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  • Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025)

    Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025)
    2026/04/09
    Panini’s Ashtadyayi is one of the most famous works in Sanskrit, a so-called “linguistic machine” that, through its 4,000 words, allows someone to generate words and grammar. Generations of commentators have tried to figure out exactly how to best interpret the work and explain its various contradictions and overlapping instructions. Then, in 2022, Rishi Rajpopat, a PhD student at Cambridge, said he’d figured out how to unravel Panini’s work to create a cohesive set of rules–and potentially wiped away centuries of commentary. The announcement made headlines (and led to some grumbling among other Sanskrit professors). That work is now a book—Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar (Harvard UP, 2025)—and Rishi joins us today to talk about it.  Rishi Rajpopat is Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Macau. His research on Pāṇini’s grammar has been covered by the BBC, Daily Mail, The Telegraph, the Times of India, The Hindu, and other global news outlets. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Panini’s Perfect Rule. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.
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    41 分
  • Peter Mauch, "Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Controversial World War II General" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    Peter Mauch, "Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Controversial World War II General" (Harvard UP, 2026)
    2026/03/31
    The military general who became Emperor Hirohito’s prime minister, Tojo Hideki is most often remembered as an iron-fisted leader who dragged Japan into World War II and—after spectacular losses—was eventually executed as a war criminal. Yet Tojo was far more than his ignominious end. In fact, as Dr. Peter Mauch argues in Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Controversial World War II General (Harvard University Press, 2026), he was one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished military statesmen. Over a career of some forty years, Tojo successfully launched himself into the highest echelons of political power. He was not only a tactical genius, Dr. Mauch shows, but also a savvy administrator, a fierce imperialist, and a deeply loyal advisor to the emperor. Tojo’s career took off with the notorious Kwantung Army in Manchuria, where he played a key role in escalating the Sino-Japanese War during the 1930s. As he rose through the ranks, becoming minister of war and then army chief of staff, he honed the efficiency of the Imperial Army and enhanced its influence within the emperor’s court. All the while, he deftly negotiated the fractious military rivalries that arose wherever he went. Brilliant, ambitious, and often ruthless, Tojo reached political heights that were perhaps matched only by his precipitous fall in the final months of World War II. Layered and evocative, Tojo is at once a riveting military history of Showa-era Japan and a nuanced portrait of the relentless personality at its center. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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    1 時間 4 分
  • Entrepreneurial Work Ethic

    Entrepreneurial Work Ethic
    2026/03/16
    In this episode of High Theory, Saronik talks with Erik Baker about the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic. The dominant work ethic of our current moment, it asks us to constantly create new work for ourselves. Eric contrasts the entrepreneurial work ethic with the industrious work ethic, which valued hard work and drudgery in one’s allotted task. Over the course of the 20th century industriousness was replaced by entrepreneurship in the American economic imaginary. The ultimate villain of the entrepreneurial mode is the bureaucrat, the ultimate failing is complacency. This toxic, exhausting ethos in which the standard of all labor is changing the world, paradoxically stabilizes our economic system, by trapping us in unachievable dreams. We should note that High Theory as an academic side hustle is exemplary of the entrepreneurial work ethic, even if we have no ethics. That’s why we made a Patreon. The transcript of this episode lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Erik’s new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (Harvard UP 2025) explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange bedfellows: Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies. Business schools and consultants exhorted managers to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in their subordinates, while an industry of self-help authors synthesized new ideas from psychology into a vision of work as “self-realization.” Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious––and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to “make your own job” keeps hope alive. Erik Baker is a lecturer in the History of Science Department and the director of the senior thesis program for the History & Science concentration. He received his PhD from Harvard and his BA from Northwestern University. He has published on the history of social science and American capitalism in Modern Intellectual History, History of the Human Sciences, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. He also writes widely for magazines such as n+1, The Baffler, and The Drift, where he is an associate editor. Image for this episode is an unidentified book illustration from the British Library Commons. It shows a group of people kneeling in front of a dollar sign. It was found for High Theory by Lili Epstein on the Public Domain Image Archive.
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    16 分
  • Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters, "The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters, "The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World" (Harvard UP, 2026)
    2026/03/13
    The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters (Harvard UP, 2026) is a groundbreaking history of political struggle in the Spanish New World, where commoners and elites alike challenged the social order through the remarkable power of paperwork. As Spanish conquistadors swept through the New World, the Crown envisioned that a rigidly hierarchical aristocratic order would flourish in their wake. At first, this vision seemed to be within reach: the great conquistadors ruled as noblemen over millions. Yet contrary to all expectations, the Spanish empire in the New World quickly became a hotbed of radical efforts to overturn the emerging order. With the conquistadors in retreat, new enclaves controlled by powerful friars and native lords arose. But they too collapsed, again to the surprise of many.
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    1 時間 44 分
  • Guoqi Xu, "The Idea of China: A Contested History" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    Guoqi Xu, "The Idea of China: A Contested History" (Harvard UP, 2026)
    2026/03/08
    What counts as China, and who counts as Chinese? China became a capitalist superpower by investing in globalization. Now that it has established its credentials—and emerged as a major US competitor—its leaders are looking within, focused on suppressing dissent and fostering cohesion. The result has been an increasingly nationalist cultural agenda, celebrating a Chinese identity steeped in the mystique of the Middle Kingdom and nostalgia for heroic twentieth-century resistance. Yet Chinese nationalism, like nationalism everywhere, is fraught. Few Westerners, and even fewer Chinese, recognize that the very idea of China is up for grabs. Xu Guoqi is the founding director of the Institute of Transnational History of China at the University of Hong Kong, and author of The Idea of China: A Contested History (Harvard UP, 2026) Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
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    1 時間 11 分
  • Rian Thum, "Islamic China: An Asian History" (Harvard UP, 2025)

    Rian Thum, "Islamic China: An Asian History" (Harvard UP, 2025)
    2026/03/05
    Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims are not really Chinese, or not really Muslim. Rian Thum, in his book Islamic China: An Asian History (Harvard UP, 2025), strives to make Chinese Muslims “ordinary”, placing them in both Chinese and global history by following pilgrims, merchants, and others across the Ming, Qing, and Republican eras. Rian is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester. A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation, he is the author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, winner of the Fairbank Prize for East Asian History from the American Historical Association and the Hsu Prize for East Asian Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Islamic China. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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    44 分
  • Michelle Jackson, "The Division of Rationalized Labor" (Harvard UP, 2025)

    Michelle Jackson, "The Division of Rationalized Labor" (Harvard UP, 2025)
    2026/02/21
    How have jobs changed in the last 150 years? In The Division of Rationalized Labor (Harvard UP, 2025) Michelle Jackson, an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University examines the original theories about the division of labour and explains why many predictions about the future of work did not emerge. Drawing on detailed case studies of medicine, law, education and manufacturing the book charts the intertwined rise of the sciences, the expansion of occupational responsibilities, and the increasing complexity of work. Theorizing the paradox of specialization, alongside detailed empirical analysis, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and for anyone interested in understanding work and occupations today.
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    1 時間 1 分
  • Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026)
    2026/02/18
    From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India. The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways. Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026) illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building. This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.
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    27 分