Edward Said is one of the foremost thinkers writing today. His work as a literary and cultural critic, a political commentator, and the champion of the cause of Palestinian rights has given him a unique position in western intellectual life. This new book is a major exploration and assessment of his writings in all these main areas.

Focusing on Said's insistence on the connection between literature, politics and culture, Kennedy offers an overview and assessment of the main strands of Said's work, drawing out the links and contradictions between each area. The book begins with an examination of "Orientalism," one of the founding texts of post-colonial studies. Kennedy looks at the book in detail, probing both its strengths and weaknesses, and linking it to its sequel, "Culture and Imperialism," She then examines Said's work on the Palestinian people, with his emphasis on the need for a Palestinian narrative to counter pro-Israeli accounts of the Middle East, and his searing criticisms of US, Israeli, and even Arab governments. The book closes with an examination of Said's importance in the field of post-colonial studies, notably colonial discourse analysis and post-colonial theory, and his significance as a public intellectual.

This book will be of great interest to anyone studying post-colonialism, literary theory, politics, and the Middle East, as well as anyone interested in Said's writings.

This volume brings together original essays by leading historians of the Atlantic World, representing recent developments in historiography of the period. These essays present the argument that coercive imperial authority has been vastly overrated. Distance, the primacy of trade over politics, and the refusal of colonized peoples to recognize European authority resulted in de-centralized "American empires".

This innovative volume brings together original essays by leading historians of the Atlantic World, representing the latest developments in historiography of the period. These essays present the argument that coercive imperial authority has been vastly overrated. Distance, the primacy of trade over politics, and the refusal of colonized peoples to recognize European authority resulted in de-centralized 'American' empires.

This work, first published in 1897, is neither more nor less than the history of China as it has been written during successive ages by the authorized historians of the Empire. The documents on which the work is based, together with the writings of Confucius and Mencius, are the only truly authentic sources from which the story of the long-lived nation can be obtained. Commencing with the mythical and legendary periods, the work moves on through successive dynasties until that of the Ts'ing concluding its account in the early years of the twentieth century.

This collection fills the need for a resource that adequately conceptualizes the place of non-European histories in the larger narrative of world history. These essays were selected with special emphasis on their comparative outlook. The chapters range from the British Empire (India, Egypt, Palestine) to Indonesia, French colonialism (Brittany and Algeria), South Africa, Fiji, and Japanese imperialism. Within the chapters, key concepts such as gender, land and law, and regimes of knowledge are considered.

'We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.' - W. Somerset Maugham The Victorian era boasted the glory of the Empire and the grandeur that Empire afforded, it saw huge technological advances in civil engineering and transport, mass urbanisation and social change, as well as still-treasured literature and the most popular sports that we play today. But it was also a time of great poverty, of mass child labour and prostitution, of the Irish Potato Famine and British concentration camps in the Boer War, of the boom and bust of the California Gold Rush and slavery being fought over in America, of sexual hypocrisy and rigid class differences. The Victorians explores the Victorian world from its cholera epidemics and asylums to its workhouses and chimneysweeps, from the Opium Wars to London's opium dens, from the gangs of New York to convicts bound for Australia, from body-snatchers to freakshows, from the British in Afghanistan to the American Civil War, from imposters claiming fortunes to women pretending to be men. Included are the lives of such colourful figures as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, the Elephant Man and Jack the Ripper, and the world that inspired Dracula, detective stories and the character of Sherlock Holmes. Expertly written and using 180 photographs, paintings, and illustrations, The Victorians reveals that behind the splendour and the facades was a world of poverty, disease and hypocrisy, where fortunes could be quickly made - and swiftly lost.

Pierre Loti was a member of a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco at Fez, and in this book he gives us an extraordinarily fascinating account of the journey. The departure of the caravan from Tangier, the encampments, the nightly arrival of the Mouna, the crossing of the Oued-M'Cazen in flood, the fantasies and powder-play of the Arab horsemen, and the magnificent state entry into Fez, are described in a succession of vivid vignettes.

This volume covers the first one hundred years of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, formerly the Royal Central Asian Society. It traces its fons et origo in the Central Asian Question, within the context of the 'Great Game', and continues its fascinating chronology through the two World Wars to the present day. There are separate chapters on its widely drawn membership, variety of activities and archive collection. Throughout the pages are glimpses and vignettes of some of its extraordinary, even eccentric, members and their astonishing adventures. The wealth of factual and often amusing detail makes it a very lively account, which is also valuable as a work of reference for all interested in Asia. The book is generously illustrated and includes some of the Society's unique archival photographs not previously published.

