The Forgotten Appeasement of 1920 examines a turning point in East European history: the summer of 1920, when Lenin's Soviet Russia decided to challenge the Versailles system and launch a military attack on the continent. The outcome of this attack might have been the occupation of all of Poland and East Central Europe, and a Red Army sweep further west. This book probes the British-Soviet negotiations and diplomatic operations behind the scenes. Professor Nowak uses hitherto unexamined documents from Russian and British archives to show how (and why) top British politicians were ready to accept a new Russian imperial control over the whole of Eastern Europe. Nowak unravels this previously untold story of that first and forgotten appeasement, stopped only by the Polish military victory over the Red Army. His excellent historical craftsmanship and new sources contribute to the book's quality, filling up a lacuna in contemporary historiography. This book will appeal to researchers of geopolitical affairs and the Great Powers, the history of Poland, and the political mentality of Western elites. It will also be of interest to university students and tutors, scholars of history and international relations and - thanks to the book's brisk and fascinating narrative - amateur historians and history aficionados.

Roots of Power tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline plants are simultaneously property rights institutions, markers of social organization, and expressions of life-force and vitality. In addition to their localized roles in forming landscapes and societies, these plants mark multiple boundaries and demonstrate deep historical connections across much of the planet's tropics. These plants' deep roots in society and culture have made them the routes through which postcolonial agrarian societies have negotiated both social and cultural continuity and change. This book is a multi-sited ethnographic political ecology of ethnobotanical institutions. It uses five parallel case studies to investigate the central phenomenon of "boundary plants" and establish the linkages among the case studies via both ancient and relatively recent demographic transformations such as the Bantu expansion across tropical Africa, the Austronesian expansion into the Pacific, and the colonial system of plantation slavery in the Black Atlantic. Each case study is a social-ecological system with distinctive characteristics stemming from the ways that power is organized by kinship and gender, social ranking, or racialized capitalism. This book contributes to the literature on property rights institutions and land management by arguing that tropical boundary plants' social entanglements and cultural legitimacy make them effective foundations for development policy. Formal recognition of these institutions could reduce contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity between resource managers and states in postcolonial societies and contribute to sustainable livelihoods and landscapes. This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental anthropology, political ecology, ethnobotany, landscape studies, colonial history, and development studies, and readers will benefit from its demonstration of the comparative method.

Drawing on historiography of the Japanese occupation in the Chinese, Japanese, and English languages, this book examines the politics of the Manchukuo puppet state from the angle of notable Chinese who cooperated with the Japanese military and headed its government institutions. The war in Asia between 1931 and 1945, and particularly the early years of the conflict from 1931 to 1937, is a topic of world history that is often glossed over or misinterpreted. Much of the research and public opinion on this period in China, Japan, and the West deem these Chinese figures to be traitors, particles of Japanese colonialism, and collaborators under occupation. In contrast, this book highlights the importance of analyzing the national ideas of Manchukuo's Chinese government leaders as a method of understanding Manchukuo's operating mechanisms, Sino-Japanese interactions, and China's turbulent history in the early twentieth century. Chinese Government Leaders in Manchukuo, 1931-1937 fills a gap in this research and is an ideal resource for scholars studying wartime Asia and Europe, as well as non-specialist readers who are interested in collaboration in general.

Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779 1859) was appointed through family influence to the East India Company, and arrived in India in 1796. He learnt Persian, and developed an interest in Indian literature and politics. After postings in Afghanistan and Poona he became Governor in 1819 of the recently acquired territory that became known as the Bombay Presidency. His biographer also had connections to India. Thomas Edward Colebrooke (1813 1890) was the son of British administrator and Sanskrit scholar Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765 1837), and although he lived in England and served as an M. P., Colebrooke remained interested in colonial affairs. He had written about Elphinstone's life in 1861 for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and subsequently expanded his work into these two volumes, published in 1884. Volume 2 covers his years in Poona and Bombay, and his eventual return to England.

