In this volume, Mr Runciman has selected extracts, from Max Weber's writings which reflect the full range of his major concerns: the nature of domination in human society, the role of ideas in history, the social determinants of religion, the origin and impact of industrial capitalism and the scope and limits of social science itself. He has also included some shorter extracts from Weber's less familiar writings on such diverse topics as the stock exchange and the history of the piano.

Categories of analysis in the social sciences include the binary pair 'nature' and 'culture', as defined by western societies. Anthropologists have often imputed these categories to the world-views of non-western people and the construct has acquired the status of a universal. It has been further argued that culture (that which is regulated by human thought and technology) is universally valued as being superior to nature (the unregulated); and that female is universally associated with nature (and is therefore inferior and to be dominated) and male with culture. The essays in this volume question these propositions. They examine the assumptions behind them analytically and historically, and present ethnographic evidence to show that the dichotomy between nature and culture, and its association with a contrast between the sexes, is a particularity of western thought. The book is a commentary on the way anthropologists working within the western tradition have projected their own ideas on to the thought systems of other peoples. Its form is largely anthropological, but it will have a wide appeal within the social sciences and the humanities, especially among those interested in structuralist thought and women's studies.

Through an investigation of the violence that marked the partition of British India in 1947, this book analyses questions of history and memory, the nationalisation of populations and their pasts, and the ways in which violent events are remembered (or forgotten) in order to ensure the unity of the collective subject - community or nation. Stressing the continuous entanglement of 'event' and 'interpretation', the author emphasises both the enormity of the violence of 1947 and its shifting meanings and contours. The book provides a sustained critique of the procedures of history-writing and nationalist myth-making on the question of violence, and examines how local forms of sociality are constituted and reconstituted, by the experience and representation of violent events. It concludes with a comment on the different kinds of political community that may still be imagined even in the wake of Partition and events like it.

Claude Markovits' book charts the development of two merchant communities in the province of Sind from the precolonial period, through colonial conquest and up to indepedence. Based on previously neglected archival sources, it describes how the communities came to control trading networks throughout the world, throwing light on the nature of these diasporas from South Asia in their interaction with the global economy. This is a sophisticated and accessible book that will appeal to students of South Asia, as well as to colonial historians and economic historians.

In a penetrating account of the evolution of British intelligence gathering in India, C. A. Bayly shows how networks of Indian spies were recruited by the British to secure military, political and social information about their subjects. He also examines the social and intellectual origins of these 'native informants', and considers how the colonial authorities interpreted and often misinterpreted the information they supplied. It was such misunderstandings which ultimately contributed to the failure of the British to anticipate the rebellions of 1857. The author argues, however, that even before this, complex systems of debate and communication were challenging the political and intellectual dominance of the European rulers.

The majority of workers in South Asia are employed in industries that rely on manual labour and craft skills. Some of these industries have existed for centuries and survived great changes in consumption and technology over the last 150 years. In earlier studies, historians of the region focused on mechanized rather than craft industries, arguing that traditional manufacturing was destroyed or devitalized during the colonial period, and that 'modern' industry is substantially different. Exploring new material from research into five traditional industries, Tirthankar Roy's book contests these notions, demonstrating that while traditional industry did evolve during the Industrial Revolution, these transformations had a positive rather than destructive effect on manufacturing generally. In fact, the book suggests, the major industries in post-independence India were shaped by such transformations. Tirthankar Roy's book offers penetrating insights into India's economic and social history.

Robert Travers' analysis of British conquests in late eighteenth-century India shows how new ideas were formulated about the construction of empire. After the British East India Company conquered the vast province of Bengal, Britons confronted the apparent anomaly of a European trading company acting as an Indian ruler. Responding to a prolonged crisis of imperial legitimacy, British officials in Bengal tried to build their authority on the basis of an 'ancient constitution', supposedly discovered among the remnants of the declining Mughal Empire. In the search for an indigenous constitution, British political concepts were redeployed and redefined on the Indian frontier of empire, while stereotypes about 'oriental despotism' were challenged by the encounter with sophisticated Indian state forms. This highly original book uncovers a forgotten style of imperial state-building based on constitutional restoration, and in the process opens up new points of connection between British, imperial and South Asian history.

This path-breaking work on the social and economic history of colonial India traces the evolution of north Indian towns and merchant communities from the decline of Mughal dominion to the consolidation of British empire following the 1857 'mutiny'. C.A. Bayly analyses the response of the inhabitants of the Ganges Valley to the upheavals in the eighteenth century that paved the way for the incoming British. He shows how the colonial enterprise was built on an existing resilient network of towns, rural bazaars, and merchant communities; and how in turn, colonial trade and administration were moulded by indigenous forms of commerce and politics. This edition comes with a new introduction.

