Extending deconstructive theory to historical and political analysis, Timothy Mitchell examines the peculiarity of Western conceptions of order and truth through a re-reading of Europe's colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.

Three powerful empires - the Habsburg, the Ottoman and the Russian - spent the 18th and the first third of the 19th centuries fighting each other for power and influence in the Balkans. This is not, however, the only significant aspect of the complicated history of the European Southeast. The intellectual and economic currents that turned the 18th century into a key event in human civilisation were refracted through the prism of Balkan regionalism. The 130 years between Karlowitz and Adrianople were able to steer the Southeast back onto the rails of a "Common European History". The volume contains the proceedings of an international conference hosted by the Sofia University Faculty of History in October 2009.

Working with Paper builds on a growing interest in the materials of science by exploring the gendered uses and meanings of paper tools and technologies, considering how notions of gender impacted paper practices and in turn how paper may have structured knowledge about gender. Through a series of dynamic investigations covering Europe and North America and spanning the early modern period to the twentieth century, this volume breaks new ground by examining material histories of paper and the gendered worlds that made them. Contributors explore diverse uses of paper—from healing to phrenological analysis to model making to data processing—which often occurred in highly gendered, yet seemingly divergent spaces, such as laboratories and kitchens, court rooms and boutiques, ladies’ chambers and artisanal workshops, foundling houses and colonial hospitals, and college gymnasiums and state office buildings. Together, they reveal how notions of masculinity and femininity became embedded in and expressed through the materials of daily life. Working with Paper uncovers the intricate negotiations of power and difference underlying epistemic practices, forging a material history of knowledge in which quotidian and scholarly practices are intimately linked.