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This book provides a significant insight into the changes that occurred in the late Roman period and which shaped the emergence of early medieval Europe. The book provides detail regarding the changes in the character of urbanism, military organization and the rural landscape which separate the Roman Empire from Late Antiquity (first to early seventh centuries AD). Some chapters focus on the lower Danube, others provide comparative studies which range from northern Italy and Pannonia to Greece, western Asia Minor and as far east as the Euphrates. These chapters compare the results of different international research teams but also contrast approaches and methodology in order to assess the extent to which these differences might account for apparently contradictory conclusions. The volume also demonstrates the uses and pitfalls encountered in attempts to combine evidence provided by ancient historians and archaeologists — a theme which has wider implications beyond this text.

After 1949, the British Empire in Hong Kong was more vulnerable than the lack of Chinese demand for return and the success of Hong Kong's economic transformations might have suggested. Its vulnerability stemmed as much from Britain's imperial decline and America's Cold War requirements as from a Chinese threat. It culminated in the little known ‘1957 Question’, a year when the British position in Hong Kong appeared more uncertain than any time since 1949. This is the first scholarly study that places Hong Kong at the heart of the Anglo–American relationship in the wider context of the Cold War in Asia. Unlike existing works, which tend to treat British and US policies in isolation, this book explores their dynamic interactions — how the two allies perceived, responded to, and attempted to influence each other's policies and actions. It also provides a major reinterpretation of Hong Kong's involvement in the containment of China. The author argues that, concerned about possible Chinese retaliation, the British insisted and the Americans accepted that Hong Kong's role should be as discreet and non-confrontational in nature as possible. Above all, top decision-makers in Washington evaluated Hong Kong's significance not in its own right, but in the context of the Anglo–American relationship: Hong Kong was seen primarily as a bargaining chip to obtain British support for US policy elsewhere in Asia. Using a variety of British and US archival material as well as Chinese sources, the author examines how the British and US government discussed, debated, and disagreed over Hong Kong's role in the Cold War, and reveals the dynamics of the Anglo–American alliance and the dilemmas of small allies in a global conflict.

With the opening of sea routes in the 15th century, groups of men and women left Portugal to establish themselves across the ports and cities of the Atlantic or Ocean Sea. They were refugees and migrants, traders and mariners, Jews, Catholics, and the Marranos of mixed Judaic-Catholic culture. They formed a diasporic community known by contemporaries as the Portuguese Nation. By the early 17th century, this nation without a state had created a remarkable trading network that spanned the Atlantic, reached into the Indian Ocean and Asia, and generated millions of pesos that were used to bankroll the Spanish Empire. This book traces the story of the Portuguese Nation from its emergence in the late 15th century to its fragmentation in the middle of the 17th, and situates it in relation to the parallel expansion and crisis of Spanish imperial dominion in the Atlantic. Against the backdrop of this relationship, the book reconstitutes the rich inner life of a community based on movement, maritime trade, and cultural hybridity. We are introduced to mariners and traders in such disparate places as Lima, Seville and Amsterdam, their day-to-day interactions and understandings, their houses and domestic relations, private reflections and public arguments. This account reveals how the Portuguese Nation created a cohesive and meaningful community despite the mobility and dispersion of its members; how its forms of sociability fed into the development of robust transatlantic commercial networks; and how the day-to-day experience of trade was translated into the sphere of Spanish imperial politics as merchants of the Portuguese Nation took up the pen to advocate a program of commercial reform based on religious-ethnic toleration and the liberalization of trade.

