This book examines how the military orders and the ideology of crusading gave rise to a new sacred landscape in the medieval Baltic region, an outpost of Latin Christianity. Drawing on a wide variety of sources and international scholarship, the book discusses the paganism of the landscape in written sources pre-dating the crusades, in addition to the narrative, legal, and visual evidence of the crusade period. It draws out the key sacralizing elements as expressed in those sources, which structure the definition of sacred landscape, particularly martyrdom, the manifestation of the sacred, and use of relics in battle. By analyzing these aspects with Geographical Information Systems (GIS), a map of the Baltic campaigns emerges that provides a fresh approach to studying contemporary views of holy war in a region with no initial links to the loca sancta of Jerusalem or Europe.

This collaborative volume focuses on imagined geography and the relationships among power, knowledge, and space. A sequel to Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space, Imagined Geographies in the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Beyond shares with its predecessor a strong focus on the role of empire and ideas of space viewed in inter-regional and interdisciplinary terms.

Both volumes bring together specialists on history, art history, literature, and theater studies, but the present volume covers an even wider geography than the first. In addition to the core provinces of Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, it also includes connections between these regions and others further away—notably Iran, Inner Asia, and the Indian Ocean. The essays collected here suggest that the phenomenon of imagined geographies is essentially discursive in nature, since Self and Other may only be defined relative to one another.

An empirically rich reconstruction of how informality became an intrinsic part of urban life across three continents.

Over a quarter of the world’s urban population lives in informal settlements. While informality as a concept has been widely debated, we still know very little about the phenomenon’s urban history or how that history has shaped the evolution of world cities. Spotlighting the historical processes that have created and sustained urban informality for more than a century, editors Charlotte Vorms and Brodwyn Fischer and this volume’s contributors reveal informality as an intrinsic feature of urbanity, shaping not only cities across the globe but also deeper processes of state formation, socioeconomic stratification, and political struggle.
 
The volume brings together case studies spanning more than a hundred years, drawn from Latin America (Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and Mexico), Northern Africa (Morocco and Algeria), and Latin Europe (France, Spain, and Italy). Together, they show that informality is neither a contemporary crisis nor a predicament unique to the Global South. Topics include the origins of informal settlements and their relationship with law and institutional power; grassroots efforts to legitimize shantytown communities; mass social movements for rights to the city; the role that shantytown removal campaigns played in populist politics, fascism, and colonialism; and the ways that informality perpetuated racial and ethnic inequalities. Informal Cities is an indispensable guide to the complex and fraught terrain of urban informality in its many historical guises.

In modern Japan, anti-establishment ideas have related in many ways to Japan’s capitalist development and industrialisation. Activist and intellectual Ishikawa Sanshir. exemplifies this imagination, connecting European and Japanese thought during the first decades of the twentieth century. This book investigates the emergence of a strand of non-violent anarchism, reassessing in particular the role of geographical thought in modern Japan as both a vehicle of political dissent and a basis for dialogue between Eastern and Western radical thinkers. By tracing Ishikawa’s travels, intellectual interests and real-life encounters, Nadine Willems identifies a transnational ‘geographical imagination’ that valued ethics of cooperation in the social sphere and a renewed awareness of the man-nature interaction. The book also examines experiments in anarchist activism informed by this common imagination and the role played by the practices of everyday life as a force of socio-political change.

From the seventh century onwards the population of the Near East gradually became Muslim. Nevertheless, other religious communities continued to exist, maintaining an enduring presence in the region, despite being surrounded by Muslims and by people becoming Muslims. 

This book argues that the causes that led to the conversion of most of the Holy Land's population, as well as the survival of some religious communities, are essentially social and geographic in nature, rather than theological, and that two parallel processes were the main catalysts of Islamization: de-urbanization and urbanization.