Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. Sociology
  4. Historical Sociology
  5. Content Listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

28 results in Historical Sociology

Page 1 of 2

Nationalism as a Way of Life
  • The Rise and Transformation of Modern Subjectivities
  • Siniša Malešević
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025

The Making of Labour Precarity in China since 1949
  • Xiaojun Feng
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    30 November 2025
  • Globally, most workers live precarious lives. In this examination of China's industrial relations since 1949, Xiaojun Feng explores why this should be. China provides an important case to examine this question because it has gone through both socialist revolution and marketized reforms, the major economic and political dynamics that have shaped the world since the twentieth century. Developing a comprehensive analytical framework for the interpretation of archives, interviews and participant observation, Feng explores the causes of and potential remedies for labour precarity in China. Bridging the 1949 and 1978 divides, this study unveils continuities and more fundamental discontinuities across these watershed moments, and sheds fresh light on the extent to which popular policy can counter labour precarity and the future dynamics of labour movements.

Pious Politics
  • Cultural Foundations of the Islamist Movement in Turkey
  • Zeynep Ozgen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • What explains the rise and resilience of the Islamist movement in Turkey? Since its founding in 1923, the Turkish republic has periodically reined in Islamist actors. Secular laws denied legitimacy to religious ideas, publications, and civic organizations, while military coups jailed or banned Islamist party leaders from politics. Despite such adversity, Islamists won an unprecedented victory at the 2002 national elections and have continued to rule since. 'Pious Politics' explains how Islamists succeeded by developing a popular, well-organized movement over decades that rallied the masses and built vigorous political parties. But an equally formative-if not more significant-factor was the cultural groundwork Islamists laid through a remarkably robust model of mobilization. Drawing on two years of ethnographic and archival research in Turkey, Zeynep Ozgen explores how social movements leverage cultural production to create sociopolitical change.

The Kansas Court of Industrial Relations
  • Interwar America's Dangerous Experiment in Social Control
  • Ben Merriman
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • The Kansas Court of Industrial Relations, founded in 1920, was the lone US trial of a labor court – a policy design used almost everywhere else in the industrialized world during the interwar period. What led Kansas to establish the KCIR when no other state did? And what were the consequences of its existence for the development of economic policy in the rest of the country? Ben Merriman explores how the KCIR's bans on strikes and lockouts, heavy criminal sanctions, and unilateral control over the material terms of economic life, resulted in America's closest practical encounter with fascism. Battered by the Supreme Court in 1923, the KCIR's failure destroyed American interest in labor courts. But the legal battles and policy divisions about the KCIR, which enjoyed powerful supporters, were an early sign of the new political and intellectual alignments that led to America's unique New Deal labor policy.

Between Empire and Nation
  • South Asian Humanitarianism in the late Colonial Period
  • Maria Framke
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    01 November 2026

The Hindu/Presidency College

The Cambridge Companion to Rammohun Roy

How Economic Ideas Evolve
  • The Impact of Religion on the German and Italian Welfare State
  • Josef Hien
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • How Economic Ideas Evolve offers a unique perspective on the development of political economies in Europe. With three major contributions, the book first establishes a link between religious, social, and economic ideas and the diverging development of political economies in Europe. Secondly, the work provides a historical sociological analysis of the contextual factors that influenced the development of religiously inspired socio-economic ideas. Chapters examine the impact of these ideas on economic and welfare institutions in Germany and Italy over three centuries. Lastly, the book goes beyond classic historical sociology to focus on the long-term developmental trajectories and impact of ideas on politics and policy. Thorough and expansive, How Economic Ideas Evolve contributes to the emerging scholarship of ideational historical sociology, broadening the toolkit of historical sociology to research the development and impact of socio-economic ideas and ideologies over long periods of time.

Shifting Landscapes
  • Education and Urban Transformations in India
  • Edited by Geetha B. Nambissan, Nandini Manjrekar, Shivali Tukdeo, Indra Sengupta
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Shifting Landscapes is a rich, multidimensional exploration of urban education in the multiverse of India, adding value to the growing scholarship on broader connections between urbanisation and education. As cities have continued to develop, their spatial, social and cultural landscapes have also evolved to adapt to the global capitalist needs. Education has been an integral part of these transformations, and the upheavals within the education sector have given rise to privilege and exclusion in schooling and growing marginality of the poor. The volume takes on an interdisciplinary approach to examine how the idea of the urban and that of urban education are co-constituted and, more specifically, how spatial and educational inequalities in cities intersect. The chapters bring together diverse contexts to address the heterogeneity of urban social reality in India and similarly document the changes in educational access, provision, aspirations and politics in several parts of the country. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Representants and International Orders
  • The Staging of Political Authority
  • Alena Drieschova
  • Published online:
    15 May 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • Different units of international politics, such as states or the church, cannot be present in their entirety during international interactions. Political rule needs to be represented for international actors to coordinate their activities. Representants (i.e. maps, GDP, buildings, and diplomatic and warfare practices) establish collective understandings about the nature of authority and its configuration. Whilst representants are not exact replica, they highlight and omit certain features from the units they stand in for. In these inclusions and exclusions lies representants' irreducible effect. This book studies how representants define the units of the international system and position them in relation to each other, thereby generating an international order. When existing representants change, the international order changes because the units are defined differently and stand in different relations to each other. Power is therefore defined differently. Spanning centuries of European history, Alena Drieschova traces the struggles between actors over these representations.

