Late Modern & Contemporary history (1801 to present) : genres & specific topics
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The Formation of Agricultural Governance
The Interplay between State and Civil Society in European Agriculture, 1870-1940
This book unravels how the agricultural sector and the rural world in Europe became more and more organised within capitalism in the years 1870-1940 and this with the aim of tackling the important challenges of the time. The focus is not so much on the myriad of individual farmers’ actions but on the collective efforts undertaken through the interplay between the state and the agricultural civil society.
A wide variety of actors from landowners associations farmers’ unions cooperatives scientific institutions and researchers to farmers themselves (or civil society) played a critical role in the process of drafting a policy agenda developing agricultural policies and were instrumental in implementing them in close relationship with the state. The result was a metamorphosis from mobilisation and representation of agrarian interests to a form of self-government or co-government of the agricultural sector at the national level which would only reach its highest point after the Second World War.
These issues are explored by established rural historians covering a period of seven decades (1870-1940). The papers provide a wide geographical perspective from the north of Europe to the Mediterranean.
Supplicant Empires
Searching for the Iberian World in Global History
This volume is a collection of reflections from leading senior and junior historians regarding the merits of historical comparativism in the field of Iberian history. The first purpose of the book is to encourage a dialogue between scholars of the Iberian Empires and to foster a reconsider how they see the broader history of the early modern world in light of recent historiography. The second aim of the book is to prompt scholars of other regions in global history to consider the recent literature on the Iberian Empires anew to move beyond the tropes of the Black Legend and narrative of growth splendour and decline and to study those imbrications had connected disparate parts of the world and which the postcolonial turn has unearthed. In a series of articles and interviews contributors were encouraged to consider the role of linguistic divides in the growth of historiographical strands and to speak plainly about the possible siloes that have emerged in the field. Contributors discuss the Atlantic turn corporate cultures the Catholic adoption of Protestant ideals gender and race all while drawing on insights from scholars who work on early modern nuns the material history of sugar and coffee or those who are exploring the uses of the concept of barbarity in borderlands.
Imperial Blind Spots. Iberian Rhizomatic Worlds. Indeterminacy, Thickness, and Multispecies Interactions in Early Modern Travel Accounts *
Disoriented
Gender Territories in Contemporary Art
'Desnortar' or disoriented means to lose the north or the sense of direction to disorient. In Disoriented a collective book from a gender perspective we consciously seek to lose both the geographical north and the north of the contemporary art canon. We aim to rethink and disrupt from feminist LGTBQ+ and postcolonial approaches the coordinates that have articulated the discourses on the art history and art system along the 20th and 21st centuries. Coordinates that define how these artistic practices and systems of modernity and the contemporary are understood the cardinal directions and main conceptual issues or which artists are relevant or expendable according to the narratives of avant-garde and contemporary art history. It is crucial to reinterpret and disorientate to disnorth and thereby shatter these references to overcome the gaps that prevent the emergence of alternative knowledges. To address questions or artists often perceived as peripheral to a grand historical narrative we propose an intersection of modern and contemporary art history gender feminist queer and postcolonial approaches and transnational interrelations. This intersectionality allows us to actively lose the north of the canon and to direct our gaze towards subjects outside the usual centres of legitimation. Mostly we attend to women artists to peripheral geographical centres to subaltern collectives or to practices or materials regularly considered of little artistic interest. All of the above critiques how conventional discourses have excluded some collectives or certain artistic proposals and the resistances that have emerged against them.
Corporations, Normative Pluralism, and Jurisdictional Culture. Explaining the Political Landscape of Early Modern Iberia *
The Many Lives of Jesus
Scholarship, Religion, and the Nineteenth Century Imagination
This collection of essays aims to offer a multi-disciplinary approach to nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship on Jesus and early Christianity which illustrates the width and depth of the questions that critical reflections on the historical Jesus raised in and beyond the field of liberal theology. More precisely it focuses on Jesus scholarship as practiced in various disciplines and fields that engaged with the academic study of religion. On the other hand this volume aims for a comprehensive multi-perspectivist historicization of this scholarship considering the full range of religious cultural racial political and national dynamics that hosted the many controversies over the historical Jesus.Divided into five sections the eleven essays in this book are organized according to guiding themes and a loose chronological structure. The first section revisits the roots of the Forschung in Liberal-Protestant Germany and especially focuses on the maturation of historical-critical consciousness in the work of Reimarus (and his predecessors) Schleiermacher and Strauss. The second section is concerned with the rise of the “oriental Jesus” against the background of the making of the academic non-theological study of religion as a scientific discipline. The third section explores how themes related to the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity were treated among different academic disciplines from the early second half of the nineteenth century onwards. The fourth section explores how the historical Jesus was at the same time further explored by the biblical scholars and theologians who integrated new comparative methods in their research. The fifth section finally highlights the cultural-political appropriations that were made of scholarly writings on Jesus which not rarely constituted the bricks with which radical political movements built their houses.
Colonial Congo
A History in Questions
Colonialism tends to arouse emotional debate often based on incomplete knowledge of the facts and context. Colonial Congo fills this gap by introducing the general reader to the latest academic thinking and research. Answering concrete questions pre-eminent historians offer a unique insight into the history of the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo.
