Originally published in the early 1970s, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China has proved to be one of the most significant and enduring books published in the field. In this new critical edition of that seminal work, Mark Selden revisits the central themes therein and reconsiders them in light of major new theoretical and documentary understandings of the Chinese communist revolution.

First published in 1983. Balzac's novels are one of the largest and most important sources for the history of post-revolutionary France, but they have scarcely been tapped as they should be. Approaching the subject from the perspective of a literary, the author shows in detail how specific historical circumstances and movement are reflected in t

Originally published in the early 1970s, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China has proved to be one of the most significant and enduring books published in the field. In this new critical edition of that seminal work, Mark Selden revisits the central themes therein and reconsiders them in light of major new theoretical and documentary understandings of the Chinese communist revolution.

How do you solve a problem like understanding Iraq? For Hanna Batatu, the solution to this conundrum lay in generating alternative possibilities that effectively side-stepped the conventional wisdom of the time. Historians had long held that Iraq - like other artificial creations of ex-colonial European powers, who drew lines onto the world map that ignored longstanding tribal, ethnic and religious ties - was best understood by delving into its political and religious history. Batatu used the problem solving skills of asking productive questions and generating alternative possibilities to argue that Iraq's history was better understood through the lens of a Marxist analysis focused on socio-economic history.The Old Social Classes concludes that the divisions present in Iraq - and exposed by the revolutionary movements of the 1950s - are those characterized by the struggle for control over property and the means of production. Additionally, Batatu sought to establish that the most important political movements of the time, notably the nationalist Ba'athists and the pan-Arab Free Officers Movement, had their origins in a homegrown communist ideology inspired by local conditions and local inequality. By posing new questions - and by undertaking a vast amount of research in primary sources, a rarity in the history of this region - Batatu was able to produce a strong, new solution to a longstanding historiographical puzzle.

New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution brings together the work of a new, international generation of students of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history. Exploiting new sources made available in China in the 1980s, some chapters in this book bring new events and areas into the study of the CCP. Other chapters provide detailed analyses on the basis of new evidence of long-standing problems in the history of the CCP, such as the rise of Mao Zedong. Yet others are significant because they offer new explanatory frameworks for understanding CCP history, such as the importance of Yanan as symbolic capital. New issues are brought up, such as the role of women, internal CCP terror, the use of opium sales to sustain the Yanan economy, and the great difficulty of controlling mass peasant movements once mobilized. The most important contribution of the volume is to show that the old explanations of the CCP's success - peasant support, organizational strength, the supply of administrative services - are incomplete and do not account for the diverse and heterogeneous nature of the CCP and the great difficulties it had in building up mass support. This volume makes clear that the question of the CCP's success remains one of the most elusive but also most important that historians of China face today.

These essays present fresh insights into the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), from its founding in 1920 to its assumption of state power in 1949. They draw upon considerable archival resources which have recently become available.

Most people believe India's struggle for independence to have begun with Mahatma Gandhi. Little credit goes to the proof that this call for a mass movement did not arise out of a void. For the past century and more, historians have overlooked the phase of twenty-five years of intense creative endeavour preceding and preparing for the Mahatma's advent. The reason for this systematic omission has been the fundamentally radical nature of the revolutionary programme put to practice by Indian leaders of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jugantar was diametrically distinct from the dream of non-violence floated by the Mahatma and the Congress. Very well documented with inputs from Indian, European and American archives, the present study carefully straightenes out the origins - philosophical, historical and religious and intellectual, so to say - of Indian nationalism. From Rammohun to Sri Aurobindo, passing through Marx and Tagore, the full set of ideological views has been analysed here. Unknown up to this day, the sustained focus in this volume on the outlook and the activities of these revolutionaries inside India and abroad brings home the 'very sophisticated understanding of the contemporary political reality' that made their leader Jatindranath Mukherjee, the 'right hand man' of Sri Aurobindo, the very emblem of an epoch and its aspirations. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

