Taming the Imperial Imagination marks a novel intervention into the debate on empire and international relations, and offers a new perspective on nineteenth-century Anglo-Afghan relations. Martin J. Bayly shows how, throughout the nineteenth century, the British Empire in India sought to understand and control its peripheries through the use of colonial knowledge. Addressing the fundamental question of what Afghanistan itself meant to the British at the time, he draws on extensive archival research to show how knowledge of Afghanistan was built, refined and warped by an evolving colonial state. This knowledge informed policy choices and cast Afghanistan in a separate legal and normative universe. Beginning with the disorganised exploits of nineteenth-century explorers and ending with the cold strategic logic of the militarised 'scientific frontier', this book tracks the nineteenth-century origins of contemporary policy 'expertise' and the forms of knowledge that inform interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere today.

A new perspective on empire, international relations and foreign policy through attention to British colonial knowledge on Afghanistan from 1808 to 1878.

Stretching from the tributaries of the Danube to the Urals and from the Russian forests to the Black and Caspian seas, the vast European steppe has for centuries played very different roles in the Russian imagination. To the Grand Princes of Kiev and Muscovy, it was the "wild field," a region inhabited by nomadic Turko-Mongolic peoples who repeatedly threatened the fragile Slavic settlements to the north. For the emperors and empresses of imperial Russia, it was a land of boundless economic promise and a marker of national cultural prowess. By the mid-nineteenth century the steppe, once so alien and threatening, had emerged as an essential, if complicated, symbol of Russia itself.Traversing a thousand years of the region's history, Willard Sunderland recounts the complex process of Russian expansion and colonization, stressing the way outsider settlement at once created the steppe as a region of empire and was itself constantly changing. The story is populated by a colorful array of administrators, Cossack adventurers, Orthodox missionaries, geographers, foreign entrepreneurs, peasants, and (by the late nineteenth century) tourists and conservationists. Sunderland's approach to history is comparative throughout, and his comparisons of the steppe with the North American case are especially telling.Taming the Wild Field eloquently expresses concern with the fate of the world's great grasslands, and the book ends at the beginning of the twentieth century with the initiation of a conservation movement in Russia by those appalled at the high environmental cost of expansion.

An innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of British India. Thomas Simpson considers the role of frontier officials as surveyors, cartographers and ethnographers, military violence in frontier regions and the impact of the frontier experience on colonial administration.

The purpose of this book is to critically enhance the appreciation of Diplomacy and Sport in global affairs for both practitioners and scholars. The book will make an important new contribution to at least two distinct fields of study: Diplomacy and Sport, as well as to those concerned with History, Politics, Sociology, and International Relations. The critical analysis the book provides explores the linkages across these fields, particularly in relation to Soft Power and Public Diplomacy. Its conclusions offer avenues for further study based on the future of the relationship between sport and diplomacy. The book has strong international basis: it covers a broad range of countries, their diplomatic relationship with sport and is written by a truly transnational cast of authors. The intense media scrutiny on the Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup, and other international sports will contribute to the global interest in this volume.

Good addition to handbooks programme, no direct competitiors HIST section of ISA is growing each year Faced with an uncertain future, an increasing number of scholars have looked to the past for guidance, patterns and ideas. This tendency has been clear, despite theoretical and methodological difference, this book will fill a lacuna.

We all know scientists study a predictable set of organisms when performing research, whether they be mice, fruit flies, or less commonly known but widely used species of snail or worm. But when we think of the so-called humanistic social sciences, we envision a different kind of research attuned to historical power relations or the unique experiences of a social group. In Model Cases, sociologist Monika Krause uncovers the ways the humanities and social sciences are shaped by and dependent on a set of canonical research objects of their own, often in unacknowledged ways. Krause shows that some research objects are studied repeatedly and shape the understanding of more general categories in disproportionate ways. For instance, Chicago comes to be the touchstone for studies of the modern city, or Michel Foucault's analysis of Bentham's prison a guiding light for understanding contemporary power relations. Moving through classic cases in the social sciences, Krause reveals the ways canonical examples and sites have shaped research and theory, showing how they can both help and harm the production of knowledge. In the end, she argues, model cases have great potential to serve scholarship--as long as they are acknowledged and examined with acuity.