The 2025 publishing year brought together a remarkably coherent body of work that spans contemporary defense transformation, global political change, and historical reflection, while continuing to deepen long‑standing partnerships with leading strategic thinkers and historians. Taken as a whole, the 2025 list underlines a central theme: democratic states are struggling to adapt to a world in which multi‑domain warfare, authoritarian competition, and historical memory all intersect in shaping the future of policy and power.
Re‑shaping Air and Maritime Power
Several 2025 titles focus on how air and maritime forces are being re‑engineered for high‑end conflict and distributed operations. 2nd Marine Air Wing: Transitioning “The Fight Tonight Force” offers a longitudinal account of how a major Marine aviation formation has moved from Iraq‑ and Afghanistan‑centric operations to preparing for high‑end warfare in the North Atlantic, Arctic, and wider Euro‑Atlantic, enabled by platforms like the MV‑22, F‑35B/C, and CH‑53K. Training for the High‑End Fight: The Paradigm Shift for Combat Pilot Training complements this by examining how pilot training is being recast around kill‑web operations, live‑virtual‑constructive ecosystems, and the cognitive demands of managing information‑rich, coalition‑centric battlespaces.
Two Osprey‑focused books—A Tiltrotor Perspective: Exploring the Experience and A Tiltrotor Enterprise: From Iraq to the Future—trace the evolution of the V‑22 from embattled program to cornerstone of a joint tiltrotor enterprise stretching across the Marine Corps, Air Force Special Operations, the Navy, and now the Army. They show how tiltrotor speed and reach have underwritten new operational concepts from Iraq to the Pacific and foreshadow the next generation of long‑range maneuver and logistics in contested environments.
My Fifth Generation Journey (Second Edition) updates the story of the F‑35’s global rollout, highlighting how the aircraft has become a software‑driven, continuously evolving combat system and a command node for emerging manned‑unmanned “wolf pack” concepts, including new insights from Israeli operations. Italy and the F‑35: Shaping 21st Century Coalition‑Enabled Airpower narrows the lens to one key ally, showing how Italy has used F‑35 participation, the Cameri facility, and carrier‑borne F‑35Bs to turn itself into a critical hub for European and global airpower. A Paradigm Shift in Maritime Operations: Autonomous Systems and Their Impact extends the modernization story to the sea, arguing that autonomous maritime systems and Distributed Maritime Effects are overturning centuries‑old capital‑ship logic, with Ukraine’s use of maritime drones against the Black Sea Fleet as emblematic of a broader revolution.
Strategy, Competition, and Global Order
Another cluster of 2025 titles grapples directly with the shift to a multipolar, increasingly authoritarian international system. The Emergence of the Multi‑Polar Authoritarian World: Looking Back from 2024 collects fifteen years of analysis documenting how China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and a wider “Global South” constructed parallel financial, trade, and political networks while Western elites remained anchored in post‑Cold War assumptions. Defense XXIV: Reworking U.S. and Allied Defenses to Deal with the Multi‑Polar Authoritarian Challenge brings the story forward into the 2024 security environment, examining how the United States and allies are re‑shaping posture, force design, and deterrence to deal with a multi‑axis authoritarian challenge, including changing nuclear dynamics and the rise of kill‑web‑enabled distributed operations.
The Biden Administration Confronts Global Change: Déjà vu All Over Again evaluates whether the promise that “America is back” amounted to a viable strategy in this transformed environment or a form of strategic nostalgia. Drawing on four years of contemporaneous analysis, it tracks how the administration’s aspirations collided with Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s assertiveness, and allied doubts about American staying power. Alongside these volumes sit two intellectual portraits: Assessing Global Change: Strategic Perspectives of Dr. Harald Malmgren and America, Global Military Competition, and Opportunities Lost: Reflections on the Work of Michael W. Wynne. The Malmgren volume highlights an integrated view of economics, diplomacy, and security developed over decades of advising leaders and analyzing global flows, while the Wynne book explores how his advocacy of fifth‑generation air dominance, hypersonics, cyber, and kill webs anticipated today’s debates and how his 2008 dismissal reflected a costly failure of strategic foresight.