Dramatic innovations in modern Japan include a mass army, overseas empire, and constitutional polity. This study links these changes in the Meiji era (1868-1912). It focuses on the life of General Katsura Taro, one of the architects of the modern military, a leading figure in Japanese colonialism, and prime minister through the 1900s. Challenging the received wisdom about Japanese militarism and imperialism, it exposes the army's ambivalence about empire but also its positive role in political change.

This book examines the role of the Irish medical profession in the First World War. It assesses the extent of its involvement in the conflict while also interrogating the effect of global war on the development of Ireland's domestic medical infrastructure, especially its hospital network. The study explores the factors that encouraged Ireland's medical personnel to join the British Army medical services and uncovers how Irish hospital governors, in the face of increasing staff shortages and economic inflation, ensured that Ireland's voluntary hospital network survived the war. It also considers how Ireland's wartime doctors reintegrated into an Irish society that had experienced a profound shift in political opinion towards their involvement in the conflict and subsequently became embroiled in its own Civil War. In doing so, this book provides the first comprehensive study of the effect of the First World War on the medical profession in Ireland.

This book is the first study that analyses bilateral commercial treaties as instruments of peace and trade comparatively and over time. The work focuses on commercial treaties as an index of the challenges of eighteenth-century European politics, shaping a new understanding of these challenges and of how they were confronted at the time in theory and diplomatic practice. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the time of the Napoleonic wars bilateral commercial treaties were concluded not only at the end of large-scale wars accompanying peace settlements, but also independently with the aim to prevent or contain war through controlling the balance of trade between states. Commercial treaties were also understood by major political writers across Europe as practical manifestations of the wider intellectual problem of devising a system of interstate trade in which the principles of reciprocity and equality were combined to produce sustainable peaceful economic development.

In the nineteenth century, the Netherlands and its colonial holdings in Java were the sites of dramatically increased industrialization. Led by a group of "merchant kings" who exemplified gentlemanly capitalism, this ambitious trading project transformed the small, economically moribund Netherlands into a global power. Merchant Kings offers a fascinating interdisciplinary exploration of this episode and reveals not only the distinctive nature of the Dutch state, but the surprising extent to which its nascent corporate innovations were rooted in early welfare initiatives. By placing colony and metropole into a single analytical frame, this book offers a bracing new approach to understanding the development of modern corporations.

This book explores the relationship between imperial formations and individual encounters at African tourist sites - spaces of leisure, healing and work. It examines how encounters between tourists and hosts tend to be constructed along colonial thought lines and considers how players in the hospitality industry do not interact as coeval participants, but are racialised, scripted and positioned according to colonially-established order. The authors focus on the language of these encounters, not only speech, performance and response, but also silence, resonance, emptiness, noise - objectified, materialised, evasive and confusing. Through its exploration of language in these encounters, the volume shows that ruination is the one feature that is omnipresent in the multiple and diverse tourist settings of the postcolonial world. This book is open access under a CC BY ND licence.

This microhistory of the Salvagos-an Istanbul family of Venetian interpreters and spies travelling the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mediterranean-is a remarkable feat of the historian's craft of storytelling. With his father having been killed by secret order of Venice and his nephew to be publicly assassinated by Ottoman authorities, Genesino Salvago and his brothers started writing self-narratives. When crossing the borders of words and worlds, the Salvagos' self-narratives helped navigate at times beneficial, other times unsettling entanglements of empire, family, and translation. The discovery of an autobiographical text with rich information on Southeastern Europe, edited here for the first time, is the starting point of this extraordinary microbiography of a family's intense struggle for manoeuvring a changing world disrupted by competition, betrayal, and colonialism. This volume recovers the Venetian life stories of Ottoman subjects and the crucial role of translation in negotiating a shared but fragile Mediterranean. Stefan Hanss examines an interpreter's translational practices of the self and recovers the wider Mediterranean significance of the early modern Balkan contact zone. Offering a novel conversation between translation studies, Mediterranean studies, and the history of life-writing, this volume argues that dragomans' practices of translation, border-crossing, and mobility were key to their experiences and performances of the self. This book is an indispensable reading for the history of the early modern Mediterranean, self-narratives, Venice, the Ottoman Empire, and Southeastern Europe, as well as the history of translation. Hanss presents a truly fascinating narrative; a microhistory full of insights and rich perspectives.

