In Conversation with Erez Manela and Kendall Carll

This academic year, Harvard historian and Weatherhead Faculty Associate Professor Erez Manela has served as acting director for the Center while Director Melani Cammett has been on leave. Manela also oversees the Graduate Student Program at Weatherhead and is highly dedicated to both undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard. In this interview, he is in conversation with Weatherhead Undergraduate Associate Kendall Carll '26. Carll has taken several of Manela’s classes and did an independent reading and research course with him on Sino-American relations. The following conversation, edited for length and clarity, reflects their common research interests and illustrates the unique connection and growth between a professor and student.

Kendall Carll (KC): Let’s go back in time. When you were in my shoes, wrapping up college, what were you most interested in or working on?

Erez Manela (EM): When I was your age, I was far less advanced than you are. I mostly spent my college years studying languages because I thought that was fun. I also studied the histories and societies behind the languages, and I was trying to figure out how to put it all together in a way that makes sense, the answer to which would turn out to be international history. That answer only came when I was in grad school. But the question—how do you put different parts of the world and the connections between them in a single frame, and what do you do with that, from the scholarly perspective—that question was already beginning to emerge.

KC: There's real pressure on students today—on young people generally—to have an increasingly clear and narrow sense of what they want to do, and why, earlier and earlier. Part of that is because everything is more competitive, and part of it is because the information ecosystem is so much more open: you can figure these things out, and if you haven't, it's on you. Do you think that has an overall negative impact—first, on the students you teach, and whether you've noticed any change there; and second, on those who do become scholars, in terms of whether the questions are getting narrower and the research more particular?

EM: That's a good question. First of all, I think the sense that you need to be practical and make choices that lead to profitable employment—that's not a new thing. I can't say whether it's more pronounced now than it used to be, but it was definitely there in my day too, and a lot of people were puzzled by my choices. I got some good advice though: if you do something you're good at, it will likely pan out regardless of what that thing is, because there's always space for people who are really good at something, whatever that something is. I don't know if that's the reason I felt compelled to continue—I might have done it anyway—but it was helpful.

In terms of the influence on scholarship of the demand for narrowness—or maybe relevance—it's hard to say. There were people doing narrow work twenty-five years ago, and there are people doing broad work today. I think market pressures do influence what people work on, but I don't know how much they determine the narrowness or broadness of it. That may be more a matter of one's intellectual tendencies and interests. You can do great scholarship that might be called very narrow—microhistory, for instance—that’s brilliantly constructed and very influential.

KC: How did you come to study US foreign policy? What keeps you broadly engaged with these topics?

EM: Well, I had a general sense that I wanted to work on something international, but I came to US foreign relations through a seminar I took with John Lewis Gaddis in my first year of graduate school.

KC: Not a bad introduction!

EM: In terms of what keeps me engaged, well, in international history, the world is your oyster. You can go anywhere, do anything. And academic life, relative to almost any other line of work I can think of, gives you an enormous amount of freedom: what you work on, what you prioritize, what topics you pursue, what kinds of engagements you take on. I find that very appealing.

KC: I like how you put it—you can pick up a new country or period, and it all connects somehow. If your organizing principle is international history, then everything is fair game, and you get to have some fun. I will ask you then, what do you wish people better understood about Sino-American relations in particular?

EM: The first thing I wish people understood—and the first thing I tell my students in the seminar I teach on this topic—is that Sino-American relations have a very long history. They go all the way back to before the founding of the United States, and obviously before the founding of the People's Republic of China. I usually start, as you know, with the Boston Tea Party—a famous episode in the lead-up to the American Revolution. Everyone knows about it, but not many stop to consider where the tea that was dumped into Boston Harbor came from, which of course was China.

In the opening session of my US-China seminar, one of the things I tell students is that there are two big reasons to study the history of this relationship. One is that it helps us understand how we got to where we are. And the second is that it helps us understand how people, and specifically powerful decision makers, think about how we got to where we are and where we ought to go from here. Because history is part of our mental software, so to speak; one's understanding of history is part of the software that drives decision making. 

KC: Exactly, very true in the Chinese case. And, as you mention, more generally. Secretary Ash Carter used to say that the dominant mental methodology of real policymakers is historical reasoning, which was a case for the use of history to inform the present. Obviously, there is some opposition to the applied history notion from the academy, but his argument was that people are going to do it regardless, and so you ought to try to do it well.

EM: How do you think your intellectual trajectory has been shaped by the classes we had together?

KC: I think your guidance has shaped my work and thinking in a couple of ways. One was in the spring of my freshman year, being very clear that if I wanted to do this work even remotely seriously, I would need to learn Chinese and immerse myself and read the primary sources and broader literature that comes out of China. I was hesitant at first—it is a hard language, after all—but grew to, of course, find it essential.

Second was forcing me to consider the moral and practical failures of American foreign policy in the past, and how one has to grapple with those and understand them, not just as a matter of informing the present, and not principally in a reparational sense, but to try to get a more comprehensive view. I, of course, have an enduring belief and faith in the American project, but recognizing our shortcomings is important.

EM: It sensitizes you to and makes you aware of some of the possible pitfalls.

KC: Yes. And last, you were always pretty strict on my work, which I always greatly appreciated. In the independent study, I remember, we fought over one reading on the syllabus—Sherman Cochran’s Big Business in China—and my inclination to include more contemporary analysis. You prevailed, and it, a story of the foreign cigarette business in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, ended up being my favorite reading of the term because one is able to pull out from this apparently narrow study all sorts of rich and interesting lessons.

More generally, I tend to think that, for a mentor, professor, etc., being too accommodating of your students or varnishing unwarranted praise is actually a profound disrespect. You never treated me paternalistically, but as someone capable of producing serious work—and thus you would mobilize weighty critiques against it.

EM: On my end, the great reward of teaching is exactly what you were just describing: watching this process of growth and development. Certainly, working with you has been extremely rewarding for me.

To end: what advice, now that you are wrapping up your college, would you give to your first-year self or underclassmen in general?

KC: Not just for Harvard students, but especially for Harvard students: you have this remarkable opportunity to study almost anything in college and go do almost anything afterward. This is why it's a liberal arts institution, why we don't have degrees in accounting or finance but economics. So you have this opportunity for genuine intellectual exploration, to do hard things—and especially if you're heading into industry afterward, you can afford to take difficult classes where you might not do particularly well, as a means of personal growth. Seize that.

Second, try to find some sense of purpose in the work you're doing. Whether you love what you are doing or not, you will work incredibly hard, here at Harvard and beyond. Things will be stressful, there will be sleepless nights, so you might as well have a mobilizing principle for why you're doing what you're doing.

And the last thing—I forget whether it was a Harvard president or another university president who said this—but the mark of a successful undergraduate education is that you meet at least one professor you plan to stay in contact with for the rest of your life—or theirs. Try to cultivate those relationships, do hard things, and engage with serious questions. You have a profound opportunity in front of you, so have fun.

EM: That's great. My advice is a lot less lofty than that. I usually give it to graduate students, although I think it applies to undergraduates as well. And that is that I think education, in general and especially education at a place like Harvard, should feel like you are a kid in a candy store. You've heard me say this before: it should feel like you are really having fun. I know that's not how it feels for everybody, but it should.