Two hundred years after Singapore's foundation by Stamford Raffles in 1819, this book reflects on the historical development of the city, putting forward much new research and new thinking. It discusses Singapore's emergence as a regional economic hub, explores its strategic importance and considers its place in the development of the British Empire. Subjects covered include the city's initial role as a strategic centre to limit the resurgence of Dutch power in Southeast Asia after the Napoleonic Wars, the impact of the Japanese occupation, and the reasons for Singapore's exit from the Malaysian Federation in 1965. The book concludes by examining how Singapore's history is commemorated at present, reinforcing the image of the city as prosperous, peaceful and forward looking, and draws out the lessons which history can provide concerning the city's likely future development.

This updated Seminar Study provides an overview of the process of British decolonisation. The eclipse of the British Empire has been one of the central features of post-war international history. At the end of the Second World War the empire still spanned the globe and yet by the mid-1960s most of Britain's major dependencies had achieved independence. Concisely and accessibly, the book introduces students to this often dramatic story of colonial wars and emergencies, and fraught international relations. Although a relatively recent phenomenon, the end of the British Empire continues to spawn a lively and voluminous historical debate. Dr. White provides a synthesis of recent approaches, specially updated and expanded for this edition, by looking at the demise of British imperial power from three main perspectives the shifting emphases of British overseas policy the rise of populist, anti-colonial nationalism the international political, strategic, and economic environment dominated by the USA and the USSR. The book also examines the British experience within the context of European decolonisation as a whole. Supporting the text are a range of useful tools, including maps, a chronology of independence, a guide to the main characters involved, and an extensive bibliography (specially expanded for the new edition. Decolonisation: the British Experience since 1945 is ideal for students and interested readers at all levels, providing a diverse range of primary sources and the tools to unlock them.

Divorce is a conspicuous character trait of modernity, commonly portrayed in texts and on screen, with its moral and social rationalisation firmly rooted in Enlightenment and Romantic thought. The aim of this volume is to bring into focus this contemporary cultural fascination by assembling the variety of academic responses it has started to create. Bringing together the reflections of scholars from the UK and North America who have worked in this domain, this study offers for the first time a genuinely wide-ranging account of the depiction of divorce across the northern hemisphere in a number of media (fiction, journalism, film and television). It reaches historically from the intellectual and legal aftermath of the Enlightenment right up to the present day. As such, the collection shows both the roots of this apparently contemporary phenomenon in nineteenth-century literary practice and the very particular ways in which divorce characterises the different narrative media of modernity.

The thirteen essays in this volume, based on selected papers given at the Second Annual Conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviemistes (2003), explore the relationships between symbolic, monetary and literary currencies in nineteenth-century France, Essays focus on the sometimes surprising treatment of capitalism and commodity culture in the works of Mallarme, Zola and Huysmans; the transfer and borrowing of economic and literary commodities, names, and concepts in nineteenth-century culture, from Flora Tristan's July Monarchy to Schwob's fin-de-siecle moment; and the interplay between wealth and identity, and commerce and globalisation, in the writings of Hugo, Janin, and Balzac. While it is widely acknowledged that the theme of money is central to nineteenth-century literature, this volume is innovative in tracing the variation, breadth and ubiquity of the idea of currencies in the cultural imaginary of the epoch.

Two hundred years after Singapore's foundation by Stamford Raffles in 1819, this book reflects on the historical development of the city, putting forward much new research and new thinking. It discusses Singapore's emergence as a regional economic hub, explores its strategic importance and considers its place in the development of the British Empire. Subjects covered include the city's initial role as a strategic centre to limit the resurgence of Dutch power in Southeast Asia after the Napoleonic Wars, the impact of the Japanese occupation, and the reasons for Singapore's exit from the Malaysian Federation in 1965. The book concludes by examining how Singapore's history is commemorated at present, reinforcing the image of the city as prosperous, peaceful and forward looking, and draws out the lessons which history can provide concerning the city's likely future development.