Weimar's Long Shadow
  • Edited by Richard Ned Lebow, Ludvig Norman
  • Published online:
    26 September 2024
    Print publication:
    27 June 2024
  • Weimar casts a long shadow over post-war political thought. The Weimar Republic is used to understand contemporary threats to democracy and to critique or defend modernity. It has generated a series of political lessons that are invoked whenever democracies are challenged. This book questions the historical validity of most of these lessons and their applicability to contemporary political orders. It shows how Weimar lessons are often influenced by partial and superficial readings of events, often intended to advance particular political projects. The chapters give detailed accounts of how so-called Weimar lessons have influenced, if not shaped, political debates in Germany, elsewhere in Europe, and the United States.

Worlds of Uncertainty
  • War, Philosophies and Projects for Order
  • Peter Haldén
  • Published online:
    21 December 2023
    Print publication:
    07 December 2023
  • In recent years we have faced huge uncertainty and unpredictability across the world: Covid-19, political turbulence, climate change and war in Europe, among many other events. Through a historical analysis of worldviews, Peter Haldén provides nuance to the common belief in an uncertain world by showing the predictable nature of modern society and arguing that human beings create predictability through norms, laws, trust and collaboration. Haldén shows that, since the Renaissance, two worldviews define Western civilization: first, that the world is knowable and governed by laws, regularities, mechanisms or plan, hence it is possible to control and the future is possible to foresee; second, that the world is governed by chance, impossible to predict and control and therefore shocks and surprises are inevitable. Worlds of Uncertainty argues that between these two extremes lie positions that recognize the principal unpredictability of the world but seek pragmatic ways of navigating through it.

Public Interest and State Legitimation
  • Early Modern England, Japan, and China
  • Wenkai He
  • Published online:
    17 November 2023
    Print publication:
    19 October 2023
  • How were state formation and early modern politics shaped by the state's proclaimed obligation to domestic welfare? Drawing on a wide range of historical scholarship and primary sources, this book demonstrates that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was common to early modern England, Japan, and China. This normative platform served as a shared basis on which state and society could negotiate and collaborate over how to attain good governance through providing public goods such as famine relief and infrastructural facilities. The terms of state legitimacy opened a limited yet significant political space for the ruled. Through petitioning and protests, subordinates could demand that the state fulfil its publicly proclaimed duty and redress welfare grievances. Conflicts among diverse dimensions of public interest mobilized cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions; justified by the same norms of state legitimacy, these petitions called for fundamental political reforms and transformed the nature of politics.

Making Global Society
  • A Study of Humankind Across Three Eras
  • Barry Buzan
  • Published online:
    27 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023
  • Barry Buzan proposes a new approach to making International Relations a truly global discipline that transcends both Eurocentrism and comparative civilisations. He narrates the story of humankind as a whole across three eras, using its material conditions and social structures to show how global society has evolved. Deploying the English School's idea of primary institutions and setting their story across three domains - interpolity, transnational and interhuman - this book conveys a living historical sense of the human story whilst avoiding the overabstraction of many social science grand theories. Buzan sharpens the familiar story of three main eras in human history with the novel idea that these eras are separated by turbulent periods of transition. This device enables a radical retelling of how modernity emerged from the late 18th century. He shows how the concept of 'global society' can build bridges connecting International Relations, Global Historical Sociology and Global/World History.

The Historicity of International Politics
  • Imperialism and the Presence of the Past
  • Edited by Klaus Schlichte, Stephan Stetter
  • Published online:
    29 June 2023
    Print publication:
    13 July 2023
  • The past is constantly present, not least in the study of imperialism and imperial forms of power in international politics. This volume shows how historical trajectories have shaped international affairs covering a wide range of imperial and (post-) colonial settings in international politics, substantiating the claim that imperial and colonial legacies - and how they have transformed over time - are foundational to the historicity of international politics. It contributes to debates on the role of history in International Relations (IR) by combining theoretical arguments on the role of history through the concept of 'historicity' with concrete empirical analyses on a wide range of imperial and colonial legacies. This volume also advances interdisciplinary perspectives on this topic by fostering dialogue with Historical Sociology and Global History. It will interest scholars and advanced students of IR, historical sociology and global politics, especially those working on the history of international politics, and the legacies of colonialism and imperialism.

