"By bringing together authors from different historical perspectives around a set of studies on the multifaceted history of prediction, forecasting and futures studies, this book calls for the need to reconsider the power of the idea of the future in historical writing. The authors of this volume share an interest in the ambiguous role played by the future, both for consolidating post war regimes of power and control, and for mobilizing crucial forms of dissent and visions of change. It is, therefore, the ambivalent and fundamentally powered role of the future that is at the center of this volume. Specifically, the chapters in this volume are held together by their interest in how post war understandings of the future were constituted by particular forms of prediction and future expertise, and in the role played by these in exercising power over time. Drawing from insights in cultural, social, political, environmental and science history, our book thus aims to rethink the future as a historical category, and set the search light on the emergence of particular forms of future knowledge that set the future as a distinct temporal field in the post war period"--