This collection fills the need for a resource that adequately conceptualizes the place of non-European histories in the larger narrative of world history. These essays were selected with special emphasis on their comparative outlook. The chapters range from the British Empire (India, Egypt, Palestine) to Indonesia, French colonialism (Brittany and Algeria), South Africa, Fiji, and Japanese imperialism. Within the chapters, key concepts such as gender, land and law, and regimes of knowledge are considered.

Can anyone really own a culture? This magnificent account argues that the story of global civilisations is one of mixing, sharing, and borrowing. It shows how art forms have crisscrossed continents over centuries to produce masterpieces. From Nefertiti's lost city and the Islamic Golden Age to twentieth century Nigerian theatre and Modernist poetry, Martin Puchner explores how contact between different peoples has driven artistic innovation in every era - whilst cultural policing and purism have more often undermined the very societies they tried to protect. Travelling through Classical Greece, Ashoka's India, Tang dynasty China, and many other epochs, this triumphal new history reveals the crossing points which have not only inspired the humanities, but which have made us human.

This title was first published in 2000. Incorporating studies of Freudian and Marxist approaches to questions of history and memory, this timely collection illuminates how history is being refigured in contemporary literary, cultural and theoretical studies. The contributors to this volume invite the reader to attend to the forms - linguistic, visual, monumental - by which a connection with, or separation from, the past takes place. It is current thinking about memory's relationship to history, and the ongoing critical reassessment of historicism, that preoccupies this collection. The volume explores the ways in which current thinking about the past operates within a dialogic space and can be located in relation to multiple perspectives. Thus cultural memory can be seen not just as a recent development within the field of cultural studies, but as constructing a between-space which also draws in aspects of psychoanalysis. Similarly, trauma theory may usefully be conceptualized as operating in a rich and complex dynamic between deconstruction and the work of Freud. Temporality, memory and the past are attended to here in terms of the dislocations of narrative, of resistances to linear genealogies, to aid the reader in making unanticipated connections between theories and cultures, and between the demands of the psyche and the polis.

A work of extraordinary range and striking originality, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen traces the global history of written constitutions from the 1750s to the twentieth century, modifying accepted narratives and uncovering the close connections between the making of constitutions and the making of war. In the process, Linda Colley both reappraises famous constitutions and recovers those that have been marginalized but were central to the rise of a modern world. She brings to the fore neglected sites, such as Corsica, with its pioneering constitution of 1755, and tiny Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, the first place on the globe permanently to enfranchise women. She highlights the role of unexpected players, such as Catherine the Great of Russia, who was experimenting with constitutional techniques with her enlightened Nakaz decades before the Founding Fathers framed the American constitution. Written constitutions are usually examined in relation to individual states, but Colley focuses on how they crossed boundaries, spreading into six continents by 1918 and aiding the rise of empires as well as nations. She also illumines their place not simply in law and politics but also in wider cultural histories, and their intimate connections with print, literary creativity, and the rise of the novel. Colley shows how-while advancing epic revolutions and enfranchising white males-constitutions frequently served over the long nineteenth century to marginalize indigenous people, exclude women and people of color, and expropriate land. Simultaneously, though, she investigates how these devices were adapted by peoples and activists outside the West seeking to resist European and American power. She describes how Tunisia generated the first modern Islamic constitution in 1861, quickly suppressed, but an influence still on the Arab Spring; how Africanus Horton of Sierra Leone-inspired by the American Civil War-devised plans for self-governing nations in West Africa; and how Japan's Meiji constitution of 1889 came to compete with Western constitutionalism as a model for Indian, Chinese, and Ottoman nationalists and reformers. Vividly written and handsomely illustrated, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen is an absorbing work that-with its pageant of formative wars, powerful leaders, visionary lawmakers and committed rebels-retells the story of constitutional government and the evolution of ideas of what it means to be modern.

