Anthem Press

‘Habermas and Giddens on Modernity: A Constructive Comparison’ investigates how two of the most important and influential contemporary social theorists have sought to develop the modernist visions of the constitution of society through the autonomous actions of subjects. It compares Habermas and Giddens’ conceptions of the constitution of society, interpretations of the social-structural impediments to subjects’ autonomy, and their attempts to delineate potentials for progressive social change within contemporary society. Habermas and Giddens are shown to have initiated new paradigms and perspectives that seek to address the foundational problems of social theory and consolidate the modernist vision of an autonomous society. The book traces the core intuitions of Habermas and Giddens’ theories back to their endeavours to incorporate, satisfy and rework the intentions of the Marxian perspective of the philosophy of praxis. It is argued that the philosophy of praxis conceptualizes the social as the outcome of the intersection of the subject and history. For this perspective, the altering of the relationship of the subject and history is the precondition of an autonomous society. Habermas and Giddens accept the theoretical and practical challenges that are contained in this conception of the social, whilst contending that the basic assumptions of the philosophy of praxis need to be reformulated and that its interpretation of the constraints upon autonomy should be rethought in light of the developments associated with contemporary capitalist modernisation and the dilemmas of the institution of the welfare state.

This book explores how the two theorists argue that the contemporary period represents a new phase of modernity, rather than a transition to a postmodern social order. Habermas depicts the present period as one conditioned by the fracturing of the class compromise of the welfare state and argues that contemporary postmodernism is more a symptom of an exhausting of the utopian energies previously associated with labour. Whereas Giddens considers that the contemporary period is one of late-modernity or reflexive modernization, that is, it represents a fuller realisation of the tendencies of modernity. Yet, it likewise undermines some the emancipatory aspirations of the modernist vision, owing to the predominance of risk and uncertainty. The book then compares the ensuing critical diagnoses that Habermas and Giddens derive from these positions on contemporary society, such as Habermas’ conception of the internal colonisation of the lifeworld and Giddens’ vision of the runaway world of intensifying globalization. These arguments are located in relation to the long-term historical perspectives that the two theorists developed and the respective methodological approaches to history that underpin them. In particular, a number of key contrasts in Habermas and Giddens’ respective accounts of the historical institutionalization of modernity are highlighted. Habermas’ attempt to reconstruct historical materialism, the importance he attributes to cultural rationalisation in explaining change, and his assumption of a logic of evolutionary development are contrasted with Giddens’ proposed deconstruction of historical materialism, the centrality of domination to his depiction of different historical forms of society, and how his opposition to evolutionary conceptions leads to his contention that modern capitalist societies are radically discontinuous.

Furthermore, the book examines how Habermas and Giddens have sought to relate their theories to political practice and the capacities or competences of subjects. Both have applied their perspectives to the potentials for progressive social change and they have had a major impact on public debates, especially those over the future of the European Union, social democracy, new social movements, human rights, and democracy. Giddens is the most important theorist of the Third Way political program and Habermas is most important Critical Theorist since the Frankfurt School. The significance of these two theorists’ practical-political arguments is outlined and the different implications of their respective positions, especially with respect to the future of social democracy, assessed. The constructive approach of the book is continued in its critique of these two theories. The respective strengths of aspects of each theorist’s perspective are highlighted in comparison to the other, for instance, Habermas’ theories’ superior normative grounding is contrasted with Giddens’ more developed perspective on power. Similarly, the book overviews those contemporary social theory initiatives that developed from critical dialogues with the work of Habermas’ and Giddens’ approaches to modernity, such as some of the theories associated with the perspectives of global modernity and multiple modernities. Finally, the book draws on the author’s own work, which has extended aspects of Habermas’ and Giddens’ approach to modernity. Despite the criticisms that are developed over the course of the book, Habermas and Giddens are found to be two of the most important theorists of democratization and social democracy, the dynamics of capitalist modernity and their paradoxes, social practices and reflexivity, and the foundations of social theory in the problem of the relationship of social action and social structure.

Indian novels in English have generated a considerable amount of interest both in India and in English-speaking countries, particularly during India’s postliberalization period since 1991. For India, this period has seen unparalleled consumption of global goods and exposure to international media, and has resulted in Indian writers writing in English (including writers of Indian origin) catching the attention of the Western world like never before.

“Postliberalization Indian Novels in English: Politics of Global Reception and Awards” focuses on Indian writers writing in the English language, whose concerns are related to India in her immediacy, and who have come into literary prominence in the postliberalization period. Such writers have broached issues including nationalism, diaspora, identity, communalism, subaltern representation, modernism and the impact of globalization. Although the idea of this study is not to undermine the value of their novels, its aim is to consider the correlation of their novels’ themes with the workings of the organized, global market processes now present in postliberalized India.

As such, some large questions arise: What are the cultural and critical frameworks that define literary reception? Has there been a marked shift in the reception of Indian novelists writing in English postliberalization? To what extent are the works of these writers driven by the dictates of the market, and does a commercially/economically driven media influence critical/commercial perceptions? And are there certain thematic concerns and representations which are deemed “prize and attention worthy,” and do these factors influence the critical/commercial reception of the novels?

In investigating these questions, this critical handbook reveals the forces shaping the modern Indian novel in the postliberalization period, and provides a systematic approach to the study of Indian novelists in terms of their global reception. 

"Challenging Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood" investigates the stereotyping of Black womanhood and the larger sociological impact on Black women’s self-perceptions. It details the historical and contemporary use of stereotypes against Black women and how Black women work to challenge and dispel false perceptions, and highlights the role of racist ideas in the reproduction and promotion of stereotypes of Black femaleness in media, literature, artificial intelligence and the perceptions of the general public. Contributors in this collection identify the racists and sexist ideologies behind the misperceptions of Black womanhood and illuminate twenty-first–century stereotypical treatment of Black women such as Michelle Obama and Serena Williams, and explore topics such as comedic expressions of Black motherhood, representations of Black women in television dramas and literature, and identity reclamation and self-determination.

