For over a century, Europe has been characterized by a plurality of capitalist modernities. At any moment, each country possesses its own distinctly modern qualities which are partly shaped through interrelationships with other countries. Each European commodity society has experienced successive, but different overlapping, periods of industrial modernity (large scale factories and urban growth), high modernity (social modernization promoted by social engineering) and hypermodernity (the acceleration of modernity, yielding new circumstances and sensibilities). Interrogating contemporary,...

Derek Gregory and Allan Pred's "Violent Geographies" gathers together a group of young and well established geographers to look at how territory and space delimit and shape both terrorism and political violence in wide range of places, from the Middle East to Latin America. In short, the book shows how physical violence, especially terrorism, disrupts the distinction between the global and the local by injecting transnational politics into the intimacies of everyday life." Violent Geographies" also shows how terrorism is not simply used by nonstate groups --states use it as well, including...

"Violent Geographies is essential to understanding how the politics of fear, terror, and violence in being largely hidden geographically can only be exposed in like manner. The 'War on Terror' finally receives the coolly critical analysis its ritual invocation has long required."

--John Agnew, Professor of Geography, UCLA

"Urgent, passionate and deeply humane, Violent Geographies is uncomfortable but utterly compelling reading. An essential guide to a world splintered and wounded by fear and aggression--this is geography at its most politically engaged, historically...

In this original study of the transformation of late nineteenth-century Stockholm into a flourishing industrial capital, Allan Pred reconstructs the development of Stockholm's local economy, civil society and built environment through an interpretation of lost elements of language, of forgotten fragments of daily discourse, of lost words and meanings that belonged to members of the working and periodically employed classes. Pred demonstrates how the emergence of industrial capitalism in Stockholm and the onslaught of modernization were not simply imposed upon the local arena; instead they...

Using both grand conceptualizations and grounded case studies, Allan Pred and Michael Watts look at how people cope with and give meaning to capitalism and modernity in different times and places. As capital accumulation has grown and taken new forms, it has affected technology and labor relations which in turn have affected people's daily lives. These changes have not always been either welcome or easy. Pred and Watts focus on the symbolic discontent and cultural confrontations that accompany capitalism. They depict people struggling over the meaning of change in their lives and over new...