The most recommended citizenship books

For the first eighteen years of Israel’s existence most Arabs in the country were ruled by a military administration. It was formally abolished only a year before the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and the establishment of Israeli military rule in those territories. The story of that early military government is not well known, except by specialists. But with the publication of Shira Robinson’s book, based on declassified archival material, we now know the details of how Arab citizens of Israel were subordinated, exploited, and manipulated, under false rationales of security concerns, in order to bolster the political position of the dominant Labor Party, to advance Zionist goals of land acquisition and subsidization of Jewish settlement, and, as the title of the book suggests, to help present Israel as a “liberal” state while concealing its settler colonialist dynamics.

Torchbearers is a pathbreaking history of the fight for American democracy during World War I, told from the perspective of African American servicemen who joined, fought, and returned from battle. Already engaged in conflict over civil rights in the US, African Americans took seriously the call to “make the world safe for democracy.” Through writing, activism, and organizing, they linked their domestic fight to the foreign fight against democracy’s enemies. Perhaps no other group in the US, Williams shows, was poised to engage the very biggest questions that animated the war – questions of citizenship, rights, freedom, and empire – as were African Americans. And their wartime service, he shows, was the crucible for the long freedom movement that followed.  

Accountable is a highly researched book filled with case studies and interesting stats to help make the author's case – that Capitalism needs some adjustments. It's especially important for people who don't fully buy into the modern rhetoric and abundant lip service of large companies regarding their "good doing" and self-stated "care" for communities, employees, and stakeholders. It grants an eye-opening perspective regarding the real motivations of business leaders and the incredible power their corporations wield. The many case studies of large and global companies convincingly demonstrate the danger we all face if that power is left unchecked and its wielders are left unaccountable to the globe we live in and the people that inhabit it. 

Linda Kerber’s No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies offers a fantastic insight into the maleness of rights-bearing citizenship embedded within the United States legal tradition. As Kerber demonstrates, the notion that women were incapable of performing certain civic obligations formed a central reason for why early U.S. political and legal authorities had excluded women from certain rights of citizenship. I found Kerber’s study especially helpful for dissecting the history of the common law tradition of domestic relations, or the doctrine known as coverture. As I discuss in the first chapters of my own book, and as Kerber brilliantly illustrates in No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies, the doctrine of coverture deprived women of having self-ownership over their own bodies, which led to intense restrictions on women’s opportunities and their overall civic autonomy. 

My first two picks concern the inhumanities that White Americans perpetrated against Black people, and my second two picks concern the inhumanities that Nazis perpetrated against Jews, Roma, and others. My fifth pick brings both of these seemingly independent strands together. In it, Yale University historian James Q. Whitman documents how, during the early years of the regime, Nazi lawyers looked to racist American legislation as a model for the infamous 1935 Nuremburg laws, which were the first step down the road that led to Auschwitz. This short, eye-opening book leads readers to see how American racist values were not only bad in themselves, but also contributed to the most horrific genocide of the twentieth century.

The thing I love about this book is that it illustrates how difficult the jobs of street-level bureaucrats (i.e., public servants working directly with the public at the street level) are.

Being a cop, teacher, social worker, etc. is a lot more complex than what it looks like from the outside because it’s not just about helping citizens; it’s also about navigating all the rules and policies that govern how public services are delivered.

It’s impossible to read this book and not walk away with a respect for how hard those jobs are.

Students of Middle East studies learn a lot about Ottoman history, specifically about the Ottoman Empire's last decades, before WWI. But historians gave very little attention to the Arab provinces of the empire in comparison to Istanbul and the imperial center. In this book, Campos presented the fascinating case of Ottoman Palestine. Campos shows the most convincing rebuttal for the theories that attributed no Ottoman identity in the peripheries. The fantastic picture of Jerusalem during the last years of the empire can teach us a lot about the relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Palestine, the understanding of national and imperial frameworks at the turn of the century, and the optimistic reader may find ideas to deadlock conflicts in the 21st century.

This is easily the best account of the complex, racialized history of U.S. immigration law, politics, and policy. One of the arguments in it that impressed me most is that the category “illegal aliens”—the “impossible subjects” of the title—barely existed in the pre-World War I years, when almost no European immigrants were turned away from the U.S. (Asians were another story). Ngai also brilliantly analyzes two landmark laws: the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which dramatically restricted immigration through nationality-based quotas limiting arrivals from Eastern and Southern Europe; and the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which eliminated the quotas and opened the door to a massive new immigrant influx. This is a densely written book, not an easy read, but no other text has taught me more about this topic.

Torpey’s book, first published in 2000, is now a classic. With it, he helped open up a whole field of inquiry into the history of official documents and identification techniques that both constrain—and make conceivable—modern society. Here, think of street addresses, fingerprints, birth certificates, credit records, driver’s licenses, tax forms, and visas. For Torpey, the passport, “that little paper booklet with the power to open international doors,” is a window into modern nation states’ interest in regulating movement. For his readers, it is a bracing reminder of how recent those controls are and how habituated we denizens of the 21st century have become to showing our papers.

This is one of my favorite new books that provides an on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship. I learned a tremendous amount about the “market” for passports.

Surak provides a window into the states and brokers who sell them and the billionaire/multimillionaire elites who can afford to buy them. With an incredible six years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, she shows the scale of a full-blown industry where buyers, brokers, and sellers all profit from the citizenship trade.