Europe 1715 1919

Europe 1715-1919 explores the tumultuous period in European history between the Age of Enlightenment and World War I. By integrating political, social, economic, and cultural history, Shirley Elson Roessler and Reny Miklos provide an entertaining and comprehensive account of the emergence of modern Europe. With clear and eloquent prose, the book explains the ideas of the Enlightenment and their effect on the social fabric of Europe, the watershed of the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the advances of the Industrial Revolution, and the centrifugal forces of nationalism that led, ultimately, to the disaster of World War I. Eminently readable, Europe 1715-1919 will appeal to students, scholars, and all interested in the history of modern Europe.

A unique international collaboration, presenting various perspectives on the Genoa Conference of 1922.

Regions. How they emerge and how they are dramatically changing the appearance of the present 'world of states' and its related forms of governance from local to global levels is analysed in this monograph. But what are regions? Regions can be small or huge. They can be part of a single state, be composed out of different states or stretched out across borders. They can be important recognized economic, social or cultural entities or they can be largely ignored by the people who live on a region's territory. They can be well-defined with clear cut boundaries as is the case in so-called 'constitutional regions' or they can be fuzzy as for instance in cross-border regions. In sum, they are not a natural kind and defining regions is not a simple task. Luk Van Langenhove advances the concept of region building as an alternative to the construction of regions with three issues of region building being explored: - Why are regions built in a world of states? - How do region building processes take place? - How are regions transforming the present world order? Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book is an exercise in theorizing regions and brings together under one conceptual framework, different processes and concepts such as regional integration, devolution, federalism, and separatism and refines the social constructionist view on regions

Why are historically Catholic countries and regions generally more corrupt and less competitive than historically Protestant ones? How has institutionalization of religion influenced the prosperity of countries in Europe and the Americas? This open access book addresses these critical questions by elucidating the hegemonic and emancipatory religious factors leading to these dissimilarities between countries. The book features up-to-date mixed methods from interdisciplinary research contributing to existing studies in the sociology of religion field by demonstrating—for the first time—the effect of the mutually reinforcing configuration of multiple prosperity triggers (religion–politics–environment). It demonstrates the differences in the institutionalization of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism by applying quantitative and qualitative methods and by performing a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of 65 countries. The author also provides a comprehensive survey and results of empirical research on different theories of development, focusing on the influence of religion.

This book offers a relational theory of International Relations (IR). To show the ways in which the relationality is foreshadowed in IR conversations it makes the following three points: 1) it recovers a mode of IR theorizing as itinerant translation; 2) it deploys the concept and practices of guanxi (employed here as a heuristic device revealing the infinite capacity of international interactions to create and construct multiple worlds) to uncover the outlines of a relational IR theorizing; and 3) it demonstrates that relational theorizing is at the core of projects for worlding IR. By engaging with the phenomenon of relationality, Emilian Kavalski invokes the complexity of possible worlds and demonstrates new possibilities for powerful ethical-political innovations in IR theorizing. Thus, relational IR theorizing emerges as an optic which both acknowledges the agency of ‘others’ in the context of myriad interpretative intersections of people, powers, and environments (as well as their complex histories, cultures, and agency) and stimulates awareness of the dynamically-intertwined contingencies through which meanings are generated contingently through interactions in communities of practice. The book will have a strong appeal to the broad academic readership in Asian Studies, Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Relations theory and students and scholars of non-/post-Western International Relations and non-/post-Western Political Thought.

This book is about the evolution and nature of cooperation and altruism in social-living animals, focusing especially on non-human primates and on humans. Although cooperation and altruism are often thought of as ways to attenuate competition and aggression within groups, or are related to the action of “selfish genes”, there is increasing evidence that these behaviors are the result of biological mechanisms that have developed through natural selection in group-living species. This evidence leads to the conclusion that cooperative and altruistic behavior are not just by-products of competition but are rather the glue that underlies the ability for primates and humans to live in groups. The anthropological, primatological, paleontological, behavioral, neurobiological, and psychological evidence provided in this book gives a more optimistic view of human nature than the more popular, conventional view of humans being naturally and basically aggressive and warlike. Although competition and aggression are recognized as an important part of the non-human primate and human behavioral repertoire, the evidence from these fields indicates that cooperation and altruism may represent the more typical, “normal”, and healthy behavioral pattern. The book is intended both for the general reader and also for students at a variety of levels (graduate and undergraduate): it aims to provide a compact, accessible, and up-to-date account of the current scholarly advances and debates in this field of study, and it is designed to be used in teaching and in discussion groups. The book derived from a conference sponsored by N.S.F., the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Washington University Committee for Ethics and Human Values, and the Anthropedia Foundation for the study of well-being.

Just over 200 years ago on a stormy night, a young woman conceived of what would become one of the most iconic images of science gone wrong, the story of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature. For a long period, Mary Shelley languished in the shadow of her luminary husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, but was rescued from obscurity by the feminist scholars of the 1970s and 1980s. This book offers a new perspective on Shelley and on science fiction, arguing that she both established a new discursive space for moral thinking and laid the groundwork for the genre of science fiction. Adopting a contextual biographical approach and undertaking a close reading of the 1818 and 1831 editions of the text give readers insight into how this story synthesizes many of the concerns about new science prevalent in Shelley's time. Using Michel Foucault's concept of discourse, the present work argues that Shelley should be not only credited with the foundation of a genre but recognized as a figure who created a new cultural space for readers to explore their fears and negotiate the moral landscape of new science.