Yasmin Cordery Khan0.0 The Partition of India in 1947 promised its people both political and religious freedom—through the liberation of India from British rule, and the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan. Instead, the geographical divide brought displacement and death, and it benefited the few at the expense of the very many. Thousands of women were raped, at least one million people were killed, and ten to fifteen million were forced to leave their homes as refugees. One of the first events of decolonization in the twentieth century, Partition was also one of the most bloody.
In this book Yasmin Khan examines the context, execution, and aftermath of Partition, weaving together local politics and ordinary lives with the larger political forces at play. She exposes the widespread obliviousness to what Partition would entail in practice and how it would affect the populace. Drawing together fresh information from an array of sources, Khan underscores the catastrophic human cost and shows why the repercussions of Partition resound even now, some sixty years later. The book is an intelligent and timely analysis of Partition, the haste and recklessness with which it was completed, and the damaging legacy left in its wake.
Filippo de Vivo0.0 This is a unique investigation of the political uses of different forms of communication - oral, manuscript, and printed - in sixteenth and seventeenth century Venice. De Vivo uses a rich and diverse range of sources - from council debates to leaks and spies' reports, from printed pamphlets to graffiti and rumors - to demonstrate just how closely political communication was intertwined with the wider social and economic life of the city.
The book also engages with important wider problems, inviting comparison beyond Venice. For instance, today we take it for granted that communication and politics influence each other through spin-doctoring and media power. What, however, was the use of communication in an age when rulers recognized no political role for their subjects? And what access to political information did those excluded from government have?
In answering these questions, de Vivo offers a highly original reinterpretation of early modern politics that steers a course between the tendency of the political historian to view events from the windows of government buildings and the 'history from below' of social historians. As this account shows, neither perspective is sufficient in isolation, because even the most secretive oligarchs, ensconced in the Ducal Palace's most restricted councils, were constantly preoccupied by their vociferous subjects in the squares below. Challenging the social and cultural boundaries of more traditional accounts, the book goes on to show how politics in early modern Venice extended far beyond the patrician elite to involve the entire population, from humble clerks and foreign spies, to notaries, artisans, barbers, and prostitutes.
