History

This book focuses on the history of the provision of legal aid and legal assistance to the poor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in eight different countries. It is the first such book to bring together historical work on legal aid in a comparative perspective, and allows readers to analogise and contrast historical narratives about free legal aid across countries. Legal aid developed as a result of industrialisation, urbanization, immigration, the rise of philanthropy, and what were viewed as new legal problems. Closely related, was the growing professionalisation of lawyers and the question of what duties lawyers owed society to perform free work. Yet, legal aid providers in many countries included lay women and men, leading at times to tensions with the bar. Furthermore, legal aid often became deeply politicized, creating dramatic conflicts concerning the rights of the poor to have equal access to justice.

This textbook explores the mystery of human origins in the Arabian Peninsula, the lost Southern Crescent where humanity took its first steps toward civilization. Under Arabia’s surface of sand and stone lies a primordial realm of rolling grasslands, freshwater lakes, and river floodplains. This book aims to restore a critical missing chapter in the prehistory of our species that played out in this forgotten place of plenty.

The author has carried out more than twenty years of fieldwork in Yemen and Oman, weaving his research together  into an unorthodox tapestry of archaeology, environmental science, genetics, and Middle Eastern mythology. This volume peers beneath Arabia’s abandoned deserts, revealing a land that once served as a bridge between prehistoric worlds. This textbook is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students as well as all readers who are interested in learning about Arabian prehistory.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of pupils attended boarding schools in various places across the globe. Their experiences were vastly different, yet they all had in common that they were separated from their families and childhood friends for a period of time in order to sleep, eat, learn and move within the limited spatial sites of the boarding school. This book frames these ‘boarding schools’ as a global and transcultural phenomenon that is part of larger political and social developments of European imperialism, the Cold War, and independence movements. Drawing together case studies from colonial South Africa, colonial India, Dutch Indonesia, early twentieth-century Nigeria, Fascist Spain, Ghana, Nazi Germany, nineteenth-century Ireland, North America and the Soviet Union, this edited collection examines the ways in which boarding schools extracted pupils from their original social background in order to train, mold and shape them so that they could fit intothe perceived position in broader society. The book makes the broader argument that framing boarding schools as a global phenomenon is imperative for a deepened understanding of the global and transnational networks that linked people as well as ideas and practices of education and childhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.   

This book provides a new perspective on the study of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its monarchy – its political leadership and decisions. Moreover, it analyzes how that decision-making evolved before, during, and after the Arab–Israeli War of 1973, and the subsequent Arab oil embargo that followed; the run-up to and aftermath of the 1975 murder of King Faysal; discussions over the oil weapon; and Saudi responses to the Carter presidency in the United States. Through the prism of tribal decision-making, this book sheds new light on a number of important political events, which have shaped the political leadership in Saudi Arabia, and explores the behind-the-scenes workings of the Saudi royal family.

This book proposes a significant new interpretation of the relations between Italian partisans and British forces during the Italian campaign of 1943-1945. The core of the argument challenges many assumptions that are today still present both in Italian and in the Anglophone historiography on the subject. In current historiography, the debate is still ongoing as to whether the British were a hostile force to the Italian Resistance, trying to weaken it to better control it, or a genuine and committed ally. Instead of a clear-cut and artificial dichotomy between the 'Italians' and the 'British' this book posits the idea that lines were often blurred, and relations existed on a scale that included lots of grey and overlapping areas. Thanks to an original approach that examines the Italo-British interaction from a point of view as close as possible to the ‘action’, it proposes a new interpretation based on the way the British image was cast in Italy. Politics is left in the background in favour of an analysis of the concrete problems and difficulties that Italians and the British had to face when working together and how these processes influenced the image of Great Britain in Italy in the following decades. This produces a final interpretation that enriches current historiography and pushes forward our understanding of the relationship between Italian partisans and British forces.

