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How did Latin Americans represent their own countries as modern? By treating modernity as a ubiquitous category in which ideas of progress and decadence are far from being mutually exclusive, this book explores how different groups of intellectuals, between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, drew from European sociological and medical theories to produce a series of cultural representations based on notions of degeneration. Through a comparative analysis of three country case studies − Argentina, Uruguay and Chile − the book investigates four themes that were central to definitions of Latin American modernity at the turn of the century: race and the nation, the search for the autochthonous, education, and aesthetic values. It takes a transnational approach to show how civilisational constructs were adopted and adapted in a postcolonial context where cultural modernism foreshadowed economic modernisation. In doing this, this work sheds new light on the complex discursive negotiations through which the idea of ‘Latin America’ became gradually established in the region.

This book provides an exhaustive reading of the significant yet understudied intellectual review Lignes, from 1987 to 2017, to demonstrate how it has managed to preserve and develop the legacy of French radical thought often referred to as ‘French Theory’ or ‘la pensée 68’. Whilst many studies on intellectual reviews from the 1930s to the 1980s exist, this book crucially illuminates the shifting intellectual and political culture of France since the 1980s, filling a major gap in contemporary debates on the continued relevance of French intellectuals. This book provides a strong counter-narrative to the received account that, after the anti-totalitarian ‘liberal moment’ of the late 1970s, Marxism and structuralism were completely banished from the French intellectual sphere. It provides the historical context behind the rise of such internationally renowned thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière Jean-Luc Nancy, whilst placing them within an intellectual genealogy stretching back to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot in the 1930s. The book also introduces the reader to lesser known but nonetheless significant thinkers, including Lignes editor Michel Surya, Dionys Mascolo, Daniel Bensaïd, Fethi Benslama, Anselm Jappe and Robert Kurz. Through the review’s pages, a novel cultural history of France emerges as intellectuals respond to pressing contemporary issues, such as the fall of Communism, the European migrant crisis and rising nationalist tensions, the globalisation of financial capitalism and the 2008 economic crisis, scandals surrounding paedophilia and the return of religious thought to France, as well as debates on literature and the political value of art.

This volume is dedicated to Maritime Business History, by means of commemorating the career of Professor Peter Neville Davies, a prominent member of the Economic and Social History department of the University of Liverpool (a career spanning the dates 1964-1992). The volume is divided into four sections. The first is a tribute and appreciation of Professor Davies, which also acts as an introduction to his work for unfamiliar readers. The second section focuses on business aspects of British maritime history, with particular attention to the impact of British shipping overseas, and the rise and decline of shipbuilding industries. The third section is specific to Liverpool and Merseyside, and explores the local maritime history of the area, including trade with the Mediterranean, local shipbuilding, the Mersey port system, and nautical archaeology. The final section explores subjects within international maritime history, particularly within Norway and America. All essays and topics covered aim to collectively and significantly develop the field of maritime business history, and all are directly related to Professor Davies' academic interests, as a means of celebrating Professor Davies own accomplishments during his career. The journal concludes with a comprehensive bibliography of Professor Davies' work.

In 1771 Joseph Banks, John Fothergill and other wealthy collectors sent a talented, self-taught naturalist to Sierra Leone to collect all things rare and curious, from moths to monkeys. The name of this collector was Henry Smeathman, an ingenious and enterprising Yorkshireman keen on improving his position in the world. His expedition to the West African coast, which coincided with a steep rise in British slave trading in this area, lasted four years during which time he built a house on the Banana Islands, married several times into the coast’s ruling dynasties, and managed to negotiate the tricky life of a ‘stranger’ bound to landlords and local customs. In this book, which draws on a rich and little-known archive of journals and letters, Coleman retraces Smeathman’s life and his attitudes to slavery, both African and European, as he shuttled between his home on the Bananas and two key Liverpool trading forts—Bunce Island and the Isles de Los. In the logistical challenges of tropical collecting and the dispatch of specimens across the middle passage we see the close connection forged in this period between science, collecting, and slavery. The book also reproduces and discusses Smeathman’s essay describing his journey on a fully slaved ship from West Africa to Barbados, a unique account because it is written by a passenger unconnected to the slave trade. After four years in the West Indies observing plantation slavery Smeathman returned to England to write his ‘Voyages and Travels’.

This book reconsiders the career of an important, controversial, but neglected figure in this history of Irish Presbyterianism. The Revd Isaac Nelson is mostly remembered for his opposition to the evangelical revival of 1859, but this book demonstrates that there was much more to Nelson’s career. Nelson started out as a protégé of Henry Cooke and as an exemplary young evangelical minister. Upon aligning himself with the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society and joining forces with American abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Nelson emerged as a powerful voice against compromise with slaveholders. One of the central objectives of this book is to show that anti-slavery, especially his involvement with the ‘Send Back the Money’ controversy in the Free Church of Scotland and the debate over fellowship with slaveholders at the Evangelical Alliance, was crucially important to the development of Nelson into one of Irish Presbyterianism’s most controversial figures. His later opposition to the 1859 Revival has often been understood as being indicative of Nelson’s opposition to evangelicalism. This book argues that such a conclusion is mistaken and that Nelson opposed the Revival as a Presbyterian evangelical. His later involvement with the Land League and the Irish Home Rule movement, including his tenure as the Member of Parliament for County Mayo, could be easily dismissed as an entirely discreditable affair. While avoiding romantic nostalgia in relation to Nelson’s nationalism, this book argues that Nelson’s basis for advocating Home Rule was not as peculiar as it might first appear.