History, Memory, and Political Transformation
The 2025 catalogue also underscores an ongoing commitment to historical depth and to the politics of memory. Remembering the B‑17 and Its Role in World War II uses the 1943 loss of a Flying Fortress over France and a 2013 ceremony on Noirmoutier Island to illuminate the human cost and strategic logic of the Allied air campaign, as well as the enduring Franco‑American bonds forged in resistance, rescue, and remembrance. Perspectives on Portuguese History: The 2024 Lectures by Professor Kenneth Maxwell gathers bilingual lectures linking the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the 1974 Portuguese Revolution, and decolonization to show how Portugal repeatedly reinvented itself through catastrophe and how its experience illuminates broader patterns of democratic transition and empire’s end.
The Tale of Three Cities: The Rebuilding of London, Paris, and Lisbon, also by Maxwell offers a comparative urban history of how those three capitals responded to fire, earthquake, and political crisis, turning destruction into engines of modernization and instruments of social control. It highlights the interplay of catastrophe, leadership, state capacity, circulating ideas, and economic forces in shaping the built environment. Controlling Contraband: Mentality, Economy, and Society in Eighteenth‑Century Rio de Janeiro, by Ernst Pijning, further broadens the historical canvas, examining how smuggling in gold‑rich colonial Brazil functioned as a central, negotiated feature of imperial governance and local society rather than a marginal criminality.
A Coherent Publishing Trajectory
Across these domains, the 2025 books share a common preoccupation: how systems, military, political, economic, and urban, adapt under pressure, and what happens when institutions fail to recognize or act on the need for transformation. Whether the subject is Marine aviation shifting to distributed operations, navies grappling with autonomous swarms, allies like Italy leveraging industrial capacity for strategic weight, or Western policymakers confronting a hardened multipolar authoritarian system, the underlying concern is the same: how democracies can recover strategic agility in an unforgiving world.
By pairing cutting‑edge defense analysis with deep historical and conceptual work, the 2025 list reinforces our publishing program’s distinctive niche: connecting front‑line operational change to long‑duration patterns of statecraft, economic power, and societal resilience.
Here is an ordered list of our 2025 books, grouped thematically (operational air/maritime power; historical and conceptual strategy; politics and global order; history and society), with an approximately 300‑word summary of each book.
- 2nd Marine Air Wing: Transitioning “The Fight Tonight Force”
This book traces the evolution of 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing from the height of the Iraq/Afghanistan era through 2025, showing how a legacy “fight tonight” organization has been re‑shaped for high‑end maritime conflict and integrated naval operations. Built around interviews with successive wing commanders and unit leaders, it reconstructs two decades of change in platforms, concepts of operations, and geography of concern—from desert expeditionary bases to the North Atlantic, High North, and wider Euro‑Atlantic theater.
The narrative follows three intertwined trajectories. First is platform modernization: the arrival of MV‑22 Ospreys, F‑35B/Cs, and the CH‑53K, and how each platform changed not only what could be done tactically but how Marine aviation conceives time, distance, and logistics. Second is operational transition: from counter‑insurgency support to distributed operations in contested air and maritime spaces, including the re‑grounding of the wing in naval integration with carrier strike groups and amphibious task forces. Third is the human and command story: how commanders adapted C2, training, and culture to exploit fifth‑generation capabilities while preserving the core Marine ethos of supporting Marines in contact.
A recurring theme is distributed lethality: the shift from a few concentrated hubs toward a more survivable, dispersed force in depth, connected by resilient C2 and supported by heavy‑lift and tiltrotor mobility. The book also highlights allied interplay, especially cooperation with Nordic and broader NATO partners as the North Atlantic and Arctic re‑emerge as central theaters in great‑power competition.
For readers, the book provides more than a unit history. It becomes a case study in how a combat aviation wing manages technological disruption, strategic re‑tasking, and alliance demands without losing its identity. The 2nd MAW story becomes a template for understanding how other combat organizations must rethink their role as fifth‑generation aircraft, kill‑web concepts, and multi‑domain operations redefine the “fight tonight” mandate.
- Training for the High-End Fight: The Paradigm Shift for Combat Pilot Training
This volume examines how combat aviation training is being reinvented for a world of kill webs, ubiquitous sensors, and machine‑speed decision cycles. The central argument is that the traditional “ace pilot” model is no longer adequate; the defining skill now is cognitive agility inside a complex, networked battlespace.
The book contrasts the legacy “kill chain” mindset, linear targeting from find to finish, with the emerging kill‑web paradigm in which pilots operate as managers of distributed effects across air, maritime, land, space, and cyber domains. Fifth‑generation aircraft such as the F‑35 are treated as information nodes as much as shooters, demanding that pilots become integrators of data and orchestrators of coalition assets. This leads to an exploration of “chaos management”: training aircrew to function under compressed timelines, ambiguous information, and simultaneous threats where procedural competence is necessary but not sufficient.