On February 26th 2012 seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking home with a bag of Skittles and a can of juice when a fatal encounter with a gun-wielding neighbourhood watchman ended his young life. In a matter of weeks, Trayvon Martin's name would be spoken by President Obama, honored by professional athletes, and passionately discussed all over traditional and social media. Trayvon's parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, driven by their intense love for their lost son, launched a nationwide campaign for justice that would change the USA and the world. Five years after his tragic death, Travyon Martin has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a young man, wearing his favourite hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became an icon? And how did one black child's death become the match that lit a civil rights movement? Rest in Power, told through the compelling alternating narratives of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, answers those questions from the most intimate of sources. It's the story of the beautiful and complex child they lost, the cruel unresponsiveness of the police and the hostility of the legal system, and the inspiring journey they took from grief and pain to power, and from tragedy and senselessness to meaning.

THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BERBICE SLAVE REBELLION Winner of the 2021 Cundill History Prize Winner of the 2021 Frederick Douglass Prize 'A gripping tale about the human need for freedom ... spellbinding' NPR 'Impressively detailed ... Kars provokes the reader into seeing the many sides involved in this bloody and desperate struggle with empathy and pity ... excellent' Paterson Joseph, actor and author of The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho 'A masterpiece ... a story for the ages' Elizabeth Fenn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World In February 1763, thousands of slaves in the Dutch colony of Berbice - in present-day Guyana - launched a massive rebellion - and very nearly succeeded. For an entire year, they fought their enslavers, dreaming of establishing a free state, what would have been the first Black republic. Instead, they vanished from history. Blood on the River is the explosive story of this forgotten revolution, an event that almost changed the face of the Americas. Historian Marjoleine Kars draws on long-buried Dutch interrogation transcripts to reconstruct a rich day-by-day account of this extraordinary event, providing a rare look at the political vision of enslaved people at the dawn of the Age of Revolution. An astonishing original work of history, Blood on the River will change our understanding of revolutions, slavery and the story of freedom in the New World.

The work focuses on a subaltern local sovereignty movement called "Telangana" in India. Over the last ten years, this movement has engaged in a massive political mobilization, including strikes, rallies, work stoppages, occupation of public spaces, electoral contests, 200 and more political suicides and media battles. But, interestingly enough, notwithstanding a political mobilization that has brought day-to-day life to a halt on a number of occasions, it has remained largely invisible in international media and global politics. Fascinated by the social movement's international invisibility as well as the causes and conditions of its eruption around a city/region that has become a showcase of new capitalist development, Muppidi seeks to unpack this issue, showing that this invisibility is not just intrinsically puzzling, but also represents the operation of power on a global scale. Investigating the conditions of invisibility in this instance can therefore tell us something important about the way global power works to produce visibility and invisibility in the 21st century world. This book provides a unique resource for students of Postcolonalism, International relations and South East Asian studies.

On August 19, 1991, eight high-ranking Soviet officials took over the government of the USSR and proclaimed themselves its new rulers. Less than seventy-two hours later, their coup had collapsed, but it would change the course of history in a way that no one - certainly not the plotters themselves - could have foreseen. The editor of this volume, who witnessed these momentous events, have assembled firsthand accounts of the attempted coup. They include testimonies from "junta" members and military officers, resistance leaders and ordinary citizens, Muscovites and residents of other locales, Russian and foreign journalists, foreign visitors and returning emigres, as well as Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Key documents and photographs complement the individual accounts. The provocative introduction to the volume places the August events in the larger context - from the early days of perestroika and glasnost to the second confrontation at the White House, in October 1993.

Mageza-Barthel provides a context sensitive analysis of how Rwanda's women's movement used the United Nations (UN) gender norms in its efforts to insert gender-specific demands in the post-genocide period. The overall goal of these women - and their supporters - has been to further gender equality and equity in Rwanda. This study details which political processes could be engendered. It further illustrates why certain gender norms were adopted and adapted, whereas others were not. The study addresses issues of global governance in gender politics through such international frameworks as CEDAW, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, as well as Resolution 1325. These instruments have been brought forth by a transnational women's movement to benefit women and women's rights across the globe. It shows how these gender norms were introduced, adapted and contested locally at a crucial time of the transformation process underway. Concerned with the interplay of domestic and international politics, it also alludes to the unique circumstances in Rwanda that have led to unprecedented levels of women's political representation. Which tools have been the most significant in women's mobilisation and how these relate to precedents set within international relations is of interest to a wide community of scholars and policy-makers alike.

