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The end of colonial rule in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean was one of the most important and dramatic developments of the twentieth century. In the decades after World War II, dozens of new states emerged as actors in global politics. Long-established imperial regimes collapsed, some more or less peacefully, others amid mass violence. This book takes an incisive look at decolonization and its long-term consequences, revealing it to be a coherent yet multidimensional process at the heart of modern history.Jan Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel trace the decline of European, American, and Japanese colonial supremacy from World War I to the 1990s. Providing a comparative perspective on the decolonization process, they shed light on its key aspects while taking into account the unique regional and imperial contexts in which it unfolded. Jansen and Osterhammel show how the seeds of decolonization were sown during the interwar period and argue that the geopolitical restructuring of the world was intrinsically connected to a sea change in the global normative order. They examine the economic repercussions of decolonization and its impact on international power structures, its consequences for envisioning world order, and the long shadow it continues to cast over new states and former colonial powers alike.Concise and authoritative, Decolonization is the essential introduction to this momentous chapter in history, the aftershocks of which are still being felt today

Solide und umfassende Lektüre zur wirtschaftlichen, politischen und gesellschaftlichen Weltgeschichte der Zeit zwischen 1870 und 1945 für ein historisches Fachpublikum. Mit umfangreichem Verzeichnis einschlägiger Forschungsliteratur

The first global history of the middle class While the nineteenth century has been described as the golden age of the European bourgeoisie, the emergence of the middle class and bourgeois culture was by no means exclusive to Europe. The Global Bourgeoisie explores the rise of the middle classes around the world during the age of empire. Bringing together eminent scholars, this landmark essay collection compares middle-class formation in various regions, highlighting differences and similarities, and assesses the extent to which bourgeois growth was tied to the increasing exchange of ideas and goods.

This volume combines a present-day and historical concern on the topic of global publics between the communication revolution of the 1870s and the digital age. Building on earlier theories of public spheres, Valeska Huber and Jurgen Osterhammel expand the notion of global publics not only geographically but also by charting new thematic territory, describing global publics as courts of global opinion, as market places, or as arenas for competition. As the first historical volume ever to combine different facets of global publics ranging from infrastructures, the press, film and theatre to human rights politics, it brings together established and emerging authors in the field of history and from related disciplines such as geography, sociology, and literature who explore how global publics were configured, imagined, and fragmented. In this way, Global Publics: Their Power and Their Limits not only provides a new conceptual framework and important case studies but also shows how histories of global communication might be studied in the future

How did the way people looked at music affect the interactions among different groups and individuals in the course of the 20th century? This volume presents a number of case examples from various musical genres and thus offers many insights into both general and genre-specific figurations of musical communication. This ranges from direct live acts to political productions, which cause inclusive and exclusive mechanisms to become active in communication processes taking place at various levels. The contributions to this volume show how, and why, opportunities for communication arise during musical activities which can lead to either complete harmony or fierce dissonance. --From publisher's website

Global Interdependence provides a new account of world history from the end of World War II to the present, an era when transnational communities began to challenge the long domination of the nation-state. In this single-volume survey, leading scholars elucidate the political, economic, cultural, and environmental forces that have shaped the planet in the past sixty years.Offering fresh insight into international politics since 1945, Wilfried Loth examines how miscalculations by both the United States and the Soviet Union brought about a Cold War conflict that was not necessarily inevitable. Thomas Zeiler explains how American free-market principles spurred the creation of an entirely new economic order--a global system in which goods and money flowed across national borders at an unprecedented rate, fueling growth for some nations while also creating inequalities in large parts of the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. From an environmental viewpoint, J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke contend that humanity has entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene era, in which massive industrialization and population growth have become the most powerful influences upon global ecology. Petra Goedde analyzes how globalization has impacted indigenous cultures and questions the extent to which a generic culture has erased distinctiveness and authenticity. She shows how, paradoxically, the more cultures blended, the more diversified they became as well.Combining these different perspectives, volume editor Akira Iriye presents a model of transnational historiography in which individuals and groups enter history not primarily as citizens of a country but as migrants, tourists, artists, and missionaries--actors who create networks that transcend traditional geopolitical boundaries