James Steuart published An Inquiry into the Principles of Political OEconomy in 1767, the first systematic treatise on economics, nine years before Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Traditional historiography has tended to disregard and even deny Steuart's oeuvre, categorizing him as the last, outdated advocate of mercantilist policies in Britain. A clear portrait of a modernizing and enlightened Steuart emerges from this book, opening up an alternative approach to many key developments in economic theory. This book brings together a diverse international team of experts to overturn the "advocate of mercantilism" myth and explore different interpretations of Steuart's work within the context of the writings of other contemporary authors. A diverse range of specialists - historians, economists, political scientist, and sociologists - reflecting the diversity of James Steuart's work explore various aspects of the life, works, and influence of James Steuart, including his links to other authors who conceive - as Steuart did - the economic system of "natural liberty" as an artificial creation. The portrait of a demarginalized, modernizing, and enlightened Steuart emerges clearly in this book. This book is not reduced to old authors whose ideas would be at the Museum of Dead Ideas, it has a very contemporary resonance. The subjects and the way Steuart tackles them could have a big influence on future authors who recognized some advantages of an alternative approach to many key developments in economic theory. This will also be of interest to scholars of history of economic thought, intellectual history, and 18th century history.

Islamic civilization flourished in the Middle Ages across a vast geographical area that spans today's Middle and Near East. First published in 2006, Medieval Islamic Civilization examines the socio-cultural history of the regions where Islam took hold between the 7th and 16th centuries. This important two-volume work contains over 700 alphabetically arranged entries, contributed and signed by international scholars and experts in fields such as Arabic languages, Arabic literature, architecture, history of science, Islamic arts, Islamic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Near Eastern studies, politics, religion, Semitic studies, theology, and more. Entries also explore the importance of interfaith relations and the permeation of persons, ideas, and objects across geographical and intellectual boundaries between Europe and the Islamic world. This reference work provides an exhaustive and vivid portrait of Islamic civilization and brings together in one authoritative text all aspects of Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages. Accessible to scholars, students and non-specialists, this resource will be of great use in research and understanding of the roots of today's Islamic society as well as the rich and vivid culture of medieval Islamic civilization.

First published in 1998, this valuable reference work offers concise, expert answers to questions on all aspects of life and culture in Medieval England, including art, architecture, law, literature, kings, women, music, commerce, technology, warfare and religion. This wide-ranging text encompasses English social, cultural, and political life from the Anglo-Saxon invasions in the fifth century to the turn of the sixteenth century, as well as its ties to the Celtic world of Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the French and Anglo-Norman world of the Continent and the Viking and Scandinavian world of the North Sea. A range of topics are discussed from Sedulius to Skelton, from Wulfstan of York to Reginald Pecock, from Pictish art to Gothic sculpture and from the Vikings to the Black Death. A subject and name index makes it easy to locate information and bibliographies direct users to essential primary and secondary sources as well as key scholarship. With more than 700 entries by over 300 international scholars, this work provides a detailed portrait of the English Middle Ages and will be of great value to students and scholars studying Medieval history in England and Europe, as well as non-specialist readers.

Islamic civilization flourished in the Middle Ages across a vast geographical area that spans today's Middle and Near East. First published in 2006, Medieval Islamic Civilization examines the socio-cultural history of the regions where Islam took hold between the 7th and 16th centuries. This important two-volume work contains over 700 alphabetically arranged entries, contributed and signed by international scholars and experts in fields such as Arabic languages, Arabic literature, architecture, history of science, Islamic arts, Islamic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Near Eastern studies, politics, religion, Semitic studies, theology, and more. Entries also explore the importance of interfaith relations and the permeation of persons, ideas, and objects across geographical and intellectual boundaries between Europe and the Islamic world. This reference work provides an exhaustive and vivid portrait of Islamic civilization and brings together in one authoritative text all aspects of Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages. Accessible to scholars, students and non-specialists, this resource will be of great use in research and understanding of the roots of today's Islamic society as well as the rich and vivid culture of medieval Islamic civilization.

This book offers an understanding and analysis of the aesthetics of historying through the specific concepts and process of the fabricated, factitious, factional, factious, factitive, factive, factualist, fictitious, fictive and the figurative. These concepts create the(ir) connection(s) between "the past" and 'history" hitherto rethink the nature of "the historical past." There are many different available 'forms' of histories that shape the minds of historians when they deploy their historical imaginations through "the past(s) via their preferred history creations." For every historian and every history reader, there is a different experience of "the history past aesthetic."

Examining two state-sponsored history writing projects in Indonesia and the Philippines in the 1970s, this book illuminates the contents and contexts of the two projects and, more importantly, provides a nuanced characterization of the relationship between embodiments of power (state, dictators, government officials) and knowledge (intellectuals, historians, history). Known respectively as Sejarah Nasional Indonesia (SNI) and the Tadhana project, these projects were initiated by the Suharto and Marcos authoritarian regimes against the backdrop of rising and competing nationalisms, as well as the regimes' efforts at political consolidation. The dialectics between actors and the politico-academic contexts determine whether scholarship and politics would clash, mutually support, or co-exist parallel with one another. Rather than one side manipulating or co-opting the other, this study shows the mutual need or partnership between scholars and political actors in these projects. This book proposes the need to embrace rather than deny or transcend the entwined power/knowledge if the idea is for scholarship to realize its truly progressive visions. Analyzing the dynamics of state-scholar relations in the two countries, the book will be of interest to academics in the fields on Southeast Asian history and politics, nationalism, historiography, intellectual history, postocolonial studies, cultural studies, and the sociology of knowledge.

This book examines the relationship between class and culture in 1930s Britain. Focusing on the reading and cinema-going tastes of the working classes, Robert James' landmark study combines rigorous historical analysis with a close textual reading of visual and written sources to appraise the role of popular leisure in this fascinating decade. Drawing on a wealth of original research, this lively and accessible book adds immeasurably to our knowledge of working-class leisure pursuits in this contentious period. It is a key intervention in the field, providing both an imaginative approach to the subject and an abundance of new material to analyse, thus making it an undergraduate and postgraduate 'must-have'. It will be a particularly welcome addition for anyone interested in the fields of cultural and social history, as well as film, cultural and literary studies. -- .

Although there is a rich historiography on Enlightenment Tuscany in Italian as well as French and German, the principle Anglophone works are Eric Cochrane's Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies (1961) and his Enlightenment Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1973). It is high time to revisit the Tuscan Enlightenment. This volume brings together an international group of scholars with the goal of putting to rest the idea that Florence ceased to be interesting after the Renaissance. Indeed, it is partly the explicit dialogue between Renaissance and Enlightenment that makes eighteenth-century Tuscany so interesting. This enlightened age looked to the past. It began the Herculean project of collecting, editing, and publishing many of the manuscripts that today form the bedrock of any serious study of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Vasari, Galileo, and other Tuscan writers. This was an age of public libraries, projects of cultural restoration, and the emergence of the Uffizi as a public art gallery, complemented by a science museum in Peter Leopold's reign whose relics can still be visited in the Museo Galileo and La Specola.

This book offers a collection of innovative methodological approaches to Memory Studies in Russia and Eastern Europe. Providing insights into the relationship between memory and identity, the twelve chapters provide multidisciplinary analysis of how history is used to reinforce, remould, and reinvent national and group identities. This analysis includes a strong emphasis on interrogating the role of the researcher and the impact of methodology, exploring the field's most pressing challenges, such as the subjectivity of remembrance, reception versus production of discourse, and the inclusion of marginal perspectives. By focussing on countries in which the past is highly politicised, including Serbia, Ukraine, Poland, Russia and the Baltic States, the volume also analyses the diverse - and often conflicting - ways in which historical narratives emerge from these states' efforts to create new pasts that shape their respective visions of the future, with pressing ramifications across this region and beyond.

