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During the First World War, conflicts between the people’s sacrifices and their political participation led to crises of parliamentary legitimacy. This volume compares British, German, Swedish and Finnish debates on revolution, rule by the people, democracy and parliamentarism and their transnational links. The British reform, although more about winning the war than advancing democracy, restored parliamentary legitimacy, unlike in Germany, where Allied demands for democratisation made reform appear treasonous and fostered native German solutions. Sweden only adopted Western political models after major confrontations, but reforms saw it embark on its path to Social Democracy. In Finland, competing Russian revolutionary discourses and German- and Swedish-inspired appeals to legality brought about the deterioration of parliamentary legitimacy and a civil war. Only a republican compromise imposed by the Entente, following a royalist initiative in 1918, led to the construction of a viable polity.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Why are citizens in some countries more willing to pay taxes than in other countries? This book examines the history of the relationship between citizens and their states in five countries, (Sweden, Britain, Italy, Romania, and the United States), and demonstrates how and why people in in some countries have come to trust the government with their money while in other countries they do not. The book explores the evolution of this relationship in detail, in each case showing how some governments developed the fiscal and technical capacity to tax their citizens fairly and deliver public services efficiently. In short, how and why some countries became more trustworthy than others. The volume concludes by examining the implications of these five cases for developing countries today and the lessons that can be learned.
Middle Eastern Christians have a long tradition of interacting with Europe. As other minorities they have also "emerged" through relations of European powers with the region. The historical circulation of people and ideas is also relevant for identities of Middle Eastern Christians who have settled in Europe in the past decades. This volume, stemming from an interdisciplinary workshop in Salzburg 2016, brings together both perspectives of entanglement.
Dress helps us fashion identity, history, community, and place. Dress has been harnessed as a metaphor for both progress and stability, the exotic and the utopian, oppression and freedom, belonging and resistance. Dressing with Purpose examines three Scandinavian dress traditions—Swedish folkdräkt, Norwegian bunad, and Sámi gákti—and traces their development during two centuries of social and political change across northern Europe. By the 20th century, many in Sweden worried about the ravages of industrialization, urbanization, and emigration on traditional ways of life. Norway was gripped in a struggle for national independence. Indigenous Sámi communities—artificially divided by...
The author discusses how religious groups, especially Jews, Mormons and Jesuits, were labeled as foreign and constructed as political, moral and national threats in Scandinavia in different periods between c. 1790 and 1960. Key questions are who articulated such opinions, how was the threat depicted, and to what extent did it influence state policies towards these groups. A special focus is given to Norway, because the Constitution of 1814 included a ban against Jews (repelled in 1851) and Jesuits (repelled in 1956), and because Mormons were denied the status of a legal religion until freedom of religion was codified in the Constitution in 1964. The author emphasizes how the construction of ...
Lisa Hellman offers the first study of European everyday life in Canton and Macao. How foreigners could live, communicate, move around – even whom they could interaction with – were all things strictly regulated by the Chinese authorities. The Europeans sometimes adapted to, and sometimes subverted, these rules. Focusing on this conditional domesticity shows the importance of gender relations, especially the construction of masculinity. Using the Swedish East India Company, a minor European actor in an expanding Asian empire, as a point of entry highlights the multiplicity of actors taking part in local negotiations of power. The European attempts at making a home in China contributes to a global turn in everyday history, but also to an everyday turn in global history.
In the Danish West Indies, hundreds of enslaved men and women and a handful of Danish judges engaged in a broken, often distorted dialogue in court. Their dialogue was shaped by a shared concern with the ways slavery clashed with sexual norms and family life. Some enslaved men and women crafted respectable Christian self-portraits, which in time allowed victims of sexual abuse and rape to publicly narrate their experiences. Other slaves stressed African-Atlantic traditions when explaining their domestic conflicts. Yet these gripping stories did not influence the legal system. While the judges cunningly embraced slave testimony, they also reached guilty verdicts in most trials and punished with extreme brutality. Slaves spoke, but mostly to no avail. In Slave Stories, Gunvor Simonsen reconstructs the narratives crafted by slaves and traces the distortions instituted by Danish West Indian legal practice. In doing so, she draws us closer to the men and women who lived in bondage in the Danish West Indies (present-day US Virgin Islands) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This is a book about how the modern notion of materiality was established during the period c. 1680-1760. It studies what natural philosophers engaged in chemistry and mineralogy said about phenomena such as witchcraft, trolls and subtle matters, and relates this discourse to their innovations in matter theory. In this way it takes the debate about Enlightenment, which has mostly been confined to fields such as the history of philosophy, theology and physics, into a new arena.
The 'Age of Revolution' is a term seldom used in Scandinavian historiography, despite the fact that Scandinavia was far from untouched by the late eighteenth-century revolutions in Europe and America. Presenting the latest research on political culture in Scandinavia, this volume with twenty-seven contributions focuses on four key aspects: the crisis of monarchy; the transformation in political debate; the emerging influence of commercial interest in politics; and the shifting boundaries of political participation. Generously illustrated throughout, this book will introduce non-Scandinavian readers to developments in the Nordic countries during the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries and both complement and challenge research into the political cultures of Europe and America.
This volume analyses the societal legacy of Lutheranism in Finland in broad terms. It contributes to the recent renewed interest in the history of religion in Finland and the Nordic countries by bringing together researchers in history, political science, economics, social psychology, education, linguistics, media studies, and theology to examine the mutual relationship between Lutheranism and society in Finland. The two main foci are (i) the historical effects of the Reformation and its aftermath on societal structures and on national identity, values, linguistic culture, education, and the economy, and (ii) the adaptation of the church – and its theology – to changes in the geo-politic...