Dina Danon’s The Jews of Ottoman Izmir vividly captures life in that city as it was being transformed by Ottoman and European modernities. Danon’s book embraces the full diversity of the city. We meet men, women, children, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, rich and poor, foreigners and locals. Danon argues that the story of Jewish modernization in Izmir is very different from that of the Jews of Europe. In Izmir, Jews were not made to feel that their religious particularism impinged on their loyalty as citizens. They never dismantled their semi-autonomous institutions of communal leadership, nor were they asked to do so. Nonetheless, even as the community retained its organizational structure, fissures developed along socio-economic lines that profoundly changed how Jews engaged both with one another and with their fellow Ottomans. 

The most recent entry on my list is already a landmark achievement.

Margarita Fajardo’s authoritative monograph places the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America – the incubator for the cepalinos who successfully challenged the postwar consensus on developmental policy – into the broader geopolitical history of the 20th century. This richly detailed study retraces the emergence of an intellectual and political movement that channeled discontent with the structural biases inherent in the global economic order into a cogent agenda of political economy for the peripheries of capitalism.

It also reveals how the fragmentation of the fragile postwar liberal consensus, in both North and South, eventually pushed this movement toward the high-powered framework of dependency theory, and thence into anti-establishment activism across the world.

I’m a huge fan of books that are packed with compelling details. In Since Yesterday, Frederick Allen covers everything about the Thirties, from fashion to food to politics, music, and movies—and everything in between. A powerful story, sometimes dark but rich with odd little treasures that will make you smile. I especially like the searchable digital edition. Example quote: “Dance orchestras were blaring ‘The Music Goes ’Round and ’Round.’ Major Bowes was the current radio sensation, so warmly did he inquire into the life histories of the yodelers and jews-harp-players on his Amateur Hour. At the movie houses Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were dancing nimbly in ‘Follow the Fleet.’ Seven-year-old Shirley Temple was becoming the rising star of Hollywood.”

I have always wondered whether John Law, the creator of the ill-fated Mississippi System that brought the financial system of France to its knees in 1720, a genius who understood money better than anyone before him, or a deluded fantasist who had learnt just enough to create a monetary weapon of mass destruction?

In his careful and well-researched account, Antoin Murphy leans towards the first interpretation, but he offers enough information to allow the reader to form their own conclusions.

I chose this book for two reasons. First, Cowie masterfully documents the hugely significant political and social shift that took place in the 1970s, as America transitioned from the liberalism of the New Deal era to the conservatism of the Reagan revolution. And second, he assumes that culture is just as important as economics in the constructions of and understandings of social class.  Cowie engages the reader in a fascinating look at popular culture to reveal the ways in which a coherent white, working-class male identity fell apart, a process that contributed to the overall decline in organized labor’s power in this crucial decade.  As a bonus, the book is beautifully written. 

The joy of this book (and its sister volumes on the “national” and the democratic” experience) comes from the panoramic journey across space and time that the reader is taken on. This work is, above all, a positive, life-enhancing view of the United States with its focus on continuity rather than conflict. There is an idealistic and romantic strain to this vision, as he pictures a young nation sloughing off the rigid carapace of the Old World, with the idea of a calling replaced by an idea of opportunity. Boorstin is an exemplary guide: his canvas is rich and complex, with countless stories brilliantly picked out to illuminate his vision. Examples include: the utopian vision for the State of Georgia known as “The Margravate of Azalia”; the creation of the Minnesota Pioneer as a dynamic editor loaded a press on a steamboat going up the Mississippi to the future state… show more.

Everyone knows China has experienced amazingly long and rapid development, but also that in an autocratic country with plenty of laws but no rule of law, corruption is rife. Normally, deeply corrupt countries don’t ‘make it’, but China has, and I found Yuen Yuen Ang’s book an illuminating guide to just how and why a particular form of corruption in China has worked to its advantage. 

She calls this ‘access money’ as opposed to other forms of corruption such as embezzlement, petty bribery, extortion, and thuggery. She shows how to access money while producing perverse and risky outcomes, has actually nurtured investment and growth. It’s an interesting perspective on China’s long economic march since the 1980s, though she concludes that even this form of corruption is now generating problems and changes that will most likely end up undermining Xi Jinping’s China.

Mary Furner’s book presents what is the common view of progressives as liberal reformers, but there is another side to progressive social science that is less liberal. 

The progressive era social science literature is replete with racism and with arguments about racial and other forms of inferiority derived from eugenics.

The vast amount of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe gave rise to concerns about the undermining of American standards, both biological and economic, including theories of “race suicide.” 

Leonard’s book has generated a great deal of discussion, and while there is no doubt that many progressives displayed eugenic and racist ideas, it needs to be stressed that such views were not limited to progressives, but included many of those with conservative and even free-market views in other areas.     

Africa has been a test-bed for China’s new foreign economic policy since the early 2000s. This is the seminal, and at the time definitive, treatment of Chinese engagement on the continent. Brautigam’s knowledge of Sino-African relations is unrivalled and her myth-busting approach makes for compelling and enlightening reading. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the nature of Sino-African relations. 

Mariana Candido’s book brings to light the importance of land ownership among West Central Africans, by contesting the work of historians who up to here have basically agreed with the claims of European conquerors and colonizers who stated that West Central African land was plentiful and empty, therefore available to be occupied by the newcomers.

Drawing on detailed archival research, the book also us how West Central African men and women acquired and owned land and movable property. Candido brings to light how West Central African communities were consumers of European and Asian goods, and therefore connected to other parts of the world.

The book shows how men and women in Angola accumulated wealth, and also how during the rise of colonialism they were deprived of this wealth.