Harvard Historical Studies

First published in 1951, Genesis and Geology describes the background of social and theological ideas and the progress of scientific researches which, between them, produced the religious difficulties that afflicted the development of science in early industrial England.

The newly established Weimar Republic, defenseless against the Communists, hired groups of volunteer soldiers (the Free Corps) to fight for it. When it, in fear, tried to disband them, these volunteers went underground until they reappeared in the brown shirts of the Nazis. The savage spirit, brutal acts, and perverted ideology of the men whom Hermann Goering called “the first soldiers of the Third Reich” stand out in glaring relief in this record.

No political parties of present-day Germany are separated by a wider gulf than the two parties of labor, one democratic and reformist, the other totalitarian and socialist-revolutionary. Social Democrats and Communists today face each other as bitter political enemies across the front lines of the cold war; yet they share a common origin in the Social Democratic Party of Imperial Germany. How did they come to go separate ways? To answer this question is the purpose of Carl Schorske’s study.

Sedgwick presents an intensive examination of the political problems confronting French Royalists, Catholics, and conservative Republicans in their attempt to form a conservative party, within the framework of the Republic, in the decade dominated by the Panama Scandal and the Dreyfus Affair.

On the basis of extensive manuscript study, Goffart disentangles the order of composition and authoritatively pronounces on the authenticity of the eighty-four Le Mans charters. Most of all, he insists that the forgeries are an essay on church property and its law.

In this first monograph on the White Terror since Ernest Daudet wrote on the subject in 1878, Daniel Resnick presents the only documented account of the magnitude of the political reaction of 1815–16 in France. By means of a statistical record of police arrests and judicial convictions, he demonstrates the nature, extent, and impact on French political history of the widespread repression that grew out of the royalist crusade to extirpate any trace of Napoleonic influences. The calculated policy of intimidation pursued by the royalists, the author argues, engendered the political reflexes that were to prove fatal to the House of Bourbon.

This study of the policy-making process in China during the Sino–French controversy of 1880–1885 adds a new dimension to our understanding of China’s response to the West in the nineteenth century. The implicit threat presented by French efforts to extend her control into northern Vietnam was the catalyst in Chinese policy decisions, and Eastman traces the dramatic process by which the problem was eventually resolved.

This is the first scholarly study in depth of the crucial prewar phase of the French army’s development into a disruptive force in national life. A chapter from the portentous twentieth-century story of the soldier in politics, it has relevance now to situations already formed or forming in other western societies. The value of the book is greatly enhanced by an encyclopedic bibliography of writing on French political history in this century.

Presenting a new interpretation of humanist historiography, Donald J. Wilcox traces the development of the art of historical writing among Florentine humanists in the fifteenth century. He focuses on the three chancellor historians of that century who wrote histories of Florence—Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Bartolommeo della Scala.

John W. Padberg, S.J., has written the first full-length study of these colleges, from their revival in 1815 to their suppression in 1880. Drawing almost exclusively on archival material not previously utilized, Father Padberg places his study against the background of anti-clericalism, revolution, the Second Empire, and the first decade of the Third Republic.

In 1624 James I invited Parliament to discuss issues of war and peace, setting a precedent which would make yet another inroad into the prerogatives of the crown. The “Happy Parliament” turned against the peace-loving King and supported war with Spain. Robert Ruigh presents an absorbing narrative of the proceedings between Parliament and the crown and their far-reaching consequences.

This work on the colloquy presents the dialectical complexities of the sixteenth-century theology—a theology that had emerged with binding strands of religious idealism and political interest. Theology was, indeed, the medium of discourse, but it was not an end in itself. Rather, it was a means to a higher goal: religious reconciliation.

This book examines the institutional structure of Restoration elections as well as the play of political factors in the final years of the Bourbon monarchy. It tells why the French king Charles X and his prime minister Joseph de Villele decided to call the general election of 1827, and the reasons for the dramatic defeat they suffered; the means employed to elect a chamber of deputies that would sustain the reactionary leanings of the king; and the range of efforts by both left and extreme right oppositions to win the election.

This is the first book to explore how pessimism could be the psychological basis for the Victorians’ progressive conception of history. Throughout, von Arx skillfully interweaves threads of religion, politics, and history, showing how ideas in one sphere cannot be understood without reference to the others.

Helena Wall shows what life was like in colonial America, a culture where individuals and family were subordinated to the demands of the community. Using local town, church, and especially court records from every colony, she examines the division of authority between family and community throughout colonial America.

