One of the first long-term studies of the Catalonian city of Manresa during the late medieval crisis.

Family, Work, and Household presents the social and occupational life of a late medieval Iberian town in rich, unprecedented detail. The book combines a diachronic study of two regionally prominent families—one knightly and one mercantile—with a detailed cross-sectional urban study of household and occupation. The town in question is the market town and administrative centre of Manresa in Catalonia, whose exceptional archives make such a study possible. For the diachronic studies, Fynn-Paul relied upon the fact that Manresan archives preserve scores of individual family notarial registers, and the cross-sectional study was made possible by the Liber Manifesti of 1408, a cadastral survey which details the property holdings of individual householders to an unusually thorough degree. In these pages, the economic and social strategies of many individuals, including both knights and burghers, come to light over the course of several generations. The Black Death and its aftermath play a prominent role in changing the outlook of many social actors. Other chapters detail the socioeconomic topography of the town, and examine occupational hierarchies, for such groups as rentiers, merchants, leatherworkers, cloth workers, women householders, and the poor.

This book describes and assesses an emerging threat to states’ territorial control and sovereignty: the hostile control of companies that carry out privatized aspects of sovereign authority. The threat arises from the massive worldwide shift of state activities to the private sector since the late 1970s in conjunction with two other modern trends – the globalization of business and the liberalization of international capital flows. The work introduces three new concepts: firstly, the rise of companies that handle privatized activities, and the associated advent of "post-government companies" that make such activities their core business. Control of them may reside with individual investors, other companies or investment funds, or it may reside with other states through state-owned enterprises or sovereign wealth funds. Secondly, "imperfect privatizations:" when a state privatizes an activity to another state’s public sector. The book identifies cases where this is happening. It also elaborates on how ownership and influence of companies that perform privatized functions may not be transparent, and can pass to inherently hostile actors, including criminal or terrorist organizations. Thirdly, "belligerent companies," whose conduct is hostile to those of states where they are active. The book concludes by assessing the adequacy of existing legal and regulatory regimes and how relevant norms may evolve.

Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250–1900 is the first collection of studies to focus on slavery and related forms of labor throughout Asia. The 15 chapters by an international group of scholars assess the current state of Asian slavery studies, discuss new research on slave systems in Asia, identify avenues for future research, and explore new approaches to reconstructing the history of slavery and bonded labor in Asia and, by extension, elsewhere in the globe. Individual chapters examine slavery, slave trading, abolition, and bonded labor in places as diverse as Ceylon, China, India, Korea, the Mongol Empire, the Philippines, the Sulu Archipelago, and Timor in local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts. Contributors are: Richard B. Allen, Michael D. Bennett, Claude Chevaleyre, Jeff Fynn-Paul, Hans Hägerdal, Shawna Herzog, Jessica Hinchy, Kumari Jayawardena, Rachel Kurian, Bonny Ling, Christopher Lovins, Stephanie Mawson, Anthony Reid, James Francis Warren, Don J. Wyatt, Harriet T. Zurndorfer.

Drawing in lessons from 400 years of Great-Power politics, this volume challenges both the "declinist" arguments and the overstretched hypothesis of Paul Kennedy to develop an alternative approach to the debate on the rise and fall of the Great Powers. The first half of the book compares the Spanish, Dutch and the First and Second British world orders. It identifies their common features in order to find the most salient causes for their rise as world powers, and the most probable reasons for their decline. The second half of the book addresses the American world order in the 20th century, from Pax Americana to the End of US Hegemony. The author sees the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the resurgence of the US as evidence of the role played by normative dimensions, commonly underestimated in International Relations analysis. Theoretically challenging, Knutsen's volume provides a fresh approach to debates in international relations aimed at both students and scholars.

In War, Entrepreneurs, and the State, Jeff Fynn-Paul (Leiden) assembles an internationally acclaimed selection of authors to push forward the debate on the role of entrepreneurs in making war and building states in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Topics covered include logistics, supply, recruitment, and the finance of war. Chapters have been carefully commissioned with an eye towards complementarity. In an introduction co-written with Marjolein ‘t Hart and Griet Vermeesch, Fynn-Paul challenges existing discourses of military entrepreneurialism. A new benchmark is proposed: did states choose to work with entrepreneurs, or to restrict their activities and subvert the market? From the introduction and the individual chapters, a new more expansive vision of the military entrepreneur emerges. Contributors are: Carlos Álvarez-Nogal, Pepijn Brandon, William Caferro, Stephen Conway, Thomas Goossens, Aaron Graham, Rhoads Murphey, David Parrott, Helen Paul, Guy Rowlands, Kahraman Şakul, Marjolein 't Hart, Andrea Thiele, and Rafael Torres Sánchez.

The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Rural Life brings together the latest research on peasantry in medieval Europe. The aim is to place peasants – as small-scale agricultural producers – firmly at the centre of this volume, as people with agency, immense skill and resilience to shape their environments, cultures and societies. This volume examines the changes and evolutions within village societies across the medieval period, over a broad chronology and across a wide geography. Rural structures, families and hierarchies are examined alongside tool use and trade, as well as the impact of external factors such as famine and the Black Death. The contributions offer insights into multidisciplinary research, incorporating archaeological as well as landscape studies alongside traditional historical documentary approaches across widely differing local and regional contexts across medieval Europe. This book will be an essential reference for scholars and students of medieval history, as well those interested in rural, cultural and social history.

"A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula" is the second comparative history of a new subseries with a regional focus, published by the Coordinating Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association. As its predecessor for East-Central Europe, this two-volume history distances itself from traditional histories built around periods and movements, and explores, from a comparative viewpoint, a space considered to be a powerful symbol of inter-literary relations. Both the geographical pertinence and its symbolic condition are obviously discussed, when not even contested.Written by an international team of researchers who are specialists in the field, this history is the first attempt at applying a comparative approach to the plurilingual and multicultural literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. The aim of comprehensiveness is abandoned in favor of a diverse and extensive array of key issues for a comparative agenda."A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula" undermines the primacy claimed for national and linguistic boundaries, and provides a geo-cultural account of literary inter-systems which cannot otherwise be explained.

In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of black people and black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of blacks on western continents, Robinson argues, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this. To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright.

First published in 1990, Global Capitalism and National Decline is a major contribution to the study of British political and economic decline. The author concentrates on the global nature of capitalism as the context for the development of national capitalism, and on the relationship between internal and external factors. A long-term view of British politics enables him to demonstrate that competing popular explanations of Britain’s crisis and the rise of Thatcherism in response to it, are in fact interconnected. The long decline of Britain originating in the 19th century, the inherent weakness of the post-1945 settlement, and the critical events of 1970s, acquire their fullest meaning when seen as different ‘layers’ of one and the same historical process. Henk Overbeek takes the story of Britain’s decline through to Margaret Thatcher’s tenth anniversary in office. His book will be invaluable to scholars and students of economics, politics, and history. it offers a clear perspective on the problems of national decline within a global context, and on Britain’s position in Europe and in the wider world.