The Emma LaRocque Reader: On Being Human. Elaine Coburn (ed.). University of Toronto Press. 2026.

To justify their political existence, all nations tell origin stories. The founding myths of the world’s most powerful states, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, tell of heroic Europeans discovering lands that were empty but for primitive peoples, the “Indians” or “Aboriginals”.  Colonial oppressors characterised Indigenous peoples as savages who deserved to be wiped out, unworthy of a future, or doomed to disappear, given their primitive “race” or culture unsuited to modernity.

The myth of manifest destiny

Tomorrow was reserved for European peoples, who brought civilisation to a wild land. The oppression and massacre of Indigenous peoples was justified as part of the inevitable “march of progress”, known in America as manifest destiny; “the right”, as the Representative of Massachusetts claimed in 1846, “to spread over this whole continent.” These founding myths uphold capitalist relations, redefine the land as private property to be bought and sold, justify colonial power structures, and overwrite Indigenous peoples’ governance practices. Today, Donald Trump’s efforts to “restore truth and sanity to American history” by removing exhibits from the Smithsonian museums that are critical of white supremacy exemplify the dangers of the authoritarian control of historical narratives.

But myths are not reality. Indigenous peoples did not die out, and they are reclaiming their histories, their voices, their lands. Vine Deloria Jr, Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and Audra Simpson, and many more scholars and intellectuals are speaking back to empire. Among the most striking contemporary contributions to this demythologising literature is the writing of a Cree-Métis intellectual and poet, now gathered together for the first time in The Emma LaRocque Reader: On Being Human. Born in 1950 in Lac La Biche, in northeastern Alberta, Canada, LaRocque grew up Métis in a “Cree oral literature language and worldview” that together made up a “richly woven cultural life” (145). From the vantage point of her own culture and the experience of “colonialism lived” (251), she mobilises her powers as a scholar and poet to challenge foundational myths of the most powerful nations in the world.

The myth of terra nullius

The first myth she debunks is that the lands were empty, or at least empty of any meaningful civilisation, before the Europeans arrived. LaRocque gives testament to the many original peoples in the Americas who had their own histories, traditions and attachment to the land. For her part, she grew up with a rich cultural life, in a log cabin built by her resourceful father. In characteristically vivid prose, LaRocque recalls her childhood:

I was born into a world of people whose roots of pride, independence, industriousness and skills go back to the Red River Métis, back to the Cree. I was born into a world of magic, where seeing and hearing ghosts was a routine occurrence, where the angry Pehehsoo (thunder-bird) could be appeased by a four-directional pipe chant, where the spirits danced in the sky on clear nights and where tents shook for people to heal (48).

.With particular intensity from the late 19^th century onwards, colonisers deliberately disrupted the lifeworlds of Indigenous peoples, including LaRocque’s Métis people, through violent repression but also through forced religious instruction, residential and public schooling

Colonising Europeans interrupted self-determining Indigenous civilisations for their own gain. With particular intensity from the late 19^th century onwards, colonisers deliberately disrupted the lifeworlds of Indigenous peoples, including LaRocque’s Métis people, through violent repression but also through forced religious instruction, residential and public schooling (c.1890 to 1996), and adopting Indigenous children into White families. Despite efforts at erasure, Indigenous peoples have persisted, remembering their histories on lands filled with the stories of their ancestors.

The myth of the prehistoric “Indian”

Indigenous peoples are often considered purely historical, consigned to the past. Against this myth, change is part of every living culture, LaRocque emphasises, including Indigenous civilisations. The Métis practiced adaptable economies, rooted in land-based and wage labour, and their participation has been central to the development of contemporary nations like Canada and the United States:

Métis have been the labouring backbone of this country, serving first as portaging and fur packing coureur de bois, defining the buffalo industry with their organization and technologies, then on to building railroad lines and roads, clearing fields for farmers or fighting fire for forestry (98).

Today, LaRocque emphasises that artists, writers, poets and political and social commentators are revitalising and renewing Indigenous lifeways and knowledges.

Despite tendencies to imagine Indigenous peoples as consigned to a “primitive past” (131), their cultures have been fluid and changing. If forced change is oppression, some change is chosen. “Like the rest of humanity” LaRocque writes, Indigenous peoples are “facing and adapting to change” (xxxi, italics in original), participating in a world in movement.

The myth of the “Vanishing Race”

As LaRocque documents, Indigenous peoples, including Cree-speaking Métis like her own family, were deemed incapable of “civilisation,” hence doomed to vanish as too savage for the present or future. This myth was popularised by the 19^th and early 20^th century photographer Edward Curtis, who stripped his Indigenous subjects of any sign of modernity and then labelled them, “The Vanishing Race”. Too primitive and too pure to survive the wicked world, they were destined to disappear in the face of the “progress” brought by European colonisers. This myth lives on in contemporary re-tellings, from The Last of the Mohicans to coffee-house artbooks, like Jimmy Nelson’s infamous Before They Pass Away. In reality, “the Métis were systematically coerced from their land” (8) by civil servants, priests, police, surveyors and settlers. European settler success, never total, was a contingent fact of struggle, rather than a result of the necessary march of history. Today, LaRocque emphasises that artists, writers, poets and political and social commentators are revitalising and renewing Indigenous lifeways and knowledges (269).

The myth of the savage

Colonial oppressors created dehumanising stereotypes about Indigenous peoples to justify their oppression, which linger today. One frames them as ignoble savages, “grunting and bloodthirsty” (32), hence deserving of elimination by a more civilised European colonial culture. Recalling the first cowboy and Indian movie she watched, LaRocque writes:

I was riveted, revolted, and terrified. I was perhaps eight years old. I do not remember the name of the movie; I only remember “the Indians”: grotesque, wild-eyed, lurking creatures with painted bodies and hideous faces, tomahawks on hand, howling and whooping, crouching like animals across the screen, preying on beautiful white people on their way west to bring law and order (122).

LaRocque urges us to relate to each other as more than the “sum of our colonial parts” (xxiv); this is key to challenging oppression.

Alternatively, “Indians” are figured as noble savages, wise, kind and close to nature. LaRocque laments that the noble savage trope, for instance, the ecologically attuned Indigenous person, acts as a “prop for the conscience of a morally lethargic corporate world” (133). The noble savage is a normative ideal, not a fully realised person. Rejecting these fictions, LaRocque reminds us that Indigenous peoples are, simply, human: “People who can laugh, cry, hate and love” (xxxi). The response to demands for the “authentic Indian” (130), whether in the ignoble or noble variant, must be an insistence on Indigenous humanity. This requires the direct, honest appraisal of “the good, the bad and the ugly” (xxxvi).

Beyond myths to the human

In her scholarship and poetry spanning a half a century, LaRocque has appealed to our “will for justice” (133) to writings remind us of the imperative to dismantle dangerous, obfuscating political mythologies, and that recognising each other’s humanity:

I am ethically committed to the vocation of humanization, that is, both to the ending of injustice and oppression, whether social or intellectual, and at the same time, to the reconstruction of Indigenous humanity. And ultimately, all humanity (227).

LaRocque urges us to relate to each other as more than the “sum of our colonial parts” (xxiv); this is key to challenging oppression. We can begin by telling the truth about the lands that we are on and the original peoples who have lived here, not as ciphers representing good or evil, but as human beings filled with hopes and dreams, foibles and failures, strengths and weakness. In an era where truth is a casualty of national mythmaking this is a special challenge; but only then can we begin to build right relations for a future together.

Note: This essay gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: Bing Wen on Shutterstock.

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Dichotomies in Media and Communication Theory. Bart Cammaerts. Routledge. 2026.

How the internet fostered subcultures

The internet has been described as a revolutionary, disruptive technology that has created a global networked information society and paradigmatic shifts in all walks of life. Such techno-optimist discourses are often deemed overly technologically deterministic, but they are highly prevalent and salient in business-oriented literature, in macro-economics, as well as in sociology, political science, and media and communication studies. One of the most defining characteristics of the contemporary new media and communication environment shaped by the internet is the “convergence of specific technologies into a highly integrated system” according to Castells. This has a material side to it, but also a cultural dimension, which is encapsulated in what American media scholar Henry Jenkins termed “convergence culture”. Convergence culture has, however, disrupted and complicated the distinction between mainstream and alternative media.