The five sections of the book provide a brief historical overall of the long-standing use of stereotypes used against Black women; explore the systematic attack on Black motherhood and how Black mothers use self-determination to thrive; investigate treatments of Black womanhood in media, television and literature; examine the political impact of stereotyped frameworks used for deconstructing Black female public figures; and discuss self-affirmation and identity reclamation among Africana women.

"Challenging Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood" establishes the criteria with which to examine the role of stereotypes in the lives of Black females and, more specifically, its impact on their social and psychological well-being.

In the twelve studies collected in this book, the collaborators take their points of departure from the thesis that the initial exchanges of post-war letters between exiles from Nazi Germany and former colleagues and friends who remained in Germany provide unique insights into the aspirations, hopes, and fears of both sets of writers, as well as the costs of both types of experiences, varied as they are. The best-known of such exchanges, subjected to two quite distinct studies in the book, is the public correspondence between Thomas Mann and Walter von Molo, in the course of which Mann sets forth his bitter reasons for failing to return to Germany at the end of the war. Another familiar correspondence examined anew in the book is of a radically different kind, consisting mainly of letters by Hannah Arendt to Martin Heidegger, where the confluence of personal, emotional currents with questions of academic weight define a distinctive, troubling connection, indicative of quite distinct costs of exile. Included in the collection are also fresh studies of figures who may be less well-known but whose distinctive responses to the challenges posed by first letters provide matter for fresh insights into exile and its liquidation. The first essay in the book and the last focus on questions of method and interpretation in studies of this valuable kind of evidence. Apart from the rewarding historiographical findings of these inquiries, they also offer a demanding contrast in methods and theoretical claims.

As this book shows, different British responses to the material conditions of the Arab region and its inhabitants were mapped onto some British debates about the viability of modern commercial societies and the apparently intractable problem of securing a more benign relationship between material advance and virtue, modernity and traditions, improvement and backwardness. These debates reflected some significant transformations of the period: fears of French invasion during the Seven Years Wars, Enclosure Acts and the Jacobite Rebellion, the corruption of East India Company, the crisis of the American colonies and French Revolution, and the debate over slavery of the 1790s. En route, Britons raised concerns about a host of religious, political and ethical questions that troubled eighteenth-century Britain: Is moral corruption a necessary price a society has to pay in return for living in a materially advanced state? Do people need to honour traditions and religion in modern commercial society in which people have never been freer? Can one find virtue and morality in commercial society? Can an advanced and enlightened society tolerate religion? How can it be that a wealthy society also has poor and dispossessed people who live in workhouses? How is it possible that a society which respects Enlightenment values of freedom and liberty also practices slavery and colonises other societies? European travellers in the Levant often found themselves confronting these questions, especially in a region known for being grand and great in the past but barren and full of ruins in the present. 

‘ISIS and the Pornography of Violence’ is a collection of iconoclastic essays on ISIS, spanning the four-year period from its ascendancy in late 2014 to its demise in early 2018. From a trenchant critique of the infantilisation of jihadists to a probing examination of the parallels between gonzo porn and ISIS beheading videos, the pieces collected in this volume challenge conventional ways of thinking about ISIS and the roots of its appeal. Simon Cottee’s core argument is that Western ISIS recruits, far from being brainwashed or ‘vulnerable’ dupes, actively responded to the group’s promise of redemptive violence and self-sacrifice to a total cause.

Radicalization, Cottee argues, is a murky and complex process that cannot be reduced to any single explanatory scheme or thesis. He also documents the emergence of a new kind of ‘liquid jihad’ in the West, where involvement in jihadism reflects more a process of drift than any full ideological conversion, and where commitment, often fragile, is sustained by social networks.

Creeping slow death of the human brain’s ability to reason, function, remember and respond, poses a family tragedy. As major increases in the volume of dementia cases have been predicted for the coming decade, this book is ever more needed to cut through the clutter of assumptions and anecdotes. It explains governmental and private entities’ benefit programs for aiding dementia patients. The text faces the sad crisis of widespread dementia, explains how government and insurers do and should respond, and integrates sophisticated medical tactics with vital cooperative responses by families and friends to their loved one’s mental health crisis.

This book contains selected papers from the Annual Conference on Development and Change (ACDC) held at Sao Paulo in November 2006. Second in a series of three conferences, the 2006 ACDC showcased research by relatively younger scholars. While precise and rigorous alternatives to the neoliberal agenda are often overlooked in the huge volume of literature that addresses the larger issues, both aspects - the larger picture and the smaller nuts-and-bolts details - are very important, and this volume fills the gaps in the latter category. These papers were written before the global recession, and events subsequent to the conference and the writing of these papers have validated several of the concerns raised by their authors.

This volume focuses on a plethora of issues from the point of view of the South. It demonstrates, for example, that if capital inflows exceed a certain volume - no matter how they are absorbed - such openness will inevitably result in a crisis in the receiving country. The popular understanding of foreign portfolio investment as more benign than foreign direct investment (FDI) is also challenged. By contrasting contemporary capital flows as well as the international capital flows of the nineteenth century, this collection highlights the role of regulation and the role of the state, and ultimately emphasizes the need for recipient country governments to exercise policy options to control the volume of foreign capital inflows.

Black Configurations is the first volume of a three-volume study that offers a fresh reading of African-American literary history by locating within the literature itself the terms for a revisionary account of black writing, terms pursued along three distinct but interlocking pathways (each to be pursued in the Impact Series format): by charting figurations of tradition among six of the most innovative practitioners of black literary expression from Sterling Brown to Toni Morrison (Volume 1); by following the haunting pathways of spectral dialogues between slavery and African-American modernism (Volume 2); and by interrogating interlocking topoi of critique and assertion (naming; facing; voicing) across the history of African-American literary expression (Volume 3). The critical trilogy presents thereby a narrative of African-American literature as a continual, dialectical process, blending confrontation with traumatic origins and the quest for expressive transformation.