This book provides a detailed narrative history of the first six centuries of the Christian Church, from the first followers of Jesus to the papacy of Gregory the Great (590–604). It describes how Christianity, initially a persecuted sect, developed the ideas and organization to fulfil its ambition of being a universal faith, not tied to any particular people. The new religion had to separate itself completely from Judaism and set about the capture of the society and state of the Roman Empire during the centuries when the Empire divided into a Latin west and a Greek east and was beset by invasions by Christian and pagan barbarians, resulting in the disintegration of the western empire. Debates within Christianity, most fundamentally about the divine or human nature of Christ, are discussed in detail and in relation to both the politics and power struggles of the Empire and to the all‐important question of authority within the Church. The origins and fate of schismatic movements are considered in the context of the struggle for authority among the rival sees of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. Christianity is discussed, therefore, in relation to its internal growth and divisions and also to how it was viewed by Jews and pagans, showing its debts to and division from both its Jewish origins and Graeco‐Roman philosophy. The major theological and ecclesiastical texts and debates are considered in relation to the diverse beliefs and practices of the people who attended churches and the local and regional conditions that profoundly affected the outcome of events. The major Christian thinkers and their contributions to the success of Christianity are examined in detail. The importance of theological, personal, and political factors is demonstrated in showing how they fostered divisions in the Church and prevented reconciliation and balanced against the desire of successive emperors to foster unity for political reasons. The Church captured society, east and west, but at the cost of long‐lasting divisions and conflicts.

The history of the Persian Empire in the west has been seen/presented largely in terms of Persian-Greek interactions. However, the fact that the Persians mounted ten campaigns against Egypt from the late sixth through the fourth century indicates that the subjugation of Egypt was Persia’s primary concern in the west. This was true in the sixth and fifth centuries, when Persia conquered and, despite chronic revolts led by Egyptian dynasts, held on to Egypt, and also in the fourth century, when after successful Egyptian revolt, Persian kings spent nearly seventy years in largely futile attempts to recover Egypt. Trouble in the West reconstructs the largely lost story of the Persian-Egyptian conflict and reinterprets sixth–fourth-century eastern Mediterranean history in general from the perspective of Persia’s continuous preoccupation with Egypt.

This book focuses on travelogues by Iranians traveling to Europe in the nineteenth century. It argues for an interpretive framework that moves away from an overemphasis on the destinations of travel (particularly in cases where the destination, such as Europe, signifies larger meanings such as modernity) and that historicizes the travelogue itself as a rhetorical text in the service of its origin’s concerns and developments. Within this framework, this book demonstrates the ways in which travel writings from Iran to Europe were used to position Qajar Iran (1794–1925) within a global context—that is, narration of travel to Europe was also narrating the power of the Qajar court even when political events were tipped against it—and relatedly, how both travel to Europe and also translations of travel narratives into Persian should be included in our understanding of the importance of geography and mapping to the Qajars, especially during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this process, it also reexamines the notion that Iranian modernity was the chief outcome of Iranians traveling in and writing about Europe.

This book examines the formation of the Christian ascetic tradition in the western Roman Empire during the period of the barbarian invasions, c.400–600. In an aggressively competitive political context, one of the most articulate claims to power was made, paradoxically, by men who had renounced ‘the world’, committing themselves to a life of spiritual discipline in the hope of gaining entry to an otherworldly kingdom. Often dismissed as mere fanaticism or open hypocrisy, the language of ascetic authority, the book shows, was both carefully honed and well understood in the late Roman and early medieval Mediterranean. It charts the development of this new moral rhetoric by abbots, teachers, and bishops from the time of Augustine of Hippo to that of St Benedict and Gregory the Great.

This book presents an interdisciplinary discussion of the important methodological tool known as prosopography — the collection of all known information about individuals within a given period. With the advent of computer technology it is now possible to gather and store such information in increasingly sophisticated and searchable databases, which can bring a new dimension to traditional historical research. The book surveys the transition in prosopographical research from more traditional methods to the new technology, and discusses the central role of the British Academy, as well as that of French, German and Austrian academic institutions, in developing prosopographical research on the Later Roman Empire, Byzantium and now Anglo-Saxon and other periods. The chapters discuss both national histories of the discipline and its potential for future research. The book demonstrates mutual benefits and complementarity in such studies between the use of new technology and the highest standards of traditional scholarship, and in doing so it sets forth new perspectives and methodologies for future work.

