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This book examines the writings of a motley collection of interwar far-right intellectuals, showing that they defined Frenchness in racial, gendered, and sexual terms. A broad, ambitious cultural and intellectual history, the book offers a provocative reinterpretation of a topic that has long been the subject of controversy. In works infused with rhetorics of abjection, disgust, and dissolution, such writers as Maulnier, Brasillach, Céline, and Blanchot imagined the nation through figures deemed illegitimate or inferior—Jews, colonial subjects, homosexuals, women. The author argues that these intellectuals offered an “aesthetics of hate,” reinventing a language of far-right nationalism by appealing to the realm of beauty and the sublime for political solutions. By acknowledging the constitutive relationship of anti-Semitism and colonial racism at the heart of these canonical writers' nationalism, this book makes us rethink how aesthetics and politics function, how race is imagined and defined, how gender structured far-right thought, and how we conceive of French intellectualism and fascism.

More than twenty years have passed since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a multiethnic country that did not establish nation-states like most of Europe but opted for a confederation. In the 1990s, when the European Union was consolidating and expanding, Yugoslavia was fast dissolving. Scholarship treating the disintegration of Yugoslavia has overlooked the cultural dimension of its collapse. This volume fills that gap by bringing together leading writers and scholars to focus specifically on the dynamics of post-Yugoslav cultural transition. The authors touch upon the topic of dissolution of the common state but move beyond it to consider consequences and repercussions in various cultural fields. Together, the contributions show that while the country has ceased to exist as a political project, it lives on in the individual and collective memory, in a variety of cultural practices, and as a potent legacy.

This book reframes our understanding of single women and religious culture in colonial and nineteenth-century Latin America. Most works on women and early modern religion examine nuns, holy women, or religious “deviants,” and emphasize rising hostility towards female autonomy as officials moved to enclose unmarried women and intensive female religiosity (e.g. mysticism, asceticism). This study takes a different approach and examines ordinary laywomen, particularly the broad population of non-elite women living outside of both marriage and convent. Much like other Spanish American cities, Guatemala’s colonial capital was a city of women due to labor and migration patterns with many single and widowed women heading households. Alone at the Altar argues that laboring single women forged complex alliances with the Church, which shaped local religion and the spiritual economy, late colonial reform efforts, and post-Independence politics in Guatemala. Through an analysis of approximately 550 wills, as well as a variety of other sources such as hagiographies, religious chronicles, and ecclesiastical records, this study moves beyond anecdotal evidence and exemplary case studies, to consider broader patterns and the ways in which gender, social, and marital status shaped early modern devotional networks. By extending its analysis to 1870, the book also illuminates how the alliances between laboring women and the Catholic Church became politicized in the Independence era and influenced the successful rise of popular conservatism in Guatemala.

This book reconstructs the world of eighteenth-century Amazonia to argue that indigenous mobility did not undermine settlement or community. In doing so, it revises long-standing views of native Amazonians as perpetual wanderers, lacking attachment to place and likely to flee at the slightest provocation. Instead, native Amazonians used traditional as well as new, colonial forms of spatial mobility to build enduring communities under the constraints of Portuguese colonialism. Canoeing and trekking through the interior to collect forest products or to contact independent native groups, Indians expanded their social networks, found economic opportunities, and brought new people and resources back to the colonial villages. When they were not participating in these state-sponsored expeditions, many Indians migrated between colonial settlements, seeking to be incorporated as productive members of their chosen communities. Drawing on largely untapped village-level sources, the book shows that mobile people remained attached to their home communities and committed to the preservation of their lands and assets. This argument still matters today, and not just to scholars, as rural communities in the Brazilian Amazon find themselves threatened by powerful outsiders who argue that their mobility invalidates their claims to territory.

This book tells the story of eight men and women with deep roots in provincial Hungary. "Hungary" before the First World War meant the eastern half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the second largest state in Europe after Russia. Hungary then was as large as Italy and more populous than Spain. Another Hungary lingers in prewar Hungary's small towns and studies their inhabitants, asking how they earned a living, what they thought about politics, and how they got along with their neighbors, including those who might speak a different language or practice a religion different from their own. This book argues that the history of small towns in Eastern Europe matters. They were not just a dull reflection of the capital city or of western Europe, but interesting and important in their own right. They mattered economically, they mattered culturally, and they mattered politically; their history deserves our attention. Each of the book's eight chapters examines someone born in a small town but eager to act upon a wider stage. They include a garrulous aristocrat, a misunderstood merchant, a tobacco enthusiast, and other figures from the nineteenth-century provinces. One of the central premises of this book is that surprising, interesting, and valuable ideas can sometimes emerge from the most unlikely of places.

For eight years President Dwight Eisenhower claimed to pursue peace and national security. Yet his policies entrenched the United States in a seemingly permanent cold war, a spiraling nuclear arms race, and a deepening state of national insecurity. This book uncovers the key to this paradox in Eisenhower's unwavering commitment to a consistent way of talking, in private as well as in public, about the cold war rivalry. Contrary to what most historians have concluded, Eisenhower never aimed at any genuine rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The discourse always assumed that the United States would forever face an enemy bent on destroying it, making national insecurity a permanent way of life. The “peace” he sought was only an endless process of managing apocalyptic threats, a permanent state of “apocalypse management,” intended to give the United States unchallenged advantage in every arena of the cold war. The goal and the discourse that supported it were inherently self-defeating. Yet the discourse is Eisenhower's most enduring legacy, for it has shaped the United States' foreign policy ever since, leaving it still a national insecurity state.

Between 1830 and 1870, French army officers serving in the colonial Offices of Arab Affairs profoundly altered the course of political decision-making in Algeria. Guided by the modernizing ideologies of the Saint-Simonian school in their development and implementation of colonial policy, the officers articulated a new doctrine and framework for governing the Muslim and European populations of Algeria. This book shows the evolution of this civilizing mission in Algeria, illustrates how these forty years were decisive in shaping the principal ideological tenets in French colonization of the region, and offers a rethinking of nineteenth-century French colonial history. It reveals not only what the rise of Europe implied for the cultural identities of non-elite Middle Easterners and North Africans, but also what dynamics were involved in the imposition or local adoptions of European cultural norms, and how the colonial encounter impacted the cultural identities of the colonizers themselves.

To a degree uncommon among Chinese cities, Republican Shanghai had no center. Its territory was divided among three (sometimes more) municipal governments integrated into various national states and empires. No government building or religious institution gave Shanghai a “center.” Yet amidst deep cleavages, the city functioned as a coherent whole. What held Shanghai together? The authors of this book's answer is that a group of middlemen with myriad connections across political and social boundaries created networks which held Republican Shanghai together.

This book is about a barber, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Budayr (fl. 1761), who shaved and coiffed, and probably circumcised and healed, in Damascus in the eighteenth century. The barber wrote a history book, a chronicle of the events that took place in his city during his lifetime. Examining the “life and work” of Ibn Budayr, the book uncovers the emergence of a larger trend of history writing by unusual authors—people outside the learned establishment—and identifies a new phenomenon: nouveau literacy. In addition to offering a microhistory of the barber and his work, this book discusses the social and literary aspects of nouveau literacy within the context of a changing social, political, and urban topography in the eighteenth-century Levant. Nouveau literacy is about the emergence of authority among various social groups as a result of new material and cultural wealth. Like the barber, the other nouveau literates use their chronicles to display their improved positions and to navigate a new social order. Finally, the book examines a later edition of the barber's history by the nineteenth-century scholar, Muḥammad Sa`īd al-Qāsimī (d. 1900), to show how the editorial interventions by a figure of al-Nahḍa (Arab Renaissance) served to silence the barber's voice.

From 1980 to 1992, Maoist Shining Path rebels, Peruvian state forces, and Andean peasants waged a bitter civil war that left some 69,000 people dead. Using archival research and oral interviews, this book is a long-term historical examination of the Shining Path's political, economic, and social antecedents in Ayacucho, the department where the Shining Path initiated its war. This study uncovers rural Ayacucho's vibrant, but largely unstudied twentieth-century political history and contends that the Shining Path was the last and most extreme of a series of radical political movements that indigenous peasants pursued. The Shining Path's violence against rural indigenous populations exposed the tight hold of anti-Indian prejudice inside Peru, as rebels reproduced the same hatreds they aimed to defeat. But, this was nothing new. The book reveals that minute divides inside rural indigenous communities repeatedly led to violent conflict across the twentieth century.

This book breaks down the naturalized and eternal relationship between female infanticide and Chinese culture and reconstructs that association as a product of historical processes of the nineteenth century. It takes as its explicit focus the changing perception of female infanticide in Chinese history, rather than its practice. Without diminishing the seriousness of the problem of excess female mortality in either the Chinese present or past, this book seeks to disrupt the familiar, shopworn narrative about the continuity of female victimhood in China from the premodern era to the present, and to introduce the possibility of historical change. Historically the nature of infanticide in China has evolved from a general trend analogous to trends of infanticide and child abandonment in other parts of the world, to a distinctly gender-specific and culturally unique phenomenon. This text focuses particularly on the transformation of thought that occurred in the nineteenth-century, and how the lives and bodies of newborn Chinese infant girls came to mean something new and distinct in the early twentieth century, when compare to the nineteenth. If we wish to move beyond an undifferentiated past of Chinese gender discrimination and barbarity, then we need to frame our central question in a radical, new way. This book does not take female infanticide and Chinese culture as a given; instead it asks: just when and how did female infanticide become so Chinese?

Between Iran and Zion analyzes the responses of Iranian Jews to the social, political, and cultural developments of the twentieth century. The book examines their integration into the nation-building projects of the twentieth century (by the first and second Pahlavi monarchs, and then by the postrevolutionary Islamic Republic); it analyzes their various reactions to Zionism from the early twentieth century, through the state years, and until the end of that period; and it analyzes the social and cultural transformations this community underwent in a relatively short period of time, growing from marginal and peripheral community into a prominent and visible one. Between Iran and Zion examines the different groups that constituted this community—for example, the Jewish communists who became prominent activists in the left-wing circles in the 1950s, or the revolutionary organizations that won the community elections in 1978 and participated in the 1979 revolution. It also sheds light on a wide range of responses to Zionism: from religious Zionism in the early 1900s to political Zionism in the 1950s, and a combination of the two from the 1970s onward. Between Iran and Zion shows the rich ethnic, social, and ideological diversity of a religious minority in Iran amid rapid transformations.

This book focuses on the first fifty years of the Ligue des droits de l'homme—the League of the Rights of Man—informed by the recently available archives of the organization. Founded during the Dreyfus affair, the Ligue took as its mandate the defense of human rights in all their forms. The central argument of this book—and the point on which it differs from all other writings on the subject—is that the Ligue often failed to live up to its mandate because of its simultaneous commitment to left-wing politics. By the late 1930s the Ligue was in disarray, and by the 1940s a number of its members opted to defend the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain.

The Transylvanian Question—the struggle between Hungary and Romania for control of Transylvania—seems at first sight a side-show in the story of the Nazi New Order and the Second World War. These two allies of the Third Reich spent much of the war arguing bitterly among themselves over Transylvania's future; Europe's leaders, Germany and Italy, were drawn into their dispute to prevent it from spiraling into a regional war. But precisely as a result of this interaction, the story of the Transylvanian Question offers a new way into the history of the European idea—how state leaders and national elites have interpreted what “Europe” means and what it does. For tucked into the folds of the Transylvanian Question's bizarre genealogy is a secret that no one ever tried to keep, but that has remained a secret nonetheless: small states matter. The perspective of small states puts the struggle for mastery among its Great Powers into a new and perhaps chastening perspective. In short, when we look closely at what people in small states think and how they behave, the history of twentieth-century Europe looks suddenly very different.

