Critical Concepts in Historical Studies – serie

The philosopher W.B. Gallie argued many years ago that there could be no simple definition of words such as 'freedom' because they embodied what he called 'essentially contested concepts'. They were words whose meaning had to be fought over and whose compteting definitions arose out of political struggle and conflict. Imperialism, and its close ally, colonialism, are two such contested concepts.This set will give readers an insight in to the main lines of debate about the meanings of imperialism and colonialism over the last two centuries.

Since the end of the 1980s the field of Holocaust studies has burgeoned, diversified, and experienced a series of important controversies. Drawing on the best research of the past sixty years, this collection brings together the most significant secondary literature on the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews. Care is taken to set the work in a context of historical breadth and depth.

This collection reflects both the classic building blocks of Reformation history, such as the writings of Luther and Calvin, and also the new historiography which has emerged in recent years. The material is organized so as to explore the thematic complexities of this all-encompassing movement, whilst giving due weight to developments in different parts of Europe including France, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, England and Scotland.

In the English-speaking world at least, there has been something of a deficit of explicit methodological reflection on history. However, there now exists a widespread sense that this must change. There is no question that the ‘postmodern’ debate has done a great deal to put serious reflection on historiography on the agenda of researchers, teachers, and students of history, but it has also been used indiscriminately to cover substantially differing approaches to the area. This collection will enable the reader to disentangle some of the ambiguities and confusions that have characterized the use of this term. Organized thematically, this important five-volume set brings together key essays from the field of historical studies. Including an extensive general introduction by the editor in the first volume, as well as shorter individual introductions in each of the following volumes, this set is essential reading for scholars and students alike.

More than any earlier period of European intellectual history, the age of Enlightenment infused the republic of letters with social and political significance; this long-awaited new collection from Routledge brings together in five volumes the very best scholarship on the period and its legacy. It also incorporates historical and critical essays addressed to the Enlightenment’s alleged responsibility for institutions or policies prevalent in the twentieth century, including economic globalization and the Holocaust.

The Celtic World, a new title in the Routledge Critical Concepts in Historical Studies series, brings together canonical and the best cutting-edge scholarship in Celtic Studies, including key journal articles, many of which have been translated into English specifically for this set. Organized into four volumes, it gives an overview of the most important issues in the fields of theory, archaeology, history and linguistics, covering different aspects of Celtic cultures in Central and Western Europe, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.There are several Celtic worlds: some in the past, some in the present, some in archaeology, some in language, some in history. In this collection, several of these worlds are explored in depth. The present discussions in Celtic Studies about how to deal with its subject—and if it exists at all—are examined, as is the debate about where it should turn in the future. The greater part of this set, however, investigates the Celtic pasts and the three main strands that provide us with evidence about it: archaeology, history and linguistics.The first volume deals with Theory in Celtic Studies, from the ‘Celticity’ debate and the nativism-versus-antinativism controversy to the search for the discipline’s future role. Volume 2 covers Celtic archaeology, from the search for ‘Celtic origins’ via late Hallstatt ‘princely’ tombs and La Tène culture to Romano-Celtic and ‘late Celtic’ archaeology of the British Isles. Volume 3 looks at historical sources on Celtic topics, in Antiquity, ‘the age of Arthur’ and the early Middle Ages. Finally, the fourth volume covers language from the earliest to medieval attestations, examining their typology and language contacts.The collection is completed by an introduction to each volume, newly written by the editors, together with a full index. It is destined to be welcomed by Celtic Studies scholars—and those working in allied disciplines such as archaeology, history and linguistics—as an invaluable reference resource.

The Crusades is an area of rapidly expanding interest. Students increasingly see an understanding of the roots of religious violence and of interaction between Christian and Islamic cultures as a critical tool for citizenship in the modern world. This is borne out by the large number of general books written on crusading, from ‘popular’ narrative histories to more academic analyses. Not even the best general survey, however, can afford the level of detailed argument based on careful analysis of evidence that can be presented in a more narrowly focused article or essay. This collection makes available a group of carefully selected articles which, taken together, develop themes and problematics in crusading history.Articles include the papal reform movement, the development of a theory of holy war, the Reconquista in Spain, the theology of penance, pilgrimage and devotion to the Holy Land, the Seljuqs and the political dynamics of the Near East in the late 11th century, military and logistical technologies in crusading, the Islamic response under Nur ad-Din and Saladin and the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, the fall of the Ayyubid dynasty and the rise of the Mamluks, the emergence of the Mongols, the kingdom of Cyprus, the fall of the Crusader States 1260s-1291, crusading in the later Middle Ages, the treatment of indigenous peoples under western rule, the development of crusader visual culture in the east, church building, castles, settlement patterns and the economy of the crusader states.Comprehensively indexed and with an introduction by the editor, a leading expert in the field, The Crusades is a key work of reference destined to be an essential research and teaching resource.