The first in a sweeping, multi-volume history of Abraham Lincoln, from his obscure beginnings to his presidency, death, and the overthrow of his post-Civil War plan of reconciliation. From his youth as a voracious newspaper reader, Abraham Lincoln became a free thinker, reading Tom Paine, as well as Shakespeare and the Bible. In the "fascinating" (Booklist, starred review) A Self-Made Man, Sidney Blumenthal reveals how Lincoln's antislavery thinking began in his childhood in backwoods Kentucky and Indiana. Intensely ambitious, he held political aspirations from his earliest years. Yet he was a socially awkward suitor who had a nervous breakdown over his inability to deal with the opposite sex. His marriage to the upper class Mary Todd was crucial to his social aspirations and his political career. "The Lincoln of Blumenthal's pen is...a brave progressive facing racist assaults on his religion, ethnicity, and very legitimacy that echo the anti-Obama birther movement....Blumenthal takes the wily pol of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals and goes deeper, finding a Vulcan logic and House of Cards ruthlessness" (The Washingtonian). Based on prodigious research of Lincoln's record, and of the period and its main players, Blumenthal's robust biography reflects both Lincoln's time and the struggle that consumes our own political debate. This first volume traces Lincoln from his birth in 1809 through his education in the political arts, rise to the Congress, and fall into the wilderness from which he emerged as the man we recognize as Abraham Lincoln. "Splendid...no one can come away from reading A Self-Made Man...without eagerly anticipating the ensuing volumes." (Washington Monthly).

Niall Ferguson's acclaimed bestseller on the highs and lows of Britain's empire Once vast swathes of the globe were coloured imperial red and Britannia ruled not just the waves, but the prairies of America, the plains of Asia, the jungles of Africa and the deserts of Arabia. Just how did a small, rainy island in the North Atlantic achieve all this? And why did the empire on which the sun literally never set finally decline and fall? Niall Ferguson's acclaimed Empire brilliantly unfolds the imperial story in all its splendours and its miseries, showing how a gang of buccaneers and gold-diggers planted the seed of the biggest empire in all history - and set the world on the road to modernity. 'The most brilliant British historian of his generation ... Ferguson examines the roles of "pirates, planters, missionaries, mandarins, bankers and bankrupts" in the creation of history's largest empire ... he writes with splendid panache ... and a seemingly effortless, debonair wit' Andrew Roberts 'Dazzling ... wonderfully readable' New York Review of Books 'A remarkably readable precis of the whole British imperial story - triumphs, deceits, decencies, kindnesses, cruelties and all' Jan Morris 'Empire is a pleasure to read and brims with insights and intelligence' Sunday Times

The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History engages with some of the most recent trends in French revolutionary scholarship by considering the Revolution in its global context. Across seventeen chapters an international team of contributors examine the impact of the Revolution not only on its European neighbours but on Latin America, North America and Africa, assess how far events there impacted on the Revolution in France, and suggest something of the Revolution's enduring legacy in the modern world. The Companion views the French Revolution through a deliberately wide lens. The first section deals with its global repercussions from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean and includes a discussion of major insurrections such as those in Haiti and Venezuela. Three chapters then dissect the often complex and entangled relations with other revolutionary movements, in seventeenth-century Britain, the American colonies and Meiji Japan. The focus then switches to international involvement in the events of 1789 and the circulation of ideas, people, goods and capital. In a final section contributors throw light on how the Revolution was and is still remembered across the globe, with chapters on Russia, China and Australasia. An introduction by the editors places the Revolution in its political, historical and historiographical context. The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History is a timely and important contribution to scholarship of the French Revolution.

First published in 1998, Revolutionary Iran investigates two major political transformations in the modern history of Iran: the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-09 and the Islamic Revolution 1976-79 and their relation to the modernization of Iran in this century. It addresses a core question: Why did the clergy not take political power in the Constitutional Revolution when Iran was a traditional society and they played a key leadership role in the revolution; yet they succeeded in the more modern Iran of 1979. Characterization of socio-economic relationships between the two major influential groups of civil society in Iran and their role in political transformation is considered central for answering such a question. The book deals with revolution in terms of relationships between civil society and state; which, it is argued, are central to analysing and understanding modern movements in Iran and other Islamic countries. The major contribution of the book can be summarized as follows: It identifies a socio-political division of power and influence between state and civil society during a long period of Iran's Islamic history as the key theoretical basis for understanding modern transformations of Iranian society. Such a division has, so far, been largely ignored. It explores the clergy and bazaris as the social basis of civil society in Iran, and challenges Gellner's viewpoint that an Islamic civil society is an impossibility. It argues that the modernization of religion and the creation of modern political theories by the clergy were both crucial means for defeating a modern authoritarian state and seizing political power. It identifies the main social group without whom the Islamic Revolution of Iran would not have achieved political victory, i.e., the dispossessed. It presents a theoretical basis for analysing and understanding new Islamic movements in the Islamic world.

