Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922 (Cambridge UP, 2024) offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India...

During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most creative and successful challengers in this effort was Ernst...

In the early 1960s, British colonial administrations in East Africa organized the systematic destruction and removal of secret documents from colonies approaching independence. The Colonial Office in London arranged the...

It is often assumed that only sovereign states can join the United Nations. But this was not always the case. At the founding of the United Nations, a loophole drafted by British statesmen in its predecessor...

The outbreak of the First World War shattered the established European art market. Amidst fighting, looting, confiscations, expropriation fears and political and economic upheaval, an integrated marketplace shaped by...

For decades, the field of scholarship that studies the law and practice of international organisations -also known as 'international institutional law'- has been marked by an intellectual quietism. Most of the...

The transformation of the Labour Party by 1997 is among the most consequential political developments in modern British history. Futures of Socialism overhauls the story of Labour's modernisation and provides an...

What is the role of the state in supporting transitions and deeper transformations towards a more sustainable world? Brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group. The role of the state in...

As the world moves with increasing urgency to mitigate climate change and catalyze energy transitions to net zero, understanding the governance mechanisms that will unlock barriers to energy transitions is of critical...

Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted, resulting in the births of thousands of children. These...

The way we govern the past to ensure peaceful futures keeps conflict anxieties alive. In pursuit of its own survival, permanence and legitimacy, the project of transitional justice, designed to put the 'Never Again'...

Originating in the Nineteenth Century, the European idea of development was shaped around the premise that the West possessed progressive characteristics that the East lacked. As a result of this perspective, many...

Sarah Derbew’s new book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) asks how should articulations of blackness from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century be properly read and interpreted?...

The Bhagavad Gita is a world classic often considered to be not just the 'Hindu Bible' but sometimes the 'Indian Bible' as well. Over the last two centuries, it has attracted much scholarly attention from Indologists...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, chats with Verena Halsmeyer, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vienna, about her recent, award-winning book, Managing Growth in Miniature: Solow’s Model as an Artifact. The...

Thomas Morel joins Jana Byars to tell the story of subterranean geometry, a forgotten discipline that developed in the silver mines of early modern Europe, talking about his book Underground Mathematics: Craft Culture...

Why do some revolutions fail and succumb to counterrevolutions, whereas others go on to establish durable rule? Marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900 and new evidence from the reversal of...

Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge UP, 2025) tells the story of Patna, in the north Indian region of Bihar, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A...

How did China’s Nationalists feed their armies during the long war against Japan? In her new book, Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945 (Cambridge UP, 2025), Jennifer Yip (National...

Political Scientists Jack Greenberg (Yale University) and John Dearborn (Vanderbilt University) have a new book that focuses on the idea of presidential self-restraint and the ways in which the U.S. Congress has tried...

Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City,1890-2000 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is about the reciprocal relationship between cinema and the city as two institutions which co-constitute each...

During the First World War, over 300,000 Italian emigrants returned to Italy from around the world to perform their conscripted military service, a mass mobilisation which was a uniquely Italian phenomenon. But what...

Epic poetry, notably the Iliad and the Odyssey, stands as one of the most enduring legacies of ancient Greece. Although the impact of these epics on Western civilization is widely recognized, their origins remain the...

Legal Knowledge in Organizations: A Source of Strategic and Competitive Advantage (Cambridge UP, 2025) offers a step-by-step guide on how to utilize the law as a source of value in organizations. Robert C. Bird...

In Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Kalle Kananoja tells the story of how pre-colonial communities throughout the west coast of Africa employed a wide range of medical and spiritual strategies...