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Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, the book unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history. Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, the book traces how Islam's growth in West Africa, along with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A radically new account of the importance of early Africa in global history, the book puts early and medieval West Africa on the map of global history.

This book traces the development of a group of anonymous, vernacular, annalistic chronicles—‘the Anglo-Saxon chronicles’—from their genesis at the court of King Alfred to their end at the Fenland monastery of Peterborough. It reconsiders them in the light of wider European scholarship on the politics of history-writing. It covers all surviving manuscript chronicles, with detailed attention being paid to palaeography, layout, and content, and identifies key lost texts. It is concerned with production, scribe-authors, patrons, and audiences. The centuries these chronicles cover were critical to the making of England and saw its conquest by Scandinavians and Normans. They have long been part of the English national story. The book considers the impact of this on their study and editing. It stresses their multiplicity, whilst identifying a tradition of writing vernacular history. It sees that tradition as an expression of the ideology of a southern elite engaged in the conquest and assimilation of old kingdoms north of the Thames, Trent, and Humber. The book connects many chronicles to bishops and especially to archbishops of York and Canterbury. Vernacular chronicling is seen, not as propaganda, but as engaged history-writing closely connected to the court, whose networks and personnel were central to the production of chronicles and their continuation. The disappearance of the English-speaking elite after the Norman Conquest had profound impacts on them, repositioning their authors in relation to the court and royal power, and ultimately resulting in the end of the tradition of vernacular chronicling.

This book focuses on the strand of the Irish republican left which followed the ‘alien ideology’ of Soviet-inspired Marxism. Moscow-led communism had few adherents in Ireland, but Irish and British officials were concerned about the possibility that communists could infiltrate the republican movement, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Another concern arose for British and American observers from 1969: would the Soviets resist the temptation to meddle during the Northern Ireland Troubles and cause trouble for Britain as a geo-political crisis unfolded? The book considers questions arising from the involvement of left-wing republicans, and what became the Official republican movement, in events before and during the early years of the Troubles. Could Ireland’s communists and left-wing republicans be viewed as strategic allies of Moscow who might create an ‘Irish Cuba’? The book examines another question: could a Marxist party with a parliamentary presence in the militarily-neutral Irish state – the Workers’ Party (WP) – be useful to the Soviets during the 1980s? This book, based on original sources rather than interviews, is significant in that it analyses the perspectives of the various governments concerned with subversion in Ireland. This is a study of perceptions. The book concludes that the Soviet Union had been happy to exploit the Troubles in its Cold War propaganda, but, excepting supplying arms to the Official IRA, it did not seek to maximise difficulties whenever it could in Ireland, north or south.

Al-Andalus, the Iberian territory ruled by Islam from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, was home to a flourishing philosophical culture among Muslims and the Jews who lived in their midst. Andalusians spoke proudly of the region's excellence, and indeed it engendered celebrated thinkers such as Maimonides and Averroes. This book offers an integrative new approach to Jewish and Muslim philosophy in al-Andalus, where the cultural commonality of the Islamicate world allowed scholars from diverse religious backgrounds to engage in the same philosophical pursuits. The book traces the development of philosophy in Muslim Iberia from its introduction to the region to the diverse forms it took over time, from Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism to rational theology and mystical philosophy. It sheds light on the way the politics of the day, including the struggles with the Christians to the north of the peninsula and the Fāṭimids in North Africa, influenced philosophy in al-Andalus yet affected its development among the two religious communities in different ways. While acknowledging the dissimilar social status of Muslims and members of the religious minorities, the book highlights the common ground that united philosophers, providing new perspective on the development of philosophy in Islamic Spain.

How did ordinary people in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) deal with the demands of the state? This book explores the myriad ways that families fulfilled their obligations to provide a soldier to the army. The complex strategies they developed to manage their responsibilities suggest a new interpretation of an important period in China's history as well as a broader theory of politics. The book examines how soldiers and their families living on China's southeast coast minimized the costs and maximized the benefits of meeting government demands for manpower. Families that had to provide a soldier for the army set up elaborate rules to ensure their obligation was fulfilled, and to provide incentives for the soldier not to desert his post. People in the system found ways to gain advantages for themselves and their families. For example, naval officers used the military's protection to engage in the very piracy and smuggling they were supposed to suppress. The book demonstrates how subjects of the Ming state operated in a space between defiance and compliance, and how paying attention to this middle ground can help us better understand not only Ming China but also other periods and places. The book illustrates the ways that arrangements between communities and the state hundreds of years ago have consequences and relevance for how we look at diverse cultures and societies, even today.

The Arthur Crawford Scandal explores how nineteenth century Bombay tried a British official for corruption. The presidency government persuaded Indians, government officials, to testify against the very person who controlled their career by offering immunity from legal action and career punishment. A criminal conviction of Crawford’s henchman established the modus operandi of a bribery network. Subsequent efforts to intimidate Indian witnesses led to litigation at the high court level, resulting in a political pressure campaign in London based on biased press reports from India. These reports evoked questions in the House of Commons; questions became demands that Indians witnesses against Crawford be fired from government service. The secretary of state for India and the Bombay government negotiated about the fate of the Indian witnesses. At first, the secretary of state accepted the Bombay government’s proposals. But the press campaign against the Indian witnesses eventually led him to order the Government of India, in consultation with the Government of Bombay, to pass a law ordering those officials who paid Crawford willingly, to be fired. Those whom the Bombay government determined to be extorted were not to be fired. Both groups retained immunity from further actions at law. Thus, Bombay won a victory that almost saved its original guarantee of immunity: those who were fired were to receive their salary (along with periodic step increases) until they reached retirement age, at which time they would receive a pension. However, this ‘solution’ did little to overcome the stigma and suffering of the fired officials.

Atlantic Wars explores how warfare shaped human experience around the Atlantic from the late Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. Military concerns and initiatives drove the development of technologies like ships, port facilities, fortresses, and roads that made crossing the ocean possible and reshaped the landscape on widely separated coasts. Forced migrations made land available for colonization, and the transportation of war captives provided labor in the colonies. Some wars spread to engulf widely scattered places, and even small-scale, localized conflicts had effects beyond the combat zone. Wars in Africa had consequences in the colonies where captives were sold. Europeans and their descendants held the upper hand in combat on the ocean, but in the early modern period they never dominated warfare in Africa or the Americas. New ways of fighting developed as diverse groups fought alongside as well as against each other. In the Age of Revolution enslaved Africans, indigenous Americans, and colonists in various places rejected cross-cultural alliances and the prevailing pattern of Atlantic warfare. New military ethics were developed with important implications for the governance of the European empires, the security of the new American nation-states, the legal status of indigenous peoples, the future of slavery, and the development of Atlantic economy. The pervasive influence of warfare on life around the ocean becomes apparent only by examining the Atlantic world as a whole.

In this book, Ashanté M. Reese makes clear the structural forces that determine food access in urban areas, highlighting Black residents’ navigation of and resistance to unequal food distribution systems. Linking these local food issues to the national problem of systemic racism, Reese examines the history of the majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Reese not only documents racism and residential segregation in the nation’s capital but also tracks the ways transnational food corporations have shaped food availability. By connecting community members’ stories to the larger issues of racism and gentrification, Reese shows there are hundreds of Deanwoods across the country. Reese’s geographies of self-reliance offer an alternative to models that depict Black residents as lacking agency, demonstrating how an ethnographically grounded study can locate and amplify nuances in how Black life unfolds within the context of unequal food access.

Part I of this book is a geographic history of Kentucky’s distilling industry, focusing on the nineteenth century. Kentucky distillers have produced alcohol spirits, bourbon, and rye whiskeys for more than two centuries. This part examines the change from craft distilling practiced by farmers and millers to large-scale industrial distilling using mechanized processes and refined production techniques. Some distillers relocated their works away from traditional sites along creeks to rail-side sites, whether in the countryside or in towns. The changeover to commercial-scale distilling was accompanied by increasing government taxation and oversight controls. Mechanized distilleries readily expanded production and increased their demand for labor, grains, cooperage, and copper stills. Improved transportation allowed distillers to obtain grains and equipment from more distant sources, while also allowing them to distribute their products to national and international markets. A by-product of industrial production was spent grains, or slop,which was disposed of primarily by feeding it to livestock. The nineteenth-century temperance movement eventually led to national Prohibition, which was in effect from 1920 to 1933. A small number of distillers survived by making medicinal whiskey. Part II consists of three chapters that outline the concentration of industrial distilling in the Inner and Outer Bluegrass regions as well as in Ohio Valley cities.

