by the JHI Community
For our Summer 2026 installment of the JHI Blog’s Reading Recommendations, we asked members of the JHI community to recommend a text related to intellectual history, broadly conceived. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Sunil Amrith, The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years (W. W. Norton, 2024).
Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth gripped me because I came away from it with the sense that the climate crisis is, at its core, a history of ideas about human control over nature and the unequal distribution of environmental risk. Working at a global scale, Amrith traces how empire and development planning reshaped understandings of the natural world and produced uneven forms of vulnerability. What excited me most was the way environmental history and intellectual history folded into one another, as debates over development and population emerged as forms of political thought. The book also offers a compelling model for global intellectual history written from the vantage point of the South, in which state planners and local communities advance competing visions of responsibility and repair. Perhaps the book’s most enduring contribution is its reminder that confronting climate change demands a reckoning with the histories that produced our present vulnerabilities.
—Sarah Hussain, JHI Blog Contributing Editor
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Dwaipayan Banerjee, Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India’s Lost Technological Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2026).
The figure of the Indian IT service worker has long been reduced to a comic trope in popular culture. Dwaipayan Banerjee’s Computing in the Age of Decolonization shatters this lazy stereotype, which is exactly why I am so eager to share it. Instead of accepting the current global tech hierarchy as an inevitable default, Banerjee unearths a “lost future.” He asks a vital question: Why did a nation bursting with computing talent become restricted to providing cheap support for foreign monopolies rather than building its own sovereign tech industry?
What makes this book so compelling is how it reframes global tech history. Banerjee brilliantly traces India’s ambitious post-independence attempts to build a self-reliant computing sector, revealing how Cold War geopolitics, imperialist interests, and US corporate monopolies actively derailed these postcolonial dreams. He exposes the glaring gap between the free flow of ideas and the heavily guarded diffusion of material technologies.
I highly recommend this text because it feels intensely relevant. It proves that genuine technological independence requires more than just raw expertise—it demands dismantling enduring structures rooted in the colonial past.
—Mayukh Chakrabarty, JHI Blog Contributing Editor
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Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
The intellectual and formal fecundity that France enjoyed in the interwar period needs no introduction. Surrealism, Existentialism, Modernism—these are well-known formations. What tends to slip through the net are the experiments in thought and style that certain intellectuals, engaged in the Left but lacking a stable affiliation with one movement or another, carried out in the 1920s and ’30s. Such is the case of Georges Bataille. Influenced by Catholicism, Marx, and the Marquis de Sade (among others), his essays from the period oscillate between sober analyses of fascism and its meteoric rise and abject theories of revolt premised on the radical potential of “unconditional expenditures”: excrement, feasts, revolutionary warfare, sex, art-making. These “joyful excesses,” Bataille argues in “The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade” (1930) and “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933), serve neither production nor acquisition; they have “no end beyond themselves,” and their meaning is necessarily predicated on loss. As such, they stand in direct opposition to “the economic principle of balanced accounts” of the capitalist, “the autocrat’s vile repression […] that authorizes exploitation.” According to Bataille, only when worker-led class struggle becomes, by dint of unqualified rage and exuberance, “the grandest form of social expenditure” will the “sinister cancellation” of human life in the name of rationalist principles of extraction, production, and accumulation cease to have a stranglehold on human existence. So, come for the critique of fascism, stay for the sui generis vision of liberation.
—Carolina Iribarren, JHI Blog Contributing Editor
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Uma Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Rutgers University Press, 1990), 27–87.
Whatever happened to the Vedic dasi, or the “woman in servitude” in ancient India? To answer this question, Uma Chakravarti revisits the nineteenth-century encounter between Europe and India that furnished our “script for the past.” Orientalists, nationalists, and religious revivalists identified the golden age of ancient India with the Vedas and a conquering Aryan civilization; the dasi “disappeared without a trace,” while the Aryan woman became “the only object of historical concern” (p. 28). What Chakravarti demonstrates so compellingly is how these “images of women” inflected the “actual experiences of women” (p. 29) in colonial debates over child marriage, sati, and national regeneration—and how women themselves grappled with what these images had cost.
