History

Pëtr F. Iakubovich was born in Novgorod Province to a noble family in 1860, during a period of upheaval in Russia called the Great Reforms. In 1884, he was arrested and convicted as a member of the terrorist organization the People’s Will. Iakubovich spent five years at a Siberian penal labor prison, followed by several more as a forced settler in Tobolsk Province. He began writing about his experiences while still in prison. The book he eventually produced is a quasi-fictionalized memoir loosely modeled on Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from a Dead House.”

Iakubovich represents himself through his protagonist Ivan Nikolaevich. For most of Volume One, Ivan Nikolaevich must deal, as an imprisoned nobleman, with a population largely comprised of violent criminals. As commoners, these are people with whom he barely interacted in his earlier life, but he is now living cheek-by-jowl with them. His conflicts and faux pas with Buzzy, Goncharov, the cousins Burenkov et al. are by turns comic and dreadful. Ivan Nikolaevich nevertheless manages to befriend several and to learn their life stories. Iakubovich uses these character vignettes to cast light on Imperial Russia’s underclass. Though his circumstances do not afford the privileges he previously enjoyed, Ivan Nikolaevich does enjoy unusual access to the lonely and jaded prison commandant, Luchezarov—better known to prisoners as “Six-Eyes.” But despite his verbal jousts with Luchezarov, Ivan Nikolaevich finds himself contemplating suicide.

Volume Two begins with the arrival at the prison of two fellow revolutionaries—Dmitrii Shteinhart and Valerian Bashurov. Ivan Nikolaevich is overjoyed to find himself with like-minded compatriots, and the three self-styled reformers take it upon themselves to undermine Luchezarov’s increasingly despotic management and to improve conditions for all the prisoners. Several conflicts emerge, and Iakubovich uses these to both parody and indict the penal justice system and Russian bureaucracy. Finally, Luchezarov is forced from office and the prison regime he installed is condemned by a superior. Soon after, Ivan Nikolaevich leaves prison for forced settlement. This much briefer section of the work concerns his difficulty in readjusting to life outside prison and his joy at being joined by his sister (in real life, she was Iakubovich’s fiancée). The book ends with a melancholy reflection on the human destruction wrought by the tsarist penal system.

This study examines America's Middle East area specialists and their experience over three critical decades of foreign policy, aiming to understand how they were trained, what they learned, what was their foreign policy perspective, as well as to evaluate their influence.  The book examines the post-1946 group and their role in the formulation and implementation of Middle East policy, and how this has shaped events in the relationship between American and the Middle East.

The book examines the worldview of these modern “Arabists” or Middle East hands.  It also examines their interactions with the peoples of the region and with American presidents through a series of case studies spanning the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations. Case studies shed light on Washington’s perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. The Middle East Area Program (MEAP) was established at Beirut to train US Foreign Service Officers to communicate in Arabic and to understand the region and all its peoples.  Middle East hands replaced the old East Coast elite who had staffed the interwar Near East Bureau. The program promised rapid advancement, but required them to invest two years at the American University of Beirut in order to immerse themselves in language training and area studies.

Over three decades, the program recruited, selected and trained a corps of approximately fifty-three diplomats, who were a much more diverse, middle-class group than their predecessors. They were ambitious careerists who sought the fast track to the top, ultimately serving throughout the Arab world and in Israel, staffing the State Department’s area desks and advising presidents. Many were skilled political reporting officers; and almost all of them became ambassadors as America expanded its presence in the region during the period of waning British influence. The program transformed the core of the State Department staff, replacing the old network of Orientalists with this small corps of highly-trained professionals. Ultimately, despite their expertise and a realistic view of American interests, their advice was often overridden by external political concerns.

‘Iron Lazar’ is the first English-language biography of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalinist Russia’s leading deputies. With its focus on the political and personal relations of the Stalin group, this groundbreaking text offers a previously inaccessible insight into Kaganovich’s role in shaping policy during the Stalinist era.

The study begins by examining Kaganovich’s early political career and his ascent to power – a feat achieved via a distinguished role in the Civil War, which led to his elevation into the party Secretariat in Moscow. By 1930 he, Stalin and Molotov effectively constituted Russia’s ruling triumvirate, and for a period Kaganovich appeared to be the heir apparent to the Soviet Union. He played a crucial role in enforcing agricultural collectivization, in the reconstruction of Moscow, in railway and industrial administration and in carrying out the Great Terror. A very close associate of Stalin, and a major figure in promoting his cult of celebrity and establishing his dictatorship, Kaganovich subsequently fell out of favour.

Rees’s work strives to examine the personal and political dynamics shaping the Stalinist system. He notes that Kaganovich was a colourful figure – an orator as well as a forceful administrator – and that he was the most prominent Jewish figure in Soviet political life in this era. This unique biography charts the way in which these personal characteristics contributed to the development of the Stalinist system throughout Kaganovich’s career, how he was himself transformed by this experience, and the way in which he subsequently sought to rationalize his role.

'Colonial Childhoods' is about the politics of childhood in India between the 1860s and the 1930s. It examines not only the redefinition of the 'child' in the cultural and intellectual climate of colonialism, but also the uses of the child, the parent and the family in colonizing and nationalizing projects. It investigates also the complications of transporting metropolitan discourses of childhood, adulthood and expertise across the lines of race. Focused on reformatories and laws for juvenile delinquents, and boarding schools for aristocratic children, it illuminates a vital area of conflict and accommodation in a colonial society.

In 1887, following several years’ imprisonment for his role in the People’s Will terrorist group, Ivan P. Iuvachëv was exiled with other political prisoners to the notorious Sakhalin penal colony. The penal colony emerged during the late 1860s and 1870s and collapsed in 1905, under the weight of Japan’s invasion of Sakhalin. The eight years between 1887 and 1895 that Iuvachëv spent on the island were some of the most tumultuous in the penal colony’s existence. Originally published in 1901, his memoir offers a first-hand account of this netherworld that embodied the extremities of tsarist Russian penality. A valuable historical document as well as a work of literature testifying to one man’s ability to retain his humanity amid a sea of human degradation, this annotated translation marks the first time Iuvachëv’s memoir has appeared in any language besides Russian.

Iuvachëv describes both colorfully and with journalistic objectivity fellow political prisoners as well as criminal exiles, corrupt prison wardens, well-intentioned administrators, and island aboriginals. As such, he is able to bring to life the many characters whose fate it was to live on Sakhalin, where, he writes, “This Sakhalin kaleidoscope is so complex in consistency it will hang before my eyes my entire life.” A man of many talents, Iuvachëv was employed by the island administration as a surveyor, navigator, hydrologist, meteorologist, engineer, choir director, and interior designer. He describes all these employs in detail and with humility. Dispatched as well on expeditions through the Tatar Strait and the Sea of Japan, he saw much of the region, and his observant eye and knowledge of nature allows him to paint wonderful portraits of the region’s flora, fauna, and natural wonders.

This book captures Iuvachëv’s wit, style, and sense of wonder, and has an introductory essay, explanatory notes, and a brief biography. The result is a comprehensive work that will prove especially useful to students of Russian and European history and literature, but that should also interest any reader desiring an inspiring story of one man’s survival against the odds. 

'Colonial Childhoods' is about the politics of childhood in India between the 1860s and the 1930s. It examines not only the redefinition of the 'child' in the cultural and intellectual climate of colonialism, but also the uses of the child, the parent and the family in colonizing and nationalizing projects. It investigates also the complications of transporting metropolitan discourses of childhood, adulthood and expertise across the lines of race. Focused on reformatories and laws for juvenile delinquents, and boarding schools for aristocratic children, it illuminates a vital area of conflict and accommodation in a colonial society.

