New Releases

Images of Africa challenges the widely-held idea that Africans are powerless in the creation of self-image. It explores the ways in which image creation is a process of negotiation entered into by a wide range of actors within and beyond the continent - in presidents' offices and party HQs, in newsrooms and rural authorities, in rebel militia bases and in artists' and writers' studies.

Its ten chapters, written by scholars working across the continent and a range of disciplines, develop innovative ways of thinking about how image is produced. They ask: who controls image, how is it manipulated, and what effects do the images created have, for political leaders and citizens, and for Africa's relationships with the wider world. The answers to these questions provide a compelling and distinctive approach to Africa's positioning in the world, establishing the dynamic, relational and sometimes subversive nature of image.

With an eye to recovering the experiences of those in frontier zones of contact, Savage Worlds maps a wide range of different encounters between Germans and non-European indigenous peoples in the age of high imperialism. Examining outbreaks of radical violence as well as instances of mutual co-operation, it examines the differing goals and experiences of German explorers, settlers, travellers, merchants, and academics, and how the variety of projects they undertook shaped their relationship with the indigenous peoples they encountered.
Examining the multifaceted nature of German interactions with indigenous populations, this volume offers historians and anthropologists clear evidence of the complexity of the colonial frontier and frontier zone encounters. It poses the question of how far Germans were able to overcome their initial belief that, in leaving Europe, they were entering ‘savage worlds’.

Early modern dietaries are prose texts recommending the best way to maintain physical and psychological well-being. Three sixteenth-century dietaries contains Thomas Elyot's Castle of Health, Andrew Boorde's Compendious Regiment and William Bullein's Government of Health, all popular and influential works that were typical of a genre advising the reader on how best to maintain physical and psychological health. They are here introduced, contextualized and edited for the first time in a modern spelling edition.

Introductory material explores the dietary genre, its relationship to humanism, humoral theory, and the wide range of authorities with which the dietary authors engaged. The volume includes an examination of the bibliographical and publication history of each work, comprehensive explanatory notes and appendices that provide prefaces to earlier editions, a glossary, and a list of authorities and works cited or alluded to in the dietaries.

In the last decade Ireland’s immigrant population grew to more than one in ten. Now in the midst of an economic crisis the integration of immigrants has become a topical issue. Drawing extensively on demographic data and research on immigrant lives, immigrant participation in Irish politics and the experiences of immigrants living in deprived communities, this book offers a thorough study of the immigrant experience in Ireland today. Well-researched chapters and case studies examine the effects of immigration on social cohesion, the role of social policy, the nature and extent of segregation in education, racism and discrimination in the labour market, and the barriers faced by immigrants seeking Irish citizenship.

This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of immigration in Ireland and will appeal more broadly to those studying politics, sociology, geography and social policy.

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the 'spatialities of cinema' across the social sciences and humanities, yet to date critical inquiry has tended to explore this issue as a question of the 'city' and the 'urban'. For the first time, leading scholars in geography, film and cultural studies have been drawn together to explore the multiple ways in ideas of cinema and countryside are co-produced: how 'film makes rural' and 'rural makes film'. From the expanse of the American great west to the mountainous landscapes of North Korea, Cinematic Countrysides draws on a range of popular and alternative film genres to demonstrate how film texts come to prefigure expectations of rural social space, and how these representations come to shape, and be shaped by, the material and embodied circumstances of 'lived' rural experience.

At the heart of this volume's varied apprehensions of the 'cinematic countryside' is a concern to argue that ideas of rurality in film are central to wider questions of 'modernity' and 'tradition', 'self' and 'other', 'nationhood' and 'globalisation', and crucially, ones that are central to an account of the 'cinematic city'.

Is parents’ power over their children legitimate? And what role does theoretical analysis play when we make such normative evaluations? While this book adds to the growing literature on parents, children, families, and the state, it does so by focusing on one issue, the legitimacy of parents’ power. It also takes seriously the challenge posed by moral pluralism, and considers the role of both theoretical rationality and practical judgement in resolving moral dilemmas associated with parental power.

The primary intended market for this book is advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and established academics, in particular those with an interest in practical and applied ethics, contemporary political theory, moral theory, social theory, the sociology of childhood, political sociology, social work, and social policy.

Paradoxes of internationalization deals with British and German trade union responses to the internationalization of corporate structures and strategies at Ford and General Motors between the late 1960s and the early twenty-first century. The book is based on research in numerous archives in Britain, Germany and the United States.

The book points to the paradoxical effects of internationalization processes. First, it demonstrates how internationalization reinforced trade unions’ national identities and allegiances. Second, the book highlights that internationalization made domestic trade union practices more similar in some respects, while it simultaneously contributed to the re-creation of diversity between and within the two countries. Third, the book shows that investment competition was paradoxically the most important precondition for the emergence of cross-border cooperation initiatives.

The book will be of interest to academics and students in a range of disciplines from comparative industrial relations, to international political economy, business studies and transnational history.

This ground-breaking study is the first to systematically examine the politics and political culture of provincial Ireland. The book compares two distinct localities that provide differing perspectives on how politics and power manifested itself in provincial Ireland: Sligo in the north west and Limerick in the south west. Drawing on a wealth of previously unknown and under-utilised contemporary material, David Fleming focuses on individuals who were determined to shape the political landscape and those who were affected by their actions.

The book challenges many accepted models of how Ireland and the Irish were governed. While the propertied élite dominated many aspects of the political process, individuals and groups from the professional, mercantile, rural and other sections of society – the ‘middling orders’ – were also active in local institutions and office-holding. Their story, recounted here, reveals a far more complex set of relationships.

Politics and provincial people is a carefully constructed story of people’s motivations, ideas, and actions, and offers new insights into the complexity of their lives and the Irish political landscape.

This book explores the legal and social consequences of growing up illegitimate in England and Wales. Unlike most other studies of illegitimacy, Frost's book concentrates on the late-Victorian period and the early twentieth century, and takes the child's point of view rather than that of the mother or of 'child-saving' groups. Doing so allows for an extended analysis of criminal and civil cases involving illegitimacy, including less-studied aspects such as affiliation suits, the poor law and war pensions. In addition, the book explores the role of blended, extended and adoptive families, the circulation of children through different homes and institutions, and the prejudices children endured in school, work and home.

