Shlapentokh asserts that asocial behavior in both medieval France and the contemporary West is not a marginal occurrence but rather a mainstream phenomena, and one that can often be stopped by strong force as the only antidote to social chaos.

This book explores the intricate and intimate relationship between military organization, imperial policy, and society in colonial South Asia. The chapters in the volume focus on technology, logistics, and state building. The present volume highlights the salient features of expansion and consolidation of imperial control over the subcontinent, and ultimate demise of the Raj. Further, it turns the spotlight on to subaltern challenges to imperialism as well as the role of non-combatants in warfare. The volume: • Deals with both conventional and guerrilla conflicts and focuses on the frontiers (both North-West and North-East, including Burma); • Looks at the army as an institution rather than present a chronological account of military operations, which highlights the complex and tortuous relationship between combat institution, colonial state, and Indian society; • Integrates top-down approaches in military and strategic studies with the bottom-up perspectives and discusses on how the conduct of war (organisation and technology) is related to the economic, societal, and cultural impact of war. A rich account of the British ‘Army in India’, this book will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of South Asian history, military history, political history, colonialism, and the British Empire.

This monograph utilizes three theoretical models to explain Kazakhstan’s emergence as an independent state and its changing relationships with the broader world, particularly Russia, since the beginning of the twentieth century. The book first explores the construction of Kazakh national identity and the ways in which intellectuals appealed to history to substantiate their claims about Kazakhstan’s future. Secondly, the narrative demonstrates that not all segments of totalitarian machinery work in unison. While terror reached its peak in the 1930s, cultural and ideological control was not as rigid as it would become in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Most importantly, the work is grounded in the study of the social universe. The book introduces the notion of “cosmos,” the peculiar connections between social, economic, and political forces. While not necessarily directly dependent on each other, they nevertheless created a unique interplay among the segments of societal structures and the state’s relationship with the wider universe. Taking this framework as the point of departure, this research analyzes Kazakhstan’s “multi-vectorism” as uniquely fit to contemporary global arrangements, when no global power dominates, and the lines between friend and foe are blurred. This compelling approach to Kazakhstan’s history will appeal to postgraduate students and scholars in Russian history and world history.

Winner of the Jordan Schnitzer Award in the category of Modern Jewish History. This award, the highest honor the Association for Jewish Studies bestows on scholarship, was established in 2008 by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation to honor scholars whose work embodies the best in the field: rigorous research, theoretical sophistication, innovative methodology, and excellent writing. Presented here to the public for the first time, the Pinkas of the Metz Beit Din is the official register of civil cases that came before the Metz rabbinic court in the two decades prior to the French Revolution. Brimming with details of commercial transactions, inheritance disputes, women’s roles in economic life, and the interplay between French law and Jewish law, the Metz Pinkas offers remarkable evidence of the engagement of Jews with the surrounding society and culture. The two volumes of Protocols of Justice comprise the complete text of the Metz Pinkas Beit Din, which is fully annotated by the author, and a thorough analysis of its significance for history and law at the threshold of modernity. Through his painstaking and path-breaking treatment of this incredibly nuanced and rich text, Jay Berkovitz has placed before academics and all other interested readers a heretofore untapped resource of vast importance. His insightful and extensive introductory monograph beautifully sets the stage for scholars in a wide array of fields to mine this material, which will undoubtedly yield significant new results in the history of Jewish and non-Jewish society in eighteenth-century Europe and beyond. Ephraim Kanarfogel, E. Billi Ivry University Professor of Jewish History, Literature and Law, Yeshiva University Protocols of Justice is a scholarly tour de force. Jay Berkovitz has not only brought to life a type of source that has been all but ignored in the study of Jewish life in Europe in the early modern period but offers a rich introduction that places the material in its historical context. This is a book that will stand the test of time and is a must for academic libraries. Edward Fram, Department of Jewish History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev "Author Jay Berkovitz, Professor and Chair of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has painstakingly transcribed the pinkas, which provides fascinating and new insights in the lives of the Jews of Metz. Through his work, Berkovitz has opened a manuscript long gathering dust in the YIVO archives, brought it to light, and created an invaluable resource for scholars." Ben Rothke, The Times of Israel

In Law’s Dominion, Jay Berkovitz offers a new history of early modern Jewry. Set in the city of Metz, legal sources reveal a robust community able to integrate religion and civic consciousness while navigating competing Jewish and French jurisdictions.