This project arises from the question: how does one construe and narrate the story of a tradition for which the conventional structure of literary history—that is, the relation between discourse and its referents—is itself such a politically and thematically charged issue? On one hand, the ideological exclusion of the African-American subject from authorized spheres of meaning and signification gives value to narrating black literary tradition as the progressive emergence of a fully articulate presence, and seems to find warrant in black writing’s persistent thematization of literacy, public performance, and self-definition. On the other hand, such a narrative of fully realized agency and consciousness risks replicating the dominant ideology’s own reductive vision of identity as a predetermined totality, thus imagining some singular and final form for African-American being. The study asserts instead that African-American literature is fueled by the simultaneous workings of a desire for a totally realized subject and the constant displacement of that desire by a willingness—in contrast to the oppressive system that would deny its agency—to put its own mode of being into question.

During the eighteenth century, the Bourbon monarchy set about making geopolitical changes in the colonies in order to encourage trade. Buenos Aires was designated as the new capital city of the Viceroyalty of the River Plate in 1776. However, the city had at the time very little urban infrastructure – it did not even have a cathedral or appropriate government buildings to welcome high-ranked bureaucrats from Spain, such as the Viceroy. Streets were mainly unpaved, dusty and there were no parks or promenades like in other capitals, where the eighteenth-century society could parade in fine clothes and displayed their often newly acquired social status.

This book tells the story of how the monarchy aimed at creating a new capital city in a remote and forgotten area of the empire. It also shows how the local Creole bourgeoisie rapidly assumed the role of urban developers, and enhanced their economic status by investing in and controlling the Buenos Aires’ property market. In a short period, from 1776 to 1810, the urban transformation of Buenos Aires helped increase the Crown’s revenues and considerably reduced contraband trade. Nevertheless, urban changes generated an internal struggle for power for the control of the city between the Spanish loyalist and the local wealthier Creoles. As this book concludes, for an empire such as the Spanish, which was constructed upon a network of cities, the Crown’s loss of the control of Buenos Aires’ urban space was a serious threat to its power that foreshadowed Argentina’s wars of independence.

The essays gathered in Magazines and Modernity in Brazil explore transnational topics such as architecture; cosmopolitanism and universalism; antisemitism, anti-war movements; visual artistic movements; advertising; anti-racism; avant-garde; class; consumer society; design; ethnicity and race; fascism and anti-fascism; intellectual elites; literature; modernity; publishing; translation, as well as book and periodical exchange, which is the main focus of this collection.

Together, these essays propose a critique of traditional comparatist approaches, promoting instead the study of contact zones and intersections, highlighting the place of production and reception of cultural products, as well as the role of mediators. What guide these analyses of magazines are concepts such as connected and shared histories, which emphasize transnational interactions. Within the spectrum of global history, this collection is related to a recent body scholarship on cultural transfers, which opened a fertile field for new research based on the analysis of transnational movements not only of ideas but also of networks and magazines.

Organized chronologically, the chapters explore a period from the mid-nineteenth century to the aftermath of World War II, always having key magazines as the focus of analysis. The authors deliberately move away from traditional comparative approaches, in which two or more nations are set as a parameter, leading to emphasize their similarities and differences in a rigid framework that does not take into account interactions and cross-pollination of cultures and ideas. Some of the keywords that appear here are transnational models, global, circulation, mediation, hybridity, mestizaje, as well as histories that are shared and connected. These keywords help the authors to analyse the formation and development of the participation of Brazil in the global, modern periodical print culture. However, it should be noted that the purpose of this book is not to suggest a supposed singularity of the Brazilian case. The contribution of this volume of essays is precisely the opposite of this, showing how modernity in Brazil, including what is conventionally called modernism, is a complex expression of transnational movements and cross-cultural exchanges.

The astonishing political rise of Donald Trump sent seasoned observers scurrying for clues and explanations. How did Trump happen? Of course no one guide will suffice, but a surprisingly helpful one, suggests Sidney Plotkin, is the early twentieth-century American radical, Thorstein Veblen. In remarkably vivid ways, Veblen understood the enduring American allure of figures such as Trump. [NP] As Plotkin shows in “Veblen’s America,” Trump’s booming persona springs noisily out the country-town hucksterism that Veblen sardonically depicted, its fabulist habits fitting Trump’s “truthful hyperbole” to a tee. But Veblen saw darker, more ominous forces in American life too––habits of barbaric violence, misogyny and xenophobia––forces that foreshadowed Trump’s appeal to what Veblen called a deep “sclerosis of the American soul.” New Deal liberalism helped mute the strains, but economic crisis and the neoliberal response aggravated them. Donald Trump’s appeal to hate made their revival unmistakable.

To shape the study, Plotkin introduces readers to Veblen’s critical institutional theory and its application to both the American case generally and to the Trump family story in particular. With Veblen as foundation, he examines three generations of Trumps as they engage the forces of American development: Friedrich Trump, the hard-scrabble immigrant grandfather, on the make in the gold mining towns of the Pacific Northwest; Fred Trump, the father, who showed the way in using the loose rules of American housing policy to become a captain of local industry; and Donald J. Trump himself, who, having first burst onto the New York City scene as a burgeoning celebrity entrepreneur of the neoliberal era, then turned against neoliberal globalism, proclaiming himself the one and only savior of working-class America. As Plotkin shows, Trump’s poisonous ascendancy exposed a barbaric malevolence that has long torn at the fabric of American democracy and its aspirations for equality.