While showing how the effects of illegitimacy varied both by class and gender, the book highlights the ways in which children showed resilience in surviving the various types of discrimination common in this period. It will appeal to anyone interested in British social history, childhood studies, or legal history.

Songs of Protest, Songs of Love shows how songs can bring back voices from the past in a new way. The focus of the book is on rural Britain in a time of crisis. As the traditional rights of peasants were being jettisoned to enforce a new system of enclosure, rural labourers chanted out their concerns in songs of protest. These songs became increasingly strident and popular after the 1770s as rural life became even more precarious with fluctuating grain prices and uncertain employment opportunities. Many ballads in the eighteenth century were love songs. But these are also rich in social meaning. Many of these love songs celebrated the free and easy sexuality of rural workers, especially milkmaids and ploughmen, which was contrasted with the tepid and flaccid sex life attributed to urban aristocrats.

The book will be of interest to scholars, advanced students and readers with an interest in cultural history and popular ballads.

Britain’s work camp systems have never before been studied in depth. Highly readable, and based on thorough archival research and the reminiscences of those involved, this fascinating book addresses the relations between work, masculinity, training and citizen service.

The book is a comprehensive study, from the labour colonies of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain to the government instructional centres of the 1930s. It covers therapeutic communities for alcoholics, epileptics, prostitutes and ‘mental defectives’, as well as alternative communities founded by socialists, anarchists and nationalists in the hope of building a new world. It explores residential training schemes for women, many of which sought to develop ‘soft bodies’ fit for domestic service, while more mainstream camps were preoccupied with ‘hardening’ male bodies through heavy labour.

Working men’s bodies will interest anyone specialising in modern British history, and those concerned with social policy, training policy, unemployment, and male identities.

Ever since their rediscovery in the 1920s, John Donne's writings have been praised for their energy, vigour and drama - yet so far, no attempt has been made to approach and define systematically these major characteristics of his work.
Drawing on J. L. Austin's speech act theory, Margret Fetzer's comparative reading of Donne's poetry and prose eschews questions of personal or religious sincerity and instead recreates an image of John Donne as a man of many performances. No matter if engaged in the writing of a sermon or a piece of erotic poetry, Donne placed enormous trust in what words could do. Questions as to how saying something may actually bring about that very thing, or how playing the part of someone else affects an actor's identity, are central to Donne's oeuvre - and moreover highly relevant in the cultural and theological contexts of the early modern period in general.

In treating both canonical and lesser known Donne texts, John Donne's Performances hopes to make a significant contribution not only to Donne criticism and research into early modern culture: by using concepts of performance and performativity as its major theoretical backdrop, it aims to establish an interdisciplinary link with the field of performance studies.

Universalism shows two faces to the world: an emancipatory face that looks to the inclusion of the other, and a repressive face that sees in the other a failure to pass some fundamental test of humanity. Universalism can be used to demand that we treat all persons as human beings regardless of their differences, but it can also be used to represent whole categories of people as inhuman, not yet human or even enemies of humanity.

The Jewish experience offers an equivocal test case. Universalism has stimulated the struggle for Jewish emancipation, but it has also helped to develop the idea that there is something peculiarly harmful to humanity about Jews – that there is a 'Jewish question' that needs to be 'solved'. This original and stimulating book traces struggles within the Enlightenment, Marxism, critical theory and the contemporary left, seeking to rescue universalism from its repressive, antisemitic undertones.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

The 1950s and 1960s were a transformative phase in modern Irish history. In these years, a conservative society dominated by the Catholic Church, and a state which was inward-looking and distrustful of novelty, gradually opened up to fresh ideas. This book considers this change. It explores how the intellectual movement Tuairim (‘opinion’ in Irish), was at the vanguard of the challenge to orthodoxy and conservatism.

Tuairim contributed to debates on issues as diverse as Northern Ireland, the economy, politics, education, childcare and censorship. The society established branches throughout Ireland, including Belfast, and in London. It produced frequent critical publications and boasted a membership that included the future Taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald. Tuairim occupied a unique position within contemporary debates on Ireland’s present and future. This book is concerned with its role in the modernisation of Ireland. In so doing it also addresses topics of continued relevance for the Ireland of today, including the Northern Ireland Peace Process and the institutional care of children.

This collection of highly original essays by leading early medieval historians honours the work and career of Dame Janet (Jinty) Nelson, one of the most respected and influential scholars of her generation. The essays build on the spirit of Janet Nelson’s work by linking the study of Francia with at least one other area or general theme of early medieval history. The papers range across all of the regions of Europe affected by Frankish culture and explore themes which reflect the cutting edge of the work she inspired: memory, queenship, the treatment of prisoners of war, penance, the use of property, historiography, palaeography, prosopography and religious organization. The volume includes an appreciation of her career, and is rounded off by a topical index to highlight its thematic aspects.














































The contributors are drawn from those who have worked alongside Janet Nelson and from some of her former students. They include David Bates, Stephen Baxter, Wendy Davies, Paul Fouracre and David Ganz.

This groundbreaking, cross-generic collection is the first to consider the entire breadth of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning writing. Focused through the concept of influence, the volume addresses critical issues surrounding the work of Britain's most important contemporary novelist. It encompasses provocative and timely subjects ranging from gay visual cultures and representations, to Victorian, modernist and contemporary literature, as well as race and empire, theatre and cinema, eros and economics. The book reveals the fascinating intellectual and affective matter that lies beneath the polished control and dazzling style of Hollinghurst's work. Alongside contributions by distinguished British and American critics, the book includes an unpublished interview with Hollinghurst.

Alan Hollinghurst: Writing under the influence uses a creative range of critical approaches to provide the most authoritative and innovative account available of Hollinghurst's works.

Design and Popular Entertainment offers a selection of nine essays that examine the range of design for popular entertainment, from theatre and film, to television and radio. Investigating entertainment design from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, the book is divided into two sections. The first addresses the ‘hardware’ of popular entertainment, in other words the objects through which images, sound and performance are transmitted. The second explores the construction of cinematic and televisual imagery and the design of objects for the screen, the ‘software’ of entertainment. In so doing it offers important insights into this little explored aspect of design.