Stimulated anew in the 1990s by the slaughter and the so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia, and by the horrors of Rwanda, research about and around genocide flourishes as never before. Genocide studies has now accrued a large, sophisticated, and growing, body of scholarly literature. This growth looks set to continue: historians and social scientists are increasingly casting their analytical nets further into the past to investigate whether group destruction and population expulsions have been constitutive of imperial and state expansion over millennia. And, moreover, events such as the Sudanese government’s genocidal counter-insurgency in Darfur suggest that, like war, genocide is a pervasive feature of human society that is here to stay.Addressing the need for an authoritative and comprehensive reference work to enable users to make sense of—and to navigate around—the ever more complex research corpus, Genocide is a new title in Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Historical Studies series. Edited by A. Dirk Moses of the University of Sydney, it is a six-volume collection of foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship.Genocide is at once a legal, historical, and sociological concept; it is subject to considerable definitional dispute. Volume I (‘The Discipline of Genocide Studies’) brings together the most important and influential thinking on its contested definition (what, for instance, is the relationship of genocide to mass murder and war crimes?). It also gathers work on the various attempts to explain the occurrence of genocide.The collection is characterized by its broad temporal and geographical coverage; Volumes II (‘Genocide Before Modernity’) and III (‘Colonial and Imperial Genocides’) collect the key research on genocidal phenomena across history and in all parts of the globe. The scholarship gathered here includes work on the Roman Empire, the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and the campaigns against its indigenous peoples by settler colonies in the New World.Volumes IV–VI of the collection focus on genocide in the twentieth century and beyond. Volume IV is devoted to the Holocaust, and to the Nazi extermination policies more generally, and to Stalin’s genocidal policies in the Soviet Union. Volume V (‘Post-Colonial and -Imperial Genocide’) gathers key research on often overlooked—and sometimes wilfully ignored—episodes. Topics covered here include the partition of India; Nigeria, 1967–70; and the ongoing events in Darfur.The scholarship assembled in the final volume (‘Humanitarian Intervention, the Prosecution of Genocide, Trauma, and Recovery’) brings together vital research on anti-genocide international law since 1948. It also focuses on the work of international criminal tribunals. Finally, Volume VI also explores the emergence of the controversial ‘duty to protect’ doctrine.Genocide is supplemented with a full index and other scholarly apparatus. It also includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. The collection is a landmark reference work and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Serious research in and around the history—and contemporary reality—of slavery is very wide-ranging, and flourishes as never before. This new four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed series, Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, meets the need for a reference work to help users make sense of the subject’s vast and dispersed literature, and the continuing explosion in research output.Edited by two of the leading scholars in the area, the four volumes bring together in one ‘mini library’ both classic and contemporary contributions to provide authoritative coverage of the transatlantic slave trade; slavery in Africa and the Indian Ocean region; slave culture; the slave economy; and slave resistance. Other topics include family, gender, and community. The collection also gathers the best and most influential scholarship on attempts to abolish the trade, and the legacy of emancipation.With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editors, which places the collected materials in their intellectual context, Slavery is an essential work of reference. The collection will be particularly useful as a database allowing scattered and often inaccessible material to be easily located. It will also be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar—and sometimes overlooked—texts. For scholars and advanced students of Slave Studies, it is a vital one-stop resource.

Magic and witchcraft have been important components of almost every human culture throughout history, and continue to be so in the present day, both globally and in the West. These topics have attracted an enormous amount of scholarship, but publications are often scattered, and scholars working in one area rarely address research produced in others. These volumes bring together important representative publications spanning antiquity to the present day, and setting Western developments in a global context. Significant attention has been given to the major witch hunts of early modern Europe, because scholarship on early modern witchcraft has often driven the field. But other periods and regions are not neglected. Important theoretical issues are also addressed, such as the conceptual relationship between magic, science, and religion, and the role of gender in the perception (and persecution) of magical practices in many parts of the world.

Recent decades have seen a remarkable growth of interest in intellectual history. Intellectual history has become a popular branch of historical studies at the same time as it has a growing audience among students reading politics, philosophy, international relations, English, and other academic areas across the arts and social sciences. This new landmark collection from Routledge provides a comprehensive survey of the subdiscipline, and assembles the very best research undertaken by scholars in Britain, Europe, North America, and the wider world from ancient times to the present. The collection offers an essential synthesis of past and current work but pays special attention to prevailing controversies in order to provide readers with an up-to-date sense of the area.

