From the time of China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95 until the 1930s, the assumption that China was a "weak state" dominated political discourse in China and beyond. In those discussions, China was seen as  lacking competitiveness in a...

Though when people discuss World War I, they usually center on the fighting in Europe, it truly was a global war. This book examines the role of East Asia in the fighting. It looks at how East Asian commentators saw and interpreted the war, both in E...

Maritime history tends to draw stark lines between legal and illegal trading practices, with the naval and commercial vessels of sovereign states on one side and rogue pirates and smugglers on the other. This book reveals how, in the centuries before...

"Politics of Solidarity" explores the transformation of public services in post-apartheid South Africa and the effects of privatization in three cities: Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni, and Cape Town. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork, Carmen Ludwi...

Historians discuss the 1970s as an era of deep transformations and even structural rupture in Western societies. For the first time, Cities Contested engages in this debate from the perspective of comparative urban history, examining the struggles in...

Unquestionably a watershed year in world history, 1917 not only saw the Russian Revolution and the US entry into World War I, it also marked a foundational moment in determining global political structures for the remaining twentieth century. Yet whi...

Everyday heroes and heroines – ordinary men, women, and children who are honored for actual or imagined feats – have received only scant attention in heroism scholarship. While scholars have devoted thousands of pages to war heroes, heroic leaders, a...

States in sub-Saharan Africa, as anywhere else, are vested with the authority to implement laws and sanction their application. But in spite of a growing emphasis in Africa on participatory approaches to legislation, little research has focused on th...

Contemporary European public art often addresses the past and future of European unity, democracy, immigration, and civil rights".The Art of the Multitude" explores how participation in art works affects the formation of public memory, the commemorat...

From anti-Reagan riots in West Berlin to pictures of revolutionary Nicaragua, it is impossible to examine global social protest movements of the 1970s and '80s without addressing how these movements imagined the Americas. By examining historical repr...