Pëtr F. Iakubovich was born in Novgorod Province to a noble family in 1860, during a period of upheaval in Russia called the Great Reforms. In 1884, he was arrested and convicted as a member of the terrorist organization the People’s Will. Iakubovich spent five years at a Siberian penal labor prison, followed by several more as a forced settler in Tobolsk Province. He began writing about his experiences while still in prison. The book he eventually produced is a quasi-fictionalized memoir loosely modeled on Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from a Dead House.”

Iakubovich represents himself through his protagonist Ivan Nikolaevich. For most of Volume One, Ivan Nikolaevich must deal, as an imprisoned nobleman, with a population largely comprised of violent criminals. As commoners, these are people with whom he barely interacted in his earlier life, but he is now living cheek-by-jowl with them. His conflicts and faux pas with Buzzy, Goncharov, the cousins Burenkov et al. are by turns comic and dreadful. Ivan Nikolaevich nevertheless manages to befriend several and to learn their life stories. Iakubovich uses these character vignettes to cast light on Imperial Russia’s underclass. Though his circumstances do not afford the privileges he previously enjoyed, Ivan Nikolaevich does enjoy unusual access to the lonely and jaded prison commandant, Luchezarov—better known to prisoners as “Six-Eyes.” But despite his verbal jousts with Luchezarov, Ivan Nikolaevich finds himself contemplating suicide.

Volume Two begins with the arrival at the prison of two fellow revolutionaries—Dmitrii Shteinhart and Valerian Bashurov. Ivan Nikolaevich is overjoyed to find himself with like-minded compatriots, and the three self-styled reformers take it upon themselves to undermine Luchezarov’s increasingly despotic management and to improve conditions for all the prisoners. Several conflicts emerge, and Iakubovich uses these to both parody and indict the penal justice system and Russian bureaucracy. Finally, Luchezarov is forced from office and the prison regime he installed is condemned by a superior. Soon after, Ivan Nikolaevich leaves prison for forced settlement. This much briefer section of the work concerns his difficulty in readjusting to life outside prison and his joy at being joined by his sister (in real life, she was Iakubovich’s fiancée). The book ends with a melancholy reflection on the human destruction wrought by the tsarist penal system. 

In a time when mass joblessness and precarious employment are becoming issues of national concern, it is useful to reconsider the experiences of the unemployed in an earlier period of economic hardship, the Great Depression. How did they survive, and how did they fight against inhumane government policies? Americans are often thought to be a very conservative and individualistic people, but the collective struggles of the supposedly “meek” and “atomized” unemployed in the 1930s belie that stereotype. 

Focusing on the bellwether city of Chicago, this book reevaluates those struggles, revealing the kernel of political radicalism and class resistance in practices that are usually thought of as apolitical and un-ideological. From communal sharing to “eviction riots,” from Unemployed Councils to the nationwide movement behind the remarkable Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill, millions of people fought to end the reign of capitalist values and usher in a new, more socialistic society. While they failed in their maximal goal of abolishing economic insecurity and the disproportionate power of the rich, they did wrest an incipient welfare state from the ruling class. Today, their legacy is their resilience, their resourcefulness, and their proof that the unemployed can organize themselves to renew the struggle for a more just world.

This collection of eleven essays deals with Lenin’s life in western European emigration in the years before the First World War. The first five essays explore Lenin’s efforts to build a purely Bolshevik Party through the creation of a unique school for underground workers outside of Paris, his schismatic machinations in calling the 1912 Prague Conference, his problematic relations with the new Bolshevik daily ‘Pravda’, his unsuccessful attempt to call a party congress in 1914, and his defeat at the Brussels ‘Unity’ Conference summoned by the International Socialist Bureau on the eve of the war. These essays are based on a detailed reading of Western and Soviet sources, and they question the common assumption that Lenin was unquestioned inside his own faction and that pre-war Bolshevism was a monolithic entity well-prepared to seize power.

The latter essays discuss Lenin’s curious friendship during the pre-war period with Roman Malinovsky, who turned out to be a police spy, and Inessa Armand, a Bolshevik feminist with whom he had a romantic relationship. They also investigate such mundane but little-studied topics as what he liked to eat in emigration, his annual habit of taking bourgeois vacations and his obsession with athletic pursuits. The picture which emerges from these studies is not of a single-minded, perfect leader solely devoted to carrying out revolution, but rather of a ‘non-geometric’ Lenin with very human foibles and weaknesses.

‘Adult Reactions to Popular Music and Inter-generational Relations in Britain, 1955–1975’ challenges the often unquestioned assumption that ‘the older generation’ largely reacted in a negative or hostile fashion to forms of music popular with young people in Britain from the 1950s to the mid-1970s (including rock ’n’ roll, skiffle, ‘beat’ and rock music), and that the music invariably exacerbated inter-generational tensions. Utilizing extensive primary evidence, from first-person accounts to newspapers, television programmes, surveys and archive collections, the book demonstrates the considerable variety which frequently characterized adult responses to the music, whilst also highlighting that the impact of the music on inter-generational relations was more complex than is often assumed. There has been a growing recognition among scholars of the need to reassess the alleged ‘generation gap’ of this era, but this theme has yet to be examined in depth via the prism of popular music. [NP] The book is also distinctive in the thematic approach it adopts. Rather than attempting a chronological survey, it identifies three key arenas of British society in which adult responses to popular music, and the impact of such reactions upon relations between generations, seem particularly revealing and significant, and explores them in considerable depth. The first chapter examines the place of popular music within family life, the second focuses on the Christian churches and their engagement with popular music, particularly within youth clubs, and the third explores ‘encounters’ between the worlds of traditional Variety entertainment and popular music. The work offers detailed appraisals of each of these areas, while also providing fresh perspectives on this most dynamic and turbulent of periods.

While each chapter possesses a certain cohesion in its own right, illuminating and adding fresh perspectives on key topics within post-war British history, certain key ideas reappear throughout the work. The nature and significance of ‘everyday’ multi-generational consumption of popular music constitutes one such theme, as does the manner in which the highly varied, and ever-evolving, character of ‘pop’ in this era frequently, and in various ways, rendered it more accessible to older people and more capable of traversing generational boundaries. The final unifying theme concerns the distinctive way in which ‘old’ and ‘new’ cultural forces continued to interact in the lives of young and old during this transitional era.

This study examines America's Middle East area specialists and their experience over three critical decades of foreign policy, aiming to understand how they were trained, what they learned, what was their foreign policy perspective, as well as to evaluate their influence.  The book examines the post-1946 group and their role in the formulation and implementation of Middle East policy, and how this has shaped events in the relationship between American and the Middle East.

The book examines the worldview of these modern “Arabists” or Middle East hands.  It also examines their interactions with the peoples of the region and with American presidents through a series of case studies spanning the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations. Case studies shed light on Washington’s perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. The Middle East Area Program (MEAP) was established at Beirut to train US Foreign Service Officers to communicate in Arabic and to understand the region and all its peoples.  Middle East hands replaced the old East Coast elite who had staffed the interwar Near East Bureau. The program promised rapid advancement, but required them to invest two years at the American University of Beirut in order to immerse themselves in language training and area studies.

Over three decades, the program recruited, selected and trained a corps of approximately fifty-three diplomats, who were a much more diverse, middle-class group than their predecessors. They were ambitious careerists who sought the fast track to the top, ultimately serving throughout the Arab world and in Israel, staffing the State Department’s area desks and advising presidents. Many were skilled political reporting officers; and almost all of them became ambassadors as America expanded its presence in the region during the period of waning British influence. The program transformed the core of the State Department staff, replacing the old network of Orientalists with this small corps of highly-trained professionals. Ultimately, despite their expertise and a realistic view of American interests, their advice was often overridden by external political concerns.

