Around the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna and Berlin were centers of scientific knowledge, accompanied by a sense of triumphalism and confidence in progress. Yet they were also sites of fascination with urban decay, often focused on sexual and...

For sale in CIS only! This volume offers a comprehensive and original analysis and reconceptualisation of the compendium of struggles that wracked the collapsing Tsarist empire and the emergent USSR, profoundly affecting the history of the twentieth...

With "England's Great Transformation", Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi's landmark "The Great Transformation". The conventional wisdom...

For centuries before the arrival in Australia of Captain Cook and the so-called First Fleet in 1788, intrepid seafaring explorers had been searching, with varied results, for the fabled "Great Southland". In this enthralling history of early discover...

During the Victorian era, new laws allowed more witnesses to testify in court cases. At the same time, an emerging cultural emphasis on truth-telling drove the development of new ways of inhibiting perjury. Strikingly original and drawing on a broad...

Germain Sicard proves that Europe's first corporations were fourteenth-century mill companies operating in Toulouse, rather than seventeenth-century English and Dutch trading companies as commonly believed. He shows that the corporate form derives fr...

What constitutes a need? Who gets to decide what people do or do not need? In modern France, scientists, both amateur and professional, were engaged in defining and measuring human needs. These scientists did not trust in a providential economy to di...

Seventy years have passed since the tortured inmates of Hitler's concentration and extermination camps were liberated. When the horror of the atrocities came fully to light, it was easy for others to imagine the joyful relief of freed prisoners. Yet...

Abigail L. Swingen's insightful study provides a new framework for understanding the origins of the British Empire while exploring how England's original imperial designs influenced contemporary English politics and debates about labor, economy, and...

Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems – natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others – whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteen...