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When it was founded in 1824, the Athenæum broke the mold. Unlike in other preeminent clubs, its members were chosen on the basis of their achievements rather than on their background or political affiliation. Public rather than private life dominated the agenda. The club, with its tradition of hospitality to conflicting views, has attracted leading scientists, writers, artists, and intellectuals throughout its history, including Charles Darwin and Matthew Arnold, Edward Burne-Jones and Yehudi Menuhin, Winston Churchill and Gore Vidal. This book is not presented in the traditional, insular style of club histories, but devotes attention to the influence of Athenians on the scientific, creative, and official life of the nation. From the unwitting recruitment of a Cold War spy to the welcome admittance of women, this lively and original account explores the corridors and characters of the club; its wider political, intellectual, and cultural influence; and its recent reinvention.

This book covers the turbulent period from the 1916 Rising to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 — a period which saw the achievement of independence for most of nationalist Ireland and the establishment of Northern Ireland as a self-governing province of the United Kingdom. Separatists fought for independence against government forces and, in North East Ulster, armed loyalists. Civilians suffered violence from all combatants, sometimes as collateral damage, often as targets. This book catalogues and analyzes the deaths of all men, women, and children who died during the revolutionary years. The book provides a unique and comprehensive picture of everyone who died: in what manner, by whose hands, and why. Through their stories the reader obtains original insight into the Irish revolution itself.

This book is a study of British imperialism's imaginative geography, exploring the pairing of India and the Atlantic world from literature to colonial policy. The book weaves a complex portrait of the imaginative geography of British imperialism. Contrary to most current scholarship, eighteenth-century Britons saw the empire not as separate Atlantic and Indian spheres but as an interconnected whole: the Indies. Crisscrossing the hemispheres, the book traces global histories of race, slavery, and class, from Boston to Bengal. It also reveals the empire to be pervasively present at home, in metropolitan scenes of fashionable sociability. The book reveals how the pairing of the two Indies in discourse helped produce colonial policies that linked them in practice. Combining the methods of literary studies and new imperial history, the book demonstrates how the imaginative geography of the Indies shaped the culture of British imperialism, which in turn changed the shape of the world.

Idi Amin began his career in the British army in colonial Uganda and worked his way up the ranks before seizing power in a British-backed coup in 1971. He built a violent and unstable dictatorship, ruthlessly eliminating perceived enemies and expelling Uganda's Asian population as the country plunged into social and economic chaos. This book places Amin's military background and close relationship with the British state at the heart of the story. It traces the interwoven development of Amin's career and his popular image as an almost supernaturally evil monster, demonstrating the impossibility of fully distinguishing the truth from the many myths surrounding the dictator. Using an innovative biographical approach, the book reveals how Amin was, from birth, deeply rooted in the history of British colonial rule, how his rise was a legacy of imperialism, and how his monstrous image was created.

Early medieval communities were thinking seriously about their environments. They saw themselves as part of a complex and dynamic universe that was propelled by interconnected organisms and forces. In that system, even the smallest creatures or events could have far-reaching consequences. The big picture was tied to hyperlocal circumstances. The people who lived in the early medieval West (in what is now northwest Africa and Europe) brought these perspectives to bear on their farming, policy making, and philosophizing. And pigs were both a means and a motivation for doing this. They were a flexible species that could handle a diversity of ecologies. They illustrated the benefits of being adaptable. But they were also a constant reminder that humans had to adapt to their animals and landscapes: total control or assimilation was unthinkable. Pigs were nearly everywhere in the early medieval West, and they left their hoofprints on laws, politics, philosophy, religion, and even humans’ own sense of themselves.

The old aphorism “possession is nine-tenths of the law” is particularly relevant in Indonesia, which has seen a string of regime changes and a shifting legal landscape for property claims. Ordinary people struggle to legalize their possessions and claim rights in competition with different branches of government, as well as police, army, and private gangs. Some people acquire land, but more seem to lose it when their lack of wealth, knowledge, language, connections, and organization leaves them vulnerable. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but the last tenth, recognition, still matters a great deal. Moreover, recognition often takes the form of legalization, through efforts to make claims and decisions appear legal. And, crucially, this very plausibility of legality can have the effect of law. The book is about how and why people and institutions work to make claims stick by legalizing them: the relationship between legal recognition and possession. The book explores the relationship between possession and legalization across Indonesia, examining the imaginative and improvisational interpretations of law by which Indonesians navigate dispossession.

In Past and Prologue, Michael Hattem shows how colonists’ changing understandings of history shaped the politics of the American Revolution and the origins of American national identity. Between the 1760s and 1800, Americans stopped thinking of the British past as their own history and created a new historical tradition that would form the foundation for what subsequent generations would think of as “American history.” This change was a crucial part of the cultural transformation at the heart of the Revolution by which colonists went from thinking of themselves as British subjects to thinking of themselves as American citizens. Rather than liberating Americans from the past—as many historians have argued—the Revolution actually made the past matter more than ever. Past and Prologue shows how the process of reinterpreting the past and creating a new historical tradition played a critical role in the founding of the nation.

This book to weaves Eurasia together through the perspective of the oceans and seas. Eurasia's emerging powers — India, China, and Russia — have increasingly embraced their maritime geographies as they have expanded and strengthened their economies, military capabilities, and global influence. Maritime Eurasia, a region that facilitates international commerce and contains some of the world's most strategic maritime chokepoints, has already caused a shift in the global political economy and challenged the dominance of the Atlantic world and the United States. Climate change is set to further affect global politics. The book considers how the melting of the Arctic ice cap will create new shipping lanes and exacerbate a contest for the control of Arctic natural resources. It also explores the strategic maritime shifts under way from Europe to the Indian Ocean and Pacific Asia. The race for great power status and the earth's changing landscape, the book shows, are rapidly transforming Eurasia and thus creating a new world order.