This selection of short stories offers a return journey through the future as it used to be. Time speeds backwards to the 1870s—to the alpha point of modern futuristic fiction—the opening years of that enchanted period before the First World War when Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and many able writers delighted readers from Sydney to Seattle with their most original revelations of things-to-come. In all their anticipations, the dominant factor was the recognition that the new industrial societies would continue to evolve in obedience to the rate of change. One major event that caused all to think furiously about the future was the Franco-German War of 1870. The new weapons and the new methods of army organization had shown that the conduct of warfare was changing; and, in response to that perception of change, a new form of fiction took on the task of describing the conduct of the war-to-come.

This book provides a detailed account of French history from the oripins of the Thrid Republic, born out of the collapse of Napoleon III's Second Empire, to the coming of the Great WAr in 1914. Part 1 begins with the fall of the "notables" and the victory of the republicans. Then follows a picture of the economy and society of late nineteenth-century France, and an examination of spiritual and cultural development under the increasing threat from nationalist and socialist forces. The moderates' brief ascendancy at the end of the century followed by the extreme sentiments unleashed at the time of the Dreyfus affair, brings the story in Part 2 to a more passionately political period, when the republic finallynbecame established as a bulwark of bourgeois prosperity, witnessing the rise of the banks and big business, and the dangerous revival of colonial expansion.

The existence of the Schlieffen plan has been one of the basic assumptions of twentieth-century military history. It was the perfect example of the evils of German militarism: aggressive, mechanical, disdainful of politics and of public morality. The Great War began in August 1914 allegedly because the Schlieffen plan forced the German government to transform a Balkan quarrel into a World War by attacking France. And, in the end, the Schlieffen plan failed at the battle of the Marne. Yet it has always been recognized that the Schlieffen plan included inconsistencies which have never been satisfactorily explained. On the basis of newly discovered documents from German archives, Terence Zuber presents a radically different picture of German war planning between 1871 and 1914, and concludes that, in fact, there never really was a `Schlieffen plan'.

The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer is an 1871 novella by George Tomkyns Chesney, starting the genre of invasion literature and an important precursor of science fiction. Written just after the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War, it describes an invasion of Britain by a German-speaking country referred to in oblique terms as The Other Power or The Enemy. Excerpt: "You ask me to tell you, my grandchildren, something about my share in the great events that happened fifty years ago. 'Tis sad work turning back to that bitter page in our history, but you may perhaps take profit in your new homes from the lesson it teaches. For us, in England, it came too late. And yet we had plenty of warnings if we had only made use of them."

A comprehensive analysis of the international political pronouncements of John Stuart Mill: the pre-eminent thinker of the liberal tradition.

Over the past fifty years, many thousands of conflict simulations have been published that bring the dynamics of past and possible future wars to life. In this book, Philip Sabin explores the theory and practice of conflict simulation as a topic in its own right, based on his thirty years of experience in designing wargames and using them in teaching. Simulating War sets conflict simulation in its proper context alongside more familiar techniques such as game theory and operational analysis. It explains in detail the analytical and modelling techniques involved, and it teaches you how to design your own simulations of conflicts of your choice. The book provides eight simple illustrative simulations of specific historical conflicts, complete with rules, maps and counters. Simulating War is essential reading for all recreational or professional simulation gamers, and for anyone who is interested in modelling war, from teachers and students to military officers.

The media have always played a central role in organising the way ideas flow through societies. But what happens when those ideas are disruptive to normal social relations? Bringing together work by scholars in history, media and cultural studies and sociology, this collection explores this role in more depth and with more attention paid to the complexities behind conventional analyses. Attention is paid to morality and regulation; empire and film; the role of women; authoritarianism; wartime and fears of treachery; and fears of cultural contamination. The book begins with essays that contextualise the theoretical and historiographical issues of the relationship between social fears, moral panics and the media. The second section provides case studies which illustrate the ways in which the media has participated in, or been seen as the source of, the creation of threats to society. Finally, the third section then shows how historical research calls into question simple assumptions about the relationship between the media and social disruption.

'At The Violet Hour' offers a richly historicised, trenchant look at the interlocking of literature with violence in British and Irish modernist texts.

This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines some of the ways in which writers, artists, film-makers, strategists and political thinkers have imagined the future over the last two centuries. Although a number of contributions discuss 'mainstream' science fiction, the collection's emphasis is not on any single genre, but rather on the ways in which different histories - technological, cultural, military, ideological - generate and inform different modes of speculation about things to come. These histories also disclose that our patterns of expectation are much influenced by our relationship to the past.

As Philip Taylor has written, 'The challenge (of the modern information age) is to ensure that no single propaganda source gains monopoly over the information and images that shape our thoughts. If this happens, the war propagandists will be back in business again.' Propaganda came of age in the Twentieth Century. The development of mass- and multi-media offered a fertile ground for propaganda while global conflict provided the impetus needed for its growth. Propaganda has however become a portmanteau word, which can be interpreted in a number of different ways. What are the characteristic features of propaganda, and how can it be defined? The distinguished contributors to this book trace the development of techniques of 'opinion management' from the First World War to the current conflict in Afghanistan. They reveal how state leaders and spin-doctors operating at the behest of the state, sought to shape popular attitudes - at home and overseas - endeavouring to harness new media with the objective of winning hearts and minds. The book provides compelling evidence of how the study and practice of propaganda today is shaped by its history.