エピソード

  • Selda Altan, "Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan-Indochina Railway" (Stanford UP, 2024)

    Selda Altan, "Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan-Indochina Railway" (Stanford UP, 2024)
    2025/05/21
    Chinese workers helped build the modern world. They labored on New World plantations, worked in South African mines, and toiled through the construction of the Panama Canal, among many other projects. While most investigations of Chinese workers focus on migrant labor, Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan-Indochina Railway (Stanford UP, 2024) explores Chinese labor under colonial regimes within China through an examination of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway, constructed between 1898-1910. The Yunnan railway--a French investment in imperial China during the age of "railroad colonialism"--connected French-colonized Indochina to Chinese markets with a promise of cross-border trade in tin, silk, tea, and opium. However, this ambitious project resulted in fiasco. Thousands of Chinese workers died during the horrid construction process, and costs exceeded original estimates by 74%. Drawing on Chinese, French, and British archival accounts of day-to-day worker struggles and labor conflicts along the railway, Selda Altan argues that long before the Chinese Communist Party defined Chinese workers as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement in the 1920s, the modern figure of the Chinese worker was born in the crosscurrents of empire and nation in the late nineteenth century. Yunnan railway workers contested the conditions of their employment with the knowledge of a globalizing capitalist market, fundamentally reshaping Chinese ideas of free labor, national sovereignty, and regional leadership in East and Southeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    56 分
  • Ben Jackson, "Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England" (Manchester UP, 2025)

    Ben Jackson, "Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England" (Manchester UP, 2025)
    2025/05/20
    Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Ben Jackson examines the material and consumer practices of over 1000 men from the middling and upper ranks of eighteenth-century society, c.1650-1850. It draws upon evidence from over 35 archives and museum collections to detail how material objects were integral for men in forming identities and shaping experiences. For men of all social ranks, ages, and geographic locations, material knowledge was imperative for masculine social identities to operate in a commercial society. Before the centralised factory and widespread mass-produced goods, men personalised and repaired their goods; products were shaped by men's attitudes and concerns. Objects were tools in men's identity formation and the exercise of social and gendered power. There was a reciprocal relationship between men and goods in this period; men were active agents of material and commercial change driving product and aesthetic innovation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    59 分
  • Júlia Király, "Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm: From Minor Troubles to Global Hurricane" (Springer, 2020)

    Júlia Király, "Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm: From Minor Troubles to Global Hurricane" (Springer, 2020)
    2025/05/19
    Donald Trump is putting liberal democracy through its greatest test in 80 years. None of it is original. His style of rule is straight from the democratic backsliders' playbook. To secure long-term power rather than short-term office, rulers must take over the institutions that check and balance majority rule and bend them to their will. Trump has tamed Congress and inserted his people into the Supreme Court, law enforcement, intelligence, and competition regulation but - to his great frustration - the Federal Reserve is holding out. It was the same story in Hungary after Viktor Orbán returned to the premiership in 2010. Bound by EU law and the mandates of the governor and his deputies, Orbán had to wait three years to break the national bank. One of those deputy governors, Júlia Király, experienced state capture from the inside and resigned with a public protest at the loss of institutional independence. Now an associate professor of finance and monetary economics at the International Business School in Budapest, she began her career under socialism at the statistics and planning offices. As deputy governor, she was part of the team that managed the Hungarian economy through the post-2007 financial crisis – an experience she chronicles in Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm: From Minor Turbulences to a Global Hurricane (Springer, 2020). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at www.242.news on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    47 分
  • False Dawn: A Conversation with George Selgin on Recovering from the Great Depression

    False Dawn: A Conversation with George Selgin on Recovering from the Great Depression
    2025/05/18
    Join us on Madison's Notes as we sit down with George Selgin, senior fellow and director emeritus of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Georgia. In this insightful conversation, Selgin unpacks the myths and realities of FDR’s New Deal through the lens of his book, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 (University of Chicago Press, 2025). While the New Deal is often celebrated as a bold and successful response to the Great Depression, Selgin argues that many of its policies actually prolonged economic suffering—with unemployment remaining staggeringly high years later. Drawing on extensive historical and economic analysis, he separates the New Deal’s successes from its failures, examines the distinct roles of fiscal and monetary policy, and reveals the overlooked factor that truly ended the Great Depression (hint: it wasn’t just WWII). This episode challenges conventional narratives and offers crucial lessons for navigating future economic crises. Tune in for a nuanced discussion on why we must assess policy decisions carefully—learning from the past to build a more resilient future. Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間
  • Myka Tucker-Abramson, "Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony" (Stanford UP, 2025)

