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Why did the past matter so greatly in ancient China? How did it matter and to whom? This is an innovative study of how the past was implicated in the long transition of power in early China, as embodied by the decline of the late Bronze Age aristocracy and the rise of empires over the first millenium BCE. Engaging with a wide array of historical materials, including inscriptional records, excavated manuscripts, and transmitted texts, Vincent S. Leung moves beyond the historiographical canon and explores how the past was mobilized as powerful ideological capital in diverse political debate and ethical dialogue. Appeals to the past in early China were more than a matter of cultural attitude, Leung argues, but were rather deliberate ways of articulating political thought and challenging ethical debates during periods of crisis. Significant power lies in the retelling of the past.

Soldiers and Gentlemen: Australian Battalion Commanders in the Great War, 1914–1918 is the first book to examine the background, role and conduct of Australian commanding officers during the First World War. Though they held positions of power, commanding officers inhabited a leadership no man's land - they exerted great influence over their units, but they were also largely excluded from the decision-making process and faced the same risks as junior officers on the battlefield. A soldier's well-being and success in battle was heavily dependent on a commanding officer's competence, but little is known about the men who filled these roles. In his groundbreaking book, William Westerman explores the stories of the vitally important, yet often forgotten, commanding officers. Theirs is a story of the timeless challenges of military leadership, and this book prevents them from slipping from the public memory to enhance our knowledge of the conflict.

As a philosopher, psychologist, and physician, the German thinker Hermann Lotze (1817–81) defies classification. Working in the mid-nineteenth-century era of programmatic realism, he critically reviewed and rearranged theories and concepts in books on pathology, physiology, medical psychology, anthropology, history, aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, and religion. Leading anatomists and physiologists reworked his hypotheses about the central and autonomic nervous systems. Dozens of fin-de-siècle philosophical contemporaries emulated him, yet often without acknowledgment, precisely because he had made conjecture and refutation into a method. In spite of Lotze's status as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century intellectual thought, no complete treatment of his work exists, and certainly no effort to take account of the feminist secondary literature. Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography is the first full-length historical study of Lotze's intellectual origins, scientific community, institutional context, and worldwide reception.

As disciplines, psychology and history share a primary concern with the human condition. Yet historically, the relationship between the two fields has been uneasy, marked by a long-standing climate of mutual suspicion. This book engages with the history of this relationship and possibilities for its future intellectual and empirical development. Bringing together internationally renowned psychologists and historians, it explores the ways in which the two disciplines could benefit from a closer dialogue. Thirteen chapters span a broad range of topics, including social memory, prejudice, stereotyping, affect and emotion, cognition, personality, gender and the self. Contributors draw on examples from different cultural contexts - from eighteenth-century Britain, to apartheid South Africa, to conflict-torn Yugoslavia - to offer fresh impetus to interdisciplinary scholarship. Generating new ideas, research questions and problems, this book encourages researchers to engage in genuine dialogue and place their own explorations in new intellectual contexts.

This monograph provides an overview of research into disasters from a historical perspective, making two new contributions. First, it introduces the field of ‘disaster studies’ to history, showing how we can use history to better understand how societies deal with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. Second, we introduce historians to the topic of disasters and the field of disaster studies, and explicitly show the relevance of studying past disasters to better understand the social, economic, and political functioning of past societies.

This book explores how an international health statistics system was built and implemented as statistical practices developed in public health schools (Johns Hopkins University and Peking Union Medical College), intergovernmental health organizations (the League of Nations, UNRRA, and the WHO), and philanthropic programs were transferred to the Chinese republics. Drawing on archival sources from three continents, the book follows a transnational network of experts who lay the foundation for the trust in numbers that characterizes international health governance today. International organizations opted for different strategies when standardizing their health statistics: whereas the League of Nations only included statisticians from North Atlantic countries in its standard-making, the WHO took local knowledge into account by tailoring its standards to local capacities. Individual experts also adapted their strategies for collecting and standardizing statistics to different geopolitical and administrative contexts. Interwar experts tended to simply dismiss the numbers and relied on their authority when promoting their programs, but statistics came to play a greater role in policy decisions in the postwar years. Experts both within and outside the WHO mobilized their public health knowledge to select and report statistics to support their arguments.

A study of the genesis of ‘European civilisation’ as a concept of 20th-C EU political practice & as a specific project of a transnational network of EU elites, examining how they sought to rehabilitate EU identity as a response to a crisis of belonging following the 1917-1920 revolutions & the collapse of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg & RU Empires.

Through an examination of the creation of the first linguistically organized province in India, Odisha, Pritipuspa Mishra explores the ways regional languages came to serve as the most acceptable registers of difference in post-colonial India. She argues that rather than disrupting the rise and spread of All-India nationalism, regional linguistic nationalism enabled and deepened the reach of nationalism in provincial India. Yet this positive narrative of the resolution of Indian multilingualism ignores the cost of linguistic division. Examining the case of the Adivasis of Odisha, Mishra shows how regional languages in India have come to occupy a curiously hegemonic position. Her study pushes us to rethink our understanding of the vernacular in India as a powerless medium and acknowledges the institutional power of language, contributing to global debates about linguistic justice and the governance of multilingualism.

This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. African institutions, political events, and economic structures shaped Africa's voluntary involvement in the Atlantic arena before 1680. Africa's economic and military strength gave African elites the capacity to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics of colonization which made slaves so necessary to European colonizers, and he explains why African slaves were placed in roles of central significance. Estate structure and demography affected the capacity of slaves to form a self-sustaining society and behave as cultural actors, transferring and transforming African culture in the New World.

This book aims to give the reader an appreciation of the historical perspective of surgery and the author illustrates this in a number of ways. Firstly, Professor Ellis describes some of the major surgical'break-throughs', such as the first gastrectomy. He then goes on to cover some procedures which, though minor in themselves, nonetheless made a great impact on surgery. An example of this is the first operation to be performed under anaesthesia. Finally, he describes a number of operations of varying degrees of complexity that were performed on famous people (e.g. Lord Nelson). In surgery, as in all fields of human activity, history is forgotten at our peril. The examples described in this book combine to give the reader a unique insight into a remarkable specialty, using the lessons of history to instruct as well as entertain.

Western Europeans were among the first, if not the first, to invent mechanical clocks, geometrically precise maps, double-entry bookkeeping, precise algebraic and musical notations, and perspective painting. By the sixteenth century more people were thinking quantitatively in western Europe than in any other part of the world. The Measure of Reality, first published in 1997, discusses the epochal shift from qualitative to quantitative perception in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. This shift made modern science, technology, business practice and bureaucracy possible.

This is the second and final volume of manuscripts by or relating to Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) that are now held at Kanto Gakuen University in Japan. Volume I contains 75 items of correspondence, while Volume II contains transcriptions of further original manuscripts, including: four of Malthus'sermons; his diary of a tour of the Lake District; an extensive set of calculations in the bullion trade, suggesting that he was giving serious thought to becoming a bullion trader on his own account; lecture notes on European history from the fifth to the tenth century; his wife's diary of their holiday in Scotland in 1826 and an essay on foreign trade. These previously unknown and unpublished manuscripts promise insights into his intellectual development and the events and circumstances of his life, as well as glimpses of the lifestyle of his wider family and contemporaries.