cultural exchange Archives

Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery

Historians often assume a one-directional transmission of knowledge and ideas, leading to the establishment of spatial hierarchies defined as centres and peripheries. In recent decades, transnational and global history have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges that profoundly challenged the ways in which we draw our mental maps.

Covering the early modern and modern periods, Re-mapping Centre and Periphery investigates the asymmetrical and multi-directional structure of such encounters within Europe as well as in a global context. Exploring subjects from the shores of the Russian Empire to nation-making in Latin America, the international team of contributors demonstrates how, as products of human agency, centre and periphery are conditioned by mutual dependencies; rather than representing absolute categories of analysis, they are subjective constructions determined by a constantly changing discursive context.

Through its analysis, the volume develops and implements a conceptual framework for remapping centres and peripheries, based on conceptual history and discourse history. As such, it will appeal to a wide variety of historians, including transnational, cultural and intellectual, and historians of early modern and modern periods.

Post-war Architecture between Italy and the UK

Italy and the UK experienced a radical re-organisation of urban space following the devastation of many towns and cities in the Second World War. The need to rebuild led to an intellectual and cultural exchange between a wave of talented architects, urbanists and architectural historians in the two countries. Post-war Architecture between Italy and the UK studies this exchange, exploring how the connections and mutual influences contributed to the formation of a distinctive stance towards Internationalism, notwithstanding the countries’ contrasting geographic and climatic conditions, levels of economic and industrial development, and social structures.

Topics discussed in the volume include the influence of Italian historic town centres on British modernist and Brutalist architectural approaches to the design of housing and university campuses as public spaces; post-war planning concepts such as the precinct; the tensions between British critics and Italian architects that paved the way for British postmodernism; and the role of architectural education as a melting pot of mutual influence. It draws on a wealth of archival and original materials to present insights into the personal relationships, publications, exhibitions and events that provided the crucible for the dissemination of ideas and typologies across cultural borders.

Offering new insights into the transcultural aspects of European architectural history in the post-war years, and its legacy, this volume is vital reading for architectural and urban historians, planners and students, as well as social historians of the European post-war period.

No Country for Travellers?

No Country for Travellers? explores the rise and nature of British travel to Spain and Portugal between 1760 and 1820, across a region that is conventionally overlooked in studies of British travel to Europe. Drawing on extensive archival and printed sources left by travellers in the period, Rosemary Sweet and Richard Ansell reveal the unheralded significance of the two countries to eighteenth-century British culture, and their attraction as destinations long before the Peninsular War and nineteenth-century romanticism. Along the way, the book’s compelling narrative reveals the realities of Iberian travel, the different itineraries that travellers followed, the place of Spanish and Portuguese cities in the British imagination, and the importance of mediators in cultural exchange, on the Iberian side as well as the British. The travellers’ memoirs reflect changing perceptions of Spain and Portugal as modernisation raised new hopes that vied with pessimism and ancient prejudice, and also the persistence of cultural stereotypes, while the counterintuitive relationship between civilian travel and armed conflict emerges through a case study of the Peninsular War. Finally, focusing on contemporary fascination with the Alhambra in Granada, the authors examine the rise of British interest in Iberia’s Islamic history, with its significance for contemporary understandings of ‘Europe’.