The period between 1880 and 1914, the subject of this volume, sees increasing questioning of free trade, especially in those sectors impacted adversely by foreign competition, and within political circles, where the notion of protecting native industries shifted from an agricultural to an industrial base. There was a greater willingness, especially in the Conservative party, to consider it as a viable policy. The ‘constituencies’ or interest groups created by free trade however defended it fiercely among the Liberal party and in manufacturing industries, primarily those highly dependent on export markets. Debates on commercial policy in this period had another dimension which had been subsidiary in earlier periods—the colonial empire and the economic, political, and cultural ties with it promoted. The period between 1880 and 1914 was one where the language of empire was at its height and the economic relationship between the Mother Country and the colonies entered political debate in a forceful way. The sources include several petitions from parliamentary papers attacking the system of commercial treaties pursued by the British government. Towards this end, extracts from the journal Fair Trade, and a body of newspaper material detailing extra-parliamentary movements against free trade, from the Leeds Mercury, Glasgow Herald, Pall Mall Gazette, and Daily Mail, are also included. Making the transition to the early twentieth century and the rise of the labour movement, printed sources such as Fabian tracts on tariff reform, as well as material from the International Free Trade Congress, are incorporated.

The break-up of the Ottoman empire and the disintegration of the Russian empire were watershed events in modern history. The unravelling of these empires was both cause and consequence of World War I and resulted in the deaths of millions. It irrevocably changed the landscape of the Middle East and Eurasia and reverberates to this day in conflicts throughout the Caucasus and Middle East. Shattering Empires draws on extensive research in the Ottoman and Russian archives to tell the story of the rivalry and collapse of two great empires. Overturning accounts that portray their clash as one of conflicting nationalisms, this pioneering study argues that geopolitical competition and the emergence of a new global interstate order provide the key to understanding the course of history in the Ottoman-Russian borderlands in the twentieth century. It will appeal to those interested in Middle Eastern, Russian, and Eurasian history, international relations, ethnic conflict, and World War I.

This monograph examines the imperial spectacles and startling reversals of fortune related in History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), and investigates how Prescott's histories inspired fictional adaptations by George A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and George Griffith. The revision of history in the Amerindian adventure entertained young transatlantic audiences, was a vehicle to attract tourism and investment in countries such as Mexico and Peru, and a way to impart British values. Such values compel the characters and narrators of novels discussed to act as cultural mediators, to acquire indigenous languages and adopt native ways of being, and, in several of the romances under consideration, to marry Mexican or Incan noblewomen. Part I, Conquest, examines George Henty's By Right of Conquest: Or, With Cortez in Mexico (1891), Rider Haggard's Montezuma's Daughter (1893) and George Griffith's Virgin of the Sun: A Tale of the Conquest of Peru (1898). Part II, Reclamation, argues that English re-writings of history work to eclipse the Spanish in Haggard's of Virgin the Sun (1922), Henty's Treasure of the Incas (1902) and Griffith's Romance of Golden Star (1897).

Although it lasted only thirty years, German colonial rule dramatically transformed South West Africa. The colonial government not only committed the first genocide of the twentieth century against the Herero and Nama, but in their efforts to establish a "model colony" and "racial state," they brought about even more destructive and long-lasting consequences. In this now-classic study-available here for the first time in English-the author provides an indispensable account of Germany's colonial utopia in what is present-day Namibia, showing how the highly rationalized planning of Wilhelmine authorities ultimately failed even as it added to the profound immiseration of the African population.

