Progressive Geographies

Gavin Healy, A Guide to Mao’s China: Showing the Nation to Foreign Guests – Cornell University Press, June 2026

A Guide to Mao’s China explores how personnel within China’s state tourism bureaucracy during the Mao era struggled to balance inbound foreign tourism as a form of political, historical, and cultural representation with demands for developing a revenue-generating service industry in a socialist economy. The People’s Republic crafted its national narrative through tightly managed tours, and foreign visitors were led through model communes and factories by officials, guides, and service workers still negotiating what tourism meant within a socialist state.

Drawing on government archives, service worker manuals, firsthand tourist reports, and rare ephemera, Gavin Healy offers a human face to people-to-people diplomacy and shows how tourism workers shaped foreign impressions of Chinese socialism, while grappling with its meaning themselves. A Guide to Mao’s China offers a fresh view of Mao-era China as more globally engaged and performative than often remembered.

Louis Blin, Napoléon et l’Islam, Erick Bonnier, 2025

« La religion de Mahomet est la plus belle » ; « J’aime l’islam, vénère le Prophète, respecte le Coran » ; « J’aime mieux la religion de Mahomet. Elle est moins ridicule que la nôtre ».

Ainsi parla Napoléon, seul dirigeant français de l’histoire à avoir écrit et prononcé la profession de foi musulmane. Affabulateur ou sincère ? Chrétien ou musulman ?

C’est une étrange histoire tissée de séduction et de répulsion que conte ce livre. Récusée malgré les évidences, incomprise ou au contraire revendiquée, la fascination de l’Empereur pour l’islam fait de lui un révélateur des passions françaises au sujet de cette religion et de ses adeptes, qui résonne jusqu’à nos jours.

De la jeunesse à l’exil à Sainte-Hélène, Napoléon Bonaparte a subi la tentation de l’islam et de l’Orient. Il a concilié cette attirance avec son héritage catholique, sans toujours être compris par sa postérité. Son ambition de pouvoir, jamais assouvie, contredit sa tolérance religieuse. Cet admirateur de l’islam massacra les Égyptiens et les Palestiniens qui résistèrent à son invasion.

Louis Blin décrypte dans cet essai l’extraordinaire aventure musulmane de Napoléon, poursuivant la réflexion sur l’islam dans la culture française engagée dans ses ouvrages sur Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine et Alexandre Dumas.

A sequel on Napoléon et l’Arabie is forthcoming.

Wendy Wolford, The Plantation Ideal: Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique – University of California Press, November 2025

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

Plantations have been the privileged tool of colonial rule and extraction in Mozambique for more than one hundred years despite never having delivered sustained economic or social benefits. Drawing on extensive archival and qualitative contemporary research, The Plantation Ideal offers new insights into plantation economies, histories, and landscapes. Wendy Wolford tells the story of how the largely failed pursuit of plantation production has shaped agricultural science, government rule, life on the land, and community development in Mozambique from the harshest years of Portuguese colonization to the present.

Afshin Matin-Asgari, Axis of Empire: A History of Iran–US Relations – Verso, January 2026

A chronicle of intrigue and influence in the Iran-US entanglement

Ironic plot twists and colorful characters abound in Afshin Matin-Asgari’s accessible history of relations between the United States and Iran. The missionaries and educators who descended on Iran in the early nineteenth century made way for the next century’s oilmen, CIA agents, scholars, and arms dealers in the assertion of US imperial priorities. Whether Iran resisted or succumbed to US interests, it couldn’t fail to be shaped by the superpower.

Matin-Asgari offers fresh takes on familiar topics: America’s rise as a Middle East hegemon during the Cold War; the special relationship between Washington and the shah; the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis; the Iran-Iraq war; the Islamic Republic’s peculiar anti-imperialism; the decades of onerous American sanctions; Israel’s intervention in Iran-US relations; the ascendance of Trump; and the 2025 attempt by the United States and Israel to bring regime change to Tehran.

A labyrinthine tale of American imperial misadven­tures, Axis of Empireincorporates and challenges scholarly narratives while offering a sophisticated yet highly readable account of Iran-US history.

Amar Thorton and Katherine Harloe, Women Working the Past: Archaeology, History and Heritage in Britain, 1870–1950 – University of London Press, December 2026

This book offers a new history of women’s integral contribution to archaeology, history, and heritage in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and beyond.

Born out of the Beyond Notability project, the book draws on the project’s openly accessible database to reveal how hundreds of previously forgotten women saved, presented, excavated, researched, analyzed, and promoted the past. Using cutting-edge digital methods, the Beyond Notability team has reconstructed the lives and work of these women from fragments of information held in major UK cultural heritage institution archives. Juxtaposing broad overviews of work and education, family and empire, with focused case studies on lecturing, history-making, excavations, and folklore collecting, the book presents macro and micro histories in parallel, while centering women’s experiences and trajectories, as well as their voices. In this way, it is a major contribution to the histories of women’s work. By interweaving practice with analysis, it offers a valuable critical and reflexive model for revealing archives’ wealth of historical information on marginalized individuals and groups.