Books by Stephen W. Sawyer
What We Eat: A Global History of Food (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)
by Pierre Singaravélou, Sylvain Venayre, Stephen W. Sawyer
Ketchup seems iconically American, but the word comes from a Southeast Asian anchovy sauce, and today it is made largely from Chinese tomato paste. Japan’s beloved ramen arose from the meeting of Chinese noodles and American wheat flour before attaining worldwide popularity in both gourmet and convenience-food forms. The baguette is mythologized as a product of the French Revolution, but in fact it emerged during late-nineteenth-century urbanization. Colonialism brought baguettes to Vietnam, where street vendors devised a new dish: banh mi, which refugees took with them around the world.
Telling these tales and many others, What We Eat explores world history through the lens of the global journeys of nearly ninety food products. Leading historians trace the origins and popularization of items commonly found in supermarkets, showing how each food illuminates wider histories. They consider the tension between the role of cuisine in shaping particular cultural identities and the standardization associated with globalization, and they demonstrate how foods have transformed as different societies have borrowed them. Chapters reveal the surprising sagas of coffee, cornflakes, gin, guacamole, hot dogs, hummus, naan, pet food, pizza, sparkling water, sushi, and many more. At once an intimate and a global history, What We Eat shows readers the everyday items on grocery store shelves in a new light.
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$26.00
Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840–1880
An intelligent, engaging, and in-depth reading of the nature of the state and the establishment of the modern political order in the mid-nineteenth century.
Previous studies have covered in great detail how the modern state slowly emerged from the early Renaissance through the seventeenth century, but we know relatively little about the next great act: the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. And in an era where our democratic institutions are rife with conflict, it’s more important now than ever to understand how our institutions came into being.
Stephen W. Sawyer’s Demos Assembled provides us with a fresh, transatlantic understanding of that political order’s genesis. While the French influence on American political development is well understood, Sawyer sheds new light on the subsequent reciprocal influence that American thinkers and politicians had on the establishment of post-revolutionary regimes in France. He argues that the emergence of the stable Third Republic (1870–1940), which is typically said to have been driven by idiosyncratic internal factors, was in fact a deeply transnational, dynamic phenomenon. Sawyer’s findings reach beyond their historical moment, speaking broadly to conceptions of state formation: how contingent claims to authority, whether grounded in violence or appeals to reason and common cause, take form as stateness.
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Boundaries of the State in US History
by Stephen W. Sawyer, James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak
The question of how the American state defines its power has become central to a range of historical topics, from the founding of the Republic and the role of the educational system to the functions of agencies and America’s place in the world. Yet conventional histories of the state have not reckoned adequately with the roots of an ever-expanding governmental power, assuming instead that the American state was historically and exceptionally weak relative to its European peers.
Here, James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer assemble definitional essays that search for explanations to account for the extraordinary growth of US power without resorting to exceptionalist narratives. Turning away from abstract, metaphysical questions about what the state is, or schematic models of how it must work, these essays focus instead on the more pragmatic, historical question of what it does. By historicizing the construction of the boundaries dividing America and the world, civil society and the state, they are able to explain the dynamism and flexibility of a government whose powers appear so natural as to be given, invisible, inevitable, and exceptional.
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