Idea and Reality

Edited by Tamar Mayer, Suleiman A. Mourad

Jerusalem, the holy city of three faiths, has been the focus of competing historical, religious, and political narratives from Biblical chronicles to today’s headlines. With an aura that transcends the boundaries of time and place, the city itself embodies different levels of reality – indeed, different realities altogether – for both observers and inhabitants. There is the real Jerusalem, a place of ancient streets and monuments, temples and coffee-houses, religious discourse and political argument. But there is also the imaginary and utopian city that exists in the minds of believers, political strategists, and artists. The study of this multifaceted city poses complex questions that range over several fields of inquiry.

The multidisciplinary studies in Jerusalem offer insights into this complexity. Chapters by leading scholars examine the significant issues that relate to the perception, representation, and status of the city at the historical, religious, social, artistic, and political levels. Together they provide an essential resource for anyone interested in the paradoxes that Jerusalem offers.

ISBN: 9780415421287

Published May 12 2008 by Routledge.

English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740-1830

By David Allan

Making British Culture explores an under-appreciated factor in the emergence of a recognisably British culture. Specifically, it examines the experiences of English readers between around 1707 and 1830 as they grappled, in a variety of circumstances, with the great effusion of Scottish authorship—including the hard-edged intellectual achievements of David Hume, Adam Smith and William Robertson as well as the more accessible contributions of poets like Robert Burns and Walter Scott—that distinguished the age of the Enlightenment.

ISBN: 9780415962865

Published May 09 2008 by Routledge.

Preemptive War in Modern History

By Matthew J. Flynn

Preemptive warfare is the practice of attempting to avoid an enemy’s seemingly imminent attack by taking military action against them first. It is undertaken in self-defense. Preemptive war is often confused with preventive war, which is an attack launched to defeat a potential opponent and is an act of aggression. Preemptive war is thought to be justified and honorable, while preventive war violates international law. In the real world, the distinction between the two is highly contested.

In First Strike, author Matthew J. Flynn examines case studies of preemptive war throughout history, from Napoleonic France to the American Civil War, and from Hitler’s Germany to the recent U.S. invasion of Iraq. Flynn takes an analytical look at the international use of military and political preemption throughout the last two hundred years of western history, to show how George W. Bush’s recent use of this dubiously "honorable" way of making war is really just the latest of a long line of previously failed attempts.

Balanced and historically grounded, First Strike provides a comprehensive history of one of the most controversial military strategies in the history of international foreign policy.

ISBN: 9780415958448

Published May 07 2008 by Routledge.

By Christopher Daniell

Christopher Daniell's Atlas of Medieval Britain presents a sweeping visual survey of Britain from the Roman occupation to 1485.

Annotated throughout with clear commentary, this volume tells the story of the British Isles, and makes visually accessible the varied and often complex world of the Middle Ages. The Atlas depicts the spatial distribution of key events and buildings between 1066 and 1485, as well as providing the relevant Anglo-Saxon background. Charting the main political, administrative and religious features of medieval society, the maps also locate cultural landmarks such as the sites of mystery plays, universities and specific architectural styles.

Topics covered include:

• Iron Age and Roman occupation
• Anglo-Saxons and Vikings
• changing political scenarios within England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland
• religious framework, including diocesan boundaries, monasteries and friaries
• government, society and economy.

Complete with recommended further reading, this volume is an indispensable reference resource for all students of medieval British history.

ISBN: 9780415340694

Published May 03 2008 by Routledge.

The Abu Musa and Tunbs in Strategic Context

By Kourosh Ahmadi

The position of the Persian Gulf as the main highway between East and West has long given this region special significance both within the Middle East and in global affairs more generally. This book examines the history of international relations in the Gulf since the 1820s as great powers such as Britain and the US, and regional powers such as Iran and Iraq, vied for supremacy over this geopolitically vital region. It focuses on the struggle for control over the islands of the Gulf, in particular the three islands of Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb – an issue that remains highly contentious today. It describes how for 170 years Britain eroded Iranian influence in the Gulf, both directly by asserting colonial rule over Iranian islands and port districts, and also through claiming Iranian islands for their protégés on the Arab littoral. It shows how, after Britain's withdrawal, these islands became a pawn in the animosity and conflict that pitted, at one time, Arab radicals and nationalists against monarchical Iran, and, later, the conservative-moderate Arab camp against Islamic Iran. It goes on to explore the impact of the rise of American power in the Gulf since the start of the 1990s, its policy of containment of Iran and Iraq, and how this has provided encouragement to the ambitions of the Persian Gulf Arab littoral states, especially the UAE, towards the islands of the Gulf.

ISBN: 9780415459334

Published May 02 2008 by Routledge.

By Boria Majumdar

This is an exacting social history of Indian cricket between 1780 and 1947. It considers cricket as a derivative sport, creatively adapted to suit modern Indian socio-cultural needs, fulfil political imperatives and satisfy economic aspirations. Majumdar argues that cricket was a means to cross class barriers and had a healthy following even outside the aristocracy and upper middle classes well over a century ago. Indeed, in some ways, the democratization of the sport anticipated the democratization of the Indian polity itself.