The diverse essays in this book reflect Jonathan Steinberg’s methodological pluralism and insatiable curiosity for historical questions which cross disciplinary and geographical boundaries. Animating students, colleagues, friends and wider audiences with his enthusiasm for ‘thinking about the past’ was his vocation, one that he pursued with unmatched enthusiasm. Through this collection of essays, the book hopes to convey something of the intellectual range, analytical purchase and moral purpose of his historical writing and teaching.

One feature of Steinberg’s inspiring and charismatic lectures was his unique ability to combine an analysis – always fresh, never pre-cooked – of big historical structures and trends with an acute awareness of the importance of individual personalities. Jonathan Steinberg also believed in contingency, the importance of chance, and was keen to reject any form of historical determinism. The third salient feature of his work was his sense of moral purpose. He understood history as a hermeneutic science and was appropriately cautious about the epistemological status of historical claims, but he nevertheless saw the correctness of historical arguments and the probity of historical claims to be moral as well as empirical questions. His ethical sensibilities, his openness to interdisciplinary work and the humane and nuanced understanding of human motivation equipped him to tackle some of the most difficult subjects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history.

Eight American military veterans of the Vietnam/Cold War era describe their service and its influence on their lives since leaving active service in this book. Their stories are preceded by a concise history of America's methods of raising its military forces from colonial days to today. Particular focus is given to the 34 years in which the nation relied on the possibility of mandatory service (the draft, Selective Service) from young men. Drafted service was essential to America's role in World War I, World War II, the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Special emphasis is given to Congressional acceptance of drafted service in World War I which shaped the remaining uses of the draft until 1973.

The largest part of the book provides the author's recollections of their service in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard in the United States and overseas. Their service was compelled or stimulated by the presence of the draft. Their military service then shaped the next half-century of their working lives.

The final section of the book provides the author’s collective recollections of their military service as seen from the third decade of the 21st century and half a century after the end of the military draft. They reflect on the challenges faced by the current American military and the possibilities of a return to some form of drafted military service.

Thomas Pennant of Downing, Flintshire (1726–1798), naturalist, antiquarian and self-styled ‘Curious Traveller’, published accounts of his pioneering travels in Scotland and Wales to wide acclaim between 1769 and 1784, directly inspiring Dr Johnson, James Boswell and hundreds of subsequent tourists. A keen observer and cataloguer of plants, birds, minerals and animals, Pennant corresponded with a trans-continental network of natural scientists (Linnaeus, Simon Pallas, Joseph Banks, Gilbert White), and was similarly well-connected with leading British antiquarians (William Borlase, Francis Grose, Richard Gough). Frequently cited as witness or authority across a wide range of disciplines, Pennant’s texts have seldom been themselves the focus of critical attention. There is as yet no biography of Pennant, nor any edition of his prolific correspondence with many of the leading minds of the European Enlightenment.

The ‘Tours’ were widely read and much imitated. As annotated copies reveal, readers were far from passive in their responses to the text, and ‘local knowledge’ would occasionally be summoned to challenge or correct them. But Pennant indisputably helped bring about a richer, more complex understanding of the multiple histories and cultures of Britain at a time when ‘Britishness’ was itself a fragile and developing concept. Because the ‘Tours’ drew on a vast network of informants (often incorporating material wholesale), they are, as texts, fascinatingly multi-voiced: many of the period’s political tensions run through them.

This volume of eleven essays seeks to address the comparative neglect of Pennant’s travel writing by bringing together researchers from literary criticism, art history, Celtic studies, archaeology and natural history. Attentive to the visual as well as textual aspects of his topographical enquiries, it demonstrates how much there is to be said about the cross-currents (some pulling in quite contrary directions) in Pennant’s work. In so doing they rehabilitate a neglected aspect of the Enlightenment in relation to questions of British identity, offering a new assessment of an important chapter in the development of domestic travel writing.

Edited and with an introduction by Professor Habib, 'Confronting Colonialism' is a series of essays commemorating the second centenary of Tipu's final battle against the British at Sriranagapatnam in 1799. The essays, devoted to the history of Mysore under Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, underscore the need to defend the memory of two rulers, who were indomitable opponents of the colonial regime; they also emphasize the centrality of Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan in Indian nationalist historiography. This collection is of particular importance, especially in light of the recent tendency to devalue the significance of the two rulers.

The book looks at the turn of the century, when organized soccer began to be played in a systematic way by the European community of Rio and São Paulo, mostly by the British. It shows that the new sport was embraced by these people as a way to celebrate their culture, and to imitate the activities of the elite schools in Britain that became quite popular throughout Europe. Young Brazilians from the elite also embraced the sport as a way of sharing a popular European sport that was identified with what was respected as a white/upper class activity. In this way making a distinction from the lower and darker populations. Making this distinction was important in this moment of post-emancipation, affirming the superiority of the upper/white class. It was also important for the European residents of Brazil in order to distinguish themselves from Brazilians (colonial mentality). Football was one aspect of the modernity that these two cities were craving to achieve.

The book highlights the impact of European-based racial assumptions on the development of professional soccer. It provides a broad discussion on how the official discourse after 1930 was one of conciliation, claiming that Brazil was not European, but unique due to its racial mixing. This idea began to be promoted by artists and intellectuals as an attempt to Brazilianize the country, but it was soon embraced by politicians with the leadership of President Getulio Vargas in an attempt to create a unified national identity. In this context, futebol was also unique in relation to European football because of its mulatoism. Although this new attitude would influence social and racial barriers within football to fall, racism did not end, nor did Brazil become a racial democracy – as it has been claimed by many. 

Brazil and Transnational Human Rights Movement, 1964–1985 explores how solidarity for Brazil contributed to the global human rights movement of the 1970s. Through protests, petitions, posters, and numerous other cultural, artistic, and media-based campaigns, solidarity for Brazil popularised the language of human rights and prompted the international community to join the fight against the country’s military regime. But solidarity for Brazil also reframed the debate on human rights itself, stretching the concept beyond mainstream interpretations that emphasised the violation of ‘basic’ individual rights, such as the use of torture and political imprisonment, to also incorporate social and economic rights, inequality, indigenous minorities, and the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies and development projects. Crucial to this process were multiple networks of exiles, catholic activists, journalists, and academics between Brazil and Western Europe, who drew from the Latin American experience to challenge mainstream narratives of human rights from below.

This book reviews changes in attitudes to immigrants in Britain and the language that was used to put these feelings into words between 1841 and 1921. Using a historical and linguistic method for an analysis of so far for this purpose relatively unused primary sources, this book offers novel findings. It has found that changes in the meaning and use of the word ‘alien’ in Britain coincided during the period between 1841 and 1921 with the expression of changing attitudes to immigrants in this country and the modification of the British variant of the English language. When people in Britain in these years used the term ‘an alien’, they meant, most likely, a foreigner, stranger, refugee or immigrant. In 1841 an alien denoted a foreigner or a stranger, notably a person residing or working in a country who did not have the nationality or citizenship of that country. However, by 1921 an alien mainly signified an immigrant in Britain – a term, which as this book shows, had in the course of the years since 1841 acquired very negative connotations.

This book concludes that by 1921, in contemporary minds the word alien aroused utter hostility. Alien had first become a byname for immigrants, and then it was turned into a term of abuse, a badge of dishonour and a mark of danger – a comprehensively negative label that could be attached at will or unconsciously at any time to any group of immigrants.

