Great Little Britain Literary Agency
Great Little Britain is an independent literary agent representing a group of authors and fictional works ranging from crime to domestic suspense, chick lit to children's books.
View Rights PortalGreat Little Britain is an independent literary agent representing a group of authors and fictional works ranging from crime to domestic suspense, chick lit to children's books.
View Rights PortalFounded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in Asian Studies, Classical Studies, History, Middle East and Islamic Studies, Biblical and Religious Studies, Language & Linguistics, Philosophy and International Law to name but a few. With offices in Leiden (NL), Boston (US), Paderborn (GER), Singapore (SG) and Beijing (CN), Brill today publishes more than 300 journals and close to 1,400 new books and reference works each year, available in print and online. Brill also markets a large number of primary source research collections and databases. The company’s key customers are academic and research institutions, libraries, and scholars. Brill is a publicly traded company and is listed on Euronext Amsterdam NV.
View Rights PortalThis is a study of Britain's presence in China both at its peak, and during its inter-war dissolution in the face of assertive Chinese nationalism and declining British diplomatic support. Using archival materials from China and records in Britain and the United States, the author paints a portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted "Britain-in-China", challenging our understanding of British imperialism there. Bickers argues that the British presence in China was dominated by urban settlers whose primary allegiance lay not with any grand imperial design, but with their own communities and precarious livelihoods. This brought them into conflict not only with the Chinese population, but with the British imperial government. The book also analyzes the formation and maintenance of settler identities, and then investigates how the British state and its allies brought an end to the reign of freelance, settler imperialism on the China coast. At the same time, other British sectors, missionary and business, renegotiated their own relationship with their Chinese markets and the Chinese state and distanced themselves from the settler British.
Decades-old calls to promote the significance of China for anthropological theory and the social sciences more generally ring more urgently today given China's importance to social, political and economic life globally. Yet Chinese-grounded ideas remain marginal to the discipline, and scholarly discussions retain a sense of China as an 'Other' apart from the 'real' world, and thus unsuitable or generating widely applicable theoretical ideas. Inspired by East Asian postcolonial scholarship, this volume tackles this unsettling situation head-on, arguing that without taking China seriously as a powerful agent, a locus of knowledge production, and a new discursive topos of an emerging post-global imaginary, anthropologists and other social scientists may fail to adequately analyse the global present and make sense of both the material and immaterial forces that animate it, wherever and however they work. Amid the end of Western globalisation and shifting anthropological understandings of relations between ethnography and theory, we show how 'China' must be understood as the ordinary 'context' for anthropological research practices worldwide.
This is a study of Britain's presence in China both at its peak, and during its inter-war dissolution in the face of assertive Chinese nationalism and declining British diplomatic support. Using archival materials from China and records in Britain and the United States, the author paints a portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted "Britain-in-China", challenging our understanding of British imperialism there. Bickers argues that the British presence in China was dominated by urban settlers whose primary allegiance lay not with any grand imperial design, but with their own communities and precarious livelihoods. This brought them into conflict not only with the Chinese population, but with the British imperial government. The book also analyzes the formation and maintenance of settler identities, and then investigates how the British state and its allies brought an end to the reign of freelance, settler imperialism on the China coast. At the same time, other British sectors, missionary and business, renegotiated their own relationship with their Chinese markets and the Chinese state and distanced themselves from the settler British. ;
Railway Imperialism in China: a Political Biography is the first and most comprehensive book on history and politics of all major railways in China from the late Qing to the post-Mao era. It investigates the transformation of railways from a bête noire within discussions about reform to the emblematic "engines for empire" as foreign powers used it to carve outspheres of control and exploit the late Qing, and as an instrument of nation making for Chinese regimes. The book introduces new archival sources and a wide range of secondary materials. Boldly conceived, it situates the making of modern China in the context of British, Russian, German, Japanese, American expansion. It traces China's transformation from a victim of railway imperialism in the Age of Empireto a railway expansionist in the twenty-first century.
