Suchergebnisse

Understanding the origins of capitalism in terms of feudal crisis, agrarian class structures and economic development in Europe has been an enduring concern of a growing body of scholarship focusing on changes in social property relations. This work has been distinctive in highlighting long-term patterns of social property relations central to shaping late medieval and early modern Europe, variegated patterns of serfdom within feudalism, class conflicts intrinsic to the emergence of agrarian capitalism, and thus capitalist 'transition' through different paths of development. Most recently, the implications of a focus on social property relations have been drawn out in its relevance for International Relations (IR), expressly in terms of tracing specificities within the age of absolutism that shaped the expansion of the states-system and its relation to modernity. This article outlines and engages with past and present debates linked to the social property relations approach. It raises several problematics through an engagement with the theorising of political modernity by Antonio Gramsci and on this basis offers pointers towards future lines of enquiry from which further reflection on the conditions of historical and contemporary state formation and restructuring may proceed.

In this book, Maarten Van Ginderachter investigates the relationship between working-class identities, socialist politics, ethnicity and nationhood in modern Europe. This new contribution to nationalism studies challenges the dominant view of nationalism as the result of modernization as well as the assumption that nationalism is necessarily a reflection of entho-linguistic identity.

The extraction of zinc from ores began late in history, mainly because of the fact that it tended to evaporate when smelting in the open was attempted. It was only when closed stills began to be used for liquor distillation that the same method could be adopted for zinc. This technique began to be used in China and India in medieval times, the major zinc mine in India being at Jāwar in Mewar, Rajasthan. These mines remained in operation till at least well into the seventeenth century, when zinc imports from China apparently made zinc extraction at Jāwar unprofitable and the mines closed down. The famous Bidri ware datable to the eighteenth century seems to have depended for its zinc on China.

Abstract
Early modernists have been among the most early and active contributors to the establishment of New Diplomatic History. How has their work affected that on other periods, and how might it continue to do so? How have such extensive histories written during the past decade reframed a wider understanding of the European state system that did so much to establish modern diplomacy? And how might such an understanding be relevant to modern, even contemporary, historians, as well as to other scholars?

"Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity. The First Modern Jew provides a riveting look at how Spinoza went from being one of Judaism's most notorious outcasts to one of its most celebrated, if still highly controversial, cultural icons, and a powerful and protean symbol of the first modern secular Jew. Ranging from Amsterdam to Palestine and back again to Europe, the book chronicles Spinoza's posthumous odyssey from marginalized heretic to hero, the exemplar of a whole host of Jewish identities, including cosmopolitan, nationalist, reformist, and rejectionist. Daniel Schwartz shows that in fashioning Spinoza into "the first modern Jew," generations of Jewish intellectuals -German liberals, East European maskilim, secular Zionists, and Yiddishists- have projected their own dilemmas of identity onto him, reshaping the Amsterdam thinker in their own image. The many afterlives of Spinoza are a kind of looking glass into the struggles of Jewish writers over where to draw the boundaries of Jewishness and whether a secular Jewish identity is indeed possible. Cumulatively, these afterlives offer a kaleidoscopic view of modern Jewish culture and a vivid history of an obsession with Spinoza that continues to this day."--Jacket

Histories of the Turks were a central means through which English authors engaged in intellectual and cultural terms with the Ottoman Empire, its advance into Europe following the capture of Constantinople (1454), and its continuing central European power up to the treaty of Karlowitz (1699). Writing the Ottomans examines historical writing on the Turks in England from 1480-1700. It explores the evolution of this discourse from its continental roots, and its development in response to moments of military crisis such as the Long War of 1593-1606 and the War of the Holy League 1683-1699, as well as Anglo-Ottoman trade and diplomacy throughout the seventeenth century. From the writing of central authors such as Richard Knolles and Paul Rycaut, to lesser known names, it reads English histories of the Turks in their intellectual, religious, political, economic and print contexts, and analyses their influence on English perceptions of the Ottoman world.

Arming slaves as soldiers is a counterintuitive idea. Yet throughout history, in many varied societies, slaveholders have entrusted slaves with the use of deadly force. This book is the first to survey the practice broadly across space and time, encompassing the cultures of classical Greece, the early Islamic kingdoms of the Near East, West and East Africa, the British and French Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America.To facilitate cross-cultural comparisons, each chapter addresses four crucial issues: the social and cultural facts regarding the arming of slaves, the experience of slave soldiers, the ideological origins and consequences of equipping enslaved peoples for battle, and the impact of the practice on the status of slaves and slavery itself. What emerges from the book is a new historical understanding: the arming of slaves is neither uncommon nor paradoxical but is instead both predictable and explicable

"This book answers the need for a contextual, long-term and interpretative analysis of risk from original sources. Risk has historically been a way of imagining what could happen in the future based on expert theories and predictions. This book explores this notion of 'managing the future' by tracing the conceptual development of risk from its origin in Islamic Koranic theology. It follows its long voyage from mercantile law in Medieval Mediterranean to the mathematical invention of probability in games of chance; from the birth of journalism in Britain with Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year to the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 and the subsequent controversy between apocalyptic believers and enlightened philosophers. Tracking the growth and evolution of risk as a concept across various historical periods and events, Mairal highlights four key features of risk- time, knowledge, relationship and probability- and argues that risk is not based on perception as it is generally presented, but rather on knowledge accrued and developed over a vast historical timeframe. A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk will be of great interest to students and scholars of risk management."

"In the wake of the Arab uprisings, the Middle East descended into a frenzy of political turmoil and unprecedented human tragedy which reinforced regrettable stereotypes about the moribund state of Arab intellectual and cultural life. This volume sheds important light on diverse facets of the post-war Arab world and its vibrant intellectual, literary and political history. Cutting-edge research is presented on such wide-ranging topics as poetry, intellectual history, political philosophy, and religious reform and cultural resilience all across the length and breadth of the Arab world, from Morocco to the Gulf States. This is an important statement of new directions in Middle East studies that challenges conventional thinking and has added relevance to the study of global intellectual history more broadly." (Publisher's description)