During the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, arguably the most radical revolution of the modern world, slaves and former slaves succeeded in ending slavery and establishing an independent state. Yet on the Spanish island of Cuba barely fifty miles distant, the events in Haiti helped usher in the antithesis of revolutionary emancipation. When Cuban planters and authorities saw the devastation of the neighboring colony, they rushed to fill the void left in the world market for sugar, to buttress the institutions of slavery and colonial rule, and to prevent "another Haiti" from happening in their own territory. Freedom's Mirror follows the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba, where the violent entrenchment of slavery occurred at the very moment that the Haitian Revolution provided a powerful and proximate example of slaves destroying slavery. By creatively linking two stories - the story of the Haitian Revolution and that of the rise of Cuban slave society - that are usually told separately, Ada Ferrer sheds fresh light on both of these crucial moments in Caribbean and Atlantic history.
Winner, 2015 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University
Freedom's Mirror offers "a fresh perspective and links these two nations together in a complex web, in which sugar slavery declined in Haiti just as it rose in Cuba," commented the jury. "Ferrer's research is most impressive, she fills her pages with proslavery Cuban generals, African slaves in both colonies, refugee 'French Negroes,' and Haitian leaders who hoped to weaken slavery on the islands that surrounded them.Freedom's Mirror will force even specialists to reconsider this era," At the same time, "one of Ferrer's greatest successes is her rendering of the complex politics in a beautifully written and understandable way that will be readily followed by readers with minimal knowledge of nineteenth-century Cuba, Haiti, and the Spanish Caribbean."
The Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field of slavery and abolition by honoring outstanding books on the subject. The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers, and orators of the nineteenth century.
Winner, 2015 Friedrich Katz Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in Latin American History
Ada Ferrer has crafted a work of remarkable insight and methodological brilliance. Many evoke Haiti's hemispheric significance as an impulse for liberation and conservative re-entrenchment; no one so meticulously traces the interdependencies of freedom and enslavement, incorporating diplomatic, military, and social history as well as extraordinarily imaginative textual analysis. Ferrer's chapter on the Aponte rebellion is a tour de force, ingeniously unraveling the enigmatic strands that bound Haiti, Cuba, and the African diaspora in the Age of Revolution.
Winner, 2015 James Rawley Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in Atlantic World History
Winner, 2015, Wesley Logan Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in the History of the African Diaspora
Winner, 2015, Haiti Illumination Prize from the Haitian Studies Association for the best book in Haitian Studies
Honorable Mention, PROSE Award in European and World History, Association of American Publishers

A Concise History of Modern India by Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, has become a classic in the field since it was first published in 2001. As a fresh interpretation of Indian history from the Mughals to the present, it has informed students across the world. In the third edition of the book, a final chapter charts the dramatic developments of the last twenty years, from 1990 through the Congress electoral victory of 2009, to the rise of the Indian high-tech industry in a country still troubled by poverty and political unrest. The narrative focuses on the fundamentally political theme of the imaginative and institutional structures that have successively sustained and transformed India, first under British colonial rule and then, after 1947, as an independent country. Woven into the larger political narrative is an account of India's social and economic development and its rich cultural life.

Over a period of several centuries, Europeans developed an intricate system of plantation agriculture overseas which was quite different from the agricultural system used at home. Though the plantation complex centered on the American tropics, its influence was much wider. Much more than an economic order for the Americas, the plantation complex had an important place in world history. These essays concentrate on the intercontinental impact.

What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta. The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Burma was among the most prosperous territories in the East. Yet since gaining independence in 1948, its economy has struggled. Burma's developmental failure has often been attributed to gross mismanagement of the economy by the military who took power in 1962 but in this illuminating book, Ian Brown, one of the leading economic historians of Southeast Asia, provides a fresh examination of the country's economic past, thereby setting that failure in the context of the colonial period. For the first time, a review of Burma's economic experience in the final decades of British rule is integrated with an analysis of its economy since independence, providing a detailed understanding of the complex origins of Burma's economic failure in the second half of the twentieth century. This is a compelling introduction to Burma's political and economic history for students in Southeast Asian history, development studies and political science.

Few milestones in human history are as dramatic and momentous as the meeting of three great civilizations on American soil in the sixteenth century. Latin America in Colonial Times presents that story in an engaging but scholarly new package, revealing how a new civilization – Latin America – emerged from that encounter. The authors give equal attention to the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and settlers, to the African slaves they brought across the Atlantic, and to the indigenous peoples whose lands were invaded. From the dawn of empires in the fifteenth century, through the conquest age of the sixteenth, to the end of empire in the nineteenth, Latin America in Colonial Times combines broad brush strokes with the anecdotal details that bring the era to life.