Most scholars believe that China's nationality policy, like that of other socialist states, imitated the Soviet nationality model, a system which has been termed an "affirmative action empire." This book offers two contributions to the literature which run counter to this convention. First, it argues that the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union (USSR) were different; while the PRC was aimed to build an ideal-typical nation-state, the USSR was an open union of nation-states that was only temporarily confined to a physical territory. Second, while scholars who have noted this difference attribute it to contextual factors, such as ethnic structure, geopolitical status, and Russia's intervention into the Chinese Revolution, this book contends that context shaped the Sino-Soviet difference, yet it did not determine it. Rather, there was significant leeway between the implications of the contextual factors, and what the policy-designers ultimately established. This book probes who held agency, and how these individuals bridged this gap.
In den zwanzig Jahren nach seinem Highschool-Abschluss hatte Hu Anyan neunzehn verschiedene Jobs. Er arbeitete unter anderem als Verkäufer im 24h-Markt, als Fahrradmechaniker, Pakete-Kurier, Sicherheitsmann, im Logistikzentrum, der Tankstelle, der Kantinenküche. Er zog von einer chinesischen Großstadt zur nächsten, jedes Mal weiter, wenn die Arbeit unerträglich und der Boss zu bossy wurde, und richtete sich wieder in einem winzigen Zimmer ein, mit nicht mehr als seinen zerlesenen Ausgaben von Tschechow und Carver. Von der Psychologie der Hackordnung in einer gigantischen Sortierhalle für Pakete über die kafkaeske Bürokratie der Personalabteilungen bis hin zur idealen Gestaltung einer Lieferroute – mit aufrichtiger Neugier und trockenem Humor erzählt Hu Anyan unerhörte Geschichten der Menschlichkeit vor dem Hintergrund größter Schinderei. Ich fahr Pakete aus in Peking ist ein intimer Bericht über ein Leben als Niedriglohnarbeiter in den anonymen Megastädten des heutigen China. Und gibt zum ersten Mal den Blick frei auf die Massen, die von den gesellschaftlichen Realitäten, von der Art des Wirtschaftens, von der Staatsgewalt, an den Rand, in die Armut, ins Vergessen gedrängt werden.
A bold and balanced re-appraisal of New Labour in power. Rewriting the story of New Labour, Glen O'Hara challenges the prevailing narrative to present a more balanced and positive assessment. New Labour, new Britain is the first book to examine both the intentions behind New Labour's domestic policies and their real-world effects, moving beyond the entrenched left-right debates that have dominated the party's legacy. The period from 1997 to 2007 marked a pivotal moment in modern British history, as New Labour sought to reshape Britain into a more cohesive and forward-thinking society. It saw the rise of socially liberal attitudes and flourishing public services under a government committed to rebuilding and investing in them. Yet New Labour's track record was far from flawless and its legacy remains complicated and contested. Through interviews with key players and rigorous archival research, O'Hara offers a new perspective on Tony Blair's years in power. Painting a fuller picture of New Labour's successes and challenges, he highlights its lasting impact on Britain and offers a thoughtful reassessment of its place in history.
This book examines the political works of Andrew Michael Ramsay (1683-1743) within the context of early eighteenth-century British and French political thought. In the first monograph on Ramsay in English for over sixty years, the author uses Ramsay to engage in a broader evaluation of the political theory in the two countries and the exchange between them. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain and France were on divergent political paths. Yet in the first three decades of that century, the growing impetus of mixed government in Britain influenced the political theory of its long-standing enemy. Shaped by experiences and ideologies of the seventeenth century, thinkers in both states exhibited a desire to produce great change by integrating past wisdom with modern knowledge.
Devolution in Britain today provides a comprehensive analysis of both the historical development and the current state of devolved government. Devolution is now a key element in A-level syllabuses and on most undergraduate politics courses. This book is written in a clear and accessible style for students either encountering devolution for the first time or for those who need to explore the subject area in greater detail. All of the devolved bodies in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are examined. This book is a thorough update of the first edition, written by Colin Pilkington and published by MUP in 2002. The book explains the concept and background of devolution, and indicates the constitutional implications of political devolution in the United Kingdom before providing a full and considered historical background to devolution, including an explanation of how the United Kingdom came to be united. It then examines the historical and political events that surrounded the preparation of devolution across Britain, before addressing each country in turn, assessing the relative success of devolution in that country. ;
Environmental policy has become an increasingly important area of European Union (EU) policy-making and the source of political conflict between Britain and Germany. This book explains why national conflicts have arisen and how they are resolved at EU level by focusing on the Europeanisation of air and water pollution control in particular. Wurzel argues that Anglo-German divergences are best explained in terms of ecological vulnerability, economic cost and capacity, political salience and environmental regulatory styles. Focusing on two very important and media-exploitable issues - car emissions and bathing water regulation - this book challenges the conventional wisdom that Britain has shown a clear preference for environmental quality objectives while Germany championed uniform emission limits. Acceptance of the concept of ecological modernisation plays a vital role in the adoption of more progressive environmental standards. ;
Richard Haass and Mitchell Reiss, as autonomous diplomats in the George W. Bush State Department, were able to alter US intervention in Northern Ireland and play critical roles in the post-1998 peace process. Their contributions have not been fully appreciated or understood. The restoration of Northern Ireland's power-sharing government in 2007 was made possible by State Department-led intervention in the peace process. There are few references to Northern Ireland in work examining the foreign policy legacy of the George W. Bush presidency. Moreover, the ability to control US foreign policy towards the region brought one of George W. Bush's Northern Ireland special envoys into direct diplomatic conflict with the most senior actors inside the British government. This book will uncover the extent of this fall-out and provide original accounts on how diplomatic relations between these old allies became so fraught.
This is the first book to survey in comparative form the transmission of imperial ideas to the public in six European countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapters, focusing on France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, provide parallel studies of the manner in which colonial ambitions and events in the respective European empires were given wider popular visibility. The international group of contributors, who are all scholars working at the cutting edge of these fields, place their work in the context of governmental policies, the economic bases of imperial expansion, major events such as wars of conquest, the emergence of myths of heroic action in exotic contexts, religious and missionary impulses, as well as the new media which facilitated such popular dissemination. Among these media were the press, international exhibitions, popular literature, educational institutions and methods, ceremonies, church sermons and lectures, monuments, paintings and much else.
The rule of law, an ideology of equality and universality that justified Britain's eighteenth-century imperial claims, was the product not of abstract principles but imperial contact. As the Empire expanded, encompassing greater religious, ethnic and racial diversity, the law paradoxically contained and maintained these very differences. This book revisits six notorious incidents that occasioned vigorous debate in London's courtrooms, streets and presses: the Jewish Naturalization Act and the Elizabeth Canning case (1753-54); the Somerset Case (1771-72); the Gordon Riots (1780); the mutinies of 1797; and Union with Ireland (1800). Each of these cases adjudicated the presence of outsiders in London - from Jews and Gypsies to Africans and Catholics. The demands of these internal others to equality before the law drew them into the legal system, challenging longstanding notions of English identity and exposing contradictions in the rule of law.
(B)ordering Britain argues that Britain is the spoils of empire, its immigration law is colonial violence and irregular immigration is anti-colonial resistance. In announcing itself as postcolonial through immigration and nationality laws passed in the 60s, 70s and 80s, Britain cut itself off symbolically and physically from its colonies and the Commonwealth, taking with it what it had plundered. This imperial vanishing act cast Britain's colonial history into the shadows. The British Empire, about which Britons know little, can be remembered fondly as a moment of past glory, as a gift once given to the world. Meanwhile immigration laws are justified on the basis that they keep the undeserving hordes out. In fact, immigration laws are acts of colonial seizure and violence. They obstruct the vast majority of racialised people from accessing colonial wealth amassed in the course of colonial conquest. Regardless of what the law, media and political discourse dictate, people with personal, ancestral or geographical links to colonialism, or those existing under the weight of its legacy of race and racism, have every right to come to Britain and take back what is theirs.