What is the Irish nation? Who is included in it? Are its borders delimited by religion, ethnicity, language, or civic commitment? And how should we teach its history? These and other questions are carefully considered by distinguished historian Hugh F. Kearney in Ireland: Contested Ideas of Nationalism and History. The insightful essays collected here all circle around Ireland, with the first section attending to questions of nationalism and the...

What was the fight for Africa's independence all about? Was it just about majority rule? Was it to replace foreign economic and political systems with home-grown African systems or for Africa to remain with and/or adopt foreign systems? In "African Nationalism", the late African freedom fighter Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole presents a compelling account of why Africans sought their independence and his vision of a system that would be ideal for Africa's...

Is ethnicity a result of cultural differences? Is ethnicity dependent on the practical use and belief in cultural differences? Drawing on a wide-range of classic and recent studies in anthropology and sociology, Thomas Hylland Eriksen examines the relationship between ethnicity, class, gender and nationhood. Using the question 'What is ethnicity?' as his starting point, Eriksen examines the interplay between ideology and ethnicity, how the Internet...

A timely history of the world spanning every continent, religion and era, told through the creation and destruction of 21 Statues. The statues range from the iconic to the unknown, from Hatshepsut in Ancient Egypt to statues destroyed in 2020 including Cecil Rhodes (Cape Town), George Washington (Portland) and Edward Colston (Bristol). Statues represent our ideals and our imperfections, our heroes and our villains, those we love and those we hate....

Why are some territorial partitions accepted as the appropriate borders of a nation's homeland, whereas in other places conflict continues despite or even because of division of territory? In Homelands, Nadav G. Shelef develops a theory of what homelands are that acknowledges both their importance in domestic and international politics and their change over time. These changes, he argues, driven by domestic political competition and help explain the...

The Middle East plays a major role in the history of genetic science. Early in the twentieth century, technological breakthroughs in human genetics coincided with the birth of modern Middle Eastern nation-states, who proclaimed that the region's ancient history-as a cradle of civilizations and crossroads of humankind-was preserved in the bones and blood of their citizens. Using letters and publications from the 1920s to the present, Elise K. Burton...

The election of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) to power in Bolivia in 2006 marked a historic break from centuries of foreign domination and indigenous marginalisation. Evo Morales, leader of the MAS, became the first indigenous president of Bolivia. Kepa Artaraz looks at the Morales' government's attempt to 'refound the nation'. He shows how the mix of Marxism, indigenous liberation politics, anti-imperialism and environmentalism has made...

Africa in Fragments is one of a few texts to tackle many topics on the position and challenges of Africa, its peoples, and its diaspora in the world today. It is, part of a new genre that makes old and new academic debates on the problems and predicaments of Africanness accessible to a broad spectrum of audiences while outlining and defending the author's own compelling arguments. This book is also one of a few texts breaking new ground by bringing...

Globalization has brought with it many difficult and contradictory phenomena: violence, deep national insecurities, religious divisions and individual insecurities. This book takes a critical look at three key areas - globalism, nationalism, and state-terror - to confront common mythologies and identify the root causes of the problems we face. Too many commentators still argue that globalization is predominantly a neo-liberal economic phenomenon;...

Jerry Z. Muller is professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. His previous books include Adam Smith in His Time and Ours (Princeton). His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. How the fate of the Jews has been shaped by the development of capitalism The unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial...