New Books in Diplomatic History

Many of us have watched the classic 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, the somewhat fictionalized work based on the life of T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt and the First World War.

But Lawrence was part of the Arab Bureau, an effort to better understand and influence the region as Britain fought the Ottoman Empire for control of the Middle East. Chastened by their intelligence failures at Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara, the British tried to do something unthinkable: Actually learn how local communities operated, and ensure that propaganda was culturally authentic.

It’s the subject of The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit (Hurst, 2026), a new book from Eamonn Gearon which he calls the first in-depth investigation into what this intelligence agency did.

Eamonn is a global historian, specialising in the Middle East and North Africa and the history of intelligence, whose books also include The Arab Revolt. His doctoral research uncovered previously unknown Arabic documents which shed new light on British intelligence work in the region.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Arab Bureau. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. R. Joseph Parrott
explores how anti-colonial movements in Angola, Mozambique, and
Guinea-Bissau reshaped US activist engagement with the Global South from
the 1960s through the 1970s and influenced American foreign policy as
the Vietnam War drew to a close. These Portuguese African liberation
movements, led by nationalists like Eduardo Mondlane and Amílcar Cabral,
built global solidarity networks to support their military and social
challenges to empire while defending against Western intervention. US
activists disillusioned with the Cold War came to see African
self-determination as central to global campaigns for racial and
economic justice. A broad coalition ranging from Black Power radicals to
religious liberals mobilized against the North Atlantic alliance with
Portugal. In the process, this grassroots movement helped define a New
Left Internationalism that championed decentralized, multiracial
organizing and a collaborative vision of US foreign policy to redress
historic inequalities between Global North and South.

Drawing
on more than fifty oral histories and research in government and
activist archives on three continents in English, Portuguese, French,
and Afrikaans, Dr. Parrott reconstructs the transnational anti-imperial
network that injected Global South priorities into US political debates.
Popular protests and informational campaigns led to collaborations with
legislators eager to constrain the powerful executive branch. In 1976,
this grassroots-legislative alliance halted Gerald Ford’s anti-communist
intervention against the Soviet-backed government of newly independent
Angola. This victory of New Left Internationalist ideas anticipated
future anti-apartheid and Latin American peace movements while also
fueling
a conservative revival of Cold War containment. By exploring US
engagement with the contested process of African decolonization, Dream the Size of Freedom
highlights the origins of two contrasting visions of American foreign
policy that defined debates over the country’s proper role in the Global
South into the 1990s.

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. 
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In 1914 the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru
left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered
by railway contractor and purported rubber planter Gurdit Singh, the
ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and two months
later were deported to Calcutta.

In Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Duke University Press, 2018) Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata Maru.
Drawing on "oceans as method"—a mode of thinking and writing that
repositions land and sea—Mawani examines the historical and conceptual
stakes of situating histories of Indian migration within maritime
worlds.

Through close readings of the ship, the manifest, the trial, and the
anticolonial writings of Singh and others, Mawani argues that the Komagata Maru's
landing raised urgent questions regarding the jurisdictional tensions
between the common law and admiralty law, and, ultimately, the legal
status of the sea. By following the movements of a single ship and
bringing oceans into sharper view, Mawani traces British imperial power
through racial, temporal, and legal contests and offers a novel method
of writing colonial legal history.

The conversation also covers how the book, published in 2018, has
shaped the author’s more recent work as well as how historical methods
and approaches have evolved in the years since publication.

Helen Dewar is an historian of the Atlantic World and French
colonization in North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is a
professor of history at the Université de Montréal (Québec, Canada) and
the author of Disputing New France: Companies, Sovereignty and Law in the French Atlantic, 1598-1663 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

Helen’s institutional website
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Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line (Oxford UP, 2026) reveals the rise and fall of the mavericks running Britain's Cold War forgery empire. Their secret mission was audacious: to disrupt and discredit adversaries across the world using phantom groups, fake sources, and counterfeit documents.

The leader was a remarkable character, wrestling with personal and professional dilemmas: Hans Welser. An Austrian refugee and one-time MI5 suspect interned behind barbed wire, Welser was a great survivor who rose to become special operations adviser to the Foreign Office, working hand in glove with MI6. His second in command was an eccentric, hard drinking, and high-flying journalist-turned-propagandist called John Rayner. Brought out of semi-retirement, for one final posting. Their team of bowler-hatted refugees, voluble ex-journalists, trailblazing women, and licentious literary sorts navigated loyalty and betrayal — both professionally and romantically — from the diplomats' attic, in the most sensitive part of the Foreign Office's secret propaganda department.

The newly declassified files expose an array of plots, some comically absurd and others dangerously controversial. The forgery empire impersonated everything from hippies and ghosts to Islamists and ballet composers in their campaign to smear hostile politicians, stir tensions among adversaries, and even stymie the career of a contentious British historian. All took place against a high stakes backdrop — both overseas as states competed beneath the looming threat of nuclear war and in the corridors of power at home where grey-suited bureaucrats circled, keen to shut down the team for good.

With timely insight into how propaganda works and how to respond to disinformation, Fakers is a thrilling journey into a secret world where nothing was as it seemed.

Rory Cormac is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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In Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power (Wisdom Editions, 2026), Massoud Amin confronts the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States, and the civilians caught beneath it. Writing from a dual vantage as an Iranian-born American trained to see how systems break, Amin traces the chain that led to catastrophe. Iran's thwarted democracies. The 1953 coup. The architecture of sanctions was designed to inflict economic pain rather than produce diplomacy—the destruction of the JCPOA while the IAEA was certifying Iranian compliance.
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