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In the wake of Iran's revolution in 1978–79, a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy took control of the country. These dramatic changes impacted all sectors of society including a vast array of diverse peoples and cultures. In this book, Lois Beck provides an anthropological and historical account of Iran's many minorities. She focuses on the aftermath of the revolution, declaration of an Islamic republic, and Iraq-Iran war. Drawing on six decades of anthropological research, Beck provides frameworks for understanding how each of Iran's linguistic, religious, ethnic, ethno-national, and tribal minorities fashioned unique identities. These identities stem from factors relating to history, location, socioeconomic patterns, and sociocultural traits. They reflect the people's interactions with Iran's rulers and governments as they changed over time. A modern nation-state cannot be fully understood without knowing the extent of its reach in the peripheries and border regions and among its diverse peoples. This landmark study challenges existing scholarly accounts by offering broad and detailed perspectives on Iran's many distinct languages, religions, ethnicities, ethno-nations, and tribes.
The death of Carlos II in 1700 and the rise of Felipe V to the Spanish throne sparked a global war-and in New Spain, a cultural and political upheaval. As Bourbon loyalists staged elaborate ceremonies and circulated propaganda to legitimize the new dynasty, priests, artists, and local elites reimagined sacred kingship through vivid metaphors of death, rebirth, and regeneration. Sermons, rituals, devotional images, and unofficial texts anchored the new monarchy in familiar religious frameworks, linking the king's body to Christ's and reinforcing loyalty to both Church and Crown. In this contested public sphere, municipalities, religious orders, and colonial officials vied to display their allegiance and shape a renewed vision of empire. Frances L. Ramos's The Rebirth of the Spanish Empire offers a compelling and deeply researched account of how ritual, visual culture, and oratory redefined imperial identity in early eighteenth-century Mexico-illuminating the politics of loyalty and legitimacy during a time of dynastic change.
Abul A'la Maududi (1903–1979) was arguably one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, and a foundational Islamist thinker. This volume brings together a broad range of his important works for the first time, covering concerns such as anticolonialism, permissibility of violence, capitalism and gender roles, principles for an Islamic economy, innovation in legal frameworks as well as the limits of nationalist politics. Showcasing his writings across different genres, this volume includes influential early works such as his seminal Al Jihad fil Islam, Quranic exegesis and essays as well as later works on Islamic law. An extensive introduction situates Maududi's ideas within global anticolonial conversations as well as Islamic and South Asian debates on urgent contemporary political questions and highlights the conceptual innovations he carried out. Fresh translations allow readers to critically engage with Maududi's writings, capturing nuances and shifts in his ideas with greater clarity.
Spain's musical history has often resided on – or been consigned to – the margins of historical narratives about mainstream European culture. As a result, Spanish music is universally popular but seldom well understood outside Iberia. This volume offers, for the first time in English, a comprehensive survey of music in Spain from the Middle Ages to the modern era, including both classical and popular traditions. With chapters from a group of leading music scholars, the book reevaluates the history of music in Spain, from devotional works of the Middle Ages and Renaissance to masterpieces of the postwar avant-garde. It surveys a deep legacy of classical music as well as a rich heritage of folklore comprising songs and dances from Spain's many regions, especially but not exclusively Andalusian flamenco. Folklore in turn informed the nationalist repertoire with which music lovers are most familiar, including pieces by Albéniz, Granados, Falla, Rodrigo, and many others.
For activists in West Germany, politicization often began in childhood. This was frequently followed by decades of intense political engagement, in myriad forms and venues, insisting on the free and democratic values their post-fascist country was supposed to embody. Through oral histories of fifty-five West German activists, this study explores how individuals became and remained politicized. Belinda Davis examines the diverse lived experiences of these activists, highlighting how social change took place both through protest and in the building of alternatives. In doing so, this study challenges conventional portrayals of 'the student movement' and of the ''68ers' and reveals the critical role of activists' experiences across decades, locations and venues. At a moment when we once again face challenges to democracy and peaceful political expression, this historic engagement offers valuable lessons on the achievements of grassroots politics, emphasizing just how personal is the political.
There is a widespread assumption that both ethnicity itself, and ethnic conflict, are inevitable. Yet, we know very little about how ethnic identifications function in bureaucratic terms in Africa. The stakes of this problem are rapidly escalating in moves to digital identification and population knowledge systems. Focusing on Kenya, this study provides an urgently needed exploration of where ethnic classifications have come from, and where they might go. Through genealogies of tools of ethnic identification – maps, censuses, ID cards and legal categories for minorities and marginalised communities – Samantha Balaton-Chrimes challenges conventional understandings of classifications as legible. Instead, she shows them to be uncertain and vague in useful ways, opening up new modes of imagining how bureaucracy can be used to advance pluralism. Knowing Ethnicity holds important insights for policy makers and scholars of difference and governmentality in postcolonial societies, as well as African and ethnic politics.
For some Germans, Nazism represented an ecological outlook and a return to a simpler, healthier, more natural way of life founded on environmental harmony. That image fundamentally conflicts with the astonishing destructiveness of the Nazi military machine and its legacy of concentration camps, dictatorship, and mass murder. This study argues that these two facets of Nazism, the ecological and the imperial, were integrally intertwined. Peter Staudenmaier uses new archival evidence to examine this contested history, ranging from early organic farming movements to landscape protection advocates. In doing so, Staudenmaier reveals a remarkable range of practical endeavors in Nazi Germany that were shaped by ecological ideals coupled with potent racial myths. The Politics of Nature in Nazi Germany challenges previous scholarly frameworks, bringing together environmental history and the history of Nazism in new and revealing ways.
