Spies and Scholars

Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power

Gregory Afinogenov

A Financial Times Book of the Year

“The history of Sino-Russian relations appears in a much-altered light thanks to Gregory Afinogenov’s impressive new book. From the mid-17th century, the tsarist empire outdid all other European powers in gathering political, industrial, and commercial intelligence about China under the Qing dynasty. It is a little-known story, and [he] tells it beautifully.”

—Tony Barber, Financial Times

“Reads like a detective novel…a tour de force that offers new information about the rise of empires and the globalization of the world.”

Journal of Jesuit Studies

Beginning in the seventeenth century, Russian officials made a concerted effort to collect information about the Qing dynasty in China. From diplomatic missions in the Forbidden City to remote outposts on the border, Russian spies and scholars collected trade secrets, recipes for porcelain, and gossip about the country and its leaders— but the information was secret, not destined for wide circulation. Focused at first on the Siberian frontier, tsarist bureaucrats relied on spies, some of whom were Jesuit scholars stationed in China. When their attention shifted to Europe in the nineteenth century, they turned to more public-facing means to generate knowledge, including diplomatic and academic worlds, which would ultimately inform the broader encounter between China and Western empires. Peopled with a colorful cast of characters and based on extensive archival research in Russia and beyond, Spies and Scholars is a dramatic tale of covert machinations that breaks down long-accepted assumptions about the connection between knowledge and imperial power.

january · paper · 384 pages 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 · $35.00 • £30.95

History

6 photos · 13 maps

9780674294035

Belknap Press cloth · April 2020 · 9780674241855

Gregory Afinogenov is Assistant Professor of Imperial Russian History at Georgetown University and Associate Editor at Kritika, the leading journal of Russian and Eurasian history. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Nation, London Review of Books, and n+1.

Nazis of Copley Square

The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front

Charles R. Gallagher

Winner of a Catholic Media Association Book Award

“A great, but deeply unsettling, revelation…This book is more than an account of Boston in wartime. It is a warning.”

Boston Globe

“The rare book by a scholar that is such a page-turner it is hard to put down…A potent brew of spy story, detective story, and frank, fearless account of how a significant wing of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States spawned a movement aimed at defending Hitler and sabotaging America’s war effort.”

—David I. Kertzer, author of The Pope and Mussolini

“[A] well told, expertly researched, and much-needed history of the Christian Front, an organization that presages today’s far-right activity…Riveting.”

Commonweal

On January 13, 1940, FBI agents burst into the homes of seventeen members of the Christian Front, seizing guns, ammunition, and homemade bombs. J. Edgar Hoover’s charges were incendiary: the group, he alleged, was planning to incite a revolution and install a “temporary dictatorship” to stamp out Jewish and Communist influence in the United States. Interviewed in his jail cell, the front’s ringleader was unbowed: “All I can say is—long live Christ the King! Down with Communism!”

In this brilliant work of historical reconstruction, Charles Gallagher provides a crucial missing chapter in the history of the American far right. The men of the Christian Front imagined themselves to be crusaders fighting for the spiritual purification of the nation, and they were hardly alone in their beliefs.

Nazis of Copley Square chronicles the evolution of the front, the transatlantic cloak-and-dagger intelligence operations that subverted it, and the political and religious leaders who shielded it from scrutiny. A riveting tale of faith perverted to violent ends, it offers a potent warning to those who hope to curb the spread of far-right ideologies today.