Topics covered by the collection include the design of theatrical lighting and stage sets, cinema and radio design, the representation of designers within film, and the relationship between design and television. The book’s concentration on the 1950s and 1960s reflects the profound changes in modes of entertainment that took place during that period, in particular the spread of television, which not only attracted a huge popular audience but also stimulated experimental designing approaches and thinking. With particular focus on the way that both the objects and the construction of entertainment have altered audience’s experience, the essays present a novel approach to the subject. This book will be of particular interest to students and teachers working in design and cultural history as well as film and theatre studies.

Living in sin is the first book-length study of cohabitation in nineteenth-century England, based on research into the lives of hundreds of couples. ‘Common-law’ marriages did not have any legal basis, so the Victorian courts had to wrestle with unions that resembled marriage in every way, yet did not meet its most basic requirements.

The majority of those who lived in irregular unions did so because they could not marry legally. Others, though, chose not to marry, from indifference, from class differences, or because they dissented from marriage for philosophical reasons. This book looks at each motivation in turn, highlighting class, gender and generational differences, as well as the reactions of wider kin and community.

Frost shows how these couples slowly widened the definition of legal marriage, preparing the way for the more substantial changes of the twentieth century, making this a valuable resource for all those interested in Gender and Social History.

This book focuses on the historical and current place of religion in the Irish education system from the perspective of children's rights and citizenship. It offers a critical analysis of the political, cultural and social forces that have shaped the system, looking at how the denominational model has been adapted to increased religious and cultural diversity in Irish society and showing that recent changes have failed to address persistent discrimination and the absence of respect for freedom of conscience. It relates current debates on the denominational system and the role of the State in education to competing narratives of national identity that reflect nationalist-communitarian or republican political outlooks.

This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of education policy and Church/State relations in Ireland and will also engage non-academic audiences with an interest or involvement in Irish education.

Can the participation of civil society organisations democratise policy making in the European Union? This book challenges the widespread optimism about civil society participation in European governance and offers a nuanced and realistic evaluation of its democratic potential. Friedrich argues that the participation of these groups is only of democratic value if participatory patterns are democratised through appropriate institutional means.

This book systematically brings together insights from normative democratic theory with an empirical evaluation of concrete policy-processes. It demonstrates that the participation of civil society organisation cannot be conceived as a panacea for the European Union’s democratic deficit, because the participatory pattern of EU policy-making violates the key democratic value of political equality.

This book will be of interest to all of those concerned about the future of European democracy, those studying and teaching European politics, the European Union, international relations and democratic theory.

At a time when education appears to be simply reproducing social class relations, Radical childhoods offers a timely consideration of how children’s and young people’s education can confront and challenge social inequality. Presenting detailed analysis of archival material and oral testimony, the book examines the experiences of students and educators in two schooling initiatives that were connected to two of the most significant social movements in Britain: Socialist Sunday Schools (est. 1892) and Black Saturday/Supplementary Schools (est. 1967).

Analysing across time, the author explores the ways in which these two very different schooling movements incorporated large numbers of women, challenged class and race inequality, and attempted to create spaces of ‘emancipatory’ education independent to the state. It argues that despite appearing to be on the ‘margins’ of the public sphere these schools were important, if contested and complex, sites of political struggle.

According to Tom Gallagher, Romania's predatory rulers, the heirs of the sinister communist dictator Ceausescu, have inflicted a humiliating defeat on the European Union. He argues convincingly that Brussels was tricked into offering full membership to this Balkan country in return for substantial reforms which its rulers now refuse to carry out. This book unmasks the failure of the EU to match its visionary promises of transforming Romania with the shabby reality. Benefiting from access to internal reports and leading figures involved in a decade of negotiations, it shows how Eurocrats were outwitted by unscrupulous local politicians who turned the EU's multi-level decision-making processes into a laughing-stock. The EU's famous 'soft power' turned out to be a mirage, as it was unable to summon up the willpower to insist that this key Balkan state embraced its standards of behaviour in the political and economic realms.

The book unravels policy failures in the areas of justice, administrative and agricultural reform and shows how Romania moved backwards politically during the years of negotiations.

This book presents a collection of cutting-edge historical and cultural essays in the field of women, theatre and performance. The chapters explore women’s networks of professional practice in the theatre and performance industries between 1900 and 1950, with a focus on women’s sense and experience of professional agency in an industry largely controlled by men. The book is divided into two sections: ‘Female theatre workers in the social and theatrical realm’ looks at the relationship between women’s work – on and off stage – and autobiography, activism, technique, touring, education and the law. ‘Women and popular performance’ focuses on the careers of individual artists, once household names, including Lily Brayton, Ellen Terry, radio star Mabel Constanduros and Oscar-winning film star Margaret Rutherford.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

This volume of essays explores the rise of parliament in the historical imagination of early modern England. The enduring controversy about the nature of parliament informs nearly all debates about the momentous religious, political and governmental changes of the period – most significantly, the character of the Reformation and the causes of the Revolution. Meanwhile, scholars of ideas have emphasised the historicist turn that shaped political culture. Religious and intellectual imperatives from the sixteenth century onwards evoked a new interest in the evolution of parliament, framing the ways that contemporaries interpreted, legitimised and contested Church, state and political hierarchies.
Parliamentary ‘history’ is explored through the analysis of chronicles, more overtly ‘literary’ texts, antiquarian scholarship, religious polemic, political pamphlets, and of the intricate processes that forge memory and tradition.

Historical literatures recovers a rich, vibrant and complex tradition of Restoration and early eighteenth century English historical writing. Highlighting the wide variety of historical works being printed and read in England between the years 1660 and 1740, it demonstrates that many of the genres that we now view primarily as literary – verse satire and panegyric, memoir, scandal and chronicle – were also being used to represent historical phenomena.

In surveying some of this period’s 'historical literatures', it argues that many satirists, secret historians and memoirists made their choice of historical subject matter a topic of explicit commentary, presenting themselves as historians or inscribing their works in an English historical tradition. By responding to other varieties of history in this self-conscious way, writers like Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Delarivier Manley, Daniel Defoe and John Evelyn were able to pioneer influential new techniques for representing their nation’s past.

