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Order, Authority, Nation develops a sociological account of political conversion from left to right through an examination of the historical case of Marcel Déat and the French neo-socialists. Déat and the neo-socialists began their careers in the 1920s as democratic socialists but became fascists and Nazi collaborators by the end of World War II. While existing accounts of this shift emphasize the ideological continuity underlying neo-socialism and fascism, this book centers the fundamentally discontinuous and relational character of political conversion in its analysis. Highlighting the active part played by Déat and the neo-socialists in their own reinvention at different moments of their trajectory, it argues that political conversion is a phenomenon defined not just by a change in belief, but at its core, by how political actors respond to changing political circumstances. This sociological account of a phenomenon often treated polemically offers a unique contribution to the sociology and history of socialism and fascism.
How were environments and politics remade by sovereigns, floods, mapmakers, migrants, rioters, and writers during wetland improvement projects in early modern England? Violent Waters examines flagship ventures which promised to transform unruly fenland fringes into orderly terrain at the heart of national power and productivity. In practice, these projects sparked constitutional controversy, new floods, and huge riots. The first state-led project in Hatfield Level brought local, national, and transnational interests into contact and conflict for almost a century. Elly Robson Dezateux traces the environmental politics that emerged as water and land were constructed and contested, both mentally and materially. These disputes pivoted on urgent questions about risk and justice, which became entangled in civil war conflict and exposed the limits of central authority and technology. Ultimately, improvement was destabilised by a lack of legitimacy and the dynamism of local custom as a method of environmental management and collective action. Wetland communities, as much as improvers and sovereigns, remade the terrain of politics and the future of the fens.
For centuries, Western scholars portrayed China either as a land of superior morality, economy, and governance or as a formidable country of pagans that posed a global threat to Western values. Idealized images of China were used to shame rulers for their incompetence, while China was demonized as an external threat to cover up domestic political failures. In the twentieth century, the geopolitics of global capitalism have facilitated more nuanced perspectives, but the diversifying of knowledge about China is far from complete. In this thought-provoking study, Ho-fung Hung finds that both Western elites and China's authoritarian regime today continue to promote many Orientalist stereotypes to advance their economic interests and political projects. He shows how big-picture historical, social, and economic changes are inextricably linked to fluctuations in the realm of ideas. Only open debate can overcome extremes of fantasy and fear.
Why did charity become the outlet for global compassion? Charity After Empire traces the history of humanitarian agencies such as Oxfam, Save the Children and Christian Aid. It shows how they obtained a permanent presence in the alleviation of global poverty, why they were supported by the public and how they were embraced by governments in Britain and across Africa. Through several fascinating life stories and illuminating case studies across the UK and in countries such as Botswana, Zimbabwe and Kenya, Hilton explains how the racial politics of Southern Africa shaped not only the history of international aid but also the meaning of charity and its role in the alleviation of poverty both at home and abroad. In doing so, he makes a powerful case for the importance of charity in the shaping of modern Britain over the extended decades of decolonization in the latter half of the twentieth century.
What was the role of local history-writing in the early Islamic World, and why was it such a popular way of thinking about the past? In this innovative study, Harry Munt explores this understudied phenomenon. Examining primary sources in both Arabic and Persian, Munt argues that local history-writing must be situated within its appropriate historical contexts to explain why it was such a popular way of thinking about the past, more popular than most other contemporary forms of history-writing. The period until the end of the eleventh century CE saw many significant developments in ideas about community, about elite groups and about social authority. This study demonstrates how local history-writing played a key role in these developments, forming part of the way that Muslim scholars negotiated the dialogues between more universalist and more particularist approaches to the understanding of communities. Munt further demonstrates that local historians were participating in debates that ranged into disciplines far beyond history-writing.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, venereal disease, or the 'pox,' was a dreaded diagnosis throughout Europe. Its ghastly marks, along with their inexorable link to sex, were so stigmatizing that it was commonly called 'the secret disease.' How do we capture everyday experiences of a disease that so few people admitted having? Olivia Weisser's remarkable history invites readers into the teeming, vibrant pox-riddled streets of early modern London. She uncovers the lives of the poxed elite as well as of the maidservants and prostitutes who left few words behind, showing how marks of the disease offered a language for expressing acts that were otherwise unutterable. This new history of sex, stigma, and daily urban life takes readers down alleys where healers peddled their tinctures, enters kitchens and gardens where ordinary sufferers made cures, and listens in on intimate exchanges between patients and healers in homes and in taverns.