What does it mean to be a citizen? What impact does an active democracy have on its citizenry and why does it fail or succeed in fulfilling its promises? Most modern democracies seem unable to deliver the goods that citizens expect; many politicians seem to have given up on representing the wants and needs of those who elected them and are keener on representing themselves and their financial backers. What will it take to bring democracy back to its original promise of rule by the people? Bernd Reiter’s timely analysis reaches back to ancient Greece and the Roman Republic in search of answers. It examines the European medieval city republics, revolutionary France, and contemporary Brazil, Portugal, and Colombia. Through an innovative exploration of country cases, this study demonstrates that those who stand to lose something from true democracy tend to oppose it, making the genealogy of citizenship concurrent with that of exclusion. More often than not, exclusion leads to racialization, stigmatizing the excluded to justify their non-membership. Each case allows for different insights into the process of how citizenship is upheld and challenged. Together, the cases reveal how exclusive rights are constituted by contrasting members to non-members who in that very process become racialized others. The book provides an opportunity to understand the dynamics that weaken democracy so that they can be successfully addressed and overcome in the future.

Throughout the nineteenth century, shady characters appear in French writings from one end of the literary spectrum to another. While Paris gleams through the night, the City of Lights has a darker underside with its own infrastructure, its own rules and traditions – and its own literature. In the shadows of the capital, thieves, murderers, addicts, shoplifters, seducers, and smugglers carry out their nefarious acts, pursued by detectives (both police and private) who seek to apprehend and analyze them. These novels pave the way for a new genre, the detective novel or roman polar, which gains ever-increasing popularity as the nineteenth century moves toward its close and the twentieth dawns with developments in literature and other genres. These stories are experimental by nature, and lend themselves to further innovations, both apertures (to borrow Barthes’s term) and departures. In addition, the detective stories of the nineteenth century contribute to the creation of a new art in the twentieth century: they are part and parcel of the work of film, especially film noir. This volume considers literature of the criminal underworld and its encounters with society, in the city and the popular imagination. The twelve essays compiled here examine the intersections between law and literature in the nineteenth century, from the newly adjusted property laws after the Revolution of 1789 through the scientific discourse around kleptomania in the fin-de-siècle. The authors question how texts, both canonical and “paraliterary,” are inscribed into the social, political, economic and artistic dialogues of the period. Other questions come up in these textual examinations: how are real-life criminals and the spaces they inhabit translated into literary ones? How do crimes in novels reflect or produce social tensions and preoccupations around issues of gender, education, class, and ideology? And, perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to be the “author of a crime”?

What can the great crises of the past teach us about contemporary revolutions? Jack Goldstone shows the important role of population changes, youth bulges, urbanization, elite divisions, and fiscal crises in creating major political crises. Goldstone shows how state breakdowns in both western monarchies and Asian empires followed the same patterns, triggered when inflexible political, economic, and social institutions were overwhelmed by cumulative changes in population structure that collided with popular aspirations and state-elite relations. Examining the great revolutions of Europe—the English and French Revolutions—and the great rebellions of Asia, which shattered dynasties in Ottoman Turkey, China, and Japan, he shows how long cycles of revolutionary crises and stability similarly shaped politics in Europe and Asia, but led to different outcomes. In this 25th anniversary edition, Goldstone reflects on the history of revolutions in the last twenty-five years, from the Philippines and other color revolutions to the Arab Uprisings and the rise of the Islamic State. In a new introduction, he re-examines his pioneering look at the role of population changes—such as rising youth cohorts, urbanization, shifting elite mobility––as continuing causal factors of revolutions and rebellions. The new concluding chapter updates his major theory and looks to the future of revolutions in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

Examining the societies of the hundreds of small states that made up most of Europe before the 19th century, this text takes as its focus the Duchy of Lorraine.

This expanded, updated edition of Revolutions offers a new chapter on terrorism and on social movements, including jihadism. Revolutions and state breakdowns are the primary focus as Sanderson presents prominent theories and describes the process of revolutions. The book covers famous revolutions from history (France, Russia, China) and several social and political revolutions in the Third World (Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and the Philippines). Given the frequency of revolutionary movements, a key question addressed by the book is 'Why are actual revolutions so rare?' Sanderson also assesses the state breakdowns in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union after 1989, the typical outcomes of revolutions, and the future of revolutions. An appendix presents biographical and autobiographical sketches of several of the most prominent scholars of revolutions.