examples in history of the politician as high-stakes gambler, notable less for what he did than for how he did it.

Richelieu’s qualities as a statesman emerge most sharply when he is compared with other leaders of the period -- particularly his great rival, Spain’s chief minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, who lacked both the cardinal’s keen foresight and his taste for risk but nonetheless came close to defeating him on many occasions. For this reason, the single best recent treatment of Richelieu remains the British historian J. H. Elliott’s brilliant 1984 study Richelieu and Olivares. Blanchard’s biography is engaging and well written but has a more sprawling and somewhat thinner feel. As a specialist in seventeenth-century literature, Blanchard has trouble situating Richelieu in the broader sweep of European history, particularly when it comes to the complex dynamics of ancien régime administration and diplomacy. Still, he has read the most important primary sources carefully and has a good eye for colorfully illustrative passages, along with a genuine sensitivity to his subject’s personal strengths and weaknesses. Those who know Richelieu only from the movies will find in Blanchard’s pages a very human character who triumphed in a setting far more frightening than anything Hollywood has recently devised.

ORBITING JUPITER

The tone of Richelieu’s career was set by the savage and unpredictable political culture into which he emerged. The first two kings of France in his lifetime, Henry III and Henry IV, were both assassinated. The next king, Louis XIII, had his chief minister, Concino Concini, shot in the street, after which the man’s naked body was ripped to pieces on the Pont Neuf. (Some reports claimed that members of the frenzied crowd even cooked and ate Concini’s heart.) Several other leading figures of the period ended their days on the executioner’s block, including the unhappy Comte de Chalais, whose headsman bungled the job and ended up frantically chopping away at his screaming victim with a small hatchet.

Richelieu himself was regularly in danger of meeting a similar fate. Chalais had plotted to have him stabbed to death, and another enemy tried to put a bomb under the seat of his carriage. Richelieu was Concini’s protégé, and himself escaped from the angry Parisian crowds only because he had the presence of mind to order his retainers to start shouting, “Vive le roi!” (Long live the king!). Surviving in such a milieu, to say nothing of flourishing, required brilliant timing, courage, an uncanny ability to read and manipulate others, and a willingness to take dramatic risks -- all qualities Richelieu had in abundance.

Richelieu rose to national prominence during a particularly perilous time, the years following the assassination of Henry IV in 1610. The popular monarch’s successor, Louis XIII, was just eight years old when he took the throne and grew into an awkward, insecure youth with a bad stutter, psychologically overwhelmed by his ferociously ambitious mother, Marie de Médicis, who served as his regent. Sensing an opportunity to claw back some power from the monarchy, French nobles staged a series of revolts, and eventually Louis rebelled against his mother and sought to take control of the government in his own right. (One step in this process was the killing of Concini, who had been Marie’s favorite adviser.)

It was Marie who originally saw the potential in Richelieu -- at the start of this period, a relatively minor noble from western France who had joined the clergy merely to secure his family’s rights to the revenues of a bishopric. She quickly brought him into the inner circles of power, placing him in charge of French foreign policy in 1616. In 1618, after war broke out between mother and son, Louis banished Richelieu to Avignon. But the young bishop managed to convince the king of his loyalty and proved instrumental in bringing about a family reconciliation of sorts. Following the 1621 death of Louis’ chief adviser, the Duc de Luynes, Richelieu came to the fore, eventually becoming the king’s most trusted and important councilor. In 1622, the pope agreed to make him a cardinal.

For the next two decades, Richelieu was a crucial player in French and European politics, but with his position resting on his ability to please and manipulate his vain, stubborn, and temperamental royal master -- whom Blanchard nicely describes as “worn out by inner torments, military battles, and furious hunting.” As a Spanish diplomat of the time put it, Richelieu had come “closer to Jupiter, but also to his thunder.” Blanchard might have dwelt somewhat more on this fascinating relationship, in which Richelieu not only flattered the king endlessly but also made sure the monarch was surrounded by attractive young men. Above all, Richelieu became a mentor to Louis, someone able to scold the king for his shortcomings, sometimes even in public.

