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The reign of James II was a dramatic failure in Wales. He became King when Welsh loyalty to the crown and church was strong. But his attacks on the church and his own adherents in Wales meant that loyalty to him quickly drained away. James’s treatment of the Welsh gentry, lawyers and politicians stimulated a spirit of opposition that strengthened as his Catholicising policies became more strident. Clergy members were at the forefront of resistance to the King; Bishop William Lloyd of St Asaph became one of the conspirators who sought to overthrow James and replace him with William of Orange; and, when it came, the Revolution of 1688 was much more turbulent in Wales than in England. This comprehensive study of a ruined reign shows the ways in which opinion turned against James in Wales, providing an account of a neglected period in Welsh history.

The extraordinary civilization of ancient Egypt could not have existed without the Nile, which rises in the Ethiopian Highlands and sub-Saharan Africa. In life, the ancient Egyptians were tied to an area of at most a few kilometres either side of the great river. Even in death, the Ancient Egyptians where never far from the river. Many of the most famous archaeological sites – the pyramids at Giza, the Valley of the Kings, the step pyramid at Saqqara, and the royal cult temples at Deir al-Bahri – lie within, beside, or on top of the cliffs created by the immense past flows of the River Nile. Ancient Egypt: A Journey Down the Nile follows the course of the river from south to north, illuminating ancient Egyptian history through the patchwork of temples, tombs and pyramids to either side. The Egyptian state began with unification under southern Egyptian kings around 3100 BC and it started its final decline in the north around the great city of Alexandria, established in 331 BC by Alexander the Great. Engaging and illustrated throughout with more than 180 photographs, Ancient Egypt: Journey Down the Nile is a vivid pictorial exploration of 4,000 years of Ancient Egyptian civilization from the river that gave life to the region.

The ancient Near East is known as the "cradle of civilization" - and for good reason. Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia were home to an extraordinarily rich and successful culture. Indeed, it was a time and place of earth-shaking changes for humankind: the beginnings of writing and law, kingship and bureaucracy, diplomacy and state-sponsored warfare, mathematics and literature.This Very Short Introduction offers a fascinating account of this momentous time in human history. The three thousand years covered here - from around 3500 BCE, with the founding of the first Mesopotamian cities, to the conquest of the Near East by the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE-represent a period of incredible innovation, from the invention of the wheel and the plow, to early achievements in astronomy, law, and diplomacy. As historian Amanda Podany explores this era, she overturns the popular image of the ancient world as a primitive, violent place. We discover that women had many rights and freedoms: they could own property, run businesses, and represent themselves in court. Diplomats traveled between the capital cities of major powers ensuring peace and friendship between the kings. Scribes and scholars studied the stars and could predict eclipses and the movements of the planets.Every chapter introduces the reader to a particular moment in ancient Near Eastern history, illuminating such aspects as trade, religion, diplomacy, law, warfare, kingship, and agriculture. Each discussion focuses on evidence provided in two or three cuneiform texts from that time. These documents, the cities in which they were found, the people and gods named in them, the events they recount or reflect, all provide vivid testimony of the era in which they were written. About the Series:Oxford''s Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

How climate change ushered in the collapse of one of history’s mighty empiresIn 1644, after close to three centuries of relative stability and prosperity, the Ming dynasty collapsed. Many historians attribute its demise to the Manchu invasion of China, but the truth is far more profound. The Price of Collapse provides an entirely new approach to the economic and social history of China, exploring how global climate crisis spelled the end of Ming rule.The mid-seventeenth century witnessed the deadliest phase of the Little Ice Age, when temperatures and rainfall plunged and world economies buckled. Timothy Brook draws on the history of grain prices to paint a gripping portrait of the final tumultuous years of a once-great dynasty. He explores how global trade networks that increasingly moved silver into China may have affected prices and describes the daily struggle to survive amid grain shortages and famine. By the early 1640s, as the subjects of the Ming found themselves caught in a deadly combination of cold and drought that defied all attempts to stave off disaster, the Ming price regime collapsed, and with it the Ming political regime.A masterful work of scholarship, The Price of Collapse reconstructs the experience of ordinary people under the immense pressure of unaffordable prices as their country slid from prosperity to calamity and shows how the market mediated the relationship between an empire and the climate that turned against it.