When I first read this essay, in a seminar on South Asian historiography I was taking alongside first-year Sanskrit, it was this final section that gave me pause. Turning to Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), the author of a landmark critique of the treatment of women in orthodox Hinduism, Chakravarti writes, “the glorious Aryan woman did not exist for Ramabai precisely because of her knowledge of Sanskrit” (p. 68). Four years later, I trace my research on the history of Indology back to this line.
—Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa, JHI Blog Primary Editor
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Chris Danta, Animal Fables After Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
I first came across this book a number of years ago and often return to cite it, especially the anecdotes shared in its first chapter. Animal Fables After Darwin by Chris Danta is an affectionate and intelligent examination of how we imagine humanity and animality (our own and that of others). While not strictly falling under intellectual history, this book examines Western anthropocentric thought and its instability within post-Darwinian fables.
Where some narratives seek to uplift nonhuman animals by imbuing them with human qualities, post-Darwinian fables grapple with the instability of human and animal, as Darwin’s theory of evolution blurred the lines between these categories. Danta argues that these fables challenge the hierarchies we create between species. They toy with the vertical metaphors by which we organize ourselves, reminding us that we, too, are animals.
As we navigate a precarious, ecologically vulnerable future, these fables may help by “de-sanctify[ing] the human [and] reminding it of its biological destiny” (p. 3).
—Minke Hijmans, JHI Blog Contributing Editor
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Patrick Eiden-Offe, The Poetry of Class: Romantic Anti-Capitalism and the Invention of the Proletariat, trans. Jacob Blumenfeld (Haymarket Books, 2025; German original 2017).
In his Poetry of Class—recently translated from German by Jacob Blumenfeld—Patrick Eiden-Offe retraces the making of the early nineteenth-century German working class out of a motley crowd of dispossessed artisans, rural vagrants, the urban rabble, déclassé aristocrats, and precarious intellectuals from 1815 to 1848, prior to their formal assimilation into the “solidified collective of a nationally-contained, adult white male working class” (p. 20).
He explores the writings of Vormärz figures such as Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Weitling, Louise Otto-Peters, Georg Büchner, and Friedrich Engels, among others. He approaches their newspaper articles, novels, essays, and pamphlets as sites for the crafting and expression of an early proletarian class consciousness, primarily characterized by its romantic anti-capitalism and its raw, wild, and heterogeneous enthusiasm. Arguing that the early labor movement’s romantic anti-capitalism is “not an attitude turned away from the world, but a medium of historical insight” (p. 24), Eiden-Offe therefore treats its social theory, literature, and poetry both as sources for intellectual history and as inspiration for contemporary collective organization. Now that the working class so characteristic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century trade unionism has disappeared, the various proletariats that have come in its wake have much more in common with their early industrial German comrades than with their immediate forebears.
—Benjamín Gaillard-Garrido, JHI Blog Contributing Editor
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Shamil Jeppie, “Writing, Books, and Africa,” History and Theory 53, no. 1 (2014): 94–104.
One cannot overstate the significance of “the Good Book” to African (intellectual) history. Some have located “the origins of modern African thought” in the Christian-inspired arguments of eighteenth-century abolitionists like Ottobah Cugoano. Others have traced the creation of a “new educated elite” to the unbidden intercession of European missionaries in the nineteenth century. In reading and hearing the Word of God, as this story goes, Africans gained the ability to write and speak to the world.
Shamil Jeppie’s “Writing, Books, and Africa” provides an evergreen corrective to this dominant narrative. On one level, Jeppie’s review of two edited volumes shows how literacy, textual production, and written knowledge extended far further back than “the colonial episode.” By examining sources composed in Arabic and oriented toward Islamic scholarship, the periodization of African intellectual history lengthens and thus the range of intellectual inquiry widens. Western diffusionism, be damned.
But, on another level, Jeppie’s work—here, and elsewhere—proves invaluable for his focus on “the history of the text as an object” (p. 94). For those of us who study intellectuals who unequivocally express their indebtedness to “the Good Book,” Jeppie prods us to think more seriously about the “material process[es]” (p. 94) that made certain books so good in the eyes of their readers.
—Tomi Onabanjo, JHI Blog Primary Editor
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Ayako Kano, Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor (University of Hawai’i Press, 2016).
