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Africa throughout its postcolonial history has been plagued by human rights abuses ranging from intolerance of political dissent to heinous crimes such as genocide. Some observers consequently have gone so far as to suggest that human rights are a concept alien to African cultures. The International Criminal Court (ICC)’s focus on Africa in recent years has reinforced the region’s reputation as a hotspot for human rights violations. But despite Africa’s notoriety concerning human rights, Africa and the Shaping of International Human Rights argues that the continent has been pivotal for helping shape contemporary human rights norms and practices. Challenging prevailing Eurocentric interpretations of human rights’ origins and evolution, it demonstrates that from the colonial era to the present Africa’s peoples have drawn attention to and prompted novel ways of thinking about human rights through their encounters with the world at large. Beginning with the depredations of King Leopold II in the Congo Free State in the 1880s and ending with the ICC’s current activities in Africa, it reveals how African events, personalities, groups, and nations have influenced the trajectory of human rights history in intriguing and critical ways, in the end enlarging and universalizing a major discourse of our time.

This book interleaves the history of post-Independence archaeology in India with the life and times of Madhukar Narhar Deshpande (1920–2008), a leading Indian archaeologist who went on to become the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India. Spanning nearly a century, this is a tale about the circumstances which brought men like Deshpande to this career path; what it was like to grow up in a family devoted to India’s freedom; the watershed moment that created a large cohort that was trained by Mortimer Wheeler, the doyen of British archaeology who headed the Archaeological Survey in the twilight years of the British Raj; the unknown conservation stories around the Gol Gumbad in Bijapur and the Qutb Minar in Delhi; the forgotten story of how the fabric of a historic Hindu shrine, the Badrinath temple, was saved; the chemistry shared by the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the archaeologist, Deshpande at historic cave shrines like Ajanta and Ellora, and; the political and administrative challenges faced by director generals of archaeology. The story is told through a main character—Deshpande himself—some of whose writings have been included here. Equally, there are others who figure in the narrative as it reconstructs and recounts the story of Indian archaeology after 1947 through those lives as also through the institutional history of the Archaeological Survey and the processes that were central to the discoveries it made and the challenges it faced.

This book offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. The Cancer Problem begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding The Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its focus expands to successively include the rivers, lakes, and forests of England, the mountains, poverty, and hunger of the four nations of the British Isles, the reluctant and resistant inhabitants of the British Empire, and the networks of scientists and doctors spread across Europe and North America. It argues that it was in the nineteenth century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease’s incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.

Though largely invisible in histories of World War one, over 550,000 men in the ranks of the Indian Army were followers or non-combatants. From porters and construction workers in the ‘Coolie Corps’, to ‘menial’ servants and those who maintained supply lines and removed the wounded from the battlefield, Radhika Singha draws upon their story to give the sub-continent an integral rather than ‘external’ place in this world –wide conflict. The labor regimes built on the backs of these 'coolies' had long sustained imperial militarism. This was particularly visible in the border infrastructures put in place by combinations of waged work, corvee, and, tributary labor.These work regimes, and the political arrangements which sustained them, would be bent to the demands of global war. This amplified trans-border ambitions and anxieties and pulled war zones closer home. Manpower hunger unsettled the institutional divide between Indian combatants and non-combatants. The ‘higher’ followers benefitted, less so the ‘menial’ followers, whose position recalled the dependency of domestic service and who included in their ranks the ‘untouchables’ consigned to stigmatised work. The book explores the experiences of the Indian Labor Corps in Mesopotamia and France and concludes with an exploration of the prolonged, complicated nature of the ‘end of the war’ for the sub-continent. The Coolie's Great War views the conflict unfolding over the world through the lens of Indian labor, bringing new social, spatial, temporal and sensory dimensions to the narrative.

Empire of Ruins explores the meaning of ruins in American culture, from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, arguing that photographs have been the chief means by which the significance of ruins has been created in American culture. The book traces a historical argument that begins in the nineteenth century, when Americans yearned for the ruins of Europe, then moves to the discovery of Native American ruins in the Southwest. Later chapters explore the visualization of inner city ruins, abandoned factories, and shopping malls, and the “creative destruction” of buildings in order to make way for bigger ones. In addition, it analyzes the imagery of the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster; the ruins of the industrial landscape through mining operations; the ruins created by natural disasters like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy; and the ruins produced by climate change, including the melting of the ice caps. Empire of Ruins considers, in conclusion, the way the picturing of ruins has served to mark revolutionary moments in political culture, symbolizing the choices societies must make. Empire of Ruins focuses mainly on photography, but it encompasses painting, literature, and popular films as well, in order to provide a larger picture of the cultural meaning of ruins. At the same time, it examines the powerful aesthetic attraction of ruin imagery in photographs and films, showing how the Destructive Sublime, a new category of experience, evokes contrary responses in viewers.

The Long Crisis explores the origins and implications of one of the most significant developments across the globe over the last fifty years: the diminished faith in government as capable of solving public problems. Conventional accounts of the shift toward market and private sector governing solutions have focused on the rising influence of conservatives, libertarians, and the business sector. The Long Crisis, however, locates the origins of this transformation in the efforts of city-dwellers to preserve liberal commitments of the postwar period. New York faced an economic crisis beginning in the late 1960s that disrupted long-standing assumptions about the services city government could provide. In response, New Yorkers—organized within block associations, nonprofits, and professional organizations—embraced an ethos of private volunteerism and, eventually, of partnership with private business in order to save their communities from neglect. Local liberal and Democratic officials came over time to see such alliances not as stopgap measures, but as legitimate and ultimately permanent features of modern governance. The ascent of market-based policies was driven less by a political assault of pro-market ideologues than by ordinary New Yorkers experimenting with novel ways to maintain robust public services in the face of the city’s budget woes. Local people and officials, The Long Crisis argues, built neoliberalism from the ground up. These shifts toward the market would both exacerbate old racial and economic inequalities and produce new ones that continue to shape metropolitan areas today.

This study pursues a central theme in English historical thinking—the Norman Conquest—over seven centuries. This first volume, which covers more than half a millennium, explains how and why the experience of the Conquest prompted both an unprecedented campaign in the early twelfth century to write (or create) the history of England, and to excavate (and fabricate) pre-Conquest English law. It traces the treatment of the Conquest in English historiography, legal theory and practice, and political argument through the middle ages and early modern period. It shows that during this period jurisprudence and legal practice became more important than historical writing in preserving the Conquest as a subject of interest. It concludes with an examination of the dispersal of these materials from libraries consequent on the dissolution of the monasteries, and the attempts made to rescue, edit, and print many of them in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This preservation of what had been written for the most part in the early twelfth century enabled the Conquest to become still more contested in the constitutional cataclysms of the seventeenth century than it had been in the eleventh and twelfth. The seventeenth-century resurrection of the Conquest will be the subject of a second volume.

Howard Hotson’s previous contribution to this series, Commonplace Learning, explored how a fragmented political and confessional landscape turned the northwestern corner of the Holy Roman Empire into the pedagogical laboratory of post-Reformation Protestant Europe. This sequel traces the further evolution of that tradition after that region’s leading educational institutions were destroyed by the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and their students and teachers scattered in all directions. Transplanted to the Dutch Republic, the post-Ramist tradition provided ideas, values, and methods which helped to formulate the mechanical philosophy of Descartes and institutionalize it within a network of thriving universities. Within the international diaspora of Protestant intellectuals documented in the archive of Samuel Hartlib, post-Ramist encyclopaedism provided much of the framework for the pansophic programme of Comenius, which assisted the initial spread of Baconianism and related aspirations both in England and abroad. In post-war central Europe, another branch of the tradition helped inspire Leibniz’s life-long vision of a revised combinatorial encyclopaedia as the centrepiece of a wide-ranging reform programme. But as the underlying political, confessional, educational, and intellectual context shifted after 1648, the ancient conception of the encyclopaedia as a cycle of disciplines to be mastered by every scholar exploded into a potentially infinite number of discrete topics organized alphabetically within a mere work of reference. This book weaves together many new lines of inquiry against a huge geographical and thematic canvas to contribute fresh perspectives on the fraught middle years of the seventeenth century in particular and the shape of modern knowledge more generally.