This open access book offers the first in-depth study of the history and current debates surrounding electronic cigarettes comparing the UK, US and Australia. Since their introduction, e-cigarettes have been the subject of much public, media and regulatory attention, with discussion centring on whether these devices encourage or discourage smoking. This study delves into the history of policymaking and institutions in three countries which have taken different approaches to the regulation of e-cigarettes. In the UK, the tradition of harm reduction through nicotine has helped form a response which has endorsed e-cigarettes, though not without considerable controversy. In contrast, the US has a cessation-only anti-tobacco agenda, and Australia has effectively banned e-cigarettes. This book argues that each country frames the long-term use of nicotine differently and prioritises the health of different groups within the population of smokers or non-smokers, set against a broad backdrop of national responses to addiction. By taking this comparative approach, the authors explore the relationship between history, evidence and policy in public health more widely.

Series Information:
Themes in World History

A gripping account of the violence and turmoil that engulfed England's fledgling colonies and the crucial role played by Native Americans in determining the future of North America. In 1675, eastern North America descended into chaos. Virginia exploded into civil war, as rebel colonists decried the corruption of planter oligarchs and massacred allied Indians. Maryland colonists, gripped by fears that Catholics were conspiring with enemy Indians, rose up against their rulers. Separatist movements and ethnic riots swept through New York and New Jersey. Dissidents in northern Carolina launched a revolution, proclaiming themselves independent of any authority but their own. English America teetered on the edge of anarchy. Though seemingly distinct, these conflicts were in fact connected through the Susquehannock Indians, a once-mighty nation reduced to a small remnant. Forced to scatter by colonial militia, Susquehannock bands called upon connections with Indigenous nations from the Great Lakes to the Deep South, mobilizing sources of power that colonists could barely perceive, much less understand. Although the Susquehannock nation seemed weak and divided, it exercised influence wildly disproportionate to its size, often tipping settler societies into chaos. Colonial anarchy was intertwined with Indigenous power. Piecing together Susquehannock strategies from a wide range of archival documents and material evidence, Matthew Kruer shows how one people's struggle for survival and renewal changed the shape of eastern North America. Susquehannock actions rocked the foundations of the fledging English territories, forcing colonial societies and governments to respond. Time of Anarchy recasts our understanding of the late seventeenth century and places Indigenous power at the heart of the story.

Imperial Networks investigates the discourses and practices of British Colonialism. It reveals how British colonialism in the region was informed by, and itself informed, imperial ideas and activities elsewhere, both in Britain and in other colonies.
Drawing on materialist South African historiography, postcolonial theory and geographical conceptions, imperial Networks examines:
* the origins and early nineteenth century development of the three interacting discourses of colonialism - official, humanitarian and settler
* the contests, compromises and interplay between these discourses and their proponents
* the analysis of these discourses in the light of a global humanitarian movement in the aftermath of the antislavery campaign
* the eventual colonisation of the Xhosa and the construction of colonial settler identities.
Imperial Networks introduces students to key debates in the historiography of nineteenth century South Africa, as well as in materialist and postcolonial constructions of the past.

THE PERFECT READ FOR TROUBLED TIMES From the bestselling author of The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places comes this inspiring and beautifully written meditation on the wisdom inherited from our ancestors. For all we have gained in the modern world, simple peace of mind is hard to find. In a time that is increasingly fraught with complexity and conflict, we are told that our wellbeing relies on remaining as present as possible. But what if the key to being present lies in the past? In Wisdom of the Ancients, Neil Oliver takes us back in time, to grab hold of the ideas buried in forgotten cultures and early civilizations. From Laetoli footprints in Tanzania to Keralan rituals, stone circles and cave paintings, Oliver takes us on a global journey through antiquity. A master storyteller, drawing on immense knowledge of our ancient past, he distils this wisdom into twelve messages that have endured the test of time, and invites us to consider how these might apply to our lives today. The result is powerful and inspirational, moving and profound.

In this third edition of Migration in World History, Patrick Manning presents an expanded and newly coherent view of migratory processes, conveying new research and interpretation. The engaging narrative shows the continuity of migratory processes from the time of foragers who settled the earth to farmers opening new fields and merchants linking purchasers everywhere. In the last thousand years, accumulation of wealth brought capitalism, industry, and the travels of free and slave migrants. In a contest of civilizational hierarchy and movements of emancipation, nations arose to replace empires, although conflicts within nations expelled refugees. The future of migration is now a serious concern. The new edition includes: An introduction to the migration theories that explain the shifting patterns of migration in early and recent times Quantification of changes in migration, including international migration, domestic urbanization, and growing refugee movements A new chapter tracing twenty-first-century migration and population from 2000 to 2050, showing how migrants escaping climate change will steadily outnumber refugees from other social conflicts While migration is often stressful, it contributes to diversity, exchanges, new perspectives, and innovations. This comprehensive and up-to-date view of migration will stimulate readers with interests in many fields.