Ladd describes the struggle of German leaders to bring order to their rapidly growing cities during the age of industrial expansion before World War I, setting the emerging theory and practice of city planning in the context of debates about the nature of the modern city and the possibility of improving society by regulating physical environments.

This first detailed study of the bishops of Florence tells the story of a dynamic Italian lordship during the most prosperous period of the Middle Ages. Drawing upon a rich base of primary sources, Dameron demonstrates that the nature of the Florentine episcopal lordship results from the tension between seigneurial pressure and peasant resistance.

The rich and complex texture of working-class neighborhoods in eighteenth-century Paris comes vibrantly alive in this collage of the experiences of ordinary people—men and women, rich and poor, masters and servants, neighbors and colleagues. Exploring three arenas of conflict and solidarity—the home, the workplace, and the street—Arlette Farge offers the reader an intimate social history, bringing long-dead citizens and vanished social groups back to life with sensitivity and perception.

How did propertied families in late medieval and early modern Florence maintain their power and affluence while clans elsewhere were fatally undermined by the growth of commerce and personal freedom and the consequences of the Plague? Molho suggests that the answer is found in the twin institutions of arranged marriage and the dowry.

The labor wars in Cordoba have been mythologized as a Latin American equivalent to the French student strikes of May-June 1968 and the Italian "hot summer" of the same period. Brennan demonstrates that the pronounced militancy and even political radicalism of the Cordoban working class were due not only to Argentina’s changing political culture but also to the dynamic relationship between the factory and society during those years.

This unusual biographical work traces the life and career of Ademar of Chabannes, a monk, historian, liturgist, and hagiographer who lived at the turn of the first Christian millennium. Thanks to a unique collection of over 1,000 folios of autograph manuscript that Ademar left behind, Richard Landes has been able to reconstruct in great detail the development of Ademar’s career and the events of his day.

In Calvin’s Geneva, the changes associated with the Reformation were particularly abrupt and far-reaching, in large part owing to John Calvin himself. This book makes two major contributions to our understanding of this time: the first is to the history of divorce itself; the second is in illustrating the operations of the Consistory of Geneva.

This intensively researched volume covers a previously neglected aspect of American history: the foreign policy perspective of the peace progressives, a bloc of dissenters in the U.S. Senate, between 1913 and 1935.

In the last half of the 15th century, the classic Platonic debate over the merits of rhetoric and philosophy was replayed in the debate between humanists and scholastics over philology and dialectic. The dispute between representatives of the two camps fueled many of the most important intellectual developments of the Renaissance and Reformation.

Edward Dickinson traces the story of German child welfare policy over an extended period of conflict and compromise among competing groups-progressive social reformers, conservative Protestants, Catholics, Social Democrats, feminists, medical men, jurists, and welfare recipients themselves.

Despite their importance during the French Revolution, the Paris middle classes are little known. This book focuses on the family organization and the political role of the Paris commercial middle classes, using as a case study the Faubourg St. Marcel and particularly the parish of St. Médard.

Choquette narrates the peopling of French Canada across the 17th and 18th centuries, the lesser known colonial phase of French migration. Drawing on French and Canadian archives, she carefully traces the precise origins of individual immigrants, describing them by gender, class, occupation, region, religion, age, and date of departure.

This unique account of the life of Charles Follen—German nationalist and revolutionary, Harvard professor, Unitarian minister, and abolitionist—opens a window on several worlds during the first half of the nineteenth century.

This book is an inquiry into the possibilities of politics in exile. The Mensheviks, driven out of Soviet Russia, functioned abroad in the West for a generation. For several years they also continued to operate underground in Soviet Russia, and succeeded in impressing their views on social democratic parties and Western thinking about the U.S.S.R.

Rejecting the common assumption that domestic legislation during the Civil War was a series of piecemeal reactions to wartime necessities, Heather Cox Richardson argues that Republican party members systematically engineered pathbreaking laws to promote their distinctive theory of political economy.

An influential lobbyist as well as a paragon of the doctrine of female benevolence, Dorothea Dix vividly illustrated the complexities of the “separate spheres” of politics and femininity. An activist who disdained the women’s rights and antislavery movements, Dix, an old-line Whig, sought to promote national harmony and became the only New England social reformer to work successfully in the lower South right up to the eve of secession.