The legacies of plantation slavery continue to inhabit, animate, and haunt the diverse forms of unfreedom that mark our present. Diverse Unfreedoms charts a new way of thinking through these legacies of unfreedom via a more entangled and multidirectional model of what makes for historical change and continuity in practices and relationships of subjugation. This volume troubles the stark opposition between slavery and freedom by foregrounding the diversity of types of exploitation above and beyond the most extreme forms of dehumanization characterized by slavery. The chapters, from multiple disciplines and discussing diverse regions and historical periods, illustrate the significance of interdisciplinary and international perspectives in understanding diverse unfreedoms, and offer a nuanced account of historical change and continuity in systems that generate and perpetuate unfreedom. Through examining the frictions that mark certain key moments of legal, social, and institutional transition, the essays in this volume express the limits of liberal humanist projects and present a critique of the liberal notion of freedom as the necessary horizon of emancipatory imagination and labor.

This book analyzes an example of life-writing, an autobiography that was written in the early nineteenth century and will appeal to readers of many disciplines who are interested in understanding the interconnectedness of memory, textual narrative, and ideas of selfhood. Moreover, this book reasserts the importance of the individual in history. It explains how personal narratives reveal the individual as a purposeful social actor pursuing particular objectives, but framed by cultural and social contexts, in this case by eighteenth-century London and Imperial India. The author of this autobiography, William Hickey, projects a sense of self formed by a combination of an interiorized self-consciousness (an awareness of himself as an autonomous individual, although not one prone to deep self-reflection) and a socially-turned self-fashioning. Like so many autobiographers of his time, Hickey's self is realized through the production of a narrative, his self fixed and defined through the act of writing. As he wrote his memoirs, Hickey was engaged in purposeful textual representation to satisfy his perceived sense of place in that culture (above all, as a gentleman) while tacitly reflecting the constraints of that culture imposed upon the form and content of the text.

Rise and Decline of Civilizations: Lessons for the Jewish People is a thought experiment in which the author examines the work of 23 historians of the last 2,400 years, from Thucydides to Jared Diamond, who describe the rise and decline of nations and civilizations. None of these is a historian of Judaism. The key question of the book is whether the reasons that explain the rise, decline, and fall of other civilizations could apply to the Jews as well. The answer of the author is a qualified yes. From the work of these historians he extracts 12 drivers, or factors that explain rise and decline, from religion to natural catastrophes. Reviewing the Jewish history of more than 3,000 years against the background of these drivers opens fascinating new vistas for the general reader, and may be particularly useful to historians and politicians.

This book focuses on the fate of Polish Jews and Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust and its aftermath, in the ill-recognized era of Eastern-European pogroms after the WW2. It is based on the author's own ethnographic research in those areas of Poland where the Holocaust machinery operated. The results comprise the anthropological interviews with the members of the generation of Holocaust witnesses and the results of her own extensive archive research in the Polish Institute for National Remembrance (IPN). "[This book] is at times shocking; however, it grips the reader's attention from the first to the last page. It is a remarkable work, set to become a classic among the publications in this field." Jerzy Jedlicki, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Studies on gender and sexuality have proliferated in the last decades, covering a wide spectrum of disciplines. This collection of essays offers a metanarrative of sexuality as it has been recently embedded in the art historical discourse of the European Renaissance. It revisits 'canonical' forms of visual culture, such as painting, sculpture and a number of emblematic manuscripts. The contributors focus on one image-either actual or thematic-and examine it against its historiographic assumptions. Through the use of interdisciplinary approaches, the essays propose to unmask the ideology(ies) of representation of sexuality and suggest a richer image of the ever-shifting identities of gender. The collection focuses on the Italian Renaissance, but also includes case studies from Germany and France.