Christos Tsiolkas is one of the most recognizable and internationally successful literary novelists working in Australia today. He is also one of the country’s most politically engaged writers. These terms – recognition, commercial success, political engagement – suggest a relationship to forms of public discourse that belies the extremely confronting nature of much of Tsiolkas’s fiction and his deliberate attempt to cultivate a literary persona oriented to notions of blasphemy, obscenity and what could broadly be called a pornographic sensibility.

• Joint winner of The Literary Encyclopedia book prize 2024, category ‘Literatures written in languages other than English'
• Winner of the Nancy Staub Publications Award 2024
• Winner of the AATI Book Award 2024 for Literary, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies

- Sicilian puppet theater is a unique nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular theatrical tradition based on the masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance chivalric literature. It flourished not only in southern Italy and Sicily, but also in the diasporic Italian urban communities of North and South America and North Africa, bringing immigrants together for nightly performances of the same deeply cherished chivalric stories. Even though this art form was designated by UNESCO as an “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” in 2001, it remains largely unknown today because by the late 1950s Sicilian puppet theater companies had ceased to perform the full Paladins of France cycle that used to extend nightly for well over a year. Thus, the only means we have left to explore the substance of this once widely enjoyed cultural phenomenon are the scripts dating from opera dei pupi’s heyday. Most of these invaluable documents, however, have been lost, while the few sets still in existence are either privately owned by the remaining puppeteer families and collectors or tucked away in the archives of Italian institutions. Thanks to the newly accessible scripts of the preeminent Catanese-American puppeteer Agrippino Manteo (1884–1947), whose career stretched from Sicily to Argentina to New York, students, scholars, and the general public can now explore the cycle of chivalric narratives staged during the golden age of Sicilian puppet theater.

- The many delicate hand-written notebooks containing Agrippino Manteo’s dramatic repertory are not only of interest for their historical and aesthetic value. These masterfully executed theatrical adaptations invite readers into a chivalric world featuring knights and damsels from across the globe – from Europe to Africa to East Asia – who share the stage with a host of wizards, fairies, giants, and monsters, in alternating episodes of love, enchantment, adventure, and warfare. The concerns with which they engage, such as justice, identity, duty, love, freedom, and virtue, transcend the categories of elite and folk, local and global, medieval and modern, interrogating what it means to be human.

- This book provides the most comprehensive history to date of the Manteo Family's Sicilian Marionette Theater across three generations and brings to light for the first time the contents of Agrippino Manteo’s extensive Sicilian puppet theater scripts, including translations of 8 selected plays and 270 extant play summaries of the famous Paladins of France cycle. Accompanying comparative analyses uncover the creative process of adaptation from Italian Renaissance masterpieces of chivalric poetry to nineteenth-century prose compilations to Agrippino’s opera dei pupi scripts.

Civil Society as a conceptual category across different disciplines and ideological and theoretical frameworks has enjoyed an acceptability that no other concept has in the recent past. In response to what could, perhaps, be referred to as the post-euphoric versions of the civil society, scholars across theoretical dispositions began to look for the critical limits of posturing core issues of democracy through the prism of civil society. It is in this context that Partha Chatterjee has made one of the most important interventions by opposing the idea of civil society to that of political society.

‘Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society’ critically unpacks the concept of ‘political society’, which was formulated as a response to the idea of civil society in a postcolonial context. The volume addresses the theoretical issues of political society through a number of detailed case studies from across India: Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, Chattisgarh, Delhi and Maharashtra. These case studies, combined with a sharp focus on the concept of political society, provide those interested in democracy and its changing patterns in India with an indispensable collection of works, brought together in their common pursuit to highlight the limitations with different core concepts that Chatterjee has formulated. Centred around five themes – the relation between the civil and the political; the role of middlemen and their impact on mobility of the subaltern groups; elites and leadership; the fragmentation and intra-subaltern conflicts and its implications for subaltern agency; and finally the idea of moral claims and moral community – this volume re-frames issues of democracy and agency in India within a wider scope than has ever before been published, and gathers ideas from some of the foremost scholars in the field. The volume concludes with a rejoinder from Partha Chatterjee.

With its catalogue of hit songs, iconic characters, memorable quotes and familiar scenes, ‘Grease’ is truly a behemoth of US and global popular culture. From the stage show’s debut in 1971, to the Hollywood film of 1978, to the numerous rereleases and anniversary celebrations of the twenty-first century, it has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, success across a range of media. ‘Grease’’s extended run on Broadway through the 1970s ensured it a prominent place within broader debates on the musical, 1950s nostalgia and American youth. Numerous stage revivals have followed, with theatres across the world revisiting Rydell High in front of sell-out audiences. Hollywood has time and again sought to recreate ‘Grease’ the movie’s phenomenal box-office success with a procession of similarly themed rock and roll youth musicals (‘Footloose’, ‘Dirty Dancing’, the ‘High School Musical’ franchise, to name a few). However, even as these productions enjoy their own renown, in terms of sheer longevity, prominence and popularity, ‘Grease’ was, is and will remain ‘the word’ when it comes to musical blockbusters.

Bringing together a group of international scholars from diverse academic backgrounds, ‘Grease Is the Word’ provides a series of fresh and detailed analyses of the cultural phenomenon ‘Grease’. From the stage show’s first appearance in 1971 to twenty-first century responses to the ‘Grease Megamix’, ‘Grease Is the Word’ reflects on the musical’s impact and enduring legacy. With essays covering everything from production history, political representations, industrial impact, music, stars and reception, the book shines a spotlight on one of Broadway’s and Hollywood’s biggest commercial successes. By adopting a range of perspectives, and drawing on various visual, textual and archival sources, the contributors maintain a vibrant dialogue throughout, offering a timely reappraisal of a musical that continues to resonate with fans and commentators the world over. Written in an engaging, accessible manner, the book will appeal to students, academics, and anyone interested in American popular culture.

