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      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        March 2017

        Images of the army

        The military in British art, 1815-1914

        by J. W. M. Hichberger

        In an age when engraving and photography were making artistic images available to a much wider public, artists were able to influence public attitudes more powerfully than ever before. This book examines works of art on military themes in relation to ruling-class ideologies about the army, war and the empire. The first part of the book is devoted to a chronological survey of battle painting, integrated with a study of contemporary military and political history. The chapters link the debate over the status and importance of battle painting to contemporary debates over the role of the army and its function at home and abroad. The second part discusses the intersection of ideologies about the army and military art, but is concerned with an examination of genre representations of soldiers. Another important theme which runs through the book is the relation of English to French military art. During the first eighty years of the period under review France was the cynosure of military artists, the school against which British critics measured their own, and the place from which innovations were imported and modified. In every generation after Waterloo battle painters visited France and often trained there. The book shows that military art, or the 'absence' of it, was one of the ways in which nationalist commentators articulated Britain's moral superiority. The final theme which underlies much of the book is the shifts which took place in the perception of heroes and hero-worship.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2022

        Britain and its internal others, 1750–1800

        Under rule of law

        by Dana Rabin

        The rule of law, an ideology of equality and universality that justified Britain's eighteenth-century imperial claims, was the product not of abstract principles but imperial contact. As the Empire expanded, encompassing greater religious, ethnic and racial diversity, the law paradoxically contained and maintained these very differences. This book revisits six notorious incidents that occasioned vigorous debate in London's courtrooms, streets and presses: the Jewish Naturalization Act and the Elizabeth Canning case (1753-54); the Somerset Case (1771-72); the Gordon Riots (1780); the mutinies of 1797; and Union with Ireland (1800). Each of these cases adjudicated the presence of outsiders in London - from Jews and Gypsies to Africans and Catholics. The demands of these internal others to equality before the law drew them into the legal system, challenging longstanding notions of English identity and exposing contradictions in the rule of law.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2024

        Premodern ruling sexualities

        Representation, identity, and power

        by Gabrielle Storey, Zita Eva Rohr

        This volume explores a range of premodern rulers and their depictions in historiography, literature, art and material culture to gain a broader understanding of their sexualities. It considers the methodologies and motivations of premodern writers and rulers when fashioning royal and elite sexualities and offers new analyses of an array of texts and artwork from across Europe and the wider Mediterranean.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2024

        Law across imperial borders

        British consuls and colonial connections on China’s western frontiers, 1880-1943

        by Emily Whewell

        Law across imperial borders offers new perspectives on the complex legal connections between Britain's presence in Western China in the western frontier regions of Yunnan and Xinjiang, and the British colonies of Burma and India. Bringing together a transnational methodology with a social-legal focus, it demonstrates how inter-Asian mobility across frontiers shaped British authority in contested frontier regions of China. It examines the role of a range of actors who helped create, constitute and contest legal practice on the frontier-including consuls, indigenous elites and cultural mediators. The book will be of interest to historians of China, the British Empire in Asia and legal history.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Exhibiting the Empire

        Cultures of display and the British Empire

        by John McAleer, John M. MacKenzie

        Exhibiting the empire considers how a whole range of cultural products - from paintings, prints, photographs, panoramas and 'popular' texts to ephemera, newspapers and the press, theatre and music, exhibitions, institutions and architecture - were used to record, celebrate and question the development of the British Empire. It represents a significant and original contribution to our understanding of the relationship between culture and empire. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, individual chapters bring fresh perspectives to the interpretation of media, material culture and display, and their interaction with history. Taken together, this collection suggests that the history of empire needs to be, in part at least, a history of display and of reception. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in British history, the history of empire, art history and the history of museums and collecting.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2023