How late medieval Middle Eastern peasants adopted Arab cultural identities and formed village clansDuring the later Middle Ages, peasants in Egypt and Greater Syria came to view themselves as members of Arab clans that had originated in the Arabian Peninsula. They expressed their Arab identity by wearing Arab headgear, adopting an Arab dialect, and circulating a new genre of popular epic that told heroic tales of pre-Islamic Arabia. In Becoming Arab, Yossef Rapoport argues that this proliferation of Arab village clans did not come about through mass migration and displacement but reflected an internal transformation. Drawing on extensive documentary, literary, administrative, and material evidence, Rapoport shows that the widespread formation of Arab village clans in late medieval Egypt and Greater Syria was a gradual process, the result of mass rural conversion to Islam and a new landholding regime in which peasants shifted from being landowners to being tenants. After the eleventh century, Rapoport contends, Middle Eastern villagers were turning Arab. These Arab village clans were not merely administrative regimes imposed from above; villagers enthusiastically embraced their new identities. New converts to Islam adopted Arab lineages to claim status and as a counter-identity to urban-based Turkish elites. Arab identity was used by clans to mobilize rural uprisings against the ruling sultans and to resolve disputes among villagers. Challenging traditional historiography of the Middle East, which views Arab clansmen as pastoralists whose identity separated them from that of the wider peasantry, Rapoport argues that the pervasive establishment of Arab village clans was the most important development in the history of the Middle Eastern countryside in the Islamic era.

This textbook provides a comprehensive scholarly introduction to Classical Chinese and its texts. Classical Chinese is the language of Confucius and Mencius and their contemporaries, who wrote the seminal texts of Chinese philosophy more than 2,000 years ago. Although it was used as a living language for only a relatively short time, it was the foundation of Chinese education throughout the Imperial age, and formed the basis of a literary tradition that continues to the present day. This book offers students all the necessary tools to read, understand, and analyse Classical Chinese texts, including: step-by-step clearly illustrated descriptions of syntactic features; core vocabulary lists; introductions to relevant historical and cultural topics; selected readings from classical literature with original commentaries and in-depth explanations; introductions to dictionaries and other reference works on the study of ancient China; and a guide to philological methods used in the critical analysis of Classical Chinese texts. The extensive glossary provides phonological reconstructions, word classes, English translations, and citations to illustrate usage, while the up-to-date bibliography serves as a valuable starting point for further research.

For most of their history, the people around the Persian Gulf littoral were socially intertwined and economically interdependent. But the twentieth century ushered in nationalization projects, British imperial intervention, and border regulations, all of which posed challenges to everyday mobility in this oceanic world. Those crossing the water became the primary foil for bordering spaces, restricting and regulating movement, and defining difference more generally. Belonging on Both Shores tells the story of people's struggles to move freely between Iran and the Arab shores of the Gulf as the unregulated mobility that had characterized everyday life in the nineteenth century was increasingly policed in the twentieth.   Using a wide range of Arabic, Persian, and English sources, Lindsey Stephenson demonstrates how state officials refined notions of territorial belonging against the movement of Iranians, the most visible mobile "group" in the Persian Gulf arena. Engaging migrant voices, Stephenson narrates how Iranians challenged a perceived requirement to belong to a single place and highlights the techniques these migrants employed to remain connected to both shores. Tracing the movement of Iranians across and around the Persian Gulf and investigating how the technologies of state and mobility transformed fluidity and people's understanding of movement, this book tells a new story of how the modern Gulf was formed.

Explores the intersection of racial thought and reproductive science and policy across the British Empire. In Generating Difference, Andrew Wells traces the entwined histories of race, sex, and reproduction in Britain and its empire during the long eighteenth century. Challenging the assumption that the concept of race evolved in the modern era solely through new forms of biological science, Wells argues that older ideas of lineage, sexual reproduction, and bodily difference remained central to how race was understood, categorized, and enforced well into the nineteenth century. From the pages of Enlightenment science to colonial policy in the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Pacific, Wells shows how reproductive sex served as a primary framework for defining human differences. Concepts of identity were written onto bodies—especially those marked as non-white or non-male—through perceived differences in anatomy, fertility, and sexuality, albeit never unproblematically. Whether in debates about slavery, interracial relationships, embryology, or population policy, the reproductive body became the crucible in which ideas about race and sex were forged and maintained. Offering a global scope beyond the Atlantic, including South Asia and the Pacific, and drawing from a wide range of sources—from satire to scientific treatises—Generating Difference brings the scholarship of race and sexuality into direct and compelling conversation. Wells uncovers how deeply reproduction structured imperial ideologies and how the policing of bodies helped naturalize hierarchy, control, and exclusion. At its core, the book reconsiders what made difference "visible" in a period before the dominance of the idea of racial biology.

The courtroom drama that denied the legitimacy of slavery in late medieval EuropeIn 1387, a young Muslim woman from North Africa was captured on a galley in the Bay of Naples and brought to Marseille as a slave. For more than ten years, she was held in bondage to a shipwright and privateer named Peire Huguet. Daniel Lord Smail tells the extraordinary story of Magdalena Coline, a woman who dared to file suit against the man who called himself her master, and whose passage from servitude to freedom raises tantalizing questions about how the people of her time made sense of slavery as a social category. In a masterful narrative that takes readers from the waters of the Mediterranean to the court of the Angevin King Louis II, claimant to the throne of Naples, Smail describes how Peire, pressed by Magdalena’s supporters, reluctantly granted her a tacit manumission through her marriage to her first husband, whose death two years later placed her in a state of considerable ambiguity. In 1406, following her second marriage to an immigrant shoemaker, a dispute with Peire exploded in the law courts of Marseille, where it played out over two tumultuous years through numerous suits and appeals. In a dramatic turn of events, Magdalena traveled to the royal court in nearby Aix-en-Provence, where she successfully petitioned the king and returned home victorious. Drawing on court records and an array of other archival sources from the period, Magdalena Coline brings these remarkable legal proceedings vividly to life, shedding new light on the ways slavery was understood and practiced in the late medieval Mediterranean world.

The history of the Mexican Army’s activity in the Texas Revolution is well documented but often hidden away. Many important primary sources have been lost or destroyed, but an impressive amount of period documentation has survived. And yet many of these handwritten, Spanish documents have been shelved in the back rooms of museums and libraries long enough to have been forgotten. Various archives are scattered in locations across Spain, Mexico, and the United States, with very few documents having been translated into English until now. Little can be found in Texan sources that addresses the actions, motivations, and opinions of the Mexican participants in the Texas Revolution. What does exist in Texan accounts was either added in passing or, worse, grossly fabricated. In short, the Texan side of the story has been told, and often at the expense of the perspective of Mexican participants. Author Gregg J. Dimmick makes available this new perspective, including a consideration of the many external forces affecting the Mexican government and its military leaders. At the same time Texans were fighting for independence, Mexican officials faced revolts across several states, battled each other for political control, responded to Spain’s attempts to reacquire Mexico, and contended with numerous foreign powers, including the United States and Britain. In Santa Anna’s Army in the Texas Revolution, 1835 Dimmick sheds new light on the complex motivations of the Mexican Army facing the Texas Revolution.

This comprehensive guide to the flags of the world provides concise, accurate coverage of every country in the world, giving the history, meaning, and symbolism of national flags, together with large-scale and smaller locator maps. The Complete Guide to Flags of the World, 4th Edition includes the history of flags, the colours of flags in over 220 countries and territories, flags of international organizations, large-scale and detailed locator maps for easy reference, up-to-date data and statistics for all countries, information about the history and symbolism of each flag, a section on de facto and emerging states, and a full index. This 4th edition comes with 38 updated flags and new, revised information for all things flags.

