This book illustrates the unnaturalness of modern science and technology by tracing their cognitive, evolutionary, and religious origins. It elaborates that all premodern knowers faced inherent limits, and the West was able to develop modern science and technology because of its inherent contradictions forcing the transcendence of limitations.

A landmark study of the history of male-male sex in early modern Europe, including the European colonies and the Ottoman world.

From the award-winning author of Five Points and City of Dreams, a breathtaking new history of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the Great Potato Famine, showing how their strivings in and beyond New York exemplify the astonishing tenacity and improbable triumph of Irish America.

This book examines the efforts of the government in Scotland to manage the increase of migrants travelling to Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. Focussing on the period between 1885 and 1914, the book explores how the Scottish machinery of government handled the administration of ‘foreigners.’ The author uses a comparative, thematic approach to analyse migrant experiences, identities, and relationships with state institutions. Drawing from state records held by the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, the book argues that Scottish officials in semi-autonomous boards began to recognise, describe and enumerate the presence of the ‘foreigner’ in the early twentieth century, framing their handling of foreignness in accordance with the Aliens Act of 1905. The author goes on to explain that institutions operating in Scotland developed a distinctly Scottish approach to alien matters, which continued up until the Second Word War.

This book investigates the complex relationship between the development of modern empires, nation, and the history of tropical medicine. Broadening existing historiographical perspectives, it explores imperialism outside of the British Empire, drawing on case studies from other colonial experiences in Africa, Asia, and South America in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Each of these systems adopted different approaches to colonial health and medicine. By studying their diversity, it is possible to obtain a more comprehensive picture of what we now call ‘tropical medicine.’ The authors emphasise that the British model cannot be adapted to all colonial experiences, drawing on relevant cases from both interoceanic and continental empires. The collection comprises three sections. The first examines the role of tropical medicine in the evolution and collapse of empire in countries such as Portugal and the Netherlands. The second part analyses the links between tropical medical institutions and imperial commercial and political expansion in Britain and Brazil. Finally, the authors tackle the crucial interrelated circulation of people, objects, and ideas amongst countries including Brazil, China, Italy, and Spain. Using a medical lens to analyse the inter-connected processes of nation-building and colonial expansion in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, this book provides valuable reading for scholars of imperialism and medical history alike.

This book focuses on the rise of Kurdish nationalism in northwestern Iran in the context of the emergence of the Kurdish leader, Ismail Agha Simko, who organized a movement to establish a Kurdish state between 1918 and 1922 The rise of Simko is analyzed in the historical framework of the collapse of the Russian and Ottoman empires, as well as the disappearance of Iranian governmental authority in various provinces of the country during and after the end of the First World War. The book also investigates the impact of Iranian, Turkish, and Assyrian nationalisms on Simko and his movement. Drawing upon original documents, the author provides an in-depth analysis of the political, and socio-economic causes for the rise of proto-Kurdish nationalism in northwestern Iran during and after the Great War.

This book argues for an approach based on values when trying to make sense of shifts and changes that occurred in French politics during the last four decades. Values play a pivotal role in structuring political views and policy preferences. They influence citizens’ attitudes and behaviours as well as reflect long-lasting political cultures and cleavages. After presenting the data collected within the European values studies, on which the six contributions included in this book build, we explain how these contributions highlight some major French political dynamics by scrutinizing key driving forces such as the individualization process, generational replacement or ideological consistency in economic and cultural beliefs, and by re-assessing how attitudes toward democracy, religiosity and nationalism shape political attitudes. Challenging dominant narratives of value crisis, this book sets up an agenda for future research on French politics through the lens of value change.

A critical reassessment of world-shaping Portuguese voyages of discovery that places these quests in historical context.

A vast system of prisons, camps, and exile settlements, the Gulag was one of the defining attributes of the Stalinist Soviet Union and one of the most heinous examples of mass incarceration in the twentieth century, combining the functions of a standard prison system with the goal of isolating and punishing alleged enemies of the Soviet regime. it stretched throughout the Soviet Union, from central Moscow to the farthest reaches of Siberia. From its creation in 1930 to its partial dismantling in the mid-1950s, approximately 25 million people passed through the Gulag.

In collaboration with the Imperial War Museum, go back in time and experience history with this picture-led guide to the First World War.