The EU’s single currency crisis and the ensuing human costs have led to Europe’s biggest disaster since 1945. This book examines each of its stages and the political and social impact, and reveals the longer-term origins of the crisis, particularly the failure of elites to promote a genuine European partnership grounded in democratic values and a desire to co-exist with a national outlook.

The author defends an orderly retreat from the existing model of monetary union, arguing that an alternative is needed in order for countries enduring a prolonged slump to recover, and recommending that EU chiefs should also treat the nation-state as a partner in a common emergency that needs to be overcome.

This jargon-free, insightful and long-term analysis of a dangerous crisis is an invaluable book for academics and students alike. It is also an effective tool for policy-makers, citizens and business people who require an accessible and in-depth appraisal of a continuing catastrophe.

Africa was a key focus of Britain’s foreign policy under Tony Blair. Military intervention in Sierra Leone, increases in aid and debt relief, and grand initiatives such as the Commission for Africa established the continent as a place in which Britain could ‘do good’.

Britain and Africa under Blair: in pursuit of the good state critically explores Britain’s fascination with Africa. It argues that, under New Labour, Africa represented an area of policy that appeared to transcend politics. Gradually, it came to embody an ideal state activity around which politicians, officials and the wider public could coalesce, leaving behind more contentious domestic and international issues.

Building on the story of Britain and Africa under Blair, the book draws wider conclusions about the role of ‘good’ and idealism in foreign policy. In particular, it discusses how international relationships provide opportunities to create and pursue ideals, and why they are essential for the wellbeing of political communities. It argues that state actors project the idea of ‘good’ onto idealised, distant objects, in order to restore a sense of the ‘good state’.

The book makes a distinctive and original contribution to debates about the role of ethics in international relations and will be of particular interest to academics, policy-makers and students of international relations, Africa and British foreign policy, and to anyone interested in ethics in international affairs.

This volume explores the political implications of violence and alterity (radical difference) for the practice of democracy, and reformulates the possibility of community that democracy is said to entail. Most significantly, contributors intervene in traditional democratic theory by boldly contesting the widely-held assumption that increased inclusion, tolerance and cultural recognition are democracy's sufficient conditions. Rather than simply inquiring how best to expand the 'demos', they investigate how claims to self-determination, identity and sovereignty are a problem for democracy and how, paradoxically, alterity may be its greatest strength.

Drawing largely on the Left, continental tradition, contributions include an appeal to the tension between fear and love in the face of anti-Semitism in Poland, injunctions to rethink the identity-difference binary and the ideal of 'mutual recognition' that dominate liberal-democratic thought, critiques of the canonical 'we' that constitutes the democratic community, and a call for an ethics and a politics of 'dissensus' in democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression. The authors mobilise some of the most powerful critical insights emerging across the social sciences and humanities – from anthropology, sociology, critical legal studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis and critical race theory and post-colonial studies – to reconsider the meaning and the possibility of 'democracy' in the face of its contemporary crisis.

The book will be of direct interest to students and scholars interested in cutting-edge, critical reflection on the empirical phenomenon of increased violence in the West provoked by radical difference, and on theories of radical political change.

It has become axiomatic that First World War literature was disenchanted, or disillusioned, and returning combatants were unable to process or communicate that experience. In Writing disenchantment, Andrew Frayn argues that this was not just about the war: non-combatants were just as disenchanted as those who fought, and writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf produced some of the sharpest criticisms. Its language already existed in contemporary sociological and historical accounts of the problems of mass culture and the modern city, whose structures contained the conflict and were strengthened during it.

Archival material, sales data and reviews are used to chart disenchantment in a wide range of early twentieth-century war literature from novels about fears of invasion and pacifism, through the modernist novels of the 1920s to its dominance in the War Books Boom of 1928–30. This book will appeal to scholars and students of English literature, social and cultural history, and gender studies.

'The idea which I shall present here came to me more or less out of the blue. I was on a train some five years ago, on my way to spend a day at Headingley, and I was reading a book about the death camp Sobibor... The particular, not very appropriate, conjunction involved for me in this train journey...had the effect of fixing my thoughts on one of the more dreadful features of human coexistence, when in the shape of a simple five-word phrase the idea occurred to me.'
The contract of mutual indifference

In this classic work, newly reissued here with a preface by Oliver Kamm, Norman Geras discusses a central aspect of the experience of the Holocaust with a view to exploring its most important contemporary implications. A bold and powerful synthesis of memorial, literary record, historical reflection and political theory, Geras’s argument focuses on the figure of the bystander – the bystander to the destruction of the Jews of Europe and the bystander to more recent atrocity – to consider the moral consequences of looking on without active responses at persecution and great suffering. This book argues that we owe a duty of help to those who are suffering under terrible oppression.

Geras contends that the tragedy of European Jewry – so widely pondered by historians, social scientists, psychologists, theologians and others – has not yet found its proper reflection within political philosophy. Attempting to fill the gap, he adapts an old idea from within that tradition of enquiry, the idea of the social contract, to the task of thinking about the triangular relation between perpetrators, victims and bystanders, and draws a sombre conclusion from it. Geras goes on to ask how far this conclusion may be offset by the hypothesis of a universal duty to bring aid.

The contract of mutual indifference is an original and challenging work, aimed at the complacent abstraction of much contemporary theory-building. It is supplemented by three shorter essays on the implications of the Jewish catastrophe for conceptions of human nature and progress.

Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, Karen Garner documents international women’s history through the lens of the long-established Western-led international organisations that defined and dominated women’s involvement in global politics from the 1925 founding of the Joint Standing Committee of Women’s International Organisations up through the UN Decade for Women (1976–85).
Documenting specific global campaigns in episodes that span the twentieth century, Garner includes biographical information about lesser known international leaders as she discusses important historic debates regarding feminist goals and strategies among women from the East and West, North and South. This interdisciplinary study addresses questions of interest to historians, political scientists, international relations scholars, sociologists, and feminist scholars and activists whose work promotes women’s and human rights.