John Shalikashvili: From Boy on the Bridge to Top American General tells the captivating tale of how John Shalikashvili, a penniless, stateless World War II refugee achieved the American dream by being appointed the thirteenth chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking officer in the US military, during the Clinton administration. Through a gripping narrative covering his wartime upbringing, aristocratic family background, parental influence, immigrant experience, and betrayals by loved ones—particularly by his high school girlfriend and by his father’s affiliation with the Waffen-SS, which came to light during Shalikashvili’s confirmation process—the biography explores the themes of nature vs. nurture and the role of agency vs. luck (i.e., the influence of his own actions vs. factors beyond his control) in determining Shalikashvili’s character, leadership abilities, and career success.

For over two and a half millennia Āyurveda was the mainstream healthcare programme in the Indian subcontinent. However, what was once seen as indispensable, is now often officially described as ‘alternative medicine’. Moreover, there seems to be a lack of proper understanding of the specific culture from which Āyurveda emerged. This is because existing works on the subject have mostly been mere compilations of Āyurvedic practices and focused on classical texts. This book studies the stages of development in the system of Āyurveda and its practice from proto-historic times until British colonization. Using original Pāli and Sanskrit works, archaeological artefacts, as well as oft-neglected medieval epigraphic documents, M. R. Raghava Varier highlights how centuries of privileging Western knowledge has resulted in the sidelining of indigenous learning—a process that accelerated with the advent of colonialism. Further, he makes use of Jain and Buddhist sources to question the assumption that Āyurveda is a purely Hindu or Brahmanical system, thus providing a historiographical frame for conceptually establishing the notion of Āyurveda.

In this broad yet sympathetic survey — ranging from the Crusades to the modern day — this book explores the social, political, and cultural encounters between Britain and Islam. The book looks, for instance, at how reactions against the Crusades led to Anglo-Muslim collaboration under the Tudors, at how Britain posed as defender of Islam in the Victorian period, and at her role in rearranging the Muslim world after 1918. It argues that, contrary to current assumptions, Islamic groups have often embraced Western ideas, including modernization and liberal democracy. The book shows how the difficulties and Islamophobia that Muslims have experienced in Britain since the 1970s are largely caused by an acute crisis in British national identity. In truth, Muslims have become increasingly key participants in mainstream British society — in culture, sport, politics, and the economy.

For many, Byzantium remains byzantine—obscure, marginal, difficult. Despite the efforts of some recent historians, prejudices still deform understanding of the Byzantine civilization, often reducing it to a poor relation of Rome and the rest of the classical world. This book addresses misconceptions about Byzantium, suggests why it is so important to integrate the civilization into wider histories, and lays out why Byzantium should be central to ongoing debates about the relationships between West and East, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and the ancient and medieval periods. The result is a compelling call to reconsider the place of Byzantium in Western history and imagination.

The medieval theory of the caliphate, epitomized by the Abbasids (750–1258), was the construct of jurists who conceived it as a contractual leadership of the Muslim community in succession to the Prophet Muhammed's political authority. This book traces how a new conception of the caliphate emerged under the Ottomans, who redefined the caliph as at once a ruler, a spiritual guide, and a lawmaker corresponding to the prophet's three natures. Challenging conventional narratives that portray the Ottoman caliphate as a fading relic of medieval Islamic law, the book offers a novel interpretation of authority, sovereignty, and imperial ideology by examining how Ottoman political discourse led to the mystification of Muslim political ideals and redefined the caliphate. It illuminates how Ottoman Sufis reimagined the caliphate as a manifestation and extension of cosmic divine governance. The Ottoman Empire arose in Western Anatolia and the Balkans, where charismatic Sufi leaders were perceived to be God's deputies on earth. The book traces how Ottoman rulers, in alliance with an increasingly powerful Sufi establishment, continuously refashioned and legitimated their rule through mystical imageries of authority, and how the caliphate itself reemerged as a moral paradigm that shaped early modern Muslim empires.

