Progressive Geographies

Jeremy Adelman, The Capitalist Era: The Making—and Unmaking—of the Global Mind – Princeton University Press, September/November 2026

In The Capitalist Era, leading global historian Jeremy Adelman puts the world’s current unwinding in much-needed historical perspective. Combining political, economic, intellectual, and environmental history, the book tells the epic story of the forces that, since the late eighteenth century, have transformed the world into a single but fractured survival unit that is integrated by exchange and flow, yet divided by suspicion and fear. It is a story of hopes for universal peace, panic over planetary destruction, and debates, policies, and media that have shaped how people view one another across distances and borders.

The Capitalist Era chronicles how global integration compelled people from different parts of the world to reckon with what it means to need each other for resources or recognition without knowing one another, and it describes the confrontations and experiments that have shaped the world through periods of integration and disintegration over the past two centuries. As trade, migration, and new technologies have brought people closer together in search of wealth, security, and survival, there have been huge clashes and collisions involving writers and soldiers, biologists and economists, photographers and missionaries.

Strangers—are they partners or rivals, liberators or oppressors? As The Capitalist Era shows, this is perhaps the biggest question hanging over our past, present, and future. To understand our world, it is essential to grasp how strangers have regarded each other as they decided to welcome or exclude, to respect or dominate. Rejecting simplistic determinisms about inevitable peace or inescapable doom, this book illuminates the brittle unity of today’s world.

Livia K. Stone, Without Masters: Autogestión, Anarchist Ethics, and Mexico City Punk – Duke University Press, September 2026

Introduction open access at the above link

Without Masters is an anthropological history of the radical ethical and political principle of autogestión as it traveled around the world in the twentieth century and came to be popularized in Mexico City in the early 2000s. A political term that first arose in 1962 Algeria traveled across continents until it landed in Mexico City’s anarcho-punk scene in the 1980s, where it eventually came to be associated more with zines, music, art, and Zapatismo than with its origins in anarchism or syndicalism. Without Masters brings the true history of autogestión and the quiet radicalism of Mexico City’s autogestive collectives to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Along the way, Stone brings together diverse materials, from punk zines and political fliers to Beat novels and Zapatista parables, that tell an alternate history of radical politics throughout the world in the second half of the twentieth century which serves as a reminder of Mexico’s formative role in the creation of modern social theory.

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan, Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788–1860 – Palgrave, 2022

New Books discussion with Hannah Forsyth – thanks to dmf for the link

This book examines how convicts played a key role in the development of capitalism in Australia and how their active resistance shaped both workplace relations and institutions. It highlights the contribution of convicts to worker mobilization and political descent, forcing a rethink of Australia’s foundational story. It is a book that will appeal to an international audience, as well as the many hundreds of thousands of Australians who can trace descent from convicts. It will enable the latter to make sense of the experience of their ancestors, equipping them with the necessary tools to understand convict and court records. It will also provide a valuable undergraduate and postgraduate teaching tool and reference for those studying unfree labour and worker history, social history, colonization and global migration in a digital age.

Leigh Ann Craig, Deprived of Sense and Intellect: Insanity, Possession, and Diagnosis in Medieval Europe – University of Michigan Press, July 2026

Medieval saints were thought to be able to provide miraculous cures for a wide variety of illnesses, and about one-tenth of their miracles involved the restoration of sanity to those who had lost their minds. Deprived of Sense and Intellect explores 460 of these stories written across Latin Christendom between 1240 and 1500. The study uses the lens of critical disability studies to bridge the gap between discussions of demonic possession and naturally arising somatic conditions, treating all these narratives about disability and miraculous healing not as documentation of changes to the function of an individual person, but instead as evidence of substantial and intrusive interpersonal tensions in medieval communities.
While medieval communities assigned these tensions to a malfunction of consciousness in a single person, medieval miracle texts also reveal how the function and malfunction of consciousness was named and classified. In studying these texts, Leigh Ann Craig explores the terminology and rhetoric used to diagnose a loss of mind as either from natural causes or as an effect of demonic predation, tracing the use of Latin vocabulary in medical compendia, law, and theology. Deprived of Sense and Intellect finds that since diagnoses were difficult and frequently subject to doubt, they varied based on regional cultures of disability in northern and southern Europe, the influences on the development of community consensus in Latin Europe in the Middle Ages, and assumptions based on gender, material evidence, and self-diagnosis.