Bob Crow was the most high-profile and militant union leader of his generation. This biography focuses on his leadership of the RMT union, examining and exposing a number of popular myths created about him by political opponents. Using the schema of his personal characteristics (including his public persona), his politics and the power of his members, it explains how and why he was able to punch above his weight in industrial relations and on the political stage, helping the small RMT union become as influential as many of its much larger counterparts.

As RMT leader, Crow oversaw a rise in membership and promoted a more assertive and successful bargaining approach. While he failed to unite all socialists into one new party, he established himself as the leading popular critic of neo-liberalism, 'New' Labour and the age of austerity.

Recent votes in the House of Commons on British military intervention have put foreign policy at the heart of public consciousness. This book examines fifty years and nine premierships - from Harold Wilson to David Cameron - to offer a unique account of the growing role of the prime minister in foreign policy making.

The prime minister now spends more time on foreign policy than at any previous period outside war, but excepting crises the public and MPs themselves remain relatively ill-informed on the subject. Written by a senior parliamentary researcher and based on first-hand interviews with former foreign secretaries, Cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, party officials, military chiefs and diplomats, this book provides an insider account of votes on military intervention in Syria, and raises questions around the vetting of those who seek the office of prime minister and the educating of the electorate.

This is a major study of the transformation of early modern English rural society. It begins by assessing the three major debates about the character of English society: the ‘Brenner Debate’; the debate over English Individualism; and the long running debate over the disappearance of the small landowner. It then turns to the history of Earls Colne in Essex, which has never before been the subject of a full-length study despite it being one of the most discussed villages in England.

French and Hoyle’s rounded account describes the arrival of a new landlord family, the Harlakendens, the tensions created by this change, and the gradual atrophy of their power. This account of change is backed up by a new and original analysis of landholding in the village, which depicts the land market in unprecedented detail, and explores the changing significance of landownership for ordinary people.

It is a key work for all those interested in how English rural society changed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

In this fascinating study, Samantha George explores the cultivation of the female mind and the feminised discourse of botanical literature in eighteenth-century Britain. In particular, she discusses British women’s engagement with the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and his unsettling discovery of plant sexuality.

Previously ignored primary texts of an extraordinary nature are rescued from obscurity and assigned a proper place in the histories of science, eighteenth-century literature, and women’s writing. The result is groundbreaking: the author explores nationality and sexuality debates in relation to botany and charts the appearance of a new literary stereotype, the sexually precocious female botanist. She uncovers an anonymous poem on Linnaean botany, handwritten in the eighteenth century, and subsequently traces the development of a new genre of women’s writing — the botanical poem with scientific notes.

The book is indispensable reading for all scholars of the eighteenth century, especially those interested in Romantic women’s writing, or the relationship between literature and science.

History, heritage, and colonialism explores the politics of history-making and interest in preserving the material remnants of the past in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century colonial society, looking at both indigenous pasts and those of European origin.

Focusing on New Zealand, but also covering the Australian and Canadian experiences, it explores how different groups and political interests have sought to harness historical narrative in support of competing visions of identity and memory. Considering this within the frames of the local and national as well as of empire, the book offers a valuable critique of the study of colonial identity-making and cultures of colonisation.

This book offers important insights for societies negotiating the legacy of a colonial past in a global present, and will be of particular value to all those concerned with museum, heritage, and tourism studies, as well as imperial history.

This exciting new monograph aims to establish the historical and cultural reasons why there was only a participation rate of 7-8% by the Catholic population in policing Northern Ireland when the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) came into being in 2001, even though Catholics constituted 46% of the total population. It also aims to ascertain whether or not implementation of the Patten Commission’s recommendation to recruit to the PSNI on a 50: 50 basis between Catholics and non-Catholics has resulted in greater representation and what the political and cultural obstacles might be in transforming policing from meeting colonial model criteria to those of the liberal model advocated by Patten.

In doing this, author Mary Gethins uses a wealth of historical data to show that there has for a long time been a problematic relationship between the native Irish Catholic population and the police, and the reasons for Catholic under-representation in the police force can be largely put down to this legacy. A survey of Catholic police officers focusing on family history, reasons for joining the police and sacrifices perceived to have been made in joining a largely Protestant organisation provide a strong empirical evidence base from which Gethins draws illuminating lessons. The work is informed by sociological theory to show that Catholic police officers are atypical of the Catholic population at large in Northern Ireland, and best explained by the concept of fragmented identity. Policing by consent is identified as being the most challenging criterion of the liberal model of policing to be met in Northern Ireland and in considering whether or not the PSNI by its own efforts is capable of embedding a fully developed liberal model, Gethins ends on a note of cautious optimism.

The book will be of vital benefit to anyone interested in Irish politics, sociology, peace and reconciliation and both Irish and international police forces.

Following the restoration of Lithuania’s independence and the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, the Kaliningrad region is now an exclave surrounded by EU member states. Departing from the analytical framework of Europeanisation, this book analyses the interaction between Russia and its Kaliningrad region on one side, and their European partners on the other side, thus assessing the region’s potential to serve as Russia’s main opening to the EU.

How do EU relations ‘feed back’ into Kaliningrad’s domestic arena, or, put differently, does Kaliningrad become ‘Europeanised’ – at least to some extent? In particular, do EU standards and norms impact on the exclave and in what ways? The book not only offers thorough case studies of a number of policy areas affected by the EU (environmental, economics and higher education), it also refines our way of thinking about Europeanisation ‘beyond’ Europe.

The life of mise-en-scène offers a critical history of key debates about visual style in British film journals in the post-war period. It reclaims an often-ignored or misrepresented history, including: the concept of film poetry in the journal Sequence, changing attitudes in Sight and Sound during the 1950s, and the battle over the significance of film style which raged between a number of small journals and the national press in the early 1960s.

It examines the British school, first associated with Movie in the 1960s, which, in Adrian Martin’s words, is enjoying a ‘widespread, international revival’ – but also other critical movements, more hazily remembered. It explores the role of mise-en-scène in melodrama criticism, and considers what happened to detailed criticism as major theoretical movements emerged in the 1970s. In doing so, it provides a vital context for the contemporary practice of style-based criticism and challenges received notions of critical history, developing our understanding of a range of other key debates and concerns in the study of film.

