This is a magisterial new account of Europe's tragic descent into a largely inadvertent war in the summer of 1914. Thomas Otte reveals why a century-old system of Great Power politics collapsed so ...disastrously in the weeks from the 'shot heard around the world' on June 28th to Germany's declaration of war on Russia on August 1st. He shows definitively that the key to understanding how and why Europe descended into world war is to be found in the near-collective failure of statecraft by the rulers of Europe and not in abstract concepts such as the 'balance of power' or the 'alliance system'. In this unprecedented panorama of Europe on the brink, from the ministerial palaces of Berlin and Vienna to Belgrade, London, Paris and St Petersburg, Thomas Otte reveals the hawks and doves whose decision-making led to a war that would define a century and which still reverberates today.
Kipling, Elgar, Mafeking Night . . . all these conjure up an image of a British society besotted with imperial pride in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact the true picture was more ...complex than this and people reacted to their empire in different ways. Many were hardly aware of it at all. This lively book is the first study of the impact of the empire on British society and culture that looks beneath the surface to find out what people really thought, with some surprising results.
While the impact of a colonising metropole on subjected territories has been widely scrutinized, the effect of empire on the colonising country has long been neglected. Recently, many studies have ...examined the repercussions of their respective empires on colonial powers such as the United Kingdom and France. Belgium and its African empire have been conspicuously absent from this discussion. This book attempts to fill this gap. Belgium and the Congo, 1885–1980 examines the effects of colonialism on the domestic politics, diplomacy and economics of Belgium, from 1880 - when King Leopold II began the country's expansionist enterprises in Africa - to the 1980s, well after the Congo's independence in June of 1960. By examining the colonial impact on its mother country Belgium, this study also contributes to a better understanding of Congo's past and present.
It is widely believed that the political problems of the Middle
East date back to the era of World War I, when European colonial
powers unilaterally imposed artificial borders on the post-Ottoman
...world in postwar agreements. This book offers a new account of how
the Great War unmade and then remade the political order of the
region. Ranging from Morocco to Iran and spanning the eve of the
Great War into the 1930s, it demonstrates that the modern Middle
East was shaped through complex and violent power struggles among
local and international actors. Jonathan Wyrtzen shows how the
cataclysm of the war opened new possibilities for both European and
local actors to reimagine post-Ottoman futures. After the 1914-1918
phase of the war, violent conflicts between competing political
visions continued across the region. In these extended struggles,
the greater Middle East was reforged. Wyrtzen emphasizes the
intersections of local and colonial projects and the entwined
processes through which states were made, identities transformed,
and boundaries drawn. This book's vast scope encompasses successful
state-building projects such as the Turkish Republic and the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well as short-lived political
units-including the Rif Republic in Morocco, the Sanusi state in
eastern Libya, a Greater Syria, and attempted Kurdish states-that
nonetheless left traces on the map of the region. Drawing on a wide
range of sources, Worldmaking in the Long Great War
retells the origin story of the modern Middle East.
Between Sex and Power Therborn, Göran
2004, 20040731, 2004-02-20, 2004-07-31, 20030101
eBook, Book
The institution of the family changed hugely during the course of the twentieth century. In this major new work, Göran Therborn provides a global history and sociology of the family as an institution ...and of politics within the family, focusing on three dimensions of family relations: on the rights and powers of fathers and husbands; on marriage, cohabitation and extra-marital sexuality; and on population policy. Therborn's empirical analysis uses a multi-disciplinary approach to show how the major family systems of the world have been formed and developed. Therborn concludes by assessing what changes the family might see during the next century. This book will be essential reading for anybody with an interest in either the sociology or the history of the family.
Preface Introduction: Sex, Power, and Families of the World Part 1: Patriarchy and Its Exits - and Closures 1. Modernities and Family Systems: Patriarchy around l900 2. A Long Night´s Journey into Dawn 3. The Patriarchal Burden of the 21st Century Part 2: Marriage and Mutations of the Socio-Sexual Order 4. Sex and Marriage in l900 5. Marital Curvatures of the 20th Century 6. The Return of Cohabitation and the Sexual Revolution Part 3: Couples, Babies, and States 7. Fertility Decline and Political Natalism 8. The Politics and the Sociology of Birth Control List of Tables A Note on Primary Sources References
"...a great work of historical intellect and imagination. It is the fruit of a rare combination of gifts. Trained as a sociologist, Therborn is a highly conceptual thinker, allying the formal rigor of his discipline at its best with a command of a vast range of empirical data. The result is a powerful theoretical structure, supported by a fascinating body of evidence. In it, you can find the largest changes in human relations of modern times." - The Nation
'The richness of the data and the text provide a fascinating account of how much, and in some cases how little, family systems have changed over the century, and the pace of the book certainly underlines the pace of these changes. It deserves to become a classic text for students and researchers of families past, present and future.' - Social Policy, Volume 36/2 - 2007
Göran Therborn is Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and University Professor of Sociology at Uppsala University.
Although Conservative parties did not exist in Germany until after the Napoleonic Wars, there did emerge, around 1770, traceable organized political activity and intellectual currents of a clearly ...Conservative character. The author argues that this movement developed as a response to the challenge of the Enlightenment in the fields of religion, socioeconomic affairs, and politics- and that this response antedated the impact of the French Revolution. Believing that Conservatism cannot be treated properly as a specialized phenomenon, or simply as an intellectual movement, Professor Epstein correlates it with the political and social forces of the time.
Originally published in 1976.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been ...intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways. Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.
Though the extreme right was not particularly successful in the 1999 European elections, it continues to be a major factor in the politics of Western Europe. This book, newly available in paperback, ...provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the extreme right in the Netherlands (Centrumdemocraten, Centrumpartij'86), Belgium (Vlaams Blok) and Germany (Die Republikaner, Deutsche Volksunion). On the basis of original research - using party literature - the author concludes that though individual parties might stress different issues, the extreme right party family does share a core ideology of nationalism, xenophobia, welfare chauvinism, and law and order. The author's research and conclusions clearly have broader implications for the study of the extreme right phenomenon and party ideology in general, and the book should be of interest to anyone studying or researching in the areas of European politics, political ideologies, political parties, extremism, racism or nationalism.
This collection addresses the impact of the end of the First
World War and challenges the positive vision of a new world order
that emerged from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
The battle of Tannenberg (August 27–30, 1914) opened World War I with a decisive German victory over Russia—indeed the Kaiser’s only clear-cut victory in a non-attritional battle during four years of ...war. In this first paperback edition of the classic work, historian Dennis Showalter analyzes this battle’s causes, effects, and implications for subsequent German military policy. The author carefully guides the reader through what actually happened on the battlefield, from its grand strategy down to the level of improvised squad actions. Examining the battle in the context of contemporary diplomatic, political, and economic affairs, Showalter also reviews both armies’ social settings and military doctrine, and shows how the battle may be understood as a case study of problems that military organizations face in the initial stages of a major war. In addition, he demolishes many myths about the battle, such as the supposed superiority of the German military, the animosity among Russian field commanders, and the assumption that the Germans viewed their opponents as a horde of uniformed illiterates.
Tannenberg’s mystique later served the Weimar Republic and Third Reich propagandists. For years its legends helped to shape German nationalist ideology and military policy. In 1941, Hitler’s Wehrmacht grossly underestimated Soviet military capability, leading to disaster in World War II.
