Series: The Cultural Histories Series

A Cultural History of Plants in the Early Modern Era covers the period from 1400 to 1650, a time of discovery and rediscovery, of experiment and innovation. Renaissance learning brought ancient knowledge to modern European consciousness whilst exploration placed all the continents in contact with one another. The dissemination of knowledge was further speeded by the spread of printing. New...

A Cultural History of Plants in the Modern Era covers the period from 1920 to today—a time when population growth, industrialisation, global trade, and consumerism have fundamentally reshaped our relationship with plants. Advances in agriculture, science, and technology have revolutionised the ways we feed ourselves, whilst urbanisation and industrial processing have reduced our direct connection with living plants. At the...

A Cultural History of Plants in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries covers the period from 1650 to 1800, a time of global exploration and the discovery of new species of plants and their potential uses. Trade routes were established which brought Europeans into direct contact with the plants and people of Asia, Oceania, Africa and the Americas. Foreign and exotic...

“A thick, tangled and deliciously idiosyncratic history of hair.” Times Literary Supplement The Enlightenment (1650-1800) was the Golden Age of hair. Hair dominated fashion as never before or since, with more men and women than ever donning elaborate wigs and hairdos. Such unprecedentedly extravagant styling naturally increased the demand for the services of professional hairdressers, whose numbers grew apace throughout...

The period since the First World War has been a century distinguished by the loss of any unitary foundation for truth, ethics, and the legitimate authority of law. With the emergence of radical pluralism, law has become the site of extraordinary creativity and, on occasion, a source of rights for those historically excluded from its protection. A Cultural History of...

How have definitions of race varied and changed over time? What impact have religion, science and politics had on race throughout history, and how has our concept of it been changed as a result? These ambitious questions are answered by 61 experts who—drawing on perspectives from history, sociology, anthropology, literature and medical humanities—deepen our understanding of how race has developed...

In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance environments,...

A Cultural History of Plants in Antiquity covers the period from 10,000 BCE to 500 CE. This period witnessed the transition from hunter-gatherer subsistence to the practice of agriculture in Mesopotamia and elsewhere and culminated in the fall of the Roman Empire, the end of the Han Dynasty in China, the rise of Byzantium, and the first flowering of Mayan...

How has human response to genocide evolved over time? What effect has it had on our understanding of the cause and consequences of genocide? Spanning 2,800 years of human history, A Cultural History of Genocide offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary overview of genocide from ancient times to the present day. With six highly illustrated volumes all written by leading scholars,...

With coverage extending from prehistory to the modern day, these six highly illustrated, interdisciplinary volumes are the first definitive reference work covering the cultural history of slavery and human trafficking. Volumes cover: A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking in the Ancient World (10,000 BCE - 500 CE) A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking in the Pre-Modern...

The cry of “never again” reverberated around the world in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Yet despite the unprecedented horrors of the Shoah, and the subsequent creation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the frequency of genocide intensified in the post-Holocaust period. Since 1945, there have been genocides or mass killings in East...