Sandinista!
A revisionist global history on Nicaragua's Sandinista movement, and some other recent reading.
A. A new book on the prehistory of the digital computer revolution - including the role of black boxes, portfolio insurance and index / statistical arbitrage in the 1987 Black Monday crash on Wall Street.
B. Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller (New York: Scribner Book Company, 2022). Geoeconomics and Great Power competition is now a (renewed) major theme in international political economy. Miller’s book details the rise-fall-rise arc of semiconductor chip technology innovation and manufacturing in Silicon Valley, Japan, Taiwan, and China. It features anecdotes that often turn up in the military and technology innovation literature - such as how Intel’s Andy Grove (Only The Paranoid Survive on strategic inflection points) helped to promote Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma on disruptive innovation and subsequent books). Chip War spans from William Shockley to Huawei; and from Palo Alto to offshoring and China’s resurgence. The sections on Japan’s economic bubble and then its Lost Decades are informative. Miller has an MIT Security Program guest lecture and there are plenty of other book promotion talks on YouTube. Chip War has short chapters of 5 to 7 pages which makes it easy to read and to follow Miller’s narrative arc of intersecting geopolitics and technology innovation. It is thus no surprise that FT awarded Chip War its Best Financial Book of 2023. Chip War is a model trade press published book of well targeted translational research that continues to appeal both to specific audiences and that also informs a broader readership.
C. The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History by Mateo Jarquin (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2024). Jarquin is an Assistant Professor at Chapman University: The Sandinista Revolution is a model book for being well positioned for a tenure application that is “relative to opportunity”. Many people are only familiar with the Sandinistas via The Clash’s Sandinista! triple album (1980) or the Reagan administration’s counterinsurgency and psychological operations messaging. Through interviews with Sandinista leaders Jarquin tells the inside story of an insurgent counter-elite from its origins (1933-1979) to its first power consolidation (1979-1989) and then the post-Cold War repercussions. As a revisionist global history this book decenters the dominant narratives from Cold War history and United States insurgency / revolution analyses in order to situate the Sandinistas in the broader context of Latin American area studies, North-South geoeconomic and geopolitical relations, and vanguard revolutionary movements and their decision elites. There are significant primary sources: archives, oral histories, elite decision-maker interviews, online documents, memoirs, and other published accounts. Jarquin participated in a Wilson Center seminar in 2024.
D. The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era by Edmund S.K. Fung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Fung was affiliated with Western Sydney University when he researched and wrote this book - which personifies WSU’s institutional strength in comparative area studies research. This revisionist history of China’s Republican era (1912-1949 and notably in the interwar period of the 1920s and the 1930s) focuses on liberal, conservative, and Confucian intellectual currents and their respective attempts to reform Chinese society. This book is a sophisticated analysis of domestic sociopolitical discourse, historical traditions, and how foreign and global influences were resituated and reinterpreted to address on-going social change. Of personal interest to me were brief sections on Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, and how these Western macrohistorical thinkers informed Eastern and Sinic civilisational perspectives. The book’s chapter structure and case study sequencing has a model clarity (on the various competing sociopolitical ideologies) that is a hallmark of Cambridge University Press.
E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is an Introduction to Latin American Studies created by Professor Chappell Lawson.
F. The Minneapolis Fed’s President Ned Kashkari on the second Trump administration’s tariffs.
G. Why the quantitative trading firm Susquehanna is building its own prediction market.
H. Selected lectures from an MIT course on Dynastic China (2024).