One of the primary social changes ushered in by the French Revolution was the legalization of divorce in 1792. This book tracks the part played by novels in this conflict between the secular rights of individual citizens and the sanctity of the traditional family.

This updated Seminar Study provides an overview of the process of British decolonisation. The eclipse of the British Empire has been one of the central features of post-war international history. At the end of the Second World War the empire still spanned the globe and yet by the mid-1960s most of Britain's major dependencies had achieved independence. Concisely and accessibly, the book introduces students to this often dramatic story of colonial wars and emergencies, and fraught international relations. Although a relatively recent phenomenon, the end of the British Empire continues to spawn a lively and voluminous historical debate. Dr. White provides a synthesis of recent approaches, specially updated and expanded for this edition, by looking at the demise of British imperial power from three main perspectives the shifting emphases of British overseas policy the rise of populist, anti-colonial nationalism the international political, strategic, and economic environment dominated by the USA and the USSR. The book also examines the British experience within the context of European decolonisation as a whole. Supporting the text are a range of useful tools, including maps, a chronology of independence, a guide to the main characters involved, and an extensive bibliography (specially expanded for the new edition. Decolonisation: the British Experience since 1945 is ideal for students and interested readers at all levels, providing a diverse range of primary sources and the tools to unlock them.

"A complete and unified account of Plato's epistemology . . . scholarly, historically sensitive, and philosophically sophisticated. Above all it is sensible. . . . White's strength is that he places Plato's preoccupation in careful historical perspective, without belittling the intrinsic difficulties of the problems he tackled. . . . White's project is to find a continuous argument running through Plato's various attacks on epistemological problems. No summary can do justice to his remarkable success." --Ronald B. De Sousa, University of Toronto, in Phoenix

`It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.' As Joris -Karl Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. Resisting the models of classic nineteenth-century fiction, it focuses on the attempts of its anti-hero, the hypersensitive neurotic and aesthete, Des Esseintes, to escape Paris and the vulgarity of modern life. Holed up in his private museum of high taste, he offers Huysmans's readers a treasure trove of cultural delights which anticipates many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarme and Poe. This new translation is supplemented by indispensable notes which enhance the understanding of a highly allusive work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Scarlet Letters explores the fascination exerted by adultery throughout the long history of western cultures. Critics from the UK, USA and Australia, working in a variety of specialisms, have contributed to this substantial new collection of close readings and wider contextualisations. As well as focusing on the bourgeois nineteenth century as the high age of representations of adultery, the book offers historicist and psychoanalytic analyses of texts ranging from the Amphitryon myth to Fatal Attraction and The Piano .

From the early Christian era in Europe, Southeast Asia was known as the "Land of Gold." It is a region blessed with a rich diversity of cultures, peoples, and scenery. A Traveller's History of Southeast Asia is a lucid and concise introduction to the histories of the modern states of Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Singapore, Brunei, and East Timor, providing an essential guide for both tourists and the general reader. It spans the history of the region from "Java Man" some one million years ago, to the development of the high-tech, skyscraper cities of the new millennium, all the way to the present time. Following chapters on the physical environment and the earliest human history of Southeast Asia, the authors carry the reader through the classical kingdoms that produced such architectural marvels as Borobudur in Java and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The book further explores Southeast Asia's growing trade with the outside world from 1500 culminating in colonization by the European imperial powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The struggles for independence in the last century--which made the modern nations of the region--are discussed in detail, as are the dramatic and tragic events of the post-independence era such as the Vietnam War and the Cambodia genocide. The remarkable successes and failings of the region's recent economic development are highlighted in the final chapter. Above all, A Traveller's History of Southeast Asia shows how the region's soul has been preserved against tremendous external pressures.