The many affordances of the internet – to publish freely and cheaply, to enable the transnational exchange of information, to connect groups and individuals, its horizontal architecture, and the strength of weak ties – stimulated innovation within subcultural movements.

The internet originated from a productive collaboration between military power and academic interests, but clearly pertaining to a mainstream agenda. Subsequently, the internet was enthusiastically embraced and further developed by various countercultures that we could denote as “alternative”. The techno-hippies and -punks of the 1970s and 1980s, fuelled by a hacker and cracker subculture, embraced and subsequently popularised cyber-anarcho idioms and values such as: “Information Wants to be Free”, “Mistrust Authority”, “Promote Decentralization”, “Do It Yourself”, “Fight the Power”, “Feed the Noise Back into the System”, and “Surf the Edges”, as posted on the San Franscisco-bay area Bulletin Board System (BBS) called the “Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link” or WELL. These slogans expressed an alternative digital imaginary and libertarian counterculture which played a constitutive role in the shaping the internet.

Soon enough the many affordances of the internet – to publish freely and cheaply, to enable the transnational exchange of information, to connect groups and individuals with each other in communities of interest and action, its horizontal architecture, and the strength of weak ties – stimulated innovation within subcultural movements. They also enhanced these movements’ ability to organise, communicate, mobilise, attack, and circumvent.

The very idea of a ‘free’ internet, as advocated by the alternative cyberpunks and lodged into the popular imagination, has paradoxically fuelled a mainstream business model based on the commodification of users’ sociality and their digital footprint

This stimulated what the Feminist American philosopher Nancy Fraser called “subaltern counterpublics” and the American sociologist Todd Gitlin “public sphericules”, which arguably became much easier to establish online than offline, removing geographical and temporal barriers. BBSs exemplified this capability, facilitating connection, debate and the exchange of information between individuals with similar interests, and relating to various subcultures. Today we still see remnants of this in sites such 4Chan or Reddit. The alternative DIY print-culture phenomenon of the Fanzines became eZines and Web 2.0 also gave rise to the phenomenon of weblogs or blogs, as well as an explosion of bottom-up “citizen” journalism. Also noteworthy in the alternative sphere is the development of a Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) movement, partially undermining proprietary software development.

When capitalist interests took over

However, just as the American sociologist Daniel Bell predicted in his book on the post-industrial society, dominant interests and capitalist power would eventually – with some help from the US government and the EU – fully appropriate the internet and commodify the information society, bringing it firmly in line with capitalist interests and wealth creation. In stark contrast to the myth of the internet being a level-playing field of equal opportunities, the commercialisation of the internet led to an extreme and global oligopolisation accelerated by network effects characterised by a “winner-takes-all” logic. This was achieved through two old models of media monetisation, namely subscription advertising, often combined. Subscription models are platforms designed to counter the illegal downloading of media content such as Netflix and Spotify, but also the ways in which alternative platforms encourage donations by their audiences. The advertising model is more prevalent, however, because of the free culture ideology that accompanied the emergence of the internet.

In the age of social media and big data, the advertising model has become both more sophisticated and more insidious. The privileging of data extraction models and the commodification of our sociality and everything this reveals about us, led to an era of “surveillance capitalism”, whose “mechanisms and economic imperatives have become the default model for most internet-based businesses”. The very idea of a “free” internet, as advocated by the alternative cyberpunks and lodged into the popular imagination, has paradoxically fuelled a mainstream business model based on the commodification of users’ sociality and their digital footprint. As a result, capitalism today does not only feed off our collective labour, but “every aspect of every human’s experience”.

Mainstream or alternative media?

This symbiotic dynamic between mainstream and alternative in the convergent internet era opens a range of profound questions around the continued usefulness of the categories of alternative and mainstream today. Do we consider social media platforms to be alternative channels of distribution for alternative voices and content, or are they quintessential mainstream, corporate controlled platforms? Or both? While self-management, autonomy, and independence from State and market were deemed quintessential characteristics for alternative offline media, this has been seriously undermined – and near impossible to achieve – on the internet. Atton already asked in the early 2000s whether it even “makes sense to talk of alternative media in cyberspace?”.

It is increasingly difficult to ascertain what constitutes mainstream media and what alternative. Does it refer to the nature of the content, the way it is presented, or the platform/publication it is distributed through?

When it comes to mainstream media, the emergence of social media platforms and online podcasts has also had a destabilising impact for the category of “mainstream”. What we considered mainstream media – newspapers, radio, television – is increasingly called “legacy” media to differentiate between “old” and “new” forms. Ultimately, social media platforms are also mainstream corporate spaces. At the same time, all newspapers and broadcasters are also active online, and mainstream celebrities, pundits, and journalists are increasingly setting up their own podcast operations. Furthermore, commercial tensions have emerged between social media companies and legacy media corporations, mainly because the former have eaten up a large portion of the advertising revenue of the latter. Additionally, social media also thrive on and capitalise the circulation of content produced by legacy media. Tied to this, consumption patterns and practices of news and information have also changed considerably.

In this fluid context, it is increasingly difficult to ascertain what constitutes mainstream media and what alternative. Does it refer to the nature of the content, the way it is presented, or the platform/publication it is distributed through? And what remains of the strong democratic origins of alternative media being truly independent, bottom-up, horizontal, and implicated in human rights struggles?

This is an edited extract (pp. 141-144) from Dichotomies in Media and Communication Theory
by Bart Cammaerts, published by Routledge, 2026 © reprinted here by permission.

Bart Cammaerts will speak about the book at a public LSE event from 6.30pm to 8pm on Tuesday 31 March 2026. Find details and register to end.

Note: This extract gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: Tomas Martinez on Unsplash.

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The Women’s Library is the oldest and largest library in Britain devoted to the history of women’s campaigning and activism. It was officially opened in 1926 as the Library of the London Society for Women’s Service and was renamed the Fawcett Library in 1957 in memory of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and The Women’s Library in 2002. It moved to LSE in 2013 and has remained there since.

Throughout its history, encompassing different names and locations, the Library has remained faithful to its original aims: to preserve a history of the struggle for women’s suffrage and to provide access to materials that can be used by contemporary women’s rights campaigners. It contains an array of personal and organisational archives, books, journals, pamphlets, zines, audio-visual, objects, textiles and visual materials relating to campaigning and activism from the late 19th century onwards.

It is striking how much the development of the library depended upon the long-term work of determined women

To mark its 100^th anniversary, a new exhibition at LSE explores its collections from the viewpoint of researchers and their current engagement with the materials, and celebrates the figures who created, maintained and expanded the Library in its early years. It is striking how much the development of the library depended upon the long-term work of determined women: the first official librarian was Lahore-born Vera Douie who managed the Library for over 40 years.

You can listen online to an oral history of her memories about the library produced in 1975 as part of a suffrage history interviews project. Below is a reading list of books to accompany the exhibition, shedding light on the powerful history of the Library and the women behind it.

Enterprising Women: The Garretts and their circle. Elizabeth Crawford. Francis Boutle Publishers. 2002.

Elizabeth Crawford’s Enterprising Women sheds light on the networks of women who fought for the vote and, after winning it, continued to work after with campaigning organisations such as those preserved in the Library. The book focuses on the women of the Garrett family, providing a fascinating account of how members including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Emily Davies made pioneering achievements for women in such diverse fields as education, medicine and interior design.

Turning the Tide: The life of Lady Rhondda. Angela V. John. Parthian. 2013.

The exhibition celebrates some of the many campaigning organisations who contributed to improving the lives of women. These include the work of the Six Point Group founded by Lady Rhondda in 1921 to press for changes in the law of the United Kingdom in six areas: improving legislation on child assault;  legal rights for widowed mothers; legal rights for unmarried mothers; equal rights of guardianship for married parents; equal pay for teachers and equal opportunities for men and women in the civil service.

Angela V. John’s fascinating biography of Lady Rhondda, Turning the Tide, reveals that she was the director of over 30 companies and the first woman president of the Institute of Directors in the 1920s. She also founded Time and Tide magazine, an influential, all-female produced publication which played a key role in covering politics and the arts in the interwar period.

Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928-64. Caitriona Beaumont. Manchester University Press. 2013.