A major focus is the live‑virtual‑constructive (LVC) ecosystem, with case studies such as Italy’s International Flight Training School. Here, real aircraft, advanced simulators, and constructive threats are blended to replicate contested electronic warfare, integrated air and missile defense, and joint operations at scale without prohibitive cost or operational risk. The book critiques the inertia of legacy training systems and argues that clinging to obsolete trainers and syllabi actively undermines fifth‑generation effectiveness.
Another recurring strand is coalition integration: training from the outset in multinational frameworks so that interoperability is habitual rather than improvised in crisis. Partnerships with industry are presented not as add‑ons but as structural to rapid curriculum and technology updates.
The book closes by arguing that the decisive competitive edge in future air warfare will be the cultivated minds of pilots and mission commanders, not the airframes alone. Nations that re‑engineer training to build cognitive resilience, network fluency, and cross‑domain leadership will dominate any contest for air superiority in the high‑end fight.
- A Tiltrotor Perspective: Exploring the Experience
This work tells the inside story of the V‑22 Osprey’s journey from political pariah to indispensable operational workhorse, as seen through the eyes of those who designed, flew, maintained, and fought with it. It begins with the bruising years of congressional assaults, media skepticism, and internal service resistance, situating the aircraft within the broader politics of Pentagon innovation and risk aversion.
The core of the book is the lived experience of operators. Through extensive interviews with pilots, crew chiefs, maintainers, and commanders, it traces how the Osprey’s speed, range, and vertical lift enabled new forms of maneuver in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. Missions that once required multiple platforms, exposed helicopters to extended threat envelopes, or were simply impossible because of distance become executable and routine as tiltrotor tactics matured. The narrative underscores how doctrinal innovation followed operational experimentation: Marines, Air Force special operators, and later the Navy used the aircraft’s unique envelope to re‑imagine assault support, special operations insertion, and maritime logistics.
The book also explores how the Osprey became a symbol of a broader “tiltrotor enterprise” or an ecosystem of training, sustainment, industrial cooperation, and cross‑service learning. Rather than treating the V‑22 as an isolated platform, the account shows how it catalyzed thinking about future tiltrotor programs and the integration of next‑generation sensors and weapons.
Against the early narrative of the Osprey as a “death trap,” the book documents how combat performance and user confidence reversed perceptions. Distinguished Marine leaders underscore that the aircraft now has no peer in its mission set.
Ultimately, the book argues that the Osprey story is a case study in how genuine innovation in military aviation survives bureaucratic and political headwinds when driven by operational need and the persistence of warfighters who recognize a transformational capability and refuse to let it be killed off prematurely.
- A Tiltrotor Enterprise: From Iraq to the Future
Where A Tiltrotor Perspective focuses on the fight to field and prove the Osprey, A Tiltrotor Enterprise zooms out to examine how tiltrotor technology has reshaped operational concepts and is now driving a broader joint and allied transformation. The book follows the arc from the first combat deployments in Iraq through the aircraft’s maturation as a central tool for global reach, rapid maneuver, and distributed operations.
The narrative emphasizes that the real story is not a single aircraft but an evolving enterprise. It shows how Marines used the V‑22 to convert traditional amphibious forces into a long‑range, globally deployable force, how Air Force Special Operations leveraged its performance for deep insertion and exfiltration missions, and how the Navy is now using tiltrotors to re‑invent logistics at sea. The emerging Army variant is discussed as part of a future in which tiltrotor speed and range underpin land force maneuver in contested environments rich in autonomous systems.
The book explores how pairing tiltrotor platforms with advanced sensors, C2 architectures, and precision weapons turns them into enablers for kill‑web operations rather than mere “helicopter replacements.” Interviews with warfighters and industry leaders illuminate a shift from platform‑centric thinking to enterprise‑centric planning, where training, maintenance, and concept development are integrated across services and with allies.
Throughout, the book highlights how distributed operations in theaters like the Pacific change the value proposition of tiltrotor aviation. Long distances, austere basing, and the need to complicate adversary targeting make the Osprey and its successors central to emerging operational doctrine.
In sum, A Tiltrotor Enterprise argues that tiltrotor capability has moved from controversial experiment to foundational element of 21st‑century joint power projection—and that the most significant payoffs still lie ahead as new variants, payloads, and concepts of operation are fielded.