The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction, first published in 1999, focuses on a key moment in the construction of the modern view of the family in France. Nicholas White's analysis of novels by Zola, Maupassant, Hennique, Bourget and Armand Charpentier is fashioned by perspectives on a wide cultural field, including legal, popular and academic discourses on the family and its discontents. His account encourages a close rereading of canonical as well as overlooked texts from fin de siecle France. What emerges between the death of Flaubert in 1880 and the publication of Bourget's Un divorce in 1904 is a series of Naturalist and post-Naturalist representations of transgressive behaviour in which tales of adultery, illegitimacy, consanguinity, incest and divorce serve to exemplify and to offer a range of nuances on the Third Republic's crisis in what might now be termed 'family values'.

Nicholas White opposes the long-standard view that ancient Greek ethics is fundamentally different from modern ethical views, especially those prevalent since Kant. Since the eighteenth century, and indeed since before Hegel, moral philosophers wishing to oppose the dualism of rationality-cum-morality vs. inclination, especially as it is manifested in Kant, have looked to Greek thought for an alternative conception of ethical norms and the good life. As a result, Greek ethics, particularly in the so-called Classical period of the fourth century BCE, has for more than two centuries been standardly thought to be fundamentally eudaimonist, and to have the character of what is nowadays normally called the ethics of virtue. White argues that although this picture of Greek ethics is not without an element of truth, it nevertheless seriously distorts the facts. In the first place, Greek thought is far more variegated than the picture suggests. Secondly, it contains many elements - even in the Classical thinkers Plato and Aristotle - that are not eudaimonist and also not suitable for an ethics of virtue. Greek thinkers were not as a group convinced of the possibility of a harmony of one's happiness with full regard for the happiness of others and with conformity to ethical norms. On the contrary, Greek thinkers were well aware of,and took seriously, the idea that ethical norms can possess a force that does not derive from conduciveness to one's own happiness. Indeed, even Plato and Aristotle took it that under certain circumstances there can even be a clash between ethical standards and one's own well-being. The project of completely eliminating the possibility of such a clash came to full development not in the Classical period but rather in the ethics of the Stoics in the third century. Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics argues that throughout Greek thought the concept of ethics as a source of obligations and imperatives can, in unfavorable circumstances, run counter to one's own happiness. In this sense Greek ethics has a shape similar to that of modern Kantian and post-Kantian thinking, and should not be seen as opposed to it.

Nicholas White opposes the long-standard view that ancient Greek ethics is fundamentally different from modern ethical views, especially those prevalent since Kant. White examines the ways in which Greek ethics has been interpreted since the eighteenth century, and traces the history, in Greek ethical thought, of the idea of conflict among human aims, in particular the conflict between conformity to ethical standards and one's own happiness. White's fresh, challenging perspective will demand the attention of anyone working on the history of ethics.

The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction, first published in 1999, focuses on a key moment in the construction of the modern view of the family in France. Nicholas White's analysis of novels by Zola, Maupassant, Hennique, Bourget and Armand Charpentier is fashioned by perspectives on a wide cultural field, including legal, popular and academic discourses on the family and its discontents. His account encourages a close rereading of canonical as well as overlooked texts from fin de siecle France. What emerges between the death of Flaubert in 1880 and the publication of Bourget's Un divorce in 1904 is a series of Naturalist and post-Naturalist representations of transgressive behaviour in which tales of adultery, illegitimacy, consanguinity, incest and divorce serve to exemplify and to offer a range of nuances on the Third Republic's crisis in what might now be termed 'family values'.

The thirteen essays in this volume, based on selected papers given at the Second Annual Conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviemistes (2003), explore the relationships between symbolic, monetary and literary currencies in nineteenth-century France, Essays focus on the sometimes surprising treatment of capitalism and commodity culture in the works of Mallarme, Zola and Huysmans; the transfer and borrowing of economic and literary commodities, names, and concepts in nineteenth-century culture, from Flora Tristan's July Monarchy to Schwob's fin-de-siecle moment; and the interplay between wealth and identity, and commerce and globalisation, in the writings of Hugo, Janin, and Balzac. While it is widely acknowledged that the theme of money is central to nineteenth-century literature, this volume is innovative in tracing the variation, breadth and ubiquity of the idea of currencies in the cultural imaginary of the epoch.