The election of Barack Obama marked a critical point in American political and social history. Did the historic election of a black president actually change the status of blacks in the United States? Did these changes (or lack thereof) inform blacks' perceptions of the President?

This book explores these questions by comparing Obama's promotion of substantive and symbolic initiatives for blacks to efforts by the two previous presidential administrations. By employing a comparative analysis, the reader can judge whether Obama did more or less to promote black interests than his predecessors. Taking a more empirical approach to judging Barack Obama, this book hopes to contribute to current debates about the significance of the first African American presidency. It takes care to make distinctions between Obama's substantive and symbolic accomplishments and to explore the significance of both.

Performing presence: Between the live and the simulated proposes that the advent of new media forms, and the increasing integration of contemporary performance and media, has generated new engagements, practices and understandings of presence.

Addressing new media art and performance, multi-media theatre, video installation, mixed reality environments and locative arts, the book presents case studies of work by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Paul Sermon, Gary Hill, Tony Oursler, The Builders Association and Blast Theory, as well as analyses of a series of related experiments created for CAVE, an immersive virtual reality environment. Performing presence combines extensive analysis, and extracts from interviews with the artists, as well as the documentation of elements of work and working processes, in order to provide specific insight into these engagements with contemporary practices and concepts presence.

This book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners of theatre and performance, contemporary art, media, new media and technology.

This fascinating and innovative study explores the lives of people living in early modern Ireland through the books and printed ephemera which they bought, borrowed or stole from others. While the importance of books and printing in influencing the outlook of early modern people is well known, recent years have seen significant changes in our understanding of how writing and print shaped lives, and was in turn shaped by those who appropriated the written word.

This book draws on this literature to shed light on the changes that took place in this unusual European society. The author finds that there, almost uniquely in Europe, a set of revolutions took place which transformed the lives of the Irish in unexpected ways, and that the rise of writing and the spread of print were central to an understanding of those changes which have previously only been understood to have been the result of conquest and colonisation.

This is a book which will be read not only by those interested in the Irish past but by all those who are concerned with the impact of communications media on social change.

This book charts the building of 1 Angel Square, the remarkable new head office for The Co-operative Group in Manchester’s new NOMA district.

Combining text and photographs to illustrate the building from commissioning to completion, Len Grant has interviewed the whole project team – clients, architects, engineers, project managers and builders – and has had unreserved access to document the creation of this already award-winning structure. The design of 1 Angel Square by the architects 3DReid, is currently the UK’s highest BREEAM (Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method) rated office building to date, and it is set to be one of the most sustainable buildings in Europe.

1 Angel Square, the book, is an intimate record of this fascinating building. Some of the impressive facts include: 3,157 internal and external window panels make up the façade; there are 10,500 data and power outlets; it sits on 539 foundation piles, with an average depth of 18 metres below ground; and there are approximately 22km of power cables.

This book will be required reading for students of architecture and construction, sustainability studies and urban planning, and for those with an interest in the history of one of the world’s great businesses.

This book outlines and evaluates the political thought of the Conservative Party through a detailed examination of its principal thinkers from Harold Macmillan to the present.

Traditionally, the Conservative Party has been regarded as a vote-gathering machine rather than a vehicle for ideas. This book redresses the balance through a series of biographical essays examining the thought of those who have contributed most to the development of ideas within the party. The chapters benefit from archival research and interviews with leading Conservatives. The recent revival of Conservative fortunes makes the book particularly timely.

The book begins with an introductory chapter explaining the role of ideology in the Conservative Party. It then traces the political thought of the Conservative Party through its principal theorists since the 1930s. These are Harold Macmillan, R. A. Butler, Quintin Hogg, Enoch Powell, Angus Maude, Keith Joseph, the ‘traditionalists’ (Maurice Cowling, T. E. ‘Peter’ Utley, Peregrine Worsthorne, Shirley Letwin and Roger Scruton), Ian Gilmour, John Redwood and David Willetts. The book concludes with an overall assessment of the political thought of the Conservative Party and the relevance of past debates for contemporary Conservatism.

The book will be of considerable interest to academics and non-academics alike; for those who have a special interest in the Conservative Party but also for any student of contemporary British Politics.

This first book-length study explores the history of postwar England during the end of empire through a reading of novels which appeared at the time, moving from George Orwell and William Golding to Penelope Lively, Alan Hollinghurst and Ian McEwan. Particular genres are also discussed, including the family saga, travel writing, detective fiction and popular romances.
All included reflect on the predicament of an England which no longer lies at the centre of imperial power, arriving at a fascinating diversity of conclusions about the meaning and consequences of the end of empire and the priveleged location of the novel for discussing what decolonization meant for the domestic English population of the metropole.

The book is written in an easy style, unburdened by large sections of abstract reflection. It endeavours to bring alive in a new way the traditions of the English novel.

The attitude of Jews living in the medieval Christian world to Jews who converted to Christianity or to Christians seeking to join the Jewish faith reflects the central traits that make up Jewish self-identification. The Jews saw themselves as a unique group chosen by God, who expected them to play a specific and unique role in the world.

This study researches fully for the first time the various aspects of the way European Jews regarded members of their own fold in the context of lapses into another religion. It attempts to understand whether they regarded the issue of conversion with self-confidence or with suspicion, and whether their attitude was based on a clear theological position, or on issues of socialisation.

The book will primarily interest students and lecturers of Jewish/Christian relations, the Middle Ages, Jews in the Medieval period, and inter-religious research.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Never before have the scope and limits of scientific freedom been more important or more under attack. New science, from artificial intelligence to gene editing, creates unique opportunities for making the world a better place. It also presents unprecedented dangers. This book is about the opportunities and challenges – moral, regulatory and existential – that face both science and society. How are scientific developments impacting on human life and on the structure of societies? How is science regulated and how should it be regulated? Are there ethical boundaries to scientific developments in sensitive areas? Such are the questions that the book seeks to answer. Both the survival of humankind and the continued existence of our planet are at stake.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

This is the first sustained and broad-ranging critique of the legacies of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boom. Contributors identify the damaging impact that the free market has had on a wide range of areas in public life, including the media and the pharmaceutical industry, and also examine its influence on health, education, state surveillance, immigrants, the welfare state, consumerism and the Irish language. Challenging the notion that there is no alternative for Ireland but the present economic and political dispensation, experts map out an alternative politics that could create spaces for hope and renewal in contemporary Ireland.