In the wake of the 2011 uprising in Syria, a number of Syrian intellectuals were forced into exile. Many of these intellectuals played a crucial role in mobilising people in the early days of the movement, but once in exile an irreconcilable tension emerged between their revolutionary narratives and the violent reality on the ground. Zeina Al Azmeh explores this tension, shedding light on whether and how exile influenced narratives, strategies, and political agency. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in Paris and Berlin, Al Azmeh examines how writers and artists work to reconcile revolutionary ideals with the realities of war and displacement. Bringing together insights from cultural sociology, postcolonial thought, and migration studies, Syrian Intellectuals in Exile provides new analytical tools for understanding the intersection of intellectual work and social movements. This study blends empirical research with personal narratives, offering a timely reflection on exile, memory, and the limits of intellectual activism.
Why is the Liberal International Order unraveling – and will this lead to global disorder? Broken Cycle explores this urgent question by viewing international politics through a dynamic lens focused on the rise and fall of great powers – whose periodic global wars determine who rules and which ideas and values prevail in the reordered international system. Randall L. Schweller uncovers recurring patterns of change, offering a framework to anticipate the contours of the emerging world. Rather than tracking short-term diplomatic shifts, this book seeks the deeper rhythms of history – cycles of growth, expansion, and decline – that shape international politics over centuries. These patterns are not inevitable, but they are powerful. By understanding them, we gain insight into the forces driving today's dissent – and tomorrow's possibilities. This is a study of the structural forces that govern change, the crises that break the old order, and the ideas that rise in its place.
Andrew Park tells the story of the rise and fall of the plebiscite, once seen as a promising democratic solution to international conflict which – more than once – became embroiled in controversy and war in the first half of the twentieth century. The book's central figure is the brilliant but largely forgotten American scholar Sarah Wambaugh, the leading expert on the plebiscite technique whose dramatic career took her to many of the world's political hotspots. The norms she developed for the technique continue to shape how self-determination and popular suffrage in international affairs are thought about and conducted today. In a world where borders are again being redrawn by force and democracy everywhere appears under strain, this book is a timely and compelling reminder that such events are not new.
This volume offers in-depth coverage of varieties of English across the world, outside of the British and North American arenas. It is split into two parts, with Part one dedicated to varieties of English across Africa, and Part two looking at varieties in Asia, and Australia and the Pacific. There are introductory chapters dealing with the colonial transportation of English overseas, and the generic types of English which resulted, often labelled World Englishes, and examinations of English-lexifier pidgins and creoles. The remaining sections look at different geographic regions. Anglophone Africa divides into three blocks: west, east and south, each with different linguistic ecologies determined by history and demography. Asia, especially South Asia and South-East Asia, is similar in the kinds of English it now shows, with the significance of East Asia for varieties of English increasing in recent years. Varieties of English in Australia and the Pacific are also examined.
Military governor, architect, alchemist and poet, Gao Pian (821–87) was one of the most intriguing characters to shape events in ninth-century China. His trajectory provides a step-by-step record of the late Tang empire's military, fiscal, and administrative unravelling. Utilising exceptionally rich sources, including documents from Gao Pian's secretariat, inscriptions, narrative and religious literature, and Gao Pian's own poetry, Franciscus Verellen challenges the official historians' portrait of Gao as an 'insubordinate minister' and Daoist zealot. In an innovative analysis, he argues that the life of this extraordinary general casts much-needed light on ideas of allegiance and disobedience, provincial governance, military affairs and religious life in the waning years of the Tang.