This collection provides a panoramic view of practical philosophical insight, ranging across a spectrum of humanistic themes. These essays cast light on our perennially imperfect human condition. They are written from the complementary standpoints of a classical liberal scholar with one foot planted in the academy, and of a peripatetic pioneer whom The New York Times called "the world's most successful marketer of philosophical counseling." These writings, therefore, span space in which theory and praxis are mutually informative and seamlessly collaborative.

The collection ranges from Alfred Korzybski's general semantics; Thomas Mann's prognosis for Western civilization; Hume's moral skepticism applied to globalization; Jungian synchronicity and encounters with Irvin Yalom; J.S. Mill's harm principle applied to cyberspace; Ayn Rand's prophetic apocalypse; philosophical practice as Dadaist activism; humanities-based therapies as remedies for culturally induced illnesses; biological roots of human conflict; deconstruction and critique of "sustainable development"; dangers and detriments of over-digitalized and hyper-virtualized lifestyles and learning methods; and calls for the re-emergence of philosophy from inactive academic entombment to pro-active modes of personal guidance, social influence, consumer advocacy, and political engagement. A unifying claim of this anthology is the cautionary tale that humanity's recurrent and conflict-ridden predicaments are only exacerbated by myopic analyses, toxic ideologies, and expedient prescriptions. While philosophy is scarcely a panacea for human afflictions, its proper exercise illuminates our understanding of them, thereby suggesting better as opposed to worse ways forward.

Overall, the thrust of this collection can be viewed as a realization of John Dewey's forthright vision, expressed in 1917: "Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men." Indeed, these essays deal with problems of humanity writ large. They also constitute a compelling response to Mortimer Adler's clarion call in 1965, that philosophy "must cease to be an activity conducted by moles, each burrowing in its own hole, and become a public and cooperative enterprise." As these essays reveal, Marinoff has accomplished Adler's mission, transforming and returning philosophy to the agora, which in contemporary parlance amounts to the global village. That his popular books on philosophy for everyday life have sold millions of copies in dozens of languages has distracted some—perhaps too many—philosophers from exploring what he has written for a philosophical audience itself. This book helps remedy that distraction.

Family law is a site of social conflict and the erasure of non-traditional families. This book explores how conservative religious and progressive queer groups can cooperatively work together to expand family law’s recognition beyond the traditional state-sponsored family. Various religious groups have shown an interest in promoting alternative family structures.

For example, certain Muslim and Mormon communities have advocated for polygamy, in the process aligning with queer groups’ interest in overcoming the engrafting of monogamy into state law. Advocacy by North American religious conservatives for reforms in favor of non-conjugal families and against same-sex marriage overlaps with certain queer efforts to legitimize friendships and non-traditional families more generally.

This book explores these potential areas of queer and religious political cooperation—including limitations and principled reservations to such cooperation. It then looks at additional future arenas of queer and religious political cooperation going beyond family law.

Ultimately, this book aims to locate and systematize seemingly isolated interest convergences between queer and religious groups into a coherent theoretical framework that can also be used on the ground in political work. In challenging dominant narratives of ‘culture wars,’ the book’s analysis is timely and in line with the need to prevent the escalation of social cleavages looming over our increasingly diverse societies. 

Winner of numerous awards and the epicenter of multiple controversies, Danny Boyle’s 2008 film “Slumdog Millionaire” has fueled a series of debates regarding its depictions of India and the slum, its references to Bollywood, its global circulation and success, and its reception by critics and audiences. “The ‘Slumdog’ Phenomenon” is an edited collection that seeks to address all of these topics and, in the process, provide new and innovative ways of looking at this controversial film. Each of the book’s four sections considers a particular aspect of the film – such as its relation to the nation, to the slum and to Bollywood – along with its reception and theorization.

Collecting, for the first time ever, a wide range of critical essays exploring this film from a rich variety of disciplinary perspectives, “The Slumdog Phenomenon” will be of interest to readers across the academic spectrum. Rather than offering a book-length study of the film from one point of view, this collection presents a variety of shorter pieces that consider “Slumdog Millionaire” from several different angles. Featuring a dynamic combination of landmark essays by leading critics and theorists, as well as newer pieces by emerging scholars, this collection will provide readers with an assortment of critical perspectives on a film that continues to generate fascination, curiosity and controversy around the world.

‘Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition’ is a timely study of the ‘sentimental’ in Dickens’s novels, which places them in the context of the tradition of Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan and Lamb. This study re-evaluates Dickens’s presentation of emotion – first within the eighteenth-century tradition and then within the dissimilar nineteenth-century tradition – as part of a complex literary heritage that enables him to critique nineteenth-century society.

The book sheds light on the construction of feelings and of the ‘good heart’, ideas which resonate with current critical debates about literary ‘affect’. As the text argues, such an analysis reveals sentimentalism to be a crucial element in fully understanding the achievement of Dickens and his contemporaries.

The first chapter of the book outlines the sentimentalist tradition in English literature from the Middle Ages onwards. The second and third chapters then examine Dickens’s eighteenth-century inheritance in the works of Sterne, Fielding, Goldsmith and Sheridan, whilst Chapter Four explores Dickens’s inheritance from Charles Lamb and his acting in sentimental plays by Bulwer Lytton and Wilkie Collins. Chapter Five analyses three early novels, including ‘Nicholas Nickleby’, revealing the extremism of post-Romantic sentimentalism. In Chapter Six, three later novels including ‘Dombey and Son’ are reread in terms of Dickens’s changing use of sentimentalist rhetoric to achieve remarkably subversive effects. The final chapter then looks at other examples of nineteenth-century sentimental writing, and at the ‘afterlife’ of the mode in the past two centuries.

The first thesis of ‘How Transformative Innovations Shaped the Rise of Nations’ is that economic growth, national dominance and global leadership are fueled primarily by embracing innovations, in particular transformative innovations.

A transformative innovation is one that changes the lives of people, reshapes the structure of society, disrupts the balance of power within and among nations, and creates enormous wealth for its sponsors. The adoption of a transformative innovation spawns numerous other related or consequent innovations. It provides a competitive advantage to a nation and may propel a small, backward region to world leadership in as short a time as a century. Further, the transformative innovation can sometimes itself promote the positive environment that leads to further innovations. Thus, embracing innovation can start a positive cycle of wealth creation, economic dominance and a positive environment for further innovation. This positive cycle continues as long as the environment that spawned the innovation remains supportive or until another transformative innovation arises elsewhere.

The second thesis of ‘How Transformative Innovations Shaped the Rise of Nations’ is that innovation is not adopted randomly across time and nations. Rather, it is sustained by an environment characterized by key institutional drivers within a country or region, three of the most important of which are openness to new ideas, technologies and people, especially immigrants; empowerment of individuals to innovate, start businesses, trade and keep rewards for these activities; and competition among nations, patrons, entrepreneurs or firms. Geography, resources, climate, religion and colonization probably played a role as well. However, past treatments of the rise of nations have overemphasized the role of these other factors; they have downplayed or ignored the role of innovations and the institutional drivers that led to their development and adoption.

In this book, Hogue re-configures the history of modern America and re-represents the modern American novel, allowing conceptual spaces of race, gender, sex, nature, the non-rational, the non-human, consumption, and class to be critiqued or to be displaced, eventually highlighting that modern American history and literature are not singular. They are much more complex, diverse, heterogeneous, and richer because modern American history is a series of economic, social, anti-colonial, feminist, and political and social movements, levels, and conditions, with a whole interplay of differences. The book explains how, historically and institutionally, in the 1920s and 1930s modern American society and modern American literature have been represented singularly and monoculturally, with modernity breaking with the past/nature/the non-human—animals, plants, the water, the landscape, the non-rational, and/or indifferent forces of nature such as hurricanes.

This book focuses, first, on the transformation of modern American history, literature, and culture, which had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century. The transformation created a new and different and unequal modern American society through a series of events—many of them happening sequentially and simultaneously, the United States in the early 20th century grew into an economic superpower. Second, the book examines the darker side of this unequal modern American society: the legal racial segregation of people of color and the deadly economic exploitation of the working class, women, people of color, colonized nations, incorporated territories and protectorates. Third, it focuses on how vulnerable and marginalized people of color, women, working-class European immigrants, colonized nations, incorporated territories, protectorates, and writers, who were denied justice, difference and equality, resisted, challenged, re-wrote, and transformed this modern America.

The reconfiguration of the history of modern America is explored using Althusser’s concepts of the Repressive State apparatus and the Ideological State apparatuses, and postcolonial, feminist, psychoanalytical, deconstructive, cultural theories and Foucault/Deleuze’s notion of history, showing how the US in the 1920s and 1930s emerged as a rational, mechanical society with a business civilization, where mass production, consumerism and advertising contributed to the construction of the social and the subject. The book explains how progressives, labor unions, workers, the NAACP and the Garvey movement, socialists, communists, bohemians, Asian and Native American resistance movements, the Anti-Imperialist League, and the various sectors of the women’s movements—which co-existed and developed on parallel planes and which, at times, commingle in their becomings—challenged, contested, and, at times, transformed this economically, socially, and racially unequal, modern America.

The book is an authoritative assessment of Norbert Elias (1897–1990). The volume recognizes Elias as one of the major contributors to the development of the sociological tradition in the past century and charts the continuing relevance of his conception of sociology for contemporary society. Only toward the end of his career as an academic did Elias’s work begin to attract the attention of English-speaking sociologists, historians, and scholars of cultural studies. 

It is a broad representation of Elias’s oeuvre and work inspired by it. While Elias is best known for his major study of The Civilizing Process, the reach and subtle depths of Elias’s conception of process sociology has been cemented more recently by the English-language publication of Elias’s collected work of 18 volumes. The baton of process sociology is being passed on to further generations of sociologists. As a learning process, sociologists develop this inheritance in new and stimulating ways by situating the most pressing changes and continuities facing human societies in long-term perspective.

Chapters from leading contributors outline the nature of the sociological practice of Elias and address fundamental questions of historical sociology, democratization, gender, racialization processes, and embodiment. Later chapters highlight the contribution of process sociology for understanding developments in nation, state and global sociology, criminology, art, and education.

Statistics and the use of numbers, in general, are becoming increasingly important in journalism, this to the point that it cannot be overemphasised. In the age of the so-called big data, journalists’ engagement with numbers is seen as the Holy Grail to save the news media from declining streams of revenues, hyper-fragmentation of audiences and the de-politicisation of society in general. Indeed, for some the interaction between journalists and numbers is the future. These voices often refer to the ‘datafication’ of news – and society in general – and vehemently call for the incorporation of statistics and data into journalism practice as a way of improving the quality of news. They see in the ‘data revolution’ a real possibility to revolutionise the way journalism is done, making news stories more comprehensive, relevant, accessible and engaging. It is a quest that pretends to use numbers to enhance journalism and provide better public service journalism. To be sure, many journalists are now expected to deal and examine big and small numbers almost on a daily basis at least in ways that they were not asked to do in the past. This against the pressure of time, declining resources and growing masses of quantitative information related to economic, political and social phenomena (including scientific and academic research reports, public opinion data, political polls, and official and non-official datasets, among others). 

Therefore, it is impossible today to disassociate the discussion about quality in the news from the use of numbers. In this sense, there are important questions to ask: How do journalists use statistics to articulate news? What are the reasons and rationale behind incorporating numbers in the news? Are news stories really better because they present the audience particular numbers or data? Does the incorporation of statistics make news stories more comprehensive and accessible? The book is an attempt to answer this along other more fundamental questions such as: What do we understand by quality in the news? Is data really the future for journalism?