The Arnauld family rose to prominence at the end of the sixteenth century by attaching themselves to King Louis XIV with absolute loyalty and obedience. The religious conversion of Angélique Arnauld, however, early in the seventeenth century, dramatically changed this family’s fortunes. Alexander Sedgwick’s engaging history chronicles the Arnauld family’s reaction to momentous political and religious developments and offers a unique perspective on a tumultuous period in French history.

Few studies have explored the cultural process whereby religious symbolism created social cohesion and political allegiance. This book examines religious conflict in the parish communities of early modern England using an interdisciplinary approach that includes the perspectives of class, gender, and demography.

Daniel Roche, the foremost historian of eighteenth-century France, brings the Old Regime to life by showing how its institutions operated and how they were understood by the people who worked within them. Roche depicts the eighteenth-century French “culture of appearances”—the food and clothing, living quarters, and reading material of the peasant, the merchant, the noble, the King, from Paris to the provinces.

The American Civil War and the Paris Commune of 1871, Philip Katz argues, were part of the broader sweep of transatlantic development in the mid-nineteenth century—an age of democratic civil wars. Katz shows how American political culture in the period that followed the Paris Commune was shaped by that event. The telegraph, the new Atlantic cable, and the news-gathering experience gained in the Civil War transformed the Paris Commune into an American national event.

Gruening is perhaps best known for his vehement fight against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. However, as Johnson shows here, it’s Gruening’s sixty-year public career in its entirety that provides an opportunity for historians to explore continuity and change in dissenting thought in twentieth-century America.

England’s 17th-century colonial empire in North America and the Caribbean was created by migration, as captured in the London port register of 1635, the largest extant port register for any single year in the colonial period. Games analyzes the 7,500 people who traveled from London in that year.

Thousands were executed for incompatible religious views in 16th-century Europe. The meaning and significance of those deaths are studied here comparatively, providing an argument for the importance of martyrdom as a window onto religious sensibilities and a crucial component in the formation of divergent Christian traditions and identities.

As Spang explains, during the 1760s and 1770s, sensitive, self-described sufferers made public show of their delicacy by going to the new establishments known as “restaurateurs’ rooms” to sip bouillons. But these locations soon became sites for extending frugal, politically correct hospitality and later became symbols of aristocratic greed.

This reinterpretation of the history of modern Spain from the Enlightenment to the threshold of the twenty-first century explains the surprising changes that took Spain from a backward and impoverished nation, with decades of stagnation, civil disorder, and military rule, to one of the ten most developed economies in the world.

In his study of Brandenburg, Germany, Vogt directly challenges both the “antifascist” paradigm employed by East German historians and the “sovietization” interpretive model that has dominated western studies. He argues that Soviet denazification was neither an effective purge of society nor part of a methodical “sovietization” of the eastern zone.

This book completes the grim picture of slavery by showing us the origins, nature, and extent of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late 17th century through the end of the Civil War. Here we see how the patrols, formed by county courts and state militias, were the closest enforcers of codes governing slaves throughout the South.

This political history shows how the turmoil and transformation of nursing during the French Third Republic reflected the political and cultural tensions at work in the nation, including critical conflicts over the role of the Church in society, the professionalization of medicine, and the emancipation of women.

This book reasserts the importance of the French Revolution to an understanding of the nature of modern European politics and social life. James Livesey argues that the European model of democracy was created in the Revolution, a model with very specific commitments that differentiate it from Anglo-American liberal democracy.

For much of the Middle Ages, the Lara family was among the most powerful aristocratic lineages in Spain. This book, the first modern study of the Laras, explores the causes of change in the dynamics of power, and narrates the dramatic story of the events that overtook the family.

The Battle for Children links two major areas of historical inquiry: crime and delinquency with war and social change. In a study based on impressive archival research, Fishman reveals the impact of the Vichy regime on one of history’s most silent groups—children—and offers enlightening new information about the Vichy administration.

In a unique blend of political, intellectual, and cultural history, Brian Vick explores the world of German nationalism during the first half of the nineteenth century. This study reveals how German nationalists at Frankfurt interwove cultural and political strands of the national ideal so finely as to sanction equal citizenship status in the proposed state for both the German-Jewish minority and the non-German-speaking nationalities within its boundaries.

Through case studies in crisis diplomacy—the War of 1812, the Trent affair during the U.S. Civil War, and the famous 1917 Zimmermann telegram—Nickles examines the critical impact of the telegraph on the diplomacy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In a book addressing those interested in the transformation of monarchy into the modern state and in intersections of gender and political power, Crawford examines the roles of female regents in early modern France.