Boria Majumdar reveals the appropriation, assimilation and subversion of cricketing ideals in colonial and post-colonial India for nationalist ends. He exposes a sport rooted in the contingencies of the colonial and post-colonial context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. Cricket, to put it simply, is much more than a ‘game’ for Indians.

This study describes how the genealogy of their intense engagement with cricket stretches back over a century. It is concerned not only with the game but also with the end of cricket as a mere sport, with Indian cricket’s commercial revolution in the 1930s, with ideals and idealism and their relative unimportance, with the decline of morality for reasons of realpolitik, and with the denunciation, once and for all, of the view that sport and politics do not mix.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport

ISBN: 9780415400145

Published May 02 2008 by Routledge.

Global formations past and present

Edited by Keith Hanley, Greg Kucich

This volume assembles a wide range of studies that together provide—through their interdisciplinary range, international scope, and historical emphases—an original scholarly exploration of one of the most important topics in recent nineteenth-century studies: the emergence in the nineteenth century of forms of global experience that have developed more recently into rapidly expanding processes of globalization and their attendant collisions of race, religion, ethnicity, population groups, natural environments, national will and power. Emphasizing such links between global networks past and present, the essays in this volume engage with the latest work in postcolonial, cosmopolitan, and globalization theory while speaking directly to the most pressing concerns of contemporary geopolitics. Each essay examines specific cultural and historical circumstances in the formation of nineteenth-century worlds from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including economics, political history, natural history, philosophy, the history of medicine and disease, religious studies, literary criticism, art history, and colonial studies. Detailed in their particular modes of analysis yet integrated into a collective conversation about the nineteenth century’s profound impact on our present worlds, these inquiries also explore the economic, political, and cultural determinants on nineteenth-century types of transnational experience as interweaving forces creating new material frameworks and conceptual models for comprehending major human categories—such as race, gender, subjectivity, and national identity—in global terms. As nineteenth-century global intersections differ in important ways from the shapes of globalization today, however, the essays in this volume generate new ways of understanding emergent patterns of worldwide experience in the age of imperialism and thereby stimulate fresh insights into the dynamics of global formations and conflicts today.

ISBN: 9780415448291

Published April 22 2008 by Routledge.

By Frances Garrett

This book explores the cultural history of embryology in Tibet, in culture, religion, art and literature, and what reveals about its medicine and religion. Filling a significant gap in the literature this is the first in-depth exploration of Tibetan medical history in the English language. It reveals the prevalence of descriptions of the development of the human body – from conception to birth – found in all forms of Tibetan religious literature, as well as in medical texts and in art.

By analysing stories of embryology, Frances Garrett explores questions of cultural transmission and adaptation: How did Tibetan writers adapt ideas inherited from India and China for their own purposes? What original views did they develop on the body, on gender, on creation, and on life itself?

The transformations of embryological narratives over several centuries illuminate key turning points in Tibetan medical history, and its relationship with religious doctrine and practice. Embryology was a site for both religious and medical theorists to contemplate profound questions of being and becoming, where topics such as pharmacology and nosology were left to shape secular medicine. The author argues that, in terms of religion, stories of human development comment on embodiment, gender, socio-political hierarchy, religious ontology, and spiritual progress. Through the lens of embryology, this book examines how these concerns shift as Tibetan history moves through the formative 'renaissance' period of the twelfth through to the seventeenth centuries.

ISBN: 9780415441155

Published April 22 2008 by Routledge.

Revolution, Social Conflict and Reaction in Liberal Spain, 1916–1923

By Francisco J. Romero Salvado

This book analyzes the decay of Liberal politics in Spain as the regional version of the general crisis that engulfed most of Europe between 1916 and 1923. Romero enriches the important wider debate about this watershed period of European history when, in the face of unprecedented mass social protest and political mobilization, incumbent governing elites struggled to find a valid formula of social containment in the dawning of mass politics which also saw the spread of the radical new doctrines of Bolshevism and Fascism.

Above all, this book examines Spain’s "crisis of modernization," a process marked by complex social and political realignments through which the nature of civil society was profoundly altered. It resulted in an unprecedented spiral of violence and a polarization that firstly led to an authoritarian formula of social control in 1923, and ultimately to the outbreak of civil war in 1936.

ISBN: 9780415396035

Published April 17 2008 by Routledge.

By Adrian Webb

The Routledge Companion to Central and Eastern Europe since 1919 is a compact and comprehensive reference guide to the area, from the Treaty of Versailles to the present day. With particular focus on the early nationalist and subsequent fascist and communist periods, Adrian Webb provides an essential guide to the events, people and ideas which have shaped, and continue to shape, central and eastern Europe since the re-ordering of Europe at the end of the First World War.

Covering cultural, economic, political, and environmental issues, this broad-ranging and user-friendly volume explores both the common heritage and collective history of the region, as well as the distinctive histories of the individual states. Key features include:

• wide ranging political and thematic chronologies
• maps for clear visual reference
• special topics such as the economy, the environment and culture
• full list of office holders and extensive biographies of prominent people in all fields
• glossary of specialist terms.

With a wealth of chronological, statistical and tabular data, this handy book is an indispensable resource for all those who wish to understand the complex history of central and eastern Europe.

ISBN: 9780415445634

Published April 16 2008 by Routledge.