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From 1857 to 1947, the Empire negotiated with thousands of Indian prisoners to form a convict society in the Andaman Penal Settlement and built an elaborate archive. Devised by punishment and reward, human copulation, and judicial surveillance, the Settlement created a unique penal culture away from ‘mainland’ India with religious, class, and caste divides. The Andaman Archives not only amounts to frequent commentaries, administrative studies, reports, opinions on prison reformation, and prisoners and their families, the study also encompasses significant documentations on Andaman aborigines, ocean politics, and agriculture and trade and offers insights into the work undertaken by the Empire for its overall governance. Staring 1909 elite political prisoners were transported, and after the influx of political prisoners, during 1932–1937, the Andamans entered a period of strong resistance movement. The inverted personal and political activism/nationalism and continuous hunger strikes in the Cellular Jail generated a lot of debates and agitations in India, and the repatriation of political prisoners started when Gandhi and Tagore intervened. Moreover, the contribution of petty and hereditary ‘criminals’ and female prisoners transported to the Andamans remains as important as that of V.D. Savarkar and other famous political prisoners who were incarcerated in the Cellular Jail. With a detailed introduction that recounts the genesis of the penal settlement in the nineteenth century and follows its story till the arrival of the Azad Hind army of Subhas Chandra Bose in the Andamans during the Second World War, this book introduces readers to key documents and events that remain symbolic of the themes and motifs of the penal culture and of the counterculture of nationalism that evolved with it for which the Andamans, after the independence of the country, became an integral part of India.

This book situates caste as a discursive category in the discussion of Partition in Bengal. In conventional narratives of Partition, the role of the Dalit or the Scheduled Castes is either completely ignored or mentioned in passing. This book addresses this discursive absence and argues that in Bengal, the Dalits were neither passive onlookers nor accidental victims of Partition politics and violence, which ruptured their unity and weakened their political autonomy. Indeed, they were the worst victims of Partition. When the Dalit peasants of Eastern Bengal began to migrate to India after 1950, they were seen as a ‘burden’ for the frail economy of West Bengal, and the Indian state did not provide them with a proper rehabilitation package. They were first segregated into fenced refugee camps where life was unbearable, and then dispersed to other parts of India—first to the Andaman Islands and the neighbouring states, and then to the inhospitable terrains of Dandakaranya, where they could be used as cheap labour for various development projects. This book looks critically at their participation in Partition politics, the reasons for their migration three years after Partition, their insufferable life and struggles in the refugee camps, their negotiations with caste and gender identities in these new environments, their organised protests against camp maladministration, and finally their satyagraha campaigns against the Indian state’s refugee dispersal policy. This book looks at how refugee politics impacted Dalit identity and protest movements in post-Partition West Bengal.

Celebrities, heroes and champions explores the role of the popular politician across a range of political movements and wider British and Irish society from the Napoleonic Wars to the Second Reform Act of 1867. Encompassing the parliamentary reform movements of Francis Burdett, Henry Hunt and the Chartists; Daniel O’Connell’s campaigns for Catholic Emancipation and Repeal of the Union the transatlantic anti-slavery movement; and the Anti-Corn Law League, it offers a rare comparative perspective on the popular politics of the time. It examines the construction and dissemination of public reputations, as well as the impact of fame on those individuals and their dependents. Building on recent developments in the study of historical and contemporary fame, it argues that popular politicians were revered as heroes by their followers and became personally synonymous with both the aims and values of the causes they espoused. However, through the commercialisation of their images and the burgeoning markets for information and entertainment, they also became part of an international culture of celebrity, encapsulated by the rapturous receptions accorded to the romantic continental revolutionaries Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Culture from the Slums explores the history of punk rock in East and West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. These decades witnessed an explosion of alternative culture across divided Germany, and punk was a critical constituent of this movement. For young Germans at the time, punk appealed to those gravitating toward individual and cultural experimentation rooted in notions of authenticity—endeavors considered to be more “real” and “genuine.” Adopting musical subculture from abroad and rearticulating the genre locally, punk gave individuals uncomfortable with their societies the opportunity to create alternative worlds. Examining how youths mobilized music to build alternative communities and identities during the Cold War, Culture from the Slums details how punk became the site of historical change during this era: in the West, concerning national identity, commercialism, and politicization; while in the East, over repression, resistance, and collaboration. But on either side of the Iron Curtain, punks’ struggles for individuality and independence forced their societies to come to terms with their political, social, and aesthetic challenges, confrontations which pluralized both states, a surprising similarity connecting democratic, capitalist West Germany with socialist, authoritarian East Germany. In this manner, Culture from the Slums suggests that the ideas, practices, and communities which youths called into being transformed both German societies along more diverse and ultimately democratic lines. Using a wealth of previously untapped archival documentation, Culture from the Slums reorients German and European history during this period by integrating alternative culture and music subculture into broader narratives of postwar inquiry and explains how punk rock shaped divided Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.

