General

Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) asserted his princely authority by deciding at times to lead his own armies to war, despite the misgivings of advisers. Since Europe's wars were fought with money borrowed against future revenues, even an emperor had to...

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...

This collection of essays offers a novel approach to the cultural and social history of Europe after the Second World War. In a shift of perspective, it does not conceive of the impressive economic and political stability of the postwar era as a...

Innocence Abroad explores the process of encounter that took place between the Netherlands and the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The 'discovery' of America coincided with the foundation of the Dutch Republic, a correspondence of...

This 2001 book charts the history of the States General - the parliament - of the Netherlands and its relations with two phases of monarchical rule in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Unlike the English parliament, the States General was a...

The Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest financial institution, played an important role in the expropriation of Jewish-owned enterprises during the Nazi dictatorship, both in the existing territories of Germany, and in the area seized by the German army...

Tooze provides an interpretation of the dramatic period of statistical innovation between 1900 and the end of World War II. At the turn of the century, virtually none of the economic statistics that we take for granted today were available. By 1944, the...

This latest addition to the New Studies in Economic and Social History series sheds fascinating light on an essential aspect of the history of Nazism. The social background of the supporters of Nazism has been the subject of intense debate since the...

This book examines the politics of the French Revolutionary tradition during the Bourbon Restoration and early July Monarchy. Robert Alexander argues that political change was achieved by legal grassroots organization and persuasion - rather than by the...

Fatherlands is an original study of the nature of identity in nineteenth-century Germany, which has crucial implications for the understanding of nationalism, German unification and the German nation state in the modern era. The book approaches these...

The Alchemy Reader is a collection of primary source readings on alchemy and hermeticism, which offers readers an informed introduction and background to a complex field through the works of important ancient, medieval and early modern alchemical authors...

The Huguenots formed a privileged minority within early modern France. During the second half of the sixteenth century, they fought for freedom of worship in the French 'wars of religion' which culminated in the Edict of Nantes in 1598. The community was...

The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands investigates the Soviet response to nationalist insurgencies that occurred between 1944 and 1953 in the regions the Soviet Union annexed after the Nazi-Soviet pact: Eastern Poland, Lithuania,...

This book offers a genuinely comparative analysis of the dictatorships that launched the Second World War: their origins, nature, dynamics, and common ruin. It seeks to understand their similarities and differences historically, without recourse to...

The Kingdom of Portugal was created as a by-product of the Christian reconquest of Hispania. With no geographical raison d'etre and no obvious political roots in its Roman, Germanic, or Islamic pasts, it for long remained a small, struggling realm on...

Is cleanliness next to Germanness, as some nineteenth-century nationalists insisted? This book explores the relationship between gender roles, domesticity, and German national identity between 1870-1945. After German unification, approaches to household...

Since its formation in 1861, Italy has struggled to develop an effective political system and a secure sense of national identity. This new edition of Christopher Duggan's acclaimed introduction charts the country's history from the fall of the Roman...

Utilizing evidence from numerous imperial cities, this book offers an explanation for the spread and survival of urban reform during the sixteenth century. By analyzing the operation of regional political constellations, it reveals a common process of...

Published in 2006, this is a pioneering study of the impact of the famine that occurred in Greece during its occupation by German, Italian and Bulgarian forces in 1941 and 1942. Violetta Hionidou examines the courses and politics of this food crisis,...

The Munich crisis is everywhere acknowledged as the prelude to World War II. If Hitler had been stopped at Munich then World War II as we know it could not have happened. The subject has been thoroughly studied in British, French and German documents and...

The power of big business in the economy of the Third Reich remains one of the most important issues of that era. Drawing upon research, much of it in German corporate and government archives, Peter Hayes argues that IG Farben Chemicals, the largest...

This book is a study of Catholic reform, popular Catholicism and the development of confessional identity in southwest Germany. Based on extensive archival study, it argues that Catholic confessional identity developed primarily from the identification...

Political exiles were a prominent feature of political life in Renaissance Italy, often a source of intense concern to the states from which they were banished, and a ready instrument for governments wishing to intervene in the affairs of their rivals...

This book offers a comprehensive approach to the study of the political history of the Renaissance: its analysis of government is embedded in the context of geography and social conflict. Instead of the usual institutional history, it examines the...

This new textbook examines the spectacular transformation that the French economy has undergone over the past century. Jean-Pierre Dormois offers a general introduction to the major trends as well as recent transformations of French society, and an...

This book is a major study in English of the duchy of Savoy during the period of the Thirty Years War. Rather than examining Savoy purely in terms of its military or geo-strategic role, Dynasty and Diplomacy in the Court of Savoy comprises three...

This book presents a social and cultural history of 'dishonourable people' (unehrliche Leute), an outcast group in early modern Germany. Executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, linen-weavers, sow-gelders,...

This book offers an interpretation of the rise of secular historical thought in nineteenth-century Europe. Instead of characterizing 'historicism' and 'secularization' as fundamental breaks with Europe's religious heritage, they are presented as complex...

This is a short and succinct summary of the unique position of Roman law in European culture by one of the world's leading legal historians. Peter Stein's masterly study assesses the impact of Roman law in the ancient world, and its continued unifying...

In what is sometimes called the age of absolutism, Castilian nobles and commoners, tribunes and towns, were to a considerable degree able to resist and shape royal commands. Whereas there was little open conflict, there was sometimes a surprising degree...

Relations between town and country are central to Europe's long-term economic, political and social evolution. This 2001 book surveys and re-interprets these relations in particular countries and regions in the light of the most recent debates on state...

Things which we regard as the everyday objects of consumption (and hence re-purchase), and essential to any decent, civilised lifestyle, have not always been so: in former times, everyday objects would have passed from one generation to another, without...

The authors in this collection of essays address the largely neglected but significant economic aspects of the national question in its historical context during the course of the twentieth century. There exists a large gap in our understanding of the...

This volume investigates the ways in which people in western Europe between the fall of Rome and the twelfth century used the past: to legitimate the present, to understand current events, and as a source of identity. Each essay examines the mechanisms...

This book is a major history of the dramatic and enduring changes in the daily lives of poor European women and men in the nineteenth century. Rachel G. Fuchs conveys the extraordinary difficulties facing the destitute from England to Russia, paying...

Scholars have long debated whether Heinrich Bruning, head of the German government from 1930 to 1932, was the 'last democratic chancellor'of the Weimar Republic or the trailblazer of the Nazi dictatorship. His memoirs (published in 1970) damaged his...

Centred on a study of the early archives of the Venerabile Collegio Inglese in Rome, the predecessor of the English College of today, this book is more than a study of the beginnings of English institutions in Rome. It attempts to place the English...

This 1999 book is a serious study of Henry IV's relationship with the towns of France, and offers an in-depth analysis of a crucial aspect of his craft of kingship. Set in the context of the later Wars of Religion, it examines Henry's achievement in...

The years 1936-1945 in Spain saw catastrophic civil war followed by fierce repression and economic misery. Families were torn apart and social relations were disrupted by death, exile and defeat. Society became traumatized so deeply that people avoided...

Although the German Empire of 1871-1918 was basically an authoritarian regime, its national elections were held under a democratic franchise and characterized by vigorous election campaigning and high levels of voter turnout. In The Kaiser's Voters,...