This book investigates the causes and effects of modernisation in rural regions of Britain and Ireland, continental Europe, the Americas, and Australasia between 1780 and 1914. In this period, the transformation of the world economy associated with the Industrial Revolution fuelled dramatic changes in the international countryside, as landowning elites, agricultural workers, and states adapted to the consequences of globalisation in a variety of ways. The chapters in this volume illustrate similarities, differences, and connections between the resulting manifestations of agrarian reform and resistance that spread throughout the Euro-American world and beyond during the long nineteenth century.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, agricultural practices and rural livelihoods were challenged by changes such as commercialization, intensified global trade, and rapid urbanization. Planting Seeds of Knowledge studies the relationship between these agricultural changes and knowledge-making through a transnational lens. Spanning exchanges between different parts of Europe, North and South America, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa, the wide-reaching contributions to this volume reform current historiography to show how local experiences redefined global practice.

For a long time agriculture and rural life were dismissed by many contemporaries as irrelevant or old-fashioned. Contrasted with cities as centers of intellectual debate and political decision-making, the countryside seemed to be becoming increasingly irrelevant. Today, politicians in many European countries are starting to understand that the neglect of the countryside has created grave problems. Similarly, historians are remembering that European history in the twentieth century was strongly influenced by problems connected to the production of food, access to natural resources, land rights, and the political representation and activism of rural populations. Hence, the handbook offers an overview of historical knowledge on a variety of topics related to the land. It does so through a distinctly activity-centric and genuinely European perspective. Rather than comparing different national approaches to living with the land, the different chapters focus on particular activities – from measuring to settling the land, from producing and selling food to improving agronomic knowledge, from organizing rural life to challenging political structures in the countryside. Furthermore, the handbook overcomes the traditional division between East and West, North and South, by embracing a transregional approach that allows readers to gain an understanding of similarities and differences across national and ideological borders in twentieth-century Europe.

This is the first study to systematically explore similarities, differences, and connections between the histories of American planters and Irish landlords. The book focuses primarily on the comparative and transnational investigation of an antebellum Mississippi planter named John A. Quitman (1799–1858) and a nineteenth-century Irish landlord named Robert Dillon, Lord Clonbrock (1807–93), examining their economic behaviors, ideologies, labor relations, and political histories. Locating Quitman and Clonbrock firmly within their wider local, national, and international contexts, American Planters and Irish Landlords in Comparative and Transnational Perspective argues that the two men were representative of specific but comparable manifestations of agrarian modernity, paternalism, and conservatism that became common among the landed elites who dominated economy, society, and politics in the antebellum American South and in nineteenth-century Ireland. It also demonstrates that American planters and Irish landlords were connected by myriad direct and indirect transnational links between their societies, including transatlantic intellectual cultures, mutual participation in global capitalism, and the mass migration of people from Ireland to the United States that occurred during the nineteenth century.

"Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Historical Companion enables professionals, scholars and students engaged with the SDGs to develop a richer understanding of the legacies and historical complexities of the policy fields behind each goal. Each of the seventeen chapters tells the decades or centuries-old backstory of one SDG, including an examination of how the SDG problem impacted past societies and the various attempts at understanding and addressing it. Collectively, the chapters reveal the multiple and often interwoven histories that have shaped the challenges later encompassed in the SDGs. The book's chapters, written in an accessible style, are authored by international experts from multiple disciplines. The book is an indispensable resource and a vital foundation for understanding the past's indelible footprint on our contemporary sustainable development challenges"--

Recent events around the globe have cast doubt on the assumption that, as a result of increasing cross-border migrations and global interdependencies, nation-states are becoming more inclusive, ethnic forms of identification more and more a thing of the past, and processes of supranational integration progressively more acceptable. Xenophobic forms of nationalism have once again been on the rise, as became strikingly visible through the results of the Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump, and the inclusion of the Lega Nord in the Italian government. It is timely, therefore, to inquire how multiethnic forms of nationalism can be re-promoted and for this purpose to re-investigate the concept of civic nationalism. This book assembles case studies that analyse the historical practices of civic or quasi-civic nationalisms from around the world. By allowing for global comparisons, the collection of articles seeks to shed new light on pressing questions faced by nation-states around the world today: Are truly civic nationalisms even possible? Which strategies have multiethnic nation-states pursued in the past to foster national sentiment? How can nation-states generate social solidarity without resorting to primordialism? Can the historical example of civic or quasi-civic nation-states offer useful lessons to contemporary nation-states for successfully integrating immigrants?

This book analyzes the stance of international communism towards nationality, anti-colonialism, and racial equality as defined by the Communist International (Comintern) during the interwar period. Central to the volume is a comparative analysis of the communist parties of three British dominions, South Africa, Canada and Australia, demonstrating how each party attempted to follow Moscow’s lead and how each party produced its own attempts to deal with these issues locally, while considering the limits of their own agency within the movement at large.