In this book, we aim at challenging some common assumptions about how journalists engage and use statistics in their quest for quality news. In doing so, it seeks to improve our understanding about the usage of data and statistics as a primary means for the construction of social reality. This is a task, in our view, that is urgent in times of ‘post-truth’ politics and the rise of ‘fake news’. In this sense, the quest to produce ‘quality’ news, which seems to require incorporating statistics and engaging with data, as laudable and straightforward as it sounds, is instead far more problematic and complex than what is often accounted for.

To start with, the notion of ‘quality’ in the news remains not only elusive but also contentious. On the one hand, as it is argued here, the notion of ‘quality news’ and ‘quality news providers’ has centred around the normative claims of journalism being a public service to society; something that, as we will argue, is questionable both factually and historically. On the other, there is ample evidence to suggest that contrary to the common assumptions statistics do not necessarily bring accessibility, reliability, validity nor credibility to the news stories. Indeed, based on extensive research and drawing from original data, the book explores the use of statistics within the practice of journalism through the lenses of five quality dimensions: relevance, accuracy, timeliness, interpretability and accessibility. According to the authors, by studying each dimension as a threshold that seeks to guarantee the quality of information in news it is possible to understand the whole journalistic workflow, from production to consumption, on how statistics are articulated throughout in order to substantiate quality news stories. The authors highlight the dichotomy between the normative and professional aspirations of journalism, whereby statistics help support the quality of news, and there is a desire to strengthen the ability of storytellers (journalists) through the use of numbers. The book tries to underpin the tensions and issues around journalism and statistics. The central point made is that while the concept of quality and its dimensions remains a theoretical aspiration among journalists, what they really aim to achieve is ultimately credibility and authority. Hence, drawing from this last dichotomy we argue that not only the use of statistics automatically translates into quality journalism but that in some occasions it even hinders the possibility of greater civic engagement with the news.

This collection brings together the research papers of Patrick Olivelle, published over a period of about ten years. The unifying theme of these studies is the search for historical context and developments hidden within words and texts. Words – and the cultural history represented by words – that scholars often take for granted as having a continuous and long history are often new and even neologisms, and thus provide important clues to cultural and religious innovations. Olivelle’s book on the Asramas, as well as the short pieces included in this volume, such as those on ananda and dharma, seek to see cultural innovation and historical changes within the changing semantic fields of key terms. Closer examination of numerous Sanskrit terms taken for granted as central to ‘Hinduism’ provide similar results. Indian texts have often been studied in the past as disincarnate realities providing information on an ahistorical and unchanging culture. This volume is a small contribution towards correcting that method of textual study.

‘India and the Global Financial Crisis’ offers a collection of essays based on the speeches delivered by Reddy during his tenure as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between September 2003 and September 2008, a period of rapid growth for the Indian economy as well as extraordinary challenges for the conduct of monetary policy. He has earned universal acclaim for his gubernatorial management of India’s calibrated financial integration with the global economy.

These essays provide informed critical insights into the making of public policies across a spectrum of areas during those years, while presenting an inside view of the dynamics that are played out behind the scenes. They respond to the interest in India's management of a financial sector that has facilitated growth while maintaining stability, markedly contrasting to the fragile financial climate of the USA. The volume describes India's financial situation, the Reserve Bank of India's perspective, and its policies. ‘India and the Global Financial Crisis’ was selected as Financial Book of the Year 2010 by ‘China Business News’.

Philosophical liberalism is the dominant view in the world today. Even those who reject liberalism philosophically, subscribe to its view of freedom, which is a negative view, common to liberalism, libertarianism, and anarchism. The alternative is recognition of nature, thoroughly, applied fully to human beings. The Buddha set it out as a philosophy, and he lived it. It was a practice. 

It brings death back into life. The common view is that death is the opposite of life. Yet death is part of life, from the beginning. We see this in many great writers, Dostoevsky, for example. His characters find human communion in suffering, despite their differences. Contradictions are inherent in life, but we find our way, not a single way. It brings realism back, which is truth. 

It has been present in human societies throughout history. It has been banished because of a false view of truth, connected to a false view of freedom. It could be recognized as philosophy. The Buddha taught people simply. There was no dogma. He did not teach them to follow him but to be masters of their own salvation. Unless this view is recognized as Philosophy, as it should be, including truth, it will again become religion, rather than a way of life, an art of living.

This book compiles Peter Winch’s previously unpublished manuscripts on political philosophy, together with editorial notes and references to relevant literature.

Winch is best known as the founder of post-war analytic philosophy of the social sciences, and as one of the rare post-war British philosophers who engaged with continental thought, in particular Simone Weil (on whom he wrote a book), Jürgen Habermas, and Karl-Otto Apel. Throughout his career, he also wrote on issues in political philosophy, with particular focus on questions to do with the legitimacy of the state and on the philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Simone Weil. Materials toward a book on the topic have lain in the Peter Winch archives since then, accessible only to philosophers able to visit in person. In this volume these notes are published in full, supplemented by selections from Winch's late lectures on law and authority and cross-referenced with his published discussions of political philosophy and related topics (e.g., punishment, agency).

In these unpublished writings, Winch diagnoses problematic assumptions about agency and about the relationship between language and society as these shape the social contract tradition. Winch’s critique of misconceptions of individual agency in political philosophy focuses the attention away from reasons for action discourse and toward the complex and socially constituted relations between agency, justice, and force. Following Wittgenstein’s injunction that a philosopher should always avoid hasty generalisation, Winch’s approach to questions of the legitimacy of the state is marked out by sensitivity to contextual features, including the needs and interests which influence the form that such questions take, whether those be securing peace in civil war (Hobbes), defending a nation from fascism (Weil), or rationalizing the seizure of indigenous lands by conquest (Locke).

