Over the course of the last century, there has been an outsized incidence of conflict between democracies and personalist regimes—political systems where a single individual has undisputed executive power and prominence. In most cases, it has been the democratic side that has chosen to employ military force.
Why Democracies Fight Dictators (Oxford UP, 2 ... Show More
Yesterday
Tyler Jost, "Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Why do states start conflicts that they ultimately lose? Why do leaders possess inaccurate expectations of their prospects for victory? Bureaucracies at War (Cambridge UP, 2024) examines how national security institutions shape the quality of bureaucratic information upon which l ... Show More
49m 23s
Oct 2
Luis L. Schenoni, "Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Cambridge UP, 2025) provides a fresh theory connecting war and state formation that incorporates the contingency of warfare and the effects of war outcomes in the long run. The book demonstr ... Show More
1h 1m
Oct 1
Robert F. Williams, "The Airborne Mafia: The Paratroopers Who Shaped America's Cold War Army" (Cornell UP, 2025)
The Airborne Mafia: The Paratroopers Who Shaped America's Cold War Army (Cornell UP, 2025) explores how a small group of World War II airborne officers took control of the US Army after World War II. This powerful cadre cemented a unique airborne culture that had an unprecedente ... Show More
41m 21s
Mar 2025
235. The Viceroy, The Psychopath, and The Merchant: The Irish in Empire (Ep 3)
Ireland may have been England’s first colony but, by the 17th century, Irishmen were carving out their own imperial legacies in India. Gerald Aungier, an ambitious East India Company official, saw Bombay as a new frontier for plantation and trade. Drawing from his family’s planta ... Show More
53m 58s
Oct 2023
Arunima Datta, "Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain" (Oxford UP, 2023)
The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both the colonizers and the colonized. Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain (OUP, 2023) focuses on a largely forgotten group in this story of movement and migration: South ... Show More
1h 12m
Jul 2021
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote that “the silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in wa ... Show More
1h 12m
Jul 2024
The Mighty Ashanti: Rival to the British Empire
At the end of the 17th century, a small clan - the Akan - in West Africa began growing into what would later become the powerful Ashanti Empire. The state grew rapidly in both wealth and land until it spanned most of modern day Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Togo.
Luke Pepera join ... Show More
29m 42s
Feb 2025
231. Colonising Ireland: Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, & The Tudor Conquest (Ep 1)
Ireland is the only country in Western Europe that has experienced being colonised in the modern era. It was used by England as a laboratory for imperialism, and was the site of bloody colonial wars for centuries, yet many people in the neighbouring United Kingdom have little und ... Show More
40m 19s
Feb 2025
Magnus Course, "Three Ways to Fail: Journeys Through Mapuche Chile" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
An ethnographic exploration of anthropological failures through the Mapuche archetypes of witch, clown, and usurper, Three Ways to Fail: Journeys Through Mapuche Chile (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) invites readers to consider concepts of failure, knowing, and being in the world wi ... Show More
1h 16m
Oct 2024
Jamestown | The Great Reforms | 4
In April 1613, years of bloody warfare culminated in the kidnapping of the paramount chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas. The English colonists in Jamestown offered to return her in exchange for stolen weapons, English prisoners, and corn, but their proposal was met with silence ... Show More
39m 50s