Fifty years after his death, Portugal's Salazar remains a controversial and enigmatic figure, whose conservative and authoritarian legacy still divides opinion. Some see him as a reactionary and oppressive figure who kept Portugal backward, while ot…
For much of recorded history, China was a leading science and technology power. But just as the West rose, China turned in on itself, and missed the Industrial Revolution. The result was the 'Hundred Years of Humiliation', and a long struggle for a…
The first comprehensive history of the Sami people of the Nordic countries and northwestern Russia. There is no single volume which encompasses an integrated social and cultural history of the Sami people from the Nordic countries and northwestern R…
Animism' is now an important term for describing ways in which some people understand and engage respectfully with the larger-than-human world. Its central theme is our relationship with our other-than-human neighbours, such as animals, plants, rock…
This book begins in 1820 with the Portuguese attempt to create a third, African, empire after the virtual loss of Asia and America. In the nineteenth century the most valuable resource extracted from Angola was agricultural labour, first as privatel…
In this important book, Clarence-Smith provides the first general survey of the Islamic debate on slavery. Sweeping away entrenched myths, he hopes to stimulate more research on the neglected topic. He draws on examples from the 'abode of Islam', fr…
What does it feel like to move through a world designed to limit and exclude you? What are the joys and pains of holidays for people of colour, when guidebooks are never written with them in mind? How are black lives today impacted by the othering l…
Against a backdrop of Islamophobia, Europeans are increasingly airbrushing from history their cultural debt to the Muslim world. But this legacy lives on in some of Europe's most recognisable buildings, from Notre-Dame Cathedral to the Houses of Par…
Sufism is a growing and global phenomenon, far from the declining relic it was once thought to be. This book brings together the work of fourteen leading experts to explore systematically the key themes of Sufism's new global presence, from Yemen to…
As early as the third century, St Maurice-an Egyptian-became leader of the legendary Roman Theban Legion. Ever since, there have been richly varied encounters between those defined as 'Africans' and those called 'Europeans'. Yet Africans and African…
In 1920s Shanghai, Zhou Enlai founded the first Chinese communist spy network, operating in the shadows against nationalists, Western powers and the Japanese. The story of Chinese spies has been a global one from the start.Unearthing previously unse…
No topic has captured the public imagination of late quite so dramatically as the spectre of global jihadism. While much has been said about the way jihadists behave, their ideology remains poorly understood. As the Levant has imploded and millenari…
Karoline Kan was born in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre: her generation has always been caught between China's authoritarian politics and its hyper-modern technology and economic boom.In her quest to understand the shifting sands of…
James M. Dorsey introduces the reader to the world of Middle Eastern and North African football - an arena where struggles for political control, protest and resistance, self-respect and gender rights are played out. Politics was the midwife of socc…
Whether it's working for free in exchange for 'experience', enduring poor treatment in the name of being 'part of the family', or clocking serious overtime for a good cause, more and more of us are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of bein…
In early summer 1982--winter in the South Atlantic--Argentina's military junta invades the Falklands. Within days, a Royal Navy Task Force is assembled and dispatched. This is the story of D Squadron, 22 SAS, commanded by Cedric Delves. The relentle…
Over the last 1,400 years, a succession of Muslim polities and empires expanded to control territories and peoples stretching from southern France to East Africa and South East Asia. Yet many of the contributions of Muslim thinkers, scientists and t…
As one of the earliest Arabs to join the Afghan Jihad, the Algerian Islamist Abdullah Anas counted as brothers-in-arms the future icons of al-Qaeda's global war, from Abdullah Azzam to Osama bin Laden, and befriended key Afghan resistance leaders su…
"Eurasian Crossroads" is the first comprehensive history of Xinjiang, the vast central Eurasian region bordering India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia. Forming one-sixth of the People's Republic of Ch…
Xinjiang, the vast northwestern region comprising one sixth of the PRC today, borders on India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakstan, Russia and Mongolia. Since antiquity it has stood at the crossroads between China, India, the M…
Islamic State has replaced Al Qaeda as the great global threat of the twenty-first century, the bogeyman we have all come to fear. But Daesh started as a local movement, rooted in the resentment of the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and Syria. It is they who h…
Marseille is a thoroughly ambiguous place. France's second city and its major sea-port, its impact on the national imagination is unparalleled. Yet it is also a frontier city, arguably capital of the Mediterranean, and with a traditionally suspect a…
Contemporary Germany is a modern industrial democracy admired throughout the world. Many Germans believe that they live in the 'best Germany' that has ever existed. Yet there are dissenting voices: individuals and groups that reject cosmopolitanism,…
Shinzo Abe entered politics burdened by high expectations: that he would change Japan. In 2007, seemingly overwhelmed, he resigned after only a year as prime minister. Yet, following five years of reinvention, he masterfully regained the premiership…
Jihadist narratives have evolved dramatically over the past five years, driven by momentous events in the Middle East and beyond; the death of bin Laden; the rise and ultimate failure of the Arab Spring; and most notably, the rise of the so-called I…
In the wake of its 'Caliphate' declaration in 2014, the self-described Islamic State has been the focus of countless academic papers, government studies, media commentaries and documentaries. Despite all this attention, persistent myths continue to…
