Books in the New Perspectives on the Past series

This updated edition of Ernest Gellner's classic exploration of the roots of nationalism includes an extended introduction from John Breuilly, tracing the way the field has changed over the past two decades. * As pertinent today as it was when it was first published in 1983.

The History of the Family concerns the changing interactions between family and social, political and religious structures over the last thousand years of European history. The family is usually described in terms of patterns of kinship, inheritance, and relations between sexes and generations.

From despots to powerless figureheads, and from the Neolithic era to the present, this book traces the history of kingship around the world and the tenacity of its connection with the sacred.

This study traces the development of the concept of sociocultural evolution, and relates how it is currently understood, and misunderstood, to the major political and cultural debates of the present day. It examines issues relating to neo-conservative socioeconomic policy and postmodernism.

One would not normally expect students of biology to dissect frogs without prior knowledge of frog anatomy; yet students of history are regularly expected to analyse pre--modern institutions and events without any prior knowledge whatsoever of the general anatomy of pre--industrial societies.

Drawing material from the ancient and medieval worlds, Africa and the Americas, this book discusses slavery's economic role and the significance of kin, ethnicity, race, and religious and moral ideas in the structuring, maintenance and dissolution of slave societies.

This work offers an analysis of the underlying grammar or "logic" of "culture". Ray argues that the disparate models, ideologies, and ethics that have been advanced in the name of culture derive from a shift in our ways of thinking that occurred before the advent of modernity.

In this original and timely work, David Arnold draws upon the history of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, to explain the origins and characteristics of famine. He considers whether some societies are more vulnerable to famine than others, and contests the assumption that those affected by famine are simply passive a victimsa .