Most famously designer of the great Lancaster bomber, Roy Chadwick was one of the most significant personalities in the aviation world in the first half of the twentieth century. His career encompassed both wood-and-fabric biplanes before the Great War and the futuristic delta-winged Vulcan jet bomber. This classic biography by Harald Penrose – himself a significant figure in the development of aviation – tells his fascinating story. Both Roy Chadwick and the author lived through the same contemporary events, so this biography of the great Avro designer not only deals with aircraft evolution but reflects the atmosphere of those days. No sooner was one design under way than Roy Chadwick was imagining the next and the next, totalling some two hundred. They range from initial experience with pre-Great War precursors and the world-famous Avro 504 trainer through a sequence of prototypes including ultra-light aeroplanes, powerful fighters and bombers. In particular the Avro 504 with its 20 variants, the twin-engined Anson and the mighty Lancaster were built in huge numbers. In a swift-moving story Penrose depicts Chadwick’s career through the changing years from the early revelation of flight to his 54th year when he initiated design of the futuristic delta-winged Vulcan, ending with his tragic death in the crash of the Avro Tudor II airliner in 1947.

A lavishly illustrated and meticulously guided excursion through the mapping of historic Palestine from the earliest record through to the twenty-first century.Palestine is as much a place in the psyche of those who mapped it as it is a region of the earth. An authority on the history of cartography who has also written extensively on Palestine, Thomas Suárez is uniquely qualified to address the mapping of this region “from the river to the sea.”Richly illustrated, Palestine Mapped guides the reader through the Greek and Roman concepts of Palestine, those of various medieval Mediterranean civilizations, and the European “Holy Land” mapping that has dominated for half a millennium and continues to inform modern political thought. Suárez dissects that prevailing mindset rather than viewing the land through its lens, setting the book apart from all others on the mapping of the region.

Eastern Poland’s inclusion in the Soviet Union through the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact initiated the local Ukrainian population’s long and bloody resistance to Soviet rule. Even after the end of the Second World War, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) persisted in their fight for an independent Ukrainian state. The continued confrontations between the Ukrainian underground and the Soviet security service lasted until the late 1950s. While existing scholarship has focussed on the political aspects of this conflict, women’s participation in opposing Sovietization is largely ignored. Women in the Ukrainian Underground foregrounds women’s experience in the resistance movement during the conflict with the Soviet secret service between 1944 and 1954. Olena Petrenko describes various methods and waves of women’s mobilization in the OUN and the UPA, and examines women’s role as agents in the underground struggle. The book also considers female sexuality as an instrument of power and gendered experiences of violence. Petrenko’s examination of archival records challenges stereotypes of female insurgents as bloodthirsty, easily compromised, or unthinking subordinates and considers women’s representation in film and literature. Changes in memorialization practices demonstrate how the perception of women’s activities in the nationalist underground has been shaped by competing historical views – in the USSR, among Ukrainian exiles, in post-Soviet Ukraine, and in Russia. Drawing on both Soviet and underground documents, as well as oral histories, Women in the Ukrainian Underground depicts the fates of the individual women involved in fighting communism.

Circumventing the Law probes the rabbinic logic behind the use of loopholes, the legal phenomenon of finding and using gaps within law to achieve otherwise illegal outcomes. The logic of ha'aramah, a subset of rabbinic legal circumventions mostly defined as a tool for private life, underpins both well-known circumventions, such as selling leaven before Passover, and lesser-known mechanisms, such as designating an animal intended for sacrifice "blemished" before birth to allow it to be slaughtered for food instead. Elana Stein Hain traces the development of these loopholes over time, revealing that rabbinic literature does not consistently accept or reject loopholes. Instead, rabbinic Judaism applies categories of evasion (prohibited), avoidance (permitted), and avoision (contested) to loopholes on a case-by-case basis. The intended outcome of a given loophole determines its classification, as does the legal integrity of the circumventive process in question. Yet these understandings of loopholes are not static—instead, rabbinic attitudes toward loopholing change over time. Early works display an objective, performative understanding of the self and of intention, but evolve over time to reflect more subjective and intimate understanding of the self and intention. This evolution redefines what legal integrity means in Jewish legal philosophy. Circumventing the Law brings readers through the Second Temple period to the modern era to see how loopholing has evolved over millennia. With a focus on late antiquity, Stein Hain explores tannaitic literature, the Palestinian Talmud, and contemporaneous Greco-Roman and Persian thought to show that when warranted, Jewish rhetoric and philosophy around understandings of loopholes was a unique phenomenon that relied on changes in understanding the definition of integrity itself, a key finding for scholars of Jewish Studies and of religious and of secular law writ large.

