When in 1613, following the Time of Troubles, the first Romanov came to the throne of Muscovy, sixty years had elapsed since, in the words of Richard Hakluyt, “the strange and wonderful Discoverie of Russia” by the English. It was Hakluyt who gathered together in his Principal navigations, voiages, [traffiques,] and discoueries of the English nation (first …
People and communities, lives and livelihoods. These define the Arctic, just as with all other populated areas on the planet. Is there, then, any-thing special, specific, exceptional or unique about the Arctic? To the peoples in the Arctic, the answer is ‘of course’.Because it is home.As Arctic literature is fond of stating, there is no single Arctic. Definitions abo…
Finding Jerusalem is not about bringing back to life ancient stones and walls hidden underground. It is not an adventurer’s quest for long-lost treasures and monuments of a city venerated by the three Abrahamic traditions. And least of all, it is not an attempt to uncover the biblical truth. Finding Jerusalem: Archaeol-ogy between Science and Ideology is …
This is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies, writ-ings and performances. It explores the forms knowledge takes, the mean-ings it accrues and how they are shaped by the peoples and places that use it. This is also a book about the relationships between political power, family ties and literate scholarship in the ancient Middle East of the first millennium bc (see Tables 3a…
What do we see when we look at a monument, and how do we come to see what we do? Far from the innocent ravages of time, the calculated aesthetics of the Indian temple today result from the confluence of religious performance, the politics of identity formation, the tension between neoliberal and socialist preservation mod-els, and the display, erasure, and fragmentation of the visual and materi…
This book is about interpreting the Scientific Revolution as a distinctive movement directed towards the exploration of the world of nature and coming into its own in Europe by the end of the seventeenth century. The famed English historian Lord Acton (1834-1902) is said to have advised that problems were more important than periods. If he held this o…
The title of our book pays homage to a classic anthropological monograph: Time and the Other by Johannes Fabian (1983). That critical work – unfortunately lit-tle used in studies of the ancient or indigenous Americas – examined the way in which the dominant party in an intercultural encounter tends to situate (to construct and to interpret) ‘the Other’, i.e. colonised or otherwise margi…
etween seven and eight million men and women left Ireland over the course of the nineteenth century.1 For a country whose popula-tion has never been more than eight and a half million, that is a mind-boggling statistic, and one that might easily obscure individual emigrant lives. Historians have therefore tended to tackle Irish emigration in two di…
Astronomer and Marxist Anton Pannekoek was a remarkable f igure. As an astronomer, he pioneered quantitative astrophysics and founded the renowned Astronomical Institute in Amsterdam that now carries his name. Before World War I, however, he was employed as a Marxist theorist by the Social Democratic Party of Germany, making him one of the leading intel-lectuals of international socialism. Beca…
Centuries before the Pacific was revealed to Europeans, flotillas of ves-sels carried thousands of men, women, and children, together with plants and animals, to virtually every island in a vast ocean that covers about one-third of the surface of the globe. They settled in homelands with con-siderable diversity, ranging from the high islands of Papua New Guinea to small volcanic pe…