History

We are living in a stressful world. Approximately half of all British employees suffer from workplace stress and over 13 million working days are lost through stress each year, costing the economy over £4 billion per annum. Stress has had a similar impact throughout the modern world: in both developed and developing countries, stress is now the most commonly cited cause of sickness absence from work and stress-related conditions, such as depression, heart disease and cancer, constitute a substantial source of personal ill-health and economic burden. Focusing on the evolution of biological and psychological understandings of stress during the twentieth century, The Age of Stress explores the relationship between scientific formulations and personal experiences of stress, on the one hand, and socio-political and cultural contexts, on the other. The book argues that scientific theories of stress and disease were strongly influenced not only by laboratory studies of homeostasis, but also by wider social, cultural and intellectual currents: the impact of economic depression during the inter-war years; modernist commitments to social reform; concerns about the consequences of military conflict during and after the Second World War; fluctuating global anxieties about political instability and the threat of terrorism during the Cold War; scientific studies of cybernetics; socio-biological accounts of behaviour; and counter-cultural arguments urging consumers to resist the incipient pressures of modern capitalism. The science of stress that emerged in this climate of anxiety was driven and shaped by, and in turn served to structure and direct, the search for individual and collective happiness in a troubled world.

Assimilation was an ideology central to European expansion and colonization, an ideology which legitimized colonization for centuries. This book shows that the aspiration for assimilation was not only driven by materialistic reasons but also motivated by ideas. The engine of assimilation has to be found in the combination of two powerful ideas, namely the European philosophical conception of human perfectibility and the idea of the modern state. Europeans wanted to create, in their empires, political and cultural forms which they valued and wanted to realize in their own societies but which did not yet exist. This book examines three imperial experiments—seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New France, nineteenth-century British Australia, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century French Algeria—and reveals the complex interrelationship between policies of assimilation, which were driven by a desire for perfection and universality, and the greatest challenge to those policies, namely, discourses of race, which were based upon perceptions of difference. Neither colonized nor European peoples themselves were able to conform to the ideals given as the object of assimilation. Yet, the deep links between assimilation and empire remained because at no point since the sixteenth century has the utopian project of perfection—articulated through the progressive theory of history—been placed seriously in question. The failure of assimilation pursued through empire, for both colonized and colonizer, reveals the futility of the historical pursuit of perfection.

The general argument is that the institution of the French Religious Protectorate, lasting roughly a century from the 1840s, and the missionary embrace of it had a major impact on the Catholic church in China and on Sino-foreign relations generally. The French state presented itself as the protector of all Catholics in China of whatever nationality, including Chinese. The claim was important to the French conception of its place among the powers that were then engaged in China. The foreign missionary bishops of the time believed that their work depended on secular protections. Yet the intervention of the French state was a source of aggravation for others: Chinese officials, ordinary Chinese, other countries with Catholic missionaries in China, and even the pope. Complications ensued. Amid increasing criticism within the Catholic camp in the early twentieth century, serious opposition to the status quo led to long-lasting divisions within the church. The book focuses especially on a reformist contingent of missionaries in the city of Tianjin. The struggle to free the Chinese Catholic church from its foreign identity and management and from indenture to France became intertwined with movement to change the methods of Catholic evangelism. An effort by the Vatican to make the Catholic church in China Chinese was launched from 1919 but was not sustained. When the Communists took power in 1949, the leadership of the church in China was still mostly foreign.

This book explains how efforts to support global capitalism became a core objective of the League of Nations. Based on new research drawn together from archives on three continents, it explores how the world's first ever inter-governmental organization sought to understand and shape the powerful forces that influenced the global economy, and the prospects for peace. It traces how the League was drawn into economics and finance by the exigencies of the slump and hyperinflation after the First World War, when it provided essential financial support to Austria, Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria and Estonia and, thereby, established the founding principles of financial intervention, international oversight and the twentieth-century notion of international ‘development’. But it is the impact of the Great Depression after 1929 that lies at the heart of this history. The book examines how the League of Nations sought to combat economic nationalism, and promoted economic and monetary co-operation in a variety of, sometimes contradictory, ways. Many of the economists, bureaucrats and policy-advisors who worked for it played a seminal role in the history of international relations and social science, and their efforts did not end with the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1940 the League established an economic mission in the United States, where it contributed to the creation of organizations for the post-war world the United Nations Organization, the IMF, the World Bank, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization as well as to plans for European reconstruction and co-operation.