Books in the The Wiles Lectures series

Sir George Clark discusses war as a factor for good and ill in European society in the seventeenth century. In particular, he shows how war helped to determine the emergence of modern Europe from a society geographically, politically and doctrinally confused.

This book, a revised and extended version of Professor Davies's 1988 Wiles Lectures, explores the ways in which the kings and aristocracy of England sought to extend their domination over Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

What came before 'postmodernism' in historical studies? By thinking through the assumptions, methods and cast of mind of English historians writing between about 1870 and 1970, this book reveals the intellectual world of the modernists and offers a full analysis of English historiography in this crucial period.

This study attempts to discover the fate of reforming programmes when efforts were made to translate them into reality.

An exploration of the way in which the world was categorized in the medieval period, concentrating on the division between the natural and the supernatural. This book discusses the mentalities of medieval writers and thinkers and raises the question of how to deal with beliefs we may not share.

A unique comparative account of the roots of Communist revolution in Russia and China. Steve Smith examines the changing social identities of peasants who settled in St Petersburg from the 1880s to 1917 and in Shanghai from the 1900s to the 1940s. Russia and China, though very different societies, were both dynastic empires with backward agrarian economies that suddenly experienced the impact of capitalist modernity. This book argues that far more happened to these migrants than simply being transformed from peasants into workers. It explores the migrants' identification with their native homes; how they acquired new understandings of themselves as individuals and new gender and national identities. It asks how these identity transformations fed into the wider political, social and cultural processes that culminated in the revolutionary crises in Russia and China, and how the Communist regimes that emerged viewed these transformations in the working classes they claimed to represent.

This book is an extended version of the Wiles lectures given at the Queen's University, Belfast, in 1954. It illustrates the rise, scope, methods and objectives of the history of historiography. The topics selected for discussion give a general outline of the modern historical movement from the mid-eighteenth century to the contribution of Lord Acton in the late nineteenth century.

Professor G. S. Graham sets broadly and clearly in perspective the limiting factors which permitted British predominance at sea in the nineteenth century. He introduces the British fleet in its European, Atlantic and Indian Ocean contexts and examines the local as well as the general conditions for its superiority.

The main theme of Professor Plucknett's Wiles Lectures is the transition from the local legislation of Anglo-Saxon times to the beginnings of the English common law under feudalism, and especially under Edward I's direction. Professor Plucknett examines the early laws, which were mainly the attempts of perplexed men in a harsh age to fix a value on human life and property.

In his Wiles Lectures for 1977 Professor Roberts examines some of the problems raised by Sweden's brief career as a great power, and seeks to answer some of the questions that flow from them. Were the underlying considerations which prompted the unexpected development geopolitical, or social, or economic? How was it possible to produce the financial resources and the manpower which the enterprise demanded? How far was seventeenth-century Sweden a militarized society? What importance had official propaganda and national myths? Did the consititutional situation help to make an expansionist foreign policy easier? The structure of the empire is next examined: its administration, the ties that held it together, the differing interests of the provinces, the varying responses of the metropolitan power was there, in fact, anything deserving the name of an imperial policy? How did the provinces view the Swedish connexion? In a final chapter the author tries to answer the question why, if Sweden could acquire an empire without undue strain, she could not retain it; why the collapse was so rapid and so total; and whether her career as a great power had real relevance to the country's subsequent history. On almost all these topics little information is available in English, and no comparable treatment of them on this scale exists in any language.

Sir Keith Hancock makes a four-pronged reconnaissance of international relations and, consequently, the prospects of human survival. He begins by discussing total war and 'small wars' and considers the relevance of this discussion, particularly in its economic aspects, to 'the cold war' and its costs.

The Church historian is often required to be a student of dogma as much as of history. It is the complex relationships between history, Church history and theology that Dr Sykes examines, using as illustrations some of the vital issues arising from the revival of interest in Church history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Four hundred years ago the pattern of human life and thought was strikingly different from our own. What main features led to the change in that pattern? Professor Nef suggests that economic history cannot alone give the answer: it must be in terms of changing attitudes and interests as much as in terms of a developing economy and a growing technology.

Politics are not alien to poetry and in his Wiles Lectures Sir Maurice Bowra covered the main lines of European poetry during the first sixty years of the twentieth century in so far as it directly related to politics. He illuminates the three poetical forms with a political influence: the prophetic; the intimate and personal.

An original and challenging 1997 book on the meaning of nationalism, ethnicity and nationhood.