This book assesses the intimate connections between science and society in China, offering an in-depth look at how an array of sciences and technologies are being made, how they are interfacing with society, and with what effects. Focusing on critical domains of daily life, the chapters explore how scientists, technicians, surgeons, therapists, and other experts create practical knowledges and innovations, as well as how ordinary people take them up as they pursue the good life. The book offers a rare, up-close view of the politics of Chinese science-making, showing how everyday logics, practices, and ethics of science, medicine, and technology are profoundly reshaping contemporary China. By foregrounding the notion of “governing through science,” and the contested role of science and technology as instruments of change, the book addresses important questions regarding what counts as science in China, what science and technology can do to transform China, as well as their limits and unintended consequences.

This is a comprehensive and nuanced historical survey of the death penalty in Ireland from the immediate post-Civil War period through to its complete abolition. Using original archival material, this book sheds light on the various social, legal and political contexts in which the death penalty operated and was discussed. In Ireland the death penalty served a dual function: as an instrument of punishment in the civilian criminal justice system, and as a weapon to combat periodic threats to the security of the state posed by the IRA. In closely examining cases dealt with in the ordinary criminal courts, this book elucidates ideas of class, gender, community and sanity and how these factors had an impact the administration of justice. The application of the death penalty also had a strong political dimension, most evident in the enactment of emergency legislation and the setting up of military courts specifically targeted at the IRA. As this book demonstrates, the civilian and the political strands converged in the story of the abolition of the death penalty in Ireland. Long after decision-makers accepted that the death penalty was no longer an acceptable punishment for ‘ordinary’ cases of murder, lingering anxieties about the threat of subversives dictated the pace of abolition and the scope of the relevant legislation.

Conventional accounts often conceive the genesis of capitalism in Europe within the conjunctures of agricultural, commercial, and industrial revolutions. Challenging this widely believed cliché, this volume traces the history of capitalism across civilizations, tenth century onwards, and argues that capitalism was neither a monolithic entity nor exclusively an economic phenomenon confined to the West. Looking at regions as diverse as England, South America, Russia, North Africa, and East, South, West, and Southeast Asia, the book explores the plurality of developments across time and space. The chapters analyse aspects such as historical conjunctures, commodity production and distribution, circulation of knowledge and personnel, and the role of mercantile capital, small producers, and force—all the while stressing the necessity to think beyond present-day national boundaries. The book argues that the multiple histories of capitalism can be better understood from a trans-regional, intercontinental, and interconnected perspective.

Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cécile Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city’s development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans’s rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city’s streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana’s capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America’s most intriguing city.

On 23 February 1820 a group of radicals were arrested in Cato Street off the Edgware Road in London. They were within 60 minutes of setting out to assassinate the British cabinet. Five of the conspirators were subsequently executed and another five were transported for life to Australia. The plotters were a mixture of English, Scottish and Irish tradesmen, and one was a black Jamaican. They were motivated by a desire to avenge the ‘Peterloo’ massacre and intended to declare a republic, which they believed would encourage popular risings in London and across Britain. This volume of essays uses contemporary reports by Home Office spies and informers to assess the seriousness of the conspiracy. It traces the practical and intellectual origins of the plotters’ willingness to use violence; describes the links between Irish and British radicals who were willing to take up arms; makes a contribution to early black history in Britain; examines the European context to events, and follows the lives and careers of those plotters exiled to Australia. These well-written essays will find an appreciative audience among undergraduates, graduate students and scholars of British and Irish history and literature. The book will be of interest to those interested in black history, as well as the related fields of intelligence history and Strategic Studies. A significant contribution to our understanding of a particularly turbulent period of British history.

The 1916 Revolt was a key event in the history of Central Asia, and of the Russian Empire in the First World War. This volume is the first comprehensive re-assessment of its causes, course and consequences in English for over sixty years. It draws together a new generation of leading historians from North America, Japan, Europe, Russia and Central Asia, working with Russian archival sources, oral narratives, poetry and song in Kazakh and Kyrgyz. These illuminate in unprecedented detail the origins and causes of the revolt, and the immense human suffering which it entailed. They also situate the revolt in a global perspective as part of a chain of rebellions and disturbances that shook the world’s empires, as they crumbled under the pressures of total war.