In a society whose public debates have been largely dominated by the instrumentalist logic of stockbroker economists and the regressive populism of talk-radio shock jocks, Transforming Ireland offers a more substantial and considered analysis, uncovering hidden aspects of everyday Irish life. It reveals that, virtually unnoticed by the media, there exist lively debates in today’s Ireland which draw on international insights about globalisation to probe how it is reshaping Irish society. Covering four principal topics – culture and society, media and social change, social control, and power and politics – this impressive volume opens new and hopeful perspectives for students and also the general reader.

Though primarily a book about Ireland, it is also a book about today’s form of globalisation, offering a rare and accessible analysis of the damage done to society when market forces are given free rein.

The Colonial Medical Service was the personnel section of the Colonial Service, employing the doctors who tended to the health of both the colonial staff and the local populations of the British Empire. Although the Service represented the pinnacle of an elite government agency, its reach in practice stretched far beyond the state, with the members of the African service collaborating, formally and informally, with a range of other non-governmental groups. This collection of essays on the Colonial Medical Service of Africa illustrates the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zanzibar. They reveal many new insights into the enactments of colonial policy and the ways in which colonial doctors negotiated the day-to-day reality during the height of imperial rule in Africa. The book provides essential reading for scholars and students of colonial history, medical history and colonial administration.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Marching to the beat of punk rock and reggae, Rock Against Racism was a mass movement built in opposition to racism and fascism in 1970s Britain. At a time of severe economic and social crises, RAR, alongside the Anti-Nazi League, organised one of the biggest and most effective political and cultural mobilisations of the post-war period.

Expressing itself through spectacular carnivals, concerts, marches and innovative forms of design and communication, RAR combined hard-headed political organisation with the optimism and energy of radical youth culture.

Drawing on interviews with activists, supporters and critics, and based on the latest research, Crisis music explores the nature of this ground-breaking politico-cultural phenomenon. The author explains why RAR seized upon the power and passion of punk and reggae, and how this has helped to shape the boundaries of modern popular music. He also offers, for the first time, a clear picture of the relationship between RAR and its main political sponsor, the Socialist Workers Party. Crisis music discusses RAR’s place within the left’s often-troubled encounters with popular culture, and draws comparisons with other music-based movements and campaigns, such as the post-war folk revival and Live 8.

This book casts light on numerous current debates: about ‘celebrity politics’ and the role of musicians as political spokespeople, for instance, and the links between ethnicity, popular culture and politics. It will be of value to students and researchers in cultural studies, politics and labour history, and to anyone interested in the role of culture in political activity.

The Civil Service and the London County Council employed tens of thousands of women in Britain in the early twentieth century. As public employers these institutions influenced both each other and private organisations, thereby serving as a barometer or benchmark for the conditions of women’s white-collar employment.

Drawing on a wide range of archival sources – including policy documents, trade union records, women’s movement campaign literature and employees’ personal testimony – this is the first book-length study of women’s public service employment in this period. It examines three aspects of their working lives – inequality of pay, the marriage bar and inequality of opportunity – and demonstrates how far wider cultural assumptions about womanhood shaped policies towards women’s employment and experiences. Scholars and students with interests in gender, British social and cultural history and labour history will find this an invaluable text.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5, Gender equality.

This book explores the life of Madeleine Smith, who in 1857 was tried for poisoning her secret lover. As well as charting the course of this illicit relationship and Madeleine’s subsequent trial, the authors draw on a wide range of sources to pursue themes such as the nature of gender relations and the extent of women’s social and commercial activities, and to bring vividly to life the world of the mid-Victorian middle class.The book contains new discoveries about Madeleine’s long and colourful life after the trial which confirm the view that it is only in fiction that the bad end unhappily.

The book will be of interest to academic social historians, but the fascination of its subject matter and the way in which much rich material is used to evoke a vivid sense of time and place, will also promote a wider interest among a more general readership.

This book tells the story of the emergence of the concept of crimes against humanity. It examines its origins, the ethical assumptions underpinning it, its legal and philosophical boundaries, and some of the controversies connected with it. A brief historical introduction is followed by an exploration of the various meanings of the term ‘crimes against humanity’ that have been suggested; a definition is proposed linking it to the idea of basic human rights. The book looks at some problems with the boundaries of the concept, the threshold for its proper application and the related issue of humanitarian intervention. It concludes with a discussion of the prospects for the further development of crimes-against-humanity law.

The work serves as a clear and compact introduction for students of politics, philosophy and law, as well as for the general reading public.

This study explores France’s preoccupation with memories of the Second World War through an examination of popular culture and one of its more enduring forms, crime fiction. It examines what such popular narratives have to tell us about past and present perceptions of the war years in France and how they relate to post-war debates over memory, culture and national identity.

Starting with narratives of the Resistance in the late 1940s and concluding with contemporary crime fiction for younger readers, Gorrara examines popular memories of the Second World War in dialogue with the changing social, cultural and political contexts of remembrance in post-war France. From memories of the persecution of Jews and French collaboration to the legacies of the concentration camps and the figure of the survivor-witness, all the crime novels discussed grapple with the challenges of what it means to live in the shadow of such a past for generations past, present and future.

This collection assembles many of the major theorists of postmodernism, across the humanities and the social sciences, to reconsider the nature and significance of the postmodern moment, as historical phase and as theoretical field. The authors look back on their own contributions to the postmodernism debate of the 1980s and 1990s and address the ways in which the contemporary world and their own concerns have developed, and the continuing validity or otherwise of ‘postmodern’ as a master designator of the contemporary.

Following a substantial introductory survey, the 15 compact articles include contributions from: Linda Hutcheon, Robert Venturi, Zygmunt Bauman, Douglas Kellner, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Lawrence Grossberg, Gianni Vattimo and Ernesto Laclau. The collection provides an important testimonial source for researchers interested in contemporary theoretical developments, whether in the arts and humanities or the social sciences. It will be a useful text for teachers leading classes with a focus on postwar intellectual history and cultural theory.

