The logic of political survival

Sample

James Falkner

"The War of the Spanish Succession, fought between 1701 and 1714 to decide who should inherit the Spanish throne, was a conflict on an unprecedented scale, stretching across most of western Europe, the high seas and the Americas. Yet this major subject is not well known and is little understood. That is why the publication of James Falkner's absorbing new study is so timely and important. In a clear and perceptive narrative he describes and analyses the complex political manoeuvres and a series of military campaigns which also involved the threat posed by the Ottoman Turks in the east and Sweden and Russia in the north. Fighting took place not just in Europe but in the Americas and Canada, and on the high seas. All European powers, large and small, were involved -- France, Spain, Great Britain, Holland, Austria and Portugal were the major players, while many others -- Savoy, Prussia, Hanover and Denmark -- were drawn into the conflict. The end result of almost twelve years of outright war was a French prince firmly established on the throne in Madrid and a division of the old Spanish empire. More notably though, French power, previously so dominant, was curbed for almost ninety years, with a balance of power being established in Europe which was only overset with the emergence of the military genius of Emperor Napoleon." -- Publisher's description

Sample

Catherine Jinks

""I hereby record those events which took place in and around the city of Lazet relating to the assassination of our venerable Brother Augustin Duese in the year of the Inicarnate Word, 1318." So writes Brother Berneard, an Inquisitor of Heretical Depravity, following the discovery of his superior's dismembered corpse."--Jacket.

Sample

Alexis de Tocqueville

"Although Tocqueville never published a book-length study of French North Africa, his various writings on the subject provide as invaluable a portrait of French imperialism as Democracy in America does of the Early Republic period in American history. In Writings on Empire and Slavery, Jennifer Pitts has selected and translated nine of his most important dispatches on Algeria, which offer startling new insights into both Tocqueville's political thought and French liberalism's attitudes toward the political, military, and moral aspects of France's colonial expansion. Also included in this collection is Tocqueville's influential call for the abolition of slavery in the French West Indies, an action he felt would regain for France the moral high ground taken by Britain when it abolished slavery in its colonies - even as the conquest and settling of Algeria would unify the French nation and gain for it international respect."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Timothy Hampton

"Assessing the relationship between the emergence of modern French literary culture and the ideological debates that marked Renaissance France, Timothy Hampton explores the role of literary form in shaping national identity.". "The foundational texts of modern French literature were produced during a period of unprecedented struggle over the meaning of community. In the face of religious heresy, political threats from abroad, and new forms of cultural diversity, Renaissance French culture confronted, in new and urgent ways, the question of what it means to be "French." Hampton shows how conflicts between different concepts of community were mediated symbolically through the genesis of new literary forms. Hampton's analysis of works by Rabelais, Montaigne, Du Bellay, and Marguerite de Navarre, as well as writings by lesser-known poets, pamphleteers, and political philosophers, shows that the vulnerability of France and the instability of French identity were pervasive cultural themes during this period.". "Contemporary scholarship on nation-building in early modern Europe has emphasized the importance of centralized power and the rise of absolute monarchy. Hampton offers a counterargument, demonstrating that both community and national identity in Renaissance France were defined through a dialogic relationship to that which was not French - to the foreigner, the stranger, the intruder from abroad. He provides both a methodological challenge to traditional cultural history and a new consideration of the role of literature in the definition of the nation."--BOOK JACKET.