- My Fifth Generation Journey (Second Edition)
This revised edition updates the original 2023 volume with new material through 2025, including perspectives drawn from recent Israeli operations employing the F‑35. The book remains, at its core, a first‑hand chronicle of how the F‑35 moved from contested program to operational cornerstone of a global fifth‑generation enterprise.
Structured as a series of essays and interview‑based case studies, it follows the aircraft’s introduction across multiple services and allied air arms, focusing on the people who made the transition possible: pilots, maintainers, logisticians, and planners who re‑shaped their forces around a software‑driven, sensor‑rich, networked combat system. The narrative emphasizes that the F‑35 is not a traditional airframe upgraded at long intervals, but an information age platform designed for continual software‑driven enhancement. Block upgrades are depicted as steps in a rolling transformation, each adding capabilities across sensing, weapons, and integration.
A central theme is the F‑35 as a bridge to manned‑unmanned teaming and future sixth‑generation systems. The book explains how planners increasingly see the aircraft as a command node for “man‑robotic wolf packs,” orchestrating autonomous sensors and shooters rather than acting alone.
The text also situates the program in a geopolitical frame: the spread of the F‑35 binds together a coalition of democracies with shared tactics, training, and logistics, creating an unprecedented level of interoperability. Critics who focused on developmental stumbles are contrasted with the operational reality of a maturing fleet that has altered the airpower balance in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo‑Pacific.
Ultimately, the second edition reinforces the core argument that the “fifth‑generation journey” is less about a single aircraft and more about a new model of continuous capability development, allied integration, and information‑centric warfighting.
- Italy and the F‑35: Shaping 21st Century Coalition‑Enabled Airpower
This book analyzes how Italy has leveraged the F‑35 program to transform itself from a perceived secondary NATO airpower into a central node of coalition‑enabled operations. It argues that Italy’s approach combining industrial participation, operational innovation, and strategic ambition offers a template for mid‑tier powers seeking greater influence in a contested world.
Central to the narrative is the Cameri facility, presented as far more than a production line. Cameri emerges as a strategic hub where Italy builds and sustains F‑35s for itself and partners, converting industrial competence into political and military weight. The integration of F‑35B aircraft on the carrier ITS Cavour is highlighted as a key turning point, marking Italy’s return to serious carrier aviation and giving it an expeditionary strike capability highly relevant from the Mediterranean to the Indo‑Pacific.
The book develops the idea of Italy’s “double transition”: simultaneously fielding and networking F‑35s while modernizing legacy platforms such as Eurofighter Typhoons, tankers, and CAEW assets. This creates a layered force where fifth‑generation aircraft act as sensors and coordinators for a broader combat cloud.
Case studies of exercises and operations ranging from participation in distant exercises like Pitch Black to NATO missions demonstrate how Italian pilots are using the F‑35 to project presence and interoperability far beyond national borders.
Drawing on a decade of interviews with Italian airpower leadership, the book presents Italy’s journey as both national narrative and a broader lesson: in the 21st century, smart investments in integrated airpower, industrial capacity, and coalition roles can elevate a country’s strategic profile more effectively than traditional measures of size alone.
- A Paradigm Shift in Maritime Operations: Autonomous Systems and Their Impact
This book explores how autonomous maritime systems are overturning centuries‑old assumptions about naval power, using Ukraine’s successful strikes against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet as a vivid point of departure. It argues that traditional capital‑ship‑centric models are giving way to Distributed Maritime Effects (DME), where swarms of relatively low‑cost, networked unmanned platforms can generate combat power once monopolized by major surface combatants and submarines.
The narrative explains how Maritime Autonomous Systems on, above, and under the sea are becoming the backbone of this shift. These systems, integrated with manned aircraft and ships in kill‑web architectures, enable more resilient, flexible, and affordable combat clusters. The book contrasts the glacial pace and cost of conventional shipbuilding with the rapid, modular deployment of autonomous fleets by innovative militaries.
Policy and legal frameworks are addressed through discussion of U.S. directives governing autonomous weapons, emphasizing the requirement for meaningful human judgment while recognizing that the technology is already operational rather than speculative. Examples range from Ukraine to Task Force 59 in the Arabian Gulf and Australian initiatives, underscoring that the maritime autonomy revolution is global in scope.