Weddings in 15th-century Italian courts were grand, sumptuous affairs, often requiring guests to listen to lengthy orations given in Latin. D’Elia shows how Italian humanists used these orations to support claims of legitimacy and assertions of superiority among families jockeying for power, as well as to advocate for marriage and sexual pleasure.

An investigation into the politics of consumerism in East Germany during the years between the Berlin Blockade of 1948–49 and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Dictatorship and Demand shows how the issue of consumption constituted a crucial battleground in the larger Cold War struggle.

Brown offers a new appraisal of the Reformation and its popular appeal, based on the place of German hymns in the 16th-century press and in the lives of early Lutherans. The Bohemian mining town of Joachimsthal—where pastors, musicians, and laity forged an enduring, influential union of Lutheranism, music, and culture—is at the center of the story.

How and why did the promise of oil fail Galicia and the Austrian Empire, which at the beginning of the twentieth century ranked third among the world’s oil-producing states? Alison Frank traces the interaction of technology, nationalist rhetoric, social tensions, provincial politics, and entrepreneurial vision in shaping the Galician oil industry.

In twentieth-century Britain the literary landscape underwent a fundamental change. Aspiring authors—traditionally drawn from privileged social backgrounds—now included factory workers writing amid chaotic home lives and married women joining writers’ clubs in search of creative outlets. In this brilliantly conceived book, Christopher Hilliard reveals the extraordinary history of “ordinary” voices. In capturing the creative lives of ordinary people—would-be fiction-writers and poets who until now have left scarcely a mark on written history—Hilliard sensitively reconstructs the literary culture of a democratic age.

In a bold reinterpretation of a crucial development in modern European intellectual history, Matthew W. Maguire uncovers a history of French thought that casts the imagination as a dominant faculty in our experience of the world. Original and thought-provoking, The Conversion of Imagination will interest a range of readers across intellectual history, political theory, literary and cultural studies, and the history of religious thought.

Keys offers the first major study of the political and cultural ramifications of international sports competitions in the 1930s. Focusing on the U.S., Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, she examines the transformation of events like the Olympics and the World Cup from small-scale events to the expensive, political, global extravaganzas of today.

Challenging standard interpretations of American dominance and French weakness in postwar Western Europe, Michael Creswell argues that France played a key role in shaping the cold war order. Creswell sketches the successful French challenge to the United States that ultimately resulted in security arrangements preferred by the French but acceptable to the Americans. Impressively researched and vigorously argued, A Question of Balance significantly advances our understanding of power politics and the rise of the cold war system in Western Europe.

Arguing that the French have cherished and demonized Jacobinism at the same time—their hearts following Robespierre, but their heads turning toward Benjamin Constant—Rosanvallon traces the long history of resistance to Jacobinism, including the creation of associations and unions and the implementation of elements of decentralization.

In this well-researched work, Davidson provides a reevaluation of prevailing views on the effects of the French Revolution, and particularly on the role of women. Arguing against the idea that women were forced from the public realm of political discussion, Davidson demonstrates how women remained highly visible and active. On a broader level, France after Revolution sheds light on how a changing society progressed in a time of unprecedented sociopolitical experimentation.

Investigating the role of religious tradition in the legitimation of power and the establishment of identity, Samantha Kahn Herrick illuminates the often murky early history of the duchy of Normandy. Innovative in its historical use of hagiographical literature, this work advances our understanding of early Normandy and the Vikings’ transformation from pagan raiders to Christian princes, shedding light on the intersection of religious tradition, identity, and power.

The ending of absolute monarchy and the start of political combat between nobles and commoners make 1787–1788 the first stage of the French Revolution. In a detailed look at this critical transition, Gruder explores how the French people became engaged in an opposition movement that culminated in demands for the public’s role in government.

Drawing on political oratory, diplomatic correspondence, crusade propaganda, and historical treatises, Meserve shows how research into the origins of Islamic empires sprang from—and contributed to—contemporary debates over the threat of Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean. This groundbreaking book offers new insights into Renaissance humanist scholarship and long-standing European debates over the relationship between Christianity and Islam.

In the late 1770s, as a wave of revolution and republican unrest swept across Europe, scholars looked with urgency on the progress of European civilization. Carhart examines their approaches to understanding human development by investigating the invention of a new analytic category, “culture.”

Anderson uses one man’s compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with Native religion in colonial North America. Pastedechouan’s story illuminates struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the 17th-century Atlantic, even as it has relevance to the contemporary encounter between Native and non-Native peoples.

