Browse

In this broad yet sympathetic survey — ranging from the Crusades to the modern day — this book explores the social, political, and cultural encounters between Britain and Islam. The book looks, for instance, at how reactions against the Crusades led to Anglo-Muslim collaboration under the Tudors, at how Britain posed as defender of Islam in the Victorian period, and at her role in rearranging the Muslim world after 1918. It argues that, contrary to current assumptions, Islamic groups have often embraced Western ideas, including modernization and liberal democracy. The book shows how the difficulties and Islamophobia that Muslims have experienced in Britain since the 1970s are largely caused by an acute crisis in British national identity. In truth, Muslims have become increasingly key participants in mainstream British society — in culture, sport, politics, and the economy.

This book unveils the enduring power of witchcraft, curses, and black magic in modern times. Few topics are so secretive or controversial. Yet, whether in the 1800s or the early 2000s, when disasters struck or personal misfortunes mounted, many Britons found themselves believing in things they had previously dismissed — dark supernatural forces. The book explores the lives of cursed or bewitched people, along with the witches and witch-busters who helped and harmed them. It takes us on a fascinating journey from Scottish islands to the folklore-rich West Country, from the immense territories of the British Empire to metropolitan London. We learn why magic caters to deep-seated human needs but see how it can also be abused, and discover how witchcraft survives by evolving and changing. Along the way, the book examines an array of remarkable beliefs and rituals, from traditional folk magic to diverse spiritualities originating in Africa and Asia. This is a tale of cynical quacks and sincere magical healers, depressed people and furious vigilantes, innocent victims and rogues who claimed to possess evil abilities. Their spellbinding stories raise important questions about the state's role in regulating radical spiritualities, the fragility of secularism and the true nature of magic.

In early modern Britain, belief in prophecies, omens, ghosts, apparitions and fairies was commonplace. Among both educated and ordinary people the absolute existence of a spiritual world was taken for granted. Yet in the eighteenth century such certainties were swept away. Credit for this great change is usually given to science — and in particular to the scientists of the Royal Society. But is this justified? This book argues that those pioneering the change in attitude were not scientists but freethinkers. While some scientists defended the reality of supernatural phenomena, these sceptical humanists drew on ancient authors to mount a critique both of orthodox religion and, by extension, of magic and other forms of superstition. Even if the religious heterodoxy of such men tarnished their reputation and postponed the general acceptance of anti-magical views, slowly change did come about. When it did, this owed less to the testing of magic than to the growth of confidence in a stable world in which magic no longer had a place.

Plague remains the paradigm against which reactions to many epidemics are often judged. This book examines how a major city fought, suffered, and survived the impact of plague. Going beyond traditional oppositions between rich and poor, the book provides a nuanced and more compassionate interpretation of government policies in practice, by recreating the very human reactions and survival strategies of families and individuals. From the evocation of the overcrowded conditions in isolation hospitals to the splendor of religious processions, the book analyzes Florentine reactions within a wider European context to assess the effect of state policies on the city, street, and family. It unearths the forgotten stories of doctors and administrators struggling to cope with the sick and dying, and of those who were left bereft and confused by the sudden loss of relatives.

In Regency England the eldest son usually inherited almost everything while his younger brothers, left with little inheritance, had to make a crucial decision: what should they do to make an independent living? This book begins with an exploration of the complicated relations between siblings during the Regency era, given the privileged position of the eldest son in the family. Not all gentlemen were rich; indeed, many had little money of their own and had to pursue a career. The eldest son would normally inherit the family estate, while the daughters and younger sons would receive no more than a start in life. Inequality was universal and taken for granted. The chapters discuss the career options for younger sons, often with bleak prospects. The book weaves together the stories of many obscure and well-known young men, shedding light on an overlooked aspect of Regency society.

This book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. As the Nazis launched the Holocaust, Lisbon emerged as the best way station for Jews to escape Europe for North and South America. Jewish refugees had begun fleeing the continent in the mid-1930s from ports closer to home. But after Germany defeated Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, and Italy joined the war, all in the spring of 1940, Lisbon became the port of departure from Europe. Jewish refugees from western and eastern Europe aimed for Portugal. An emotional history of fleeing, the book probes how specific locations touched refugees' inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation.

This book explores the subtle transformation of the coastal province of the Languedoc in the eighteenth century. Mining a wealth of archival sources, the book unveils how provincial elites and peasant households unwittingly created new practices. Managing local political institutions, establishing new credit systems, building networks of natural historians, and introducing new plants and farm machinery to the region opened up the inhabitants of the province to new norms and standards. The practices were gradually embedded in daily life and allowed the province to negotiate the new worlds of industrial society and capitalism.

Today, the portrait of the Pacific Islander, Mai, painted by Joshua Reynolds is world-renowned as a symbol of empire and of the eighteenth century. But Reynolds painted other visitors from the New World, now forgotten. One especially haunting portrait was of a Cherokee warrior called Ostenaco, who visited Britain a dozen years before Mai. This book is less about Reynolds’s portraits than the full, complicated, and richly illuminating lives behind them. It tells the whole life story of Mai, the refugee from Ra‘iatea who voyaged with James Cook to London in the 1770s and returned home again to seek vengeance on his neighboring Islanders. It traces, for the first time, the entire biography of Ostenaco, who grew up in the southern Appalachians, engaged with colonists throughout his adulthood, and became entangled with imperial politics in complex ways during the American Revolution. And it reveals the experiences of the painter who encountered both Indigenous visitors, Reynolds himself—an artist often celebrated as a founder of modern British art but rarely seen as a figure of empire. This book interweaves all three parallel and otherwise unconnected lives together, explaining their links but also exposing some of the extraordinary diversity of the eighteenth-century world. It shows that Indigenous people pushed back and shaped European expansion far more than is acknowledged. It also reveals how much more conflicted Britons were about their empire in this era than is assumed, even while they witnessed its reach into every corner of the globe.