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Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne. The names of these and other French regions bring to mind time-honored winemaking practices. Yet the link between wine and place, in French known as terroir, was not a given. In The Sober Revolution, Joseph Bohling inverts our understanding of French wine history by revealing a modern connection between wine and place, one with profound ties to such diverse and sometimes unlikely issues as alcoholism, drunk driving, regional tourism, Algeria’s independence from French rule, and integration into the European Economic Community. In the 1930s, cheap, mass-produced wines from the Languedoc region of southern France and French Algeria dominated French markets. Art...
German imperialism in Europe evokes images of military aggression and ethnic cleansing. Yet, even under the Third Reich, Germans deployed more subtle forms of influence that can be called soft power or informal imperialism. Stephen G. Gross examines how, between 1918 and 1941, German businessmen and academics turned their nation - an economic wreck after World War I - into the single largest trading partner with the Balkan states, their primary source for development aid and their diplomatic patron. Building on traditions from the 1890s and working through transnational trade fairs, chambers of commerce, educational exchange programmes and development projects, Germans collaborated with Croatians, Serbians and Romanians to create a continental bloc, and to exclude Jews from commerce. By gaining access to critical resources during a global depression, the proponents of soft power enabled Hitler to militarise the German economy and helped make the Third Reich's territorial conquests after 1939 economically possible.
A capacious history of decolonization, from the decline of empires to the era of globalization Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative pr...
For nearly two decades, including after its independence, Algeria was named as a part of the European Economic Community. Megan Brown unearths this forgotten history, showing that early visions of European unity were not limited to the "natural" geographic boundaries on which many today insist.
¡Vino! explores the history and identity of Spanish wine production from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Nineteenth-century infestations of oidium fungus and phylloxera aphids devastated French and Italian vineyards but didn’t extend to the Iberian Peninsula at first, giving Spanish vintners the opportunity to increase their international sales. Once French and Italian wineries rebounded, however, Spanish wine producers had to up their game. Spain could not produce only table wine; it needed a quality product to compete with the supposedly superior French wines. After the Spanish Civil War the totalitarian Franco regime turned its attention to Spain’s devastated agricultural sector...
This Companion rethinks food in literature from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to contemporary food blogs, and recovers cookbooks as literary texts.
In Automotive Empire, Andrew Denning uncovers how roads and vehicles began to transform colonial societies across Africa but rarely in the manner Europeans expected. Like seafaring ships and railroads, automobiles and roads were more than a mode of transport—they organized colonial spaces and structured the political, economic, and social relations of empire, both within African colonies and between colonies and the European metropole. European officials in French, Italian, British, German, Belgian, and Portuguese territories in Africa shared a common challenge—the transport problem. While they imagined that roads would radiate commerce and political hegemony by collapsing space, the pre...
Reports for 1957/58- are condensations of the unavailable official annual reports published as issues of the Board's Monthly bulletin.
Over the past 250 years, energy transitions have occurred repeatedly—the rise of coal in the nineteenth century, the explosion of oil in the twentieth century, the nuclear utopianism of the 1950s and 1960s. These transitions have been as revolutionary as any political or economic upheaval, and they required changes in infrastructure and behavior. Yet new energies never wholly replace old ones. This volume historicizes energy production and consumption while demonstrating how energy use has reshaped everything from social life and economic organization to political governance. It foregrounds the importance of energy for big historical questions about capitalism, democracy, inequality, the environment, and identity, and it argues that energy systems themselves merit attention as key agents of historical change. Given the urgency of climate change, and the central position that energy plays in causing and potentially solving global warming, this volume engages history as a discipline in the debate over what may be most monumental energy transition of all time: the shift away from fossil fuels.
A novel exploration of the deeper political, economic, and geopolitical history behind Germany's daring campaign to restructure its energy system around green power. Since the 1990s, Germany has embarked on a daring campaign to restructure its energy system around renewable power, sparking a global revolution in solar and wind technology. But this pioneering energy transition has been plagued with problems. In Energy and Power, Stephen G. Gross explains the deeper origins of the Energiewende--Germany's transition to green energy--and offers the first comprehensive history of German energy and climate policy from World War II to the present. The book follows the Federal Republic as it passed ...