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Although state transformation – continuous struggle and bargaining between rulers and their subjects, producing an unpredictable variety of political structures – is often overlooked, the process is crucial in assessing the organizational development of early modern composite monarchies and deserves further investigation. In Austria, the monarchy’s emergence as a great power required it to overcome several successive crises that culminated in the decades around 1700. The Habsburgs succeeded more by adjusting relations between Crown and lordships than through institution building. This unusual interaction of state and non-state actors resulted in an Austria that markedly deviated from t...
The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) lies at the intersection of early modern and modern times. Frequently portrayed as the concluding chapter of the Reformation, it also points to the future by precipitating fundamental changes in the military, legal, political, religious, economic, and cultural arenas that came to mark a new, the modern era. Prompted by the 400th anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the contributors reconsider the event itself and contextualize it within the broader history of the Reformation, military conflicts, peace initiatives, and negotiations of war.
The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000. Offering a valuable corrective to the Anglocentric narratives of previous English-language textbooks, scholars from all over Europe have pooled their knowledge on comparative themes such as identities, cultural encounters, power and citizenship, and economic development to reflect the complexity and heterogeneous nature of the European experience. Rather than another grand narrative, the international author teams offer a multifaceted and rich perspective...
Global War on the Human Brain Throughout the world, mental capacity is declining, especially among young people, while depression rates are rising dramatically. Meanwhile, one in forty men and women suffers from Alzheimer's, and the age of onset is falling rapidly. But the causes are not being eliminated, quite the opposite. Can this just be coincidence? The Indoctrinated Brain introduces a largely unknown, powerful neurobiological mechanism whose externally induced dysfunction underlies these catastrophic developments. Michael Nehls, medical doctor and internationally renowned molecular geneticist, lays out a shattering chain of circumstantial evidence indicating that behind these numerous ...
This book uncovers a long-lost classification mechanism for analysing the Deliberazioni, secretive records of the medieval Venetian Senate. Using Albanian cities as a case study, the book helps identify unspoken state priorities during a transformative decade for Venice.
In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the o...
The autonomy granted to local communities (such as towns, municipalities, and city-states) by larger, central powers (such as empires, kings, lords, and central states) is a recurrent feature of European history over time, from Antiquity to the contemporary period. This volume explores the political, social, and cultural aspects of this feature in a diachronic and comparative perspective, from the Roman Empire to today's city partnerships. To this end, it uses the concept of polycentric governance. Originally developed by political economist Vincent Ostrom in the 1960s and then expanded by the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, political scientist Elinor Ostrom, this concept charac...
"From the Black Death to Covid, infectious diseases have killed far more people than hunger or violence, and they still cause 40 per cent of deaths in developing countries today. Epidemic disease is one of our best laboratories for exploring how societies deal with negative externalities-a cost not paid wholly by oneself, but instead discharged partly onto other people. Once an epidemic is raging, it raises three challenges for society which this book seeks to address. First, what institutions help care for the victims? Second, what institutions help societies recover from the huge economic devastation caused by mass disease, disability, and death? And finally, how are institutions themselve...
Offers new perspectives on how alliances in early modern Europe promoted shared sovereignty, and the impact on the evolution of the state.
This book investigates perceptions, modes, and techniques of Venetian rule in the early modern Eastern Mediterranean (1400–1700). Against the backdrop of the controversial notion of the Venetian realm as a colonial empire, essays from a range of specialists examine how Venice negotiated control over the territories, resources, and traditions of different empires (Byzantine, Roman, Mamluk, Ottoman) while developing its own claims of authority. Focusing in particular on questions of belonging and status in the Venetian overseas territories, the volume incorporates observations on the daily realities of Venetian rule: how did Venice negotiate claims of authority in light of former and ongoing...