The richest and most politically complex regions in Italy in the earliest Middle Ages were the Byzantine sections of the peninsula, thanks to their links with the most coherent early medieval state, the Byzantine Empire. This comparative study of the histories of Rome, Ravenna, and Venice arises from their unifying element: their common Byzantine past, since all three escaped being incorporated into the Lombard kingdom in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. By 750, however, their political links with the Byzantine Empire were irrevocably severed, except in the case of Venice. Thus, after 750, and in the ninth and tenth centuries, did these cities remain socially and culturally heirs of Byzantium in their political structures, social organization, material culture, ideological frame of reference, and representation of identity? Did they become part of the Western political and ideological framework of Italy: Frankish Carolingian in the ninth, and German Ottonian in the tenth, centuries? This book attempts to identify and analyse the ways in which each of these cities preserved the continuity of structures of the late antique and Byzantine cultural and social world; or in which they adapted each and every element available in Italy to their own needs, at various times, and in various ways. It does so through a story which encompasses the main contemporary narratives, the documentary evidence, recent archaeological discoveries, and discussions on art history, and it follows the markers of status and identity through titles, names, ethnic groups, liturgy and ritual, foundation myths, representations, symbols, and topographies of power

In late-eighteenth-century India, the glory of the Mughal emperors was fading, and ambitious newcomers seized power, changing the political map forever. Enter the legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh, whose Sikh Empire stretched throughout northwestern India into Afghanistan and Tibet. Priya Atwal shines fresh light on this long-lost kingdom, looking beyond its founding father to restore the queens and princes to the story of this empire’s spectacular rise and fall. She brings to life a self-made ruling family, inventively fusing Sikh, Mughal and European ideas of power, but eventually succumbing to gendered family politics, as the Sikh Empire fell to its great rival in the new India: the British. Royals and Rebels is a fascinating tale of family, royalty and the fluidity of power, set in a dramatic global era when new stars rose and upstart empires clashed.

The police are constantly under scrutiny. They are criticized for failings, praised for successes, and hailed as heroes for their sacrifices. Starting from the premise that every society has norms and ways of dealing with transgressors, this book traces the evolution of the multiple forms of ‘policing’ that existed in the past. It examines the historical development of the various bodies, individuals, and officials who carried these out in different societies, in Europe and European colonies, but also with reference to countries such as ancient Egypt, China, and the United States. By demonstrating that policing was never the exclusive dominion of the police, and that the institution of the police, as we know it today, is a relatively recent creation, the book explores the idea and reality of policing, and shows how an institution we now call ‘the police’ came to be virtually universal in our modern world.

This book examines diverse aspects of the social history of the marginalized sections of society in Orissa, focusing on the problems of colonialism and the way it impacted the lives of tribals, outcastes and dalits. It delineates how these socially excluded sections were terrorized and further impoverished by both the colonial government and the chiefs of the despotic princely states who worked in tandem with them. In course of six tightly argued chapters, Biswamoy Pati studies several key issues including ‘colonial knowledge’ systems which had a long afterlife, such as the stereotyping of tribals as violent and brutal and colonial constructions of the ‘criminal tribe’. In addition, he closely examines colonial agrarian settlements, adivasi strategies of resistance (including uprisings); indigenous systems of health and medicine, the colonial ‘medical gaze’; conversion (to Hinduism), fluidities of caste formations in the nineteenth century, the Hinduization and appropriation by princely rulers of adivasi deities and healing methods, rituals of legitimacy adopted by these rulers as well as the development of colonial capitalism and urbanization. Alongside, he explores the connections between the marginal social groups and the national movement, besides touching upon the manner in which the ruling classes after Independence have allowed a host of inherited problems to remain unresolved. Adopting an inter-disciplinary method and drawing upon archival and rare, untapped sources, this fascinating study would be of interest to students of history, social anthropology, political sociology, cultural studies, dalit studies and social exclusion. It would also attract non-governmental organisations and planners of public policy.

During the Second World War, all contact between German soldiers and Polish women — considered an “inferior race” — was officially banned. Sexual encounters frequently took place, however. Some were consensual, while others were characterised by brutal violence, and women often sold their bodies as a means of survival. The army and SS constructed purpose-built brothels for their soldiers, but also banned and frequently punished loving relationships. This book gives a powerful account of these encounters and describes the actions of the army and the SS in regulating relations between soldiers and civilian women. The book provides new and important insights into everyday life during the occupation, Nazi racial policy, and the fates of the women involved.