How did Leopold II’s autocratic government function and what do we know about the victims of his rule? How much profit was made in the Congo and who benefitted the most? What was life like for Congolese men and women during colonial rule and how did they feel about it? Did the Congolese offer resistance and in what ways? What was colonialism’s impact on the Congo’s natural world? How did colonial policy affect infrastructure education healthcare and science? Did missionaries give colonialism a more human face? Colonial Congo’s explorations of these issues and more are revealed in this eye-opening indispensable guide.
Résistance sans frontières
À propos de moines espions, de lignes d'évasions et du 'Hannibalspiel', 1940-1943
Le 9 octobre 1943 neuf membres de la résistance belge et néerlandaise étaient exécutés à Rhijnauwen (près d’Utrecht). Parmi eux deux moines de l’abbaye du Val-Dieu. En suivant le parcours de ces deux ecclésiastiques le livre retrace de façon précise l’histoire des groupes d’espionnage et des lignes d’évasion. Ces lignes de secours étaient utilisées par des prisonniers de guerre évadés par des pilotes alliés abattus par des personnes d’origine juive et des ressortissants néerlandais en fuite vers l’Angleterre. La ligne d’évasion partait d’Allemagne et des Pays-Bas pour rejoindre Eijsden puis Mouland et Visé. Une fois arrivés au pays de Herve ou de Liège les réfugiés étaient conduits à Givet ou à Bruxelles où d’autres groupes de résistance les prenaient en charge. En 1942 le contre-espionnage allemand infiltre les groupes au départ de Groningue et de Liège : l’Hannibalspiel. L’issue sera dramatique.
En cherchant à comprendre pourquoi dans la région de Liège ces deux moines se décident à entrer en résistance l’enquête met en lumière le rôle joué par l’Église et par l’abbaye du Val-Dieu mais aussi par leurs familles.
Résistance sans frontières est la première recension ayant trait à la résistance de chaque côté de la frontière belgo-néerlandaise pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale.
Global History of Techniques
(Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries)
It is impossible to understand societies without looking at their technological underpinnings. Technology constitutes the very fabric of societies' political economic cultural and everyday realities. Building on recent historiography this book offers the first overview of the global history of contemporary technology.
Gathering more than fifty specialists of the history of technology the collection of essays presents an overview of technological evolutions on a global scale. The book challenges both teleological approaches on progress and eurocentric perspectives. It explores the complex socio-economic implications of ‘techniques’ (and not simply technology) as well as the systems of representation and power structures that led to the emergence of today’s world.
The purpose of the collected essays is to offer a new history of technology. In this perspective a central question concerns the very category of the history of technology i.e. the term ‘technology’ itself. Refusing both the limitations of ‘technology’ and of ‘useful knowledge’ the book stresses the necessity to study technology as embodying human activity as a whole. In that sense history of technology envisioned as techniques rather than purely technologies is intrinsically linked to anthropology and ethnology.
This book is divided into three sections. The first section opens with a world tour of techniques restoring the complexity of regional historiographies and of the meanings given to technological activities in different societies. The second part focuses on sectors of activity processes and products with a strong emphasis on means of production and communication the exploitation of natural resources major technological systems infrastructures and networks. The final section provides access to major cross-related issues. It pays particular attention to the role played by technology/techniques in the process of globalization particularly through colonization imperialism and the development of large technological systems.
Women of the Past, Issues for the Present
The roles played by women in history and even the very idea of what it is to be female have always been in flux changing over centuries between cultures and in response to diverse social and economic parameters. Even today women’s roles and women’s rights continue to face changes and pressures. In establishing the series Women of the Past: Testimonies from Archaeology and History the ambition is to build on the profound theoretical and empirical developments that have taken place over the last fifty years of gender-focused research and to explore them in a contemporary context.
The aim of this series is to shed light on not just the outstanding and extraordinary women who were trendsetters of their time but also the not quite so outstanding women often overshadowed by outstanding men and the ordinary women those who simply went about their everyday life and kept their world turning in their own quiet way. This edited volume Women of the Past Issues for the Present is the inaugural volume of the series and shows the wide span of the series chronologically geographically and socially in terms of the research presented. From Roman slaves to Viking women and from medieval wet-nurses to the nineteenth-century wives who supported their archaeologist husbands on excavation this groundbreaking volume opens a new vista in our understanding of the past.
Re-Thinking Late Antique Armenia: Historiography, Material Culture, and Heritage
This book questions the place of Armenian visual and material culture in the period known as Late Antiquity at a time when Armenia is usually presented as an in-between space defined by surrounding external entities: the Roman and the Persian and later Arab world. The volume includes articles that confront this notion both from the perspective of art history architecture and archaeology and from a historiographical point of view which examines the reception of Armenian arts by scholars from Italy Russia and France. The articles in this richly illustrated volume aim to reposition Armenia as one of the forces of artistic creation and mediation to be reckoned with within the Mediterranean and Eurasian space of Late Antiquity. This project draws on the papers presented at the conference “Re-Constructing Late Antique Armenia (2nd–8th Centuries CE). Historiography Material Culture Immaterial Heritage” that took place in February 2022 at the Center for Early Medieval Studies in Brno Czech Republic.