Browse all Reviews
It is a bold historian who, in the 21st century, still advertises, even as subtitle, a history of ‘Germanic Europe’ in the late Middle Ages. Evidently alarm bells were sounding in the author’s own ears, as he uses his first page (p. viii) to insist that ‘this book does not revive discredited racist notions based upon a supposedly pristine Germanic antiquity’. And nor does it.
In 1722 a German travel-writer and political economist named Ernst Ludwig Carl published a three-volume Traité de la richesse des princes et de leurs états: et des moyens simples et naturels pour y parvenir.
‘Earth, earth, do not cover our blood and do not keep silent’.
Although this book is not very long (109 pages, not counting appendices and index), it might be characterized in multiple ways. First, it is important, making a valuable addition to the literature on medieval prisons. Interestingly, medieval prisons have not attracted a great deal of scholarly attention.
Until recently, the mixed economies of the welfare state in general and of social insurance in particular were a neglected issue in social and economic history. The historiography of the welfare state concentrated mainly on the public side of social policies, namely on the development of social insurance, neglecting the parallel worlds of commercial and mutual insurance.
In Our Friend ‘The Enemy’ Thomas Weber attacks both the Sonderweg-interpretation of the German Kaiserreich and theories of British exceptionalism before 1914.
Companions and handbooks to various periods or problems of history are currently all the rage. This one is the 37th in its own publisher’s series, which ranges from the whole sweep of a continent’s or a nation’s history (such as Latin America, or Japan) to much more restricted periods or problems of current scholarly interest.
To study Russia before the late 19th century is to labour under a twofold handicap.
On 8 February 2008, the Polish minister of culture announced that his government would not support the establishment of a centre in Berlin commemorating the expulsion of Germans and other ethnic minorities in the 20th century.
Cars for Comrades is a kind of ‘total history’ of the automobile and ‘car culture’ in the Soviet Union, one that is exhaustively researched and engagingly written.