The Domestication of Competition
  • Social Evolution and Liberal Society
  • Jonathan Hearn
  • Published online:
    26 January 2023
    Print publication:
    16 February 2023
  • Competition is deeply built into the structures of modern life. It can improve policies, products and services, but is also seen as a divisive burden that pits people against one another. This book seeks to go beyond such caricatures by advancing a new thesis about how competition came to shape our society. Jonathan Hearn argues that competition was 'domesticated', harnessed and institutionalised across a range of institutional spheres in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Responding to crises in traditional forms of authority (hereditary, religious), the formalisation of competition in the economy, politics, and diverse new forms of knowledge creation provided a new mode for legitimating distributions of power in the emerging liberal societies. This insightful study aims to improve our ability to think critically about competition, by better understanding its integral role, for good and ill, in how liberal forms of society work.

Moving Bodies
  • Embodied Minds and the World That We Made
  • Erik Ringmar
  • Published online:
    12 January 2023
    Print publication:
    26 January 2023
  • Increasingly we have come to live in our heads, leaving our bodies behind. The consequences have been far-reaching, of which cognitive theory has warned us, advocating a 'return to the body.' This book employs several case studies-kings performing in ballets, sea captains dancing with natives, nationalists engaged in gymnastics exercises-to demonstrate what has been lost and what could be gained by a more embodied approach to living, to history. These curious movements were ways to be, to think, to know, to imagine, and to will. They highlight the limits of historical explanations focusing on cultural factors and question currently fashionable 'cultural' and 'post-modern' perspectives. Bodies, cognitive theory tells us, are the same regardless of historical context, and they engage in the same intentional activities. Returning to our bodies and their movements enables us not only to explain historical actions anew, but also to understand ourselves better.

State Formation through Emulation
  • The East Asian Model
  • Chin-Hao Huang, David C. Kang
  • Published online:
    21 July 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022
  • Neither war nor preparations for war were the cause or effect of state formation in East Asia. Instead, emulation of China—the hegemon with a civilizational influence—drove the rapid formation of centralized, bureaucratically administered, territorial governments in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Furthermore, these countries engaged in state-building not to engage in conflict or to suppress revolt. In fact, war was relatively rare and there was no balance of power system with regular existential threats—the longevity of the East Asian dynasties is evidence of both the peacefulness of their neighborhood and their internal stability. We challenge the assumption that the European experience with war and state-making was universal. More importantly, we broaden the scope of state formation in East Asia beyond the study of China itself and show how countries in the region interacted and learned from each other and China to develop strong capacities and stable borders.

Before the West
  • The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders
  • Ayşe Zarakol
  • Published online:
    24 February 2022
    Print publication:
    03 March 2022
  • How would the history of international relations in 'the East' be written if we did not always read the ending – the Rise of the West and the decline of the East – into the past? What if we did not assume that Asia was just a residual category, a variant of 'not-Europe', but saw it as a space of with its own particular history and sociopolitical dynamics, not defined only by encounters with European colonialism? How would our understanding of sovereignty, as well as our theories about the causes of the decline of Great Powers and international orders, change as a result? For the first time, Before the West offers a grand narrative of (Eur)Asia as a space connected by normatively and institutionally overlapping successive world orders originating from the Mongol Empire. It also uses that history to rethink the foundational concepts and debates of international relations, such as order and decline.

The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia
  • From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class
  • Tomila V. Lankina
  • Published online:
    02 December 2021
    Print publication:
    16 December 2021
  • A devastating challenge to the idea of communism as a 'great leveller', this extraordinarily original, rigorous, and ambitious book debunks Marxism-inspired accounts of its equalitarian consequences. It is the first study systematically to link the genesis of the 'bourgeoisie-cum-middle class' – Imperial, Soviet, and post-communist – to Tzarist estate institutions which distinguished between nobility, clergy, the urban merchants and meshchane, and peasants. It demonstrates how the pre-communist bourgeoisie, particularly the merchant and urban commercial strata but also the high human capital aristocracy and clergy, survived and adapted in Soviet Russia. Under both Tzarism and communism, the estate system engendered an educated, autonomous bourgeoisie and professional class, along with an oppositional public sphere, and persistent social cleavages that continue to plague democratic consensus. This book also shows how the middle class, conventionally bracketed under one generic umbrella, is often two-pronged in nature – one originating among the educated estates of feudal orders, and the other fabricated as part of state-induced modernization.

Page 1 of 2