This brilliant, vivid and impressionistic series of sketches, formed during her 1892 stay in Persia, is Gertrude Bell's first published work. Infused with a distinctive orientalism, 'Persian Pictures' is an evocative, virtuosic meditation, moving sinuously between Persia's heroic, complex, mythical past and its present decline; the public face of Tehran and the otherworldly 'secret, mysterious life of the East', the lives of its women, its enclosed, quasi-medieval gardens; from the bustling cities to the lonely wastelands of Khorasan. Bell's documentation of Muharram – the month of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed – and Ramadan, display a mind finely attuned to the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity, East and West. 'Persian Pictures' is both travelogue and meditation, an elegiac and beautifully observed account of a spellbinding land.

This fascinating book, based on extensive archival research in Britain and India, examines why mutineer-rebels chose to attack prisons and release prisoners, discusses the impact of the destruction of the jails on British penal policy in mainland India, considers the relationship between India and its penal settlements in Southeast Asia, re-examines Britain’s decision to settle the Andaman Islands as a penal colony in 1858, and re-evaluates the experiences of mutineer-rebel convicts there. As such this book makes an important contribution to histories of the mutiny-rebellion, British colonial South Asia, British expansion in the Indian Ocean and incarceration and transportation. Coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the mutiny-rebellion, this book will be of interest to academics and students researching the history of colonial India, the history of empire and expansion and the history of imprisonment and incarceration.

Early modern European monarchies legitimized their rule through dynasty and religion, and ideally the divine right of the ruler corresponded with the confession of the territory. It has thus been assumed that at princely courts only a single confession was present. However, the reality of the confessional circumstances at court commonly involved more than one faith. Religious Plurality at Princely Courts explores the reverberations of biconfessional or multiconfessional intra-Christian situations at courts on dynastic, symbolic, diplomatic, artistic, and theological levels, exploring interreligious dialogue, religious change, and confessional blending. Incorporating perspectives across European studies such as domestic and international politics, dynastic strategies, the history of ideas, women’s and gender history, as well as visual and material culture, the contributions to this volume highlight the dynamics and implications of religious plurality at court.

This book constructs an anthropological history of a subaltern religious formation, Mahima Dharma of Orissa, a large province in eastern India. Tracking the contingent making of a critical community over a hundred and forty year period, Religion, Law and Power explores the interplay of distinct expressions of time and history, innovative reformulations of caste and Hinduism and distinct engagements with state and nation. This serves to unravel the wider entanglements of religion, history, law, modernity and power. Ishita Banerjee-Dube provides a situated and critical analysis of the different trajectories of Mahima Dharma, bringing to the fore a clutch of empirical and theoretical issues. Understandings of the articulation and institutionalization of a subaltern religious order are not marked off from, but reveal the techniques and textures of, the modern state and dominant Hinduism. Such moves foreground subaltern and ascetic expressions and negotiations of modernity in institutional and everyday arenas, and further question widespread propositions of a singular Hinduism, especially in India today. ‘Religion, Law and Power’ should be of interest to historians, anthropologists and religious studies scholars as well as general readers interested in religion, politics, community and state. It will be of particular interest to students of South Asia concerned with Hinduism and religious sects, history and law, and power and resistance.

British Battles 493–937 is about war. Specifically, it offers solutions to the locations and other problems of battles in Britain between the invasions of the Anglo-Saxons and the age of the Vikings. It locates the victory of Mount Badon in 493 of the Britons over the West Saxons at Braydon, Wiltshire; the battles of the British hero Arthur (of the ‘King Arthur’ legend) in southern Scotland and the borders, with his death in 537 at ‘Camlan’ or Castlesteads, near Carlisle; ‘Degsastan’, the Northumbrian massacre of an allied Scots-Irish army in 603, at Dawyck on the Upper Tweed, Scotland, where a standing stone at Drumelzier is the Stan of the conflict’s ancient name; Maserfelth in 642, where King Oswald of Northumbria was killed and his head and arms nailed up as trophies, will be at Forden (near Welshpool), on the old Roman road into Wales; and Brunanburh of 937, where Athelstan crushed the forces of united Viking-Scots-Strathclyde invaders, at Lanchester in County Durham, above the Brune or River Browney.

The implications of the book are threefold. First, it will mean the rewriting of much early British and Anglo-Saxon history; knowing where battles took place means that we shall understand better the war-aims of those who won or lost them. The second is a benefit for battle archaeologists. They need not waste time seeking swords and spears at traditional locations for these battles, like Badbury in Wiltshire for 493 or Oswestry in Shropshire for 642 or Bromborough in Cheshire for 937 because they would be digging in the wrong place. The third is the indication of a method, as follows.

An analysis of early place-names in Old English or Middle Welsh or other languages lets us pin-point ancient battlefields. It allows us to show that the ‘Legionum Urbs’ of the Roman martyrs Julius and Aaron was surely not Caerleon in South Wales (as often said), but Legorum Urbs or Leicester, which is hence the scene of Britain's earliest Christian martyrdoms. Similarly, the birthplace of St. Patrick can be proved (following suggestions by others) as Bannaventa Tabernae or Banwell, Avon. St. Patrick will have been a Somerset man, brought up on a Roman villa near a low-lying coast open to the Irish pirates who enslaved him. British Battles 493–937 thus indicates techniques whereby future researchers may solve historical problems in Britain and beyond.

This fascinating book, based on extensive archival research in Britain and India, examines why mutineer-rebels chose to attack prisons and release prisoners, discusses the impact of the destruction of the jails on British penal policy in mainland India, considers the relationship between India and its penal settlements in Southeast Asia, re-examines Britain’s decision to settle the Andaman Islands as a penal colony in 1858, and re-evaluates the experiences of mutineer-rebel convicts there. As such this book makes an important contribution to histories of the mutiny-rebellion, British colonial South Asia, British expansion in the Indian Ocean and incarceration and transportation. Coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the mutiny-rebellion, this book will be of interest to academics and students researching the history of colonial India, the history of empire and expansion and the history of imprisonment and incarceration.

Unlike many partisan accounts of the nineteen sixties this book aims to give a considered explanation of the context in which the sixties radical movements arose and, also, their significance from the standpoint of various nations' actors, often ignored by North American and West European standpoints. Secondly, it examines how the radical decade sowed the seeds of various liberation or 'rights movements' – initially in the West but also globally as movements became increasingly diffused. Contributors' varied international backgrounds and specialities provide expertise in examining the international context. Thirdly, many nineteen sixties' radicals' values and strategies recur in contemporary social movements; albeit in different technological and, post 9/11, political and cultural environments. Unravelling similarities and differences is a key theme. Fourthly, many participants in sixties radicalism saw it as 'cultural' as well as 'political' and in some historical treatments as primarily or 'only' cultural. Detailed examinations of this perspective involve critical discussion – particularly in the light of the allegedly 'mere' (i.e. apolitical) cultural hedonism and escapism of youth in the nineteen eighties and nineties. Contrarily, the contributions here assess resonances between the radical/libertarian emphasis on civil society 'freedoms' in sixties' cultural radicalism and, arguably, today’s more self-consciously political global human rights movement. The conclusion suggests that, in some senses, the sixties live on today in discursive and political themes.

Transnational Coupling in the Age of Nation Making during the 19th and 20th Centuries deals with courtships and marriages that transcended national, cultural and linguistic boundaries. It deals with the formation of transnational families and transnational spaces. And, finally, because the historical concept of transnational marriage provides a unique prism through which to view the interconnectedness of societies at their most intimate cultural intersections, it deals with the longstanding, complex cultural relations between France and the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries.

In an effort to address not only why Franco-American marriages occurred but also how and why the dynamics that produced them changed over time, this work examines and compares two transnational marriage patterns in different historical contexts: the first, when wealthy American heiresses married French aristocrats during the second half of the 19th century—a period marked by relatively free transatlantic circulation and mobility—and the second, when borders were far more solidified—during the world wars when French women entered into matrimonial contracts with American soldiers.

The purpose of this work is twofold. In an effort to provide new categories of analysis that place the human experience into broader, more global perspectives, the first is to show how concepts of transnational marriage and courtship allow the historian to move further beyond the analytical frameworks of national histories by forcing the researcher to reconsider the ways in which one thinks about family formation and the permeability of national borders during these different stages of the national project. The second is to challenge underlying assumptions in existing historiographical explanations that those who crossed national borders to couple or to marry did so for purely socio-economic reasons. Nicole Leopoldie contends that such rationalizations are simply too narrow and that at the intersection of cross-cultural encounter and transnational coupling stood a profoundly emotional experience. Therefore, greater analytical considerations need to include both cultural and emotional motivations that were always in the background.

Because the social practices of courtship and marriage became mechanisms through which borders were crossed and new cultural spaces were created, they represent important elements of transnational entanglements. Therefore, rather than examining marriage motivation from the perspective of one society or another, this work seeks to examine instead the ways in which patterns of transnational marriage emerged out of social spaces of cross-cultural encounter between the two societies. In order to identify, map and analyze the transnational spaces that produced marriage during the 19th and 20th centuries, this work draws on descriptions of social events found in the French and American press, travel literature, personal accounts and guest lists. By examining where and how couples met and courted one another, these sources provide an important glimpse into not only transnational social networks and cultural rituals but also the ways in which marriage participants perceived, experienced and interpreted these spaces. In this spatial examination, emotions are employed as a category of analysis rather than a narrative device in order to show how complex cultural meanings within transnational spaces were experienced on personal levels among transnational-marriage participants. Because a variety of emotions manifested in both encounter and representations of the “other,” Leopoldie proposes that othering be further considered as not simply a cultural process, but an emotional one. By drawing on French and American literary works, travel literature and personal accounts found in unpublished and published memoirs, letters and interviews collected by contemporary journalists and oral historians, she argues that even though marriage participants from each of the two patterns conceived of the national and cultural boundaries that separated them in very different ways, attraction to notions of difference provoked important emotional responses and largely remained the driving force of marriage and coupling processes in both historical contexts. By participating in a transnational marriage, participants bound themselves not only to their spouse but also to the culture of that spouse. Motivations for transnational marriage were, therefore, still strategic but were largely based on preconceived notions of what they believed the other culture to be.

‘The United States, the Soviet Union and the Geopolitical Implications of the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1949’ postulates that the geopolitical interests and needs of the superpowers led to the configuration of the post-war international order. Taking a long-term approach to the evolution of the system of states, it describes how the United States and the Soviet Union deployed their hard and soft power resources to create the basis for the institutionalization of the international order in the aftermath of World War Two. The main idea advanced by this book is that the origins of the Cold War should not be seen from the perspective of a magnified spectrum of conflict but should be regarded as a process by which the superpowers attempted to forge a normative framework capable of sustaining their geopolitical needs and interests in the post-war scenario. This book examines how the use of ideology and the instrument of political intervention in the spheres of influence managed by the superpowers was conducive to the establishment of a stable international order.

‘The United States, the Soviet Union and the Geopolitical Implications of the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1949’ postulates that the element of conflict present in the early period of the Cold War served to demarcate the scope of manoeuvring available to each of the superpowers. This state of affairs denotes the existence of diverging geopolitical interests, acknowledged through the presence of well-demarcated spheres of influence. The book examines the notion that the United States and the Soviet Union were primarily interested in establishing the conditions for accomplishing their vital geostrategic interests, which required the implementation of social norms imposed in the respective spheres of influence, a factor that provided certainty to the spectrum of interstate relations after the period of turmoil that culminated in the outbreak of World War Two. Drawing on the example of the friction that affected Soviet-American relations at the end of World War Two, this book examines the circumstances that give rise to the construction of sound international orders and the functional values that sustain their existence.

‘The United States, the Soviet Union and the Geopolitical Implications of the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1949’ starts by examining the manner in which great power management has served as an instrument of the process of re-institutionalization, with special emphasis on the geopolitical elements that underpinned the intervention of the superpowers in their spheres of influence and how this state of affairs impacted on the stability of the system of states that emerged after World War Two ended. The book also examines the implications of the process of de-institutionalization that took place in the system of states since the emergence of a unified Germany and how it led to the disruption of interstate relations in the European political order. The settlement of the German Question provided the wartime allies with an opportunity to deal with the problems that stemmed from the process of de-institutionalization of the international order that the United States facilitated through the enforcement of its vital geopolitical interests in Western Europe. Emphasizing the central role of ideology in the deployment of American geopolitical power in the aftermath of World War Two the book examines the way in which the Soviet Union contributed to institutionalizing the international order by establishing the parameters of intervention that would regulate interstate relations. There will also be an emphasis on the role of ideology in the formulation of the Soviet foreign policy in the post-war era. The book also examines the special geopolitical culture of Russia and the concept of Eurasianism as the reasons behind the establishment of the spheres of influence system that operated during the Cold War. This book discusses how the process of institutionalization that took place following World War Two can teach us about the configuration of the geopolitical mechanisms needed for reconfiguring international and regional orders after a period of military conflict.

‘Holland House and Portugal’, a study in political and diplomatic history, focuses on the relations between Lord Holland and Portugal from 1793 to 1840. The book traces the evolution of Holland’s views on Portugal from the time of his first visit to Spain to his later contribution to the establishment of a constitutional regime in Portugal. It pays particular attention to the Hollands’ visits to Portugal in 1804–5 and 1808–9. On their travels, they met a number of prominent Portuguese, notably Palmela, who were to remain in contact with Holland House for many years. The Portuguese journeys and the continuing contact with people like Palmela were to play an important part in the development of Lord Holland’s views, not only on Portugal but also on broader political and constitutional issues.

Thus ‘Holland House and Portugal’ investigates Lord Holland’s influence on the establishment of a constitutional regime in Spain in 1809–10 and – indirectly and unintentionally – in Portugal in 1820–23. It includes a study of Holland’s contribution to the creation of a government in Brazil in 1808 – when the Braganças moved from Portugal to Rio de Janeiro – and his indirect influence on the establishment of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves in 1815.

Lord Holland’s contribution to the establishment of a Liberal regime in Portugal in 1834 is examined at some length in ‘Holland House and Portugal’. The book includes a study of the extent of Holland’s support for the Portuguese Liberal Cause after Dom Miguel’s usurpation of the throne in 1828 and of his subsequent role in the ‘Liberal invasion’ of Portugal. To this end it investigates relations between Portuguese émigrés and the Holland House Circle, and Holland’s role in the triangular diplomacy between Lisbon, St James and South Audley Street in 1828 and later. Finally, it considers Holland’s contribution to the end of the Portuguese Civil War in 1834 and to the subsequent establishment of a constitutional regime in that country.