        The fall and rise of the English upper class

        Houses, kinship and capital since 1945

        by Daniel R. Smith

        The fall and rise of the English upper class explores the role traditionalist worldviews, articulated by members of the historic upper-class, have played in British society in the shadow of her imperial and economic decline in the twentieth century. Situating these traditionalist visions alongside Britain's post-Brexit fantasies of global economic resurgence and a socio-cultural return to a green and pleasant land, Smith examines Britain's Establishment institutions, the estates of her landed gentry and aristocracy, through to an appetite for nostalgic products represented with pastoral or pre-modern symbolism. It is demonstrated that these institutions and pursuits play a central role in situating social, cultural and political belonging. Crucially these institutions and pursuits rely upon a form of membership which is grounded in a kinship idiom centred upon inheritance and descent: who inherits the houses of privilege, inherits England.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2011

        Oceania under steam

        Sea transport and the cultures of colonialism, c. 1870–1914

        by Andrew Thompson, Frances Steel, John Mackenzie

        The age of steam was the age of Britain's global maritime dominance, the age of enormous ocean liners and human mastery over the seas. The world seemed to shrink as timetabled shipping mapped out faster, more efficient and more reliable transoceanic networks. But what did this transport revolution look like at the other end of the line, at the edge of empire in the South Pacific? Through the historical example of the largest and most important regional maritime enterprise - the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand - Frances Steel eloquently charts the diverse and often conflicting interests, itineraries and experiences of commercial and political elites, common seamen and stewardesses, and Islander dock workers and passengers. Drawing on a variety of sources, including shipping company archives, imperial conference proceedings, diaries, newspapers and photographs, this book will appeal to cultural historians and geographers of British imperialism, scholars of transport and mobility studies, and historians of New Zealand and the Pacific. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2016

        Oceania under steam

        Sea transport and the cultures of colonialism, c. 1870–1914

        by Andrew Thompson, Frances Steel, John M. MacKenzie

        The age of steam was the age of Britain's global maritime dominance, the age of enormous ocean liners and human mastery over the seas. The world seemed to shrink as timetabled shipping mapped out faster, more efficient and more reliable transoceanic networks. But what did this transport revolution look like at the other end of the line, at the edge of empire in the South Pacific? Through the historical example of the largest and most important regional maritime enterprise - the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand - Frances Steel eloquently charts the diverse and often conflicting interests, itineraries and experiences of commercial and political elites, common seamen and stewardesses, and Islander dock workers and passengers. Drawing on a variety of sources, including shipping company archives, imperial conference proceedings, diaries, newspapers and photographs, this book will appeal to cultural historians and geographers of British imperialism, scholars of transport and mobility studies, and historians of New Zealand and the Pacific.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2017

        Oceania under steam

        Sea transport and the cultures of colonialism, c. 1870–1914

        by Frances Steel

        The age of steam was the age of Britain's global maritime dominance, the age of enormous ocean liners and human mastery over the seas. The world seemed to shrink as timetabled shipping mapped out faster, more efficient and more reliable transoceanic networks. But what did this transport revolution look like at the other end of the line, at the edge of empire in the South Pacific? Through the historical example of the largest and most important regional maritime enterprise - the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand - Frances Steel eloquently charts the diverse and often conflicting interests, itineraries and experiences of commercial and political elites, common seamen and stewardesses, and Islander dock workers and passengers. Drawing on a variety of sources, including shipping company archives, imperial conference proceedings, diaries, newspapers and photographs, this book will appeal to cultural historians and geographers of British imperialism, scholars of transport and mobility studies, and historians of New Zealand and the Pacific.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2019

        The British political elite and Europe 1959-1984

        by Bob Nicholls

      • Trusted Partner
        Colonialism & imperialism
        March 2015

        Britain's lost revolution?

        by Daniel Szechi

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure
        October 2022

        Derailed

        by Tom Haines-Doran, Julie Froud

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2024

        Egypt and the rise of fluid authoritarianism

        Political ecology, power and the crisis of legitimacy

        by Maria Gloria Polimeno

        Egypt and the rise of fluid authoritarianism focuses on the struggle of the post-2013 political authorities for internal political legitimacy after the crisis following the 2013 coup d'état. It explores the microstructural and macro-systemic dynamics of leadership, power, protests and the authority-making process in political systems. These cannot simply be defined as structural, political, social and economic projections of the authoritarianism of the past, but rather as a rupture with that past. The book offers a complex, ground-breaking socio-political and economic analysis into how the forging of an internal political legitimacy claim has eventually modified the regime in Egypt along the authoritarian spectrum, turning into a fluid autocracy closer to a non-exclusivist personalist regime. This shift had implications that resonated both politically and economically.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2024

