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In the inter-war years, groups of enterprising Yoruba traders from a few towns in Western Nigeria established a successful trading network throughout the Gold Coast (Ghana). Then, in 1969, they were abruptly ordered to leave the country. At the time of the exodus, Jerry Eades followed the traders back to Nigeria. There, on the basis of extensive interviews and archival sources, he reconstructed the history of the migration from four Yorubu towns to northern Ghana. The result is one of the fullest and most detailed accounts of chain migration and its implications for economic development ever written.

A book about Jacobean civic pageants.

This topical book examines the debates around contemporary conflicts between liberal democracies and increasingly vociferous special interest groups within society. It analyses the way a new sense of difference and the growth of multi-culturalism are straining modern notions of citizenship and rights, looking in particular at how ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe have escalated to international tragedies, while in the US and Canada, race, ethnicity and radical feminism are at the heart of a social conflict which challenges national identity and the unity of the state.

This book provides a notable addition to the new historiography of mid-twentieth-century Soviet history. Sabine Dullin has researched the history of Soviet diplomacy from 1930 to 1939 through a variety of now-accessible diplomatic, political, administrative and social archives. She has added to the mix the memories and testimonies of diplomatic personnel.Through her research, Dullin sheds light on the workings of the Soviet bureaucracy and in particular the role of Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Foreign Minister, and his relations with Stalin. She examines in detail Soviet foreign policy and the process of Stalinisation, and argues persuasively that these 'men of influence' were not simply agents of the Kremlin, but were able, through the 1930s and with the emergence of Soviet power on the eve of the Second World War, to initiate and pursue their own agendas.

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Nietzsche. In this book, Tsarina Doyle sets out to show that a specifically Kantian-informed methodology lies at the heart of Nietzsche's approach to epistemology and metaphysics. The author claims, contentiously, that both Nietzsche's early and late writings may be understood as responses to Kant's constitutive-regulative distinction at the level of epistemology and to his treatment of force and efficient causality at the level of metaphysics.

This new approach to Highland history before the Clearances draws attention to little-studied yet important economic and social processes within the Highland clan system and argues that we should consider the problems of traditional Highland society, economy and environment together. Exploring how the different aspects of the clan system - chiefs and kinsmen, landlords and tenants, farming systems, production strategies and marketing - changed between the 16th-18th centuries, it shows how the character and ideology of clans and chiefdoms are inextricably part of the twin problems of socio-political control and food production. Shifting the emphasis away from depictions of Highland society as lawless and disorganised, this is a welcome antidote to the many romanticised views of pre-Clearance society. Prize Winner! Honorable Mention - Frank Watson Scottish History Prize 1999

This book examines in historical perspective the hitherto little-studied relationship between Islam and caste among the Haalpulaaren of Senegal. The Islamic uprising of the 1770s, which established a class of Islamic clerics in positions of authority in the Senegal river valley, had long-term consequences for the social relations between clerics and caste groups. The book examines how at different historical junctures attempts were made to negotiate the equalitarian claims of a universalist faith with the expression of social differentiation lying at the heart of caste inequality. While the existing literature focuses on those who established Islam within the region, this present work provides insights into how marginalised artisans, poets and musicians understood themselves and how they responded to a faith which had become the cornerstone of social prestige and status. It analyses the knowledge practices of clerics and of specialised craft groups, arguing that they are crucial for our understanding of social and cultural distinction. This involves a synthesis of historical sources and ethnography, and provides an innovative approach to the study of religious identity and specialist practitioners.

This book offers the first full analysis of the Social Democratic Federation's (SDF's) history and is essential reading for historians of the Labour Movement.The SDF was the pioneer of the Socialist revival in the 1880s, Britain's first avowedly Marxist party and an important component of the Communist Party of Great Britain. As such, it represents a crucial strand in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century English political history.Although critical, Dr Crick dismisses the stereotype of a sectarian and dogmatic organization attempting to force a foreign ideology onto an unreceptive audience. Blending the national picture with a detailed study of the party in Lancashire and Yorkshire, he reveals an organization whose members contributed far more to the formation of local politics than is generally realized. They produced a generation of working-class militants, pioneered forms of social protest and made available for the first time in English a number of Marxist classics.

