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.

This book reappraises Australia’s experience of empire since the end of the British Empire. The volume examines the meaning and importance of empire in Australia across a broad spectrum of historical issues — ranging from the disinheritance of the Aborigines to the foundations of a new democratic state. The overriding theme is the distinctive Australian perspective on empire. The country’s adherence to imperial ideals and aspirations involved not merely the building of a ‘new Britannia’ but also the forging of a distinctive new culture and society. It was Australian interests and aspirations which ultimately shaped ‘Australia’s Empire’. While modern Australians have often played down the significance of their British imperial past, the chapters in this book argue that the legacies of empire continue to influence the temper and texture of Australian society today.

At the start of his administration, John F. Kennedy launched a personal policy initiative to court African nationalist leaders. This policy was designed to improve US-African relations and constituted a dramatic change in the direction of US foreign relations. The Kennedy administration believed that the Cold War could be won or lost depending upon whether Washington or Moscow won the hearts and minds of the Third World. Africa was particularly important because a wave of independence saw nineteen newly independent African states admitted into the United Nations during 1960–61. By 1962, 31 of the UN’s 110 member states were from the African continent, and both Washington and Moscow sought to add these countries to their respective voting bloc. For Kennedy, the Cold War only amplified the need for a strong US policy toward Africa—but did not create it. The Kennedy administration feared that American neglect of the newly decolonized countries of the world would result in the rise of anti-Americanism and for this reason needed to be addressed irrespective of the Cold War. For this reason, Kennedy devoted more time and effort toward relations with Africa than any other American president has. By making an in-depth examination of Kennedy’s attempt to court African nationalist leaders, this study adds an important chapter to the historiography of John F. Kennedy’s Cold War strategy. It also demonstrates that, through understanding and personal diplomacy, Kennedy realigned US policy toward Africa and largely won over the sympathies of its people.

This work explores the lives of people of sub-Saharan Africa and their descendants, how they were shaped by empire, and how they in turn influenced the empire in everything from material goods to cultural style. The black experience varied greatly across space and over time. Accordingly, thirteen substantive essays and a scene-setting introduction range from West Africa in the sixteenth century, through the history of the slave trade and slavery down to the 1830s, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century participation of blacks in the empire as workers, soldiers, members of colonial elites, intellectuals, athletes, and musicians. No people were more uprooted and dislocated; or travelled more within the empire; or created more of a trans-imperial culture. In the crucible of the British empire, blacks invented cultural mixes that were precursors to our modern selves — hybrid, fluid, ambiguous, and constantly in motion.

In 1842, the German poet, Henrich Heine, wrote that the bourgeoisie, ‘obsessed by a nightmare apprehension of disaster’ and ‘an instinctive dread of communism’, were driven against their better instincts into tolerating absolutist government. Theirs was a ‘politics … motivated by fear’. Over the next 150 years, the middle classes were repeatedly accused by radicals of betraying liberty for fear of ‘red revolution’. The failure of the revolutions of 1848, conservative nationalism from the 1860s, fascist victories in the first half of the twentieth‐century, and repression of national liberation movements during the Cold War — these fateful disasters were all explained by the bourgeoisie’s fear of the masses. For their part, conservatives insisted that demagogues and fanatics exploited the desperation of the poor to subvert liberal revolutions, leading to anarchy and tyranny. Only evolutionary reform was enduring. From the 1970s, however, liberal revolution revived on an unprecedented scale. With the collapse of Communism, bourgeois liberty once again became a crusading, force, but now on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the armed forces of the United States, Britain and NATO became instruments of ‘regime change’, seeking to destroy dictatorship and build free‐market democracies. President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a ‘watershed event in the global democratic revolution’. This was an extraordinary turn‐around, with the middle classes now hailed as the truly universal class which, in emancipating itself, emancipates all society. The debacle in Iraq, and the Great Recession from 2008, revealed all too clearly that hubris still invited nemesis.This book examines this remarkable story, and the fierce debates it occasioned. It takes in a span from the seventeenth century to the twenty‐first, covering a wide range of countries and thinkers.