New Books in Diplomatic History

As Foreign Secretary in Neville Chamberlain's Cabinet in 1937, Eden
didn't believe in appeasing the German and Italian dictatorships or the
militaristic Japanese regime. Instead, he wanted to confront their
aggression head on. Faced with growing Japanese assertiveness, including
the launching of an undeclared war on China in July 1937, Eden appealed
to the US for help. He believed sending an Anglo-American naval force
to the Western Pacific would demonstrate that the democracies were not
spineless, but were prepared to stand up for what they believed in. Was
this a viable alternative to Chamberlain's appeasement policy, now
notorious for its failure in the face of fascism?

In Eden's Alternative to Appeasement: The Anglo-American Strategy that Might Have Been, 1937–38 (Tithebarn Press, 2026), historian
Malcolm Murfett tells the story, using a wide range of primary sources
from the UK and US archives, of Eden's push to persuade Roosevelt's
administration to be more assertive in the Pacific. He reveals the
diplomatic dance both sides engaged in, each unsure of the other's
reliability, of their own ability to commit, and tied up in their own
internal struggles for policy dominance. We get a real insight into how
two once-and-future allies managed each other's expectations, as well as
the wider strategic parameters within which they were operating.

With
eerie echoes of our own times, Murfett explores the challenges involved
in both international diplomacy, and foreign and security policy. How
standing up for principles and values can become compromised by the
requirements of Realpolitik, and logistical constraints.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Constructing the Medieval Maritime State: Identity, Violence, and Connection in the Mediterranean (Oxford
University Press, 2026) by Professor Travis Bruce explores how the
small medieval kingdom of Denia in Spain became a powerful maritime
state after the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate. Its rulers built
authority, not only through war and seafaring raids but also by
connecting Denia to wider Mediterranean trade, diplomacy, and culture.

The rise and evolution of the taifa
of Denia is a powerful case study for understanding the construction of
medieval maritime states in the Mediterranean. Dr. Bruce situates Denia
within the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate and explores how its rulers
forged legitimacy through identity formation, maritime violence, and
regional connectivity. Denia's identity was negotiated through
rulership, unfreedom, and cultural hybridity, and violence —
particularly predatory warfare and maritime jihad — functioned as both
statecraft and economic extraction. At the same time, Denia's
entanglement in commercial, diplomatic, and intellectual networks
positioned it as a key node linking the Islamic Mediterranean and the
Latin West. The state's trajectory cannot be reduced to narratives of
decline or simple religious conflict but instead reveals a process of
negotiation shaped by mobility, interdependence, and the fluid
boundaries between public and private power. This narrative reframes
Mediterranean history beyond Eurocentric paradigms and underscores the
significance of Islamic maritime states within the wider medieval world.

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. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Examining the emergence of international public health policy between the 1930s and 80s, The Emergence of International Health Policy in Southeast Asia, India, and Sri Lanka, 1937–1978
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) by Dr. Vivek Neelakantan sheds light on the
role that rural community health initiatives in South and Southeast Asia
played in the movement towards ‘primary health care’ and ‘health for
all,’ articulated ultimately at the 1978 International Conference on
Primary Health Care in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. The author argues that the
movement was not directed exclusively from the headquarters of the World
Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, but also by institutions such as
the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division in rural
Southeast Asia, and through local community initiatives including the
Bandung Plan for Health in Indonesia.

The book illustrates how an exclusive association of global health with the emergence of the WHO in the 1950s fails to
account for the local, national, or regional contexts that shaped the
evolution of primary health care in South and Southeast Asia.

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. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode we spoke with Marian Scheuer Sofaer, Esquire, and Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman about The Expulsion of Jews from Iraq, 20th Century: The Agonies of Redemption (Brill, 2024), by Dr. Zvi Yehuda, and translated by Sofaer.

Dr. Zvi Yehuda, born in Iraq in 1936, immigrated to Israel
as a teenager during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah and went on to complete
a PhD in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, later founding
and heading the research institute at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage
Center. He began to write the book in 1984, in a conversation with
former Knesset Speaker Shlomo Hillel, and grew into a forty-year project
of archival research across Israel, the United Kingdom, France, the
United States, and Iraq, conducted in Hebrew, English, French, German
and Judeo-Arabic. Yehuda passed away before he could complete editing
the English translation; his daughter, Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman,
together with Sofaer, brought the English edition to completion.

The book situates the modern Iraqi Jewish community within a
more discontinuous history than is often assumed. Yehuda's research
identified a substantial gap, from the fourteenth through the eighteenth
centuries, in which no functioning Jewish community existed in Iraq;
the community that flourished into the twentieth century instead
descended from waves of immigration beginning after 1740, drawing Jews
from Kurdistan, Iran, and Europe, and developing its own distinct
Judeo-Arabic dialect.

Following Israel's establishment and victory in 1948,
Sofaer and Yehuda-Shnaidman described the systematic persecution that
followed: mass dismissals of Jews from government employment, punitive
import-export regulations, and new restrictions on real estate and
mortgages. Yehuda-Shnaidman emphasized that Prime Minister Nuri al-Said
was a central architect of this policy, proposing to the United Nations a
plan to force Iraq's Jews to leave within four months, stripped of
citizenship and property—a plan ultimately abandoned only after Jordan
refused to allow the deportation convoys to cross its territory.

Central to Yehuda's research is his conclusion that the
expulsion was not, as long assumed, a response to Zionist activity, but a
deliberate, state-directed policy to remove Iraq's Jews and seize their
assets. The book also overturns the long-standing claim that bombs
thrown at Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1950–51 were planted by Zionists
to encourage emigration; evidence uncovered only in 2013 by an Iraqi
journalist instead implicates Arab extremists, and points to the
wrongful execution of Jews framed for the attacks.

Altogether, the book documents the expulsion and
dispossession of some 150,000 Jews from Iraq, part of the roughly one
million Jews forced from Muslim-majority countries across the twentieth
century—a history Yehuda insisted be established on primary evidence
rather than inherited assumption.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Henry VIII is England’s most famous king. He is simultaneously the virtuous Renaissance prince gone wrong, the psychopathic, paranoid tyrant, the religious disruptor and the much-married glutton.

Overlord: The Life and Reign of Henry VIII (Birlinn, 2026) is a groundbreaking study of Henry’s life examines and destroys many of the long-repeated myths about this complex monarch: he was not particularly gluttonous, not particularly prudish, and not particularly messy in his religious changes. Nor did he see himself as simply King of England. Drawing on archival sources from across the British Isles, Dr. Steven Veerapen reveals how Henry fashioned an image of himself as a law-abiding and benevolent emperor who dreamed of uniting England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and swathes of France under Tudor rule.

Yet the image was false and the dream a nightmare for his queens, his ministers and many of his subjects. This new portrait shows Henry for what he really was: a self-aggrandising actor who, by fair means and foul – murder plots, marriage negotiations and military ventures – did all he could to realise his imperial fantasy.

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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices