This book provides fresh insights into colonial and imperial histories by focusing on spatial appropriations. Moving away from European notions of property, appropriation encompasses the many ways in which social actors consider a space as their own. This space may be physical or immaterial, public or intimate, lived or imagined. In modern empires, spatial appropriations amounted neither to a material and violent dispossession orchestrated by European or Japanese powers, nor to an ongoing and unquestioned resistance by subaltern peoples. They were rather sites of complex interactions, in which the part of each actor owed as much to “foreign” domination as to other political, social, economic and environmental factors. Cutting across common historiographical boundaries, the chapters of this book bring to light the declination and conjugation of various forms of spatial appropriation in the modern imperial age (1820-1960), taking readers on a journey from Russia to China, from the United States to South America, and from the Mediterranean world to Africa.

This book starts from the premise that the study of "exceptionally normal" women and men - as conceived by microhistory - has radical implications for understanding history and politics, and applies this notion to Sudan. Against a historiography dominated by elite actors and international agents, it examines both how ordinary people have brought about the most important political shifts in the country's history (including the recent revolution in 2019) and how they have played a role in maintaining authoritarian regimes. It also explores how men and women have led their daily lives through a web of ordinary worries, desires and passions. The book includes contributions by historians, anthropologists, and political scientists who often have a dual commitment to Middle Eastern and African studies. While focusing on the complexity and nuances of Sudanese local lives in both the past and the present, it also connects Sudan and South Sudan with broader regional, global, and imperial trends. The book is divided into two volumes and six parts, ordered thematically. The first part tackles the entanglement between archives, social history, and power. The second focuses on women's agency in history and politics from the Funj era to the recent 2018-2019 revolution. Part 3 includes contributions on the history and global connections of the Sudanese armed forces. In the second volume, part 4 intersects the themes of urban life, leisure, and colonial attitudes with queerness. In part 5, labour identities, practices, and institutions are discussed both in urban milieus and against the background of war and expropriation in rural areas. Finally, part 6 studies the construction of social consent under various self-styled Islamic regimes, as well as the emergence of alternative imaginaries and acts of citizenship in times of political openness.

Historians typically regard the British Empire as a state project aided by corporations. Philip Stern turns this view on its head, arguing that corporations drove colonial expansion and governance, creating an overlap between sovereign and commercial power that continues to shape the relationship between nations and corporations to this day.

Adab is a concept situated at the heart of Arabic and Islamic civilization. What became of it, towards modernity? The question of the civilising process (Norbert Elias) helps us reflect on this story.

Approaching subalternity from a broad Gramscian angle, this edited collection contributes to the understanding of popular politics in parliamentary, autocratic, and colonial contexts. The book explores individual stories and micro-histories of complaints, requests, rumors, and other mediated and unmediated interactions between political institutions and the subjects they claimed to govern or represent. It challenges the approaches of institutionally oriented political historiography and its attention to the top-down construction of political representation, citizenship, and power and powerlessness. The book discusses more subtle forms of agency and the spaces these pertained to, which could indicate contestation or resistance taking place within a framework of loyalty towards the existing political institutions. This research does not only bridge the divide between political and apolitical frames of reference, but it also provides a new perspective on the dichotomy between loyalty and resistance by acknowledging the nuances of these seemingly opposing stances. With case studies from Europe, North Africa, South America, and India, the chapters cover political communication in proto-democratic, democratic, imperial, and authoritarian contexts. This volume is crucial reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars in history and social sciences who are interested in political culture and the mechanisms of negotiating local, national, or imperial identities.

This book provides fresh insights into colonial and imperial histories by focusing on spatial appropriations. Moving away from European notions of property, appropriation encompasses the many ways in which social actors consider a space as their own. This space may be physical or immaterial, public or intimate, lived or imagined. In modern empires, spatial appropriations amounted neither to a material and violent dispossession orchestrated by European or Japanese powers, nor to an ongoing and unquestioned resistance by subaltern peoples. They were rather sites of complex interactions, in which the part of each actor owed as much to â oeforeignâ domination as to other political, social, economic and environmental factors. Cutting across common historiographical boundaries, the chapters of this book bring to light the declination and conjugation of various forms of spatial appropriation in the modern imperial age (1820-1960), taking readers on a journey from Russia to China, from the United States to South America, and from the Mediterranean world to Africa.

Offers a new reading of the history of the colonization of North America and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples.