The war of 1914–18 was the first great conflict to be fought between highly industrial societies able to manufacture and transport immense quantities of goods to the field of battle. In Civilian Specialists at War, Christopher Phillips examines the manner in which Britain’s industrial society influenced the character and conduct of industrial warfare. This book analyses the multiple connect…
This volume focuses on the rise of transnational constitutional laws, primarily created by the interaction between national and international courts, and by the domestic transformation of international law. Through detailed analysis of patterns of institutional formation at key historical junctures in a number of national societies, it examines the social processes that have locked national sta…
In this book Ernesto Screpanti provides a rigorous examination of Marx’s theory of exploitation, one of the cornerstones of Marxist thought. With precision and clarity, he identifies the holes in traditional readings of Marx’s theory before advancing his own original interpretation, drawing on contemporary philosophy and economic theory to provide a refreshingly interdisciplinary exegesis. …
From Goethe to Gundolf: Essays on German Literature and Culture is a collection of Roger Paulin’s groundbreaking essays, spanning the last forty years. The work represents his major research interests of Romanticism and the reception of Shakespeare in Germany, but also explores a broader range of themes, from poetry and the public memorialization of poets to fairy stories - all meticulously r…
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction combines innovative literary and historiographical analysis to investigate the way neo-Victorian novels conceptualise our relationship to the Victorian past, and to analyse their role in the production and communication of historical knowledge. Positioning neo-Victorian novels as dynamic participants in the contemporary historical imaginary, …
A Certain Age' is an unconventional, evocative work of history and a moving reflection on memory, modernity, space, time, and the limitations of traditional historical narratives. Rudolf Mrázek visited Indonesia throughout the 1990s, recording lengthy interviews with elderly intellectuals in and around Jakarta. With few exceptions, they were part of an urban elite born under colonial rule and …
There is to date no comprehensive treatment of eye disease texts from ancient Mesopotamia, and no English translation of this material is available. This volume is the first complete edition and commentary on Mesopotamian medicine from Nineveh dealing with diseases of the eye. This ancient work, languishing in British Museum archives since the 19th century, is preserved on several large cuneifo…
The substantive and methodological contributions of professional historians to development policy debates was marginal, whether because of the dominance of economists or the inability of historians to contribute. There are broadly three ways in which history matters for development policy. These include insistence on the methodological principles of respect for context, process and difference; …
A Bowl for a Coin is the first book in any language to describe and analyze the history of all Japanese teas. To understand the triumph of the tea plant in Japan, Wayne Farris begins with its cultivation and goes on to describe the myriad ways in which the herb was processed into a palatable beverage. Along the way, he traces the shift in tea's status from exotic gift item from China to its com…
The region of the Middle East has been called the cradle of mankind. This volume studies historical, cultural, religious, social and political legacies, which play a central role in obstructing intercultural dialogue in the Middle East. The region became home to numerous cultures, religions and ethnicities with long experience of living together in a multicultural environment and has an immense…
This volume presents recent research on the relationship between the material format of text-bearing artefacts, the texts they carry, and their genre. The essays cover a vast period, from the counting stones of the late 4th millennium BCE to the time of the Great Hittite Kingdom in the 2nd millennium BCE. The breadth of substantive focus allows new insights of relevance to scholars in both Anci…
Described by the sixteenth-century English poet George Turbervile as "a people passing rude, to vices vile inclin’d", the Russians waited some three centuries before their subsequent cultural achievements—in music, art and particularly literature—achieved widespread recognition in Britain. The essays in this stimulating collection attest to the scope and variety of Russia’s influence…
The Nordic Model is the 20th-century Scandinavian recipe for combining stable democracies, individual freedom, economic growth and comprehensive systems for social security. But what happens when Sweden and Finland – two countries topping global indexes for competitiveness, productivity, growth, quality of life, prosperity, and equality – start doubting themselves and their future? Is the N…