The Cambridge Companion to the Byzantine Church explores the intricate dimensions of the Church in Byzantium-its emergence, theology, art, liturgy and histories-and its afterlife, in captivity and in the modern world. Thirty leading theologians and historians of eastern Rome examine how people from Greece to Russia lived out their faith in liturgies, veneration of the saints, and other dimensions of church life, including its iconic art and architecture. The authors provide a rich overview and insights from the latest scholarship on the lives and beliefs of emperors and subjects across the Byzantine empire. The volume thereby fills a prominent gap in current offerings on the development and continuing impacts of the Byzantine church from the fourth to fifteenth centuries, and will serve as a valuable resource for scholars, a companion for students and an introduction for the wider community to this fascinating chapter in the history of Christianity.
In this rich study of early modern Würzburg, Jan de Vries reconstructs the demographic life of a pre-industrial city. Utilising modern demographic techniques, he analyses data about thousands of families between 1696–1711 and examines every stage of the life course from infancy, leaving home, marriage and fertility, to widowhood, remarriage, and mortality. Close study of a single German city allows for special attention to be paid to differences of social class and migrant status, and de Vries emphasises the critical role of migrants to the make-up of the urban community. This new interpretation allows for the Sharlin theory and other questions concerning marriage choice, fertility control, and mortality risks to be tested. At every stage, de Vries compares the findings for Würzburg to those of other cities in Germany and Europe, developing existing generalisations, and contributing to a better understanding of urban historical demography.
During the Great Leap Forward (1958–62), the collectivization of the Chinese countryside had catastrophic results, but how did this short-lived political experiment reshape urban life? In the first English history of urban collectivization, Fabio Lanza explores the most radical attempts to remake cities under Mao. Examining the universalization of production, the collectivization of life, including communal canteens and nurseries, and women's liberation, intended to transform modern urban life along socialist lines, he shows how many residents, and women in particular, struggled to enact a radical change in their everyday lives. He argues that the daily reality of millions of city residents proved the limitations of an effort that tied emancipation to industrial labor and substituted subjugation to the assembly line for subjugation to the stove, confronting some of the crucial contradictions of the socialist revolution.
Examining sectarian divergence in the early modern Middle East, this study provides a fresh perspective on the Sunni-Shi'i division. Drawing on Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and European sources, Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer explores the paradox of an Ottoman state that combined rigid ideological discourses with pragmatic governance. Through an analysis of key figures, events, periods, and policies, it reveals how political, economic, and religious forces intersected, challenging simplistic sectarian binaries. Baltacıoğlu-Brammer provides a comprehensive historical account of Ottoman governance during the 'long sixteenth century', focusing on its relationship with non-Sunni Muslim subjects, particularly the Qizilbash. As both the founders of the Safavid Empire and the largest Shiʿi-affiliated group within the Ottoman realm, the Qizilbash occupied a crucial yet often misunderstood position. Boundaries of Belonging examines their role within the empire, challenging the notion that they were merely persecuted outsiders by highlighting their agency in shaping imperial policies, negotiating their status, and influencing the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry in Anatolia, Kurdistan, and Mesopotamia.
How did Soviet Jews rebuild their lives after the Holocaust? How did they navigate Stalinist rule, reclaim their place in society, and seek retribution against those responsible for wartime atrocities? This study uncovers the resilience and adaptability of Soviet Jews in postwar Moldavia, a borderland where identities were fluid, loyalties were tested, and survival demanded ingenuity. Using newly accessed archives and oral histories, Diana Dumitru reveals how Jews pursued professional success, resisted discrimination, and sought vengeance on their wrongdoers. Far from passive subjects of repression, they carved out spaces for agency in an era of contradictions – between social mobility and state-imposed limitations, between the Soviet promise of equality and the rising anti-Jewish drive of the early 1950s, and between ideological control and personal ambition. In doing so, this study offers a fresh perspective on a complex, understudied chapter of 20th-century history.
Hipparchus was the most important astronomer of the ancient Greek world. This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to almost everything that can be known or reasonably surmised about his life and work. Hipparchus was the first to apply an effective geometric model to the cosmos, which enabled him to predict the positions of the Sun, Moon and stars more reliably than before. He was also the first to catalogue most of the stars that were visible in the northern hemisphere, giving a detailed account of their risings, settings and culminations. His most important discovery was the long-term movement of the sky, known as precession. Crucially, this study provides a translation and analysis of Hipparchus' only surviving work, the Commentary on the Phenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus, and reconstructs his catalogue of the stars, which has not survived, using a modern precession model.
What kind of trouble lies ahead? How can we successfully transition towards a sustainable future? Drawing on a remarkably broad range of insights from complex systems and the functioning of the brain to the history of civilizations and the workings of modern societies, the distinguished scientist Marten Scheffer addresses these key questions of our times. He looks to the past to show how societies have tipped out of trouble before, the mechanisms that drive social transformations and the invisible hands holding us back. He traces how long-standing practices such as the slave trade and foot-binding were suddenly abandoned and how entire civilizations have collapsed to make way for something new. Could we be heading for a similarly dramatic change? Marten Scheffer argues that a dark future is plausible but not yet inevitable and he provides us instead with a hopeful roadmap to steer ourselves away from collapse-and toward renewal.
In the classical law of nations there was a doctrine of civil war. This book sets out to recover the forgotten legal tradition that shaped the modern world from 1575-1975. The result is an autonomous reassessment of four hundred years of the law of insurgencies and revolutions, both in state practice and in legal scholarship. Its journey through centuries of rebellion and the rule of law touches some of the most basic questions of international law across ages. What does it mean to stand among the nations of the world? Who should be welcomed among the subjects of international law, who should not, and who should decide? Its findings not only help make the classical doctrine understandable again, but also offer potential new insights for present-day lawyers about the origins, aspirations and vulnerabilities of the legal tradition with which they work today.