As Richelieu’s star and influence rose, Marie grew resentful of her former protégé, and a showdown became inevitable. On November 11, 1630, Marie exploded at the cardinal in front of the king, showering him with insults and forcing him to beg for mercy on his knees. Louis, apparently struck dumb by the outburst, left without acknowledging Richelieu, and Marie’s supporters rejoiced that their nemesis the cardinal had fallen. That evening, the king summoned Richelieu to his hunting lodge at Versailles -- for his execution, the cardinal thought, assuming he had finally lost the high-stakes poker game of court politics. Overcoming his urge to flee, Richelieu obeyed the king’s command and discovered that he was in fact being restored to royal favor, in an episode that would become known as the Day of the Dupes, with Marie’s leading allies arrested instead the next morning. By 1642, Louis could write to Richelieu, “I have never loved you so much. We have been together for too long ever to be separated.”

THE GAMBLER

Richelieu’s statecraft involved as much dangerous risk taking as his domestic political career. In 1618, what would become known as the Thirty Years’ War broke out -- Europe’s last great spasm of religious warfare, in which a furious conflict between a series of Protestant states, on one side, and the House of Hapsburg and its Catholic allies, on the other, tore the center of the continent apart. France, a Catholic state itself, nevertheless intervened on the Protestant side, hoping to supplant the Austrian and Spanish Hapsburgs as the strongest power in Europe.

Richelieu initially felt that France could do no more than subsidize Protestant efforts and engage in strictly limited military campaigns. Ironically, he feared treachery from the Huguenots, France’s own small Protestant minority, who had lingering grievances against the French state and control of several strategic towns, including the Atlantic port of La Rochelle. Realizing that he had to address the Huguenot threat before intervening seriously abroad, in 1627 Richelieu laid siege to La Rochelle and starved the city into submission. (By the end of the operation, even the rats had disappeared, and the starving locals were reduced to eating boiled shoe leather.)

Then, Richelieu made one of his boldest moves. With France exhausted and indebted, he quickly raised another army and sent it on the dangerous route across the Alps into northern Italy, where an unstable political situation offered France the chance to break the Hapsburgs’ extended supply lines. The gamble paid off, and a few months after the fall of La Rochelle, Richelieu and Louis watched French forces storm in triumph across the northern Italian plains.

After its victory in Italy, France continued to encourage and subsidize Protestant powers, such as the Netherlands and Sweden, without committing fully to the broader war. A series of Catholic victories in the early 1630s, however, finally convinced Richelieu to go all in, and in May 1635, he sent a gaudily dressed herald across the border to Spanish-ruled Brussels to issue a formal declaration of war.

At first, the gambit seemed to go terribly wrong. Spanish forces invaded France’s northern provinces in the summer of 1636, capturing several strategic fortresses and coming within a day’s ride of the capital. Panicky crowds flooded the streets of Paris calling for Richelieu’s head. The cardinal fell into a deep despair. Yet François-Joseph le Clerc du Tremblay, the so-called Gray Eminence, who stayed at Richelieu’s side throughout much of his career, managed to rouse him, and recovering his nerve, France’s chief minister walked out onto the Pont Neuf to much the same spot where his predecessor, Concini, had been butchered two decades earlier. Admiring his nerve, the crowd cheered the man it had just been cursing. Meanwhile, the French armies held, then gained a respite when the Spanish broke off their offensive to rebuff an attack from the Dutch. Over the next six years -- the last six years of Richelieu’s life -- France seized large new territories and established itself as a leading power in Europe.

THE CARDINAL’S VIRTUES

Many today might dismiss Richelieu’s brand of leadership as archaic, something with little relevance to the far more ponderous process of modern statecraft, with its armies of bureaucratic functionaries analyzing all policy options in mind-numbing detail. Yet from Munich to the Cuban missile crisis to nuclear proliferation, recent history is replete with instances of international politics resembling nothing so much as a poker game. And was not the 2003 invasion of Iraq very much a gamble, with the Bush administration having its own, not-entirely-un-Richelieu-like power behind the throne, manipulating an inexperienced young leader struggling to emerge from the shadow of his powerful parent? In this sense, the survival skills that politicians develop in their rise to power at home may serve them surprisingly well when they take on responsibility for international affairs, and Richelieu may offer a model of sorts.

As for his historical significance in France’s long-term development, the record is less clear. Richelieu won important victories over his country’s great rivals, Hapsburg Austria and Spain, but he did not consolidate those triumphs. He raised tax revenues manyfold, allowing France to fight effectively in the Thirty Years’ War, but in the process he squeezed the peasantry and provincial elites so brutally that he provoked a series of ruinous revolts that culminated, soon after his death, in outright civil war. And although Richelieu improvised brilliantly, as when he sent out agents called intendants, armed with new powers, to help collect taxes and control the army in the provinces, he did not design permanent new administrative structures.