From 1998 to 2005 film-maker Susan Bain worked on the documentary series The Gathering Place. She has been one of the few outsiders to be granted such exclusive access to the inside story of the new parliament building at Holyrood. This book tells that story.Holyrood has become far more than the story of a building. It is an exploration of Scotland's long anticipated new democracy, hamstrung by its own incumbents and wrecked by the egotism and ingrained agendas of politicians, journalists and other 'interested' parties.Almost everything which has appeared in the public domain over the past five years has been inaccurate - the result of misinformation, wrong information and deliberate untruth. And all this has had a profound impact on how the parliament building - intended as a physical manifestation of the new Scotland - has unfolded. What Holyrood reveals is a nation profoundly self-divided.Powerful, thought-provoking and thoroughly researched, the book explores in great depth the story of Holyrood itself: the first years of devolution and the nature of modern Scotland - stories for which the Holyrood building has become a potent and revealing metaphor. This is the definitive story of a crucial period in Scotland's history and the controversies that have shaped it.Key Features:*A hard-hitting behind-the-scenes look at the building of the Scottish Parliament*Written by one of the team behind the controversial TV documentary series The Gathering Place

This book is about democracy and communication. The media and popular culture are often identified as bearing primary responsibility for the decline of active citizenship and the decay of democratic institutions. Media culture is charged with eroding the capacity of citizens to trust in public institutions and with encouraging widespread civic disengagement. In Culture and Democracy, Clive Barnett critically evaluates the conceptual underpinnings of such widespread judgements. In doing so he provides an innovative and theoretically informed exploration of the interface between culture, political economy, and public life. Through a triangulation of the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, and Habermas, he argues that deconstruction, poststructuralism, and critical theory converge around shared concerns for the possibilities of democratic public life in a globalising age. Drawing on cultural and media studies, human geography, political philosophy and social theory, and research on media policy and politics in the United States, Europe and South Africa, he demonstrates the indispensability of concepts of the public sphere, representation, and spatiality to the analysis of the politics of cultural democratisation. This book combines critical conceptualisation with policy analysis, and connects cultural studies to normative political theory. Clive Barnett demonstrates the importance of developing theoretical arguments in connection with case studies for understanding the contemporary interactions between media, culture and democracy.

This book for the first time brings together Gillian Beer's essays on Virginia Woolf. Widely recognised as a leading authority on Woolf and a sophisticated critic of modernism and fiction, Beer's essays make fascinating reading. Beer demonstrates, through close investigative textual readings, how Woolf's conceptualisations of history and narrative are intimately bound up with her ways of thinking about women, writing and social and sexual relations.

Cultural pessimism arises with the conviction that the culture of a nation, a civilisation or of humanity itself is in a process of irreversible decline. In an incisive and wide-ranging analysis, Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World charts the growth of pessimism in the West during the last decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on studies from within a very broad range of fields, which include ecology, human rights, military history, international relations, criminology, history of science, cultural criticism and political economy, the author shows how cultural pessimism in the postmodern world can be related to the cumulative effect of four key narratives of decline:*Environmental decline*Moral decline*Intellectual decline*Political declineAfter a review of pessimism in other historical periods, each of these narratives is explored in depth. The book attempts to answer a number of questions: how are the narratives constituted and what are the conditions to which they refer? To what extent are those conditions historically unprecedented? To which cultures do the narratives relate? What values do they reflect? To what extent are the identified processes of decline seen as irreversible? Concluding that cultural pessimism is as much a matter of psychological and biological disposition as of intellectual judgement, Oliver Bennett's challenging book offers valuable new insights into how we view the prospects of the twenty-first century.Features:*Provides an authoritative account of how the postmodern world has been represented as one of decline. *Brings together different perspectives kept apart by professional and academic specialisation*Views culture in its broadest sense as 'a whole way of life'*Provides an historical overview of cultural pessimism, tracing its various manifestations from the modern period back to its existence in early religions*Examines the biological, psychological and sociolog

This book is an account of, and commentary on, a collection of dreams by the novelist, playwright and theorist Helene Cixous. As such the book presents a rich poetic experience and is a key document in understanding Cixous' writing practice. Jacques Derrida's commentary on Dream I Tell You is published in 'The Frontiers of Theory' series as Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius.Key Features* Importance of Helene Cixous to contemporary literary and French feminist theory.* The poetic, autobiographical quality of the writing.* Significance of the book to the Cixous oeuvre.

Islamic law never achieved unity but developed into five surviving schools, which, when first established, were in competition with one another. This scholarly book is the first to examine critically the differing Islamic theories of abrogation (or Naskh) upon which each school based its claim to be the correct interpretation.