Marriages that involve the migration of at least one of the spouses challenge two intersecting facets of the politics of belonging: the making of the 'good and legitimate citizens' and the 'acceptable family'. In Europe, cross-border marriages have been the target of increasing state controls, an issue of public concern and the object of scholarly research. The study of cross-border marriages and the ways these marriages are framed is inevitably affected by states' concerns and priorities. There is a need for a reflexive assessment of how the categories employed by state institutions and agents have impacted the study of cross-border marriages. This collection of essays analyses what is at stake in the regulation of cross-border marriages and how European states use particular categories (e.g., 'sham', 'forced' and 'mixed' marriages) to differentiate between acceptable and non-acceptable marriages. When researchers use these categories unreflexively, they risk reproducing nation-centred epistemologies and reinforcing state-informed hierarchies and forms of exclusion. The chapters in this book offer new insights into a timely topic and suggest ways to avoid these pitfalls: differentiating between categories of analysis and categories of practice, adopting methodologies that do not mirror nation-states' logic and engaging with general social theory outside migration studies. This book will be of interest to researchers and academics of Sociology, Politics, International Relations, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Human Geography, Social Work, and Public Policy. Barring one, all the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

This collection, comprising essays by an array of scholars from Europe and the United States, offers a new look at transatlantic political activity since 1800. It reperiodizes transatlantic politics to include early and mid-19th and post-1945 eras, while showing the ideological heterogeneity of transatlantic political exchange

This book considers the evolution and characteristics of Nigeria's third-generation literature, which emerged between the late 1980s and the early 1990s and is marked by expressive modes and concerns distinctly different from those of the preceding era. The creative writing of this period reflects new sensibilities and anxieties about Nigeria's changing fortunes in the post-colonial era. The literature of the third generation is startling in its candidness, irreverence as well as the brutal self-disclosure of its characters, and it is governed by an unusually wide-ranging sweep in narrative techniques. This book examines six key texts of the oeuvre: Maria Ajima's The Web, Okey Ndibe's Foreign Gods, Inc., Teju Cole's Open City, Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters Street, Lola Shoneyin's The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck. The texts interpret contemporary corruption and other unspeakable social malaise; together, they point to the exciting future of Nigerian literature, which has always been defined by its daring creativity and inventive expressive modes. Even conventional storytelling strategies receive revitalizing energies in these angst-driven narratives. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of contemporary African literature, Sociology, Gender and women's studies, and post-colonial cultural expression more broadly.

This book presents Durkheim as an important political sociologist, inspired by and advocating socialism. Through a series of studies, it argues that Durkheim's normative vision, which can be called libertarian socialism, shaped his sociological critique and search for alternatives. With attention to the value of this political sociology as a means of understanding our contemporary world, the author asks us to look again at Durkheim. While Durkheim's legacy has often emphasised the supposed conservative elements and stability advocated in his thought, we can point to a different legacy, one of a radical sociology. In dialogue with the decolonial critique, this volume also asks 'was Durkheim white?' and in doing so shows how, as a Jew, he experienced significant racialisation in his lifetime. A new reading and a vital image of a 'political Durkheim', The Political Durkheim will appeal to scholars and students with interests in Durkheim, social theory and political sociology.

Brings together three key concepts - race, nation and capitalism, to analyse the inequalities caused by the confluence of all three, which allows the reader to really grasp the key relationship between them across history. Useful for those studying topics on racism, race, capital, the history of inequality, and human and civil rights. Racism particularly, but also issues around nationalism and capitalism, are increasingly of interest to students thinking about how history relates to the present. Compared to other titles which only look at individual nations or one of the three themes discussed in this volume, this book is more extensive because it looks at the interrelationship of these three concepts in history.