In 1918, Woodrow Wilson’s image as leader of the free world and the image of America as dispenser of democracy spread throughout Italy, filling an ideological void. American popularity, though, did not ensure mutual understanding. Rossini sets the Italian-American political confrontation within the full context of the two countries’ cultural perceptions of each other, different war experiences, and ideas about participatory democracy and peace.

In an illuminating study that blends diplomatic, military, technology, and business history, Winkler shows how U.S. officials during World War I discovered the enormous value of global communications. Winkler sheds light on the early stages of the global infrastructure that helped launch the U.S. as the predominant power of the century.

Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville published his observations in Democracy in America, Americans have recognized the distinctiveness of their voluntary tradition. In a work of political, legal, social, and intellectual history, Neem traces the origins of this venerable tradition to the vexed beginnings of American democracy in Massachusetts.

On July 10, 1940, by a 570 to 80 margin, the representatives in the French parliament voted full powers to Philippe Pétain, ending the Third Republic and paving the way for the Vichy regime. Recreating the tense atmosphere of summer 1940, Olivier Wieviorka shows how pressures brought on by defeat could affect even the most hardened republicans.

The Conservative Turn tells the story of postwar America’s political evolution through two fascinating figures: Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers, who went on to intellectual prominence, sharing the questions, crises, and challenges of their generation. Kimmage argues that the divergent careers of these two men exemplify important developments in postwar American politics: the emergence of modern conservatism and the rise of moderate liberalism.

In a brilliant comparative study of law and imperialism, Lisa Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers in North America and Australia defined indigenous theft and violence as crime. Ford traces the emergence of modern settler sovereignty in everyday contests between settlers and indigenous people in early national Georgia and the colony of New South Wales. In both places, settler sovereignty emerged when, at the same time in history, settlers rejected legal pluralism and moved to control or remove indigenous peoples.

Linking the study of business and politics, Haynes reconstructs the passionate and protracted debate over the development of the book trade in nineteenth-century France. In tracing the contest over literary production in France, Haynes emphasizes the role of the Second Empire in enacting—but also in limiting—press freedom and literary property.

Combining the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, Atlantic history, and the history of the French Revolution, Paul Cheney explores the political economy of globalization in eighteenth-century France.

The first comprehensive history of German youth in WWI, this book investigates the dawn of the great era of mobilizing teenagers and schoolchildren for experiments in state-building and extreme political movements like fascism and communism.

Tracing commercial imagery across different products and media, David Ciarlo shows how and why the “African native” had emerged by 1900 to become a familiar figure in the German landscape, selling everything from soap to shirts to coffee. The racialization of black figures found ever greater purchase in German advertising up to and after 1905, when Germany waged war against the Herero in Southwest Africa. The new reach of advertising not only expanded the domestic audience for German colonialism, but transformed colonialism’s political and cultural meaning as well.

Because of its location, volume, speed, and propensity for severe flooding, the Rhône, France’s most powerful river, has long influenced the economy, politics, and transportation networks of Europe. The Rhône valley has undergone especially dramatic changes since World War II. Sara B. Pritchard traces the Rhône’s remaking since 1945, interweaving an analysis of how state officials, technical elites, and citizens connected the environment and technology to political identities and state-building.

In 1990, months before crowds in Moscow and other major cities dismantled their monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. William Jay Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire inadvertently shaped this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union.

The French Revolution invented the notion of the citizen, but it also invented the noncitizen—the person whose rights were nonexistent. The South American outpost of Guiana became a depository for these outcasts of the new French citizenry, and an experimental space for the exercise of new kinds of power and violence against marginal groups.

Though blacks were not often seen on the streets of seventeenth-century London, they were already capturing the British imagination. In her exploration of this emerging black presence, Molineux assembles evidence ranging from shop signs, tea trays, trading cards, board games, and playing cards to song ballads and William Hogarth’s graphic satires.

Meredith Martin tells a story that has been largely forgotten today: that of the pleasure dairy of early modern France. These garden structures—most famously the faux-rustic, white marble dairy built for Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau at Versailles—have long been dismissed as the trifling follies of a reckless elite. Martin challenges such assumptions and reveals the pivotal role that pleasure dairies played in cultural and political life, especially with respect to polarizing debates about nobility, femininity, and domesticity.

An overriding assumption has directed scholarship in both European and Slavic history: that Kievan Rus’ was part of a Byzantine commonwealth separate from Europe. Raffensperger refutes this, and offers a new frame for two hundred years of history, in which Rus’ is understood as part of medieval Europe, and East is not so neatly divided from West.

