In addition to Prof. Kate McDonald’s first book, a study on travel in imperial Japan, and Prof. Hal Drake’s examination of miracles in the fourth century Roman empire, summer and fall 2017 will see the publication of Prof. Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World and Prof. Toshi Hasegawa’s Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd.
In A Thirst for Empire, Prof. Rappaport highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In doing so, she argues, they made tea one of the most popular commodities in the world and created our modern consumer society.
Prof. Hasegawa’s Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution offers a new perspective on Russia’s February Revolution of 1917 through the lens of violent crime and its devastating effect on ordinary people. When the Bolsheviks redefined crime as “counterrevolutionary activity,” he argues, they helped pave the way for a Communist dictatorship.