Domestic Surveillance and Social Control in Britain and France during World War I examines the rapid development and expansion of agencies and governmental power to monitor and control the homefront in Britain and France during World War I. It documents the rapid shift in focus from the feared but unimportant threat of German espionage toward homegrown radicals. The book utilizes a vast array of documents generated during the war by top-level government committees, intelligence agencies, and police services as it demonstrates the emergence of mass domestic surveillance. Detailing how events and ideas in one country impacted the other, the book argues that Britain and France developed remarkably similar intelligence agencies and policies due to their shared experiences before, during, and after the war. This book will appeal to students and scholars alike, though its moderate length and chronological approach make it accessible to a wider audience. Additionally, it will fit a number of courses, including studies of the state, intelligence studies, and modern European history courses.

In the last third of the eighteenth-century, Bristol and Nantes were two of the most active commercial ports of England and France, despite a slowdown of their economy. Their economies were based primarily on the maritime trade, but they developed alongside Atlantic industries that attracted many migrants, both male and female, from the surrounding countryside and from abroad. The busy urban environment, the high number of sailors and single men migrating to the port, and the decline of female house based proto-industries, were factors encouraging the development of prostitution. How prostitution is perceived in the context of social control and urban change is key to understanding the evolving attitudes to gender and sexuality in the eighteenth century. In this comparative study, Marion Pluskota offers an analysis of the lives of prostitutes that looks beyond a purely criminal perspective, and which encompasses their roles within their families, relationships and social networks. Using police and judicial records, she provides a valuable corrective to the narrow analysis of prostitutes in terms of immorality or deviance. The unique forms of development and problems faced by port cities in the early modern period make them particularly interesting subjects for comparative history. This book is well suited for those who study social history, gender and women’s history.

This first volume of a two-volume collection of essays provides a comprehensive examination of the idea of social control in the history of Europe. The uniqueness of these volumes lies in two main areas. First, the contributors compare methods of social control on many levels, from police to shaming, church to guilds. Second, they look at these formal and informal institutions as two-way processes. Unlike many studies of social control in the past, the scholars here examine how individuals and groups that are being controlled necessarily participate in and shape the manner in which they are regulated. Hardly passive victims of discipline and control, these folks instead claimed agency in that process, accepting and resisting -- and thus molding -- the controls under which they functioned. The essays in this volume focus on the interplay of ecclesiastical institutions and the emerging states, examining discipline from a bottom-up perspective. Book jacket.

Social Control falls within social psychology, which is thebranch of knowledge that deals with the psychic interplaybetween man and his environment. In Ross' terms, one ofthese branches, social ascendency, deals with the dominationof society over the individual. Another, individualascendency, embraces such topics as invention, leadership,the role of great men, and deals with the dominationof the individual over society. Social ascendency is divided into social infl uence--mob mind, fashion, convention, custom, public opinion,and the like--and social control. Th e former is occupiedwith social domination that is without intention or purpose.The latter is concerned with social domination thatis intended and that fulfi ls a function in the life of society.At the start of the twentieth century this work played animportant role in the origination of social psychology asa distinct field. Ross sought to determine how far the order we seeabout us is due to infl uences that reach men and womenwithout social intervention. Investigation shows that thepersonality freely unfolds under conditions of healthy fellowshipand may arrive at goodness on its own, and thatorder is explained partly by this streak in human natureand partly by the infl uence of social surroundings. Ross'book separates the individual's contribution to socialorder from that of society, and, brings to light everythingthat is considered in the social contribution of the individual.Th is classic volume is an important contributionto the history of ideas. Edward Alsworth Ross (1866-1951) wasknown as one of the founders of Americansociology and was most famous for hisview that the purpose of sociology is thereform of society. He was also professorand chair of the department of sociologyat the University of Wisconsin. Some ofhis work includes Sin and Society, ChangingAmerica and The Social Trend. Matthias Gross is senior research scientist in the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on the history of the social sciences, environmental sociology, and science and technology studies.

Disputes, discord and reconciliation were fundamental parts of the fabric of communal living in early modern Europe. This edited volume presents essays on the cultural codes of conflict and its resolution in this period under three broad themes: peacemaking as practice; the nature of mediation and arbitration; and the role of criminal law in conflicts. Through an exploration of conflict and peacemaking, this volume provides innovative accounts of state formation, community and religion in the early modern period.

This volume brings together a distinguished group of international scholars to discuss the major debates in the study of early twentieth-century Europe. Brings together contributions from a distinguished group of international scholars. Provides an overview of current thinking on the period. Traces the great political, social and economic upheavals of the time. Illuminates perennial themes, as well as new areas of enquiry. Takes a pan-European approach, highlighting similarities and differences across nations and regions.

In the decades after World War II, French ideas about gender and family life underwent dramatic changes, laying the groundwork for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. This book offers a broad view of changing lives and ideas about love, courtship, marriage, giving birth, parenting, childhood, and adolescence in France from the Vichy regime to the sexual revolution of 1960s.

The Everyday Nationalism of Workers upends common notions about how European nationalism is lived and experienced by ordinary people—and the bottom-up impact these everyday expressions of nationalism exert on institutionalized nationalism writ large. Drawing on sources from the major urban and working-class centers of Belgium, Maarten Van Ginderachter uncovers the everyday nationalism of the rank and file of the socialist Belgian Workers Party between 1880 and World War I, a period in which Europe experienced the concurrent rise of nationalism and socialism as mass movements. Analyzing sources from—not just about—ordinary workers, Van Ginderachter reveals the limits of nation-building from above and the potential of agency from below. With a rich and diverse base of sources (including workers' "propaganda pence" ads that reveal a Twitter-like transcript of proletarian consciousness), the book shows all the complexity of socialist workers' ambivalent engagement with nationhood, patriotism, ethnicity and language. By comparing the Belgian case with the rise of nationalism across Europe, Van Ginderachter sheds new light on how multilingual societies fared in the age of mass politics and ethnic nationalism.

How successful was Mussolini in creating a force of loyal and committed policemen to defend his regime and assist in the creation of a new fascist civilization? How far were the Italian police transformed under Mussolini, and how did policemen experience the dictatorship? This book examines Italy’s regular police in the context of fascism’s efforts to modernise and establish ideological control over the state. Contrasting the regime’s idealised representations with the more humdrum realities of everyday practice, the book considers the impact of the dictatorship on the Italian police and their personnel. Presenting an inside perspective on fascist repression, it focuses particularly on recruitment, training and professionalism in the Interior Ministry Police, as well as officers' ideological orientation, working conditions and quality of life. This book will appeal to students and researchers in police history, Italian fascism and, more generally, conflict and oppression in the twentieth century.