Is it right for historians to serve as 'expert witnesses' to past events? Since the end of the Cold War, a series of heated and politicised debates across Europe have questioned the 'truth' about painful episodes in the twentieth century. From the Holocaust to Srebrenica, inquiries and fact-finding commissions have become a common device employed by governments to deal with the pressure of public opinion. State-sponsored programmes of education and research attempt to encourage a common moral understanding of the lessons we learn from these painful memories. Contemporary historians have increasingly been drawn into these efforts since 1989 - in the courtroom, in the media, on commissions, as advisers. In a series of thoughtful essays, written by leading historians from across Europe, this volume considers the ethics and responsibilities that this new role entails. For anyone concerned with the role of the historian in contemporary society and how we arrive at a public understanding of history, this book is essential reading. -- .

This volume tells the story of the legacy and impact of the great German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Leibniz made significant contributions to many areas, including philosophy, mathematics, political and social theory, theology, and various sciences. The essays in this volume explores the effects of Leibniz's profound insights on subsequent generations of thinkers by tracing the ways in which his ideas have been defended and developed in the three centuries since his death. Each of the 11 essays is concerned with Leibniz's legacy and impact in a particular area, and between them they show not just the depth of Leibniz's talents but also the extent to which he shaped the various domains to which he contributed, and in some cases continues to shape them today. With essays written by experts such as Nicholas Jolley, Pauline Phemister, and Philip Beeley, this volume is essential reading not just for students of Leibniz but also for those who wish to understand the game-changing impact made by one of history's true universal geniuses.

Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006) was one of most imposing and influential European intellectual historians in the twentieth century. Constantly probing and transgressing the boundaries of mainstream historical writing, he created numerous highly innovative approaches, absorbing influences from other academic disciplines as represented in the work of philosophers and political thinkers like Hans Georg Gadamer and Carl Schmitt and that of internationally renowned scholars such as Hayden White, Michel Foucault, and Quentin Skinner. An advocate of "grand theory," Koselleck was an inspiration to many scholars and helped move the discipline into new directions (such as conceptual history, theories of historical times and memory) and across disciplinary and national boundaries. He thus achieved a degree of international fame that was unusual for a German historian after 1945. This book not only presents the life and work of a "great thinker" and European intellectual, it also contributes to our understanding of complex theoretical and methodological issues in the cultural sciences and to our knowledge of the history of political, historical, and cultural thought in Germany from the 1950s to the present.

This book presents original studies of how a cultural concept of Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history came to make sense in the experiences of people entangled in different historical situations. Instead of searching for the inconsistencies, discontinuities, or ruptures of dominant grand historical narratives of Jewish cultural history, this book unfolds situations and events, where Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history became useful, meaningful, and acted upon as a site of causal explanations. Inspired by classical American pragmatism and more recent French pragmatism, we present a new perspective on Jewish cultural history in which the experiences, problems, and actions of people are at the center of reconstructions of historical causalities and projections of future horizons. The book shows how boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish are not a priori given but are instead repeatedly experienced in a variety of situations and then acted upon as matters of facts. In different ways and on different scales, these studies show how people's experiences of Jewishness perpetually probe, test, and shape the boundaries between what is Jewish and non-Jewish, and that these boundaries shape the spatiotemporal linkages that we call history.

This book explores the intellectual world of Francesco Robortello, one of the most prominent scholars of the Italian Renaissance. From poetics to rhetoric, philology to history, topics to ethics, Robortello revolutionised the field of humanities through innovative interpretations of ancient texts and with a genius that was architectural in scope. He was highly esteemed by his contemporaries for his acute wit, but also envied and disparaged for his many qualities. In comparison with other humanists of his time such as Carlo Sigonio and Pier Vettori, Robortello had a deeply philosophical vein, one that made him unique not only to Italy, but to Europe more generally. Robortello's role in reforming the humanities makes him a constituent part of the long-fifteenth century. Robortello's thought, however, unlike that of other fifteenth-century humanists, sprung from and was thoroughly imbued with a systematic, Aristotelian spirit without which his philosophy would never have emerged from the tumultuous years of the mid-Cinquecento. Francesco Robortello created a system for the humanities which was unique for his century: a perfect union of humanism and philosophy. This book represents the first fully fledged monograph on this adventurous intellectual life.