The ‘knowledge turn’ in curriculum studies has drawn attention to the central role that knowledge of the disciplines plays in education, and to the need for new thinking about how we understand knowledge and knowledge-building. Knowing History in Schools explores these issues in the context of teaching and learning history through a dialogue between the eminent sociologist of curriculum Mic…
We thank Ekman & Co AB and Gadelius Holding Ltd for their kind and generous support, making this research available online for free. Lottaz and Ottosson explore the intricate relationship between neutral Sweden and Imperial Japan during the latter’s 15 years of warfare in Asia and in the Pacific. While Sweden’s relationship with European Axis powers took place under the premise of existenti…
Teaching and learning about the Holocaust is central to school curriculums in many parts of the world. As a field for discourse and a body of practice, it is rich, multidimensional and innovative. But the history of the Holocaust is complex and challenging, and can render teaching it a complex and daunting area of work. Drawing on landmark research into teaching practices and students’ knowle…
Among our most cherished modern assumptions is our distance from the material world we claim to love or, alternately, to dominate and own. As both devotional tool and art object, the Byzantine icon is rendered complicit in this distancing. According to well-established theological and scholarly explanations, the icon is a window onto the divine: it focuses and directs our minds to a higher unde…
In 1591, Giovanni Paolo Gallucci published his Della simmetria dei corpi humani, an Italian translation of Albrecht Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion. While Dürer’s treatise had been translated earlier in the sixteenth-century into French and Latin, it was Gallucci’s Italian translation that endured in popularity as the most cited version of the text in later Baroque treatises, cov…
Princess Marie Adelheid of Lippe-Biesterfeld was a rebellious young writer who became a fervent Nazi. Heinrich Vogeler was a well-regarded artist who was to join the German Communist Party. Ludwig Roselius was a successful businessman who had made a fortune from his invention of decaffeinated coffee. What was it about the revolutionary climate following World War I that induced three such diffe…
Recent years have shown an increase in interest in the study of cleanliness from a historical and sociological perspective. Many of such studies on bathing and washing, on keeping the body and the streets clean, and on filth and the combat of dirt, focus on Europe. In Cleanliness and culture attention shifts to the tropics, to Indonesia, in colonial times as well as in the present. Subjects ran…
Fragile countries face a triple data challenge. Up-to-date information is needed to deal with rapidly changing circumstances and to design adequate responses. Yet, fragile countries are among the most data deprived, while collecting new information in such circumstances is very challenging. This open access book presents innovations in data collection developed with decision makers in fragile c…
Concepts of ‘balance’ have been central to modern politics, medicine and society. Yet, while many health, environmental and social challenges are discussed globally in terms of imbalances in biological, social and ecological systems, strategies for addressing modern excesses and deficiencies have focused almost exclusively on the agency of the individual. Balancing the Self explores the div…
This open access book modifies and revitalizes the concept of the ‘developmental state’ to understand the politics of emerging economy through nuanced analysis on the roles of human agency in the context of structural transformation. In other words, there is a revived interest in the ‘developmental state’ concept. The nature of the ‘emerging state’ is characterized by its attitude t…
This edited volume offers the first comprehensive historical overview of the Belgian medical field in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its chapters develop narratives that go beyond traditional representations of medicine in national overviews, which have focused mostly on stateprofession interactions. Instead, the chapters bring more complex histories of health, care and citizenship. Th…
The revised prose version of the Babad Tanah Jawi was originally prepared by C.F. Winter Sr. (1799-1859), with the twofold aim of providing Javanese-language teaching material and of setting a standard for formal Javanese prose writing. At that time, Javanese was almost exclusively written in verse, which was not a medium suitable for the modern world that was dawning on Java. Although Winter a…
This book traces the journey of new Muslims as they joined the early Islamic community and articulated their identities within it. It focuses on Muslims of slave origins, who belonged to the society in which they lived but whose slave background rendered them somehow alien. How did these Muslims at the crossroads of insider and outsider find their place in early Islamic society? How did Islamic…
Through studies of beheaded Irish traitors, smugglers hung in chains on the English coast, suicides subjected to the surgeon's knife in Dresden and the burial of executed Nazi war criminals, this volume provides a fresh perspective on the history of capital punishment. This book has two open access chapters under a CC BY license.
Coalmining was a notoriously dangerous industry and many of its workers experienced injury and disease. However, the experiences of the many disabled people within Britain’s most dangerous industry have gone largely unrecognised by historians. This book examines the British coal industry through the lens of disability, using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the lives of disabled miner…
"Interest in world history has never been greater—both among historians and the reading public. Globalization has coaxed historians out of their fixation on all things national, which has characterized historical research since the nineteenth century. But with this new global field of research has come new methodological problems. It is high time that these problems were tackled, if only to d…
At the heart of Victorian culture was the local weekly newspaper. More popular than books, more widely read than the London papers, the local press was a national phenomenon. This book redraws the Victorian cultural map, shifting our focus away from one centre, London, and towards the many centres of the provinces. It offers a new paradigm in which place, and a sense of place, are vital to the …
Complexity, Security and Civil Society in East Asia offers the latest understanding of complex global problems in the region, including nuclear weapons, urban insecurity, energy, and climate change. Detailed case studies of China, North and South Korea, and Japan demonstrate the importance of civil society and ‘civic diplomacy’ in reaching shared solutions to these problems in East Asia and…
The ANZUS Alliance was a defence arrangement between Australia, New Zealand and the United States that shaped international policy in the aftermath of the Second World War and the early stages of the Cold War. Forged by influential individuals and impacting on global events including the Japanese Peace Treaty, the Korean War and the Suez Crisis, the ANZUS Alliance was a crucial factor in the se…
Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers. The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle th…
By using history and theory of communication as an integrative methodological device, this book reaches out to those properties of totalitarian society which appear to be beyond the grasp of specific disciplines. Furthermore, this functional approach allows to extend the analysis of communicative practices commonly associated with fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, to other locations…
The 'just about managing'. 'Hardworking families'. 'Alarm-clock Britain'. In recent years British political discourse has been filled with these slogans, as politicians claim to speak on behalf of families who are in work, but struggling to get by. This book allows us to hear from some of these families directly. At a time when the impact of austerity is more relevant than ever, Just Managin…
The field of disability studies significantly contributes to contemporary discussions of the marginalization of and social justice for individuals with disabilities. However, what of disability in the past? The Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe explores what medieval texts have to say about disability, both in their own time and for the present. This interdisciplinary volume on med…
In the thirteenth century, the Armenians of Greater Armenia and of the Armenian Kingdom in Cilicia were invaded by Mongol nomads of the Inner Asian steppe. The ensuing Mongol-Armenian relations were varied. The Greater Armenians became subjects of the Mongol Empire, whereas the Cilician Armenians, by entering into vassalage, became allies and furthered the Mongol conquests. In order to enhance …
The essays in this volume analyze strategies adopted by contemporary novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and biographers interested in bringing the stories of early modern women to modern audiences. It also pays attention to the historical women creators themselves, who, be they saints or midwives, visual artists or poets and playwrights, stand out for their roles as active practitioners of …
In refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American political and cultural memory, Sensational Internationalism radically changes our understanding of the relationship between France and the United States in the long nineteenth century.
We’re in an era of ever increasing attention to animal rights, and activism around the issue is growing more widespread and prominent. In this volume, Kerstin Jacobsson and Jonas Lindblom use the animal rights movement in Sweden to offer the first analysis of social movements through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s sociology of morality. By positing social movements as essentially a moral phen…
Examines the underlying precarity in twenty-first-century immigrant fiction and reveals the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism as an ideology.
This book radically refigures the conceptual and formal significance of childhood in nineteenth-century English poetry. By theorizing infancy as a poetics as well as a space of continual beginning, Ruderman shows how it allowed poets access to inchoate, uncanny, and mutable forms of subjectivity and art. While recent historicist studies have documented the "freshness of experience" childhood co…
This essential introduction to American studies examines the core foundational myths upon which the nation is based and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of »discovery,« the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the melting pot myth, the myth of the West, and the myth of the self-made man…
This insightful volume provides a comprehensive account of the history and politics of lawyers of the last 200 years in the Nordic countries: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland. Topping most global indexes of core civil rights, these states have been found to contain few to no visible legal complexes. Where previous studies have characterized lawyers as stewards and guardians of the …
Few areas in economics are as controversial as economic forecasting. While the field has sparked great hopes for the prediction of economic trends and events throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, economic forecasts have often proved inaccurate or unreliable, thus provoking severe criticism in times of unpredicted crisis. Despite these failures, economic forecasting has not lost its importance…
This open access book provides a multi-perspective approach to the caravan trade in the Sahara during the 19th century. Based on travelogues from European travelers, recently found Arab sources, historical maps and results from several expeditions, the book gives an overview of the historical periods of the caravan trade as well as detailed information about the infrastructure which was necessa…
In Authoritarian Modernization in Indonesia’s Early Independence Period, Farabi Fakih offers a historical analysis of the foundational years leading to Indonesia’s New Order state (1966–1998) during the early independence period. The study looks into the structural and ideological state formation during the so-called Liberal Democracy (1950–1957) and Sukarno’s Guided Democracy (1957�…
This book presents an innovative format for poetry criticism that its authors call "dialogical poetics." This approach shows that readings of poems, which in academic literary criticism often look like a product of settled knowledge, are in reality a continual negotiation between readers. But Derek Attridge and Henry Staten agree to rein in their own interpretive ingenuity and "minimally interp…
Bringing together a vivid array of analog and non-traditional sources, including colonial archives, newspaper reports, literature, oral histories, and interviews, Buried in the Red Dirt tells a story of life, death, reproduction and missing bodies and experiences during and since the British colonial period in Palestine. Using transnational feminist reading practices of existing and new archive…
This open access book uses Finland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an empirical case in order to study the emergence, shaping and renewal of a nation through histories of experience and emotions. It revolves around the following questions: What kinds of experiences have engendered national mobilization and feelings of national belonging? How have political and societal conflicts tu…