Intresset för världshistoria är större än på länge - både bland den läsande allmänheten och bland forskare. Globaliseringen har bidragit till att historiker kommit ut ur den fixering vid det nationella som kännetecknat deras forskning ända sedan 1800-talet. Men med den nya globala arenan för forskning följer också nya metodproblem. Det är hög tid att de världshistoriskt orienterade forskarna tar sig an de här problemen och utvecklar metoder som gör att de kan arbeta med samma höga kvalitet...

Methods in World History is the first international volume that systematically addresses a number of methodological problems specific to the field of World History. Prompted by a lack of applicable works, the authors advocate a considerable sharpening of the tools used within the discipline. Theories constructed on poor foundations run an obvious risk of reinforcing flawed assumptions, and of propping up other, more ideological constructions. The dedicated critical approach outlin...

A " concise and utterly enlightening" look at why we can't wrap our minds around climate change ( Publishers Weekly).Are we deranged? Award-winning essayist and novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? The Great Derangement examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of c...

The meaning that people attribute to things necessarily derives from human transactions and motivations, particularly from how those things are used and circulated. The contributors to this volume examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings, both present and past. Focusing on culturally defined aspects of exchange and socially regulated processes of circulation, the essays illuminate the ways in which people find value in things and things give value...

In this epoch of instability, crisis, war and ever‑growing inequality, Marxism is becoming an increasingly attractive proposition to millions of workers and young people around the world. The old mole of revolution, to use Karl Marx's own phrase, is burrowing deep into the foundations of society.Marxism — or scientific socialism — is the name given to the body of ideas first worked out by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In their totality, these ideas provide a fully worked-out theo...

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today's planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and ot...

Why society’s expectation of economic growth is no longer realisticEconomic growth--and the hope of better things to come—is the religion of the modern world. Yet its prospects have become bleak, with crashes following booms in an endless cycle. In the United States, eighty percent of the population has seen no increase in purchasing power over the last thirty years and the situation is not much better elsewhere. The Infinite Desire for Growth spotlights t...

This influential book challenges one of the most pervasive and powerful beliefs of our time--that Europe rose to modernity and world dominance due to unique qualities of race, environment, culture, mind, or spirit, and that progress for the rest of the world resulted from the diffusion of European civilization. J. M. Blaut persuasively argues that this doctrine is not grounded in the facts of history and geography, but in the ideology of colonialism. Blaut traces the colonizer's model of t...

World History: An Introduction provides readers with the knowledge and tools necessary to understand the global historical perspective and how it can be used to shed light on both our past and our present. A concise and original guide to the concepts, methods, debates and contents of world history, it combines a thematic approach with a clear and ambitious focus.Each chapter traces connections with the past and the present to explore major questions in world history:

How have societies changed over the past 5,000 years? Welcome to the brief, manageable macro-sociology text that takes your students on a journey to answer this question.This book, the only brief and affordable macro-sociology text available for undergraduates, describes how societies have changed over the past five thousand years. The discussion focuses on the idea that industrial societies, despite their great success, have created a new set of recurring and unso...

For twenty years, the renowned philosopher of science Sandra Harding has argued that science and technology studies, postcolonial studies, and feminist critique must inform one another. In The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, Harding puts those fields in critical conversation, assembling the anthology that she has long wanted for classroom use. In classic and recent essays, international scholars from a range of disciplines think through a broad array of science...

The Companion Encyclopedia of Geography provides an authoritative and provocative source of reference for all those concerned with the earth and its people. Examining both physical and human geography and charting human activities within their habitat up to the present day, this Companion also asks what lies in the future:* A differentiated world* A world transformed by the growth of a global economy* The global scale of habitat modification* A...