Overseas department of France in Amazonia and ‘ultraperipheral region’ of the EU, Guyane (French Guiana) is at the juncture of Europe, the Caribbean and South America. This collection of essays explores historical and conceptual locations of Guyane, as a relational space characterised by dynamics of interaction and conflict between the local, the national and the global. Does Guyane have, or has it had, its own place in the world, or is it a borderland which can only make sense in relation to elsewhere: to France and its colonial history, for example, or to African and other diasporas, or as a ‘margin’ of Europe? This edited collection will be the first volume to study Guyane from multiple historical and contemporary perspectives. It subjects the enduring clichés and negative stereotypes regarding Guyane to critical examination. It addresses how and why discourse on this DOM has come to be characterised by paradoxes and lacunae, and suggests ways in which this can be redressed. Chapters explore geographical, literary and cultural ‘locations’ of Guyane, past and present. They challenge its relegation to the ‘periphery’, whilst also historicising the production of its marginal status.  Finally, the collection aims to outline possible future directions for research on Guyane.

This volume collects eight essays that all attempt to answer two key concerns: did markets for seafarers exist in the age of sail; and, if so, were these markets efficient? The question was initially approach by Charles Kindleberger, who claims a market is efficient if it permits free access for employer and employee, is supply and demand match balance so that wages increase, and that labour must command the same price across the market. The first four focus on the broadly defined early-modern period, and all agree on the existence of the markets but are divided over whether or not they are efficient. The second section asks the same questions of the nineteenth century, and receives similar answers. All of the essays take issue with the definition and application of the term ‘efficiency’ when approaching their conclusions. Each author is considered an expert within their field, and all base their research on the North Atlantic.

Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France offers a critical assessment of the ways in which French writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists descended from immigrants from former colonial territories bring their specificity to bear on the bounds and applicability of French republicanism, “Frenchness” and national identity, and contemporary cultural production in France.

Reframing Irish Youth in the Sixties focuses on the position of youth in the Republic of Ireland at a time when the meaning of youth was changing internationally. It argues that the reformulation of youth as a social category was a key element of social change. While emigration was the key youth issue of the 1950s, in this period young people became a pivotal point around which a new national project of economic growth hinged. Transnational ideas and international models increasingly framed Irish attitudes to young people’s education, welfare and employment. At the same time Irish youths were participants in a transnational youth culture that appeared to challenge the status quo. This book examines the attitudes of those in government, the media, in civil society organisations and religious bodies to youth and young people, addressing new manifestations of youth culture and new developments in youth welfare work. In using youth as a lens, this book takes an innovative approach that enables a multi-faceted examination of the sixties, providing fresh perspectives on key social changes and cultural continuities.

Socialism and the Diasporic ‘Other’ simultaneously examines how left-wing politics functioned within the diasporic communities and how Irish and Jewish populations were viewed by the wider socialist and trade union movements. It discusses the similarities and differences in how politics and communal dynamics were apparent in the Irish and Jewish East Ends, and the relationships formed between Irish and Jewish women, men and children in numerous contexts. It also compares the structures and agendas of the Jewish and Catholic metropolitan hierarchies, and how communal leaderships attempted to maintain control over working class migrant communities. The book emphasises the lack of consistency in progressive attitudes towards ethnic and religious minorities in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, and the use of ethnic difference as a way of demarcating political space in an often chaotic and fractured London left. It argues that there were two key major differences in the ways in which communal politics functioned in Jewish and Irish Catholic East London, the first based around the nature of hierarchical authority, and the second on how class relations manifested themselves in the communities. It roots the divergent paths that Jewish and Irish communal East End politics took before the First World War in these differences.

Two Irelands beyond the Sea: Ulster Unionism and America, 1880-1920 uncovers the transnational movement by Ireland’s unionists as they worked to maintain the Union with Great Britain during the Home Rule era of Irish history. Overshadowed by Irish-American nationalist relations, this transnational movement attempted to bridge the Atlantic to gain support for unionism from the United States. During the Home Rule era, unionists were anxious about Irish-American extremism, apprehensive of American involvement in the Irish question, and eagerly sought support for their own movement. Two Irelands beyond the Sea explores the political, social, religious, and ethnic connections between Irish unionists and the United States as unionists appealed to Americans for backing and reacted to Irish nationalism. The role of the United States in unionist political thought is also investigated, as unionists used American history, political systems, and Scotch-Irish ethnic traditions to bring legitimacy to their own movement. This examination drives the study of Irish unionism into a new arena, illustrating that Irish unionists were much more internationally-focused than generally portrayed. Two Irelands beyond the Sea challenges our understanding of Irish unionism by revealing the many ways in which unionists reached out to the United States, sought international support, and constructed their own image of America to legitimize the unionist movement.