This book shows how a model of Western human-canine relations – dogopolis – emerged in modern London, New York, and Paris. Dogopolis was the arrangement that arose amongst the middle classes of London, New York, and Paris on how urban dogs should cohabit cities with humans. Between 1800 and the 1930s, dogs and humans were thrown together in these rapidly expanding cities, generating a host of feelings: love, compassion, disgust, and fear. Dogs were eventually integrated into city life in line with middle class emotional values that centered on revulsion at dirt, fears of vagabondage, anxieties about crime, and the promotion of humanitarian sentiments. By the late 1930s, fears of biting and straying dogs had diminished; canine death had been rendered mostly acceptable through the management of canine suffering; dogs fulfilled emotional roles as pets and as police dogs (who in theory soothed worries about criminality); and the first steps had been taken to reduce the disgust provoked by canine defecation. Underscoring this transformation was the actual and perceived ability of dogs to bond emotionally with humans. The emotionally-charged transnational attempts to harness, constrain or eliminate canine straying, biting, suffering, thinking, and defecating became part of the making of Western urban modernity. Dogopolis did not obliterate earlier aspects of human-dog relations. Some dogs kept on straying and biting, and dog mess remained an unresolved problem. But the place of dogs within the Western city was assured and a model of urban human-dog cohabitation established, within which Western urbanites still reside.

From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars is a history of life in the German lands and Russia during the Age of Revolution. The story begins in 1768, when the Old Regimes of early modern Europe were still intact, and ends in 1870, when nationalism, liberalism, and industrial capitalism were triumphant. Using the methodology of microhistory, the book traces the odyssey of one family, the Rosenstrauchs. Johannes Ambrosius Rosenstrauch, the book’s central figure, was a shapeshifter who embodied the restless mobility of the Age of Revolution. Born and raised in Prussia, he wandered across the German lands and Holland, lived for years in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and finally settled on the Ukrainian steppe. He was a barber-surgeon, then an actor, then a businessman. He was raised a Catholic, became a prominent Freemason, and ended his life as a Lutheran pastor. He saw the terminal crisis of Germany’s Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Wars, and the rise of the centralized nineteenth-century Russian autocracy. When Europe changed after the Napoleonic Wars, his family changed with it: his son Wilhelm fashioned himself into a quintessential Moscow bourgeois of the age of Nicholas I, and prospered until he was brought low by a financial scandal in the 1860s. Presenting a broad panorama of society and culture in Germany and Russia from the Enlightenment to the dawn of modernity, this microhistory explores how the lives of individual people are entangled with the great forces of their age.

There has been a growing acceptance among historians that significant social and personal tensions and divisions existed even within the apparently homogeneous and solid ‘traditional’ working-class communities in Britain before World War Two. But no work has been undertaken on how any such conflicts and distrust also affected political views—and particularly attitudes held towards external institutions such as the state. A larger role for government, it has continued to be argued, was generally rejected by these communities. This book investigates, across a range of topics, whether it is true that the poor in particular were hostile towards the interventions of the state in Britain in this period. It suggests that the evidence previously used by historians looking at this question painted a somewhat distorted picture of uniformity. There was a far more diverse range of attitudes than realized within these communities. Power differences (including between men and women) and struggles with neighbours or others of the working class were crucial in the development of individuals’ attitudes. Many of the poor wanted authorities to have a larger role, and for there to be greater intervention, in neighbourhoods, institutions, and lives. As well as being a direct challenge to current historical understandings on this topic, this book’s themes have a contemporary political relevance. Many of the points it makes are also important for further challenging the idea, held across much of the political spectrum, that understanding a ‘lost’ solidarity of working-class neighbourhoods is essential to comprehending current political responses in these communities.

The book recounts for the first time the 400-year history of oasts and hop kilns, vernacular farm buildings uses for drying hops. They are found in three regions of England: Kent and Sussex, Hampshire and Farnham, Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The evolution of the kilns, the drying methods and the machinery used is pieced together from surviving buildings, agricultural books, archives and local lore. 250 diagrams, sketches and photographs present a graphic picture of hop drying and the impact of oasts and kilns on the countryside. Hop growing expanded to meet the demands of Industrial Revolution Britain, its army and navy. The commercial and political drama of hop farming, drying and marketing is present in the book. Fortunes were made and lost. Gambling and dodgy dealing on hops and taxes was common. No crop was more volatile than hops. Political battles over tariffs and free trade are reported. The hop drying buildings in continental Europe – notably Flanders, Alsace, Bavaria and the Czech Republic- and in parts of the USA are described. They demonstrate that hop drying buildings in England were unmatched in the 17^th-19^th centuries, but that in the 20^th century modern drying machinery in the USA and Germany left England behind.

What if history, as we know it, had run another course? Touching on alternate histories of the future and the past, or uchronias, this book encourages deeper consideration of watershed moments in the course of history. Wide-ranging in scope, it examines the Boxer Rebellion in China, the 1848 revolution in France, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and integrates science fiction, history, historiography, sociology, anthropology, and film. In probing the genre of literature and history that is fascinated with hypotheticals surrounding key points in history, the book reaches beyond a mere reimagining of history, exploring the limits and potentials of the futures past. From the most bizarre fiction to serious scientific hypothesis, the book provides a survey of the uses of counterfactual histories, methodological issues on the possible in social sciences, and practical proposals for using alternate histories in research and the wider public.