This book tackles the difficult challenge of uncovering the pathogenic cause, epidemiological mechanics and broader historical impacts of an extremely deadly third-century ancient Roman pandemic. The core of this research is embodied in a novel systems synthesis methodology that allows for ground-breaking historical-scientific problem-solving. Through precise historical and scientific problem-solving, analysis and modelling, the authors piece together a holistic puzzle portrait of an ancient plague that is fully consistent, in turn, with both the surviving ancient evidence and the latest in cutting edge twenty-first-century modern medical and molecular phylogenetic science. Demonstrating the broader relevance of the crisis-beset world of the third-century Roman Empire in providing guiding and cautionary historical lessons for the present, this innovative book provides fascinating insights for students and scholars across a range of disciplines.

Written amidst the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, this edited volume draws on the expertise of social scientists and humanities scholars to understand the many ramifications of Covid-19 on societies, politics, and the economies of Africa. The contributors examine measures, communicative practices, and experiences that have guided the (inter)action of governments, societies, and citizens in this unpredictable moment. Covid-19 tested governments’ disaster preparedness as well as exposed governments’ attitudes towards the poor and vulnerable. In the same vein, it also tested the agency of the African populace in the face of containment measures and their impact on everyday social, cultural, and economic practices of ordinary people. In this vein, our concern is to understand the relationship between growing vulnerability on the one hand, and ingenuity of agency on the other, and how both were embodied, narrated and discoursed by the African poor, university students, religious entities, middle-classes, and those who bore the major brunt of the lockdowns.

The volume is thus a useful resource for scholars of Africa, policy makers and those who want to understand Covid-19 in Africa. It provides a multiplicity of perspectives of the pandemic and African responses at different levels of society, economy and the political spectrum. The continental focus of this volume gives room for broader comparative analyses. Lastly, this interdisciplinary work benefits from the input of medical historians, anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, political scientists, literature scholars, urban planners, geographers and others.

This book focuses on two commercial radio stations, Radio Luxembourg and Europe n°1, which were popular institutions in Western Europe throughout the Long Sixties, working across media and broadcasting transnationally. It argues that the existence of an overarching ‘dispositif ’ of commercial radio stations enabled them to operate on various dimensions and differentiated them from other broadcasters. The book therefore answers current calls in media history to look beyond national and single-medium borders and contributes to the cultural and media history of Western Europe.

This book provides the hitherto disregarded development of the principle of angular momentum, and aims at reconstructing its inception by analyzing Euler's relevant publications and correspondence, and using his unpublished manuscripts and notebook records. The derivation of the equations of motion for rigid body rotation is one of Euler's main achievements in mechanics and celestial mechanics. It enabled the foundation of later developments that became known as the angular momentum theorem or, as it is called here, the principle of angular momentum (PAM). Along with Euler's first mathematical formulation of “Newton's law of motion,” called the linear momentum theorem or the principle of linear momentum (PLM), modern historiography of science assigned these principles to Euler, honoring him by calling them “Euler's principles or laws of mechanics.” However, the history behind these principles, in particular the developing and establishing processes of PAM, remained in darkness until now. This is probably why Euler's achievements commonly are still subsumed in “Newtonian physics” or even labeled with it. A good deal of Euler's original documents relevant for unearthing these processes are presented and translated here for the first time.

This book analyses the liberation struggles that took place in the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Cabo Verde, and São Tomé e Príncipe during the second half of the twentieth century, highlighting how they unravelled and challenged colonialism in the international sphere. Activists established headquarters and training camps in various exile settings that were instrumental in their struggle for independence. Exile settings were places where the liberation movements worked with host countries, accessed representatives of foreign countries, made connections with nonstate actors and networks of support, and received political and military training. The complex networks of support formed by protestors around the globe operated on a transnational scale, using urban centres as sites of activism and arenas to promote a multiplicity of connections. Bringing together contributions from a range of skilled authors, the book explores selected hubs around the globe including those based in Kinshasa, Dar es Salaam, Cairo, Moscow, Beijing, New York, London, Paris, and São Paulo. Taking a comparative approach, this collection sheds light on the infrastructures of solidarity that were established by activists around the world, and highlights the transnational circulation of ideas around anticolonialism.

