CSSH congratulates Kristen Alff (“Levantine Joint-Stock Companies, Trans-Mediterranean Partnerships, and Nineteenth-Century Capitalist Development” (60-1, 2018)) upon the publication of her new book, Violent Interests: Capitalism and Social Transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean (Stanford University Press, 2026). The book is summarized,
Between the 1830s and 1930s, companies established by Beirut-based businessmen emerged among the largest shareholders in major British manufacturing and trading companies. These companies transformed from small family partnerships to large shareholder corporations that wielded significant influence across the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe. People, capital, and ideas flowed from Beirut to Haifa, Alexandria, Liverpool, and London. In so doing, collaboration and competition across companies and regions gave global capitalism its shape.
Violent Interests examines processes of capital accumulation in the Eastern Mediterranean and the dynamic relationships of Beiruti entrepreneurs with centers of capital in Western Europe to reveal the inner workings of capitalism on local, regional, imperial, and global scales. Kristen Alff shows how land, labor, and gender relations were reorganized across the region, and focuses on war—most notably World War I—as powerful points of political economic change critical to the naturalization of capitalism’s new social order in the Eastern Mediterranean. With profit propelled by war and the logic of commodification, the companies of late Ottoman Beirut, Alff argues, advanced the subjugation of social relations to the driving demand of capital accumulation—and transformed the Eastern Mediterranean in ways that endured long after the dissolution of both companies and empire.
Congratulations are extended to Matei Candea (“French Law, Danish Cartoons, and the Anthropology of Free Speech” (67-1, 2024) and “What was antiformalism, and what comes next” with Paolo Heywood, forthcoming) for his new book as well. Reason, Carnival and Honour: An Anthropology of Free Speech (Pelican, 2026) is described thusly:
What does free speech really mean? How does our understanding of it differ around the world? Why does it divide us – and how can we find common ground?
What free speech really means is hotly contested. Is it increasingly under attack in our democracies, or is it being weaponized by the powerful? These debates don’t just happen in the news: they divide families, strain relationships. This is because, anthropologist Matei Candea shows, arguments about free speech are not just about abstract principles: they question what it means to be a good person, to have empathy and courage. They involve fears for the future and longings for the past – and they demand that you pick a side, right now!
In order to move away from the simple binaries of polarised debate, Candea shows us that we need to start counting to three. Deploying the power of thinking anthropologically, Reason, Carnival and Honour outlines three visions of free speech – Reason, or civil rational debate; Carnival, or the right to be outrageous; and Honour, the duty to stand by one’s word. Sometimes supporting each other and sometimes at odds, they entail very different understandings of what language is and does, of what it means to be free.
Building on years of research and an exploration of anthropological literature from around the globe – from tales of French cartoonists to Egyptian Bedouin women, Finnish talk-show hosts to Tibetan Buddhist monks – Reason, Carnival and Honour reveals a richer landscape of differences, to help us find new alliances and even answers to the question of what it is we’re really arguing about.
Congratulations to Matthew Shutzer (Jack Goody Award Winner for “Subterranean Properties: India’s Political Ecology of Coal, 1870–1975” (63-2, 2021)) upon the publication of his new book, Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis (2026). Princeton University Press summarizes,
India is today one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of fossil fuels, driving new investments in the global fossil economy and achieving record-breaking levels of coal extraction at home. As the planet burns from climate change, this entrenchment of fossil fuel dependence has left many searching for how we arrived at this point. Until the Last Ton provides a sweeping new appraisal of this planetary dilemma, uncovering how India became part of an emerging fossil capitalism that continues to shape the present.
Matthew Shutzer recasts the origins of the fossil economy by showing how European industrialization unleashed a global search for fossil energy in the colonial world. Placing India at the center of this history, Shutzer traces how the highland forests of eastern India became early frontiers for global coal investment, transforming this landscape into the largest site of imperial overseas coal production across a century of colonial rule. At the heart of these shifts was a legal framework of subterranean property, which redefined local relations of land ownership and social power, while tying the growth of India’s fossil economy to the progressive ecological destruction of the forest frontier.
Following these dynamics into the postcolonial period, Until the Last Ton reveals the enduring impacts of colonial property on independent India’s energy history, shedding new light on postwar struggles for energy development and resource sovereignty, as well as the violent conflicts over mining dispossession that have haunted India’s economic ascent in an age of climate crisis.
Don’t miss our conversation with Shutzer about his award-winning CSSH essay!