A concise account of the life and career of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881 - 1938), the formidable "founder of modern Turkey", who turned the ruins of the old and ramshackle Ottoman Empire into a modern, westernised and secularised nation state. It also provides an introduction to the Turkish Republic itself. Key features: The study of Ataturk is essential to those studying the history of Modern Turkey and also useful for the study of nationalism Turkey has recently become very important to the western powers e.g. during the Gulf War, and its recent history is now of general, not specialist, concern a topical subject - Ataturk's achievements are currently being challenged, particularly by Islamic fundamentalists, and the collapse of the Soviet Union has reopened questions about Turkey's role which Ataturk originally seemed to have settled for good. Readership: Level: Undergraduate and postgraduate, suitable for general reader. Courses: European history in the period of WWl and it's reader aftermath, Near and Middle Eastern History, Age of Dictators.

A collection of essays first published in Moscow in 1909. Writing from various points of view, the authors reflect the diverse experiences of Russia's failed 1905 revolution. Condemned by Lenin and rediscoverd by dissidents, this translation has relevance for discussions on contemporary Russia.

From Bullets to Ballots considers non-state Muslim organizations at different stages of abandoning violence and pursuing their goals through a political process. Some have successfully made the transition. Others are in mid-stream. Some have tried but backtracked, splintered, or simply abandoned such efforts, reverting to pathological violence. Many groups could be case studies, but Phillips has selected the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Kurdistan Workers Party, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, and the Free Aceh Movement, because they cover the spectrum.This book deals with political strategies for moderating violent Muslim movements by engaging them in the political process. In strong criticism of the Bush administration, Phillips notes that the push for democracy may have increased conflict by giving violent groups "the ballot" which they use to gain power. Focusing on non-state Muslim organizations, From Bullets to Ballots considers the relationship between ideology and policy. Phillips discusses their origin, ideology, structure, and leadership and examines financing, activities, and communications. He assesses the groups' commitment to elections and its acceptance of the responsibility that comes with governance.From Bullets to Ballots draws on twenty years of Phillips' experience working democratization and conflict prevention in the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and South Asia. His recommendations are primarily directed to the United States because he believes the United States should be a leader in promoting democracy around the world. At the same time, he is convinced that the United States must tread softly, or run the risk of fomenting further violence, undermining future democratic development, and setting back its own national interests. This is a provocative, informed, and balanced analysis of the theories behind current policies.

An examination of the portrayal of one of the most important uprisings in the middle ages in subsequent history writing. The revolt of Owain Glyndwr (1400-c.1415) was a remarkable event in both English and Welsh contexts, and as such was narrated by a number of chroniclers, including Adam Usk, John Capgrave, Thomas Walsingham and Edward Halle. Theyoffer a range of perspectives on the events, as well as portrayals of the main characters (especially, of course, Glyndwr himself), the communities involved, and Wales. This book studies the representations of the revolt in English chronicles, from 1400 up to1580. It focuses on the narrative strategies employed, offers a new reading of the texts as literary constructs, and explores the information they present. Alicia Marchant is a ResearchAssociate in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Western Australia.

In The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg does more than introduce his readers to a novel group of supposed witches - the Benandanti, from the northern Italian province of Friulia. He also invents and deploys new and creative ways of tackling his source material that allow him to move beyond their limitations. Witchcraft documents are notoriously tricky sources - produced by elites with fixed views, they are products of questioning designed to prove or disprove guilt, rather than understand the subtleties of belief, and are very often the products of torture. Ginzburg placed great stress on variations in the evidence of the Benandanti over time to reveal changing patterns of belief, and also focused on the concept of 'reading against the text' - essentially looking as much at what is absent from the record as at what is present in it, and attempting to understand what the absences mean. His work not only pioneered the creation of a new school of historical study - 'microhistory' - it is also a great example of the creative thinking skills of connecting things together in an original way, producing novel explanations for existing evidence, and redefining an issue so as to see it in a new light.

Many people want to understand what revolutions are and - especially - how they come about, from the academics who study them to the states that wish to prevent (or, in some cases, provoke) them. But it is arguably the US scholar Theda Skocpol who has done most to create a viable model of revolution, and States and Social Revolutions is the work in which she sets out her intellectual stall. Skocpol's magnum opus can be considered a classic product of the critical thinking skill of problem-solving. She assesses several different revolutions - those of France, Russia and China - and asks new, productive questions about their causes and outcomes. The answers, collectively, allow her to move beyond existing theories such as the 'voluntarist' school (which suggests that revolutionaries have agency) and the Marxist school (which sees state institutions as nothing more than a front for class interests). Skocpol's model assumes that states are autonomous bureaucratic institutions, which act in their own interests - a fundamental re-imagining based on fresh interpretations of the evidence. Her analysis extends beyond the causes of revolution to their consequences, and her argument that the revolutionary state that survives is the one that successfully implements a far-reaching program of reform helps to explain not only why the three revolutions she studied have proved enduringly influential, but also why hundreds of others, less successful, are barely remembered today.

Originally published in 1931 this volume is a level-headed account of the Bolshevik Revolution and Bolshevist Russia which covers the whole ground of the Revolution, the early history of Bolshevism and the state of Russia in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Based on two visits by the author to Russia, the book presents a picture in which real problems are set against an historical background, examining life under Bolshevism and examining it as a working system.

The twenty-first century so far has seen the global rise of authoritarian populism, systematic racism, and dogmatic metaphysics. Even though these events demonstrate the growth of an age of 'unreason', in this original and compelling book John Roberts resists the assumption that such thinking displays an unthinking irrationality or loss of reason; instead he asserts that an important feature of modern reactionary politics is that it offers a supposedly convincing integration of the particular and the universal. This move is defined by what Roberts calls the 'reasoning of unreason' and has deep roots in the history of Western thought and politics. Tracing the dark history of enlightenment-disenlightenment, John Roberts explores 'the reasoning of unreason' across centuries from Aquinas, William of Ockham, the most important treatise on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, Locke, Kant, and Count Arthur de Gobineau, to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Friedrich von Hayek. Roberts provides a new set of philosophical-political tools to understand the formation and denigration of the rational subject and the current reinvestment in various forms of political unreason globally. The Reasoning of Unreason is the first book to draw on the philosophy of reason, political philosophy, political theory and political history, in order to produce a dialectical account of the 'making of reason' internal to the forces of unreason and the limits of reason.

Perhaps no work of history written in the 20th century has done more to undermine an existing consensus and cause its readers to re-evaluate their own preconceptions than has Jonathan Riley-Smith's revisionist account of the motives of the first crusaders. Riley-Smith's thesis - based on extensive original research and firmly rooted in his refusal to uncritically accept the evidence or reasoning of earlier historians - is that the majority of the men who travelled to the east on crusade in the years 1098-1100 were primarily motivated by faith. This finding, which ran directly counter to at least four centuries of consensus that other motives, not least greed for land, were more important, has helped to stimulate exciting reappraisals of the whole crusading movement. Riley-Smith backed it up with forensic examination of the key crusader-inspiring speech delivered by Pope Urban II, looking to clarify the meanings of five competing contemporary accounts in order to understand how an initially simple, and rather confused, appeal for help became a sophisticated rationale for the concept of 'just war.'

