I have not read nearly as many books cover-to-cover as I have the past couple of years. Started reading a large number, but between the disruption of everything by COVID and changes in the programs I support at work, a tendency to burrow deeper into articles, and the tiredness that came from major blockages of three coronary arteries and then recovering from the resulting surgery, I have been both more scattered and just had less energy and time finish books. That said, these are my favorites from those I did finish in 2020, though many of them are older. I am sure that some will find things to which to object in this list or my comments.
Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Harvard, 2020). In her previous books, Satia has looked at various aspects of British imperialism and its effects. In Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin, 2018) she dealt with the largest private gun manufacturer in Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, who just happened to be a Quaker. In reviewing the personal history of Samuel Galton (grandfather of the more famous Francis Galton, founder of eugenics and one of the founders of modern statistics), she was confronted by what seemed to us, and increasingly to his contemporaries, with a set of personal beliefs that justified his actions to himself. Instead of simply looking at him as a hypocrite, which she found not very useful, she began to wonder about the mechanisms that he used to "manage his conscience." The new book is the result, and she puts the evolution of history as a discipline in Britain front and center. Starting with the loss of America and then the trial of Warren Hastings that led to changes in how Britain saw its Indian empire, she looks at how historians created ideas about Britain, and about its subject peoples, that helped colonial administrators, soldiers, businessmen, and missionaries tell themselves they were doing good when then were doing just the opposite. The details changed greatly over the course between the 1780s and 1790s and the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, but there was little dissent from historians or anyone else until the years after the First World War. Satia traces an interesting thread from that down to modern studies of colonialism and imperialism, showing how, as historians moved away from championing empire, economists took over. She brings the story down to the present, where the old and new ideas about empire and colonialism have collided in Brexit. There is a lot to unpack in this book, and I know it is one I will reread.
Paul Hannebrink, A Specter Is Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Harvard, 2018) is a study of the ways that Anti-Communism and Antisemitism have conflated the two great bogeymen of the last century, Communism and unfounded beliefs in global Jewish conspiracies. This is one of those books where the devil is in the details. You may know a lot about aspects of this, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an unholy mess cobbled together from various nineteenth-century political tracts and novels (some of them having nothing whatsoever to do with Jews) in the bowels of the Okhrana, the old Tsarist secret policy, and popularized so well by American military intelligence and Henry Ford, but there is a lot more too the story. There were the French brothers, travel writers of a sort, who greatly exaggerated the Jewish influences in Béla Kun's revolutionay government in post-WWI Hungry. There was the whole way in which Stalin's decision to pay less attention to the Holocaust and more to the way all of the peoples of Eastern Europe were persecuted by the Nazis, combined with a few high-profile Jewish Socialists and Communists in the new Soviet Block governments that helped keep Antisemitism alive and well in those countries, allowing them to reemerge hydra-headed after the fall of the Soviet Union. We really do have to look back to events a hundred years ago, and other events after 1945 to understand how the Far Right has reemerged.
Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Rid, who lectures on cybersecurity at Johns Hopkins, takes a stab at producing a scholarly overview of information warfare ("active measures" was a Soviet term for it). from the end of the First World War down to the 2016 election. Within the limits of a single volume, he has to pick and choose his materials and examples. His choices may displease some readers but he has stuck to what he can document through archival sources and interviews. Because of what has become available from former Warsaw Pact countries, and perhaps because of changing methods or policy by the CIA, the focus is mostly on Soviet Block disinformation projects. There are a few important lessons that he has for readers. These include the difficulty of measuring the success of most active measures, the tendency of the press to actually amplify the success of disinformation by spreading it, while simultaneously over-estimating the original influence of a particular campaign, that, since the 1980s, the main focus is simply to create chaos and undermine belief in institutions, rather than convince people of something in particular. This last is important, for it explains the extremely heterogenous nature of recent campaigns, and also some of the effects we are seeing now. Also of note for anyone in 2020, with its COVID conspiracies, is his chapter on Soviet exploitation of disinformation already available in the American press about AIDS, and the ways they both amplified and supplemented it. I cannot trace a complete path from the 80s AIDS disinformation to 2020's COVID disinfo, but it seems like a real possibility.
