This is a study of how political ideas travel across languages and cultures. It examines the reception in Germany of the civic theories of the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Ferguson, and shows how German intellectuals misread his work, but in a way which opened up many fruitful insights.

Andrew Brown explores lay piety in its contexts of landscape, society, and the church, and examines the many different issues and activities which were of contemporary importance, such as the religious guilds, charity, and heresy. He shows how the regional variations in social and economic structure affected parish life, and concluces with an important assessment of the reception of the Reformation in the diocese. This is the first scholarly study of the lay religion of this region, and its broad chronological range of and meticulously researched local focus offer illuminating insights into...

This book examines a period of particular importance in the formation of the modern French state. The revolutionary strife and international war of the 1790s had important and far-reaching consequences for the development of democracy and bureaucracy in France. Howard G Brown's study of changes in army administration in this period sheds light on the dynamic relationship between the spread of political participation, the rationalization of public power, and the build-up of military might. Dr. Brown shows how the exigencies of war and the vagaries of revolutionary politics wrought rapid and...

Idealism became the dominant philosophical school of thought in late nineteenth-century Britain. In this original and stimulating study, Sandra den Otter examines its roots in Greek and German thinking and locates it among the prevalent methodologies and theories of the period: empiricism and positivism, naturalism, evolution, and utilitarianism. In particular, she sets it in the context of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debate about a science of society and the contemporary preoccupation with community'.

This book is concerned with the way in which the concept of the state was invoked in British political argument between 1880 and 1914. It central claim is that the decades bracketing the turn of the century witnessed a significant change in the prevailing terms of British political discourse - that the concept of the state, hitherto a relative stranger to British debate, emerged as a key component of the idiom in which critical reflection on politics was cast. James Meadowcroft surveys the ways in which the state was understood in this period, and also presents a detailed analysis of the...

This is the first intensive study of the political development of a major English town during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Perry Gauci examines the activities of the local oligarchy over a period which begins in upheaval, in the aftermath of civil war, and ends in the relative stability of early Georgian England. He brings a fresh perspective to such important episodes as the borough regulation of the 1680s, and the rage of party' after 1689, by broadening the sphere of politics' to encompass provincial experiences.

The Second Spanish Republic survived unchallenged for a mere five years, its fall plunging Spain into a bitter civil war. Mary Vincent examines this crucial period in Spanish history. She demonstrates how political choice was eroded under the Second Republic, and reveals how popular religiosity came to be the Right's most potent weapon. Her fascinating analysis throws new light on the origins of the Spanish Civil War and on the vexed question of who bore ultimate responsibility for the conflict.

This is a study of the role of regions in the development of modern nations in Latin America. The book focuses on the Colombian Caribbean between 1870 and 1950. It examines the achievements and shortcomings of arable agriculture and the significance of the livestock industry, the link between town and countryside, the influence of foreign migrants and foreign capital, the relationship between local and national politics, and the extent to which regionalism represented a challenge to the consolidation of the national state in Colombia.

This revisionist account challenges the view that anti-Semitism was imposed on a majority of moderate Germans following Hitler's rise to power. Anthony Kauders argues that the Weimar Republic was instrumental in changing people's attitudes towards the Jews. The author studies the common man's reaction to the "Jewish Question" in two towns, Dusseldorf and Nuremberg, between 1910 and 1933.

This is an original and important study of the significance of witchcraft in English public life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his lively account, Bostridge explores contemporary beliefs about witchcraft and shows how it remained a serious concern across the spectrum of political opinion. He concludes that its gradual descent into polite ridicule had as much to do with political developments as with the birth of reason.