It would take another monarch and another chief minister -- Louis XIV and Jean-Baptiste Colbert -- to take the story further in the decades that followed. They were the ones who secured the French state’s modern borders, who cooperated more closely with provincial elites and extracted even greater sums from the country with considerably less strife (in order to wage even more ambitious wars), and who turned Richelieu’s intendants into established arms of the central state. Richelieu, in short, did not create modern France nor make it the leading force in Europe. But his actions paved the way for his successors to do so, which is no small feat.

Freedom’s Secret Recipe: Balancing the State, Law, and Accountability

By Michael Mann

Francis Fukuyama shot to fame with a 1989 essay called "The End of History?" which he expanded into a 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. His thesis was a reworking of the "end of ideology" argument propounded in the 1950s by Daniel Bell and others, with an even more emphatic twist. "What we may be witnessing," Fukuyama declared, "is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." The argument seemed hubristic, a product of the era's American triumphalism.

Two decades later, Fukuyama has revisited the question of political development in another, more sophisticated book, The Origins of Political Order -- the first of a projected two volumes, with the initial one running from prehistory to the French Revolution and its successor planned to take the story into the present and the future. Fukuyama still believes in the virtues of Western liberal democracy but now asks where it came from and how it might be sustained. At 608 pages, the first volume is long and dense, even though written with great fluency, and few are likely to read it cover to cover. But they should, since it is a brilliant book demonstrating great independence of mind and an astonishing breadth of knowledge.

THE SECULAR TRINITY

Fukuyama starts by asking why only a few nations behave like Denmark. That small Scandinavian country, he notes, combines three elements essential to political freedom: an orderly and efficient state, the rule of law, and government accountability to the people. The "miracle of modern politics," he argues, is the balancing of a powerful, effective state with a transparent legal system and representative assemblies. As he demonstrates in a survey of political regimes across history, the combination of all three components in a stable liberal democracy is a rarity, generated by long and winding historical paths and much good fortune.

Fukuyama's emphasis on an orderly and efficient state is notable and represents just one of his deviations from standard liberal theory, with its emphasis on free markets and small government as the recipes for progress and liberty. Fukuyama loves to take on opposing arguments, politely laying them out before declaring that, unfortunately, they bear no relation to reality. Against social contract theory, for example, he writes, "Human beings never existed in a presocial state. The idea that human beings at one time existed as isolated individuals, who interacted either through anarchic violence (Hobbes) or in pacific ignorance of one another (Rousseau), is not correct."

As for that economic favorite, "the tragedy of the commons," in which commonly held property supposedly stifles individuals' drives to improve it, he calls it a myth. There is no evidence anywhere, he says, that an absence of private property rights has been a problem for economic or political development. Nor must the legal protection of property rights be absolute for development to occur; such protections must only be good enough, as they were in early modern Europe or contemporary China. (He might have benefited here from the work of the political scientist Jean Oi and the sociologist Andrew Walder, who usefully write about the contemporary Chinese case by considering property rights as a "bundle," including rights to control property, derive income from it, and transfer it.)

Such forays against utilitarianism make Fukuyama a card-carrying sociologist, and sure enough, the influence of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber (although not Marx) is clear and acknowledged. He does not refer to Karl Polanyi (that will probably come in the second volume), but his text offers emphatic support for Polanyi's notion, taken further by recent economic sociologists, that market economies are not natural but rather always embedded in social structures.

Weber also seems to have inspired Fukuyama's argument that the main enemies of the efficient, orderly state are the patrimonialism, cronyism, and corruption of family, kin, and tribal networks that protect their privileges and exact rents. He calls this "the tyranny of cousins," since it stifles economic and political development, and he devotes much space to examining how various regimes have sought to combat it. China developed competitive examinations for its scholar-gentry bureaucrats to avoid letting jobs go to the kin of power holders. The Abbasid caliphs and the Ottoman Turks used abducted slaves (the Mamluks and the Janissaries, respectively) as officials and soldiers, since the slaves lacked blood ties to any local tribes and could not pass on their offices to their children. And the medieval Catholic Church under Pope Gregory VII introduced celibacy for priests in order to avoid kinship cronyism. Reliance on cousins and tribalism, Fukuyama suggests, remain the default modes of political organization for humans when things go wrong -- as they often do.

