European Modern History

It is a commonplace in biographies of Disraeli (later Lord Beaconsfield) that his attitude to the East and the Eastern Question is essential for understanding his complex persona and the most crucial period of his career, yet until now this topic has not been researched in detail. Disraeli and the Eastern Question now fills this gap, providing the first complete reconstruction of Disraeli's attitudes towards the East and the Eastern Question as a whole, from his early youth onwards, and using a wide range of primary sources, from Disraeli's private papers, correspondence, and novels, the manuscript collections of Queen Victoria and the prime minister's closest associates, to the minutes of parliamentary debates and the official correspondence of the Foreign Office, as well as Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Albanian documents. Blending a biographical approach with the history of ideas, Miloš Ković analyses Disraeli's role in the Eastern Crisis, at the Congress of Berlin, and after, to provide a full intellectual biography of his attitudes to the Eastern Question and how these affected the history of international relations in the late nineteenth century.

Would it have been possible to build a unified and democratic Germany half a century before the fall of the Berlin Wall? This book reassesses this question by exploring Germany's division after World War II from the point of view of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands or SED), the communist-led and Soviet-sponsored ruling party of East Germany. Drawing on unpublished documents from the SED archives, the book rejects claims that the East German comrades and their Soviet masters had abandoned their struggle for socialism and were willing to accept a democratic Germany in exchange for a pledge to neutrality. It argues that the communists' sudden switch to a multi-party approach at the end of the war was a tactical move inspired not by a desire for compromise but by the mistaken belief that they could win political hegemony — and the chance to introduce socialism throughout Germany — through the ballot box. Communist optimism, as this book shows, rested on specific assumptions about the situation after the war, all of which revolved around the prospect of political instability and social unrest in West Germany. The comrades in East Berlin did not just say that their regime would ultimately prevail, they genuinely believed it. Nor should their hopes be dismissed as a mere fantasy. In the aftermath of the war, the economic gap between the two Germanies was still relatively narrow and West Germany's future success as a magnet for the people in East Germany was by no means guaranteed.

Between 1880 and 1914, tens of thousands of men and women left France for distant religious missions, driven by the desire to spread the word of Jesus Christ, combat Satan, and convert the world's pagans to Catholicism. But they were not the only ones with eyes fixed on foreign shores. Just as the Catholic missionary movement reached its apex, the young, staunchly secular Third Republic launched the most aggressive campaign of colonial expansion in French history. Missionaries and republicans abroad knew they had much to gain from working together, but their starkly different motivations regularly led them to view one another with resentment, distrust, and even fear. This book tells the story of how troubled relations between Catholic missionaries and a host of republican critics shaped colonial policies, Catholic perspectives, and domestic French politics in the tumultuous decades before the First World War. With case studies on Indochina, Polynesia, and Madagascar, this book challenges the long-held view that French colonizing and “civilizing” goals were shaped by a distinctly secular republican ideology built on Enlightenment ideals. By exploring the experiences of Catholic missionaries, one of the largest groups of French men and women working abroad, the book argues that colonial policies were regularly wrought in the fires of religious discord — discord which indigenous communities exploited in responding to colonial rule.

This book presents a broad ranging survey of French colonial engagements in the Pacific and Asian worlds of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Multiple studies, each in a different territory, examine French ideas of imperialism as they become manifested through religion, nationalist and patriotic fervour, tropical fantasy, literary and artistic creation, or colonial match-making to shape a distinctly Gallic “Empire of Love” in the Pacific. Successive chapters examine contested colonial sites where the French were present in Tahiti, New Caledonia, and Wallis and Futuna, with analyses of encounter and conflict in France, Panama, Indochina, and Japan. Each chapter focuses on particular Islander, Asian, and French protagonists, from Kanak warriors and Tahitian monarchs, to French penal colony prisoners and Japanese courtesans as they negotiate power relations tied to emotions. All of the chapters are linked together by the politics and writings of the famed naval captain and novelist Pierre Loti.

Since the dawn of history people have used charms and spells to try to control their environment, and forms of divination to try to foresee the otherwise unpredictable chances of life. Many of these techniques were called ‘superstitious’ by educated elites. For centuries, religious believers used ‘superstition’ as a term of abuse to denounce another religion that they thought inferior, or to criticize their fellow-believers for practising their faith ‘wrongly’. From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, scholars argued over what ‘superstition’ was, how to identify it, and how to persuade people to avoid it. Learned believers in demons and witchcraft, in their treatises and sermons, tried to make ‘rational’ sense of popular superstitions by blaming them on the deceptive tricks of seductive demons. Every major movement in Christian thought, from rival schools of medieval theology through to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, added new twists to the debates over superstition. Protestants saw Catholics as superstitious, and vice versa. Enlightened philosophers mocked traditional cults as superstitions. Eventually, the learned lost their worry about popular belief, and turned instead to chronicling and preserving ‘superstitious’ customs as folklore and ethnic heritage. This book offers the first comprehensive, integrated account of Western Europe's long, complex dialogue with its own folklore and popular beliefs. Drawing on many little-known and rarely used texts, the author constructs a compelling narrative of the rise, diversification, and decline of popular ‘superstition’ in the European mind.

It is a cliché that tsarist Russia had two rival capitals: St Petersburg, Russia’s ”window to Europe” and Moscow, the tradition-bound metropolis of the Orthodox heartland. Enlightened Metropolis challenges this myth by examining the tsarist regime’s efforts to turn Moscow into a European city. In the eighteenth century, Europeans scorned Moscow as an ”Asiatic” city, and the tsars thought it a benighted place that endangered their political security and their effort to Westernize their country and gain respect for Russia abroad. Beginning with Catherine the Great, they sought to remake Moscow on the model of St Petersburg by reconstructing its buildings and institutions, fostering a Westernized ”middling sort,” and constructing a new image of Moscow as an enlightened metropolis. Drawing on the methodologies of urban, social, institutional, cultural, and intellectual history, Enlightened Metropolis asks: How was the city’s urban environment—buildings, institutions, streets, smells—transformed in the nine decades from Catherine’s accession to the death of Nicholas I? How did these changes affect the everyday lives of the inhabitants, and did a ”middling sort” in fact come into being? Did Moscow’s urban modernization resemble that of Western cities, and how was it affected by the disastrous occupation by Napoleon in 1812? Lastly, how was Moscow’s modernization interpreted by writers, artists, and social commentators in Russia and the West from the Enlightenment to the mid-nineteenth century?

The importance of early modern monasticism with its cultural and intellectual vigor as well as the plurality of religious Enlightenments are gaining increasing attention among historians. This book investigates the social, cultural, philosophical and theological challenges the German Benedictines had to face between 1740 and 1803 and how the Enlightenment process influenced the self-understanding and lifestyle of these religious communities, their forms of communication, their transfer of knowledge, their relationships to worldly authorities and to the academic world, and also their theology and philosophy. The multifaceted achievements of enlightened monks, which included a strong belief in individual freedom, tolerance, human rights and non-violence show that monasticism was on the way to becoming fully integrated into the Enlightenment. Thus, this book refutes the widespread assumption that monks were reactionary enemies of Enlightenment ideas. On the contrary, the book demonstrates that many Benedictines implemented the new ideas of the time into their own systems of thought. This revisionist account therefore contributes to a better understanding not only of monastic culture in Central Europe, but also of Catholic religious culture in general.