The best books about ethnicity

Modern states are racially structured. They become modern by assuming the structures of racial arrangement. But these arrangements are not static. As political economy shifts over time so do the conditions of racial structure. From the 1980s, neoliberalism deregulated economic activity within and across states globally, while ramping up the regulation of social order through the funding of repressive state apparatuses such as the military and police. Personal responsibility was emphasized above all in the face of the financialization of all social choices. Racial reference was erased which, rather than ending racism, rendered it less nameable, if not invisible. The book traces these developments across five regions because of the variations but especially because the threat of racism anywhere is shored up by racism elsewhere.

Marx's masterpiece Capital (Das Kapital) was ignored or misread as well as selectively and creatively interpreted by the generation of social scientists that came after him. Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel attempt to supplement what they call ‘historical materialism’ or to engage in debates about ‘socialism’ through their readings of The Communist Manifesto and occasional Capital. 

Despite their differences with Marx and with one another, they share his concern with how empirically detailed and scientifically valid knowledge of the social world may inform historical struggles for a more human world. This commitment can be called ‘Faustian,’ insofar as Marx and the classical sociologists hope to translate theory into practice while making a pact or wager with the diabolical social, political, and economic forces of the modern world.

The Hat presents the story of the 1755 Acadian Deportation from Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia, in a fresh, 21st-century way. Readers are not told—until the Afterword— where and when the action is taking place, nor by whom or to whom. Everything that happens is seen through the eyes of two central characters, 14-year-old Marie and 10-year-old Charles. The sister and brother show determination and perseverance as they deal with an incredibly difficult situation. Though based on a tragedy, the story is uplifting and inspiring. In the Afterword, readers discover the historical details behind the story they have just read.

More than 2000 years ago the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu advised us to know our enemies. The question has always been how. In A Sense of the Enemy, the historian Zachary Shore demonstrates that leaders can best understand an opponent not simply from his pattern of past behavior, but from his behavior at pattern breaks. Meaningful pattern breaks occur during dramatic deviations from the routine when the enemy imposes costs upon himself. It's at these unexpected moments, Shore explains, that successful leaders can learn what makes their rivals truly tick.

With vivid, suspenseful prose, he takes us into the minds of statesmen to see how they in turn tried to enter the minds of others. He shows how this type of mind-reading, which he calls "strategic empathy," shaped matters of war and peace. 

Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers.

Building upon economic, labor, and environmental histories, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies, ideas, and practices that Indigenous and African miners developed in one of the largest and most lucrative industries of the colonial Americas. Mining Language develops methods of linguistic and visual analysis to convert colonial archives from spaces that justify settler colonial ideologies into sources of Indigenous and African knowledge production.

Globalization has carried vast consequences for the lives of children. It has spurred unprecedented waves of immigration, contributed to far-reaching transformations in the organization, structure, and dynamics of family life, and profoundly altered trajectories of growing up. Equally important, globalization has contributed to the worldwide dissemination of a set of international norms about children’s welfare and heightened public awareness of disparities in the lives of children around the world. This book's contributors – leading historians, literary scholars, psychologists, social geographers, and others – provide fresh perspectives on the transformations that globalization has produced in children's lives.

Almost All Aliens discusses ethnic identity and race from 1600 to the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The focus is on how immigration in the United States is and was multicultural, racialized, and deeply rooted in colonialism. Moving away from the European migrant-centered melting-pot model of immigrant assimilation, the book examines the lives of those who crossed the Atlantic, Pacific, Caribbean, and North American Borderlands, and their experiences navigating different racial and ethnic structures in the United States. 

The Hold Life Has is about ways in which people in a small Andean community connect with their land and, in the process, define and express their cultural identity. The land, which bears their crops, feeds their animals, and supplies adobes for their houses, is also a landscape of sacred places, a parallel society of animate and powerful personalities. The ritual use of coca connects people with this living landscape. Maintenance of this bond is a constant process, carried on in the daily routine as well as in the more intensified context of religious ritual. Because coca signifies the presence of social and spiritual bonds and appears in virtually every aspect of life, it serves as a kind of leitmotif for the book.

This book analyzes the shared history of Africans and their descendants in Montevideo and Buenos Aires from the late colonial era to the first decades of independence. Enslaved Africans created social identities based on their common experiences in these two towns, ranging from surviving together the Atlantic and coastal forced passages on slave vessels to serving as soldiers in the independence-era Black battalions. In addition to the slave trade and the military, their participation in Black lay Catholic brotherhoods, African-based associations called nations, and the lettered culture shaped their social identities. Linking specific regions of Africa to the Río de la Plata region, this book also explores the ties of the free Black and enslaved populations to the larger society in which they found themselves.

Following Mexico’s independence, alcohol became embedded in issues central to the nation-building project, including class politics, citizenship, patriotism, health, crime, cultural authenticity, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Alcohol and Nationhood examines drinking culture as both an important feature of Mexican social life and as a persistent source of concern for Mexican intellectuals and politicians during the nineteenth century.

Combining historical and literary analysis of novels, newspapers, judicial records, and medical texts, Alcohol and Nationhood shows that Mexican elites worried that the physically and morally debilitating aspects of alcohol consumption were preventing Mexico’s progress, but they also identified aspects of Mexican drinking cultures that could be celebrated as part of an authentic culture. The ancient, Indigenous drink pulque epitomized both the promise and peril that drinking culture posed for imagining the nation.