While it was published a decade ago, I find myself returning to Ayako Kano’s work on the evolution of modern Japanese feminism. Rather than view the Japanese feminist movement as a series of “waves,” Kano examines Japanese feminism as an ongoing series of disputes and debates that took place in what she calls “the feminist public sphere”—a “discursive space in which academic, journalistic, and political voices have met and sparred over issues that remain controversial to the present day,” including motherhood, prostitution, reproductive rights, and women’s employment (p. 3). Kano reckons with the paradox of Japanese modernity: despite the country’s swift economic development and democracy, sexism and gender inequality have remained persistent. For scholars interested in gender, Japan, and modern social movements, especially through the lens of intellectual history, Kano’s work is a well-written must-read. If you are short on time, her first chapter on “Debates? Feminist? Japanese?” is especially fascinating.
—Eleanor Eriko Tsuchiya Lenoe, JHI Blog Contributing Editor
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Pablo Sánchez León, Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain: From Crowd to People, 1766–1868 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Traditionally associated with the political legacy of the French Revolution, the concept of “the people” acquired distinctive meanings across the broader landscape of revolutionary modernity. Building on decades of collective scholarship, Pablo Sánchez León offers a major contribution to the conceptual history of the pueblo(s) in the Hispanic world. Tracing the semantic and political shift from the plebe (crowd) to the pueblo (people), he reconstructs the conditions that made democratic politics thinkable in nineteenth-century Spain. The book’s most original intervention lies in its analysis of the plural character of the pueblos. Rooted in the juridical traditions of the Spanish Monarchy, this understanding of collective political agency was reconfigured and readapted on both sides of the Atlantic during the Spanish and American independence movements. The democratic politics that were built thereafter are central to understanding the Hispanic world’s specific significance for the wider Age of Revolutions, challenging accounts centered on the Anglo and French worlds. Spanning 1766–1868, the book shows how the people(s) and their situated institutions became political actors through collective action, struggles for representation, and experiments in self-government, presenting an essential reading for historians of democracy, political language, and the Atlantic revolutionary world.
—Matias X. Gonzalez, JHI Blog Contributing Editor
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Nicolas Picard, “A French ‘Death Row’?: The Development of Specific Carceral Conditions for Pre‐Execution Prisoners (Nineteenth–Twentieth Centuries),” French Historical Studies 49, no. 2 (2026): 329–359.
Whether one is interested in revising Michel Foucault’s classic narrative of disciplinary power or, more broadly, in the relationship between ideas and practice, Nicolas Picard’s article is an engaging read. Tracing the conditions of pre-execution imprisonment in France from the Penal Code of 1810 to the abolition of the death penalty in 1981, he argues that pragmatic administrative concerns, institutional custom, and everyday prison practice gradually produced a distinct carceral regime for condemned prisoners.
On the Foucauldian front, Picard makes a distinctive intervention. Whereas much scholarship following Discipline and Punish (1975) has focused on the moment of execution to uncover the lingering “vestiges of the corporal character of the supreme punishment” in the present, Picard instead examines the increasingly long period of pre-execution imprisonment (p. 330). This shift allows him to make a stronger systematic case for the persistence of sovereign power: rather than searching for flickers of it in the brutality of the death, he shows that it structured the entire holding period, from judicial review by the Cour de cassation to the executive’s sovereign prerogative of pardon.
The article also raises broader questions about the relationship between penal thought and practice in modern France. Instead of depicting the French state as a centralized apparatus implementing penal policy from above, Picard shows how the pre-execution regime emerged through the interaction of regional administration, institutional habits, and everyday prison life. Rather than making this piece less relevant to intellectual historians, I actually believe that this makes it all the more so, because it reintroduces every contingency—from overworked interwar prison guards in Lyon to a prisoner’s humiliation in the 1970s at the prospect of being filmed “like a test subject”—back into the life of ideas (p. 351).
—Stephanie Zgouridi, JHI Blog Contributing Editor
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Pinko Collective, After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept (Revised and Updated Edition) (Haymarket Books, 2025).
From the community organizing meeting to the Bravo reunion, the concept and practice of “accountability” is a slippery object, marking both an internal process to come to terms with harm and an external articulation of readiness to re-enter a social world. Here, Pinko (“a collective for thinking gay communism together”) provides us with a sprawling yet precise oral history of an idea and practice meaningfully situated inside the militant left from which the concept, in its most useful iteration, originates. Nine organizers and practitioners, including incarcerated activists, offer histories of this method, its origins, its uses, and its limits, accompanied by framing essays by members of the Pinko collective, which situate these contributions in time, place, and conceptual landscape.
—Disha Karnad Jani, JHI Blog Contributing Editor and Co-Host of the In Theory Podcast
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Marinos Sariyannis, “Ancient History in Ottoman Universal Histories,” in Writing History in Ottoman Europe (Fifteenth–Eighteenth Centuries), ed. Ovidiu Olar and Konrad Petrovszky (Brill, 2026), 23–68.
A single chapter from an edited volume deserves special attention here: Marinos Sariyannis’s “Ancient History in Ottoman Universal Histories” in Writing History in Ottoman Europe (Fifteenth–Eighteenth Centuries). Though part of a larger collection, it stands as a self-contained and important essay. Sariyannis examines how Ottoman historians from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries approached Greco-Roman antiquity—not as a lost “Western” past, but through Persian and Arabic intellectual traditions. Particularly striking is his argument that late seventeenth-century scholars such as Kātib Çelebi (d.1657) and Hezārfen (d.1692), working outside the official “medrese” system, began incorporating Latin and Greek materials through converts and dragomans. Influenced by Ibn Khaldun, they moved from a providential, Ottoman-centered narrative toward a more cyclical and multilinear understanding of history. The chapter demonstrates that Ottoman engagement with antiquity was historically contingent, shaped by political crises and changing ideas of dynastic legitimacy. It is an essential contribution to global intellectual history and Ottoman historiography.
—Nilab Saeedi, JHI Blog Contributing Editor
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Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist and Structuralist Theories of History, trans. Jeffrey Herf (MIT Press, 1983; German original 1971).
The purpose of this slim volume was to defend Hegelian Marxism against its Althusserian foes without swinging back to a dogmatic or transhistorical humanism. In this, Schmidt succeeds marvelously. His core argument is that the concept of history is itself specific to capital as a social form with a necessary logic that unfolds through time. Marx approached Hegel in his mature works just as he approached the classical political economists, critiquing him by historicizing his categories and revealing them to be unreflexive expressions of the peculiar nature of history in capitalism. Schmidt’s critique of Althusser extends this move. Structuralist Marxism, he claims, captures the compulsive logics of capital but obscures their thoroughly temporal quality.
History and Structure is one of the clearest formulations of a rigorously historicizing Marxism particular to the “New Reading of Marx.” It is an intellectual history in its own right—a reading of Marx’s reading of Hegel, and through this a recontextualization of structuralism as a one-sided expression of capital’s historical logic. It also offers a critical method for intellectual historians focused on the capitalist epoch. Schmidt suggests our tendency to seesaw between a championing of atemporal structure and a fetish for historical contingency can itself be understood as an expression of the two-sided logics of the commodity form that Marx identified as the essential context for our era.
—Daniel Judt, JHI Blog Contributing Editor
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Simon Torracinta, “The Postindustrial Politics of Productivity: Structures and Statistics of the Service Transition in the Long 1970s,” History of Political Economy 57, S1 (2025): 221–255.
The explosion of histories of economic measures has focused on those numbers that operated as a “black box,” such as GDP. Simon Torracinta turns instead to productivity measures, whose instability made them, by contrast, a site for explicit debate about the meaning of productivity. Torracinta shows how these murky statistics propelled debates about the United States’ “postindustrial” transition and international competitiveness. What this article ultimately maps out is the way that the putatively scientific concept of productivity stood in for broader anxieties about developments in labor in the twentieth century and beyond. Rather than spurring new measures, the difficulties of measuring the economic value of service work have largely served to underscore a sense that something is awry with immaterial forms of labor, as opposed to equally exploitative but more traditional forms of labor relations. This essay came out around the same time as Madeleine Baker’s Make Your Own Job (2025), and so the two works do not cite each other, nor do they easily fit together. In Baker’s account, the rise of the “entrepreneurial work ethic” is a twentieth-century development spurred by high productivity and fears of unemployment. Torracinta’s article does not necessarily contradict this argument, but it provides an exciting way to think through the ruptures of the 1970s in the world of work.
—Zac Endter, JHI Blog Primary Editor
Edited by Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa, Tomi Onabanjo, and Zac Endter.
Featured image: Illustrations of owl by Andrea Trew and books by Anamika Singh courtesy of Noun Project.