Periyar, to many in Tamil Nadu, was an atheist and iconoclast who called out belief in gods, superstitions, and rituals. He, of course, was all of that. But despite his rejection, he had a close engagement with religion and his critique was rooted in a close reading of religious texts, practices, and the values they espoused. He also creatively drew upon extant critiques of religion, Vedic and Abrahamic, and scholarly debates of his times to propound an alternative humanist ethic rooted in justice and fraternity. This chapter maps the multiple sources of his critique of religion and outlines the contours of his call for an ethical life.

There was much overlap between Periyar's thoughts and the critiques of scripturally sanctioned hierarchies of caste by spiritual and secular thinkers, both those who preceded him and those who lived in his times. Even though he was influenced by modernist critiques of religion emerging from the West, it is important to note that his views were in line with a long lineage of materialist philosophical traditions in the subcontinent.

Periyar became a militant atheist only in his forties. It was his vehement criticism of Brahminical Hinduism that led to his position of atheism. Periyar, on several occasions, observed that he was least interested in talking about God and religion.

This chapter examines the initial conditions underlying the book’s theory by analyzing authoritarian labor control policies and political developments in Tunisia and Morocco in the postindependence period. It explores how these control strategies shaped unions’ interests, capacities, and perceptions during the early stages of state formation and investigates how relationships between unions and other collective actors influenced the emergence of labor movements. The chapter shows how exclusionary corporatism provided Tunisian unions with organizational resources that strengthened their capacity for opposition, while inclusionary strategies and alliances with political elites weakened labor autonomy in Morocco.

Volume II charts European urbanism between 700 and 1850, the millennium during which Europe became the world’s most urbanised region. Featuring thirty-six chapters from leading scholars working on all the major linguistic areas of Europe, the volume offers a state-of-the-art survey that explores and explains this transformation, how similar or different such processes were across Europe, and how far it is possible to discern traits that characterise European urbanism in this period. The first half of the volume offers overviews on the urban history of Mediterranean Europe, Atlantic and North Sea Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and European urbanisms around the world. The second half explores major themes, from the conceptualisation of cities and their material fabric to continuities and changes in the social, political, economic, religious and cultural histories of cities and towns.

No medieval pope ever forbade vernacular Bible reading.

The current chapter investigates the relationship dynamics between Germany and the Axis bloc countries. The chapter concludes that the Axis coalition-building efforts were poorly organized, haphazardly coordinated, and dreadfully led, suffering from German racism, mutual mistrust, and systematic lack of resources. Finnish participation in Operation Barbarossa was motivated by two things: the country’s exposed geographical position next to Russia and the unfinished Soviet attempt to occupy it during the Winter War in 1939–1940. Finland was not occupied by the Red Army and thus maintained its liberal democracy.

While most histories describe the Romanian Army as a reluctant ally of the German Army on the Easten Front, this chapter argues that Romania had embraced a far-right ideology that made the country Nazi Germany’s most important partner in the campaign against the Soviet Union. The Italian Royal Army fought an unplanned campaign, under German command, against the Red Army between August 1941 and January 1943. Despite severe limitations, the combatants of the CSIR and the ARMIR fought bravely until German defeat at Stalingrad led to the deadly disaster on the Don River.

In the 1000 or so years after c. 700, Britain and Ireland’s urban sector developed from a hybrid European urbanism on the edge of the continent to an imperial urbanism forming the scaffolding of a complicated colonial and commercial empire. This contributed to the long-term shift in European economic power from its traditional epicentres in the Mediterranean and North Sea and Baltic worlds, with the Atlantic Archipelago on its margins, to the new riches of the Atlantic and Asians world, with the Archipelago at its heart. British and Irish urbanization involved conquest, colonisation, and social reordering as well as material improvement; and the cities, boroughs, and towns and ‘villages’ were more than a little implicated in the human and environmental trauma of Atlantic slavery and the Anthropocene.

Introduction

In 1935, at a conference of Senguntha Mudaliars in Tiruppur, C. N. Annadurai (Anna, 1909–1969), then a twenty-six-year-old graduate, met E. V. Ramasamy (Periyar, 1879–1973). Impressed by the non-Brahmin youth who wanted to enter public life rather than seek a government job, Periyar was quick to take him under his wing. In less than three years, Anna was playing a major role in the Self-Respect Movement (SRM), becoming one of Periyar's chief lieutenants in the 1938–1939 anti-Hindi agitation which made the Dravidian movement a mass organization and effectively put Tamil assertion at the centre stage of politics. It was in the course of this mass-based agitation that the Justice Party was absorbed by the SRM and, in 1944, rechristened the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK). In 1949, Periyar's most brilliant protégé became his rival, breaking away to form the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). In 1967, the DMK dethroned the Indian National Congress (Congress). The intervening decades were marked by bitter hostility and rivalry between the DK and the DMK.

Immediately after the DMK's 1967 victory, there was a rapprochement. Since then, it has been customary to collapse the two into a unified Dravidian movement. The rivalry between the DK and the DMK has been completely elided by party ideologues, chroniclers, and historians.

This chapter explores the varied facets through which conceptions of materialism manifest across the larger ecologies of literary production bundled under the rubric “African literature.” It deliberately treats both of these terms – materialism and literature – in their broadest senses. The chapter begins with a brief consideration of the various manifestations of materialism which have emerged in studies of African literature, reading materialism variously as critique (in its Marxist/socialist guise), aesthetic (what Zimblar and Etherington call the “materials” of world literature), and context (material worlds and worldings). The chapter then expands on these ideas through a set of literary-focused readings which draw on anglophone, francophone, and other African literatures, largely emphasizing the global circulations of the novel form from 1960 to the present day. This chapter finally concludes by looking at materialism through the twinned concepts of circulation and mediation, exploring the ways in which the material structures which allow a literature to “emerge,” in market terms, simultaneously impact the constitution of the African literary text and its publics.