The book criticizes over‑emphasis on protracted testing when commercial and off‑the‑shelf systems have proven combat utility, and quotes senior Marine leaders warning that these capabilities are coming regardless of institutional hesitation.
Ultimately, it frames the central strategic question not as whether autonomous maritime operations will dominate future naval warfare, but whether established powers will adapt in time or be tactically and economically outflanked by smaller, more agile actors wielding autonomous swarms.
- Defense XXIV: Reworking U.S. and Allied Defenses to Deal with the Multi‑Polar Authoritarian Challenge
This annual “Defense” volume surveys the rapidly changing 2024 security environment and how the United States and its allies are reshaping defenses in response to an emergent multipolar authoritarian world. Drawing on interviews and field‑grounded analysis rather than abstract theory, it covers theaters from Ukraine and the broader European front to the Indo‑Pacific and Middle East.
A central theme is that today’s challenge is not a simple return to bipolar great‑power competition but a more complex struggle with multiple authoritarian actors, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and others, whose interests diverge but whose anti‑democratic impulses align. The book details how this affects force‑planning, deterrence, and crisis management. It devotes considerable attention to the evolution of nuclear dynamics, highlighting how the proliferation of nuclear actors with different risk calculations undercuts Cold War deterrence paradigms.
Another major focus is the maritime “kill‑web” paradigm and the integration of crewed and uncrewed systems in distributed operations. Case studies examine how navies and air forces are experimenting with new concepts to complicate adversary targeting and increase survivability. Allied integration emerges as a key motif, with particular emphasis on Nordic defense cooperation, European capability development, and the role of interoperable combat systems.
The volume argues that mere incremental modernization is insufficient; what is required is strategic redesign of posture, basing, and command arrangements to reflect the realities of a multi‑axis authoritarian challenge. As the latest in your annual series, Defense XXIV functions both as a snapshot of one turbulent year and as part of a longitudinal record of how democratic states are struggling—and in some cases succeeding—to adapt their defenses to a more dangerous world.
- The Emergence of the Multi-Polar Authoritarian World: Looking Back from 2024
This collection assembles fifteen years of analysis chronicling how an alternative, authoritarian‑anchored world order emerged while Western elites remained fixated on the post‑Cold War “unipolar moment.” It contends that while the West focused on counterterrorism and managing the “rules‑based order,” states like China and Russia methodically built parallel economic, financial, and political networks that now blunt Western tools such as sanctions.
The book traces how China extended influence through infrastructure, trade, and finance across the Global South, while Russia weaponized energy flows and built resilient channels to sell oil and gas despite Western efforts to choke them off. It shows how Iran, North Korea, and others plugged into this evolving ecosystem, creating a “shadow empire” that allows authoritarian systems to cooperate and hedge against Western pressure.
A key argument is that much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment remained trapped in mental frameworks forged in the 1990s and early 2000s, underestimating both the coherence and appeal of authoritarian alternatives. The book lists hard questions that now confront democracies: why sanctions have lost bite, how much of the world is prepared to operate outside Western institutional structures, and whether democracies can adapt to a multipolar order they did not plan for.
The analyses highlight the perspectives developed through Second Line of Defense and Defense.info, emphasizing continuous observation rather than retrospective theorizing. Endorsements underscore the significance of the work as a guide for understanding how the current moment came about.
In sum, the volume seeks to help readers see the international system as it has become, messier, more competitive, and less Western‑centric, rather than as many in the West still assume it to be.
- The Biden Administration Confronts Global Change: Déjà vu All Over Again
This book scrutinizes the Biden administration’s foreign and defense policy against the backdrop of accelerating global disorder, asking whether the promise that “America is back” reflected a viable strategy or an outdated mental map. It uses four years of contemporaneous commentary and analysis to track how the administration responded to crises and structural shifts from 2021 to 2024.
The narrative begins with Biden’s early speeches framing his presidency as a corrective to the Trump era and a restoration of U.S. leadership, including commitments to rally democracies against authoritarianism and address China’s ambitions and Russia’s disruptive behavior. It then examines how these aspirations collided with hard realities: the Afghanistan withdrawal, Russia’s full‑scale invasion of Ukraine, escalating competition with China, and allies’ lingering doubts about American staying power and coherence.
The book argues that the administration often tried to revive tools and assumptions from earlier periods without fully accounting for the structural changes documented in your work on multipolar authoritarianism. The notion of “going back” is contrasted with a world that had already moved on: alternative financial structures, fractured alliance politics, and shifting domestic constraints within Western democracies.
