General

The social market economy has served as a fundamental pillar of post-war Germany. Today, it is associated with the European welfare state. Initially, it meant the opposite. Rebuilding Germany examines the 1948 West German economic reforms that dismantled...

This is an innovative analysis of the agrarian world and growth of government in early modern Germany through the medium of pre-industrial society's most basic material resource, wood. Paul Warde offers a regional study of south-west Germany from the...

This 2005 book explores the ideas and culture surrounding the cataclysmic civil war that engulfed Spain from 1936 to 1939. It features specially commissioned articles from leading historians in Spain, Britain and the US which examine the complex...

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This book, first published in 2005, opens up the much neglected area of the black African presence in Western Europe during the Renaissance. Covering history, literature, art history and anthropology, it investigates a whole range of black African...

Christendom lasted for over a thousand years in Western Europe, and we are still living in its shadow. For over two centuries this social and religious order has been in decline. Enforced religious unity has given way to increasing pluralism, and since...

This book evaluates the life and empire of the pivotal yet controversial and poorly understood Byzantine emperor Heraclius (AD 610-641), a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad. Heraclius' reign is critical for understanding the background to fundamental...

Warfare and dislocation are obvious features of the break-up of the late Roman West, but this crucial period of change was characterized also by communication and diplomacy. The great events of the late antique West were determined by the quieter labours...

Gender analysis is one of the most probing ways to understand both power and cultural strategies in pre-industrial societies. In this book, sixteen scholars on the cutting edges of their disciplines explore the ideas and expressions of gender that...

Neil Kent's book sweeps through Sweden's history from the Stone Age to the present day. Early coverage includes Viking hegemony, the Scandinavian Union, the Reformation and Sweden's political zenith as Europe's greatest superpower in the seventeenth...

Across nineteenth-century Europe, the emergence of constitutional and democratic nation-states was accompanied by intense conflict between Catholics and anticlerical forces. At its peak, this conflict touched virtually every sphere of social life:...

Dutch society has enjoyed a reputation, or notoriety, for permissiveness from the sixteenth century to present times. The Dutch Republic in the Golden Age was the only society that tolerated religious dissenters of all persuasions in early modern Europe,...

Why did Europeans begin to count births and deaths? How did they collect the numbers and what did they do with them? Through a compelling comparative analysis, Vital Accounts charts the work of the physicians, clergymen and government officials who...

Throughout the nineteenth century, international relations in Europe were dominated by five great powers - Britain, France, Russia, Austria and Prussia. The creation of this system has been located traditionally in the long struggle with revolutionary...

This is the first major study of German attitudes towsrds England during the Great War, 1914-18, continuing the story of Anglo-German antagonism where previous studies have ended. In particular it focuses on the extremity of anti-English feeling in...

Medieval Concepts of the Past shows how the history of the Middle Ages is reshaped by leading medieval historians in Germany and the United States in the light of cultural and social-scientific investigations into ritual, language and memory. These two...

Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France, first published in 2000, offers a lucid interpretation of the Ancien Regime and the origins of the French Revolution. It examines what was arguably the most ambitious project of the...

Political life in the middle ages was influenced heavily by the bonds people had to one another. Among these, the bonds of kinship, friendship and lordship were by far the most important. Ritual was also often used to create and strengthen these bonds,...

This book brings together a bold revision of the traditional view of the Renaissance with a new comparative synthesis of global empires in early modern Europe. It examines the rise of a virulent form of Renaissance scholarship, art, and architecture that...

This book is a linguistic-cultural study of the emergence of the Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust. It traces the origins and uses of the term 'ghetto' in European discourse from the sixteenth century to the Nazi regime. It examines with a magnifying...

This innovative book illuminates popular attitudes toward political authority and monarchy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Prussia and twentieth-century Germany. In a fascinating study of how subjects incorporated the material culture of monarchy...

Emerging in the medieval period, chivalry embodied ideals that elite warriors cherished and practices that formed their profession. In this major new overview, Richard Kaeuper examines how chivalry made sense of violence and war, making it tolerable for...

Martha C. Howell challenges dominant interpretations of the relationship between the so-called commercial revolution of late medieval Europe and the capitalist age that followed. She argues that the merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and consumers in...

This book examines the interface between the old and the new France in the period 1760-1820. It adopts an unusual 'comparative micro-historical' approach in order to illuminate the manner in which country dwellers cut themselves loose from the congeries...

This is a major study of the collapse of the pan-European Carolingian empire and the reign of its last ruler, Charles III 'the Fat' (876-888). The later decades of the empire are conventionally seen as a dismal period of decline and fall, scarred by...

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A major contribution to the study of collective identity and memory in France, this book examines a French republican myth: the belief that the nation can be adequately defended only by its own citizens, in the manner of the French revolutionaries of...

An Economic and Social History of the Netherlands, 1800-1920 provides a comprehensive account of Dutch history from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, examining population and health, the economy, and socio-political history. The Dutch...

During its campaign against France in 1940, the German army massacred several thousand black POWs belonging to units drafted in France's West African colonies. This book, first published in 2006, documents these war crimes on the basis of extensive...

This is the first comprehensive analysis of public and private welfare in France available in English, or French, which offers a deeply-researched explanation of how France's welfare state came to be and why the French are so attached to it. The author...

The rule of the Angevins in Brittany is characterized usually as opening an isolated 'Celtic' society to a wider world and imposing new and alien institutions. This study of Brittany under the Angevins, first published in 2000, demonstrates that the...

Modern life in increasingly heterogeneous societies has directed attention to patterns of interaction, often using a framework of persecution and tolerance. This study of the economic, social, legal and religious position of three minorities (Jews,...

Martin Luther contributed extensively to the sixteenth century 'debate about women' with his writings on women and related subjects such as marriage, the family and sexuality. In this volume, Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Susan Karant-Nunn bring together a...

This 2002 book attempts to overcome the traditional historiographical approach to the role of the early modern papacy by focusing on the actual mechanisms of power in the papal court. The period covered extends from the Renaissance to the aftermath of...

Aristocratic Encounters, first published in 1999, relates how an aristocratic discourse on American Indians took shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Titled and educated French and German visitors to North America, mindful of the...

Christians are supposed to love their neighbours, including their enemies. This is never easy. When feud and honour are common realities, it is even harder than usual. This book sketches the history of peace-making between people (not countries) as an...

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This volume of essays provides a comprehensive treatment of a very significant component of the societies of late medieval and early modern Europe: the dead. It argues that to contemporaries the 'placing' of the dead, in physical, spiritual and social...

John Wyclif was the fourteenth-century English thinker responsible for the first English Bible, and for the Lollard movement which was persecuted widely for its attempts to reform the Church through empowerment of the laity. Wyclif had also been an...

This book explores the full range of social, economic, religious and cultural contacts between England and the German city of Cologne during the central Middle Ages, c.1000 to c.1300. A wealth of original archive material reveals an extensive network of...