Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

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 happened to these men following their arrival and once the war had ended? In Emigrant Soldiers: Mobilising Italians Abroad in the First World War (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Selena Daly reconstructs the lives of these emigrant soldiers before, during and after the First World War, considering their motivations, combat experiences, demobilisation, and lives under Fascism and in the Second World War. Adopting a micro-historical approach, Emigrant Soldiers explores the diverse fates of four men who returned from the United States, Brazil, France, and Britain, interwoven with accounts of other emigrants from across Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Through letters, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, newspapers, and diplomatic reports, Dr. Daly focuses on the experiences and voices of the emigrant soldiers, providing a new global account of Italians during the First World War. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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 subject of heated debate. Were they composed in a single era or over the course of centuries? Were they crafted by one or by many poets? Do they reflect historical reality? These and other important questions are answered in this book. Michael Cosmopoulos, in The World of Homer: Archaeology, Social Memory, and the Emergence of Epic Greek Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2025), reconstructs the world of the Homeric poems and explores the interplay between poetry, social memory, and material culture. By integrating key insights from archaeology, philology, anthropology, and oral tradition, he offers a nuanced perspective of the emergence and early development of Greek epic. His wide-canvas approach enables readers to appreciate the complexity of the Homeric world and gain a deeper understanding of the intricate factors that shaped these magnificent poems.

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 demonstrates how legal knowledge can be a valuable asset for firms, providing them with a sustainable competitive advantage that is difficult for rivals to imitate. Bird presents a five-part framework that outlines how firms can use legal knowledge in competitive markets and how they can avoid misusing it. Chapters also highlight how firms can cultivate legal knowledge and apply novel risk tools to overcome unexpected legal threats. The book emphasizes the importance of ethical values in business decisions and shows how managers and lawyers can build an ethical practice of legal knowledge that benefits both business and society. With the help of numerous visuals, this book makes it easy for readers to leverage legal knowledge and apply it to specific business contexts.

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 to treat all kinds of diseases. In the sixteenth century, the arrival of European traders and colonists initiated an exchange of healing knowledge that moved across the Atlantic for the next three-hundred years. The initial links in this chain of exchanges were established by European settlers or visitors who, given the limited number of European doctors and medications available, sought the services of African healers whose methods were often seen as more suited and efficacious in the local environments. Missionaries, travelers and botanists also added to these exchanges by collecting and systematizing some of the knowledge they acquired from African informants. By documenting the richness and mobility of African healing knowledge, Kananoja points that even though plants, remedies and practices from the Americas and Asia have been more widely studied, African contributions were equally significant. Africans also sought to learn from the practices, institutions and remedies that travelers brought back from Europe and other parts of the Atlantic world, and incorporated them into what was an already rich and diverse body of healing knowledge. Ultimately the prevalence of these exchanges illustrates not just the differences that existed between European and African understandings of disease and the human body, but also how much common ground there was between them. Kananoja compellingly argues that African healing knowledge should be seen as a rich and dynamic system, which was central to the emergence of an Atlantic world. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.

The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2025) tells the stories of women from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and Canaries accused of sorcery in sixteenth-century Mexico for adapting native magic and healing practices. These non-native women - the mulata of Seville who cured the evil eye; the Canarian daughter of a Count who ate peyote and mixed her bath water into a man's mustard supply; the wife of a Spanish conquistador who let her hair loose and chanted to a Mesoamerican god while sweeping at midnight; the wealthy Basque woman with a tattoo of a red devil; and many others - routinely adapted Native ritual into hybrid magic and cosmology. In this episode Dr. Martin Nesvig (University of Miami) and Leah Cargin (University of Oklahoma) discuss processes of acculturation, early colonial witchcraft practices, and doing historical research at Mexico’s national archive. This episode is hosted by Leah Cargin

Prof Mukul Sharma is a professor of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University. His formal training is in Political Science and has worked as a special correspondent with a leading news outlet in India and received 12 national and international awards for his environmental, rural and human rights journalism. additionally he has also been the Director Amnesty International and South Asia of Climate Parliament. His scholarly has focused on environmental politics and discourses in India and explored crucial intersections of ecology, caste, political ideology and the development rhetoric.  Abhilasha Jain is an anthropologist with an MSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an MPhil in Gender Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is currently working as an independent researcher focusing on climate justice, digital infrastructure and digital rights for children/youth.

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 leaders base their choice for conflict – which institutional designs provide the best counsel, why those institutions perform better, and why many leaders fail to adopt them. Author Tyler Jost argues that the same institutions that provide the best information also empower the bureaucracy to punish the leader. Thus, miscalculation on the road to war is often the tragic consequence of how leaders resolve the trade-off between good information and political security. Employing an original cross-national data set and detailed explorations of the origins and consequences of institutions inside China, India, Pakistan, and the United States, this book explores why bureaucracy helps to avoid disaster, how bureaucratic competition produces better information, and why institutional design is fundamentally political. Our guest is Tyler Jost, an assistant professor of political science and the Watson Institute Assistant Professor of China Studies at Brown University. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

How and why did the Chinese Communist Party rise to power in the 1940s at the expense of its Nationalist (KMT) rival? In his new book, Domination and Mobilization: The Rise and Fall of Political Parties in China’s Republican Era (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Professor Xiaobo Lü (UC Berkeley) adopts a new model for thinking about this question. Using new qualitative and quantitative evidence, Lü shows how CCP success was built on dominant leadership and its interaction with a strategy of mass-centric mobilization to harness resources. By contrast, the contested factional leadership of the KMT and its elite-centric mobilization held back the party’s power, particularly after it lost its geographical and fiscal base during China’s war with Japan. In this interview, Professor Lü draws out the comparison between the two parties going back to the 1920s. He discusses how both parties adapted to the challenges of the Nanjing Decade and the 1937-45 wartime period – and how the legacies of party-building before 1949 still affect China today. Domination and Mobilization is strongly recommended for anyone interested in modern Chinese history, comparative revolutions, and party mobilization in authoritarian systems. Mark Baker is lecturer (assistant professor) in East Asian history at the University of Manchester, UK.

As academia increasingly comes under attack in the United States, The War on Tenure (Cambridge UP, 2025) steps in to demystify what professors do and to explain the importance of tenure for their work. Deepa Das Acevedo takes readers on a backstage tour of tenure-stream academia to reveal hidden dynamics and obstacles. She challenges the common belief that tenure is only important for the protection of academic freedom. Instead, she argues that the security and autonomy provided by tenure are also essential to the performance of work that students, administrators, parents, politicians, and taxpayers value. Going further, Das Acevedo shows that tenure exists on a spectrum of comparable employment contracts, and she debunks the notion that tenure warps the incentives of professors. Ultimately, The War on Tenure demonstrates that the job security tenure provides is not nearly as unusual, undesirable, or unwarranted as critics claim. Deepa Das Acevedo, JD, PhD is an Associate Professor of Law at Emory University. Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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 demonstrates that international wars in nineteenth-century Latin America triggered state-building, that the outcomes of those wars affected the legitimacy and continuity of such efforts, and that the relative capacity of states in this region today continues to reflect those distant processes. Combining comparative historical analysis with cutting edge social science methods, the book provides a comprehensive picture of state formation in nineteenth-century Latin America that is compelling for readers across disciplines, breathes new life into bellicist approaches to state formation, and offers a novel framework to explain variation in state capacity across Latin America and the world.