Historians have long believed that Catholics were late and ambivalent supporters of the German nation. Rebecca Ayako Bennette’s bold new interpretation demonstrates definitively that from the beginning in 1871, when Wilhelm I was proclaimed Kaiser of a unified Germany, Catholics were actively promoting a German national identity for the new Reich.

Paper Memory tells of one man’s mission to preserve for posterity the memory of everyday life in sixteenth-century Germany. Lundin takes us inside the mind of an undistinguished German burgher, Hermann Weinsberg, whose early-modern writings sought to make sense of changes that were unsettling the foundations of his world.

The Puritans were not as busy policing their neighbors’ behavior as Nathaniel Hawthorne or many early American historians would have us believe. Keeping their own households in line occupied too much of their time. Under Household Government reveals that family members took on the role of watchdogs in matters of sexual indiscretion.

Though James II is often depicted as a Catholic despot who imposed his faith, Scott Sowerby reveals a king ahead of his time who pressed for religious toleration at the expense of his throne. The Glorious Revolution was in fact a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained.

Industrial workers, not just peasants, played an essential role in the Mexican Revolution. Tracing the introduction of mechanized industry into the Orizaba Valley, Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato argues convincingly that the revolution cannot be understood apart from the Industrial Revolution, and thus provides a fresh perspective on both transformations.

Age of Entanglement explores the connections that linked German and Indian intellectuals from the nineteenth century through the Second World War as they shared ideas, formed networks, and studied one another’s worlds. But, as Kris Manjapra shows, transnational intellectual entanglements are not inherently liberal or conventionally cosmopolitan.

Exploring the morally entangled territory of language and race in 18th- and 19th-century America, Sean Harvey shows that whites’ theories of an “Indian mind” inexorably shaped by Indian languages played a crucial role in the subjugation of Native peoples and informed the U.S. government’s efforts to extinguish Native languages for years to come.

Sana Aiyar chronicles the strategies by which Indians sought a political voice in Kenya, from the beginning of colonial rule to independence. She examines how the strands of Indians’ diasporic identity influenced Kenya’s leadership—from partnering with Europeans to colonize East Africa, to collaborating with Africans to battle racial inequality.

Besieged during the Franco–Prussian War, its buildings damaged, its finances mired in debt, Paris was a city in crisis. Alexia Yates chronicles the private actors and networks, practices and politics, that spurred the largest building boom of the nineteenth century, turning city-making into big business in the French capital.

As readers of Russian literature know, the nineteenth century was a time of pervasive financial anxiety. Russians of all classes were enmeshed in networks of credit and debt, and borrowing and lending shaped perceptions of material and moral worth. Sergei Antonov recreates this imperial world of borrowers, bankrupts, lenders, and loan sharks.

Around 1800, the English East India Company controlled half of the world’s trade and deployed a vast network of political influencers. Yet the story of its 17th-century beginnings has remained largely untold. Rupali Mishra’s account of the Company’s formative years sheds light on one of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world.

Sarah Kinkel shows that the rise of British naval power was neither inevitable nor unquestioned: it was the outcome of fierce battles over the shape of Britain’s empire and the bonds of political authority. The Navy was one of many battlefields where British subjects debated whether the empire would be ruled from Parliament down or the people up.

Heidi Tworek’s innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire—and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. When the news became a form of international power, it changed the course of history.

Money did not become obsolete under Communism. The ruble remained a key feature of Soviet life. After World War II, money became an essential tool of the Soviet government. A strong ruble represented the nation’s promise of future prosperity, but its failure to deliver improved purchasing power undermined popular confidence in Communism.

Margarita Fajardo tells the story of the cepalinos, Latin American economists and policymakers, and their dependentista critics, whose ideas about economic growth and global inequality transformed our approach to development and changed the course of the twentieth century.

Samoans had been engaged in economic and cultural exchange long before Germans and Americans arrived on the islands. Holger Droessler shows how Samoans adapted their traditions to challenge the new globalization imposed on them by colonialism, regaining agency through the efforts of farm workers, nurses, and traveling entertainers alike.

Officially, revolutionary France granted all citizens a right to property. In practice, however, there was significant continuity with the Old Regime. H. B. Callaway argues that the state’s fraught attempts to confiscate property from Parisian émigrés reveal contradictions in ideas of ownership considered foundational to modern property rights.