Whereas in the rest of Europe World War II brought about the rapid decline in residential domestic service, the Soviet Union saw a significant growth of the domestic service sector. Even though many Soviet citizens felt uneasy about the class inequality that was at the heart of domestic service, there were no public discussions of the issue during the last decade of Stalin’s rule. Only after Stalin’s death did the country’s new leader Nikita Khrushchev allow for more open conversations about social problems. In these debates, domestic service became a vehicle to discuss class inequality in Soviet society. Gender inequality, however, was never questioned. On the contrary, the debates around paid domestic labor only reinforced the notion that was fundamental to gender inequality in the Soviet Union: that housework was women’s work. The failure to question the gendered division of labor in the home demonstrated the limits of the Bolsheviks’ program of women’s emancipation during a crucial period when the regime sought to reimagine socialism.

Chapter 19 focuses on the political and moral stakes of one of the most contentious questions of the peace conference: on what grounds Germany was to pay reparations and how high the reparation claims of the victors were to be. It not only demonstrates how intricately the indemnity problem was linked with the fundamental question of who bore responsibility for the Great War and all the casualties and destruction it had caused, eventually leading to a clash between western claims of Germany’s “war guilt” and German efforts to refute them. Placing this problem in a transatlantic context, it also emphasises that the reparations conundrum was inseparable from the tectonic changes the war brought in the financial and economic spheres, especially America’s ascent to the status of the world’s pre-eminent economic and financial power and the massive indebtedness of Britain and France to the new “world creditor”. It thus casts fresh light on the question of why it proved impossible to negotiate a “rational” and mutually acceptable reparations settlement in 1919. And it reappraises why only limited advances towards a new financial and economic order and effective postwar reconstruction could be made. Finally, it highlights the far-reaching political consequences this had.

Modern means of transportation and communication along water, rails, and roads had a profound impact on the economic and social development of China from the mid-nineteenth century onward. After the arrival of the steamship in the 1840s and the telegraph in the early 1860s, railroad construction began to emerge slowly at the close of the century, followed by bus and motor traffic bringing about macadamized city streets and highway expansion, with a modest level of air traffic taking off in the 1930s. This chapter addresses the structural changes in transportation and communication that characterized the transition from the last decades of the Qing empire (1644–1911) through the Republican period (1911–1949) to the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

This chapter provides an overview of policing in modern Iraq, with a special focus on the role of sectarian identity in citizen–police relations. Following the 2003 US invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the transitional government initially purged Sunnis from the state security forces. However, the government soon faced domestic and international pressures to reintegrate Sunnis into the police as a counterinsurgency measure. In some areas like Anbar and parts of Baghdad, these pressures led to substantial inclusion of Sunnis in the police. In other areas, local politicians resisted Sunni integration so they could distribute police jobs as political patronage. Drawing on interviews with Iraqi citizens, I show just how salient the police’s makeup is to ordinary citizens’ relationships with the state. Citizens see access to positions in the police as a path toward empowerment and, at times, self-preservation. At the same time, they perceive that officers behave differently depending on their sect, with shared identity smoothing interactions between citizens and the police.

The concluding chapter puts the book’s findings about the first year of the Syrian uprising in a broader context and restates the book’s contributions to the study of ethnic politics and violent intrastate conflict. It draws out the implications of the study for thinking about Syria in a state of civil war (2012–18) and its future governance and reconstruction (post-2018). It highlights the role of local network ties and connections to outside authorities in rebel governance, then discusses the ways in which state–society linkages might be reconstructed or made anew and their role in governing Syria in the future.

The first chapter focuses on the experiences of Jewish refugees who came to Palestine before or during World War II but sought to return to their European countries of origin at war’s end through a repatriation program launched by the Middle East office of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Since the repatriation program took place during the heightened period of the Zionist struggle for statehood in Palestine, it became a source of conflict between the Zionist leadership in Palestine and the UNRRA. The former accused the latter of encouraging Jewish return to Europe, whereas UNRRA officials accused Zionists in the Yishuv of trying to prevent repatriation and of ostracizing those opting to return. The chapter analyzes this conflict from the perspectives of UNRRA, the Jewish Agency, the Jewish press in Palestine, and the refugees themselves. It shows that the controversy derived from conflicting ideological and political considerations regarding the role of Jewish refugees in postwar reconstruction. But the positions of the quarreling parties were disconnected from those of repatriation applicants, who were determined to rebuild their lives outside Palestine, but conceived of postwar reconstruction mainly in material and personal rather than ideological and political terms.

Having laid the groundwork for debates about jazz reception in Germany in ,explores jazz in the years of immediate postwar occupation in Germany: from the fall of the regime in 1945 to the founding of the GDR in 1949. During these years, Berlin, the former Nazi capital, served as the epicenter for the formerly Allied occupying powers to engage in ideological battle. During this time, both Soviet and Western allies employed culture, music, and jazz as key tools of the postwar rebuilding effort, with each side using jazz as a political tool to sway audiences toward democratic or socialist ideals. This chapter details the prominence Soviet policymakers assigned to music of African-American descent, recruiting it for propagandistic purposes, and shows how jazz served as entertainment for troops in the Western sectors. Charting the political developments that led to the creation of the GDR in 1949, this chapter further explores the personal experiences of German jazz fans in the late 1940s, whose experiences offer key accounts of racial segregation in the American sectors alongside the impact of Soviet propaganda of the time.