Many of the campaigning organisations archived in the Women’s Library were small grassroots groups run by dedicated volunteers, often from their own homes. Caitriona Beaumont’s Housewives and Citizens is an excellent insight for anyone interested in these groups. It focuses on six organisations in the period 1928-64: the Mothers’ Union, the Catholic Women’s League, the National Council of Women, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (whose records are held by LSE) and the National Union of Townswomen’s Guild.

Many of these published journals which included calendars of events and articles on campaigns, which are rich sources of information on women’s local, regional and national activism. The LSE Digital Library has recently added the Townswoman, a journal published by the Townswomen’s Guild.

A Bookshop of One’s Own: How a Group of Women Set Out to Change the World. Jane Cholmeley. Mudlark. 2024.

Feminist book publishing is a key theme in the exhibition, (including the work of the Sheba Press which became a pioneering publisher of Black women. A Bookshop of One’s Own is a riveting account of the women who set up and ran the famous Silver Moon bookshop on Charing Cross Road, written by one of its co-founders, Jane Cholmeley. The bookshop championed women’s and feminist writing, like that of Sheba. Watch a YouTube video of or read a Q&A with the author from 2024 detailing the trials and tribulations and the grit and optimism required to open a bookshop in 1980s London despite a lack of business experience and funding!).

For more recent accounts of journal publishing by feminists. I would also recommend the Liberating Histories website which provides detailed timelines, research bibliographies and teachers notes of iconic and recent feminist magazines ranging from Spare Rib to Red Rag.

Chrystal Macmillan, 1872-1937: Campaigner for Equality, Justice and Peace. Helen Kay and Rose Pipes. Edinburgh University Press. 2024.

The exhibition also emphasises the long history of feminist internationalism, as many organisations engaged in international campaigning and forged alliances with their peers overseas. This historical biography by Helen Kay and Rose Pipes celebrates the achievements of Chrystal Macmillan, a remarkable woman who was one of the founders of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She was also an organiser of the 1915 International Women’s Congress at The Hague, which urged political leaders to use mediation to stop World War One.

Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel. Rachel Holmes. Bloomsbury. 2020.

Did you know that suffrage campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst was also politically involved in Ethiopia? In 1935 she campaigned against the Italian invasion of the country and in the 1950s moved there permanently, working ceaselessly to improve social conditions and writing a detailed history of the country as well as founding a newspaper.

This was one of the great surprises I discovered from a recent biography of Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes which offers a highly readable insight into the achievements of her long, impactful life, including those that have been less examined. Watch a video of the author speaking about the book at LSE library.

Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles. Imaobong Umoren. University of California Press. 2018.

An LSE author who has also emphasised the long history and importance of transnational feminist connections is Imaobong Umoren, based in the Department of International History. Her book, Race Women Internationalists, which won the 2019 Women’s History Network Book Prize, focuses on the lives of American Eslanda Robeson, Martinican Paulette Nardal, and Jamaican Una Marson, exploring how they created and used global networks to campaign against colonialism, fascism, sexism, and racism.in the 20^th Century.

I hope these recommendations have inspired you to explore the exhibition and Women’s Library itself. During March, look out for links I will be posting on Instagram of other recommended resources available via LSE Library, including databases of articles and primary resources. LSE staff and students can book one-to-one advice sessions for further help researching women’s history resources.

Note: This article gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies procession with Frances Balfour, Millicent Fawcett, Emily Davies and Sophie Bryant, 13 June 1908. Credit: The Women’s Library collection by LSE Library on Flickr.

The LSE exhibition The Women’s Library at 100: celebrating a century of collections, curated by Patricia Owens, Kelly Bosomworth, Grace Heaton, Lyndsey Jenkins, Claire Cunnington, Caroline Derry, Nazmia Jamal, Angèle David-Guillou, and Gillian Murphy, runs from 2 March to 30 September 2026.

A launch event for the exhibition will take place next Thursday 12 March from 5 to 8 pm at LSE – find details and register.

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The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years. Sunil Amrith. Penguin Books. 2025 (paperback) 2024 (e-book).

Today, Earth is a burning planet. And yet, human societies’ relationship to changing ecologies is not something new. If environmental history “begins in the belly”, as the old saying goes, Sunil Amrith’s book only further demonstrates that our relationship with nature – how we eat, live, and breath – has always been the driving force of political, social, and cultural change. As a historian of transnational migration in Southeast Asia, Amrith presents a series of networked vignettes indebted to thinking within the Anthropocene, or what Dipesh Chakrabarty describes as the collapse of age-old distinctions between human and natural history. He moves, almost theatrically, from meditations on Mongol horsemanship to the Black Death; from the Bengal Bay to the transatlantic slave trade; and from the First World War to chemical warfare in Vietnam, India, and China. In this way, he shows how the motion and movement of changing ecologies reshaped ideas about freedom across time and space, and underpinned conquest, empire, and the emergence of new visions of human life.

Seeds of change

The first part examines how ecologies shaped medieval and early modern worlds. Amrith moves from the Mongol Empire to Ming China, the Russian steppe, and the Iberian conquest of the Americas. The mines of Potosí, Bolivia are a recurring image: silver extracted in the Andes, refined with mercury, and funnelled into global trade networks transformed demography, ecology, and economies across continents. China’s demand for silver to pay taxes connected Iberian conquests to Ming fiscal policy and, crucially, gave claims to power an ecological foundation: “As the ecological basis of China’s power and wealth came under strain from the length of the growing seasons [and] the soundness of flood defenses, it is no surprise that the mandate of heaven, the Ming dynasty’s right to rule, teetered” (57-58). Smallpox, the Columbian Exchange, and the transformation of forests into furnaces for refining ore all appear as ecological processes that underwrote empire.

Land and labour reconfigurations helped naturalise racial hierarchies and legitimise slavery, linking environmental change to the ideological birth of racial capitalism.

Following the ecological provocations of David Graber and David Wengrow, Amrith shows how these transformations were intertwined with new justifications for hierarchy and human exceptionalism. Likewise, land and labour reconfigurations helped naturalise racial hierarchies and legitimise slavery, linking environmental change to the ideological birth of racial capitalism. Sovereignty, he suggests, depended on ecological conditions, whether in food supply, flood control, or labour organisation. Likewise, the Atlantic slave trade is presented as a multispecies tragedy: “So violent were the floating prisons that their impact reverberated across species. Sharks followed slave ships, hungry for the broken bodies that would be thrown overboard” (71). This is one of the book’s most powerful images, demonstrating how the quest for cheap things becomes legible, not simply from an ecological bird’s-eye view of, for example, sugar extraction in Madeira.

Technological innovation reshaped landscapes as profoundly as armies did, and imperial violence and animal slaughter are treated as parallel acts of mastery over nature.

Equally, Amrith traces these entanglements through early modern political thought. Hobbes’s claim that “the NUTRITION of a Commonwealth consisteth in the plenty and distribution of materials conducing to life” (8), Bacon’s vision of making nature a “slave” (84), and Jefferson’s notion of liberty arising from the “spontaneous energies” of the earth and its gifts (91) are all interpreted as ways of framing human freedom through the remaking of non-human nature. Where others have looked at the “death of nature” from the perspective of feminism, or as a the conceptual problem of the “free gift” as a social form, Amrith demonstrates how Enlightenment attitudes have a much longer duration history of ecological entanglement with empire.

Breaking the chains

The second part examines the 19th and early 20th centuries, which Amrith calls the “chasm of freedom” (111). In settler colonies, freedom often meant unbounded land acquisition and mobility, with little regard for Indigenous land claims. Across the US, Russia, India, and China, ecological reconfigurations in grain markets, cattle expansion, refrigeration, and fossil-fuel use were central to new visions of liberty and life. Technological innovation reshaped landscapes as profoundly as armies did, and imperial violence and animal slaughter are treated as parallel acts of mastery over nature. While Amrith appears to be following Pierre Charbonnier and the fraught imperial legacy of the relationship between freedom and abundance, the extent to which these long ecological underpinnings might make the concept politically problematic remain quite vague. Still, Amrith establishes the gap between freedom as a horizon of expectation and those experiences of imperial conquest, slavery, and war – all mediated by our relation to nature, or more politically stated, our ecologies of freedom.

The First World War appears as “not only an imperial, but also an ecological catastrophe. It slaughtered animals, devoured forests, feasted on minerals, and left its poisonous trace in soils that remained toxic more than a century later” (162-163). Here, Amrith figures the global dimensions of this war, and how it required a global ecology. In what feels like the heart of the book, “Nitrogen Nightmares” (Chapter seven), interweaves stories about this new, global ecology that set the Great War in motion. On the one hand, we have a familiar story about the invention of synthetic nitrogen by Fritz Haber and the promise of technology to feed a hungry world. On the other, we see the environmental reverberations of chemical warfare in the eyes of Russian, Senegalese, and Indian soldiers. Amrith’s use of images to support his vignettes is brilliant, using art as a window into the experience of wartime destruction and its environmental underpinnings.

Hydroelectric dams and other mega-development projects are used to think through the Janus-faced nature of emancipation, as these projects often generated ecological dilemmas.

The Second World War similarly illustrates how struggles over resources and space (“Lebensraum”) in Germany and Japan reflect fears of ecological limits. Instead of thinking these movements as “stages” or “ages”, Amrith instead considers how “planetary power beyond comprehension” (207) builds upon much longer traces and legacies of ecological entanglement across empires. This is a great strength of Amrith’s writing: he resists Eurocentric narration by showcasing the ecological shockwaves of events placed in a global context. And yet, the political implication of his bricolage remains unclear, perhaps intentionally. He mentions the pathbreaking work of Andreas Malm and the rise of fossil capital and discusses what Timothy Mitchell frames as remaking of our carbon-based democracy. But the extent to which Amrith believes his narration of the ecological underpinnings of freedom bend towards a potentially class-oriented form of politics (as suggested by the many working-class testimonies) is not made explicit.

The human exception

The third part, 1945-2025, links freedom to the ecological transformations of the postwar world. Anticolonial leaders like Sukarno, Ho Chi Minh, Ambedkar, and Nehru are mobilised as touchstones to think critically about how freedom came to be seen as the “sovereign control over the products of nature” (216). Here, hydroelectric dams and other mega-development projects are used to think through the Janus-faced nature of emancipation, as these projects often generated ecological dilemmas. Readers may enjoy “The Human Condition” (Chapter 10), in which Amrith juxtaposes Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, and Indira Gandhi to trace the rise of postwar environmentalism, the Green Revolution, and the globalisation of climate change. He notes that environmentalists brought “a multiplicity of aims and tactics and a breadth of utopian visions” (297), but whether Amrith deems any of them useful remains an open question.

How does one “conclude” such a bricolage of open-ended stories and moving images from which to make ecology legible? Amrith does by navigating Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece Princess Mononoke to emphasise that what is needed are “roads to repair”. While one cannot disagree, there is something lofty about stating that “the struggle ahead is to remember and to integrate our creatureliness into new visions of human flourishing on earth. Only then can we regain our freedom” (348). If political theory is a precondition for writing history, then we may be left wondering what kind of politics leads to this freedom? Despite these uncertainties, The Burning Earth offers a compelling reorientation of global history, insisting that any vision of emancipation must reckon with the material webs that have always sustained and imperilled human life.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: A_Lesik on Shutterstock

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Islam: A New History from Muhammad to The Present. John Tolan. Princeton University Press. 2025.

Islam’s beginnings and evolution 

What are the roots of Islam, and how has it been interpreted and practiced in different ways across time and place since its inception? Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present by John Tolan, surveys a wide range of defining historical episodes and movements from the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the 6^th century through to today. Tolan’s historicising approach focuses not only on events, but highlights the diverse contributions of caliphs, travellers, Sufi saints, merchants, and Islamic reformers in shaping Islamic societies across regions and eras.  

From the spiritual legacy of Rabia al-Adawiyya, the 8th-century Muslim saint, to contemporary interpretations of Islam, the tradition has continually transformed, adapted, and evolved since its inception. During the life of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam remained unified under his direct guidance and the presence of his companions. However, the significant doctrinal and political developments emerged following his death in 632 CE. The first caliph was chosen by Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (632-634) and unifying the Arabian Peninsula and combating early waves of apostasy. The question of succession – specifically who would lead the Ummah (believers of Islam) – marked a decisive moment in Islamic history and led to the emergence of sectarianism such as Sunni and Shi’a. 

Tolan reveals how early political rivalries were transformed into lasting sectarian cleavages within the Islamic tradition.

Tolan draws attention to Nana Asmau, Uthman ibn Fodio’s daughter, a distinguished scholar, poet, Sufi, and reformer, who exercised significant intellectual and political influence during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the modern period, figures such as African American Imam Amina Wadud – who converted from Christianity to Islam – have continued this tradition of reinterpretation. In her work Qur’an and Woman (1999), Wadud argues that each generation of Muslims must retain the freedom to reread and reinterpret the Quran, underscoring Islam’s dynamic and evolving engagement with history, and society. Further, Tolan highlights how Muslim scholars, organisations, and leaders have politically mobilised Muslim communities across the world and their contribution of proliferations of Islam especially in the Middle East, the USA and Europe. He discusses figures from an Egyptian author Gamal al-Banna to the brother of Hassan al-Banna and from Malcolm X to Mahmud Muhammad Taha and Bilali Muhammad.  

The Quran and sectarianism

Tolan  episodic historical approach zones in on key events in Islam, particularly those surrounding the compilation of the Quran and the struggle for political authority after the Prophet Muhammad’s death. The Quran was first full text compiled in written form during the caliph of Uthman ibn Affan, a process that later became a source of sectarian controversy. Certain Shi’a scholars such as Ibn Abil Hadid and Yasir al-Habib have argued that portions of the original revelation were concealed, alleging that Ali ibn Abi Talib as the rightful successor were omitted, and that some Quranic materials were destroyed during the standardisation of the text. 

Tolan further situates these theological disputes within the larger political conflicts between emerging Sunni authorities and Shi’a factions during the Umayyad period, followed by the Abbasid era, when competing claims to the caliphate continued to shape Islamic governance. He demonstrates how the institution of the caliphate became a source of deep and enduring division within Islam. For instance, Tolan discusses accusations directed at Ali in relation to the assassination of Caliph Umar, including claims that Ali protected and facilitated the escape of the assassin, Piruz Nahavandi – a Persian captive taken during the Battle of Al-Qadisiyya (25). Through these episodes, Tolan reveals how early political rivalries were transformed into lasting sectarian cleavages within the Islamic tradition. 

Islam’s spread and divisions 

Initially, Islam expanded its dominance from Damascus (634 CE) to Antioch (637 CE) and Jerusalem (638 CE). By the time of Caliph Umar’s death in 644 CE, the Islamic empire spanned from Libya to Afghanistan and from Azerbaijan to Yemen. Later, Tolan briefly discusses the rise of Islam most continents of the world through battles, merchants, and Sufi’s spirituality. Tolan notes that how the first Fitna or civil war stated in the 7^th century in Islam which gave to rise new sectarian divisions such as Sunnis, Shi’a, and Kharijites. These sects started to practice Islam in their own ways. For instance, Shi’a believed that Ali was first Caliph of Umma and Sunnis believed Abu-Bakr, and some Muslim rulers imposed a Jizya (tax) on Christians, Jews, Jains, Buddhists and Hindus. 

Movements including Deobandi, Wahhabi, Ahmadiyya and Faraizi emerged that created identity-based segregation and emphasised strict adherence to the Quran and Hadith, rejecting some traditional practices among Muslims

Tolan highlights the significance of Ibn Battuta’s Rihla (1959) in understanding the global spread and lived diversity of Islam. Battuta’s travels from Mecca to Mali, India, Mauritius, and China – illustrate how Islam adapted cultures across regions. Serving as a qadi (a Muslim judge) in India under Muhammad bin Tughlaq and later as an envoy to China, Battuta offers detailed observations on governance, economy, and international relations. His vivid, experiential narrative enriches Islamic history, particularly through contributions such as his writing of hadith (corpus of sayings or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad) in Arabic at the request of Muhammad ben Aydin, Sultan of Birki (Birkin) (125). 

Colonial influence and modern Islam 

In the chapter “Colonization and Its Discontents, 1798-1918,” Tolan traces the history of European colonisation in Muslim societies from the late 18th to the early 20th century. He examines how India came under the control of European powers such as the East India Company, the Portuguese, and the Dutch, who established colonial regimes across different regions. Tolan highlights how the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) employed Muslims to codify Islamic law in matters of inheritance, marriage, and divorce, at Masulipatnam (Andhra Pradesh), Malabar Coast (Kerala) Gujarat, and some part of Bengal, while the British East India Company similarly institutionalised Islamic (Sharia) law for Muslims in Bengal, Madras, Bombay presidencies and later all over India as part of its colonial governance strategy (168).  