In this fully updated second edition of 'A History of Russia' Vol. II, Walter G. Moss has significantly revised his text and bibliography to reflect new research findings and controversies on numerous subjects. He has also brought the history up-to-date by revising the post-Soviet material, which now covers events from the end of 1991 up to the present day. This new edition retains the features of the successful first edition that have made it a popular choice in universities and colleges throughout the US, Canada and around the world. Moss’s accessible history includes full treatments of politics, economics, foreign affairs and wars, and also of everyday life, women, legal developments, religion, literature, art and popular culture. In addition, it provides many other features that have proven successful with both academics and students, including a well-organized and clearly written text, references to varying historical viewpoints, numerous illustrations and maps that supplement and amplify the text, fully updated bibliographies accompanying each chapter as well as a general bibliography of more comprehensive works, a glossary and a chronology of important events. Moss's 'A History of Russia' will appeal to academics, students and general readers alike.

‘Planting the Seeds of Research’ explores why by the beginnings of the twentieth century the United States dominated agricultural production worldwide. The thesis is that the ultimate investments made by the United States Department of Agriculture and State governments created the research structure that made American agriculture spectacularly successful. The social commitment, by business, government and farmers built the productive capabilities that generated sustainable prosperity in American agriculture. The ultimate investment in agriculture enabled Americans over time to spend less of their disposable income on food and more on other goods and services, and compete in international agricultural markets.

China preoccupies us; yet its recent past is still relatively unfamiliar. No country has undergone a greater period of sustained and turbulent change than China in the twentieth century, but it has emerged again as a leading global power. It is, therefore, more important than ever to understand the society it has become and its rise to such influence. This timely study uses recent research to explore how China has been transformed from an economic and political backwater at the start of the twentieth century to its current pre-eminent position one hundred years later.

During this convulsive period, China experienced a multitude of political systems: from the final years of the Qing dynasty, it entered a democratic phase in the 1920s when central government was weak and local warlords ruled supreme. As the Nationalist Government struggled to maintain control in the 1930s, the country was subject to invasion and partial occupation by Japan. At the end of the Second World War, the country was again torn apart in a struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists under Mao Zedong. Finally, a new People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, but early social and economic advances were thrown away as Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution. These experiments brought the country to the brink of ruin. It was not until the death of Mao in 1976 and the subsequent reforms of Deng Xiaoping that the emphasis finally turned to practical change and the revival of the economy. Uniquely, subsequent success has been achieved through the adoption of capitalist enterprise in a one-party communist state – a fusion which has defied Western scepticism.

This study tackles all these major social, economic and political developments. In the process, it explores regional variation, cultural change and philosophy, as well as contrasting interpretations of Chinese history, the fluctuating role of women and the family and the challenges for the world’s most populous nation as it enters the twenty first century. It portrays a resilient people whom we must understand, for their future is also ours.

The book explores the era of space collaboration (from 1970 to the present). This period has been largely ignored by historians in favor of a focus on the earlier space race. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a key program and catalyst for Détente, marked the transition to the new age of space collaboration, which continued through the Soviet Interkosmos missions, the Mir-Shuttle dockings of the early 1990s, and on through the International Space Station. Europeans, Americans, and Russians envisioned space collaboration as a way to reconfigure political and international relations. 

The shift toward collaboration was a result of a new focus on safety, which displaced the earlier emphasis on risk-taking in the first phase of the space race, when military imperatives often overshadowed peaceful goals. Apollo-Soyuz (ignored by Cold War historians) was thus imagined as a test project for a docking mechanism that would allow a manned-capsule stranded in orbit to dock with another capsule and provide an escape hatch back to earth (it was actually inspired, in part, by the 1969 Hollywood film “Marooned” with Gene Hackman). The focus on engineering for safety grew out of the broader concerns about environmental degradation and nuclear war that in turn reflected a growing sense in the 1970s and 1980s of the dangers associated with excessive risk-taking in politics and engineering. Few historians or social scientists have examined the social construction of safety and its use in engineering and politics. 

The book draws on the Russian Academy of Sciences Archives, Nixon and Reagan libraries and National Archives Collections, NASA headquarters library documents, and various memoirs and other published sources in English and Russian.

The Great Irish Famine claimed the lives of one million people, mainly from the lower classes. More than a million others fled the stricken land between 1845 and 1851. This catastrophe ranks among the worst famines to afflict pre-industrial societies, and it retains an important place in the psyche of the Irish people and the Irish diaspora to this day. In recent decades, its history has become the focus of considerable scholarly and popular attention. In particular, a tremendous amount of work has been undertaken on mortality, emigration, relief efforts and the wider political, social and psychological consequences of the calamity. Yet much remains to be retrieved and reconstructed, particularly at the level of the rural poor. This book intends to fill that gap. Astonishingly, there is a large volume of reports on social conditions in the Irish localities, emanating from within those localities, that has never been used systematically by historians. It bears the compelling title of the ‘Death Census’. Most historians are simply unaware of its existence. The outstanding feature of the Death Census is that it was authored by local clergymen who lived among the people they served, and were intimately involved with their lives. 

The census, which has never been published in composite form, is a unique store house of testimonies from near the base of society that awaits the attention of students of famine in Ireland. Ninety-nine clergymen from across Ireland, with marked concentrations in the worst affected parts of the country, contributed to the census. Some of these documents are coloured by politics, which in itself is revealing, but most aspire to more dispassionate representations of the horror facing a famishing people within the ‘little society’ of the parish, accompanied by appeals, explicit or implicit, to the humanitarian instincts of the wider society. In terms of wider significance, this is one of the great unstudied texts of modern Irish history. This book brings the Death Census together in composite form for the first time, and provides a detailed examination of its contents. The result is a new understanding of the Great Famine as it was experienced on the ground.

How do you make abstract historical interpretations authentic? This question troubled communist party leaders and propaganda historians in Hungary following the restoration of dictatorship after 1956. Accordingly, this book investigates the crooked history of the retrospective state revisions of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic between the years of its 30th and 40th anniversary, 1949 and 1959.

In recent decades the study of memory has become central to the historical discipline as a powerful conceptual tool to assess both the political-ideological implications of social constructions of the past and the writing of history itself. Yet, most of these investigations focus on postdictatorial situations, and suggest ways to understand how these societies confront their controversial and often traumatic pasts. In this volume, Péter Apor takes an in-depth look at a particular phenomenon – the First Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 – to illustrate how a dictatorship and a communist state remembers. Unlike other works analysing social memory, this book concentrates on authenticity as the crucial concept in establishing the success or failure of memory constructions, integrating the broad range of processes – political, scholarly, artistic – through which history is sought to be rendered authentic.

Throughout history, public corruption has been endemic. Exceptionally, it was significantly suppressed in modern times in northwestern Europe. Why did that happen? Why did politicians introduce measures that acted against their own interests? And are the political forces that then induced reform alive in today's world? Neild explores these highly topical questions by looking at the suppression of corruption in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in four countries – France, Germany, Britain and the USA; at the evolution of independent judiciaries; at developments in the twentieth century, including a reminder of how widely corruption was used as a weapon in the Cold War, particularly in the Third World. Finally, and most devastatingly, he analyses the rise and decline in standards of public life in Britain in the twentieth century.

Whilst debates over secret agents and the public revelation of lists of former collaborators have fascinated both post-Communist societies and the wider world, it is surprising how little has been written either on the nature of Communist-era collaboration or the processes through which post-Communist societies have sought to make sense of what collaboration was, and how it should be dealt with in the present. This is surprising given the amount of work that has been produced on the themes of resistance and victimization.

Unlike more popular (and often lurid) accounts of collaboration, which naturalise the concept as an obvious and incontestable characterization of Communist-era behaviour, ‘Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe’ rather interrogates the ways in which Post-Socialist cultures produce the idea of, and knowledge about, ‘collaborators’. It addresses those institutions which produce the concept and examines the function, social representation and history of secret police archives and institutes of national memory that create these histories of collaboration. This work seeks to provide a more nuanced historical conception of ‘collaboration’, expanding the concept towards broader frameworks of cooperation and political participation in order to facilitate a better understanding of the maintenance of Eastern European Communist regimes.