King Salman of Saudi Arabia began his rule in 2015 confronted with a series of unprecedented challenges. The dilemmas he has faced are new and significant, from leadership shuffles and falling oil prices to regional and international upheaval. 'Salm…
The Somali people are fiercely nationalistic. Colonialism split them into five segments divided between four different powers. Thus decolonisation and pan-Somalism became synonymous.In 1960 a partial reunification took place between British Somalila…
In 1993, a newly-appointed CIA director warned that Western powers might have 'slain a large dragon' with the fall of the USSR, but now faced a 'bewildering variety of poisonous snakes'. Since then, both dragons (state enemies like Russia and China)…
In early 2019, the Islamic Republic of Iran marked its fortieth anniversary, despite decades of isolation, political pressure, sanctions and war. Observers of its security policies continue to try and make sense of this unlikely endurance. Though th…
Why Spy? is the result of Brian Stewart's seventy years of working in, and studying the uses and abuses of, intelligence in the real world. Few books currently available to those involved either as professionals or students in this area have been wr…
In 1960 a mysterious car crash killed Albert Camus and his publisher Michel Gallimard, who was behind the wheel. Based on meticulous research, Giovanni Catelli builds a compelling case that the 46-year-old French Algerian Nobel laureate was the vict…
Can laughter really be used to undermine the appeal of terrorist groups? And should it be? Is there any truth in the stereotypical notions of fanaticism as humourless, and of humour as the antithesis of fanaticism? What is the deeper significance of…
Western democracies are experiencing a new wave of right-wing populism that seeks to mobilise religion for its own ends. With chapters on the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland and Israel, Saving the People asks…
Reporter Chang Frick grew up dark-haired in a nation of blonds. Ostracised as a child, in adulthood he set out to expose the hypocrisy of Swedish society. When he revealed the cover-up of mass sexual assaults on teen girls at a 2015 music festival,…
'Iceland's 1100 Years' recounts the history of a society on the margin of Europe as well as on the margin of reaching the size and wealth of a proper state. Iceland is unique among the European societies in being founded as late as the Viking Age, a…
The rediscovery of Assyria in the 1840s transformed Western views on the origins of civilisation. The excavation of Nineveh proved that even the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians together did not constitute the ancient world. These peoples had nothing to…
Over the course of more than three decades as an American diplomat, William J. Burns played a central role in the most consequential diplomatic episodes of his time-from the bloodless end of the Cold War to the collapse of relations with Putin's Rus…
Every year in England and Wales alone, one in twenty adults suffer domestic abuse, two thirds of them women. Every week, two men kill a woman they were intimate with. And still we ask the wrong question: Why didn't she leave? Instead, we should ask:…
Lebanon seems a country in the grip of permanent crisis. In recent years it has suffered blow after blow, from Rafiq Hariri's assassination in 2005, to the 2006 July War, to the current Syrian conflict, which has brought a million refugees streaming…
This is a personal account of the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, fought between May 1998 and June 2000, as well as of the periods immediately preceding and following the conflict. 'Shallow Graves' traces shifting local perceptions of time, the na…
Ilhan Omar's career is a collection of historic firsts: she is the first refugee, the first Somali-American and one of the first two Muslim women to serve in the United States Congress. Against a xenophobic and divisive administration, she has risen…
In almost every military intervention in its history, the US has made cultural mistakes that hindered attainment of its policy goals. From the counterproductive strategic bombing of Vietnam to the misguided accidental burning of the Koran in Afghani…
Nerve agents are the world's deadliest means of chemical warfare. Nazi Germany developed the first military-grade nerve agents and massive industry for their manufacture-yet, strangely, the Third Reich never used them. At the end of the Second World…
What is military strategy today? In an era when European states seek to de-escalate and avoid armed conflict, and where politicians fear the consequences of protracted operations or tactical hazards, does military strategy have any relevance? This i…
After the collapse of the Soviet Union the Caucasus was wracked by ethnic and separatist violence as the peoples of the region struggled for self-determination. Vicken Cheterian, who spent many years as a reporter and analyst covering the region's c…
The dispossession and forced migration of nearly 50 per cent of Syria's population has produced the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. This new book places the current displacement within the context of the widespread migrations that have i…
In the first historical account of international NGOs, from the French Revolution to the present, Thomas Davies places the contemporary debate on transnational civil society in context. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, which sees transnationa…
This comprehensive overview traces the evolution of modern Mozambique, from its early modern origins in the Indian Ocean trading system and the Portuguese maritime empire to the fifteen-year civil war that followed independence and its continued aft…
Hitler was one of the few politicians who understood that persuasion was everything, deployed to anchor an entire regime in the confections of imagery, rhetoric and dramaturgy. The Nazis pursued propaganda not just as a tool, an instrument of govern…
Popular consensus says that the US rose over two centuries to Cold War victory and world domination, and is now in slow decline. But is this right? History's great civilisations have always lasted much longer, and for all its colossal power, the US…