Rather than focusing solely on policy outcomes, the book treats the Biden years as a test case for whether traditional liberal‑internationalist playbooks can function in a world of resilient authoritarian competitors and skeptical partners.
In doing so, it offers both an assessment of one administration and a broader reflection on the challenges any U.S. leadership will face in trying to reassert influence in a system where the old defaults no longer apply and where domestic and international constraints sharply limit grand strategic ambitions.
- America, Global Military Competition, and Opportunities Lost: Reflections on the Work of Michael W. Wynne
This volume is a deep exploration of the ideas and legacy of Michael W. Wynne, 21st Secretary of the Air Force, cast as both tribute and cautionary tale. It presents Wynne’s core doctrine, never accept a “fair fight” because it signals failure of strategic preparation, and shows how this principle informed his advocacy of transformational technologies and concepts years before they became fashionable.
The book details Wynne’s championing of fifth‑generation air dominance, hypersonic strike, advanced logistics enabled by UID/RFID, cyber capabilities, and the kill‑web approach to integrating sensors and shooters across domains. It emphasizes how he saw technology not as an end in itself but as a means to compress OODA loops and ensure U.S. forces could out‑think and out‑decide adversaries.
A central section examines the 2008 firing of Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Moseley, arguing that their removal marked a strategic misstep in which the United States turned away from precisely the capabilities and concepts that would later be recognized as essential in great‑power competition. The book traces how, when Donald Trump later declared the return of great‑power rivalry, much of Wynne’s agenda resurfaced as urgent priority after a costly delay.
Through essays and testimonials, the volume explores leadership as willingness to push against bureaucratic inertia and to think ahead of political comfort zones. It also reflects on how institutional myopia and short‑termism can squander windows of advantage.
The result is both an intellectual biography and a meditation on strategic foresight, what it means, how it is resisted, and what happens when a system punishes rather than leverages its most forward‑leaning thinkers.
- Assessing Global Change: Strategic Perspectives of Dr. Harald Malmgren
This collection presents fifteen years of work with Harald Malmgren, portraying him as a strategic “chess grandmaster” who integrates economics, diplomacy, and security into a unified framework for understanding global power shifts. It highlights his role as adviser to presidents and corporate leaders and as an architect of key elements of the modern trading system.
The book organizes Malmgren’s essays and interviews around recurring themes: the interplay of financial flows and geopolitical leverage, the vulnerabilities of global supply chains, and the ways in which trade architecture shapes and constrains national strategy. Co‑authored context and commentary situate his analyses within journeys across the Asia‑Pacific, Europe, and U.S. military commands, emphasizing the fusion of high‑level insight with on‑the‑ground observation.
One of the work’s strengths is showing how Malmgren identifies pattern and trajectory amid the noise of daily events. Essays track how shifts in monetary policy, energy markets, and regulatory regimes cascade into strategic consequences, often years before they become obvious to mainstream observers.
The book also sheds light on Malmgren’s method: treating the global system as an interconnected board on which states, corporations, and institutions act with different time horizons and constraints. This approach underscores why purely military or purely economic analyses often mislead policymakers.
Overall, the volume offers readers both a guided tour of two volatile decades in world affairs and a masterclass in synthetic thinking, how to connect dots across domains to see the underlying structure of change rather than just its surface manifestations.
- Perspectives on Portuguese History: The 2024 Lectures by Professor Kenneth Maxwell
This book collects and contextualizes Kenneth Maxwell’s 2024 lectures delivered in Lisbon, Harvard, and other venues, presenting them as a coherent exploration of Portugal’s modern history and its global reverberations. It traces a narrative from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake through the 1974 Revolution and decolonization, showing how Portugal repeatedly reinvented itself through crisis.
The lectures, presented bilingually in English and Portuguese, link the reconstruction of Lisbon after 1755 to broader European urban transformations in London and Paris, and then connect the Carnation Revolution to the late‑20th‑century wave of democratization and decolonization. Maxwell examines how elites, social movements, and external powers interacted at critical junctures, and how Portugal’s experience illuminates the dynamics of regime change more generally.
The volume includes a rare early essay from 1964, offering a snapshot of Portugal still under dictatorship, and juxtaposes it with his later reflections on democratic consolidation and the international consequences of decolonization. Throughout, Maxwell is portrayed by commentators such as Carlos Gaspar as the leading historian of the revolution and its aftermath.