Movements including Deobandi, Wahhabi, Ahmadiyya and Faraizi emerged that created identity-based segregation and emphasised strict adherence to the Quran and Hadith, rejecting some traditional practices among Muslims. For instance, the Deobandi Movement founded in 1866, went against modern western education and promoted traditional studies (Quran, Hadith, Fiqh). Contrastingly, Sir Syed Ahmad founded Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875, to modernise education with Islamic values. Later, these movements spread not only across the Indian subcontinent but also to the Middle East, South Asia and Europe.   

Overall, Tolan’s book is a comprehensive account of key Islamic events and historical developments; however, some of his arguments are insufficiently substantiated. For instance, the claim that Shi’a Muslims believed that Ayesha (wife of Muhammad) concealed Quranic verses proving Ali’s rightful succession is presented with limited evidentiary support. The book also overlooks the significant role of Sufi traditions in the spread of Islam in the Indian subcontinent, particularly the contributions of key figures. Nonetheless, Tolan’s work offers a broad historical perspective on Islam’s evolution, transformation, and the emergence of diverse sects across regions. The book focuses primarily on political events in Islamic history and their role in the making and unmaking of Islam. In so doing, it makes a meaningful contribution for Islamic scholars, academicians and individuals to understand the evolution of Islam from Muhammad to present.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency. Terry M. Moe and William G. Howell. Princeton University Press. 2025.

Conservatives vs. the administrative state

In the early decades following the Progressive Era, as the administrative state grew and put down roots, conservative Republicans and their business and intellectual allies railed against Democratic presidents – Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson – for advancing big government and progressive programs. But the Republican Party was fairly diverse and moderate at that time, and its staunch conservatives were shouting from the margins. The party as a whole, moreover, was in no position to take on the administrative state even if it wanted to. Congress was controlled by Democrats, who stood ready to defend it against any opposition. The courts were filled with judges who accepted it as a modern reality and adapted their jurisprudence to accommodate it. And the bureaucracy was in the expert hands of experienced civil servants who were adept at defending their turf.

Yet conservatives wouldn’t forever reside at the margins. They rose to political power during the late 1970s, elected Ronald Reagan president, took control of the Republican Party (eventually), and dedicated it to undermining the administrative state. The obstacles to change were the same as before. But conservatives hit upon a novel solution that, for professed believers in limited government and individual liberty, has to be regarded as the ultimate irony: they would endorse and pursue a presidency of extraordinary power, capable of dominating, retrenching, and sabotaging the administrative state unilaterally through top-down presidential control of the executive.

Hence the new asymmetry. Democrats didn’t need a president to pursue such domination, because the administrative state was largely performing functions that they supported. If the agencies and programs just did their jobs and carried out their legal missions, the progressive agenda would be advanced. This state of affairs, moreover, was the prevailing status quo; and as political scientists have long known, it takes much less power to protect the status quo than it does to change it. Conservative Republicans were on the other end of this power equation. They were the ones seeking to upend the established system. And to do so, they recognised, they needed a vastly more powerful presidency than the Democrats did.

The pursuit of extraordinary power

Their pursuit of extraordinary power took decades, and it continues today. Its first stirrings can be seen in the “administrative presidency” of Richard Nixon’s final two years in office. But it was Reagan who embraced it as a full-blown, systematic strategy of conservative governance. This involved greatly magnifying the presidency’s traditional reliance on centralisation and politicisation to enhance top-down control. But it also involved a radical move of great historical consequence: Reagan’s Department of Justice, led by Ed Meese, began developing the Unitary Executive Theory (UET), a new line of legal theory that rejected the traditionally understood constraints of statutory law and separation of powers and claimed that the Constitution grants presidents vast inherent powers of unilateral action and supreme authority over all agencies within the executive – what they do, how they do it, how they are staffed, and what decisions get made.

An anti-system populist base [in the Republican Party] yearned for strongman leadership: a president who would exercise unilateral power untethered to traditional democratic norms and procedures.

Over time, the theory came to be more fully developed and diversified by conservative legal scholars. It also was sharply criticised, not simply for its questionable jurisprudence but for its potential to unleash and legitimize strongman powers threatening to democracy. Those fears appeared to be borne out during the presidency of George W. Bush, whose administration relied on the UET to justify controversial actions – notably, the torture of prisoners – that violated existing law. Prominent legal scholars soon began pointing to Bush as the poster boy of an antidemocratic president.

The arrival of the strongman

Bush, however, was but a pale imitation of the real thing, which was coming soon enough. Conservatism itself was slowly being transformed and rendered much more extreme by the rise of right-wing populism, which began to threaten democracies throughout the developed West during the 1990s, was supercharged in the United States by the emergence of the Tea Party in 2010 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and became the controlling force within the Republican Party. The party’s pursuit of extraordinary presidential power was no longer just a strategic choice. It was now magnified and driven to extremes by an anti-system populist base that yearned for strongman leadership: a president who would exercise unilateral power untethered to traditional democratic norms and procedures.

In Donald Trump, they found their man – and put American democracy in great danger. That danger was very real during Trump’s first term and has so far been magnified during his second. There is good reason to think, moreover, that it will persist well after he leaves centre stage. For with the Republican Party in the thrall of populist forces – an entrenched feature of American politics that will not end soon – future Republican presidents will have much the same incentives to embrace the role of the strongman.

This is an extract from Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency by Terry M. Moe and William G. Howell, published by Princeton University Press, 2025 © reprinted here by permission.

Note: This extract gives the views of the authors and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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The Cameroon War: A History of French Neocolonialism in Africa by Thomas Deltombe, Manuel Domergue and Jacob Tatsitsa. Translated from the French by David Broder. Verso. 2025.

Cameroon’s transition to independence in France in 1960 was preceded by a strong resistance movement starting from 1955. To prevent new losses after Indochina and the Algerian war, France waged a secret war on Cameroon lasting until 1964, and then installed a neocolonial authoritarian system tied to the French Presidency which still holds sway today. The Cameroon War by Cameroonian historian Jacob Tatsista, and two French journalists, Thomas Deltombe and Manuel Domergue, was originally published in French in 2011 as an 800-page volume and has now appeared in English. David Broder’s translation of the second, shortened, 2016 edition is updated with new archival materials from Britain. It constitutes a valuable contribution to the scholarship through its focus on this suppressed piece of history and the origins of contemporary French neocolonial policies.

Cameroon’s colonial history 

Cameroon was a German colony from 1884 to 1916. After the First World War, Cameroon – like Palestine and Rwanda among others – it came under a League of Nations Mandate. The larger part was governed by the French, a smaller by the British. Mandate status and, after 1945, the United Nations trusteeship, implied indeterminacy of sovereignty: what the authors deem an “unsolvable colonial equation” and show how it was exploited by colonial powers and local movements alike.

As the authors turn to the Cameroonian independence movement (1948 to1955), they describe how, in 1948, the Union of the Populations of Cameroon (UPC) came together under the leadership of Ruben Um Nyobe who mobilised strong support across the population (43). The UPC petitioned the UN directly, calling on colonial powers to deliver “full autonomy and independence” (48). In response, France established alternative political parties led by Franco-Cameroonian elites who appropriated UPC demands, intercepted UPC communications, machine-gunned UPC-led strikes in Douala, and prevented UN visitors from interacting with militants directly. Ultimately France succeeded in convincing the UN to ban the UPC in 1955 (68). Denied legitimate political recourse, the UPC turned to armed action known as maquis (guerillas) (74). While earlier accounts on UPC nationalism have focused on Bassa and Bamileke groups, the authors bring additional archival research and oral histories to weave a broader argument about the UPC’s struggle.

Forging independence after 1955 

The next two chapters detail France’s violent warfare against the maquis in 1955 to 1958, followed by French-orchestrated independence in 1959 to 1960. It is in these chapters that two key strengths of the book lie. The broader geopolitical situation of the time was unfavourable to the French empire which had lost the war in Indochina and struggled in Algeria. Ending the Cameroonian insurgency and staging its independence became key to sustaining French imperial power. Making brief reference to British suppression of Mau Mau and Kikuyu in Kenya, the authors meticulously detail how the French established “pacification zones”, deported entire populations to resettlement camps, burnt territories from planes, used rape, torture and public executions, and ultimately killed Um Nyobe.