        Ireland and the Renaissance court

        by David Edwards, Brendan Kane

        Ireland and the Renaissance court is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring Irish and English courts, courtiers and politics in the early modern period, c. 1450-1650. Chapters are contributed by both established and emergent scholars working in the fields of history, literary studies, and philology. They focus on Gaelic cúirteanna, the indigenous centres of aristocratic life throughout the medieval period; on the regnal court of the emergent British empire based in London at Whitehall; and on Irish participation in the wider world of European elite life and letters. Collectively, they expand the chronological limits of 'early modern' Ireland to include the fifteenth century and recreate its multi-lingual character through exploration of its English, Irish and Latin archives. This volume is an innovative effort at moving beyond binary approaches to English-Irish history by demonstrating points of contact as well as contention.

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA

        Marvellous Mammals

        A Wild A to Z of Southeast Asia

        by Debby Ng, Darel Seow

        We know that dogs bark, cats meow, and cows moo. But do you know dholes whistle“whee-whee”, wild boars grunt “grrt-grrt”, and siamangs call out “ooh-wow-wow”?The Southeast Asian forests are full of incredible wildlife waiting to be discovered. Inthe humid nature reserves of Singapore, high up the mountain forests of Papua, andin the tropical waters of the Irrawaddy, a multitude of mammals live their unseenlives. They await a bold explorer to learn their secrets. Could that explorer be you?In this beautifully illustrated alphabet book, wildlife ecologist Debby Ng andillustrator Darel Seow part the leaves to showcase lesser-known animals of Southeast Asia! Readers will learn about these unique mammals’ habitat, behaviour,food choices, and their relationship with humans.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        2021

        Ukrainian Worlds of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Stories about History

        by Natalya Starchenko

        The vision of the Ukrainian history dominant in the Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union focused exclusively on the heroic Cossacks and disenfranchised peasants. There was no room in it for the local elites: the Ukrainian aristocracy (szlachta) of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As the result of this biased perspective, Ukrainians to this day know very little about the life of those people. This book invites the readers to take a closer look at the Ukrainian aristocracy. This introduction is done in a somewhat unusual form, through true anecdotes from the life of aristocracy gleaned from court records and other sources from the time. We get glimpses of the elites not only in their best garbs but also in their well-worn home clothes. The book brings together 105 brief chapters that describe how these people saw themselves, how they fought and made peace, how they fell in love and got married, how unwavering they were in the defense of their rights in court. Last not least, these essays explore whether the Ukrainian elites were mere extras and viewers in history or its active makers, resolute and strong in their insistence on defending and expanding their rights and freedoms.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Engendering whiteness

        White women and colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865

        by Cecily Jones

        Engendering whiteness represents a comparative analysis of the complex interweaving of race, gender, social class and sexuality in defining the contours of white women's lives in Barbados and North Carolina during the era of slavery. Despite their gendered subordination, their social location within the dominant white group afforded all white women a range of privileges. Hence, their whiteness, as much as their gender, shaped these women's social identities and material realities. Crucially, as the biological reproducers of whiteness, and hence the symbolic and literal embodiment and bearers of the state of freedom, they were critical to the maintenance and reproduction of the cultural boundaries of 'whiteness', and consequently the subjects of patriarchal measures to limit and control their social and sexual freedoms. Engendering whiteness draws on a wide variety of sources including property deeds, wills, court transcripts, and interrogates the ways in which white women could be simultaneously socially positioned within plantation societies as both agents and as victims. It also reveals the strategies deployed by elite and poor white women in these societies to resist their gendered subordination, to challenge the ideological and social constraints that sought to restrict their lives to the private domestic sphere, to protect the limited rights afforded to them, to secure independent livelihoods, and to create meaningful existences. A fascinating study that with be welcomed by historians of imperialism as well as scholars of gender history and women's studies.

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