In 221 bc the First Emperor of Qin unified the lands that would become the heart of a Chinese empire. Though forged by conquest, this vast domain depended for its political survival on a fundamental reshaping of Chinese culture. With this informative book, we are present at the creation of an ancient imperial order whose major features would endure for two millennia.
Early Modern German Literature provides an overview of major literary figures and works, socio-historical contexts, philosophical backgrounds, and cultural trends during the 350 years between the first flowering of northern humanism around 1350 and the rise of a distinctly middle-class, anti-classical aesthetics around 1700.
Sacred History and National Identity - Comparisons Between Early Modern Wales and Brittany
The sixteenth century saw a redrawing of the borders of north-west Europe. Wales and Brittany entered into unions with neighbouring countries England and France. Nice uses Brittany and Wales’s responses to unification to write a comparative history of national identity during the early modern period.
Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns - State-building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe
The contemporary organization of global violence is neither timeless nor natural, argues Janice Thomson. It is distinctively modern. In this book she examines how the present arrangement of the world into violence-monopolizing sovereign states evolved over the six preceding centuries.
Beyond Florence - The Contours of Medieval and Early Modern Italy
For many years English-language scholarship on late medieval and early modern Italy was largely dominated by work on Florence—as a city, culture, and economic and political entity. During the past few decades, however, scholarship has moved well beyond the “Florentine model” to explore the diversity of Italian urban and provincial life—the “many Italies” that stretched from the Apennines to the Mediterranean. This volume brings together a group of sixteen urban, social, religious, and economic historians of late medieval and early modern Italy whose work reflects this shift, and illustrates some of the significant new research directions of the field.