In parallel, they prepared for independence on French terms, choosing Ahmadou Ahidjo to sign an independence agreement “promoting Franco-Cameroonian friendship” in January 1960. The Cameroonian constitution was modelled on that of the French Fifth Republic, bestowing quasi-dictatorial power on Ahidjo and ceding Cameroon’s defence, diplomacy and currency to France (95). In November 1960, additional bilateral agreements on Franco-Cameroonian development “cooperation” and “technical assistance” ensured ongoing restrictions on Cameroonian sovereignty (128). The book not only presents previously undocumented evidence; it outlines how many of these agreements remain “secret” to this day, including those granting France exclusive rights to exploit mineral resources for 60 to 80 years.

French ‘controlled massacres’ and psychological warfare continued under the guise of training manoeuvres and were normalised across Cameroon for fear unrest might spread. 

The transition from the colonial to a neocolonial system allowed France, acting behind the official Cameroonian army, to keep the war hidden. The authors distinguish themselves from other accounts, to argue that French military action should be denominated as a war waged against Cameroon; they do so by documenting, revealing and comparing French strategies here to those used in Algeria and Indochina. Under the leadership of veterans from Indochina and Algeria, UPC strongholds in the Anglophone Bamileke and Mungo regions were bombed and 21,000 people killed (118). The rest of the population was re-settled in camps for ‘re-education’ through torture. These events were little reported at the time, and if they were, it was in terms of an internal “ethnic war” (119).

French “controlled massacres” and psychological warfare continued under the guise of training manoeuvres (138) and were normalised across Cameroon for fear unrest might spread. In 1962 the temporary state of emergency was made permanent, creating an “administration of terror” where torture became a means of “governing the population” (143). During 1955 to1971, around 100,000 people were killed; “Politics became a sham and a petrified Cameroonian people took refuge in silence” (145).

Françafrique, or neocolonial rule, continued?

The book closes with its second major contribution: a description of the system of neocolonial governance known as Françafrique: a “unique system of neocolonial governance that enables a tiny number of French officials, in collusion with a handful of African leaders, to control remotely and at low cost […] peoples who remain prisoners of a system that ensures their continued domination by the old colonial power” (134). While documented in French, this is its first introduction to broader English-speaking audiences. The system, developed in Cameroon and replicated elsewhere, entailed armies built on the counter-insurgency model, secret services trained by their French counterparts, and French technical assistance which severely restricted sovereignty. Françafrique relies on control of African affairs directly by the French presidency, a situation that still holds today.

In 1982, Ahidjo was replaced by another disciple of France, Paul Biya. The reason for this change is disputed, but points to a leftward shift in French politics, and to the role of the French oil company, Elf. One wishes that the authors had investigated the so-called Elf Scandal more thoroughly. The authors move rather quickly through the years of Biya’s violent rule, highlighting continuities with Ahidjo’s autocratic regime, including the military suppression of cost-of-living protests in 2008, a renewed military pact with France against Boko Haram in 2014 and, since 2018, armed conflict with colonial roots in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon.

The book’s core contributions lie in its comparative study of French war strategies, the extensive, detailed evidence about the war, and the foundation of the intricate neocolonial system known as Francafrique.

In 2009, Prime Minster Francois Fillon publicly denied French involvement, but in 2015, President Francois Hollande announced that the history books would be reopened. Yet a commission was only appointed by the Macron presidency in 2023, led by French historian Karine Ramondy. Analysing its 2025 report, Thomas Deltombe characterised the commission as “diplomatic and communicational,” more than scholarly, revealing little that was new. These chapters would have benefited from more extensive and sustained analysis, given the authors’ intimate knowledge of French political history.

Overall, this detailed history speaks to the extreme violence of a long-silenced war in Cameroon. Written in an accessible manner, though in rather militant language that perhaps inadvertently echoes the UPC tone, the book will be of interest to those interested in French neocolonialism, geopolitics and comparative studies on independence and nationalist movements. The book’s core contributions lie in its comparative study of French war strategies, the extensive, detailed evidence about the war, and the foundation of the intricate neocolonial system known as Francafrique.

During the presidential election on 12 October 2025, many Cameroonians stayed home, sought refuge in rural areas or left the country rather than exercise their right to vote. They feared terror at the hands of the administration. Two weeks later, Paul Biya was “re-elected” – this was presented in the French and international press as a matter of dysfunctional internal politics. What Tatsitsa, Deltombe and Domergue point to is the violent colonial events that contextualise Biya becoming the world’s longest serving head of state. Seventy-five years after the hidden war on Cameroon, Biya’s recent return to power reveals that, despite major geopolitical changes with Chinese and Russians and the withdrawal of French armies in the region, Françafrique is far from gone.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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The Corporation in the 21^st Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business is Wrong. John Kay. Profile Books. 2025 (paperback); 2024 (hardback). 

How corporations have evolved over time 

What if the prevailing wisdom on what makes a successful and durable business is entirely wrong? John Kay’s The Corporation in the 21^st Century makes exactly that claim, upending the apple cart of contemporary business strategy, and making a brilliant contribution to business economics, industrial organisation, political economy, and institutional economics in so doing. Drawing from the work of Margaret M. Blair and Lynn Stout, Kay demolishes the 40-year shareholder-value orthodoxy, by demonstrating that maximising short-term financial targets may enrich a small class of executives, but it causes a slow self-euthanasia of the corporation over decades. This ambitious book describes the emergence of a new economic institutional order, very much in the tradition of, and inspired by, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nation, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and John K. Galbraith’s The New Industrial State. 

Although the dominant forms of “capital” used by the modern corporation have transformed, the language used to describe capital has not. In the 19th and 20th centuries, physical capital was dominant: textile mills and iron works, railways, steel mills assembly lines, etc. (59-70). But the 21st-century corporation is no longer defined by its physical capital (4), nor by the bourgeoise and proletariat class struggle. Instead, today’s dominant forms of capital are human (skills, experience, judgement of employees), social (trust, relationships, reputation), organisational (culture, routines, ways of working), and intellectual (knowledge, data, innovation) (335- 40). For example, Amazon requires warehouses, vehicles, and stocks of goods it rents rather than owns them (304). According to Kay the evolutions of the dominant forms of capital and modes of work have transformed capitalism into a post-capitalist economy, which he calls a “pluralist economy” (8; 351-3). 

That the evolution of capital has transformed the mode production is debatable. From a global perspective it is not clear the importance of physical capital has diminished. G7 economies have simply exported physical capital from their shores to places like China, South Korea, Mexico, and a slew of small economies across the globe. The Smithian/Marxian class struggle is now more global than ever. Although the forms may have changed, international class struggles persist, as articulated in the massive increase in inequalities of income and wealth across all the G7 economies. 

The consumer paradox and the rise of short-term thinking 

In writing this book, Kay is motivated by a paradoxical observation: consumers love the products of big corporations but hate the producers (13-25). We love our smartphones, computers, search engines, automobiles, online shopping with fast deliver, retailers who provide cheap prices and budget airlines. But we view the corporations who sell these products and their executives as overly greedy, exploitive of their workers and suppliers, social irresponsible, often unethical, sometimes criminal, and corrosive of democratic processes by influencing politics. In the 21^st century there is massive distrust of big business, and it is widespread across the G7 countries and most developed nations across the globe. Kay attributes this to an over-focus by corporations on short-term financial goals such as profit maximisation, cost minimisation, and shareholder value (178-85; 193-201). 

The pursuit of short-term financial goals gained prominence in the 1980s and was entrenched by the 1990s

Milton Friedman’s notorious article from 1970, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase its Profits” became a paradigm expression of this short-termism. The pursuit of short-term financial goals gained prominence in the 1980s and was entrenched by the 1990s. By the 2000s, short-termism began to have adverse  consequences for society and firms themselves. Not only does it damage public trust in big business, Kay maintains; it undermines the long-term performance and survival of businesses themselves (193-201).  