The integration of the blind into society has always meant taking on prejudices and inaccurate representations. This anthropological and cultural history introduces us to both real and imaginary figures from the past, uncovering French attitudes towards the blind from the Middle Ages through the first half of the nineteenth century. Much of the book, however, centers on the eighteenth century, the enlightened age of Diderot's emblematic blind man and of the Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, founded by Valentin Haüy, the great benefactor of blind people. The book paints a picture of the blind admitted to the institutions created for them and of the conditions under which they lived, from the officially sanctioned beggars of the medieval Quinze–Vingts to the cloth makers of the Institute for Blind Workers. It has also uncovered their fictional counterparts in an array of poems, plays, and novels. The book concludes with Braille, whose invention of writing with raised dots gave blind people around the world definitive access to silent reading and to written communication.

This book provides an examination of the Muslim notability (begs) and their development of capitalistic enterprises in Eastern Turkestan under the Qing Empire. The begs, the powerful organizers of trade, agriculture, and labor in the oases, needed the empire and its military as a patron of their capitalistic reorganization of the oasis agriculture and the expansion of their access to new markets and resources. The Qing needed the begs as the foundation of imperial security and as partners in revenue extraction from local agriculture and mining development constituencies. However, the capitalistic transformation of the oasis economy created socio-economic tensions between the begs and the rural villagers. From the latter’s ranks, resistance grew in the form of bandits and refugees fleeing into the mountains that surrounded the oases, where these people would amass to form outsider communities. These communities, under the leadership of Sufi holy men (khwaja), eventually engaged in over political action in the early 1800s, which culminated in war against the Qing state. The Qing fell in Central Asia in 1864, as this new crisis deepened after Opium War (1839-42). This book offers a new perspective on Qing imperial history, and also contributes to a revised narrative on the history of global capitalism and imperialism on a truly global scale, and in an interconnected fashion.

This book presents a social history of the National Steel Company (CSN), Brazil's foremost state-owned company and largest industrial enterprise in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on the role the steelworkers played in Brazil's social and economic development under the country's import substitution policies from the early 1940s to the 1964 military coup. Counter to prevalent interpretations of industrial labor in Latin America, where workers figure above all as victims of capitalist exploitation, the book shows that CSN workers held strategic power and used it to reshape the company's labor regime, extracting impressive wage gains and benefits. The book argues that these workers, and their peers in similarly strategic industries, had the power to undermine the state capitalist development model prevalent in the large economies of postwar Latin America.

This book invites the modern reader to follow the histories of colonial Mexican nuns inside the cloisters where they pursued a religious vocation or sought shelter from the world. It provides a complete overview of conventual life, including the early signs of vocation, the decision to enter a convent, profession, spiritual guidelines and devotional practices, governance, ceremonials, relations with male authorities and confessors, living arrangements, servants, sickness, and death rituals. Individual chapters deal with issues such as sexuality and the challenges to chastity in the cloisters, and the little-known subject of the nuns' own writings as expressions of their spirituality. The foundation of convents for indigenous women receives special attention, because such religious communities existed nowhere else in the Spanish empire.

Between 1889 and 1919, Weetman Pearson became one of the world's most important engineering contractors, a pioneer in the international oil industry, and one of Britain's wealthiest men. At the center of his global business empire were his interests in Mexico. While Pearson's extraordinary success in Mexico took place within the context of unprecedented levels of British trade with and investment in Latin America, the book argues that Pearson should be understood less as an agent of British imperialism than as an agent of Porfirian state building and modernization. Pearson was able to secure contracts for some of nineteenth-century Mexico's most important public works projects in large part because of his reliability, his empathy with the developmentalist project of Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, and his assiduous cultivation of a clientelist network within the Mexican political elite. His success thus provides an opportunity to reappraise the role played by overseas interests in the national development of Mexico.

This book tells the story of French statues and monuments that were melted down and shipped to Nazi munitions factories during the Second World War. Beginning with the economic context that led to the destruction of public art, the book goes on to detail the process by which monuments were removed and destroyed and the metal sent to Germany for Hitler's war machine. The most remarkable part of the story is the reaction of the French public to the loss of its artwork. People protested all over France, and many communities took extraordinary measures to save their statues. This protest, and the way the collaborationist Vichy government handled it, sheds light on the complexities of life in wartime France.