    Myka Tucker-Abramson, "Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony" (Stanford UP, 2025)
    2025/05/17
    The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic youth and American past that never existed. Yet, new road novels appear every year, tackling unexpected questions and spanning new geographies, from Mexico, Brazil, Bulgaria, Palestine, Ukraine, and former-Yugoslavia. Why did the road novel emerge and why does it persist? What does it do and why has it traveled so widely? In Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony (Stanford University Press, 2025) Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson draws from an archive of more than 140 global road novels from over twenty countries, challenging dominant conceptions of the road novel as primarily concerned with American experiences and subjectivities. Grounding her analysis in materialist theories of genre, world-ecology and commodity frontier frameworks, and post-45 American literary studies, Dr. Tucker-Abramson persuasively argues that the road novel is a genre specific to, coterminous with, and revealing of US hegemony's global trajectory. Shifting our focus from Americanness to the fraught geopolitics of US Empire, from the car to the built environment through which it moves, and from passengers to those left behind, Dr. Tucker-Abramson remaps the road novel, elucidating the genre's unique ability both to reveal the violent and vertiginous processes of capitalist modernization and to obfuscate these harsh truths through seductive narratives of individual success and failure. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間
  • Stuart Ward, "Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

    Stuart Ward, "Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
    2025/05/16
    How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Professor Stuart Ward tells the panoramic history of the end of Britain, tracing the ways in which Britishness has been imagined, experienced, disputed and ultimately discarded across the globe since the end of the Second World War. From Indian independence, West Indian immigration and African decolonization to the Suez. Crisis and the Falklands War, he uncovers the demise of Britishness as a global civic idea and its impact on communities across the globe. He also shows the consequences of this diminished 'global reach' in Britain itself, from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to resurgent Englishness and the startling success of separatist political agendas in Scotland and Wales. Untied Kingdom puts the contemporary travails of the Union for the first time in their full global perspective as part of the much larger story of the progressive rollback of Britain's imaginative frontiers. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 15 分
  • Jennifer Holt, "Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data" (MIT Press, 2024)

    Jennifer Holt, "Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data" (MIT Press, 2024)
    2025/05/16
    How the United States' regulation of broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and data—together understood as “the cloud”—has eroded civil liberties, democratic principles, and the foundation of the public interest over the past century. Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (MIT Press, 2024) is a policy history that chronicles how the past century of regulating media infrastructure in the United States has eroded global civil liberties as well as democratic principles and the foundation of the public interest. Jennifer Holt explores the long arc of regulating broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and the data centers that serve as the cloud's storage facilities—an evolution that is connected to the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media and networks, including railroads, highways, telephony, radio, and television. In the process, Cloud Policy unearths the lasting inscriptions of policy written for an analog era and markets that no longer exist on the contemporary governance of digital cloud infrastructure.Cloud Policy brings together numerous perspectives that have thus far remained largely siloed in their respective fields of law, policy, economics, and media studies. The resulting interdisciplinary argument reveals a properly scaled view of the massive challenge facing policymakers today. Holt also addresses the evolving role of the state in the regulation of global cloud infrastructure and the growing influence of corporate gatekeepers and private sector self-governance. Cloud policy's trajectory, as Holt explains, has enacted a transformation in the cultural valuation of infrastructure as civic good, turning it into a tool of commercial profit generation. Despite these current predicaments, the book's historical lens ultimately helps the reader to envision restorative interventions and new forms of activism to create a more equitable future for infrastructure policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 8 分
  • Brendan Haug, "Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

    Brendan Haug, "Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
    2025/05/15
    Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm (University of Michigan Press, 2024) is the first environmental history of Egypt’s Fayyūm depression. The book examines human relationships with flowing water from the 3rd century BCE to the 13th century CE. Until the arrival of modern perennial irrigation in the nineteenth century, the Fayyūm was the only region of premodern Egypt to be irrigated by a network of artificial canals. By linking large numbers of rural communities together in a shared dependence on this public irrigation infrastructure, canalization introduced a radically new way of interacting with both the water of the Nile and fellow farmers in Egypt. Drawing on ancient Greek papyri, medieval Arabic literature, and modern comparative evidence, Garden of Egypt explores how the Nile’s water, local farmers, and state power continually reshaped this irrigated landscape over more than 13 centuries. Following human/water relationships through both space and time further helps to erode disciplinary boundaries and bring multiple periods of Egyptian history into contact with one another. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy chats with Brendan Haug about the relationship between people, water, and the environment in Egypt’s Fayyūm. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    59 分