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…
Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and represent Antarctica, as presumed and as imagined, alongside what is experienced around the continent and by those watching from afar. These understandings explain how the Antarctic is viewed and manag…
Climate change and globalisation are opening up the Arctic for exploitation by the world – or so we are told. But what about the views, interests and needs of the peoples who live in the region? This volume explores the opportunities and limitations in engaging with the Arctic under change, and the Arctic peoples experiencing the changes, socially and physically. With essays by both academic…
Ancient Knowledge Networks is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies as well as in writings. It explores the forms knowledge takes and the meanings it accrues, and how these meanings are shaped by the peoples who use it. Addressing the relationships between political power, family ties, religious commitments and literate scholarship in the ancient Middle East of the first mill…
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…
A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events explores the traces of London’s most significant modern ‘mega events’. Though only open for a few weeks or months, mega events permanently and disruptively reshape their host cities and societies: they demolish and rebuild whole districts, they draw in materials and participants from around the globe and their organisers self-consciousl…
The center of gravity in Roman studies has shifted far from the upper echelons of government and administration in Rome or the Emperor's court to the provinces and the individual. The multi-disciplinary studies presented in this volume reflect the turn in Roman history to the identities of ethnic groups and even single individuals who lived in Rome's vast multinational empire. The purpose is le…
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…
Nowhere on Earth is there an ecological transformation so swift and so extreme as between the snow-line of the high Andes and the tropical rainforest of Amazonia. The different disciplines that research the human past in South America have long tended to treat these two great subzones of the continent as self-contained enough to be taken independently of each other. Objections have repeatedly b…
This authoritative yet accessible introduction to understanding Europe today moves beyond accounts of European integration to provide a wide-ranging and nuanced study of contemporary Europe and its historical development. This fully updated edition adds material on recent developments, such as Brexit and the migrant and Eurozone crises. The concept of Europe is instilled with a plethora of s…
Olga Tufnell (1905–85) was a British archaeologist working in Egypt, Cyprus and Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, a period often described as a golden age of archaeological discovery. For the first time, this book presents Olga’s account of her experiences in her own words. Based largely on letters home, the text is accompanied by dozens of photographs that shed light on personal experience…
Bringing to life the interaction between America, its peoples, and metropolitan gentlemen in early seventeenth-century England, this book argues that colonization did not just operate on the peripheries of the political realm, and confronts the entangled histories of colonialism and domestic status and governance. The Jacobean era is reframed as a definitive moment in which the civil self-prese…
With the publication of ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century ago, Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Privilege, he argues, brings with it the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies, but our intellectual culture only pays lip-service to this ideal. The essay has been described as ‘the single most influential p…
Recent interdisciplinary studies, combining scientific techniques such as ancient DNA analysis with humanistic re-evaluations of the transcultural value of bronze, have presented archaeologists with a fresh view of the Bronze Age in Europe. The new research emphasises long-distance connectivities and political decentralisation. 'Bronzisation' is discussed as a type of proto-globalisation. In th…
In the first comprehensive English-language portrait of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm as political thinkers and actors, Jakob Norberg reveals how history's two most famous folklorists envisioned the role of literary and linguistic scholars in defining national identity. Convinced of the political relevance of their folk tale collections and grammatical studies, the Brothers Grimm argued that they cou…
"Outcasts of Empire unveils the causes and consequences of capitalism’s failure to “batter down all Chinese walls” in modern Taiwan. Adopting micro- and macrohistorical perspectives, Paul D. Barclay argues that the interpreters, chiefs, and trading-post operators who mediated state-society relations on Taiwan’s “savage border” during successive Qing and Japanese regimes rose to prom…
What happens to legacies that do not find any continuation? In Estonia, a new generation that does not remember the socialist era and is open to global influences has grown up. As a result, the impact of the Soviet memory in people’s conventional values is losing its effective power, opening new opportunities for repair and revaluation of the past. Francisco Martinez brings together a numb…
Fonthill, in Wiltshire, is traditionally associated with the writer and collector William Beckford who built his Gothic fantasy house called Fonthill Abbey at the end of the eighteenth century. The collapse of the Abbey’s tower in 1825 transformed the name Fonthill into a symbol for overarching ambition and folly, a sublime ruin. Fonthill is, however, much more than the story of one man’s e…
The Matsu archipelago between China and Taiwan, for long an isolated outpost off southeast China, was suddenly transformed into a military frontline in 1949 by the Cold War and the Communist-Nationalist conflict. The army occupied the islands, commencing more than 40 long years of military rule. With the lifting of martial law in 1992, the people were confronted with the question of how to move…