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This book is a comparative analysis of how Western democratic nations have coped with AIDS. The book's exploration of divergent approaches to the epidemic in the United States and several European nations is a springboard for a wide-ranging historical analysis of public health practices and policies. In addition to a comprehensive presentation of information on approaches to AIDS, the book provides a new perspective on our most enduring political dilemma: how to reconcile individual liberty with the safety of the community. The book finds that Western democratic nations have adopted much more varied approaches to AIDS than is commonly recognized. It situates the range of responses to AIDS within the span of past attempts to control contagious disease and discovers the crucial role that history has played in developing these various approaches. The text finds that the various tactics adopted to fight AIDS have sprung largely from those adopted against the classic epidemic diseases of the nineteenth century—especially cholera—and that they reflect the long institutional memories embodied in public health institutions.

When France captured Tunisia by force in 1881, it appeared to have wrested control of this semi-autonomous Ottoman province away from Italy and Great Britain, the other European countries vying for it. By making a series of concessions regarding French control of the country, such as keeping intact the position of Tunisia’s ruler, the bey, and allowing other countries special legal privileges in the protectorate, France hoped to avoid the violent clashes that had marked the first decades of its rule in neighboring Algeria. Instead, the France’s conquest of Tunisia turned into decades of “divided rule” in which French power was continually thwarted by Tunisians and European rivals alike. Divided rule encouraged Muslim, Jewish, and Christian residents of Tunisia to negotiate between Tunisian, French, and foreign institutions to advance their private goals in unexpected ways. Eventually, these challenges to French authority, at a time of imperial intrigue in the Mediterranean, led France to abandon indirect rule and adopt an increasingly invasive form of colonial governance. Yet, in turn, French attempts to diminish Tunisian sovereignty inadvertently helped create a powerful backlash: the Tunisian nationalist movement, which spearheaded one of the most precocious and successful drives for independence in the French empire.

This book unsettles the idea of globalization as a recent phenomenon—and one driven solely by Western interests—by offering a new perspective on global interconnectivity in the nineteenth century. The book examines East African consumers' changing desires for material goods from around the world in an era of sweeping social and economic change. Exploring complex webs of local consumer demands that affected patterns of exchange and production as far away as India and the United States, the book challenges presumptions that Africa's global relationships have always been dictated by outsiders. Full of vignettes that outline forgotten trajectories of global trade and consumption, it demonstrates how contemporary globalization is foreshadowed in deep histories of intersecting and reciprocal relationships across vast distances.

Surfing today invokes many things: thundering waves, warm beaches, bikinis, lifeguards, and carefree pleasure. But is the story of surfing really as simple as popular culture suggests? From American empire-building in the Pacific to the surf industry’s reliance on sweatshop labor, Empire in Waves argues that the modern history of surfing is intimately tied to the global developments since the nineteenth century. Surfing was used as an imperial instrument in post-annexation Hawaii. It spawned a form of tourism that conquered the littoral third world. Surfing was even embraced as a diplomatic weapon in America’s Cold War arsenal. From Indonesia to South Africa and points between, the modern history of this cherished pastime, in other words, is hardly an uncomplicated story of beachside bliss. Sometimes messy, occasionally contentious, but never dull, surfing offers a new way of viewing our globalizing world.

The grand exhibitions of the Victorian and Edwardian eras are the lens through which this book examines the economic, cultural, and social forces that helped define Britain and the British Empire. The author focuses on major exhibitions in England, Australia, and India between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Festival of Empire sixty years later, taking special interest in the interactive nature of the exhibition experience, the long-term consequences for the participants and host societies, and the ways in which such popular gatherings revealed dissent as well as celebration. He shows how exhibitions shaped culture and society within and across borders in the transnational working of the British Empire. The exhibitions were central to establishing and developing a participatory imperial world in which each polity provided distinctive information, visitors, and exhibits. Among the displays were commercial goods, working machines, and ethnographic scenes. Exhibits were intended to promote external commonwealth and internal nationalism. The imperial overlay did not erase significant differences, but explained and used them in economic and cultural terms. The exhibitions in cities such as London, Sydney, and Calcutta were living and active public inventories of the Empire and its national political communities. The process of building and consuming such inventories persists today in the cultural bureaucracies, museums, and festivals of modern nation-states; the appeal to tradition and social order; and the actions of transnational bodies.

