Ok, I am an academic economist, but my real passion is not exchange rates or public debt. It is understanding the origins of the institutions that shape the choices we make as a society. I have always found it puzzling that some societies managed to replace kings and queens with elected parliaments and universal suffrage, while others did not. At a time when these achievements are under pressure and democratic backsliding is increasingly common, it is especially illuminating to explore the large literature on these questions, spanning history, political science and, yes, economics too.
I loved this book because it made a distant historical episode feel extraordinarily human.
I found myself fascinated by the small group of impoverished craftsmen who, in 1820, convinced themselves that they could bring down the British government. What stayed with me was not simply what they tried to do, but who they were, what motivated them, and how they came to believe that revolution was possible.
I am also full of admiration for the historical detective work behind the book. It reconstructs these lives from tiny fragments of surviving evidence, yet never feels dry or academic. I found it a genuine page-turner.
Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, and a Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine Book of the Year. On the night of 23 February 1820, twenty-five impoverished craftsmen assembled in an obscure stable in Cato Street, London, with a plan to massacre the whole British cabinet at its monthly dinner. The Cato Street Conspiracy was the most sensational of all plots aimed at the British state since Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot of 1605. It ended in betrayal, arrest, and trial, and with five conspirators publicly hanged and decapitated for treason. Their failure proved the state's physical strength, and ended hopes…
I loved Making Waves because it changed the way I think about democratization.
I was particularly struck by the story of the Danish king in 1848, watching revolution spread from France through the German states and deciding that the safest response was to concede power and introduce representative democracy.
Weyland’s many examples from Europe and Latin America made me see much more clearly how political ideas, institutional blueprints, and fears of revolution travel across borders. I found the argument both persuasive and memorable.
More than most books on democracy, it convinced me that I cannot understand political change by looking at countries in isolation.
This study investigates the three main waves of political regime contention in Europe and Latin America. Surprisingly, protest against authoritarian rule spread across countries more quickly in the nineteenth century, yet achieved greater success in bringing democracy in the twentieth. To explain these divergent trends, the book draws on cognitive-psychological insights about the inferential heuristics that people commonly apply; these shortcuts shape learning from foreign precedents such as an autocrat's overthrow elsewhere. But these shortcuts had different force, depending on the political-organizational context. In the inchoate societies of the nineteenth century, common people were easily swayed by these heuristics: jumping…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I loved this book for the sheer breadth of its perspective.
I found it exhilarating to see democratic ideas and practices placed in a history stretching back thousands of years and ranging across China, the Americas, Europe, and beyond. For me, it was a genuine eye-opener.
It reminded me how easy it is to treat the rise and fall of democratic institutions in Western Europe since the French Revolution as the central story, when in fact it is only one small part of a much larger global history.
I came away from the book thinking about democracy in a completely different way.
"One of the most important books on political regimes written in a generation."-Steven Levitsky, New York Times-bestselling author of How Democracies Die
A new understanding of how and why early democracy took hold, how modern democracy evolved, and what this history teaches us about the future
Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer-democratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa.…
I admire this book partly because I disagree with its central hypothesis.
Congleton argues that democracy emerged through a sequence of consensual constitutional bargains between kings and their parliamentary opponents, with the threat of violence playing little role. I find that claim provocative rather than convincing, and that is precisely what makes the book so rewarding.
I especially like the way it combines a clear theoretical framework with detailed historical case studies that put real institutional flesh on the theoretical bones. The cases are illuminating, deeply researched, and written by an author with an exceptional command of constitutional history.
It is a book I keep returning to, even when I want to argue with it.
Doctors at War: The Clandestine Battle against the Nazi Occupation of France takes readers into the moral labyrinth of the Occupation years, 1940-45, to examine how the medical community dealt with the evil authority imposed on them. Anti-Jewish laws prevented many doctors from practicing, inspiring many to form secret medical…
I love Captain Swing because it showed me just how much historical detective work can reveal about protest, riots, and revolutionary threat.
Not because of its strongly Marxist framing—which it certainly has—or because of its classical `Hobsbawmian’ style, but because Hobsbawm and Rudé undertook an extraordinary effort to locate and document thousands of disturbances across England during the Swing riots of 1830–31, Britain’s largest rural uprising. I am fascinated by the way they used this evidence to reconstruct what happened and why.
I still remember accidentally stumbling across the book on a dusty library shelf five stories underground and discovering the extraordinary wealth of information behind this engaging piece of historical research.
For generation upon generation, the English farm labourer lived a life of poverty and degradation. Centuries came and went, but the lives of the rural poor remained essentially unaltered. With the onset of the industrial revolution, however, new forces came into play, which were to lead to profound change across society, including the world of the poor farm labourer and yeoman farmer. As capitalism penetrated ever deeper into the countryside, tension reached breaking point. From 1830 onwards, rural England was shaken by a series of uprisings known as the "Swing". There were riots across the counties of southern and eastern…
I am obviously not a neutral reader of this book: I wrote it with Raphaël Franck. But the question at its heart is one that has fascinated me for years: does the threat of violence and revolution really drive democratic reform?
What I value most about the book is the answer we eventually arrived at. Using statistical evidence from the Great Reform Act of 1832, we found that revolutionary threats mattered, but not at every stage of the reform process. Peaceful agitation mattered too, as did the political self-interest of elite politicians in the Commons and the Lords. I like that the evidence forced us towards a more balanced and nuanced answer than the simple story we might have told.
No Color is My Kind tells the stories of the desegregation of Houston, TX, in 1960, the life of civil rights leader Eldrewey Stearns, and the author's relationship to Stearns.
They met in a psychiatric case conference while Stearns was hospitalized at the University of Texas Medical Branch. After his…
An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group’s key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs. Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private…