The Fortune 500 annually lists the 500 biggest US firms by total revenue. Only 49 firms on the 2025 edition were also on the original 1955 list. Of these 49, they have tended to resist maximising shareholder-value. Instead, they have stayed committed to their core capacities and long-term purpose at the expense of short-term financial targets (87-92), including Bosch, Toyota, Bershire-Hathway, and Unilever. Boeing resisted short-termism until a culture shift in early 2000s generating an all-time high value for the company, with the share price reaching $400 in 2019. Then planes started falling out of the sky; so did Boeing’s stock price (236-8; 18-19). 

Financialisation and macroeconomic instability  

According to Kay, focus on short-term financial targets significantly contributes to the historical process of “financialisation”, defined by Gerald Epstein in 2005 as “the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies.” Kay maintains financialisation generates macroeconomic instability. In two earlier books, The Long and the Short of It (2009) and Other People’s Money (2015) Kay argues the financial industry has become too large, too powerful and too misdirected in its activities. Worse, the financial institutions misdirect the activity of other businesses. 

Short-term financial incentives give rise to asset bubbles and recessions, encourage excessive risk-taking, irresponsible speculation, and increase the trading of financial products that benefit financiers and bankers 

Short-term financial incentives give rise to asset bubbles and recessions, encourage excessive risk-taking, irresponsible speculation (198-9), and increase the trading of financial products that benefit financiers and bankers themselves, rather than their more traditional behaviour of supporting productive businesses, savers, and the wider economy. Kay further underscores that financialisation has given rise to the “finance curse” (243-50) whereby resources get misdirected to the oversized financial sector, reducing real growth and widening inequality.  

From shareholder ownership a stakeholder approach 

Shareholder value maximisation presumes that shareholders are the “owners” of the company. But Kay insists that shareholders do not own the company but merely own shares therein. They cannot use the corporation’s assets and have no direct control of what the firm does. The shareholder ownership myth distorts the corporate purpose. Viewing shareholders as owners encourages excessive focus on short-term share price, which has had negative consequences for employees, customers, long-term value, and for company growth, even company survival itself.  

Kay supports the “stakeholder” account of business (19-21) whereby the corporation brings together employees, managers, suppliers, investors, customers, and other community members who have no formal contract or formal transaction with the corporation. What binds these stakeholders is not contracts but invested interest in the activities of the corporation. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Kay uses a sports to illustrate how this works. He contends that superstar athletes such as footballer Lionel Messi become great, not merely through competing, but primarily through the cooperation and collective activities with teammates, coaches, trainers, supporting staff and the energy of fans (132-9). 

Long-term successful businesses are shown to be more communitarian and socially engaged […] purpose-driven social institutions whose success depends on trust, collective activities, core capacities, and long-term stewardship. 

The role of managers is to protect and balance the various stakeholders’ interests to generate trust, empathy, and fairness between them. By this logic, the most important assets are collective knowledge, collective intelligence, and collective action (101-15) including employee skills and experience, organisational routines, shared culture values and norms, and long-term relationships of trust. The corporation as a stakeholder-based social organisation is their collective activities. Collective activities are created through cooperation and trust over time and cannot be owned, traded, or replicated easily (113-5). When a sense of trust, empathy, and fairness is broken the corporation is in trouble (276-89). 

Too often the stakeholder model of corporation is seen as largely normative, i.e., it prescribes how firms ought to behave and be managed. One of the greatest strengths of Kay’s argument is the evidence-based assertion that most long-term successful businesses do behave and are managed this way. Such businesses are shown to be more communitarian and socially engaged, e.g. John Lewis Partnership, Bosch, Toyota, IKEA, Mars, Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, and worker-owned models like Mondragon. These corporations are purpose-driven social institutions whose success depends on trust, collective activities, core capacities, and long-term stewardship. 

The Corporation in the 21^st Century is political economy at its best, and an essential critique of the mainstreaming of short-term financial goals in business. The book is impressive for its rich business history and full of anecdotal examples of the activities of individual businesses. Most of all, Kay’s sharp institutional analysis of how businesses succeed long-term, and how they fail by following the prevailing trend of short-term shareholder returns, is brilliant and urgently needed. It will surely make the book an instant – and long-term – classic.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle. Ching Kwan Lee. Harvard University Press. 2025.

The stories we tell ourselves can be incomplete without being untrue. That is one starting point of this ambitious work that situates a pivotal moment in Hong Kong’s history within a larger frame of geopolitical tension, rival capitalisms and postcolonial subjectivity. In Forever Hong Kong, Ching Kwan Lee offers something more thought-provoking than the conventional portrait of democracy versus authoritarianism. Nor do theories of inequality in global cities explain Hong Kong’s politicisation. In her view, existing approaches capture “the moment but not the movement, the appearance but not the essence of the uprising”. Instead, the core issue is the transformation of colonised subjects into historical agents, and their search for self-determination. 

Hong Kong’s double coloniality

The central claim is that Hong Kong’s protests in 2019 were a response to a “double coloniality coproduced by British and Chinese rule”. Lee argues that the decolonisation struggle has been directed not only towards political domination by mainland China but also legacies of British rule and crises of capitalism. She gives two main reasons to adopt this “decolonising” lens. The first is to understand the aspirations of a social and political movement. The second is to analyse the claims of Chinese officials that the problem of governing Hong Kong is one of unfinished decolonisation. 

The book is a story of becoming. It narrates how Hong Kong people turned themselves into historical agents in general, and decolonising subjects in particular, ‘with all their flaws, hesitations and limitations’.

Lee’s approach inevitably raises questions about how to situate the case of Hong Kong within broader histories. She reminds us that Hong Kong was not entirely outside the wave of decolonisation after the Second World War. Both expatriate and Chinese reformers in the colony demanded constitutional changes. But the city was actively detached from this trajectory when the PRC gained a permanent seat at the United Nations in 1971 and successfully campaigned to remove Hong Kong and Macau from the UN’s list of non-self-governing territories. The complicity of British and Chinese policy in perpetuating Hong Kong as a colony informs Lee’s framework of “double coloniality”. At the same time, an aversion to communist rule shaped an ambivalent relationship between the people of Hong Kong and colonial modernity. Lee also asks us to consider both coercive assimilation and the politics of difference as tools of imperial domination. 

The book is a story of becoming. It narrates how Hong Kong people turned themselves into historical agents in general, and decolonising subjects in particular, “with all their flaws, hesitations and limitations”. The puzzle is why this transformation intensified under “national” Chinese rule rather than “alien” British rule. Chapter One begins by juxtaposing foundational myths in the pre-1997 period – such as those of stability, rule of law, and free-market utopia – with the inconvenient realities that these incomplete stories ignored. Chapter Two focuses on the “interregnum” (1997-2017) when one political master had left the stage and the next had yet to establish itself. These chapters describe the conditions under which people responded to crises in the postcolony and began to make demands beyond the parameters of double coloniality.  

A postcolonial generation 

The following chapters go inside the 2019 movement and identify a postcolonial generation as the force behind the making of a political community. Lee contrasts this with other struggles of decolonisation, which were often spearheaded by a national bourgeoisie, an exploited working class or a dispossessed peasantry. As the title Forever Hong Kong hints at, “a new temporality imposed by the new sovereign” paradoxically accelerated the cognitive rupture of a political generation from the foundations of colonial hegemony. This led a pragmatic majority to join a struggle that had been led by a minority of passionate youths. The generation that came of age after 1997 experienced disagreement and tension as the movement developed, but has retained its primacy in assembling people otherwise divided by class, gender, race and religion.  

This book raises significant questions that are not fully resolved. One is the extent to which the articulation of a decolonising subjectivity glosses over persisting or new ambivalences among the population. Lee notes on multiple occasions that individuals’ identification with decolonisation is uneven. The precise nature of this unevenness deserves further attention. The author also points out how many activists’ demands were couched in concrete terms – like universal suffrage, anti-extradition or anti-national education – rather than explicit visions of a more completely decolonial polity. Since political identification can be implicit, we need more tools to examine the non-discursive dimensions of agency and subjectivity. Lee offers a starting point with ethnographic insights on the process of action. She is concerned not with elites and their texts but with communities of action (or what citizens called 抗爭共同體, “communions in resistance”) in the birth of a political community. And yet the exact relationship between praxis, theory and subjectivity remains unclear. Clarifying this relationship would be analytically fruitful: under what conditions does repeated action lead to qualitative changes in political consciousness? It would also allow us to better understand what a legacy of resistance looks like in the absence of an overarching theory of change.  

Waves of self-determination? 