This book provides the first major transatlantic history of Irish serving women, drawing on four years of archival research in Dublin, Belfast, New York, Boston, London and Liverpool. Domestic service was the largest source of employment for generations of women who left Ireland in the decades after the Great Famine. The perceived difficulty of managing Irish servants became a prominent feature of cultural discourse in the United States and England, where countless cartoons, editorials and literary works caricatured the figure of ‘Bridget’. Irish maids and cooks were a canvas on which to project fears not only about Irish politics and immigration but also changing class and gender roles.  Existing scholarship on the Irish experience of domestic service has typically focused on socio-economic conditions, but such approaches tend not to capture the complex ways in which Irish female immigrants were encountered both in private households and in wider society. Irish servants were framed through discourses that could involve nostalgia and guilt as well as amusement and disgust: more complex scripts, in general, than those used to describe Irish immigrant men. The period covered in the book allows for a diverse range of cultural sources – including romance novels and Hollywood films depicting working Irish women – to be examined, moving beyond the Victorian-era caricatures typically emphasised in earlier work on the Irish in domestic service.

This book provides a general guide to stone-structures of the pre-colonial period called zimbabwes. This is a name which denotes their usage as prestige buildings and that a particular quality of masonry with frequent application of wall decoration patterns was required, which distinguishes them from many other stone structures of coarse workmanship. At least 300 sites are known within the borders of Zimbabwe alone, while a few more are found in Botswana, South Africa and Mozambique. However, recent findings have indicated that stone buildings in southern Angola of similar typology also carry decoration patterns that suggests a much wider distribution in the region than was previously thought.

The word Zimbabwe is of historical origin which has been customized to refer to a specific typology of stone walls and to distinguish them from the rest of low-grade buildings which number several hundred. In the 16^th century, it denoted royal and chiefly settlements built in stone and it was used figuratively to imply the presence there of such important political figures. In this guide, zimbabwe (lower case and in italics) refers to stone walls whereas when in upper case it refers either to Great Zimbabwe or Zimbabwe the modern country. 

This work is the first comprehensive volume to act as a guide to the archaeological stone wall structures. Zimbabwe sites are the only immovable cultural remains of substantial physical form that have been inherited from a pre-colonial past. In a post-colonial state, they are extremely valuable as tangible evidence of the historical continuity of indigenous populations with a pre-colonial past. Their history implies an inheritance for present and future generations and entrust ownership to the public. Religious activities connected with the sites imply not just vestigial importance, but embody cosmological values that bind people together. A descriptive inventory such as this guidebook serves two purposes, i.e. a heritage register to support conservation programmes and as a popular study guide to interest both local and international visitors.

This volume contains 8 papers that have been collected by the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics (CSHPM). It showcases rigorously reviewed contemporary scholarship on an interesting variety of topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics.

Some of the topics explored include:

• A critical discussion of thought experiments invoking “Laplace’s demon” in the philosophy of science.


• An examination of the Hebrew-language Sefer ha-Mispar (Book of Number) by Elijah Mizrahi, a rabbi and mathematician from Constantinople.


• An examination of the work of Cambridge tutor and textbook author John Martin Frederick Wright (1792–1842) to explain some mathematical concepts from Newton’s Principia.


• The EvenQuads project developed by the Association for Women in Mathematics, which is aimed at creating vetted biographies of women mathematicians.


• A look at the history of the CSHPM at its 50th anniversary by considering its role in the consolidation and professionalization of the history of mathematics as a discipline.

Written by leading scholars in the field, these papers are accessible not only to mathematicians and students of the history and philosophy of mathematics, but also to anyone with a general interest in mathematics.