History Without a Subject presents a broad-ranging discussion of the topic of postmodernity. Beginning with an analysis of how changes in the global economy are affecting the lives of ordinary Americans, this book suggests that the postmodern condition in this country can be likened to the balkanization of culture and society and the ?Brazilianizat

'Rise and Decline of Civilizations: Lessons for the Jewish People' is a thought experiment in which the author examines the work of 23 historians of the last 2,400 years, from Thucydides to Jared Diamond, who describe the rise and decline of nations and civilizations. None of the 23 is a historian of Judaism. The key question of the book is whether the reasons that explain the rise, decline, and fall of other civilizations could apply to the Jews as well. The answer of the author is a qualified yes. From the work of these historians he extracts 12 "drivers," or factors that explain rise and decline, from religion to natural catastrophes. Reviewing the Jewish history of more than 3000 years against the background of these drivers opens fascinating new vistas for the general reader, but may be particularly useful to historians and politicians.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was one of the most celebrated and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He was awarded in 1928 the Nobel prize for literature for his philosophical work, and his controversial ideas about time, memory and life shaped generations of thinkers, writers and artists. In this clear and engaging introduction, Mark Sinclair examines the full range of Bergson's work. The book sheds new light on familiar aspects of Bergson's thought, but also examines often ignored aspects of his work, such as his philosophy of art, his philosophy of technology and the relation of his philosophical doctrines to his political commitments. After an illuminating overview of his life and work, chapters are devoted to the following topics: the experience of time as duration the experience of freedom memory mind and body laughter and humour knowledge art and creativity the elan vital as a theory of biological life ethics, religion, war and modern technology With a final chapter on his legacy, Bergson is an outstanding guide to one of the great philosophers. Including chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary, it is essential reading for those interested in metaphysics, time, free will, aesthetics, the philosophy of biology, continental philosophy and the role of European intellectuals in World War I.

Michael Polanyi is most famous for his work in chemistry and the philosophy of science, but in the 1930s and 1940s he made an important contribution to economics. Drawing on rich archival materials of Polanyi and his correspondents, Gabor Biro explores their competing worldviews and their struggles to popularize their visions of the economy, economic expertise and democracy. Special focus is given to Polanyi's pioneering economics film and postmodern ideas. This volume will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of the history of economics, philosophy of science, and science and technology studies.

The main and original contribution of this volume is to offer a discussion of teleology through the prism of religion, philosophy and history. The goal is to incorporate teleology within discussions across these three disciplines rather than restrict it to one as is customarily the case. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from individual teleologies to collective ones; ideas put forward by the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and the Scottish philosopher David Hume, by the Anglican theologian and founder of Methodism, John Wesley, and the English naturalist Charles Darwin.

Published here for the first time is much of a final and long-anticipated work on philosophy of history by the great Oxford philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943). The original text of this uncompleted work has only recently been discovered. It is accompanied by further, shorter writings by Collingwood on historical knowledge and inquiry, selected from previously unpublished manuscripts held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. All these writings, besides containing entirely new ideas, discuss further many of the issues which Collingwood famously raised in The Idea of History and in his Autobiography. The volume includes also two conclusions written by Collingwood for lectures which were eventually revised and published as The Idea of Nature, but which have relevance also to his philosophy of history. A lengthy editorial introduction sets these writings in their context, and discusses philosophical questions to which they give rise. The editors also consider why Collingwood left The Principles of History unfinished at his death, and what significance should be attached to the fact that it contains no reference to the idea of historical understanding as re-enactment. This volume will be a landmark publication not just in Collingwood studies but in philosophy of history generally.