This work contends that secret police files are too often used to provide a one dimensional historical account of the ‘mechanisms of oppression’. It demonstrates, through case studies, how secret police files can be used to produce more subtle social and cultural histories of the socialist dictatorships. Of particular importance is the focus on the microhistorical. Contributions here explore the motivations and moralities of becoming an agent, the personal decisions and social consequences such steps involved as well as the everyday milieus in which agents lived and were active. This book analyses communities of cooperation, with particular focus on local and mid-level party organizations, organs of the church organs and artist or intellectual networks. Ranging across differing categories of collaborators and different social milieux across East-Central Europe, this work provides a comparative account of collaboration and participation with a range hitherto unavailable.

Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s' departs from the dominant scholarship in South Asian history that focuses narrowly on railways, and instead argues that any discussion of railway-generated changes needs to see such changes, at least up to the 1880s, as situated amidst existing patterns and networks of circulation within which roads and ferries were crucial. The volume also offers a detailed exploration of early colonial policies on road building and ferry improvement – an area that has hitherto remained unexplored.

Just as the new development of steam technology required and necessitated ‘lateral growth’ alongside the older technologies, so too were trade linkages marked by the interconnectedness of local and supra-local ties in which the world of peddlers intersected with that of native merchants and capitalist sahibs. This volume contends that the history of colonial communication is not a story of ‘displacement’ alone – either of one means by another or of one group by another – but also of realignment. Combining the understanding of production of knowledge about routes with the ways the practice of surveying and mapping led to territorial construction of the national space of India, this book reinterprets the ‘colonial state–space’ as constituting a series of layered components, both of ‘inherited spaces and networks’ from pre-colonial times and of the processes of objectification that colonial rule initiated.

The aim of this volume is to contribute to the ‘history of social spaces’, a new field of study in which neither cultural nor economic discourse is overridden by the other. This is achieved via a micro-historical study of local circulatory regimes, together with an exploration of colonial and imperial cultural discourses on communications.

The purpose of this volume is not simply to compile yet another wearying chronicle of the horrors that have been committed by our fellow human beings. Most students who register for a course on Genocide assume that it will focus, perhaps exclusively, on the Holocaust—the only case with which they are familiar. Many of them have read Elie Wiesel’s eloquent masterpiece Night in secondary school, and some may have read The Diary of Anne Frank. A few students might even know that a genocide occurred in Rwanda or Darfur. Like most people, however, they equate genocide simply with mass killing, and assume that genocide must by definition entail millions of deaths. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”—meaning “to kill a people”— originally defined it “a colonial crime of destroying the national patterns of the oppressed and imposing the national patterns of the oppressors.” This was a process, Lemkin said, that was intended to destroy a people’s culture thatcould sometimes but not necessarily always result in mass murder. Students need to know that after World War II the great powers undermined and co-opted the process of writing the1948 Genocide Convention at the UN. It was written very carefully to remove from the definition of genocide the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada; racial lynching and Jim Crowism in the US; the “elimination of backwards people to protect human progress” in pre-apartheid South Africa, New Zealand and Australia; the mass murder of colonial subjects and repression of racial minorities at the hands of European security forces the world over; the mass murder of political opponents in Latin America; the mass murder of “economic” or social groups in the Soviet Union; and the blanket removal of any mention of famine and sexual violence as acts that could constitute genocide. Instead, they simply used the Holocaust as a template and succeeded in distorting what Lemkin originally meant by “genocide”—the murder of a people by destroying their social and cultural connections.

Students should also know that Lemkin’s ideas were most strongly supported at the UN by member states that were former colonies—namely Egypt, India, Pakistan, China and the Philippines—and by women within many of the delegations that were working to prevent the UN from succeeding in outlawing genocide, such as those from the US and the UK. When students learn this history can begin to think critically about what international law is and which systems of power international law serves. However, they also need a textbook that guides them to think critically and imaginatively about genocide and the 1948 UN Convention without reducing genocide and the UN Genocide Convention to a crude and cynical analysis of global power struggles. In other words, they need a book that is honest and that resists the temptation to spin ahistorical morality tales.

‘Friends and Enemies’ delivers a lucid and provocative history of one of the world’s largest and most successful political organizations, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Grounding his account in the origins of the CCP, Brown charts its early struggles and the emergence of the leadership of Mao Zedong in the 1930s, before unravelling the role of the Party during the Second World War and the vicious internecine struggle that culminated in the CCP’s ascent to power in 1949.

The narrative tackles the successes and failures of the CCP in the post-war era, analysing this chequered period with a close eye to the internal machinations of the Party, and then boldly considers the prospects of the CCP in the future. Brown produces a forthright analysis of where the Party stands in the 21st century, and assesses its three greatest challenges – energy, the environment and the economy – before culminating in a discussion of the potential for democratic reform and the risks the Party faces while it attempts to become a modern party in charge of a globally important economy.

‘Friends and Enemies’ is based on a combination of research and Brown’s own experiences as a business person and diplomat in China, where he lived for seven years. It has also benefited from the input of analysts of the Party from the UK and US, and from talks with Party officials at senior and working level in China.

Most books about the Irish Famine tend to take Ireland’s reliance on potato for granted and treat the arrival of the deadly blight in 1845 as merely the trigger event that launched a humanitarian crisis—one that the British government famously failed to manage. In this work, considerable attention is paid to the origins and nature of Ireland’s dangerous potato dependency. Although introduced into Ireland as a cultivated plant, the potato nevertheless had the impact of an invasive species, disrupting and reorganizing Irish agriculture. Drawing upon ecology and systems theory, this study provides a detailed account of the intricacies of Ireland’s potato economy built upon an unstable and unsustainable monoculture that became a cybernetic trap. 

When almost the whole potato crop failed in the fall of 1846, what began as an ecological disaster quickly became a political one. Hampered by long-standing prejudice and Anglo-Irish tensions, the British government’s various attempts to deal with the humanitarian crisis were muddled by competing economic and social goals. Among these was the idea that the Famine represented an “opportunity” to purge Ireland of fragmented land holding and potato dependency by encouraging an English-type market-driven agriculture. Changes did occur, but the government’s imperial dreams eventually ran up against Irish realities. 

This book provides readers with a unique, in-depth understanding of the background to the Irish Famine and a detailed account of the crisis, as well as the immediate and long-term results of the catastrophe. In addition to ecological and agriculture factors, this work shows how cultural, economic and political influences shaped British attitudes and policies. Although Britain’s policies reflected anti-Irish prejudices, it was not the “Irish people” who were the victims of the Famine, but rather the Irish poor. By the mid-1840s, Great Britain was an emerging, middle-class democracy imbued with a faith in free markets and a deep suspicion of the poor, English as well as Irish. The Government’s response to the Irish Famine reflects the problems democracies often have setting aside class and racial prejudice in order to deal with humanitarian crises. 

In 1947, the Doomsday Clock was created by a group of atomic scientists to symbolise the perils facing humanity from nuclear weapons. In 2007, it was set five minutes before the final bell, including for the first time the threat of climate change as well as new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology. This book aims at an analysis of the evolution of our present predicament throughout the Anthropocene Era beginning in 1763, making special reference to the history of the period, the study of the subject and major advances in the natural sciences.

Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson set out the basis for a scientific approach to the pre-industrial stages of historical development in the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, when the American and French revolutions created a vocabulary of modernity. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the industrial revolution unfolded in several stages, nationalism, imperialism and totalitarianism were among the phenomena impeding the update of the Enlightenment programme as well as the fulfilment of the aspirations of 1776 and 1789. Our present predicament demands a rigorous examination of its origins and an assertion of a scientific pandisciplinary approach involving history and other academic specialisations.

The present volume addresses the long-felt need for a full critical edition, with translation and commentary on The Peterborough Chronicle, together with an overview of critical writings published up until 2021. It is also the first edition to include a detailed examination and transcription of the early-modern annotations in E and on its interleaves, as well as a systematic analysis of the manuscript's complicated structure. The book consists of three parts: I. Introduction, including the history of research, detailed paleographical and codicological analysis, and discussion of the other Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscripts, and their textual relations; II. The Critical Edition, presenting the text in its immediate seventeenth-century manuscript context, with notes; III. The Modern English Translation, including detailed historical and philological notes. A bibliography, indices, and extensive comparanda complete the book. This edition, translation, and commentary greatly enhance the accessibility and research potential of one of the most important primary sources for the history, language, and culture of Anglo-Saxon England. No one to date has given attention to the 'seventeenth-century manuscript context' of The Peterborough Chronicle. William L'Isle, the manuscript's owner at that time, had the manuscript disbound and interleaved throughout with larger watermarked paper sheets on which he transcribed variant passages from other witnesses to the Chronicle, primarily from witness A, now in the Parker Library, Cambridge. He and other readers also made annotations on the manuscript itself, including Archbishop Parker (†1575), who did so in red chalk. Each of these interventions has been recorded and analyzed in the commentary on the Text presented in this edition. Extensive historical annotations accompany the Translation and bring current scholarship to bear on it. This edition also provides for the first time a set of ninety-five comparanda so that readers can review the evidence for the paleographical analysis found in the Introduction. 

A selection of ruminative nature writing on walking and the beauty of New England, here Thoreau’s characteristically wide-ranging and philosophical style offers a multitude of fascinating observations. Excursions presents Thoreau’s most studied and expansive collection of writing on the natural world. An early advocate of conservationism, he discusses here, in mesmerising prose, the complex but essential relationship between man and nature. This edition includes a remarkable Biographical Sketch by Thoreau’s great contemporary and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This choice collection of Thoreau’s nature writing includes the essays ‘The Succession of Forest Trees’, ‘Walking’, and ‘Autumnal Tints’ – each one an explorative reach into the heart of the natural world. Thoreau’s travels through the woods of New England are not only physical journeys through some of the most awe-inspiring landscapes in America but also spiritual excursions of the mind.

In 1955 ‘Jedda’ was released in Australian cinemas and the international film world, starring Indigenous actors Rosalie Kunoth and Robert Tudawali. That year Eric Bell watched the film in the Liberty Cinema in Yass. Twelve years later he was dismayed to read a newly erected plaque in the main street of the Yass Valley village of Bowning. It plainly stated that the Ngunnawal people, on whose country Bowning stood, had been wiped out by an epidemic of influenza. The local Shire Council was responsible for the plaque; they also employed Bell’s father. The Bells were Ngunnawal people.

The central paradox of 'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' is the enthusiasm of a pastoral community, made wealthy by the occupation of Ngunnawal land, for a film that addressed directly the continuing legacy of settler-colonialism, a legacy that was playing out in their own relationships with the local Ngunnawal people at the time of their investment in the film. While the local council and state government agencies collaborated to minimize the visibility of Indigenous peoples, and the memory of the colonial violence at the heart of European prosperity, a number of wealthy and high-profile members of this pastoral community actively sought involvement in a film that would bring into focus the aftermath of colonial violence, the visibility of its survivors and the tensions inherent in policies of assimilation and segregation that had characterized the treatment of Ngunnawal people in their lifetimes.

Based on oral histories, documentary evidence, images and film, 'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' explores the themes of colonial nostalgia, national memory and family history. Charles Chauvel’s ‘Jedda’ (1955), a shared artefact of mid-twentieth-century settler-colonialism, is its fulcrum. The book newly locates the story of the genesis of ‘Jedda’ and, in turn, ‘Jedda’ becomes a cultural context and point of reference for the history of race relations it tells.

'P. S. O'Hegarty (1879-1955)' provides a well-researched and engaging biography of a major figure within Irish nationalist politics. Standing at the epicentre of Ireland's revolution, this ardent separatist provided much original thinking on the central concerns of his day. Using O’Hegarty's fertile mind and prodigious literary works as a guide, this book explores the far-reaching political and cultural issues of early 20th century Ireland, such as what is meant by 'nation' and national identity, cultural and political tolerance, Republican Liberalism, and the nature (as well as the clash) of religion and the state. Of these and other important subjects still relevant today, O'Hegarty was a prolific writer and essayist, notably championing liberal and progressive ideas far ahead of his separatist contemporaries. Spanning Ireland’s cultural and political revolution in the early 20th century, his career offers interesting insights into this crucial period, as well as the social and political clime of the Free State.  His writings cast a keen and often iconoclastic eye on the developing Irish nation he helped create both as a noted Civil Servant and a social and literary critic.

Given that O’Hegarty is a name known to many Irish specialists, this full review of his separatist career will be a welcome addition to the growing canon of historical biographies of previously overlooked leading figures in this period. This biography also breaks new ground in revealing unknown aspects of this great figure's personality and life story. O'Hegarty has remained largely absent in the literature dealing with a revolutionary period to which he greatly contributed. O'Hegarty counted among his inner circle political heavyweights such as Sinn Féin leader Arthur Griffith, IRB leader Michael Collins, and Bulmer Hobson, arguably the individual with whom he stood closest in political outlook. Despite sometimes quarrelling, O'Hegarty remained a source of wise counsel to all these men. Admired by both Griffith and Collins, O'Hegarty was privy to many private conversations and documents that reveal exciting new source material for the study of this crucial period relevant in shaping modern Ireland. Working within hugely influential movements such as Sinn Féin, the IRB, and the Gaelic League, P. S. O'Hegarty was often the thrusting sword from which the most stinging precise blows landed against the Irish Party and British rule in Ireland.

Set against the backdrop of major developments in the nationalist movement in Bengal, this study focuses on the nature of the interaction between the Congress, which represented mainstream political nationalism, and popular social groups whose politics was largely disorganized. In particular, it assesses the imapct that this interplay had on the nature of the Congress and the extent to which the provincial Congress organization was able to match its aspirations to those of the people, as it matured from a loosely-structured institution to an organized politica party.

Research on the nationalist movement prior to the advent of Subaltern Studies has chiefly concentrated on the activities of the movement's elite and leadership. In recent years, subaltern historians have instead focused on the activities of subordinate classes and groups, whose form of politics has been described as autonomous and independent of the elite. However, both lines of enquiry have neglected the areas of interaction and interdependence between these two realms of political activity, especially during the phase of Gandhian nationalism. In examining the nature of the interaction between institutional politics as represented by the Congress and popular politics in Bengal between 1919 and 1939, this book is a significant and original contribution to current research in the field.

This new edition retains the features of the first edition that made it a popular choice in universities and colleges throughout the US, Canada and around the world. Moss's accessible history includes full treatment of everyday life, the role of women, rural life, law, religion, literature and art. In addition, it provides many other features that have proven successful with both professors and students, including: a well-organized and clearly written text, references to varying historical perspectives, numerous illustrations and maps that supplement and amplify the text, fully updated bibliographies accompanying each chapter as well as a general bibliography of more comprehensive works, a glossary, and chronological and genealogical lists. Moss's 'A History of Russia' will appeal to academics, students and general readers alike.