Meghan M. Garrity, Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Removal – Oxford University Press, 2026

New Books discussion with Miranda Melcher – thanks to dmf for the link

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, governments around the world have expelled, en masse, more than 30 million people. Yet despite its prevalence, mass expulsion remains an understudied phenomenon as scholarly attention has been directed toward the gravest atrocities—genocide and mass killing—or toward forced migration more broadly. Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Removal examines why and how governments expel, providing a systematic, cross-regional account of mass expulsion over the longue durée. Using the original Government-Sponsored Mass Expulsion (GSME) dataset, the book explains when and where expulsion occurs, who is targeted, and what regimes are most likely to expel. The book identifies two overarching categories of mass expulsion—security and economic—and develops a typology of four corresponding types: counter-irredentist, counter-subversive, reprisal, and nativist. It advances a theory of mass expulsion that traces the decision-making process, showing how key structural, proximate, precipitating, and intervening factors combine to shape the conditions under which governments expel or are restrained. Evidence is drawn from archival research conducted at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the League of Nations archives in Geneva, Switzerland.

This research contributes to the fields of international peace and security, political violence, and forced migration. Conceptually, it fills a gap in the literature by systematically examining mass expulsion as a distinct eliminationist policy aimed at the intentional removal of ethnic groups. Theoretically, it extends existing explanations beyond war and security threats, highlighting an entire class of expulsions targeting perceived economic threats. The book deepens our understanding of critical atrocity restraints, demonstrating the importance of alliances, the “homeland” state of the target group, and international organizations. These restraints generate core policy recommendations that seek to spur greater attention to deterring mass expulsion as a priority for atrocity prevention.

Tom Overton, John Berger: From Life – Verso, September 2026

John Berger (1926–2017) served in Britain’s wartime army before attending art school. The young artist became a critic and broadcaster, cutting a swathe through the staid world of post-war Britain, demanding political engagement in all things. In 1972, he came to prominence with Ways of Seeing, a TV series and book that inspired generations to look more closely and think more deeply about art.

Committed to the passionate exploration of life in all its forms, unbounded by convention, he applied himself to a panoply of genres, media, and subjects. His career defies definition. His work reimagined the relationship between art and society; human and animal; living and dead. He charted the disappearance of peasants from the world; documented migrant labour; explored the AIDS crisis; and was trenchantly opposed to the new world order that emerged in the 1990s, as he was to the War on Terror that followed. Berger was deeply and vocally committed to the Palestinian cause.

Through working on Berger’s archive at the British Library and fifteen years of getting to know his family, friends, lovers, and collaborators, Tom Overton has produced a portrait of an artist and storyteller who defined and transcended his times.

Bernd Herzogenrath and Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo eds. CONTRADICTionary: An Almanac of Resistance – Open Humanities Press, 2026

Available open access – thanks to dmf for the link

CONTRADICTionary: An Almanac of Resistance is a collective intervention into the politics of language at a time when words themselves are being policed, erased, and weaponized. Emerging from the suppression of terms like ‘diversity,’ ‘intersectionality,’ and ‘climate crisis,’ the project reclaims and expands this contested vocabulary through contributions from over 100 scholars, artists, and activists worldwide. Each entry interrogates how language shapes what can be known, said, and done, while offering new, situated meanings rooted in lived experience and critical inquiry. Neither dictionary nor manifesto alone, CONTRADICTionary operates as a living archive of dissent, embracing contradiction as method and multiplicity as strength. By transforming banned words into sites of analysis, imagination, and action, it challenges regimes of silence and invites readers to actively participate in redefining the terms that govern collective life.