If Fukuyama is at his most insightful and original when discussing the need for an effective, orderly state, he is also sharp in stressing the need for the rule of law and accountability to substantial numbers of citizens. Here, he sees precolonial India as a counterexample to early China. China developed a strong state that protected citizens against the tyranny of cousins but left them open to the tyranny of the state itself. The Indian caste system produced a strong civil society that protected subjects from state tyranny but exposed them instead to cousins writ large in the form of castes. A combination of the two countries' traditions, he notes, would have provided a "better form of freedom," for that "emerges when there is a strong state and a strong society, two centers of power that are able to balance and offset each other."

Moving effortlessly from ancient global history to its modern European counterpart, Fukuyama discusses "weak absolutism" in Spain and France, "successful absolutism" in Russia, "failed oligarchy" in Poland, and, finally, "accountable government" in England, which, after 1688, became the first society to establish all three elements of his secular trinity. Other western European countries influenced by the Reformation, such as Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, "also succeeded in putting together the state, rule of law and accountability in a single package by the 19th century."

Thus, he argues, the three elements of modern political order had evolved separately in different premodern civilizations: "China had developed a powerful state early on; the rule of law existed in India, the Middle East, and Europe; and in Britain, accountable government appeared for the first time." Aware that this sounds a bit like Whig history or British triumphalism, he qualifies the argument by emphasizing the role of contingency. Development, he says, was "complex and context-specific." For example, the decline in importance of extended families in early modern Europe resulted in part from the power of the medieval church. This meant that "an emerging capitalist economy in Italy, England, and the Netherlands in the sixteenth century did not have to overcome the resistance of large corporately organized kinship groups with substantial property to protect, as in India and China."

HISTORY MAN

Religion and ideology play an important part in Fukuyama's story. Where they establish a power base independent of the state, he claims -- as have Hinduism in India, Islam in the Middle East, and Christianity in Europe -- the rule of law develops most. Thus, he rejects reductionist attempts to explain political and social institutions as mere reflections of underlying economic or technological structures: "It is impossible to develop any meaningful theory of political development without treating ideas as fundamental causes of why societies differ and follow distinct development paths." And in his account of the consolidation and expansion of states through the ages, military factors also often play a more important role than economic ones. Indeed, my chief criticism might be that Fukuyama tends to give too little prominence to economic power relations in general. But this is hardly a dramatic failing, since the book manages to cover such an enormous range of subject matter and approaches.

Another concern is that Fukuyama's attempt to ground social structures in sociobiology is unsuccessful; listing supposedly innate attributes of human beings does not help explain their social and political institutions. For example, he points to a putative human propensity for violence and war, citing the work of the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley and the archaeologist Stephen LeBlanc, who have argued that virtually all primitive and ancient societies repeatedly engaged in warfare. But their conclusions have been challenged by other scholars who emphasize the enormous variability of warfare across early societies, the surge in warfare that accompanied the rise of sedentary agricultural societies, and the great variability in war proneness across regions in more modern times.

Thus, Europeans were involved in wars in nearly 75 percent of the years between 1494 and 1975 and never went 25 years without fighting somewhere. In contrast, East Asia witnessed a 300-year period of peace between the 1590s and 1894, broken only by defensive engagements against barbarian incursions and five fairly small two-state wars. During the preceding 200 years, China had been at war only once. Yet in the period from about 750 BC to AD 200, as Fukuyama notes, the Chinese fought at least as many wars as the Europeans later did. The Chinese leopard changed its spots -- as did the European leopard after 1960. The point is that warfare, although extremely important in some social contexts (such as when building up states and empires), is not invariant. It derives not from human nature per se but from certain types of societies and cultures with certain characteristics. Fukuyama himself, in fact, seems to recognize the limitations of sociobiology, since he never actually applies it to any historical context.

In any work of such breadth, there are bound to be some nits to pick. Thus, Fukuyama seems to believe the sizes of armies given in early Chinese sources, which are almost certainly vastly overstated; he writes that Denmark had representative government before 1800, when it still had an absolute monarchy; and so forth. But these occasional slips are trivial compared with the larger feat he has managed to pull off in covering so much diverse material so accessibly.

