Disintegrating Empire examines the entangled histories of three threads of decolonization: the French welfare state, family migration from Algeria, and the French social workers who mediated between the state and their Algerian clients. After World War II, social work teams, midlevel bureaucrats, and government ministries stitched specialized social services for Algerians into the structure of the midcentury welfare state. Once the Algerian Revolution began in 1954, many successive administrations and eventually two independent states—France and Algeria—continuously tailored welfare to support social aid services for Algerian families migrating across the Mediterranean. Disintegrating Empire reveals the belated collapse of specialized services more than a decade after Algerian independence. The welfare state’s story, Elise Franklin argues, was not one merely of rise and fall but of winnowing services to “deserving” clients. Defunding social services—long associated with the neoliberal turn in the 1980s and beyond—has a much longer history defined by exacting controls on colonial citizens and migrants of newly independent countries. Disintegrating Empire explores the dynamic, conflicting, and often messy nature of these relationships, which show how Algerian family migration prompted by decolonization ultimately exposed the limits of the French welfare state.

Third in the trilogy of the ancient Greek dynasty. “In Grainger’s account, the fall of the Seleukid is as enlightening as the rise.”—Minerva Magazine The concluding part of John D Grainger’s history of the Seleukids traces the tumultuous last century of their empire. In this period, it was riven by dynastic disputes, secessions and rebellions, the religiously inspired insurrection of the Jewish Maccabees, civil war and external invasion from Egypt in the West and the Parthians in the East. By the 80s BC, the empire was disintegrating, internally fractured and squeezed by the converging expansionist powers of Rome and Parthia. This is a fittingly, dramatic and colorful conclusion to John Grainger’s masterful account of this once-mighty empire. “To get the best from The Fall of the Seleukid it would be worthwhile making sure you’ve absorbed the first two volumes. Nonetheless you can enjoy and learn from this book alone. Like the fall of any other empire or the folly of human behavior—the story is compelling.”—UNRV “Grainger does a good job of producing a convincing narrative using the limited sources.”—HistoryOfWar

Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands engages with the evolving historiography around the concept of belonging in the Russian and Ottoman empires. The contributors to this book argue that the popular notion that empires do not care about belonging is simplistic and wrong. Chapters address numerous and varied dimensions of belonging in multiethnic territories of the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union, from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. They illustrate both the mutability and the durability of imperial belonging in Eurasian borderlands. Contributors to this volume pay attention to state authorities but also to the voices and experiences of teachers, linguists, humanitarian officials, refugees, deportees, soldiers, nomads, and those left behind. Through those voices the authors interrogate the mutual shaping of empire and nation, noting the persistence and frequency of coercive measures that imposed belonging or denied it to specific populations deemed inconvenient or incapable of fitting in. The collective conclusion that editors Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum provide is that nations must take ownership of their behaviors, irrespective of whether they emerged from disintegrating empires or enjoyed autonomy and power within them.

This book concerns the end of the age of colonization and the inherent changes in the world economy. It discusses the author’s perception of the disintegration of free trade and ideas on the solution of federation. Starting with an introduction to economic thought and history the author then presents the state of the world at the time of writing in terms of colonies and dependencies and looks at economic nationalism and economic separatism. This discursive text is an important account of the global economic issues of the early twentieth century by one of the most well-known economists of the age who became a foremost expert in international financial affairs.

An ambitious analysis of contemporary Ukrainian political economy.

The last place a German soldier wanted to be in 1944 was the Russian front. That summer, Stalin hurled into battle more than six million men and 9,000 tanks, supported by 16,000 fighters and bombers and more than 12,800 guns and rocket launchers. Despite this massive effort and the resulting decimation of German forces, events on the Eastern Front are largely neglected by historians who focus instead on German defeats in Normandy and the Ardennes. This account details the massive battles on the Eastern Front from the summer of 1944 until the fall of Budapest in early 1945, a period when Hitler lost the majority of his conquered Eastern territories and many of his best remaining divisions. To destroy the Third Reich, the Allies needed to defeat the German Wehrmacht militarily, and the decisive victories of this period occurred on the Russian Front. More German soldiers were lost in White Russia than at Stalingrad; more troops were lost in Rumania in a brief ten days than in the entire Normandy campaign; and German losses in Hungary were greater than the Battle of the Bulge. The most mobile army in the world in 1940, the German Army was the least mobile by 1944, and Hitler's stand fast and fortified place policies imposed a paralysis that neither senior German generals nor the High Command of the Army were able to overcome. Outnumbered 3 to 1 in men, 5 to 1 in tanks, and 20 to 1 in airplanes, the German Army was slaughtered, as casualties mounted and the empire crumbled.

From Simon & Schuster, The Fall of Imperial China is Frederic Wakeman, Jr.'s exploration of Imperial China—both its astronomic rise and steep decline. From the Introduction: "Historians of modern China are used to contrasting the dizzying changes in post-renaissance Europe with the glacial creep of Confucian civilization. The West's global expansion to new vistas of discovery thus distorts our perspective of those older worlds that resisted European conquest. The most tenacious of these ancient civilizations was the Chinese empire."