Arising from renewed engagement with Charles Tilly's canonical work on the relationship between war and state formation, this volume situates Tilly's work in a broader theoretical landscape and brings it into contemporary debates on state formation theory. Starting with Tilly's famous dictum 'war made the state, and the state made war', the book takes his claim further, examining it from a philosophical, theoretical and conceptual view, and asking whether it is applicable to non-European r...

Examining the historical and social trajectories involved in the continuous development of civil society, this volume reveals the contextual nature of the process. Through empirical studies focusing primarily on Denmark and covering the period from 1849 to the present day, it analyses the manner in which civil society has been practised and transformed over time. Presenting a new theoretical framework informed by a relational and processual perspective, the book sheds new light on familiar...

The theory and practice of history and its relevance to the modern world, by Britains greatest radical historian.

What are the origins of nationalism and why is it capable of arousing such intense emotions? In this major study, Azar Gat counters the prevailing fashionable theories according to which nations and nationalism are modern and contrived or 'invented'. He sweeps across history and around the globe to reveal that ethnicity has always been highly political and that nations and national states have existed since the beginning of statehood millennia ago. He traces the deep roots of ethnicity and...

This book provides an interpretation of one of the key aspects of Max Weber’s work: the relationship between his political and sociological writings. Weber’s sociological studies have often been treated as if they were completely separate from his political attitudes and interests, and in general his political writings have remained less well-known than his sociological work.The book contains three main sections. The first of these analyses the principal concerns underlying Weber’s...

Leading historian Lynn Hunt rethinks why history matters in today’s global world and how it should be written.Globalization is emerging as a major economic, cultural, and political force. In Writing History in the Global Era, historian Lynn Hunt examines whether globalization can reinvigorate the telling of history. She looks toward scholars from the East and West collaborating in new ways as they share their ideas. She proposes a sweeping reevaluation of ...

For the last two centuries, nationalism has been a central feature of society and politics. Few ideologies can match its power and resonance, and no other political movement and symbolic language has such worldwide appeal and resilience. But nationalism is also a form of public culture and political religion, which draws on much older cultural and symbolic forms.Seeking to do justice to these different facets of nationalism, the second edition of this popular and respected overview...

Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century "market fundamentalism" it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the ...

What is the history of knowledge? This engaging and accessible introduction explains what is distinctive about the new field of the history of knowledge (or, as some scholars say, ‘knowledges in the plural’) and how it differs from the history of science, intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge or from cultural history. Leading cultural historian, Peter Burke, draws upon examples of this new kind of history from different periods and from the history of India, East Asia and the Is...

Despite many predictions made over the last two hundred years that nation-states and nationalism are transient phenomena that will eventually fade away, the historical record and contemporary events show otherwise. Nationalism still remains the most popular, potent and resilient ideological discourse and the nation-state the only legitimate mode of territorial rule.This innovative and concise book provides an in-depth analysis of the processes involved in the emergence, formation, ...

In a world of transnational economics and mass communications, ethnic conflict and nationalism have recently re-emerged as major political forces. Is this due to the advance of modernity? Will a global culture supersede nationalism? In fact, the revolution of modernity has revitalized ethnic memories and communities, as people look for stability and meaning in an age of unprecedented change and return to their ethnic heritages.Ethnic nationalism challenges, but also reinforces the ...

The first comprehensive overview of the innovative new discipline of global historyUntil very recently, historians have looked at the past with the tools of the nineteenth century. But globalization has fundamentally altered our ways of knowing, and it is no longer possible to study nations in isolation or to understand world history as emanating from the West. This book reveals why the discipline of global history has emerged as the most dynamic and innovative fie...