I've just finished Marie Ménard's La Première Compagnie des Indes : Apprentissages, échecs et héritages 1664 - 1704. It is adapted from her PhD thesis about the first French East Indies Company launched by Colbert. She looks mainly at the lives of the merchants sent to India and how the Company failed to manage what she calls "the learning of India" made locally with decisions made in Paris. The confusion in the goals and the spatial focus of the Company led to many failed expeditions and an overall management failure in factories between merchants, missionaries, and militaries.

I found it noteworthy that just like the English factory in Japan decades earlier, the Company decided to send manufactured goods from the homeland to buy Asian products, and that these goods never found a market which led to the failure of the trade. I happen to work in the industry and I keep repeating to my management "listen to our customers and just give them what they want, nothing more, nothing less". I wish they read this book.

Academically, there seems to be a large void in studies regarding this Company, most of her secondary sources are a hundred years old, and as she says she had to use them very carefully because of their colonial point of view. I guess since the Company failed it is not as glamourous as the British one or the VOC, and it came quite late so it doesn't have the appeal of Portuguese or Spanish enterprises.

i enjoyed her focus on the men on the ground doing the trade and their daily lives and struggles. It brings several narratives which make it easier to read and to relate.

Hi all, I recently stumbled across an amazing discussion about the richness and diversity of the Black Sea region, and it's piqued my interest. It sounds like a wonderfully dense area, full of exciting history and incredible cultures.

What books could you recommend about its historical peoples - specifically, Byzantine Greeks, Kievan Rus, Armenians/Georgians, Scythians, Cossacks, etc. Not sure if all those are right, but they were all mentioned by the soruce I was checking out. I believe the time period of particular interest to me would be when they all intersected, but I'll take whatever time period you believe is most interesting.

In addition, a broader historical perspective of the entire region would be perfect, to see how everything connects and interplays.

PS: In my own research, I stumbled upon "Black Sea: A History" by Charles King, "Black Sea" by Neal Acherson. Do those come recommended by anyone?

Finally started in on Half Slave, Half Free, Bruce Levine's version of the standard antebellum survey. I've only about a third of the way through, but it's decent.

Levine takes the standard line that the South's commitment to slavery grew more intense as the antebellum went on. Fair enough, I'm increasingly not sure if that's really so as a matter of substance. It's absolutely the case that the forms of defending slavery became more intense and the preferred means more radical, but if the South's political class was, as a practical matter, comprised chiefly of slaveholding perpetualists in 1790 dedicated to fighting antislavery glimmerings (and in noting how Jefferson caved to his peers Levine suggests that) then is there really much daylight between the era of Thomas Jefferson and that of Jefferson Davis?

I'm not saying that nothing changed by any stretch, or even just that the relative popularity of slavery remained a constant, but it seems really easy to fall into taking necessary evil defenses of slavery with their ritual prayer that someone else, somewhere down the road, will somehow enact emancipation and miss that such arguments were deployed to frustrate abolitionists by throwing up endless obstacles: It's too soon. It's too disruptive. We, who are deeply committed to slavery, will not brook interference from anybody less committed to achieve the ends which we claim to favor. Too much emphasis on the evils end of necessary evil and not enough focus on the necessary. Looking at it the other way around, necessary evil arguments end up very often in the same place as positive good arguments do: slavery now, slavery (at least from the POV of the speaker) forever.

It's totally fair, of course, to switch things around and point to northern whites and their plans to end slavery a century thence, or later. I'm more willing to credit them on the point because they didn't spend their careers fighting most every practical and effective advance in restricting slavery and lack the obvious personal involvement that compromises the credibility of people who own scores of other people.

But I've got some dedicated works on proslavery rhetoric (and Onuf's and Gordon-Reed's new book on Jefferson) in the queue. When I get to them they might change my mind entirely. With regard to the Jefferson book, I know Onuf works at Monticello and Gordon-Reed has come under some criticism for being overfond of him. I'm willing to take them as both in the tank for TJ. But the more I read about the guy the less I like him, so it's only fair to take up the other side now and then.

Does anyone know any good books or articles about the instability amongst Austrian Hapsburg Archdukes in the 1600s and 1610s? I've been reading about it in Wilson's The Thirty Years War and Pursell's The Winter King but I feel like there might be more out there.

Finally reading "Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction", which I learned about because the author did an awesome AMA right here.

Being finally done with my thesis has let me delve into more philosophical historical work, particularly in the history of science. So I'm currently reading a recent publication by D. Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered. It's a great history of how statistics affected American culture through life insurance companies from the late 19th through the 20th centuries, and it's also very well-written and interesting.

I've been reading and quite enjoying Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers.

I suppose it might be better for a "what's new in history" thread but I'm also quite excited to pick up Shadi Hamid's new book Islamic Exceptionalism which comes out in a couple days. I'm not sure how much of it will be history vs. contemporary political analysis but he's probably my favorite writer dealing with Islamist movements.

I'll be teaching a lot of Cold War and USSR from September, so all of my books on the go at the moment are looking pretty damn Communist! I'm really enjoying Orlando Figes 'Revolutionary Russia 1891-1991' right now, though he does take a lot of time to get going. I'm on page 180-something and we're still in the 1920s!

Next on the list is either Anna Applebaum's Iron Curtain, or continuing to work through Tony Judt's Postwar for a better long term overview.

I am trying to compile a list of diaries, letters, reminiscences, and autobiographies of those involved in the American Revolutionary War (i.e. important players, soldiers, women)? I have made a similar list from the American Civil War, using keywords on archive.org and hathitrust.org, but having difficulty finding what I am looking for on the subject of the American Revolution. Is there a list of diaries, letters, current or out of print, of those involved in the American Revolutionary War? If so, what is the title of the document and/or where is it listed on the Internet? Thank you!