This book paints a vivid picture of caregiving for the elderly throughout history, using the innovative concept of a 'carerscape'. Inspired by Appadurai's 'ethnoscape', this framework highlights diverse aspects of caregiving across time and cultures. From kin and household members to spiritual, legal, and community-based systems, the book explores the evolution of care. Chapters delve into prehistoric caregiving practices, drawing on paleontological findings, and examine the roles of spirituality and legality in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The communal spirit of early Christianity and parish care in medieval times are explored, alongside personal narratives from nineteenth-century America. The book also considers representations of ageing and care in folklore, fiction, and media. Concluding with a discussion on modern caregiving, the 'carerscape' is reimagined through the lens of these historical insights, culminating in a reflection on how different countries now recognise the vital role of caregivers. This comprehensive book is essential for scholars of history, anthropology, and social care, as well as practitioners and policy-makers interested in the evolution of caregiving. It offers a rich tapestry of insights for anyone seeking to understand the complex dynamics of care across cultures and eras.

This book deploys the analytic model of centres and peripheries to study medieval southwestern Europe and, more specifically, the Iberian Peninsula. Here, the reader will find engaging, up-to-date scholarship on the monastic management of landscapes and hydric resources; the diffusion of fishing techniques; the roles of epigraphy and consecrations in establishing territorial, cultural, and jurisdictional boundaries; the symbolic aspects of royal legitimacy in late antiquity; the identitarian and memorialistic strategies deployed by trans-national aristocratic dynasties; the expansion of corso-piracy in the Mediterranean; and the transformation in the organization of feudal landscapes. 

Within this diversity of themes, the intrinsic tension between centres and peripheries serves as a common thread. This inherently comparative approach facilitates the construction of geographical and political systems, inter-regional hierarchies and connections, and, ultimately, a more comprehensive view of past societies. Indeed, medieval societies, territories, and cultures are particularly well-suited for these approaches due to the fragmented and highly localized nature of power, development of diverse languages and cultural systems, and exploitative nature of economic relations.

The rationale of this book is to provide carefully selected images from Google Earth, to discuss what they show, and to provide references to the heritage sites portrayed so that readers can go deeper if they wish. Taking examples from all over the world, this book aims to demonstrate their value for understanding heritage landscapes and for appreciating their aesthetics. It is organised around different types of landscape and the processes that created them, rather than regionally or on the basis of age. It includes a large number of archaeological sites that have been designated as UNESC0 World Heritage Sites. Google Earth has proved to be important for demonstrating some of the threats that major sites have been exposed to, including during recent wars in the Middle East.  The landscapes discussed are those of Water Management, Agricultural Management, War, Burial, Mines, Quarries and Salterns, Cities and Settlements, Tells, Theatres, Amphitheatres, and Hippodromes, Churches, Temples, Pagodas, and Mosques, and Geoglyphs.

This book explores the historical and legal importance of two principles, Quod Omnes Tangit, and Tianxia Wei Gong, which have played significant roles in European and Chinese political and legal history. While Quod Omnes Tangit has been thoroughly researched, Tianxia Wei Gong has not been systematically examined. This thesis fills this void and connects these two principles for the first time. 

Quod Omnes Tangit was initially introduced in Justinian's Codex Civil, while Tianxia Wei Gong originated from Liji, one of the books in a key series of works by Confucius. Liji is comparable to the Thora in the Old Testament and is considered as important as law in Chinese legal history. Both principles have undergone comparable developmental processes, with scholars contributing to their reinterpretation. 

This book thoroughly examines the interpretations of individual scholars, with particular attention given to Liang Qichao, who is the only one to have mentioned both Tianxia Wei Gong and Quod Omnes Tangit. The book also provides an explanation for the original discrepancies in their concepts, particularly their methodologies in distributing and legitimizing rights. 

This research will be of interest to legal philosophers and historians in both the Western and Eastern worlds, legal practitioners and policymakers, and researchers seeking to explain current events and explore fundamental differences between the East and West.