Featuring contributions from leading scholar-activists, People Power demonstrates how the lessons of history can inform the building of new social justice movements today. This volume is inspired by the pathbreaking life and work of writer, activist, and historian Lawrence “Larry” Goodwyn. As a radical Texas journalist and a political organizer, Goodwyn participated in historic changes ushered in by grassroots activism in the 1950s and ’60s. Professor and cofounder of the Oral History Program at Duke University, Goodwyn wrote about movements built by Latino farm workers, Polish trade unionists, civil rights activists, and others who challenged the status quo. The essays in this volume examine Goodwyn’s influence in political and social movements, his approaches to teaching and writing, and his insights into the long history behind contemporary activism. People Power will generate deep discussions about the potential of democracy amid the multiple crises of our time. What motivates ordinary people to move from kitchen table conversations to civic engagement? What do the chronicles of past social movements tell us about how to confront the real blocks of racism and the idea that Americans are somehow “exceptional”? Contributors provide key experiential knowledge that will help today’s scholars and community organizers address these pressing questions.

The two decades since the last authoritative general history of Dutch Jews was published have seen such substantial developments in historical understanding that new assessment has become an imperative. This book offers an indispensable survey from a contemporary viewpoint that reflects the new preoccupations of European historiography and allows the history of Dutch Jewry to be more integrated with that of other European Jewish histories. Historians from both older and newer generations shed significant light on all eras, providing fresh detail that reflects changed emphases and perspectives. In addition to such traditional subjects as the Jewish community's relationship with the wider society and its internal structure, its leaders, and its international affiliations, new topics explored include the socio-economic aspects of Dutch Jewish life seen in the context of the integration of minorities more widely; a reassessment of the Holocaust years and consideration of the place of Holocaust memorialization in community life; and the impact of multiculturalist currents on Jews and Jewish politics. Memory studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, and digital humanities all play their part in providing the fullest possible picture.

The introduction sets out the ways in which the volume uses an engagement with the inspiring international reverberations of the Russian Revolution across the Black Atlantic world to understand the contested articulations of left politics and different struggles against racism and colonialism. The first section situates the volume in relation to the historiography of the Russian Revolution while outlining some of the key ways in which black radicals drew inspiration from these events. The second section positions the volume in relation to recent literatures on black internationalism, drawing attention to how the chapters in this volume take forward these debates. The final section draws attention to the implications of the book for key contemporary debates on the intersection of race and class, on the emergence of politicised forms of anti-racism, in particular those arising out of a revolutionary struggle, and on racialised forms of internationalism and agency. We conclude by positioning the introduction in relation to recent political events, including the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement.

The chapters in this volume, taken together, span the era of British history (1780–the present) that has engrossed the attention of Brian Harrison in a career of more than fifty years. In keeping with his diverse interests, they vary widely in subject matter. Yet each contributes, in some fashion, to an appreciation of the complexities of reform in modern Britain. Throughout his career Harrison has demonstrated an unwavering interest in social movements and pressure groups. He has analysed the organization of reform movements and their bases of support; explored the aspirations and beliefs motivating individuals to start or join such movements; and examined the ideas and ideals shaping their conception of human improvement. No one has done more to show that the significance of a reform movement’s triumphs and disappointments can be grasped only in relation to the forces amassed to resist its claims. The chapters gathered here, on the Harrisonian theme of reform and its complexities, form an acknowledgement of the massive mark their honouree has made on the study of modern British history. They are preceded by a Foreword composed by Keith Thomas and an editorial Introduction tracing the course of Harrison’s scholarship and connecting that scholarship to the substance of the chapters. The volume encompasses both wide-ranging analytical investigations and telling case studies. All have new things to say on the subject of reform and its complexities in modern Britain.

This book examines one hundred years of the history of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), from 1922 to 2022. It looks at that history in terms of people and programmes, and also explores the BBC as an institution. It examines the role of politicians and civil servants in shaping and guiding the work of the BBC, and the impact of successive technological innovations, from radio, to television, to the new digital age. It shows how the BBC has changed over the last century, adapting to dramatic shifts in its political, social, and cultural environment. The BBC was initially constituted as a monopoly, controlling all broadcasting in Britain, including an Empire Service for white listeners in Britain’s colonies. It went on to provide services for audiences at home and overseas throughout the Second World War and into the Cold War, seeking to ‘inform, educate, and entertain’, roughly in that order of priority. From the 1950s, it faced domestic commercial competition, as politicians overturned the idea of a public service monopoly. It has since faced multiple challenges from those who question whether the public sector has a legitimate role to play in the mass media, and from governments seeking to control and influence what gets broadcast. Today it can be regarded as a vast machine for commissioning programmes, patronizing the arts, doing journalism, promoting the Union, and projecting British cultural influence to a global audience.