Kathryn Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, 2nd edition (Oxford, 2019). In a year in which conspiracy beliefs and politics have wrought such chaos, this is a good book to read. Originally composed about a decade ago it represents some of the best of the new scholarship on the topic, moving beyond the simplistic thinking of Richard Hofstadter's work in the fifties and sixties, and eschewing a viewpoint that simply condemns conspiracy theory. Olmsted set out to explain why the nature of conspiracy thinking changed in the United States with World War I and then evolved in the particular way it did. Her answer comes down to an alternation of conspiracy beliefs between those in government and those outside of it. In other words, she contends that the paranoia over "hyphenated citizens" and Bolsheviks in government and business circles in and immediately after the War (inspired in part by a very real German sabotage campaign), led to a persecution against those whose political beliefs were seen as a threat, including some of those, like Charles Lindbergh Sr. who had previously written about banking conspiracies. That led to a reaction by those like Lindbergh (and his eventually more famous son) to see conspiracies where they may or may not have existed. Olmsted traces this alternation of conspiracy ideation, in some cases justified, in many or most not, across succeeding decades. This is a great over simplification of her text.
Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (Verso, 2016). (This was originally published in 2013 as L’événement Anthropocène. La Terre l’histoire et nous.) I have been reading more and more about the Anthropocene, starting with Amitav Ghosh's book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago, 2016), but have really started to try to understand it in a more systematic fashion in the past few months. This book seeks to challenge how the Anthropocene is presented and the orthodoxy that seems to be emerging around specific "solutions." There is no challenge here to either the concept of the Anthropocene or to the science behind it and climate change. What they are arguing, in part, is that we are too trapped in specific ways of thinking, derived from the World Wars, the Cold War, and from our economic modes of thinking that are both limiting how we understand our present situation and constraining the range of options we consider for "solving" the problems confronting us.
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). I finished this a couple of weeks ago and am still absorbing it. It ties in very well with arguments made in The Shock of the Anthropocene. Basically this is a work of Object-Oriented Ontology that tries to explain why we have such trouble comprehending things like global warming, the Anthropocene, or evolution. His argument, which is rooted in part in Einsteinian Relativity, is that we are dealing with objects (even ideas and concepts are objects in OOO) so large and long-lived that we can only observe an interact with small parts of them and not comprehend their full aspect. It is something like the metaphor from Flatland of a three-dimensional object moving through a two-dimensional space, but with time as a dimension as well. I'm not doing justice to this book, I just do not have the vocabulary to spell out the implications. Definitely one I will need to reread.
William Gibson, Agency (Penguin 2020). Anyone who knows me well knows that I have difficulty reading novels these days and that the exception is William Gibson's work. Like The Peripheral, this is about what might be best described as time travel via the internet, though it is really exploring themes about politics and the anthropocene, and also about artificial intelligence (for once, one that has absorbed part of the personality of an African-American, female Marine). It is not easy to describe, but it is hopeful. The sections where Rainey, a woman from 22nd-century London tries to explain to Verity, who lives in an alternate 2017 (where Hillary won), both how the Anthropocene escaped our notice and created her future, at once high-tech and fragile.
Frederick Taylor, 1939: A People's History (Pan Macmillan, 2020). This is not about WWII per se, but about the year between the start of the Munich Crisis in 1938 and the outbreak of war in 1939, focused on the experiences of the British and German peoples. Some of the most interesting bits are about how the Kristalnacht and its aftermath helped lead to the German resistance to Hitler. There is also a lot of material on how people (and businesses such as travel agencies) tried to maintain a sense of normality in the face of one crisis after another. It is part of a growing body of work about the "people's war" that have been appearing in this century and deal with both World Wars. This would be a good book to pair with Daniel Todman's 2016 book, Britain's War: Volume 1, Into Battle, 1937-1941.
Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago, 2010). Back when I was teaching Early Modern European history so many years ago, I was fascinated by the rise of the witchcraft persecutions and the interplay by what we would think of as the occult and science. After reading James Webb's two volumes from the 70s on The Occult Underground and The Occult Establishment (about the culture and politics of the Occult in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, respectively), and Jason Josephson-Storm's recent, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, in 2019, I've gotten interested again in the irrational in modern life. Kripal write sympathetically about four modern authors who have explored the impossible in influential and intellectual ways. Starting with Frederic Myers of the Society for Psychical Research in the nineteenth century, Charles Fort (whose influence has seeped so deeply into popular culture), Jacques Vallée, the French astronomer and computer scientist who inspired François Truffaut's character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Bertrand Méhuest, a French academic exploring aspects of both UFOs and the paranormal. If you don't want to deal with the complexities of our modern fixations on these topics, don't read it. This is about the ways that mysticism, psychological experiences, and the irrational(not conceived here as a derogatory term) have intersected and interacted with the modern world. Those are themes that very much preoccupy me, as I do not buy too deeply into either the religious or the scientific world views.
