First published in 1977, France 1870-1914 combines an outline of events with an analytical treatment of the main political institutions and forces of the Third Republic, relating them to their social context. After an introductory narrative chapter, Dr Anderson discusses the social bases of politics, regional variations in political behaviour, parties and political leadership, and the parliamentary system. There are sections on the Republicans and Radicals, the Right, and the working-class movement, and a separate chapter is devoted to foreign and colonial policy. The success of the Third Republic as a working political system and a distinctive form of parliamentary democracy is emphasized. The author also provides a framework of interpretative ideas which makes the book stimulating as well as informative. This is a must read for scholars and researchers of French history and French politics.
An examination of France's presence in the South Pacific after the takeover of Tahiti. It places the South Pacific in the context of overall French expansion and current theories of colonialism and imperialism and evaluates the French impact on Oceania.
'A magnum opus, an accessible and genuinely global history ... This is a book for today and tomorrow' Financial Times Capitalist enterprise has existed in some form since ancient times, but the globalization and dominance of capitalism as a system began in the 1860s when, in different forms and supported by different political forces, states all over the world developed their modern political frameworks: the unifications of Italy and Germany, the establishment of a republic in France, the elimination of slavery in the American south, the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the emancipation of the serfs in Tsarist Russia. This book magnificently explores how, after the upheavals of industrialisation, a truly global capitalism followed. For the first time in the history of humanity, there was a social system able to provide a high level of consumption for the majority of those who lived within its bounds. Today, capitalism dominates the world. With wide-ranging scholarship, Donald Sassoon analyses the impact of capitalism on the histories of many different states, and how it creates winners and losers by constantly innovating. This chronic instability, he writes, 'is the foundation of its advance, not a fault in the system or an incidental by-product'. And it is this instability, this constant churn, which produces the anxious triumph of his title. To control or alleviate such anxieties it was necessary to create a national community, if necessary with colonial adventures, to develop a welfare state, to intervene in the market economy, and to protect it from foreign competition. Capitalists needed a state to discipline them, to nurture them, and to sacrifice a few to save the rest: a state overseeing the war of all against all. Vigorous, argumentative, surprising and constantly stimulating, The Anxious Triumph gives a fresh perspective on all these questions and on its era. It is a masterpiece by one of Britain's most engaging and wide-ranging historians.
Since its publication in 1967, Burden of Empire has been widely praised and criticized for its controversial approach to the problem of colonialism in Africa. The authors have challenged the new "orthodoxy" about Africa—the belief that little but evil and exploitation has resulted from the era of European colonialism.
A new edition of this best-selling collection of essays by leading experts on historical methodology. Since its first publication in 1992, New Perspectives on Historical Writing has become a key reference work used by students and researchers interested in the most important developments in the methodology and practice of history. For this new edition, the book has been thoroughly revised and updated and includes an entirely new chapter on environmental history. Peter Burke is joined here by a distinguished group of internationally renowned historians, including Robert Darnton, Ivan Gaskell, Richard Grove, Giovanni Levi, Roy Porter, Gwyn Prins, Joan Scott, Jim Sharpe, Richard Tuck, and Henk Wesseling. The contributions examine a wide range of interdisciplinary areas of historical research, including women's history, history &"from below,&" the history of reading, oral history, the history of the body, microhistory, the history of events, the history of images, and political history.
Colonial Cambodia's "Bad Frenchmen" provides a captivating analysis of the gradual establishment of French colonialism in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on new materials from French, Vietnamese and Cambodian archives, it reconstructs a time during which France struggled to give meaning and substance to its Protectorate over Cambodia. It traces the lives of failed colonists – most notably Thomas Caramen, who all constituted a challenge to the colonial enterprise by muddling its social, cultural and racial boundaries. In its consideration of the critical role played by these colonists, this compelling book shifts away from governor-generals, grand discourses and the simple view of colonialism as ‘colonizers’ versus ‘colonized’, to explore how things actually worked themselves out on the ground. It examines in particular the 'civilizing mission' and educational initiatives; the slow destruction of the indigenous justice system; the policing of sexual relations between colonisers and colonized; the theft of Cambodian land and taxes by the colonizing power; and the brutal repression of resistance wherever and whenever it appeared. Overall, Muller reveals the crucial role played by indigenous middlemen and marginal Europeans in the rise of the colonial state, and tells the fascinating tale of a Frenchman who came to represent everything that the colonial state dreaded.