This book sheds new light on the religious and consequently social changes taking place in late antique Rome. The essays in this volume demonstrate that the fourth-century city was a more fluid, vibrant, and complex place than was previously thought.

Prize-winning historian Robert Gildea shows that how empires did not vanish after 1945 but were constantly reinvented as neo-colonialisms. He shows how postwar immigration from the former colonies provoked racism, segregation and exclusion in metropolitan Britain and France and how imperial nostalgia has bedevilled Britain's relations with Europe.

ntellectual eminence apart, what did Kant, Clausewitz, Marx and Engels, and Tolstoy have in common? Professor Gallic argues that they made contributions to 'international theory' - to the understanding of the character and causes of war and of the possibility of peace between nations - which were of unrivalled originality in their own times.

A fresh and readable account of one of the great epochs in European history, this book will appeal to the general reader as well as to students of history and art. This second edition, which has been revised and updated by the author, gives more ample treatment to the 'reception' of the Renaissance in England.

In this magisterial study, Peter Burke explores the social and cultural history of the languages spoken or written in Europe between the invention of printing and the French Revolution, arguing that, from a linguistic point of view, 1450 to 1789 should be regarded as a distinct period. One major theme of the book is the relation between languages and communities (regions, churches, occupations and genders as well as nations) and the place of language as a way of identifying others as well as a symbol of one's own identity. A second, linked theme is that of competition: between Latin and the vernaculars, between different vernaculars, dominant and subordinate, and finally between different varieties of the same vernacular, such as standard languages and dialects. Written by one of Europe's leading cultural historians, this book restores the history of the many languages of Europe in a large variety of contexts.

Written from a geographical perspective, this book provides a new look at Ireland. Professor Evans contends that studies of heritage can assist the documentary historian in reaching a fuller understanding of the distinctive and continuing character of Irish history.

This book analyses the many attempts in Asia and Africa in the third quarter of the twentieth century to create egalitarian rural societies, their failure, and the differentiated rural regimes which, despite landlord abolition, remain there to this day.

This book examines the historical context of the earliest Christian martyrs, and anchors their grisly and often wilful self-sacrifice to the everyday life and outlook of the cities (mostly Greek) of the Roman empire. Throughout, new light is shed on the concept of martyrdom, which has been such a powerful form of dissidence down to the present day.

This book investigates the problems that committed Catholics allegedly faced if they sought careers in state employment under the Third French Republic. It is based on a wide variety of archival sources - ministerial, Masonic, and ecclesiastical archives, including Vatican papers hitherto unused.

Alfred Cobban's The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution is one of the acknowledged classics of post-war historiography. This 'revisionist' analysis of the French Revolution caused a furore on first publication in 1964, challenging as it did established orthodoxies during the crucial period of the Cold War. Cobban saw the French Revolution as central to the 'grand narrative of modern history', but provided a salutary corrective to many celebrated social explanations, determinist and otherwise, of its origins and development. A generation later this concise but powerful intervention was reissued in this 1999 edition with an introduction by Gwynne Lewis, providing students with both a context for Cobban's own arguments, and assessing the course of Revolutionary studies in the wake of The Social Interpretation. This book remains a handbook of revisionism for Anglo-Saxon scholars, and is essential reading for all students of French history at undergraduate level and above.

The business of politics offers us one of the most revealing areas of insight into any society. Sir Moses Finley's exploration of politics in the city states of Greece and republican Rome yields insights into the arenas of political debate which have impacted upon our understanding of the ancient world.

Exposes the distortions systematically introduced by historians through relying on texts without looking at what was and was not written on the body. It shows that in classical Athens, on the basis of visual evidence, the categories advertised in texts do not match those which could be operated in life.

Examining how 'strangers' - settling newcomers as well as settled ethnic and religious minorities - were treated in urban communities between 1000 and 1500, Cities of Strangers explores pathways to citizenship and arrangements for those unlikely to become citizens during a period of formative urban growth and its aftermath in medieval Europe.

Nations and Nationalism since 1780 is Eric Hobsbawm's widely acclaimed and highly readable enquiry into the question of nationalism. Events in the late twentieth century in Eastern Europe and the Soviet republics have since reinforced the central importance of nationalism in the history of the political evolution and upheaval. This second edition has been updated in light of those events, with a final chapter addressing the impact of the dramatic changes that have taken place. Also included are additional maps to illustrate nationalities, languages and political divisions across Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.