Starting in the late nineteenth century, scholars and activists all over the world suddenly began to insist that understandings of sex be based on science. As Japanese and Indian sexologists influenced their German, British, and American counterparts and vice versa, sexuality, modernity, and imaginings of exotified “Others” became intimately linked. The first anthology to provide a worldwide perspective on the birth and development of the field, this book contends that actors outside of Europe—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—became important interlocutors in debates on prostitution, birth control, and transvestism. Ideas circulated through intellectual exchange, travel, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. This book tackles specific issues, including the female orgasm and the criminalization of male homosexuality, to demonstrate how concepts and ideas introduced by sexual scientists gained currency throughout the modern world.

When Ho Chi Minh and the Communist leadership of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) agreed to the 1954 Geneva accords, ending the eight-year Franco-Indochinese War, they never imagined that within a decade they would be engaged in an even bigger conflict against the United States. Based on new documentary evidence from Vietnam, this study describes the Communist path to the Vietnam War. Specifically, it relates the thinking on national reunification of DRVN leaders from the creation of North and South Vietnam in July 1954 to the onset of American military intervention in March 1965. It considers their gradual shift from a cautious policy centered on nonviolent struggle to a risky, even reckless approach predicated on major combat operations and decisive victory over their enemies. In doing so, this study sheds light on the elements informing the Vietnamese Communist strategy, and on the domestic and foreign policies, as well as internal debates that strategy produced. Without exonerating the United States for creating circumstances that produced one of the bloodiest episodes of the Cold War, this study demonstrates that those from Hanoi who led the effort against Washington and its allies in Saigon were equally if not more accountable.

The book argues that the invention and popularization of the shopping cart from the 1940s onward provided the final link in the chain for the new system of industrialized food flow. First in the United States and then around the world, these carts enabled supermarkets to move their goods even faster off their shelves—in a sense, completing the revolution in mechanized farming, electric refrigeration, and road distribution that had occurred during the 1930s. Yet the cart, a basic machine among modernity’s new systems, also recast the work of food shopping in ways that attracted ambivalence and unease. In urging customers to buy all their groceries at once, it radically accelerated the consumerist experience of self-service, creating a new mode of accelerated shopping on impulse that often felt, ironically, far from “convenient.” Above all, as a host of U.S. cultural responses have suggested, the sheer uniformity of the shopping cart has unsettled the individualistic rhetoric of the supermarket industry. Increasingly omnipresent in online shopping, its basic form, defined as a void waiting to be filled, uncomfortably reveals the parallels that exist between human and nonhuman participants in the modern circuit of food flow.

Figurative images have long played a critical, if largely unexamined, role in Africa—mediating relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the state and the individual, and the global and the local. This book considers the meaning and power of images in African history and culture. The chapters include specific visual forms, including monuments, cinema, cartoons, domestic and professional photography, body art, world fairs, and museum exhibits. The chapters discuss various modes of visuality in Africa and of Africa, investigating the interplay of visual images with personal identity, class, gender, politics, and wealth. Integral to the argument of the book are over seventy contextualized illustrations. Africans saw foreigners in margarine wrappers, Tintin cartoons, circus posters, and Hollywood movies; westerners gleaned impressions of Africans from colonial exhibitions, Tarzan films, and naturalist magazines. The chapters provide concrete examples of the construction of Africa's image in the modern world. They reveal how imperial iconographies sought to understand, deny, control, or transform authority, as well as the complexity and hybridity of visual communication within Africa itself.

This is a chronicle of Germany's and Japan's struggles to reclaim a defeated national past. The author compares the ways German and Japanese scholars revised national history after World War II in the shadows of fascism, surrender, and American occupation. Defeat in 1945 marked the death of the national past in both countries, yet, as the author proves, historians did not abandon national perspectives during reconstruction. Quite the opposite—the nation remained hidden at the center of texts as scholars tried to make sense of the past and searched for fragments of the nation they had lost. By situating both countries in the Cold War, the author shows that the focus on the nation can be understood only within a transnational context.

In 1671, Ambrosio Bembo, a young nobleman bored with everyday life in Venice, decided to broaden his knowledge of the world through travel. That August he set off on a remarkable, occasionally hazardous, four-year voyage to Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and the Portuguese colonies of western India. His journal, translated into English in this book, is the most important new European travel account of western Asia to be published in the past hundred years. It opens a perspective on the Near East and India at a time when few Europeans traveled to these lands. Bembo's account is filled with a high sense of adventure and curiosity and provides intriguing descriptions of people, landscapes, food, fashion, architecture, customs, cities, commerce, and more. The account is presented here with the original illustrations and with an introduction and annotations.