Since the 1970s, historians have claimed that an insatiable 'will to know' has powered the growing concern with male homosexuality across Europe and the West, especially from the late nineteenth century onwards. Unwilling To Know challenges this dominant narrative by demonstrating how, unlike in neighboring France, Germany, and Britian, a mixture of silence and code surrounded homosexuality in Belgium until well after the Second World War. Whereas hundreds of scientific monographs on homosexuality were published in wider Europe during the fin de siècle, the lack of publishing in Belgium was combined with a marked lack of interest from the police, psychiatrists and wider society. Through internationally comparative analyses, and with particular reference to the importance of religion, Wannes Dupont complicates overly monolithic views of European developments based on a handful of familiar national cases. In doing so, this study lays bare the many cultural, institutional, legal and religious differences that have shaped the scrutiny of homosexuality in diverging ways.
As the 20th century recedes, how should its history be written? The 1920s and 1930s were a time of paradox, of great conflict and contradiction. If those years were the crucible of a new metropolitan modernity and its possibilities, what were the forward-moving forces and ideas? What were their effects and where did they lead? The Modernist Wish provides a comprehensive, non-hierarchical and integrated history of Europe's early 20th century across the whole of the continent. Uniting social, cultural-intellectual, and political history alongside military-strategic and geopolitical dimensions, Geoff Eley examines the distinctiveness of early-20th century modernity. He draws out the exceptional character of the interwar years and their longer-run social and political fallout, based in the excitements of metropolitan living, the progressive achievements of an industrialized machine world, and the material possibilities for fashioning new forms of selfhood. In presenting a truly European history for our time, this study encompasses both the grand narratives of large-scale transformations, and the everyday realities of individual lived experiences.
The traumatic Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica, and the Ibero-Catholic colonialism that followed, truly transformed Indigenous political, economic, and socio-cultural practices. Confronted by dogmatic European literary regimes, strident indoctrination, and acts of structural violence, how could 'Aztec' education have survived in colonial times? An Unholy Pedagogy rethinks education studies by centering discussions on Indigenous visions of learning that shaped schooling throughout the sixteenth century. Joshua Jacob Fitzgerald tracks education systems before the Spanish-Catholic invasion, examining the writings, art, and architecture of Nahua communities. He analyses Nahuatl primary sources and historical art and archaeological sources, focusing especially on materials produced by Indigenous and Indigenous-Christian artists and scribes. This fascinating interdisciplinary study reveals the ways that Nahua students transformed pedagogy, shaped learning, and preserved local knowledge.
What was the role of insects in defining the human during the British eighteenth century? If humans have always been both helpfully and antagonistically entangled with insects, why were insects absent from the stories told in the eighteenth-century realist novel? Through close ecocritical readings of classic eighteenth-century works including Robinson Crusoe and Emma, Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace reconsiders the history of entomology as science and art and places anthropomorphism in its historical context. She examines how insects were collected, classified, transported, and illustrated, touching on places and phenomena such as the Dead Zoo, and shows how they helped establish a particular way of thinking about the place of the human in the natural world. Encouraging us to rethink the traditional humanistic paradigms issuing from the Enlightenment, Wallace demonstrates that, in light of newer biological perspectives like symbiosis, a renewed concept of the human is imperative.
This formative period of EU law witnessed an intense struggle over the emergence of a constitutional practice. While the supranational institutions, including the European Commission, the European Court of Justice and the European Parliament, as well as EU law academics helped to develop and promote the constitutional practice, member state governments and judiciaries were generally reluctant to embrace it. The struggle resulted in an uneasy stalemate in which the constitutional practice was allowed to influence the doctrines, shape and functioning of the European legal order that now underpins the EU, but a majority of member state governments rejected European constitutionalism as the legitimating principle of the new EU formed on basis of the Treaty of Maastricht (1992). The struggle and eventual stalemate over the constitutional practice traced in this book accounts for the fragile and partial system of rule of law that exists in the EU today.