Exploring history 1400–1900: An anthology of primary sources reaches out to the reader across an expanse of 500 years. It offers a broad sweep of history in the light of three key themes: consumers and producers; beliefs and ideologies; and state-formation. Spanning continents and genres, the selection of documents illuminates the links between concurrent events in diverse places and illustrates the legacies of important social, religious and political trends. Previously unpublished accounts and newly translated material reveal new perspectives on both familiar and less well-known events.

In capturing this spectrum of human activity and endeavour the book uniquely provides insights into the daily concerns and critical debates of the day, and the opportunity to engage with primary sources as tools for the knowledge creation and critical evaluation. It will be an essential companion to a wide range of courses in historical study and an engaging read for anyone interested in researching, reviewing or relating more closely to a rich historical past.

The houses of history is a clear, jargon-free introduction to the major theoretical approaches employed by historians. This innovative critical reader provides accessible introductions to fourteen schools of thought, from the empiricist to the postcolonial, including chapters on Marxist history, Freud and psychohistory, the Annales, historical sociology, narrative, gender, public history and the history of the emotions.

Each chapter begins with a succinct description of the ideas integral to a particular theory. The authors then explore the insights and controversies arising from the application of this model, drawing upon debates and examples from around the world. Each chapter concludes with a representative example from a historian writing within this conceptual framework.

This newly revised edition of the highly successful textbook is the ideal basis for an introductory course in history and theory for students of history at all levels.

This lively and ground-breaking collection brings together work on forms of popular television within the authoritarian regimes of Europe after World War Two. Ten chapters based on new and original research examine approaches to programming and individual programmes in Spain, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Romania, the USSR and the GDR at a time when they were governed as dictatorships or one-party states. Drawing on surviving archives, scripts and production records, contemporary publications, YouTube clips and interviews with producers and performers, its chapters recover examples of television programming history unknown beyond national borders and often preserved largely in the memories of the audiences who lived with them.

The introduction examines how television can be considered ‘popular’ in circumstances where audience appeal is often secondary to the need for state control. Published in English, Popular television in authoritarian Europe represents a significant intervention in transnational television studies, making these histories available to scholars for the first time, encouraging comparative enquiry and extending the reach – intellectually and geographically – of European television history.

There is a foreword by John Corner and an informative timeline of events in the history of television in the countries covered.

Blair’s community is an exciting and timely book which challenges the accepted wisdom about the role of communitarian thought in the development of New Labour under Tony Blair. From the mid-1990s there has been a widespread view that Labour policies have reflected, or even been influenced by, the work of communitarian writers like Amitai Etzioni and John Macmurray, and philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel.

The book begins by establishing that such a view was widely, and frequently unquestioningly, held, in both popular and academic forums. It then identifies reasons for the persistence of this impression, the evidence on which it was based, and the understandings of communitarianism used by commentators. The book argues that existing accounts of ‘New Labour’s communitarianism’ fail to present an accurate picture because they are - in some cases explicitly - working with a generic or composite conception of communitarianism which bears little relation to the work of the communitarian writers whose names have been associated with the party.

This book argues that the welfare state cannot be understood purely as a set of social policy arrangements, but must be seen as a political institution, intended to achieve certain political objectives.

The political dimension of the welfare state is essential for understanding its initial emergence as well as assessing its ability to deal with contemporary challenges. Governments use welfare transfers to decrease the risk of political instability that may be politically disruptive and threaten to undermine social cohesion. The success of welfare institutions stems from their ability to foster a redistribution of resources and political consensus that has enabled long-term political stability and economic development.

The book develops a general model that looks at the interactive effects between welfare transfers, political instability and state capacity. It provides a unique theoretical contribution to the study of welfare spending in the context of globalisation and integration, analyses the key politial rationale for welfare programmes, namely their role in preserving social cohesion and governance and demonstrates clearly that welfare policies can be successfully adopted to meet new challenges and that retrenchment of the welfare state is not inevitable, using Scandinavia as a leading example of modern thinking policies.

The making of the Irish poor law, 1815-43 examines the debates preceding and surrounding the 1838 act on the nature of Irish poverty and the responsibilities of society towards it. It traces the various campaigns for a poor law from the later eighteenth century. The nature and internal frictions of the great Irish poor inquiry of 1833-36 are analysed, along with the policy recommendations made by its chair, Archbishop Whately. It considers the aims and limitations of the government’s measure and the public reaction to it in Ireland and Britain. Finally, it describes the implementation of the Poor Law between 1838 and 1843 under the controversial direction of George Nicholls.

It will be of particular importance to those with a serious interest in the history of social welfare, of Irish social thought and politics, and of British governance in Ireland in the early nineteenth century.

Family rhythms is the first textbook of its kind with an explicit focus on Ireland and Irish families. Uniquely, the book draws on original in-depth interviews with people of different ages to introduce contemporary scholarship on the family and to illustrate how Irish families have adapted and changed over time. With chapters on childhood, adolescence, parenting and grandparenthood, the book shows the resilience of families in different social and historical contexts. Each chapter includes a discussion of the challenges that face families and how social research can inform policy makers' responses.

Family rhythms is a comprehensive, user-friendly textbook that offers a variety of strategies for engaging readers, including direct encounters with qualitative data through the use of classroom oriented discussion panels. Synopses of landmark Irish studies are included throughout, bringing the insights from these key studies together in a single textbook for the first time.

Was Miliband successful at turning the page on New Labour and at re-imagining social democracy for the post-global financial crisis era? This study maps the ideas - old and new - that were debated and adopted by the Labour Party under Miliband and shows how they were transformed into policy proposals and adapted to contemporary circumstances. It seeks to demonstrate that the Labour Party under Miliband tried but failed to renew social democracy. This failure is one of the several reasons why 'Milibandism' was so overwhelmingly rejected by voters at the 2015 general election.

Goes offers a thought-provoking perspective on how political parties develop their thinking and political blueprints that will appeal to scholars and students of British politics and ideologies and to anyone interested in contemporary debates about social democracy.