Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A Taste for Purity
In nineteenth-century Europe and North America, an organized vegetarian movement began warning of the health risks and ethical problems of meat eating. Presenting a vegetarian diet as a cure for the social ills brought on by industrialization and urbanization, this movement idealized South Asia as a model. In colonial India, where diets were far more varied than Western admirers realized, new motives for avoiding meat also took hold. Hindu nationalists claimed that vegetarianism would cleanse the body for anticolonial resistance, and an increasingly militant cow protection movement mobilized against meat eaters, particularly Muslims. Unearthing the connections among these developments and ma...
African Activists in a Decolonising World
As wars of liberation in Africa and Asia shook the post-war world, a cohort of activists from East and Central Africa, specifically the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania, asked what role they could play in the global anticolonial landscape. Through the perspective of these activists, Ismay Milford presents a social and intellectual history of decolonisation and anticolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on multi-archival research, she brings together their trajectories for the first time, reconstructing the anticolonial culture that underpinned their journeys to Delhi, Cairo, London, Accra and beyond. Forming committees and publishing pamphlets, these activists worked with pan-African and Afro-Asian solidarity projects, Cold War student internationals, spiritual internationalists and diverse pressure groups. Milford argues that a focus on their everyday labour and knowledge production highlights certain limits of transnational and international activism, opening up a critical – albeit less heroic – perspective on the global history of anticolonial work and thought.
Prisms of Work
The phenomenon of labour takes the character of a prism. Labour is thereby always context dependent and constituted through the actions of all protagonists involved in any labour relationship. On the basis of three case studies in colonial German East Africa – the construction of the Central Railway (1905–1916), the Otto Plantation in Kilossa (1907–1916) and the palaeontological Tendaguru Expedition (1909–1911) – labour and labour relations are analysed. The focus lies on hitherto neglected actors and groups of actors of labour in the colonial context of East Africa. These were especially German companies and their staff, white subaltern railway sub-contractors and labour recruiter...
Lifelines of Our Society
A comprehensive history and examination of global infrastructures and the outsized role they play in our lives. Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today’s strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape? In Lifelines of Our Society, Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their de...
Cultural Heritage and Slavery
In the recent cultural heritage boom, community-based and national identity projects are intertwined with interest in cultural tourism and sites of the memory of enslavement. Questions of historical guilt and present responsibility have become a source of social conflict, particularly in multicultural societies with an enslaving past. This became apparent in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, when statues of enslavers and colonizers were toppled, controversial debates about streets and places named after them re-ignited, and the European Union apologized for slavery after the racist murder of George Floyd. Related debates focus on museums, on artworks acquired unjustly i...
Religious Entanglements Between Germans and Indians, 1800–1945
Religion as a form of cultural expression constitutes a critical element in the relationship between Germany and India. The discovery of Indian traditions in Germany and re-interpretations of those traditions in India fueled not only new theological and philosophical explorations, but also extensive innovations in the fields of music, dance, bodily experience, and political intervention. Seeking to uncover the enfolding of colonial thought structures through presentations of the Self, while placing them in the context of global colonial value chains that connected the peripheries with the centre, this interdisciplinary volume addresses India through the lens of an entangled relationship. Ado...
Making an African City
In Making an African City, Jennifer Hart traces the way that British colonial officials, Accra Town Council members, and a diverse group of technocrats used regulation to define what an "acceptable" city looked like. Unlike cities elsewhere on the continent, Accra had a long history of urbanism that predated British colonial presence. By criminalizing some activities and privileging others, colonial officials sought to marginalize indigenous practices of Accra residents and shape the development of a new, "modern" city. Hart argues, however, that residents regularly pushed back, protesting regulations, refusing to participate in newly developed systems, reappropriating infrastructure, demand...
Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885-1914
This open access book offers an entangled history of hygiene by showing how knowledge of purity, health and cleanliness was shaped by evangelical medical missionaries and their encounters with people in West Africa. By tracing the interactions and negotiations of six Basel Mission doctors, who practised on the Gold Coast and in Cameroon from 1885 to 1914, the author demonstrates how notions of religious purity, scientific health and colonial cleanliness came together in the making of hygiene during the age of High Imperialism. The heyday of evangelical medical missions abroad coincided with the emergence of tropical medicine as a scientific discipline during what became known as the Scramble for Africa. This book reveals that these projects were intertwined and that hygiene played an important role in all three of them. While most historians have examined modern hygiene as a European, bourgeois and scientific phenomenon, the author highlights both the colonial and the religious fabric of hygiene, which continues to shape our understanding of purity, health and cleanliness to this day.
Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond
Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond explores the cultural ramifications of food and foodways in the Mediterranean, and Arab-Muslim countries in particular. The volume addresses the cultural meanings of food from a wider chronological scope, from antiquity to present, adopting approaches from various disciplines, including classical Greek philology, Arabic literature, Islamic studies, anthropology, and history. The contributions to the book are structured around six thematic parts, ranging in focus from social status to religious prohibitions, gender issues, intoxicants, vegetarianism, and management of scarcity. Contributors are: Tarek Abu Hussein, Yasmin Amin, Kevin Blankinship, Tylor Brand, Kirill Dmitriev, Eric Dursteler, Anny Gaul, Julia Hauser, Christian Junge, Danilo Marino, Pedro Martins, Karen Moukheiber, Christian Saßmannshausen, Shaheed Tayob, and Lola Wilhelm.
Militarizing Outer Space
Militarizing Outer Space explores the dystopian and destructive dimensions of the Space Age and challenges conventional narratives of a bipolar Cold War rivalry. Concentrating on weapons, warfare and violence, this provocative volume examines real and imagined endeavors of arming the skies and conquering the heavens. The third and final volume in the groundbreaking European Astroculture trilogy, Militarizing Outer Space zooms in on the interplay between security, technopolitics and knowledge from the 1920s through the 1980s. Often hailed as the site of heavenly utopias and otherworldly salvation, outer space transformed from a promised sanctuary to a present threat, where the battles of the future were to be waged. Astroculture proved instrumental in fathoming forms and functions of warfare’s futures past, both on earth and in space. The allure of dominating outer space, the book shows, was neither limited to the early twenty-first century nor to current American space force rhetorics.