In 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany agreed to a nonaggression treaty named for its signatories, foreign ministers Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Kept hidden from the public was an addendum to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a “secret protocol” whose existence was denied by the Soviet Union until 1992. It defined new borders for German and Soviet spheres of influence, effectively preparing for the partition of Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia. Shortly after signing on August 23, 1939, both the USSR and Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In this volume, Antonella Salomoni scrutinizes this consequential document and its afterlives, focusing predominantly on the discourse that surrounded it. From the moment of the secret protocol’s inception—and the near-instantaneous rumors of its existence—it generated friction and competing narratives. The document became public during the Nuremberg trials, but the USSR declared it a fabrication evidencing the West’s willingness to falsify history. It continues to be relevant to the reconfiguration of history currently advanced by Vladimir Putin. By centering the rumors, accusations, and propaganda the pact precipitated, Salomoni illuminates how political actors can use and abuse history, how they create and disseminate truths and falsehoods, and how they can blur the boundary between facts and fictions even in the glaring face of black-and-white documentation.

Between 1956 and 1963, the United Nations grappled with the "Hungarian question"; namely, what it should do about the events and aftermath of the country''s 1956 Revolution. Cold War tensions, anxieties over the concurrent Suez crisis, and ignorance and indifference about Hungary influenced how UN member states responded to this "internal affair" and its potentially dangerous effects on international relations. Diplomacy and Disregard draws upon previously inaccessible documents, including UN archival materials, Hungarian government and secret service papers, and personal collections held by UN officials across the globe, to reveal the UN''s contradictory rhetorical and practical responses to the Hungarian Revolution. Through detailed overviews alongside case studies of individual diplomats and specific controversies, András Nagy traces the UN''s reactions to Hungarian and Soviet authorities'' blocking of resolutions and denunciation of the UN as an enemy power, its need to use the International Committee of the Red Cross as a channel for its humanitarian aid, and its inability to legitimize revolutionary leaders and allow them to represent and act on Hungary''s behalf. Reports riddled with inconsistencies, failures to call emergency sessions and fulfill information requests, and lackluster responses to known acts of terror and espionage demonstrated that even at its highest levels of leadership, the UN was not only unable to intervene against the Soviet-supported government but was often unwilling to do so. Diplomacy and Disregard provides an unprecedented look at the global reach and consequences of Hungary''s 1956 Revolution and at how the UN''s action and inaction during this political crisis ultimately defined its ability to maneuver the Cold War''s fraught political landscape and live up to the ideals of its charter.

During the American Civil War, clothing became central to the ways people waged war and experienced its cost. Through the clothes they made, wore, mended, lost, and stole, Americans expressed their allegiances, showed their love, confronted their social and economic challenges, subverted expectations, and, ultimately, preserved their history. As collections left behind make clear, Civil War Americans believed clothing was not merely a reflection of one’s class, gender, race, military rank, political ideology, or taste. Instead, from the weave of a fabric to the style and make of a coat, Northerners and Southerners alike understood that clothing had the power to affect people’s way of living through the war’s tumult. In this compelling and well-illustrated history, Sarah Jones Weicksel reveals as never before the meanings of clothing to Civil War Americans. Contributing to the growing body of scholarship on the material culture of the Civil War, Weicksel invites readers to understand the depth of how war penetrated daily life by focusing on the intimate, visceral, material experiences that shaped how people moved through the world.

The French call them ''the Dark Years''...This definitive new history of Occupied France explores the myths and realities of four of the most divisive years in French history.Taking in ordinary people''s experiences of defeat, collaboration, resistance, and liberation, it uncovers the conflicting memories of occupation which ensure that even today France continues to debate the legacy of the Vichy years.