Editorial framing underscores the contemporary relevance of these lectures. They speak to questions of how societies rebuild after catastrophe, how democratic institutions emerge from authoritarian contexts, and how a relatively small country can have outsized influence through empire, diaspora, and strategic geography.
The result is a work that appeals both to specialists in Portuguese and Iberian history and to readers interested in democracy, revolution, and the long‑term consequences of imperial rise and decline.
- The Tale of Three Cities: The Rebuilding of London, Paris, and Lisbon
Written by Kenneth Maxwell, this book offers a comparative history of how three European capitals, London, Lisbon, and Paris, responded to catastrophe and used rebuilding to re‑shape urban form, society, and power. It treats the Great Fire of London (1666), the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami (1755), and the political “catastrophe” of mid‑19th‑century Paris as gateways into understanding the making of modernity in stone and street grid.
The London section portrays grand post‑fire visions colliding with property structures and fiscal limits, yielding a city that kept its medieval pattern but changed fundamentally in material, institutions, and imperial orientation. Lisbon’s reconstruction under the Marquês de Pombal is presented as a classic case of Enlightenment urbanism, where state power, science, and new building technologies (such as the gaiola system) turn disaster into an experiment in rational planning. Paris becomes a story of Haussmannization, where an authoritarian regime wields expropriation, finance, and infrastructure to carve boulevards, parks, and standardized façades into an unruly city, with profound social and political consequences.
The book’s analytical core lies in its themes: catastrophe as opportunity, leadership and state capacity, circulation of ideas and expertise, and the economic drivers of urban change. It includes multilingual versions of the core essay, extensive notes, visual materials, and a reflective dialogue that invites readers to think about resilience, memory, and agency in city‑making.
This makes The Tale of Three Cities simultaneously a work of urban history, political thought, and intellectual history, of interest to historians, architects, planners, and anyone concerned with how power and ideas become literally built into urban landscapes.
- Remembering the B‑17 and Its Role in World War II
Centered on the 2013 commemoration on Noirmoutier Island, this book uses the story of a B‑17 Flying Fortress shot down over Nazi‑occupied France in 1943 to explore the human and strategic dimensions of the Allied air campaign. It weaves together personal accounts of American airmen, French civilians, and resistance actors to show how the crash created bonds of memory and obligation that lasted seven decades.
The narrative balances operational analysis with human experience. It explains the logic and terrible costs of daylight strategic bombing, the training pipeline that produced bomber crews, and the tactical realities of flying into dense flak and fighter opposition. At the same time, it follows the fate of downed airmen on the ground and the risks taken by French villagers who sheltered them under occupation.
Beyond recounting a specific incident, the book draws explicit links between the B‑17 era and contemporary debates about airpower and readiness. Questions that confronted wartime planners, how to design the right aircraft, train crews fast enough, and balance cost with capability, are shown to echo in current procurement and modernization struggles.
The Franco‑American dimension is a recurring theme. The Noirmoutier ceremony becomes a lens on how communities remember, how transatlantic ties are sustained, and how acts of wartime solidarity reverberate across generations.
Ultimately, the book stands as both historical narrative and reflection on remembrance: a tribute to the Flying Fortress and its crews, but also an argument that understanding this past is essential to thinking clearly about the uses and limits of airpower today.
- Controlling Contraband: Mentality, Economy, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Ernst Pijning)
This monograph by Ernst Pijning examines smuggling in 18th‑century Rio de Janeiro as a structural feature of colonial society rather than a mere pathology. It argues that contraband was woven into international relations, imperial administration, and local social hierarchies, especially after Brazil became a leading producer of gold and diamonds.
The book reframes “illicit” trade as a negotiated space among the Portuguese Crown, foreign powers, colonial officials, and Brazilian merchants. Rather than focusing on volumes or specific goods, it highlights the struggle to control the channels of legal and illegal commerce. The Crown attempted to manage this space by bending rules, selling offices, creating overlapping jurisdictions, and deploying anti‑contraband rhetoric, producing oscillations in enforcement over the 18th century.
Pijning shows how smuggling shaped and reflected mentalities and social relations in Rio, affecting how actors understood authority, opportunity, and risk. As imperial control weakened in the early 19th century, the Crown’s ability to regulate contraband eroded, mirroring the broader unraveling of colonial rule.
This work showcases our publishing program’s reach beyond contemporary defense and strategy into deeply researched, globally oriented early modern history.