This book gives a full biography of the 14th Earl of Derby — the first British statesman to become prime minister three times, and the longest serving party leader in modern British party politics. This book revises the conventional view of Derby's personality, career, and beliefs, revealing him as a complex and influential figure, a man who abolished slavery in the British Empire, established a national system of education in Ireland, was a prominent advocate for the 1832 Reform Act, and oversaw the introduction of the Second Reform Act in 1867. In short, he played an instrumental role in directing Britain's path through the historic challenges confronting the nation at a time of increasing political participation, industrial pre-eminence, urban growth, colonial expansion, religious controversy, and Irish tragedy. More generally, the volume modifies our understanding of 19th-century British party politics, the history of the Conservative party, and the nature of public life in the Victorian age, including other prominent figures such as Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, William Gladstone, and Benjamin Disraeli. Volume I takes the reader from Derby's early years through to the eve of his appointment as prime minister in the 1850s. Before this book, Derby was ‘the forgotten prime minister’, but this study fills this significant gap in the history of Victorian politics and society.

The history of police and policing have been the subject of much interest and research in recent years, but this book provides the first serious academic exploration of the origins and development of the role of soldier-policemen: the gendarmeries of 19th-century Europe. The author presents a detailed account of the French Gendarmeries from the old regime up to the First World War, and looks at the reasons for how and why this model came to be exported across continental Europe in the wake of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies. In particular, their role is examined within the differing national contexts of Italy, Germany, and the Habsburg Empire. The gendarmeries, it is argued, played a significant role in establishing the state, particularly in rural areas. As the physical manifestation of the state, gendarmes carried the state's law and a promise of protection, whilst at the same time ensuring in turn that the state received its annual levies of conscripts and taxes. This account fully explores how the organization and style of 19th-century soldier-policing in France developed in such a way that it brought the idea of the state and the state's law to much of 20th-century continental Europe.

The Black Sea has long formed a zone of interaction—sometimes cordial, sometimes conflictual—among the peoples and states around its shores, from the Balkans to the Caucasus, from Russia to Turkey. To the ancient Greeks, the sea lay at the edge of the known world. In time the growth of Greek trading colonies linked all the coasts into a web of economic relationships. In the Middle Ages the sea was tied to the great commercial cities of the Mediterranean. Later the Ottomans used the region's resources to build their own empire. In the late eighteenth century the sea was opened to foreign commerce, and the sea coasts were part of a genuinely global system of trade. After the collapse of the Russian and Ottoman empires, the coastline was carved up among a number of newly formed nation-states, with each asserting its right to a piece of the coast and a section of the coastal waters. Today, efforts to resurrect the idea of the Black Sea as a unified region are once again on the international agenda. Based on extensive research in multiple languages, this book provides a comprehensive guide to the history, cultures, and politics of the sea, and its future at the heart of Europe and Eurasia.

This book examines the interrelationship between the construction of national identity and the transformation of political thought in Germany before the First World War. During the decade or so before the war, the German Empire was challenged openly by both left and right for the first time since the 1870s. Paradoxically, however, this pre-war crisis of Germany's system of government occurred during a period of increasing nationalism, which created a solid cross-party basis of support for the Empire as a nation-state. The book argues that Wilhelmine debates about the reform of the German Empire can only be understood in the context of a broader discussion and comparison of European and American political regimes which took place in Germany after the turn of the century. In such contemporary debates about a German Sonderwag, France remained a principal point of reference because French-style parliamentarism had come to be viewed as the main alternative to German constitutionalism. By analysing Wilhelmine depictions of the Third Republic, the book revises accepted interpretations of German politics and nationalism.

The quality of life for ordinary Roman citizens at the height of the Roman Empire probably was better than that of any other large group of people living before the Industrial Revolution. This book uses the tools of modern economics to show how trade, markets, and the Pax Romana were critical to ancient Rome's prosperity. The book argues that markets dominated the Roman economy. It traces how the Pax Romana encouraged trade around the Mediterranean, and how Roman law promoted commerce and banking. It further shows that a reasonably vibrant market for wheat extended throughout the empire, and suggests that the Antonine Plague may have been responsible for turning the stable prices of the early empire into the persistent inflation of the late. The book vividly describes how various markets operated in Roman times, from commodities and slaves to the buying and selling of land. Applying modern methods for evaluating economic growth to data culled from historical sources, the book argues that Roman Italy in the second century was as prosperous as the Dutch Republic in its golden age of the seventeenth century. The book reveals how economics can help us understand how the Roman Empire could have ruled seventy million people and endured for centuries.