Science is one of the main features of the contemporary world, and shapes our lives to an extent that has no precedents in history. Yet science as we know it today is the outcome of contingent social processes, and its global success is far from self-explanatory. How did it happen? How did science emerge in history and became the most authoritative source of knowledge available in late modern societies? This set of volumes addresses these crucial questions through a selection of exemplary publications spanning antiquity to the present day. The reader will find an effective survey of the best scholarship in this rapidly growing field, and a map of the main revolutions as well as the long-term continuities that have characterized our understanding the world and our attempts to control it. The collection brings together areas of inquiry that have become increasingly distant and specialized, such as the history of antique science or Cold War studies, within broader narratives of the making of the modern world. They also reassess the traditional assumption of the exclusively Greek and Western origins of modern science, situating relevant knowledge, practices, and artefacts within the global networks that sustained them: in ancient as well as in modern times. The gathered materials address key historiographical issues, such as the relationship between science, magic, and religion; the role of science in nation-building processes; and the relationship between science and technology.

The question of gender in science and technology is pursued by scholars from different disciplines and perspectives: historians study the lives of women scientists within the context of institutions that for centuries held women at arm’s length; sociologists uncover women’s access to the means of scientific production; biologists scrutinize how science has studied female and male bodies; cultural critics explore normative understandings of femininity and masculinity; philosophers and historians of science analyse how gender has influenced the content and methods of science and technology.Now, this new four-volume collection from Routledge enables users to make sense of the interlocking pieces of the gender, science, and technology puzzle: the history of women’s participation in science and engineering; the structure of research institutions; and the gendering of human knowledge. The volumes bring together important representative publications treating these issues from antiquity to the present, and across cultures.

The history of medicine has been a robust field of academic inquiry and popular discussion since the 1970s. The interest in it goes back much further, but it was then that it began to link up with social protest and the counter-culture movement, and with feminist politics in particular. Medicine was seen as a part of ‘the Establishment’, perceived to be anti-democratic and paternalistic. The blossoming of the social history of medicine was launched on this agenda, focusing on the historically disenfranchised: the mad, women, the disabled, ‘unorthodox’ healers, social medicine, and so on. The field expanded in the 1980s and 90s with a shift from ‘the social’ to the ‘the cultural history of medicine’, connecting it to an abiding interest in ‘the body’. The centrality of medicine and the body to the work of Michel Foucault was a part of that move. Today, interest is sustained through the politics of biomedicine (including bioethics, and the turn to the ‘neuro’), which render it one of the most vibrant areas in the academy and one of the most topical in popular culture.

With over half the world’s population now living in cities, urbanization is one of the defining features of the contemporary world, and urban history – the study of the processes and consequences of urbanization – is one of the most dynamic fields of modern and contemporary history. But the dynamism of urban history is not confined to the modern era and the study of urban societies in the less recent past equally represents a highly fertile field of scholarship. This collection will provide an expert overview of the field of urban history and a representative synthesis of past and current scholarship in urban history. The articles selected will explore key debates and conceptual issues in urban history from a global perspective highlighting the benefits of comparative historical research and of interdisciplinary approaches drawn from the humanities and social sciences . The recent expansion of global history and transnational perspectives in historical research is particularly suited to the study of urban history, given the importance of cities as nodal points in the networks of global exchange and communication and this volume. The collection will also adopt a deliberately broad chronological span from antiquity to the twentieth century in order to facilitate diachronic comparisons and to emphasize the continuities, as well as discontinuities in urban history. The volumes differ from the several ‘urban studies’ readers that are already available on the market in that the long term historical perspective is central to their conception. They will address theories of urbanization and methodological and conceptual issues of urban history, including questions of definition, as well as covering wider thematic issues that are representative of the different disciplinary approaches that have influenced urban history and which reflect the wider questions that urban historians have, historically, sought to address.

The history of sexuality has progressed from its earlier marginal status to a central place in historiography. Not only are its foci of research intriguing, but the field has initiated important theoretical advances for the discipline as a whole, especially through the work of Michel Foucault. The editors of this new four-volume Routledge collection define sexuality in a broader sense than sexual identity, to include sexual emotions, desires, acts, representations, and relationships. And while the history of sexuality began in the American and European spheres, the volumes also integrate studies of Asian, African, and other sexual cultures. Similarly, the collection integrates studies from early periods (such as classical Greece and Rome and the medieval era) with modern histories of sexuality.The editors of this new four-volume Routledge collection define sexuality in a broader sense than sexual identity, to include sexual emotions, desires, acts, representations, and relationships. And while the history of sexuality began in the American and European spheres, the volumes also integrate studies of Asian, African, and other sexual cultures. Similarly, the collection integrates studies from early periods (such as classical Greece and Rome and the medieval era) with modern histories of sexuality.