The Age of Revolution is the first of four works by Eric Hobsbawm that collectively synthesize the ideas he developed over a lifetime spent studying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hobsbawm's vision is important - he was a lifelong Marxist whose view of history was shaped by a fascination with social and economic history, yet who privileged evidence over political theory - but the real power of these works, and especially The Age of Revolution, emanates from the wide range of the author's reading and his mastery of the critical thinking skill of evaluation. It is this skill that allows Hobsbawm to combine insights drawn from decades of reading into an original thesis that sees the crucial "long 19th century" as a period shaped by "dual revolution" - the twin impacts of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and the French Revolution on the continent. Hobsbawm supplemented his evaluative excellence with a firm grasp of reasoning, crafting a volume that contains brilliant, clearly-structured arguments which explain complicated ideas via well-chosen examples in ways that make his work accessible to intelligent general readers and scholars alike.

Examines the 1980 Solidarity revolution in Poland, the government's subsequent establishment of martial law in response, in 1981, and the eventual transition to democracy in 1989. The 1980 general strike in Poland and the establishment of the independent Solidarity movement, which sought to create a state based on civic freedom, were symptoms of a crisis of the communist system. On December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski on behalf of the ruling Communist Party imposed martial law, effectively quashing Solidarity. Jaruzelski won the battle, but Solidarity continued its revolution in secret and Poland remained politically destabilized. Elections held in June 1989 ended with the defeat of the Communists and the establishment in September of a coalition government in which half of the parliamentary seats went to Solidarity, whose representative was also appointed prime minister. The revolution inaugurated in 1980 by the dockworkers of Gdansk had come to fruition. Revolution and Counterrevolution in Poland, 1980-1989: Solidarity, Martial Law, and the End of Communism inEurope recounts and analyzes the events of this formative decade in Polish history, with particular emphasis on the martial law period. Drawing on extensive archival research, Andrzej Paczkowski examines the origin and form of the Solidarity revolution, the course of the Communist counterrevolution, and the final victory won by Solidarity along with its international repercussions. Andrzej Paczkowski is professor of political studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. Christina Manetti, PhD, is a translator and independent researcher of Polish history.

Over the fifty years between 1940 and 1990, the countries of eastern Africa were embroiled in a range of debilitating and destructive conflicts, starting with the wars of independence, but then incorporating rebellion, secession and local insurrection as the Cold War replaced colonialism. The articles gathered here illustrate how significant, widespread, and dramatic this violence was. In these years, violence was used as a principal instrument in the creation and consolidation of the authority of the state; and it was also regularly and readily utilised by those who wished to challenge state authority through insurrection and secession. Why was it that eastern Africa should have experienced such extensive and intensive violence in the fifty years before 1990? Was this resort to violence a consequence of imperial rule, the legacy of oppressive colonial domination under a coercive and non-representative state system? Did essential contingencies such as the Cold War provoke and promote the use of violence? Or, was it a choice made by Africans themselves and their leaders, a product of their own agency? This book focuses on these turbulent decades, exploring the principal conflicts in six key countries - Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Tanzania. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

Pathological Counterinsurgency critically examines the relationship between elections and counterinsurgency success in third party campaigns supported by the United States. From Vietnam to El Salvador to Iraq and Afghanistan, many policymakers and academics believed that democratization would drive increased legitimacy and improved performance in governments waging a counterinsurgency campaign. Elections were expected to help overcome existing deficiencies, thus allowing governments supported by the United States to win the "hearts and minds" of its populace, undermining the appeal of insurgency. However, in each of these cases, campaigning in and winning elections did not increase the legitimacy of the counterinsurgent government or alter conditions of entrenched rent seeking and weak institutions that made states allied to the United States vulnerable to insurgency. Ultimately, elections played a limited role in creating the conditions needed for counterinsurgency success. Instead, decisions of key actors in government and elites to prioritize either short term personal and political advantage or respect for political institutions held a central role in counterinsurgency success or failure. In each of the four cases in this study, elected governments pursued policies that benefited members of the government and elites at the expense of boarder legitimacy and improved performance. Expectations that democratization could serve as a key instrument of change led to unwarranted optimism about the likely of success and ultimately to flawed strategy. The United States continued to support regimes that continued to lack the legitimacy and government performance needed for victory in counterinsurgency.