Borders and Mobility in the Holy Roman Empire tells the history of free movement in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, one of the most fractured landscapes in human history. The boundaries that divided its hundreds of territories make the Old Reich a uniquely valuable site for studying the ordering of movement. The focus is on safe-conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating free movement and its restriction in the Old Reich. The study shows that attempts to escort travellers, issue letters of passage, or to criminalize the use of 'forbidden' roads served to transform rights of passage into excludable and fiscally exploitable goods. Mobile populations - from emperors to peasants - defied attempts to govern their mobility with actions ranging from formal protest to bloodshed. Newly designed maps show that restrictions upon moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century, but unevenly distributed along roads and rivers. Luca Scholz unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers' right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire's political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but claims of protection could also mask aggressive attempts of territorial expansion. Drawing on sources discovered in more than twenty archives and covering the period between the late sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, Borders and Mobility in the Holy Roman Empire offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

Presenting a broad panorama of society and culture in the German lands and Russia from the Enlightenment to the breakthrough of modernity, this microhistory of one extraordinary family explores how the lives of individual people are entangled with the great forces of their age.

Reveals how the Holy Roman Empire's cultural networks c. 1800 underpinned the transnational spread of music for the German-language stage.

This guide provides an overview of the thematic areas, analytical aspects, and avenues of research which, together, form a broader conversation around doing spatial history. Spatial history is not a field with clearly delineated boundaries. For the most part, it lacks a distinct, unambiguous scholarly identity. It can only be thought of in relation to other, typically more established fields. Indeed, one of the most valuable utilities of spatial history is its capacity to facilitate conversations across those fields. Consequently, it must be discussed in relation to a variety of historiographical contexts. Each of these have their own intellectual genealogies, institutional settings, and conceptual path dependencies. With this in mind, this guide surveys the following areas: territoriality, infrastructure, and borders; nature, environment, and landscape; city and home; social space and political protest; spaces of knowledge; spatial imaginaries; cartographic representations; and historical GIS research.

The history of Germany is intricately woven. Threaded in time through its struggles and triumphs with religion, industrialisation, enlightenment, politics, unification, and war. In A Brief History of Germany, Jeremy Black questions how the Germany we know today came to be, chronicling the events that shaped its past, present and future in a fascinating new way. From the fall of Rome in the 1500s to the enlightenment in the 1700s, from World War I and World War II to Germany post-unification, Black's writing will unlock the places and people that formed Germany and enrich your visit with stories of its society and culture. Concise yet explorative, A Brief History of Germany is an astonishing work from a renowned UK historian. Whether you are a long-term reader of Black's expansive history work or are interested in learning more ahead of a short city break or longer trip, this intriguing look at the history of Germany is an essential read.

This book examines the practice of toleration and the experience of religious diversity in the early modern world. Recent scholarship has shown the myriad ways in which religious differences were accommodated in the early modern era (1500–1800). This book propels this revisionist wave further by linking the accommodation of religious diversity in early modern communities to the experience of this diversity by individuals. It does so by studying the forms and patterns of interaction between members of different religious groups, including Christian denominations, Muslims, and Jews, in territories ranging from Europe to the Americas and South-East Asia. This book is structured around five key concepts: the senses, identities, boundaries, interaction, and space. For each concept, the book provides chapters based on new, original research plus an introduction that situates the chapters in their historiographic context. Early Modern Toleration: New Approaches is aimed primarily at undergraduate and postgraduate students, to whom it offers an accessible introduction to the study of religious toleration in the early modern era. Additionally, scholars will find cutting-edge contributions to the field in the book’s chapters.

Discussing Pax Germanica: The Rise and Limits of German Hegemony in European Integration examines and reconsiders Germany’s paramount role in shaping European integration from the aftermath of World War II to the present. This volume meticulously explores the ascendancy of Germany to a dominant position in European politics and economics. It critically engages with the concept of hegemony, delineating Germany’s influence on the development of the European Union and its resemblance to historical precedents in German history like the Holy Roman Empire. Methodologically, the book integrates archival research with contemporary literature to craft a narrative that is both historically grounded and relevant to current European affairs. The work stands out for its exploration of Germany’s strategic use of economic power and political diplomacy to shape the European Union according to its interests while facing inherent limitations and challenges, such as the eurozone crisis, migration policies, energy dependency, and foreign policy towards Russia. Targeting a diverse audience of both scholars and non-specialists, this book is particularly relevant for those interested in European politics, German history, and international relations.

This collection of essays seeks to analyse historically these influences, connections, and impact from multiple points of view, such as – but not limited to – the links between war and rebellion, the issues of trust and religious violence, early modern university debates on war and peace, the problems engendered by intolerance and the difficult management of tolerance, the delicate matters of politico-religious accommodation and the implementation of peace in towns and contested territories, the reappraisals and changes in the narratives of military prowess and religious fidelity, the role of women in the religious conflicts in the 'long sixteenth century', the porous boundaries (imagined or real) which existed between 'enemies' in times of war and the issues connected to the cohabitation with the 'Other' in times of peace.

Biographies of a Reformation: Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, c. 1520-1635 investigates how religious coexistence functioned in six towns in the multiconfessional region of Upper Lusatia in Western Bohemia. Lutherans and Catholics found a feasible modus vivendi through written agreements and regular negotiations. This meant that the Habsburg kings of Bohemia ruled over a Lutheran region. Lutherans and Catholics in Upper Lusatia shared spaces, objects, and rituals. Catholics adopted elements previously seen as a firm part of a Lutheran confessional culture. Lutherans, too, were willing to incorporate Catholic elements into their religiosity. Some of these overlaps were subconscious, while others were a conscious choice. This book provides a new narrative of the Reformation and shows that the concept of the 'urban Reformation', where towns are seen as centres of Lutheranism has to be reassessed, particularly in towns in former East Germany, where much work remains to be done. It shows that in a region like Upper Lusatia, which did not have a political centre and underwent a complex Reformation with many different actors, there was no clear confessionalization. By approaching the Upper Lusatian Reformation through important individuals, Martin Christ shows how they had to negotiate their religiosity, resulting in cross-confessional exchange and syncretism.

The book explores the complex, multi-directional connections of the "mobility/security nexus" in the re-ordering of states, empires, and markets in historical perspective. Contributing to a vivid academic debate, the book offers in-depth studies on how mobility and security interplay in the emergence of order beyond the modern state. While mobilities studies, migration studies and critical security studies have focused on particular aspects of this relationship, such as the construction of mobility as a political threat or the role of infrastructure and security, we still lack comprehensive conceptual frameworks to grasp the mobility/security nexus and its role in social, political, and economic orders. With authors drawn from sociology, International Relations, and various historical disciplines, this transdisciplinary volume historicizes the mobility-security nexus for the first time. In answering calls for more studies that are both empirical and have historical depth, the book presents substantial case studies on the nexus, ranging from the late Middle Ages right up to the present-day, with examples from the British Empire, the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, Papua New Guinea, Rome in the 1980s or the European Union today. By doing so, the volume conceptualizes the mobility/security nexus from a new, innovative perspective and, further, highlights it as a prominent driving force for society and state development in history. This book will be of much interest to researchers and students of critical security studies, mobility studies, sociology, history and political science.