Progressive Geographies

Kerry Goettlich, From Frontiers to Borders: How Colonial Technicians Created Modern Territoriality – Cambridge University Press, August 2025

I’ve shared the book details before. There is now a New Books discussion with Morteza Hajizadeh – thanks to dmf for the link

How did modern territoriality emerge and what are its consequences? This book examines these key questions with a unique global perspective. Kerry Goettlich argues that linear boundaries are products of particular colonial encounters, rather than being essentially an intra-European practice artificially imposed on colonized regions. He reconceptualizes modern territoriality as a phenomenon separate from sovereignty and the state, based on expert practices of delimitation and demarcation. Its history stems from the social production of expertise oriented towards these practices. Employing both primary and secondary sources, From Frontiers to Borders examines how this expertise emerged in settler colonies in North America and in British India – cases which illuminate a range of different types of colonial rule and influence. It also explores some of the consequences of the globalization of modern territoriality, exposing the colonial origins of Boundary Studies, and the impact of boundary experts on the Paris Peace Conference of 1919–20.

Martin Schulze Wessel, The Curse of Empire: Ukraine, Poland, and the Fatal Paths in Russian History – trans. Neil Solomon, Polity, November 2025

Russia’s attack on Ukraine marks an epochal break in European and global history. Undoubtedly, the decision to go to war is closely linked to one person, Vladimir Putin, but Russia’s war is not driven solely by one man’s power calculations. We can only make sense of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, argues the distinguished historian Martin Schulze Wessel, by putting them in the broader context of the history of Russian imperialism and the influence it continues to exert today.

Schulze Wessel argues that Russian imperialism was shaped by Russia’s relationship to Poland and Ukraine. These states were absorbed or partitioned by Russia in the eighteenth century, but Russia’s rule over them was contested both by the Poles and by the Ukrainians. The entangled history of these three states produced path dependencies whose impact is still felt toda. Poland and Ukraine share a common history characterized by Russian domination and Polish and Ukrainian resistance to it; just as the Polish question challenged the Russian Empire in previous centuries, so too does the Ukrainian question today. Schulze Wessel argues that, as a result of Russia’s confrontation with the Polish and Ukrainian questions, Russia’s national identity merged with imperial claims in ways that were pernicious and consequential – the curse of empire. 

By placing the war in Ukraine in the context of an era of Russian imperialism that spans three centuries, this book sheds new light on one of the bloodiest and most destructive conflicts of our time.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy / Unpublished Basel Writings (Winter 1869/70–Fall 1873) – trans. Sean D. Kirkland and Andrew J Mitchell, Stanford University Press, January 2026

The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Volume 1

During his early years in Basel, as professor of classical philology, Nietzsche develops an original understanding of ancient Greek poetry, philosophy, and culture, alongside a biting critique of contemporary German society and a call for its reform. These years see him publish his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, where tragic drama is understood as the harmonizing of Apollonian and Dionysian drives. In it, Nietzsche traces the rise of tragedy as an art form, diagnoses its demise at the hands of Socratic rationalism, and champions its revival in Wagnerian music drama, as part of a larger project of German national renewal. The unpublished texts gathered here allow us to see The Birth of Tragedywithin the larger context of Nietzsche’s concerns at this time and chart the compositional and interpretive development of that first book while revealing some roads not taken. Included also are three book-length projects: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, a literary presentation of a program for sweeping educational reform in the name of producing the genius; Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books, a set of short philosophical, cultural, and historical interventions; and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, an investigation of early Greek philosophy in its cultural context. The celebrated essay “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” and two short pro-Wagner pieces, “Exhortation to the Germans” and “A New Year’s Word for the Editor of the Weekly Im neuen Reich,” round out this essential collection of early writings. Extensive translators’ annotations supply critical background information and context for Nietzsche’s comments on ancient Greek and contemporary German culture.

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of War: Why We Fight – trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso, January 2026

The best-selling author of A Philosophy of Walking returns to address the eternal subject of human conflict

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seems to many like a throwback to another age, rattling Europe with memories of past horrors. But since the end of the Second World War there has not been a single day without armed conflict somewhere in the world. Drawing on the great political philosophers, from Plato to Marx, via Machiavelli and Hobbes, Frédéric Gros attempts to answer the age-old questions regarding humanity’s propensity to wage war: What is a just war? What moral constraints operate on the combatants? Does the state make war or does war make the state? Finally, after exploring the meaning and the spectre of total war, he tackles the ultimate question: Why war?

Miguel de Beistegui, Crisis: A Critique – Bloomsbury, January 2026

Crises abound.

The ‘end of history’ in the form of the triumph of liberalism has given way to a proliferation of crises internal to liberal, and especially neoliberal democracies: our economies and ecosystems, democracies, social and labour relations, constitutions, cultures, identities, and bodies are subjected to repeated and increasingly severe shocks.

Unsurprisingly, the vocabulary of crisis is ubiquitous. Ours, we are told, is an age of chronic, multiple, and mutually reinforcing cataclysms. But what exactly do we mean when we speak of crisis? Deceptively simple, the term has become a repository for a mass of fears, hopes and assumptions, bound up with the very institutions and techniques of government it so often claims to address. Overused and emptied out, it leads to either indecision and paralysis, or, at the other extreme, its cynical instrumentalization. To counter this, we need a philosophy, specifically a critique, of crisis.

Crisis: A Critique presents crisis as a construction through which we understand, experience and order the world; as a discursive event, producing a range of effects. Drawing on a range of examples (from economic crises to social uprisings, pandemics, genocides, and ecological devastation) and discourses (from ancient medicine to legal theory, political economy, philosophy, the earth sciences, and eco-criticism), this ambitious work of conceptual archaeology and typology engages with a range of authors who have questioned the nature of the connection between crisis and critique. If our time “out of joint” presents a crisis of critique itself, Miguel de Beistegui takes a vital step towards re-calibrating our language and thought for an age of seemingly unrelenting catastrophe.

Holly Brewer, The King’s Slaves: The British Empire and the Origins of American Slavery – Princeton University Press, September/November 2026

The original draft of the Declaration of Independence condemned British kings for supporting slavery in their empire. England’s two seventeenth-century revolutions were in part a reaction to the crown’s proslavery policies, with politicians such as John Locke arguing that all people were born equal and that government should be based on consent. But while these principles would underpin the American Revolution, the treaty that ended that war protected the legal foundations of the plantation system in the new republic. The King’s Slaves untangles this thorny history, arguing that American slavery was borne from authoritarian rule.

In this incisive and thought-provoking book, Holly Brewer challenges the notion that slavery arose naturally in the colonies through the interests of merchants and planters, showing how behind them lay a British crown that believed in absolute power over subjects and granted similar powers to proprietors and masters. British kings used their authority over navies and armies, judges and royal governors to create an elaborate plantation system that produced more crops for export and greater wealth from tariffs. Royal propaganda supported claims that some peoples had no rights while edicts and proclamations circumvented the legislative process. Brewer describes how African and Indigenous peoples resisted the king’s slavery, as did some colonists, English politicians, and reformers. Yet slavery persisted, becoming enshrined after independence as a dehumanizing legal foundation of American capitalism.

A bold work of scholarship by a historian at the height of her powers, The King’s Slaves shares new perspectives on America’s founding, exposing empire’s pervasive role in spreading and justifying slavery in the new world.