Mountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age. By Marc Landry (Stanford University Press)
Recommended by Nick Ostrum
In the second half of the nineteenth century, many scientists, politicians, and laypeople considered hydropower the energy of the future and a promising alternative to coal for regions not endowed with an abundance of lignite or anthracite deposits. Of course, as Marc Landry documents in Mountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age, the turn to “white coal” was neither foreordained nor uncontested, especially in the Alps. Nevertheless, through the vision and actions of engineers and government officials across Central Europe, these mountains became a literal battery, a store of energy, that was increasingly crucial to the expansive electricity networks running through the Swiss, Austrian, and Italian highlands.
Landry’s study is notable in several respects. First, it balances a keen understanding of technology and environmental science with the politics of the Alpine energy matter. Second, it dons local, regional, national, and transnational lenses to examine various discourses surrounding the potential to exploit this mountain range in pursuit of regional network integration and national autarky. Third, it makes a hitherto peripheral—disparately populated, underdeveloped, rural—region central to nineteenth and twentieth century pursuits of modernity and thereby broadens our understanding of the geographical boundaries of modernization, counterbalancing the dominant strands of energy and industrial histories that focus on cities and coal mining regions.
Some of what Landry examines is especially striking, such as the crucial role the Alps played in the Nazi pursuit of autarky. Absent access to sufficient supplies of petroleum, Nazi planners intensified the exploitation of coal for everything from rubber to chemical production to synthetic fuels. This meant, however, that Germany would also need to replace coal as a feedstock for its power supply. Enter: hydropower from the Austrian Hohe Tauern. In the end, Mountain Battery is a penetrating and novel study that makes a much needed intervention in the field of energy history’s apparent fetishization of hydrocarbons, at least before the modern environmental movement. Even in its heyday, Landry reminds, coal had real contenders, and, much as the coal industry transformed economics, society, and the landscapes in which it operated, so too did Alpine hydroelectric development. It is a mystery that it has taken so long for historians to tell this story, and it is to Landry’s credit that he tells it so well.
Tongues of Settlement: Where the World Becomes Basque
. By Blake Allmendinger (University of Nebraska Press)
Recommended by Hélène B. Ducros
What does it mean to be Basque when settled outside the Basque Country (seven provinces split between France and Spain) for generations? Further, what does it imply to be an “American Basque” author? What counts as diasporic literature? In his fascinating book about how Basque identity and memory get transposed into new horizons through various acts of writing, whether on the landscape or on pages, Blake Allmendinger addresses these questions by reviewing different types of texts produced by Basque emigrants and their descendants in the New World. Tongues of Settlement: Where the World Becomes Basque not only embarks readers on a captivating voyage through Basque cultural history, linguistic heritage, and quest for uniqueness but also provides a useful template to research and understand other diasporic groups struggling to maintain a link to the communal place of origin. In five chapters, Allmendinger describes the visceral attachment of the Basques to their language (Euskara) and the land (Euskal Herria), as well as their intergenerational nostalgia caused by distance and isolation, as Basque fishermen and whalers left their respective provinces traveling to Labrador, Newfoundland, or South America as early as the sixteenth century, while others inevitably moved away permanently because of specific inheritance laws leaving a sole elder heir with absolute property rights.
In the US (mostly in the West), Basque immigrants and their descendants would develop their own “literature,” interestingly understood very widely to comprise the arborglyphs—engravings inside the bark of aspen trees—left behind by early and madly solitary shepherds, stone carvings and haut-relief headstones, popular or learned literature, or so-called “immigrant literature” such as memoirs, journals, and autobiographies relating the experiences of transplanted pioneer migrants and later US-born next generations seeking to reclaim their roots—sometimes “returning” to the Basque Country for the first time. The book also accounts for cookbooks, digital material such as digitized oral histories, or poetry. Today’s American Basques speak English and have married into their host society long ago, as Allmendinger’s ancestors have. They are disconnected from the contemporary stakes faced by the Basque Country. But the influence of the Basques in the New World through words is certainly tangible, as demonstrated not only by certain toponyms revealing their early presence and language in the Americas—“Bolivia” (a Basque surname meaning the mill house near the river bank) or Arizona (Aritz Ona, the good oak tree)—but also by a variety of textual (and textural) evidence linking their presence to specific places, which the book highlights so splendidly. The volume shows that whatever the Basque American stories told, and through which medium they are told, the Basque language, even when no longer readily spoken, is the thread. It has been inscribed on the landscape—physical or literary—in the Americas for centuries, displaying the enduring power of language-in-place.
Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men. By Patricia Owens (Princeton University Press)
Recommended by Edina Paleviq
Can a particular discipline truly lead to an understanding of the world if it erases half the people who shaped it? Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men by Patricia Owens is a corrective lens through which to understand the foundations of international thought. With striking precision, Owens uncovers a long-overlooked intellectual lineage that brings to light the women who theorized, wrote, taught, and led in the field of international relations (IR), only to be systematically removed from its history. She dismantles the traditional story of IR, revealing how the discipline was built through selective memory and exclusion because focused exclusively on how the field was shaped by elite white men. She demonstrates that the familiar portrayal of male thinkers debating war and diplomacy is only a partial story that reflects a structural distortion in how the discipline remembers its past on core assumptions that deliberately exclude women. The early landscape of international thought was in fact filled with women whose contributions were significant, original, and foundational. They wrote about internationalism not through power politics alone but through frameworks of care, labor, peace, and justice—ideas that were sidelined as IR professionalized around war, statecraft, and treaties. Yet these women helped shape global discourse in ways that are still relevant and urgently needed today.
To uncover this hidden history, Owens focuses on Britain between the 1930s and 1970s. Drawing from a wide range of archival material, including university syllabi, personal letters, institutional records, and oral testimonies, she recovers the lives and ideas of women long written out of the canon. While her geographic focus is specific, the intellectual reach of the book is wide, as she profiles eighteen thinkers, among them Coral Bell, Eileen Power, Lucie Zimmern, Margery Perham, Merze Tate, Agnes Headlam-Morley, and Susan Strange. Some worked within academia while others contributed as journalists, educators, or activists. Many were never formally recognized, yet they influenced key debates on empire, global governance, international cooperation, and political thought. Aside from recovering these figures, Erased also does a sharp critique of the politics of knowledge itself. Who was excluded, but also why? Who gets to be seen as a legitimate thinker? What kind of intellectual labor is taken seriously? By shifting the focus from elite male diplomats to grassroots and institutional work, she reframes what counts as international thought.
Owens’s clear, accessible, evidence-based, and deeply engaging style speaks to both scholars and general readers, from students to policymakers. While focused on the field of international relations, the book also serves as a mirror for any discipline that defines itself through selective memory. Owens challenges institutions to include more women in the present, calling for a rebuilding of the foundations of international thought on more honest and inclusive grounds, thus improving our ability to respond to contemporary issues.
The Rise of the Russian Hawks: Ideology and Politics from the Late Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia. By Juliette Faure (Cambridge University Press)
Recommended by Oksana Ermolaeva
It is difficult to find a more rewarding scholarly task today than the “deconstruction” of contemporary Russian ideology. While most existing studies of this phenomenon tend to link it directly to the personality of Vladimir Putin, Juliette Faure departs from this established canon and instead focuses on how the Russian elites have generated the core tenets of this ideology. Tracing its evolution since the late Soviet period, she examines the creation and functioning of private elite clubs, in whose inner circles the concept of “Russian world” developed. Faure’s work is groundbreaking in revealing the competitiveness, disputes, and rivalries that prevailed among Russian elites in this ideological production. At a time when the most important sources on Russia’s state security apparatus—manuals, internal communications, and bureaucratic discourses—remain largely inaccessible to researchers, her study, based not only on published sources but also on challenging interviews, offers rare insights into the mindset of those in power in Russia today.
Unlike many scholars who either view contemporary Russian ideology as a systemic foundation of the state in the form of a stable set of beliefs or dismiss it as merely a cynical “toolkit” for indoctrination and repression, Faure approaches it as a lived reality and a force that has shaped and transformed Russian political practices and mindsets. Importantly, she traces both continuities and ruptures with the Soviet past. Central to her demonstration is that “ideology is a key dimension, alongside material factors, that determines the construction of elite networks” (21), which undoubtedly underscores the uniqueness of appropriation of the Soviet legacy by the Putin’s regime, providing contemporary Russia with an alternative modernity away from the Western model. At the same time, she highlights important departures: unlike the USSR, the post-Soviet regime does not rely on a formalized ideological apparatus but instead on transactional relations with networks of intellectual and political elites.
Pointing to the cyclical character of Russian history, Faure shows how the period of “managed pluralism” (2012–2021), during which the war in Ukraine started, eventually gave way to a return to a more rigid ideological framework, highly similar to the Soviet one. This raises a crucial question: if “the invasion marked a turning point in the evolution of the Russian political system, from managed ideological pluralism to an institutionalized state ideology enforced by coercive power” (253), can we conclude that wars generally make authoritarian regimes drift back towards an even more authoritarian past? Faure’s analysis thus has broader implications for understanding how authoritarian regimes, when facing international challenges and political instabilities, appropriate their own ideological heritage, adapting it in a “market for ideologies.”
