Maritime trade is the backbone of the world’s economy. Around ninety percent of all goods are transported by ship, and since World War II, shipbuilding has undergone major changes in response to new commercial pressures and opportunities. Early British dominance, for example, was later undermined in the 1950s by com...

This book offers a revisionist look at the historiography of the Republic of Letters and the community of learning in early modern Europe. It suggests a new approach, conceptualising the learned world as a web of imagined communities in which the members do not know all their peers. These communities formed through ...

Travel Writing in Mongolia and Northern China, 1860-2020 invites readers to explore Mongolia as an important cultural space for Western travelers and their audiences over three historical eras. Travelers have framed their experiences and observations through imaginative geographies and Orientalizing discourses, fixi...

Before the advent of television, cinema offered serialized films as a source of weekly entertainment. This book traces the history from the days of silent screen heroines to the sound era's daring adventure serials, unearthing a thriving film culture beyond the self-contained feature. Through extensive archival rese...

Analysis of political advertising tends to give music short shrift - which flies in the face of what we know about the power of music to set a mood, affect feelings, and influence our perceptions. This book is the first to offer a detailed exploration of the role of music in US presidential campaign advertising, fro...

Uncertainty and instability affected Geneva and the Duchy of Savoy since the mid-fifteenth century. French and Swiss expansionism had turned Savoy into part of a long geopolitical fault line, running from the North Sea to the Mediterranean along the border between France and the Empire. In Geneva, and partially in o...

The history of medieval learning has traditionally been studied as a vertical transmission of knowledge from a master to one or several disciples. Horizontal Learning in the High Middle Ages: Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer in Religious Communities centres on the ways in which cohabiting peers learned and taught one...

Independence protests are on the rise across Europe, as Spain, the UK, and other states have faced severe secessionist challenges. The largest wave of these protests swept Catalonia and reached its peak in 2017 when the push for a binding referendum led to an unprecedented secessionist crisis. Organizing for Indepen...

The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. Inspired by Marxist and psychoanaly...

The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. Inspired by Marxist and psychoanaly...

Why do early films present the Netherlands as a country full of canals and windmills, where people wear traditional costumes and wooden shoes, while industries and modern urban life are all but absent? Images of Dutchness investigates the roots of this visual repertoire from diverse sources, ranging from magazines t...

European countries, including the Netherlands, are increasingly more willing to return looted art to their former colonies. In doing so, however, they are confronted with hard choices. In The Empty Showcase Syndrome, Jos van Beurden explores three of the toughest questions that countries and governments face. First,...

Dutch cinema, when discussed, is typically treated only in terms of pre-war films or documentaries, leaving post-war fictional film largely understudied. At the same time, a Hollandse school, a term first coined in the 1980s, has developed through deadpan, ironic films like those of director and actor Alex van Warme...

Spain has been a fruitful locus for the European imagination for centuries, and it has been most often perceived in black-and-white oppositions -- either as a tyrannical and fanatical force in the early modern period or as an imaginary geography of a 'Romantic' Spain in later centuries. However, the image of Spain, ...

China’s rise is one of the transformative events of our time. Aspects of Urbanization in China: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou examines some of the aspects of China’s massive wave of urbanization – the largest the world has ever seen. The various papers in the book, written by academics from different disciplines, r...

Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media have yielded a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, and this begs the question: where do we stand now? W...