Neutrality in World History provides a cogent synthesis of five hundred years of neutrality in global history. Author Leos Müller argues that neutrality and neutral states, such as Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium have played an important historical role in implementing the free trade paradigm, shaping the laws of nations and humanitarianism, and serving as key global centers of trade and finance. Offering an intriguing alternative to dominant world history narratives, which hinge primarily on the international relations and policies of empires and global powers, Neutrality in World History provides students with a distinctive introduction to neutrality’s place in world history.

Neutrality serves different purposes during times of war and peace. ‘Notions of Neutralities’ portrays those historical challenges that neutrals faced, and are still facing, to maintain some form of economic stability and political order as chaos and wars rage. Neutrals are exposed to existential issues and questions of civil-society, international politics, and morality, in a world defiant to principles of universal peace. Every age has its own armed conflicts and while the questions they raise are often the same, the answers are different because the international word order changes. Is neutrality justifiable even when the humanity of civilization is at risk as in the Second World War or the wars of the post-Cold War era? Can those who refuse the call to arms still act by providing humanitarian services to contain the impact of war or, on the contrary, are neutrals shut-off from global politics – mere weaklings that “suffer what they must?" This book addresses such questions through an interdisciplinary scholarship by some of the world’s foremost experts on neutrality. Twelve chapters tackle different but profound aspects of the concept over a span of five hundred years. They succinctly show the evolution of international norms in the context of war and peace. What is more, the essays portray fundamental categories of thinking about a variety of neutralities that the international system has produced in the past and present. The authors discuss the complexities of neutrality, providing a new and refreshing understanding of international relations and security for the past as well as for the multipolar world of the twenty-first century.

The Soviet Union and Cold War Neutrality and Nonalignment in Europe examines how the neutral European countries and the Soviet Union interacted after World War II. Amid the Cold War division of Europe into Western and Eastern blocs, several long-time neutral countries abandoned neutrality and joined NATO. Other countries remained neutral but were still perceived as a threat to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Based on extensive archival research, this volume offers state-of-the-art essays about relations between Europe’s neutral states and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and how these relations were perceived by other powers.

This volume brings together a leading group of scholars to offer a new perspective on the history of conflicts and trade, focusing on the role of small and medium, or "weak", and often neutral states. Existing historiography has often downplayed the importance of such states in world trade, during armed conflicts, and as important agents in the expanding trade and global connections of the last 250 years. The country studies demonstrate that these states played a much bigger role in world and bilateral trade than has previously been assumed, and that this role was augmented by the emergence of truly global conflicts and total war. In addition to careful country or comparative studies, this book provides new data on trade and shipping during wars and examines the impact of this trade on the individual states’ economies. It spans the period from the late 18th century to the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War of the 20th century, a crucial period of change in the concept and practice of neutrality and trade, as well as periods of transition in the nature and technology of warfare. This book will be of great interest to scholars of economic history, comparative history, international relations, and political science.

This collection examines the theory, practice, and application of state neutrality in international relations. With a focus on its modern-day applications, the studies in this volume analyze the global implications of permanent neutrality for Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States. Exploring permanent neutrality’s role as a realist security model capable of rivaling collective security, the authors argue that permanent neutrality has the potential to decrease major security dilemmas on the global stage.

The important scholarly achievements of Polish historians remain largely unknown outside Poland. In Nation and History, editors Peter Brock, John Stanley, and Piotr J. Wróbel have brought together twenty-four essays on Polish historians from the Enlightenment to the Second World War, an era of unparalleled changes in every aspect of Polish life. From the late eighteenth century until 1918, the Polish state was partitioned between its three neighbours: Russia, Prussia (Germany), and Austria. Polish historiography throughout this period tended to focus on the reasons behind the old Polish state's decline and fall. This shaped Polish historians' vision of their country's past and created the burden of not only having to discuss the state, but the issue of 'nation' - its essence, its shape, and its failure. The contributors to this volume - from Poland and abroad - closely examine the role played by historians in both the documenting and shaping of Poland's history. While featuring different approaches, Nation and History serves as the most comprehensive work on Polish historiography written in English.

Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, University of Edinburgh, UK, and Trent University, Canada, teaches and writes about interdisciplinary cultural history and theory. --Book Jacket.

Europe's Restorations were characterised by their evolving dialectics. The chapters in this first volume address the key questions and controversies of Napoleonic history from a national and international perspective. From the re-ordering of the European world through the tools of intervention, occupation and diplomacy, to the creation of new constitutional monarchies across France, Scandinavia and Germany the volume outlines the processes that realigned national priorities and the accompanying dynamics of social and political identity. In a structure that makes sense of what Luigi Mascilli Migliorini describes as the 'fiendishly complex' process of reconstructing order in post-Napoleonic Europe, this collection of essays brings together experts in the field to set a new precedent for transnational research frameworks in the study of the European Restorations.

The construction of history as a social common denominator is a powerful achievement of the nineteenth-century novel, a form dedicated to experimenting with democratic social practice as it conflicts with economic and feudal visions of social order. Through revisionary readings of familiar nineteenth-century texts The English Novel in History 1840-1895 takes a multidisciplinary approach to literary history. It highlights how narrative shifts from one construction of time to another and reformulates fundamental ideas of identity, nature and society. Elizabeth Ermarth discusses the range of novels alongside other cultural material, including painting, science, religious, political and economic theory. She explores the problems of how a society, as defined in democratic terms, can accommodate political, gender and class differences without resorting to hierarchy; and how narrowly conceived economic agendas compete with social cohesion. Students, advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and specialists will find this text invaluable.