Following conflicting desires for an Aztec crown, this book explores the possibilities of repatriation. In The Contested Crown, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll meditates on the case of a spectacular feather headdress believed to have belonged to Montezuma, emperor of the Aztecs. This crown has long been the center of political and cultural power struggles, and it is one of the most contested museum claims between Europe and the Americas. Taken to Europe during the conquest of Mexico, it was placed at Ambras Castle, the Habsburg residence of the author’s ancestors, and is now in Vienna’s Welt Museum. Mexico has long requested to have it back, but the Welt Museum uses science to insist it is too fragile to travel. Both the biography of a cultural object and a history of collecting and colonizing, this book offers an artist’s perspective on the creative potentials of repatriation. Carroll compares Holocaust and colonial ethical claims, and she considers relationships between indigenous people, international law and the museums that amass global treasures, the significance of copies, and how conservation science shapes collections. Illustrated with diagrams and rare archival material, this book brings together global history, European history, and material culture around this fascinating object and the debates about repatriation.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contested Ground provides a comprehensive and up to date account of the processes and experiences which shaped the lives of Aboriginal Australians from 1788 to the present. It integrates eye-witness accounts, oral histories and historical research to present the first colony-by-colony, state by state history of Aboriginal-white relations. Contested Ground tells a story of dispossession and denial but it is also a positive account, revealing the persistent struggles of Aboriginal communities for a better future. Clearly written and generously illustrated, this book demonstrates why Australian Aboriginal history, like the very land itself, remains contested ground. 'Both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians have a lot to learn about each other before reconciliation between the two peoples can be realised. This book will go a long way towards achieving that end.' - Paul Behrendt.

In Contested Treasure, Thomas Barton examines how the Jews in the Crown of Aragon in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries negotiated the overlapping jurisdictions and power relations of local lords and the crown. The thirteenth century was a formative period for the growth of royal bureaucracy and the development of the crown’s legal claims regarding the Jews. While many Jews were under direct royal authority, significant numbers of Jews also lived under nonroyal and seigniorial jurisdiction. Barton argues that royal authority over the Jews (as well as Muslims) was far more modest and contingent on local factors than is usually recognized. Diverse case studies reveal that the monarchy’s Jewish policy emerged slowly, faced considerable resistance, and witnessed limited application within numerous localities under nonroyal control, thus allowing for more highly differentiated local modes of Jewish administration and coexistence. Contested Treasure refines and complicates our portrait of interfaith relations and the limits of royal authority in medieval Spain, and it presents a new approach to the study of ethnoreligious relations and administrative history in medieval European society.

The only comparative analysis available of the great navies of World War I, this work studies the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom, the German Kaiserliche Marine, the United States Navy, the French Marine Nationale, the Italian Regia Marina, the Austro-Hungarian Kaiserliche und Königliche Kriegsmarine, and the Imperial Russian Navy to demonstrate why the war was won, not in the trenches, but upon the waves. It explains why these seven fleets fought the way they did and why the war at sea did not develop as the admiralties and politicians of 1914 expected. After discussing each navy’s goals and circumstances and how their individual characteristics impacted the way they fought, the authors deliver a side-by-side analysis of the conflict’s fleets, with each chapter covering a single navy. Parallel chapter structures assure consistent coverage of each fleet—history, training, organization, doctrine, materiel, and operations—and allow readers to easily compare information among the various navies. The book clearly demonstrates how the naval war was a collision of 19th century concepts with 20th century weapons that fostered unprecedented development within each navy and sparked the evolution of the submarine and aircraft carrier. The work is free from the national bias that infects so many other books on World War I navies. As they pioneer new ways of viewing the conflict, the authors provide insights and material that would otherwise require a massive library and mastery of multiple languages. Such a study has special relevance today as 20th-century navies struggle to adapt to 21st-century technologies.

Interracial sex mattered to the British colonial state in West Africa. In Crossing the Color Line, Carina E. Ray goes beyond this fact to reveal how Ghanaians shaped and defined these powerfully charged relations. The interplay between African and European perspectives and practices, argues Ray, transformed these relationships into key sites for consolidating colonial rule and for contesting its hierarchies of power. With rigorous methodology and innovative analyses, Ray brings Ghana and Britain into a single analytic frame to show how intimate relations between black men and white women in the metropole became deeply entangled with those between black women and white men in the colony in ways that were profoundly consequential. Based on rich archival evidence and original interviews, the book moves across different registers, shifting from the micropolitics of individual disciplinary cases brought against colonial officers who “kept” local women to transatlantic networks of family, empire, and anticolonial resistance. In this way, Ray cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century.