New Books

The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China

By Ya-Wen Lei

Since the mid-2000s, the Chinese state has increasingly shifted away from labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing to a process of socioeconomic development centered on science and technology. Ya-Wen Lei traces the contours of this techno-developmental regime and its resulting form of techno-state capitalism, telling the stories of those whose lives have been transformed—for better and worse—by China’s rapid rise to economic and technological dominance.

Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork and a wealth of in-depth interviews with managers, business owners, workers, software engineers, and local government officials, Lei describes the vastly unequal values assigned to economic sectors deemed “high-end” versus “low-end,” and the massive expansion of technical and legal instruments used to measure and control workers and capital. She shows how China’s rise has been uniquely shaped by its time-compressed development, the complex relationship between the nation’s authoritarian state and its increasingly powerful but unruly tech companies, and an ideology that fuses nationalism with high modernism, technological fetishism, and meritocracy. (Read more at Princeton University Press)

Faculty Associate Ya-Wen Lei is a professor of sociology at Harvard University. 

Uncertain Futures: How to Unlock the Climate Impasse

Coauthored by Dustin Tingley

Why is the world not moving fast enough to solve the climate crisis? Politics stand in the way, but experts hope that green investments, compensation, and retraining could unlock the impasse. However, these measures often lack credibility. Not only do communities fear these policies could be reversed, but they have seen promises broken before. Uncertain Futures proposes solutions to make more credible promises that build support for the energy transition. It examines the perspectives of workers, communities, and companies, arguing that the climate impasse is best understood by viewing the problem from the ground up. Featuring voices on the front lines such as a commissioner in Carbon County deciding whether to welcome wind, executives at energy companies searching for solutions, mayors and unions in Minnesota battling for local jobs, and fairgoers in coal country navigating their uncertain future, this book contends that making economic transitions work means making promises credible. (Read more at Cambridge University Press)

Faculty Associate Dustin Tingley is a professor of government at Harvard University. 

The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History

By Serhii Plokhy

Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war—and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.

Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault—on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament—the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia’s ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics, Plokhy reveals that while this new Cold War was not inevitable, it was predictable. (Read more at W. W. Norton)

Faculty Associate Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo S. Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University.

Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations

By Christina L. Davis

Member selection is one of the defining elements of social organization, imposing categories on who we are and what we do. Discriminatory Clubs shows how international organizations are like social clubs, ones in which institutional rules and informal practices enable states to favor friends while excluding rivals.

Where race or socioeconomic status may be a basis for discrimination by social clubs, geopolitical alignment determines who gets into the room to make the rules of global governance. Christina Davis brings together a wealth of data on membership provisions for more than three hundred organizations to reveal the prevalence of club-style selection on the world stage. States join organizations to deepen their association with a particular group of states—most often their allies—and for the gains from policy coordination. Even organizations that claim to be universal, to target narrow issues, or to cover geographic regions use club-style admission criteria. Davis demonstrates that when it comes to the most important decision of cooperation—who belongs to the club and who doesn’t—geopolitical alignment can matter more than the merits or policies of potential members. (Read more at Princeton University Press)

Faculty Associate Christina L. Davis is the Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics at Harvard University.

The Anticolonial Transnational: Imaginaries, Mobilities, and Networks in the Struggle against Empire

Coedited by Erez Manela

This volume is the first to explore transnational anticolonialism as a general global phenomenon that spanned the entire twentieth century. Its collected essays model both a broadening of the issues under consideration and the collaboration necessary to do justice to the scope of this vibrant field. They showcase new work by scholars who explore the anticolonial transnational in multiple geographical regions, from a variety of perspectives, and at many different times across the long twentieth century. Revealing that anticolonial movements everywhere in this period were invariably transnational in terms of their imaginaries, mobilities, and networks, these essays also demonstrate that centering transnational connections can change our understanding of the anticolonial past. The legacies of transnational anticolonial strategies and networks fundamentally shaped the present. Together, these essays present a fresh, kaleidoscopic view of the geographical, chronological, and thematic possibilities of the global anticolonial transnational. (Read more at Cambridge University Press)

Faculty Associate Erez Manela is the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History at Harvard University.

Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942–1962

By Kalyani Ramnath 

For more than a century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period, Boats in a Storm centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires. (Read more at Stanford University Press)

Former Postdoctoral Fellow Kalyani Ramnath is an assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia.

Seeing Others: How Recognition Works—and How It Can Heal a Divided World

By Michèle Lamont

In this capstone work, Michèle Lamont unpacks the power of recognition—rendering others as visible and valued—by drawing on nearly forty years of research and new interviews with young adults, and with cultural icons and change agents who intentionally practice recognition—from Nikole Hannah Jones and Cornel West to Michael Schur and Roxane Gay. She shows how new narratives are essential for everyone to feel respect and assert their dignity.

Decades of neoliberalism have negatively impacted our sense of self-worth, up and down the income ladder, just as the American dream has become out of reach for most people. By prioritizing material and professional success, we have judged ourselves and others in terms of self-reliance, competition, and diplomas. The foregrounding of these attributes of the upper-middle class in our values system feeds into the marginalization of workers, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and minority groups. The solution, Lamont argues, is to shift our focus towards what we have in common while actively working to recognize the diverse ways one can live a life. Building on Lamont’s lifetime of expertise and revelatory connections between broad-ranging issues, Seeing Others delivers realistic sources of hope: By reducing stigma, we put change within reach. (Read more at Simon & Schuster)

Former Center Director Michèle Lamont is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and is professor of sociology and of African and African American studies at Harvard University.

Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it?

With the clarity and brilliance that made their first book, How Democracies Die, a global bestseller, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer a coherent framework for understanding these volatile times. They draw on a wealth of examples—from 1930s France to present-day Thailand—to explain why and how political parties turn against democracy. They then show how our Constitution makes us uniquely vulnerable to attacks from within: It is a pernicious enabler of minority rule, allowing partisan minorities to consistently thwart and even rule over popular majorities. Most modern democracies—from Germany and Sweden to Argentina and New Zealand—have eliminated outdated institutions like elite upper chambers, indirect elections, and lifetime tenure for judges. The United States lags dangerously behind. (Read more at Penguin Random House)

Faculty Associate Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Faculty Associate Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University.

In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations

By Merilee Grindle

Where do human societies come from? The drive to answer this question took on a new urgency in the nineteenth century, when a generation of archaeologists began to look beyond the bible for the origins of different cultures and civilizations. A child of the San Francisco Gold Rush whose mother was born in Mexico City, Zelia Nuttall threw herself into the study of Aztec customs and cosmology, eager to use the tools of the emerging science of anthropology to prove that modern Mexico was built over the ruins of ancient civilizations.

Proud, disciplined, as prickly as she was independent, Zelia Nuttall was the first person to accurately decode the Aztec calendar stone. An intrepid researcher, she found pre-Columbian texts lost in European archives and was skilled at making sense of their pictographic histories. Her work on the terra-cotta heads of Teotihuacán captured the attention of Frederic Putnam, who offered her a job at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. (Read more at Harvard University Press)

Faculty Associate (emerita) Merilee Grindle is the Edward S. Mason Professor of International Development, Emerita, at Harvard Kennedy School.

Warriors, Rebels, and Saints: The Art of Leadership from Machiavelli to Malcolm X

By Moshik Temkin

We live in a period of leadership in crisis. At home, and across the globe, we sense that unqualified and irresponsible individuals are being elevated to positions of power, strong men and autocrats are consolidating their hold on governance, and the people are losing faith in the prospect of a better future. How have we arrived at this point? And how can we correct our course?

For the past decade, Moshik Temkin has challenged his students at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and around the world to grapple with the nature of leadership as part of his wildly popular course “Leaders and Leadership in History.” Now, in Warriors, Rebels, and Saints, Temkin refashions the classroom for a wider audience. (Read more at Hachette Book Group)

Former Faculty Associate Moshik Temkin is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Leadership and History at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University.

Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia

By Meg Rithmire

Developing Asia has been the site of some of the last century's fastest growing economies as well as some of the world's most durable authoritarian regimes. Many accounts of rapid growth alongside monopolies on political power have focused on crony relationships between the state and business. But these relationships have not always been smooth, as anti-corruption campaigns, financial and banking crises, and dramatic bouts of liberalization and crackdown demonstrate. Why do partnerships between political and business elites fall apart over time? And why do some partnerships produce stable growth and others produce crisis or stagnation?

In Precarious Ties, Meg Rithmire offers a novel account of the relationships between business and political elites in three authoritarian regimes in developing Asia: Indonesia under Suharto's New Order, Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional, and China under the Chinese Communist Party. All three regimes enjoyed periods of high growth and supposed alliances between autocrats and capitalists. Over time, however, the relationships between capitalists and political elites changed, and economic outcomes diverged. While state-business ties in Indonesia and China created dangerous dynamics like capital flight, fraud, and financial crisis, Malaysia’s state-business ties contributed to economic stagnation. (Read more at Oxford University Press)

Faculty Associate Meg Rithmire is the F. Warren McFarlan Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

The Interwar World

Coedited by Heidi J.S. Tworek

The Interwar World collects an international group of over fifty contributors to discuss, analyze, and interpret this crucial period in twentieth-century history. A comprehensive understanding of the interwar era has been limited by Euro-American approaches and strict adherence to the temporal limits of the world wars. The volume’s contributors challenge the era’s accepted temporal and geographic framings by privileging global processes and interactions. Each contribution takes a global, thematic approach, integrating world regions into a shared narrative.

Three central questions frame the chapters. First, when was the interwar? Viewed globally, the years 1918 and 1939 are arbitrary limits, and the volume explicitly engages with the artificiality of the temporal framework while closely examining the specific dynamics of the 1920s and 1930s. Second, where was the interwar? Contributors use global history methodologies and training in varied world regions to decenter Euro-American frameworks, engaging directly with the usefulness of the interwar as both an era and an analytical category. Third, how global was the interwar? Authors trace accelerating connections in areas such as public health and mass culture counterbalanced by processes of economic protectionism, exclusive nationalism, and limits to migration. By approaching the era thematically, the volume disaggregates and interrogates the meaning of the ‘global’ in this era. (Read more at Routledge)

Former Visiting Fellow Heidi J.S. Tworek is an associate professor of history and public policy at the University of British Columbia.