Chambers, Nuangjamnong, and their contributors look at how the development of the beer industry in East Asia presents a unique opportunity for understanding the region's political economy. Asia is both the world's largest beer-consuming and beer-producing region, and the fastest growing beer market. Per-capita consumption is lower than Europe, but catching up fast. Beer consumption is also widely understood to correlate closely with economic growth and urbanization, much more so than other alcoholic beverages like spirits. With ten country case studies from both Northeast and Southeast Asia, the contributors to this volume look at the history of beer production and consumption across East Asia through a lens of historical institutionalism and political economy. In doing so they not only examine the development of the beer industry in the region but also what it tells us about the countries themselves. They ask questions such as: To what extent have state versus societal actors influenced the path of beer production? How has beer production changed? Was there a critical juncture at which beer production abruptly changed course? A valuable resource for students and scholars of modern East Asian History, and particularly those with a focus on colonial history, industrial history, and state-society relations.

This book uses an interdisciplinary inter-mediational approach to reflect on the relational complexity of unsettlement as a predominant sensibility of the present epoque. The book tackles interrelated aspects of unsettlement including temporality, the disconcerting effects of the Anthropocene, the biomedical facets of unsettlement and the post-pandemic futures. It uses a chimeric approach combining essayistic and speculative fiction writing methods, negotiating rational, affective and imaginative ways of inquiry, and showing rather than merely explaining. The book poses questions, but gives no ready-made answers, and invites to think together on the unsettlement as a negatively global human condition that can be collectively made into a generative move of resurgence and refuturing. Contributing to critical reflections on the main features and sensibilities of the current epoque, the book will be of interest to scholars and undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the general public, interested in critical global and future perspectives, in decolonial research, gender studies and posthumanities.

The period from 1957-1988 was transformative for the international oil industry. As the home to two major oil companies, BP and Shell, as well as the possessor of large quantities of oil and gas in its territorial waters, the United Kingdom was at the heart of this transition. While famous for its liberal policy towards oil and gas production, both before and after the discovery of North Sea oil and gas, this period actually saw the United Kingdom respond to shifts in power from the major oil companies to the oil-producing states, many of them in OPEC, by building up its competency regarding oil matters. This took the form of efforts to influence the activities of BP and Shell abroad as well as in creation of a state-run oil company, the British National Oil Corporation, in an attempt to exercise greater state control over oil and gas production and distribution. The failure of these efforts was driven in part by internal divisions within Whitehall, the efforts of the oil companies themselves, and ultimately the political will of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher to get the state out of the business of oil and gas.

This book explores the unsettling ties between colonialism, transnationalism, and anarchism. Anarchism as prefigurative politics has influenced several generations of activists and has expressed the most profound libertarian desire of Southern Mediterranean societies. The emergence of anarchist and anti-authoritarian movements and collective actions from Morocco to Palestine, Algeria, Tunis, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan has changed the focus of our attention in the last decade. How have these anarchist movements been formulated? What characteristics do they share with other libertarian experiences? Why are there hardly any studies on anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean? In turn, the book critically reviews the anti-authoritarian geographies in the South of the Mediterranean and reassesses the postcolonial status of these emancipatory projects. Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean invites us to revisit the necessity of decolonizing anarchism, which is enunciated, in many cases, from a privileged epistemic position reproducing neocolonial power relations.

This book will be the first to deeply analyze the Swedish court and monarchy through a longue duree perspective to show the crucial role of the court in maintaining a relationship between the monarchy and nobility throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sweden offered a different type of monarchy in comparison to the more often studied French and British monarchies. Sweden's court system successfully managed several coups and upheavals and maintained strong royal power throughout many transitions. Studying the Swedish model offers insights into how courts functioned in European principalities in general by providing a resilient and flexible framework for royal authority in tandem with the nobility. Based on extensive research conducted in the Swedish National Archives, the Palace Archives, and the Royal Library, the book presents some never-before published case studies and materials that drive the impact of court studies on many different areas of research, including gender studies, political science, and art history.