Beyond these questions are broader implications about the persistence of demands for self-determination in the 21^st century. Commentaries during the Second World War already talked about the rise and fall of self-determination. By telling a story from the mid-20^th century through to the 2020s, Lee convincingly shows that self-determination has an unfinished history that takes the form of multiple waves. She doesn’t make clear, however, whether we should understand the case of Hong Kong to be at the beginning, the middle or the end of a wider wave. Another suggestion is that Hong Kong’s experience with multiple empires makes obvious what has always been the case: that colonial domination does not hail exclusively from the West. Demands for self-determination will evolve as the world moves beyond the demise of European empires into a multipolar age. How will the meaning of equality – the concept with which Lee ends the book – change in tandem with patterns of domination? 

Does the case of Hong Kong reflect a wider trend in the emergence of political generations as primary claimants of self-determination?

The unfinished history of self-determination is not just about periodisation. It is also about the generational aspect of political identity. In addition to the role of a political generation in catalysing a movement for self-determination, Lee shows the effect of such a movement in the making of generations. In other words, she connects the sociological problem of generations with the political question of self-determination. Like recent reinterpretations of Black Atlantic world ordering and the indigenous politics of refusal, this book looks beyond statehood as the only way to assess the goals and outcomes of such movements. Instead, it draws on Karl Mannheim’s concept of a “generation entelechy”, which refers to the realisation of potentialities inherent in a cohort. The book invites us to ask: does the case of Hong Kong reflect a wider trend in the emergence of political generations as primary claimants of self-determination, alongside or in lieu of other social categories? If so, what difference does that make? And if a generation cannot access state power, through what political processes can its agency materialise in shaping its destiny?

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Extroverted Financialisation: Banking on US Dollar Debt. Mareike Beck. Cambridge University Press. 2025.

Mareike Beck’s Extroverted Financialisation explores why German banking, frequently characterised as relatively conservative, relationship-oriented, and domestically rooted, underwent a profound transformation by adopting US-style financial practices. The question is a salient one. Although the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-9 was caused by speculative innovations tied to the US housing market, it was European banks that ultimately sat at its epicentre and bore many of its heaviest costs. Prevailing accounts of Europe’s experience of the crisis emphasise how the globalisation of finance enabled rapid contagion. Such descriptions tend to underscore the thick mesh of cross-border claims and obligations that link the balance sheets of financial institutions trading complex products, such as credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations. 

Why did Germany deepen its exposure to risk? 

Beck acknowledges the intricacies of these mechanisms but argues that a fixation on instruments and exchanges obscures the more fundamental question of motivation. Why did German banks deepen their exposure to the vulnerabilities of US finance? The book thus traces how shifts in German banking make legible the pervasive influence of US-led financialisation. 

Germany’s two largest banks, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, exemplify the processes that Beck terms “extroverted financialisation”, through which German banks reoriented themselves towards US finance. These two banks and their historical transformations are the subject of the latter part of the book. Earlier, the focus is on some core concepts that help the reader understand financial imperatives and the prowess of the system underpinned by the United States Dollar (USD). 

The Pfandbrief, which translates to ‘letter of pledge’ is Germany’s covered bond (a financial instrument  backed by a pool of assets) and a compelling success of the banking system for supporting long-term investment in the domestic economy by easing the mismatch between the supply of capital and the demand for credit. Pfandbriefe have been a feature of German banking for centuries, with Friedrich II using this instrument in the 18th century to finance the reconstruction of Prussia. In more recent times, Pfandbriefe have provided long-term finance for urban housing, agrarian development, and infrastructure projects. Their widespread use in Germany underscores that market-based finance is not a US innovation.  

German stability versus American strain 

The 1960s offer an instructive contrast between the relative stability of a German system and the mounting strains in US banking that enhanced the appeal of speculative and market-based practices. Post-war German banking benefited from strong household savings, steady deposit growth, and robust demand for long-term credit. US banks, by contrast, were constrained by Regulation Q, which capped deposit rates; as inflation rose and non-bank instruments became more attractive, they struggled to retain deposits. In response, they began to marketise their debt and develop instruments that could circulate on money markets: pivotal shifts that undergirded the market-based strategies that would define liquidity management.  

German banks were pushed to internationalise and soon found themselves competing directly with the expanding Eurodollar market, where US banks were already offering services to European firms. 

While large German banks operated in a competitive environment and occasionally acquired smaller institutions, they did not face the rivalries confronting US banks from an expanding array of non-bank financial actors. German banks neither competed with money-market instruments for household savings nor relied heavily on wholesale funding. This divergence helps explain why the German system remained anchored in long-term, prudently structured collateralised finance, even as the US shifted steadily toward a market-based model. 

The pivot to the US market model 

Beck notes that this German model of banking might have provided the basis for a more organic European financial architecture. Yet this proved untenable given the export orientation of the German economic miracle or Wirtschaftswunder, which relied on domestic capital accumulation alongside Marshall Plan funding. German banks were therefore pushed to internationalise and soon found themselves competing directly with the expanding Eurodollar market, where US banks were already offering services to European firms. 

Eurodollars became pivotal to financial globalisation from the 1960s onwards. Beck’s account of this trajectory is so detailed and thorough that compressing it feels wrong, but its core dynamics are as follows. Eurodollars are USD-denominated deposits held outside the United States, especially in London within US and UK merchant banks. These deposits expanded rapidly during the Cold War, driven in part by foreign investors’ concerns about potential US asset seizures, which made offshore dollar holdings an attractive means of maintaining dollar liquidity beyond the reach of domestic regulation. Freed from domestic constraints and hungry for funding, US banks turned to offshore markets for liquidity, enabling rapid expansion of their asset portfolios. They soon emerged as central intermediaries for American corporations, European exporters, and an expanding group of sovereign borrowers. 

Deutsche Bank’s and Commerzbank’s strategies 

Beck shows that Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank faced complicated choices in reorienting themselves outward by adopting US-style market-based practices. Only after overcoming deep scepticism about the ethics and risks of US financial expansion did they pursue extroverted financialisation, with each bank taking a different approach. When efforts to build Pan-European resistance to the displacement of European currencies failed, Deutsche Bank, followed by Commerzbank and eventually forty or so other German banks, accepted that resistance was futile and moved to assert themselves in the Eurodollar market by establishing a strong presence in its key hubs, Luxembourg and London. Deutsche Bank, after acquiring the British merchant bank Morgan Grenfell in 1989, initially sought to keep the two entities separate: an attempt to shield its conservative domestic operations from the more aggressive, market-oriented practices of Anglo-American finance.  

Whereas Deutsche Bank saw Europe within a broader global strategy, Commerzbank remained regionally anchored, using Eurodollar liquidity mainly to support European SMEs and making only limited incursions into US finance.

This separation ended in 1994 with the creation of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. This new entity could meet a key imperative of extroverted financialisation: a presence in US money markets, which for Deutsche facilitated a series of acquisitions of American non-bank institutions. The purchase of Banker’s Trust by Deutsche in 1998, for nearly USD 10 billion, created a formidable German mega bank which would rely on investment banking for more than half of its operating income. Commerzbank did not follow the same path as its larger rival. Whereas Deutsche Bank saw Europe within a broader global strategy, Commerzbank remained regionally anchored, using Eurodollar liquidity mainly to support European SMEs and making only limited incursions into US finance. This left it poorly positioned as global banking shifted toward US money-market funding. The watershed was its 2008 acquisition of Dresdner Bank, whose own unique strategy of extroverted financialisation had produced heavy exposure to toxic US asset-backed commercial paper. Eager to expand and unaware of the full extent of Dresdner’s troubles, Commerzbank absorbed these liabilities and, in doing so, became entangled in the very US money-market dynamics it had long avoided. 

Beck’s work is rich, rigorous, and indispensable for readers seeking a deep understanding of how US hegemony is exercised across different domains. Extroverted Financialisation is, at its core, a story of how the dominance of the US dollar is sustained not only by the scale and liquidity of US debt but also by the global banking system’s persistent need to access US money markets to avert liquidity shortages. Although the book develops its arguments through meticulous analyses of European particularly German, banking, it is far from merely a study of Western finance. Its overarching themes speak directly to the major debates in the political economy of global finance, with relevance for the global South, where the dollar’s apex position is the foundation for an uneven international financial and monetary system. 

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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