A People's History of the Second World War unearths the fascinating history of the war as fought 'from below'. Until now, the vast majority of historical accounts have focussed on the conflict between the Allied and Axis powers for imperialist mastery. Donny Gluckstein shows that in fact between 1939 and 1945 two distinct wars were fought – one ‘from above’ and one ‘from below’. Using…
This open access book analyses Iberian expansion by using knowledge accumulated in recent years to test some of the most important theories regarding Europe’s economic development. Adopting a comparative perspective, it considers the impact of early globalization on Iberian and Western European institutions, social development and political economies. In spite of globalization’s minor impor…
In this open access book, Mikael Hård tells a story of how people around the world challenged the production techniques and products brought by globalization. Retaining their autonomy and freedom, creative individuals selectively adopted or rejected modern gadgets, tools, and machines. In standard historical narratives, globalization is portrayed as an unstoppable force that flattens all obsta…
Reckoning with colonial legacies in Western museum collections What are the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums? This book addresses this question from within the Africa department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It captures the Museum at a moment of substantial transformation, as it prepared the move of its exhibition to the Humboldt Forum, a new…
This open access book explores the role of religion in England's overseas companies and the formation of English governmental identity abroad in the seventeenth century. Drawing on research into the Virginia, East India, Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, New England and Levant Companies, it offers a comparative global assessment of the inextricable links between the formation of English overseas gov…
This open access book explores how different spatial geographies emerged, adapted or were transformed in various occupied and colonial settings around Asia, showing how the experiences of those living under occupation shaped and was shaped by new interpretations and typologies of ‘space’. With case studies across South, Southeast and East Asia and through a variety of disciplinary perspecti…
This open access book offers a detailed study of the foundation and expansion of the Dutch Cape Colony to ask why certain regions in the global south became European settler societies from the 16th century onwards. Examining the different factors that led to the creation of the Cape Colony, Erik Green reveals it was a gradual process, made up of ad hoc decisions, in which the agency of indigeno…
“Van der Burg presents an innovative transregional study of Napoleonic governance in the often-overlooked northern periphery of the Empire. This book carefully examines the Empire’s administrative structure in the north, focusing on the heterogeneous community of prefects and subprefects as ‘tools of incorporation’, binding the regions to the central state. His rich comparative analysis…
In , Abbé Jacques Suchet arrived in the Algerian city of Constantine, an important North African crossroads and citadel dating back to the days of the Roman Empire. The city, perched on a rock and surrounded by cliffs on three sides, had been conquered with much bloodshed only two years before, in colo-nial France’s first successful foray into the Algerian interior. Suchet …
A People's History of the Second World War unearths the fascinating history of the war as fought 'from below'. Until now, the vast majority of historical accounts have focussed on the conflict between the Allied and Axis powers for imperialist mastery. Donny Gluckstein shows that in fact between 1939 and 1945 two distinct wars were fought – one ‘from above’ and one ‘from below’. Using…