Why did a nation-state order emerge when nationalist activism was usually an elitist pursuit in the age of empire? Ordinary inhabitants and even most indigenous elites tended to possess religious, ethnic, or status-based identities rather than national identities. Why then did the desires of a typically small number result in wave after wave of new states? The answer has customarily centered on the actions of "nationalists" against weakening empires during a time of proliferating beliefs that "peoples" should control their own destiny. This book upends conventional wisdom by demonstrating that nationalism often existed more in the perceptions of external observers than of local activists and insurgents. Lynn M. Tesser adds nuance to scholarship that assumes most, if not all, pre-independence unrest was nationalist and separatist, and sheds light on why the various demands for change eventually coalesced around independence in some cases but not others.

A capacious history of decolonization, from the decline of empires to the era of globalization Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration. The End of Empires and a World Remade shows how profoundly decolonization shaped the process of globalization in the wake of empire collapse. In the second half of the twentieth century, decolonization catalyzed new international coalitions; it triggered partitions and wars; and it reshaped North-South dynamics. Globalization promised the decolonized greater access to essential resources, to wider networks of influence, and to worldwide audiences, but its neoliberal variant has reinforced economic inequalities and imperial forms of political and cultural influences. In surveying these two codependent histories across the world, from Latin America to Asia, Thomas explains why the deck was so heavily stacked against newly independent nations. Decolonization stands alongside the great world wars as the most transformative event of twentieth-century history. In The End of Empires and a World Remade, Thomas offers a masterful analysis of the greatest process of state-making (and empire-unmaking) in modern history.

In recent years, the historiography of nineteenth-century Spain and Latin America has been invigorated by interdisciplinary engagement with scholars working on topics such as empire, slavery, abolition, race, identity, and captivity. No scholar better exemplified these developments than Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, a specialist on Spain and its Caribbean colonies in Cuba and Puerto Rico. A brilliant career was cut short in 2015 when he died at the age of 48. Rethinking Atlantic Empire takes Schmidt-Nowara’s work as a point of departure, charting scholarly paths that move past reductive national narratives and embrace transnational approaches to the entangled empires of the Atlantic world.

From the late eighteenth century, the planter class of the British Caribbean were faced with challenges stemming from revolutions, war, the rise of abolitionism and social change. By the nineteenth century, this once powerful group within the British Empire found itself struggling to influence an increasingly hostile government in London. By 1807, parliament had voted to abolish the slave trade: an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. This book brings together chapters by a group of leading scholars to rethink the question of the ‘fall of the planter class’, offering a variety of new approaches to the topic, encompassing economic, political, cultural, and social history and providing a significant new contribution to our rapidly evolving understanding of the end of slavery in the British Atlantic empire. This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

Focusing on the long history of contact between indigenous peoples and the white colonial communities who settled in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, this book investigates how histories of colonial settlement have been mythologized, narrated and embodied in public culture in the twentieth century through monuments, exhibitions and images.

Despite increasingly frantic calls - especially after the London bombings of July 7, 2005 - for western leaders to 'understand Islam better', there is a still a critical distinction that needs to be made between 'Islam' as religion and 'Islamism' in the sense of militant mindset. As the author of this provocative new book sees it, it is not a more nuanced understanding of Islam that will help the western powers defeat the jihadi threat, but rather a proper understanding of Islamism: a political ideology which is quite distinct from religion. While Islamism may be draped in religious imagery and suffused by apocalyptic language, it nevertheless is similar in nature to secular ideologies of terror. And once, the author holds, this is properly appreciated, the ways to defeat it will become much better evident. Historically sophisticated and passionately argued, "Rethinking Islamism" makes a powerful case by a master theorist of political philosophy. It will be essential reading for students and policy-makers in the fields of politics, current affairs and religion.

Providing a much-needed antidote to recent revisionist attempts to 'rehabilitate' apartheid, this major new text by a leading authority offers a considered and substantive reassessment of the nature, endurance and significance of apartheid in South Africa as well as the reasons for its dramatic collapse. Paying particular attention to the international dimension as well as the domestic, the author assesses the impact of anti-apartheid protest, of changing attitudes of Western governments to the apartheid regime and the evolution of South African government policies to the outside world.

This edited collection offers a timely and original perspective on the many upheavals and revolutions that broke out across the world during the earlytwentieth century. With previous research tending to confine revolutions within national borders, this book sets out to place them within a broader global sphere of thought and action. The authors explore the time phase between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Asturian Revolution of 1934, including cases from South Africa, Australia, China, the Middle East and Latin America. Providing insights from leading scholars in the field, this collection highlights the interconnectedness and transnationalism of upheavals and revolutions, offering a new approach which integrates political, social and cultural history. Chapter 8 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via Link.springer.com

The English revolution is one of the most intensely-debated events in history; parallel events in Scotland have never attracted the same degree of interest. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution argues for a new interpretation of the seventeenth-century Scottish revolution that goes beyond questions about its radicalism, and reconsiders its place within an overarching 'British' narrative. In this volume, Laura Stewart analyses how interactions between print and manuscript polemic, crowds, and political performances enabled protestors against a Prayer Book to destroy Charles I's Scottish government. Particular attention is given to the way in which debate in Scotland was affected by the emergence of London as a major publishing centre. The subscription of the 1638 National Covenant occurred within this context and further politicized subordinate social groups that included women. Unlike in England, however, public debate was contained. A remodelled constitution revivified the institutions of civil and ecclesiastical governance, enabling Covenanted Scotland to pursue interventionist policies in Ireland and England - albeit at terrible cost to the Scottish people. War transformed the nature of state power in Scotland, but this achievement was contentious and fragile. A key weakness lay in the separation of ecclesiastical and civil authority, which justified for some a strictly conditional understanding of obedience to temporal authority. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution explores challenges to legitimacy of the Covenanted constitution, but qualifies the idea that Scotland was set on a course to destruction as a result. Covenanted government was overthrown by the new model army in 1651, but its ideals persisted. In Scotland as well as England, the language of liberty, true religion, and the public interest had justified resistance to Charles I. The Scottish revolution embedded a distinctive and durable political culture that ultimately proved resistant to assimilation into the nascent British state.