Fukuyama's method is not to cite an enormous quantity of historical scholarship but rather to rely on prominent scholars in each area. He has chosen these scholars well and is careful to present their positions accurately. It is downright refreshing to read a book of such breathtaking scope that manages to do so little violence to the work of the innumerable specialists whose insights it inevitably relies on. The bottom line is that Fukuyama's basic thesis is persuasive and he reveals good historical and sociological sensitivity throughout. The book is a great intellectual achievement and leaves one hungry for the next installment -- which may be more of a cliffhanger than readers of his earlier work might assume.

Over the last two centuries, Fukuyama writes, liberal democracies have managed to discover a resilient political equilibrium, balancing state power, the rule of law, and accountability to citizens. But he warns that past results are no guarantee of future success. Continued legitimacy for today's democracies will depend on their "being able to maintain an adequate balance between strong state action when necessary and the kinds of individual freedoms that are the basis of . . . democratic legitimacy and that foster private-sector growth." Comments at the start and the end of the first volume show that he is deeply worried by the current political situation in the United States, and his recent article in these pages elaborated on that theme. The future of History might be a bumpy ride after all.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 24 Feb 2012 08:40

From Foreign Affairs

Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt,Timothy Snyder

The late Judt was among the West’s leading public intellectuals and among the greatest intellectual historians of the West. His gift was to meld the two: his history captured the excitement of past intellectual debates, and his commentary was infused with the perspective of a master historian. The magnum opus he never wrote would have been a grand intellectual history placing in historical context the modern ideologies he studied -- socialism, nationalism, conservatism, liberalism, Marxism, Zionism, European federalism, religious fundamentalism -- and maintaining their relevance for future generations. The closest he came are the series of testimonial conversations contained in this book, conducted with the Yale historian Snyder during the final months of Judt’s battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. The book highlights his status as a perpetual insider-outsider in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which seems to have afforded him a keen appreciation of the peculiar cultural and historical circumstances of each. Yet most moving for the reader are Judt’s fierce commitment to history as an indispensable key to understanding the present and his ability, even when speaking his final thoughts through a breathing tube, to express himself in clear, forthright language. Despite a sometimes meandering conversational form, the result is a volume filled with memorable insights that any educated person will enjoy.

The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power

This book captures France’s deep ambivalence toward American economics, politics, and culture. After a scholarly lifetime explaining French attitudes toward liberal values, free markets, and foreigners, the political scientist Kuisel is uniquely suited to the task. Many French find the Unites States’ inequality, materialism, populism, and global militarism deeply distasteful. Like so many things French, this response remains paradoxical: Americanization and anti-Americanization coexist together. The French flirt with transatlantic fashions and ideas, from free-market economics to California Cabernet. Some of it sticks, as Euro Disney, 1,000 McDonald’s, and many successful American TV shows attest. The French are more willing to use military force, support high technology, and oppose both communist and Islamist extremism than most other Europeans. Yet in the end, the French remain firmly wedded to views of democracy, family, work, and lifestyle that diverge from those  of Americans, and there is little sign of change. These views are particularly pronounced on the left, but even French business is ambivalent about the United States, seeking more freedom from regulation but remaining suspicious  of moving toward what is perceived as  an underregulated U.S. model. Kuisel unpacks all this, making this book required reading for anyone interested in relations between the world’s two oldest republics.

After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent

Laqueur is a commentator about whom it is hard not to feel ambivalent. On the plus side, as a widely published scholar of twentieth-century history, now retired from Georgetown and London’s Institute of Contemporary History, he brings formidable intelligence and historical erudition to the task of putting Europe’s current predicament into perspective. In contrast to commonplace conservative critics of Europe, Laqueur, when he cites Brooks Adams or Raymond Aron, Prince Klemens von Metternich or Jean Monnet, sounds as though he knows what he is talking about. On the negative side, this book repeats a set of one-sided criticisms about continental Europe typical of the Anglo-American right: it is militarily weak, demographically feeble, economically incompetent, fixated on human rights, overly critical of the United States, morally relativistic -- and, above all, too Muslim. Laqueur searches in vain for the causes of these alleged problems, obsessing about demographics and non-Christian immigration even while admitting they are not the primary factors. When Laqueur advances such arguments, the subtlety and factual basis so evident in his more general analysis desert him. Still, this jeremiad will surely be discussed widely.

Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life

Not much new can be added to the story of a man who has been wondered over, lionized, and demonized many times before. The merit of this trim book is that it pulls together all the essentials of the life of Leon Trotsky and the revolution he so significantly shaped into a seamless, intelligent, and wonderfully accessible synopsis. This book is part of Yale’s series of biographies about noteworthy Jews, and its particular angle is to understand Trotsky as a Jew. On the one hand, he scorned the faith of his fathers: “I’m not a Jew; I’m a Marxist internationalist.” On the other hand, he showed a special sensitivity to Jewish suffering in a dying Russian empire and gravitated toward Jewish communities abroad. Such dichotomies defined the man. He was brilliant, compelling, even admirable as a young revolutionary, but brutal, arrogant, and obtuse once in power -- a contrast Rubenstein draws well. In many ways, his life was a metaphor for the Soviet revolution. “The tragedy at the heart of Leon Trotsky’s life,” Rubenstein writes, was that “it had begun with contagious idealism and ended entangled in a murderous dream.”

Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground

Steele, a veteran foreign correspondent for The Guardian, frames this exploration of the past three decades in Afghanistan by comparing the intervention of the Soviet Union in the 1980s with that of the United States in the first decade of this century. Both were ill conceived and should have been avoided, Steele argues, but the Soviets showed a better ability to cut their losses than have the Americans (and their NATO allies) thus far. Steele sets out to debunk “thirteen myths about Afghanistan,” including the false notions that the Afghans have always defeated foreign armies, that the Soviet invasion was an unprovoked attack, that the Taliban are much more oppressive than previous regimes (an admittedly low bar), and that the Taliban do not have any popular support. Steele views the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the anti-Taliban commander assassinated two days before 9/11, as no better than their opponents and offers a relatively positive appraisal of the period (1978–92) when Afghanistan was ruled by Afghan Communists, who, after all, did represent urban modernity. This eminently readable book is surely the most compelling revisionist history available of Afghanistan in the modern era.

Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi’s Long Journey to Triumph in Iraq

This is the most thorough telling of the story of Ahmad Chalabi, the scion of an upper-class Shiite Iraqi family who spent most of his life in exile but played a significant role in convincing the administration of George W. Bush to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003. It is, equally, the story of the domestic American roots of the war. Bonin reconstructs the relationships between Chalabi and his now-famous (or infamous) neoconservative allies in the Bush White House and also examines the roles played by members of Congress (Democratic and Republican), academics, and journalists eager for a scoop. The dwindling few within the Beltway who maintained that Chalabi and his opposition movement enjoyed more support along the Potomac than the Euphrates proved to be correct, but only after the fact. Arrows of the Night is a first-rate case study of both Middle Eastern émigré politics and the American way of dealing with the Middle East.

Iraq, Its Neighbors, and the United States: Competition, Crisis, and the Reordering of Power

Ten seasoned experts take their turns describing the changes wrought by the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the changes still under way, nine years into the post–Saddam Hussein era. Individual chapters are devoted to the Iraq-related diplomacy of the Gulf states, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey. Concluding essays address Iraq in the context of Arab political reform and consider the U.S. role in Iraq. This book bears out the dictum, expressed some decades ago by an Arab diplomat but still valid, that in the Middle East, everything is linked to everything else. According to the editors, the United States should pursue “increased engagement with Iraq’s neighbors” and avoid heavy-handed involvement in the region, which could “undermine steps Iraqis and the neighbors need to take to reconcile.”

Turkey and Its Neighbors: Foreign Relations in Transition

This book brings together American, European, and Turkish experts on such diverse subjects as “reclaiming Turkey’s imperial past,” the country’s move “from confrontation to engagement” in the Middle East, Turkey’s relations with its Black Sea neighbors, Turkish energy policy (including pipelines being planned or built), and Turkey as a possible model of democratization for other Muslim polities. Subjects usually given separate chapters in books about Turkey -- for example, Greek-Turkish relations and Turkey’s relationship with the EU and the United States -- are here woven into larger themes. Buttressed by many tables and figures and thus a bit ponderous at times, the book nevertheless offers many aperçus, including this one from Tocci and Walker: “Oddly, Turkey has quickly become more European, more democratic, more Islamic, and increasingly more nationalist simultaneously.” The book covers developments only prior to mid-2010, but it provides a useful background for taking the measure of issues that emerged later, such as Turkey’s changing relations with Israel and Syria.

With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918;

The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War

The suddenness with which World War I ended had lasting effects, not least the belief, later exploited by Adolf Hitler, that the only explanation for Germany’s defeat was a “stab in the back.” Rather than the deadly stalemates of the trenches, which still dominate popular views of the war, 1918 saw fast-moving offensives. The Germans went first. With Russia out of the war, extra German divisions were available. But they had little time and were anxious to strike before the Americans applied the full weight of their power. Germany’s spring offensive made rapid gains, pushing the Allies back, leading to British Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s famous order to his troops to continue fighting “with our backs to the wall,” from which Stevenson draws his title. But Germany and its army were exhausted. The offensive petered out, and the Germans were soon in retreat. Stevenson’s book is a masterful, lucid analysis that does not simply tell the tale. It also considers in detail the factors of technology, morale, supply, economics, and politics that contributed to Germany’s defeat. The tactics of the Allies were more imaginative, the blockade they imposed made life miserable for their enemies, and their leaders were more astute and attentive to the need for stability at home.

In a completely different book about the same war, Englund offers no comprehensive overview but instead reconstructs the conflict through the stories of a diverse cast of 20 people who lived through it. The book is an “intimate” history because Englund not only uses his subjects’ own words but also provides his own, sometimes sardonic commentary, supplying the background the reader needs to understand the characters’ situations and preoccupations. The cast includes a French civil servant who never heard a shot fired but wrote wry reflections on how a denial of the reality of war sustained morale in Paris. Another subject is a German seaman posted on a battleship that never saw combat; his only action came at the war’s end, when he participated in a mutiny. Others are engaged in the war far from their own countries: a Venezuelan cavalryman in the Ottoman army, a Canadian married to a Polish aristocrat, a British nurse in a Russian military hospital. Like no other, this book brings out in a poignant and effective way the meaning of World War I for those who lived through it, and allows them to speak
to us almost a century later.

Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941–1944;

The Battle of the Tanks: Kursk, 1943

Compared with southern and western Europe’s experience of World War II, the course of the war in the East has been far less thoroughly researched. But the East is now catching up. The end of the Cold War gave researchers access to Soviet archives and survivors and has made it possible to consider this epic struggle free from the ideological distortions of the communist years and also to describe some of the human stories behind the staggering statistics, as these two books do. Reid begins on the first day of the 1941 German siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), in which some 750,000 people died as Hitler sought to starve the population out of existence. During the first winter, in particular, the search for nutrition became desperate, descending even into cannibalism, which Reid describes in grisly detail. Meanwhile, the Communist Party and the secret police continued to manage the city in the spirit of prewar purges and propaganda, ready to blame defeatists and traitors for the people’s privations and never their own incompetence. Quoting from diaries, memoirs, and interviews, Reid brilliantly explodes Soviet-era myths and constructs a harrowing, unrelenting account that demonstrates how extreme human behavior can become in a struggle for survival.

Clark describes the Battle of Kursk of July 1943, the last great German Wehrmacht offensive, which was an attempt to recover from the defeat at Stalingrad, five months earlier. The scale was enormous: four million men, 13,000 tanks, and 12,000 aircraft. The Soviets took heavier loses, but the Germans could not complete a decisive breakthrough and thereafter found themselves on the defensive. Clark puts the battle in context, explaining how Hitler’s strategic misjudgments frustrated even his most loyal generals, who coped with the consequences as best they could, often with great tactical skill. Like Reid, Clark makes excellent use of firsthand accounts. Many of those who fought tell of an expectation of imminent death, as tanks fired into one another at close distance. “It wasn’t a battle,” reports a Soviet T-34 tank commander. “It was a slaughterhouse of tanks.”

The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade

Until 2001, Feinstein was a member of South Africa’s parliament for the African National Congress. He resigned in disgust at the bribes paid by arms manufacturers to senior party figures as the country modernized its military. Arms acquisition by governments is a reliable recipe for corruption: massive contracts for equipment that might never be used, all surrounded by the secretive, protective aura of national security. “Merchants of death” have long been blamed for feeding war frenzies and profiting from misery. But in Feinstein’s telling, the entire trade is a conspiracy between greedy businesses and kleptocratic elites, counterproductive for the selling nations (because the weapons often fall into the wrong hands) and for the buyers (because arms contracts use up scarce funds without doing much for security). One might argue that there are genuine defense needs that cannot be met any other way and that the trade is not always as distorted as Feinstein contends. But the book is not trying  to be balanced, and Feinstein makes his case with an impressive amount of detailed research and a gift for narrative that makes his findings hard to dismiss.