Offering a comprehensive discussion into regime change in Italy during the Early Modern period, this book will appeal to students and researchers alike interested in the dynamics between politics, military, and culture in Europe during this crucial era.

‘A notorious fiend’, ‘generally odious’, ‘he seems hideous, and so he is.’

Thanks to the invidious reputation of his most famous work, The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli exerts a unique hold over the popular imagination. But was Machiavelli as sinister as he is often thought to be? Might he not have been an infinitely more sympathetic figure, prone to political missteps, professional failures and personal dramas?

Alexander Lee reveals the man behind the myth, following him from cradle to grave, from his father’s penury and the abuse he suffered at a teacher’s hands, to his marriage and his many affairs (with both men and women), to his political triumphs and, ultimately, his fall from grace and exile. In doing so, Lee uncovers hitherto unobserved connections between Machiavelli’s life and thought. He also reveals the world through which Machiavelli moved: from the great halls of Renaissance Florence to the court of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, from the dungeons of the Stinche prison to the Rucellai gardens, where he would begin work on some of his last great works.

As much a portrait of an age as of a uniquely engaging man, Lee’s gripping and definitive biography takes the reader into Machiavelli’s world – and his work – more completely than ever before.

The first comprehensive coverage of a subject that has fascinated natural historians for centuries. Avian vagrancy is a phenomenon that has fascinated natural historians for centuries. From Victorian collectors willing to spend fortunes on a rare specimen, to today's high-octane bird-chasing 'twitchers', the enigma of vagrancy has become a source of obsession for countless birders worldwide. Vagrancy in Birds explores both pattern and process in avian vagrancy, drawing on recent research to answer a suite of fundamental questions concerning the occurrence of rare birds. For each avian family, the book provides an in-depth analysis of recent and historical vagrancy patterns, representing the first comprehensive assessment of vagrancy at a global scale. The accounts are accompanied by hundreds of previously unpublished images featuring many of the most exceptional vagrants on record. The book synthesises for the first time everything we know about the subject, making the case for vagrancy as a biological phenomenon with far-reaching implications for avian ecology and evolution.

The people who live in border towns often have closer relations with people across their immediate borders than with people in the same country as them. Despite how intertwined these border communities often are, neither community can access the governmental institutions of the nation on the other side. Why are the citizens of neighboring regions that lie across an international border often subject to very different governance systems? More broadly, why can't public services be bought piecemeal, on an a-la-carte basis, with governments competing to provide higher quality services at the lowest cost in a marketplace for government services? These questions lie at the heart of modern International Relations. In The Cartel System of States, Avidit Acharya and Alexander Lee provide a powerful and field-shaping theory to address a fundamental issue in world politics: the character of the territorial nation-state. They contend that the modern territorial state system works as an economic cartel in which states have local, bounded monopolies in governing their citizens. States refuse to violate each other's monopolies, even when they could do so easily. Acharya and Lee examine what makes this system stable, when and how it emerged, how it spread, how it has been challenged, and what led it to be so resilient over time. Drawing from the centuries long process of modern state formation, The Cartel System of States explains both how the present system of territorial states-by no means a foregone conclusion in retrospect-took over the world and how it might change in the future.

Why do some states provide infrastructure and social services to their citizens, and others do not? In Development in Multiple Dimensions, Alexander Lee examines the origins of success and failure in the public services of developing countries. Comparing states within India, this study examines how elites either control, or are shut out of, policy decisions and how the interests of these elites influence public policy. He shows that social inequalities are not single but multiple, creating groups of competing elites with divergent policy interests. Since the power of these elites varies, states do not necessarily focus on the same priorities: some focus on infrastructure, others on social services, and still others on both or neither. The author develops his ideas through quantitative comparisons and case studies focusing on four northern Indian states: Gujarat, West Bengal, Bihar, and Himachal Pradesh, each of which represents different types of political economy and has a different set of powerful caste groups. The evidence indicates that regional variation in India is a consequence of social differences, and the impact of these differences on carefully considered distributional strategies, rather than differences in ideology, geography, or institutions.