Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. The author argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy of a cultural ideal.
Crucial to the operation of this paradox and fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the interweaving of Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose centrifugal strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down to the current internal predicaments of the European Community or the tragedy of the Balkan conflicts.

Jacob Burckhardt claimed that the state in Renaissance Italy became "a work of art". In this book, the authors illiminate the corollary: that art in Italy became a work of state. They study centres of power under three distinctive governments - a civic republic of the 14th century, a princely court of the 15th, and an absolutist state of the 16th. The authors argue that, no less than armies, laws and taxes, painted halls of state were strategic instruments, tactical weapons and technical machines of government.;The three rooms examined here are Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Sala dei Nove in Siena (1338-40), Andrea Mantegna's Camera Picta in Mantua (1465-74), and Giorgio Vasari's Sala Grande in Florence (1563-71), where the wedding procession of Giovanna of Austria and Francesco de'Medici culminated in 1565. The authors investigate the rooms as monuments of public art transformed by fundamental changes in political regimes, artistic practices and cultural values. They posit that far from merely reflecting political messages, the art both constructed and contested ideology. It follows that instead of looking through art objects for the realities allegedly underlying them, the authors see the signs encoded in art as a kind of reality.;The authors go beyond secure frontiers of history and art to a field of inquiry that locates the material of investigation in a shifting calculus of relations between images, texts and circumstances. They understand art as a form of power while charting the operations of power in the forms of art.

In The Stages of Economic Growth, for which he is known around the world, W. W. Rostow distinguished five basic stages of growth experienced by societies as they change from a pre-industrial state to full economic maturity. In this book the analysis is continued but the focus is shifted, from economic growth to politics. Professor Rostow see politics as an eternal triangle of competing imperatives - of security, welfare, and constitutional order. Using this concept, he examines the political meaning and content of each of the stages as experienced by eight countries; Great Britain, France, China, Japan, Russia, Turkey, Mexico and the United States. He goes on to consider, in the heart of the book, a uniquely political stage: the search for quality which is possible in an age of high mass consumption. Special attention is given the United States. Professor Rostow also examines the character of politics in the developing nations of today, and makes explicit what he sees to be the lessons of history and the contemporary world for these nations. He concludes by using his analysis to speculate on possibilities for peace in the global community.

This book presents estimates of the growth of the tsarist economy during the 'industrialization era', 1885 1913. The performance of the tsarist economy is compared with that of Soviet Russia during the plan era and of other industrialized countries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its main importance is to provide a frame of reference against which to contrast the Soviet performance. The author finds a stronger performance from the tsarist economy than the literature had led us to suspect, and he disputes several of the established views of economic historians concerning Russian agriculture and the Russian nineteenth-century business cycle.

Justus Moser was a pivotal figure in the age of the German Enlightenment. Administrator, journalist, historian, man of letters, Moser is renowned as one of Germany's finest prose stylists and as one of its most articulate political writers. Known through his political writings for his commitment to conservative reform, he is often called the Edmund Burke of Germany and the father of German conservatism. He is also celebrated for his pioneering Osnabruck History, the first modern social and economic history and a forerunner to Ranke, Marx, and the German historical revolution of the nineteenth century. This work is the first extensive biography of Moser to place him within his society and the world of the German Enlightenment. Using Moser's published and unpublished writings, his letters, essays, and histories, the author has written a total history of Moser's world through Moser's eyes.

In 1776 Landgrave Frederick II of Hesse-Cassel dispatched 19,000 'auxiliaries' to assist the British in the American Revolution. While Frederick's action continues to color Americans' view of him, his 'enlightened' use of the funds from the soldier trade for domestic initiatives is less well known. In analyzing the origins, course, and effectiveness of domestic policymaking in Hesse-Cassel, Charles Ingrao finds that Frederick was neither as evil as we might think nor as enlightened as we might like to believe. By examining the interplay of Enlightenment ideas with entrenched Christian values, cameralist tenets, and militaristic tendencies, Professor Ingrao downplays the 'enlightenment' component in enlightened government. He also places greater emphasis on the constructive role and active cooperation of corporate bodies than have studies of similar states in the eighteenth century. The impact of the regime's numerous reforms was limited by its adherence to established values, its respect for existing institutions, its reluctance to sacrifice the welfare of any element of the population, and its failure to anticipate the unwelcome consequences of many of its initiatives. Professor Ingrao's findings stress the impracticality of dramatic change in the pre-revolutionary era - or in any pre-revolutionary society.

Published on the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of America, "Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance" uncovers from history the strange story of another, lesser-known Spanish explorer, Francisco Noguerol de Ulloa. In 1556, accompanied by his second wife, Francisco returned to his home in Spain after a profitable, 20-year sojourn in Peru. However, unlike other rich conquistadores who returned to their land of birth, Francisco was not allowed to settle into a life of leisure. Instead, he was charged with bigamy and the illegal shipment of silver, and was consequently arrested and imprisoned. Francisco's first wife (thought long dead) had filed suit in Spain against her renegade husband. So begins the legal tale of an explorer and his two wives, reconstructed through the authors' original archival research. Drawing on the records from the trial, the narrative of Francisco's adventures provides a window into daily life in 16th-century Spain, as well as the experience of conquest and settlement of the New World. Told from the point of view of the conquerors, Francisco's story reveals not only the lives of the middle class and minor nobility, but also much about those at the lower rungs of the social order.