A critical analysis of the idea of Europe and the limits and possibilities of a European identity in the broader perspective of history. This book argues that the crucial issue is the articulation of a new identity that is based on post-national citizenship rather than ambivalent notions of unity.

Wolff explores how Western thinkers contributed to defining and characterizing Eastern Europe as half-civilized and barbaric.

As early modern Europe launched its multiple projects of global empire, it simultaneously embarked on an ambitious program of describing and picturing the world. The shapes and meanings of the extraordinary global images that emerged from this process form the subject of this highly original and richly textured study of cultural geography. Inventing Exoticism draws on a vast range of sources from history, literature, science, and art to describe the energetic and sustained international engagements that gave birth to our modern conceptions of exoticism and globalism. Illustrated with more than two hundred images of engravings, paintings, ceramics, and more, Inventing Exoticism shows, in vivid example and persuasive detail, how Europeans came to see and understand the world at an especially critical juncture of imperial imagination. At the turn to the eighteenth century, European markets were flooded by books and artifacts that described or otherwise evoked non-European realms: histories and ethnographies of overseas kingdoms, travel narratives and decorative maps, lavishly produced tomes illustrating foreign flora and fauna, and numerous decorative objects in the styles of distant cultures. Inventing Exoticism meticulously analyzes these, while further identifying the particular role of the Dutch—"Carryers of the World," as Defoe famously called them—in the business of exotica. The form of early modern exoticism that sold so well, as this book shows, originated not with expansion-minded imperialists of London and Paris, but in the canny ateliers of Holland. By scrutinizing these materials from the perspectives of both producers and consumers—and paying close attention to processes of cultural mediation—Inventing Exoticism interrogates traditional postcolonial theories of knowledge and power. It proposes a wholly revisionist understanding of geography in a pivotal age of expansion and offers a crucial historical perspective on our own global culture as it engages in a media-saturated world.

This book challenges the common belief that race and racisms are phenomena that began only in the modern era.

The EU as a democratic polity has been invented: it is a product of creative and innovative actors and thinkers that conceptualized and by and by helped to realise it, from the beginning up to the present. But the concepts, ideas, and utopias of a democratic Europe differ considerably. The processes of inventing and building a democratic EU are marked by conceptual controversies in both public and academic debates. These are the resource for the present book, which focuses on the concepts, actors and controversies related to inventing the EU as a democratic polity. The chapters study exemplary long-term and detail cases related to inventing and institutionalizing the decisive elements of representative democracy in the EU—a parliament, citizens that vote for it in universal suffrage and governmental bodies that are linked to parliament in much the same way as government is in a parliamentary democracy.

Drawing on cultural, social, and environmental history, as well as the histories of science and medicine, this book shows how, amidst a growing reaction against exotic imports -- whether medieval spices like cinnamon or new American arrivals like chocolate and tobacco -- early modern Europeans began to take inventory of their own "indigenous" natural worlds.

The eleven essays in this volume offer diverse approaches to very different landscapes. Yet they agree in viewing medieval western European landscape as artifact, as territiry constructed by medieval people on several interrelated levels. By helping to articulate how places came to be managed, created, and imagined, they offer their readers a much better apprecitaion of what might be called a "deep ecology" of the Middle Ages. --introd.

The story of the women, financiers, and other unsung figures who helped to shape the post-Napoleonic global order In 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing the Concert of Europe. This new coalition planted the seeds for today's international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its center. Glenda Sluga reveals how at the end of the Napoleonic wars, new conceptions of the politics between states were the work not only of European statesmen but also of politically ambitious aristocratic and bourgeois men and women who seized the moment at an extraordinary crossroads in history. In this panoramic book, Sluga reinvents the study of international politics, its limitations, and its potential. She offers multifaceted portraits of the leading statesmen of the age, such as Tsar Alexander, Count Metternich, and Viscount Castlereagh, showing how they operated in the context of social networks often presided over by influential women, even as they entrenched politics as a masculine endeavor. In this history, figures such as Madame de Staël and Countess Dorothea Lieven insist on shaping the political transformations underway, while bankers influence economic developments and their families agitate for Jewish rights. Monumental in scope, this groundbreaking book chronicles the European women and men who embraced the promise of a new kind of politics in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and whose often paradoxical contributions to modern diplomacy and international politics still resonate today.

This book explores the development of abstraction from the moment of its declaration around 1912 to its establishment as the foundation of avant-garde practice in the mid-1920s. The book brings together many of the most influential works in abstractions early history to draw a cross-media portrait of this watershed moment in which traditional art was reinvented in a wholesale way. Works are presented in groups that serve as case studies, each engaging a key topic in abstractions first years: an artist, a movement, an exhibition or thematic concern. Key focal points include Vasily Kandinskys ambitious Compositions V, VI and VII; a selection of Piet Mondrians work that offers a distilled narrative of his trajectory to Neo-plasticism; and all the extant Suprematist pictures that Kazimir Malevich showed in the landmark 0.10 exhibition in 1915.0Exhibition: MoMA, New York, USA (23.12.2012-15.4.2013).

The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe offers a new approach to the history of Byzantine scholarship. By tracing Byzantium's impact on everything from politics to painting, this book shows that the empire and its legacy remained relevant to generations of Western writers, artists, statesmen, and intellectuals.