In addition to its interest as a Wittgensteinian treatment of key questions in political philosophy, this volume supplements Winch’s published work on Wittgenstein, ethics, the social sciences, and Spinoza. This volume, the second to come from research of the Peter Winch archives, fills in our understanding of Winch's philosophical oeuvre, drawing out the implications of his work for questions in political philosophy. In addition, the volume contributes to the emerging picture of some post-war British philosophers resisting the impoverishment of narrow logical analysis and the disengagement of philosophy from life and society.

Conditions of malnutrition, conflict, or a combination of both characterize many Arab countries, but this was not always so. As in much of the developing world, the immediate post-independence period was an age of hope and relative prosperity. But imperialism did not sleep while these countries developed, and it soon intervened to destroy these post-independence achievements.

The two principal defeats and losses of territory to Israel in 1967 and 1973, as well as the others that followed, left in their wake more than the destruction of assets and the loss of human lives: the Arab world lost its ideology of resistance. The reversal in economic and social performance between then and now requires an even-handed and theoretically coherent explanation that steers clear of the hallucinatory constructs of individual freedom and choice. Considering such choices is utterly superfluous in a situation where the important choice is often a single one—that is, no choice at all—imposed by the power of history on the unfree majority.

The Unmaking of Arab Socialism is an attempt to understand the perplexing reasons for the Arab world's developmental descent—its de-development—from the pinnacle of Arab socialism to its present desolate condition.Kadri focuses on the concept of Arab socialism in general and its application to Iraq, Syria and Egypt as he explores the deleterious effects of redundant labour expelled by dispossessions in the hinterland and the persistence of permanent war.

‘The Materiality of Politics’ uses a series of historical illustrations to reveal the physicality and underlying ‘materiality’ of political processes. The political subject of the study is the collective political actor poised against governmental rules for stabilizing order. Samaddar’s tour de force propels readers through an account of blood, violence, bodies, controls, laws and conflicts. Politics is examined not as an abstraction, but as a ‘real’ field of dynamic factors rooted in everyday life.

Volume 2, subtitled ‘Subject Positions in Politics’ focuses on the political subject emerging from post-colonial politics. The 1940s are closely examined in order to trace the genesis of the modern Indian political subject, his/her dreams of liberty and recognition of freedom’s qualifications. Contentious politics illuminates the dual tendency of the political subject to demand justice in court, and engage in rebellious street politics, clamouring for justice and equality. As the author demonstrates, the subject’s desire for the autonomy of politics manifests itself in various ways.

Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1834 seeks to explore the extent to which Early British Gothic writing, c.1760–1830, took distinctive shape in the particular theological and theo-political climate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The project takes as its starting point the widely noted ‘anti-Catholicism’ of the Early British Gothic. While taking into account the existing work in this field, the thesis will move beyond a simplistic Protestant/Catholic binary found in works, such as Diane Long Hoeveler’s The Gothic Ideology (2014) and Maria Purves Gothic and Catholicism (2009), which investigate the Gothic as anti- or pro-Catholic respectively. The project also moves the almost exclusively Anglican focus of texts like Alison Millbank’s God and the Gothic (2018), instead placing the Gothic within the complex theo-political context of tolerance debates, focused not only on Anglican-Catholic relations but on the place and suppression of Protestant Dissent. Having established the contemporary context of a proliferation of Dissenting denominations, the lack of a unified Anglican positions, the rich field of theological debate in the period and the continuing importance of Christianity (in its various forms) as a lived religion in the period, the project seeks to investigate the way in which varied theologies underpin key tropes, aesthetics and debates within the Gothic.

Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1832 seeks to explore works throughout the period of the efflorescence and decline of the Early British Gothic, mapping changing currents and trends in the theo-aesthetics of the genre and its depiction and engagement with various supernatural phenomena. It seeks to investigate not only major writers of the period, such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, but a selection of writers from different denominational backgrounds in order to investigate the ways in which contemporary theological debates can be traced across Gothic texts of the period and the ways in which different theological positions manifest in these texts. 

This book focuses on Yellowstone: the park, the larger ecosystem, and even more so, the “idea” of Yellowstone. In presenting a case for a new conservation paradigm for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), including Yellowstone National Park, the book, at its heart, is about people and nature relationships. This new paradigm will be truly committed to a healthy, sustainable environment, rich in other life forms, and one that affords dignity for all: humans and nonhumans. The new story or paradigm must be about living such a commitment and future for GYE in real time. 

To do something and understand about the present erosion of nature and growing unsustainability, particularly the GYE situation, the book offers a heuristic for problem solving, learning, and discovery. The heuristic in four general terms, People, Meaning, Society, Environment, takes into account both the content (biophysical substance such as wolves and bears) and process (people, social relations, and decision-making) of conservation and sustainability in our communities, society, and in our daily living. It calls for an explicit integrative approach to this relationship for GYE. It acknowledges that Yellowstone will be different in the future from what we have experienced in recent decades. It also asks how and why it will be different and whether we’re ready for it. To examine these and related questions, and deeper questions, it probes the future. As well, it reflects on the changing narratives, policies, and actions of different sets of residents and outside influences. The book presents a well-developed theory for interdisciplinary problem solving that is grounded in practice.

This new volume, by a team of international scholars, explores aspects of population displacement and statehood at a crucial juncture in modern European history, when the entire continent took on the aspect of a 'laboratory atop a mass graveyard' (Tomas Masaryk). The topic of state-building has acquired a new actuality in recent years, following the collapse of the USSR and the 'Soviet bloc' and in view of the complex, often violent, territorial and ethnic conflicts which have ensued. Many of the current dilemmas and tragedies of the region have their origins in the aftermath of World War I, when newly independent nation states, struggling to emerge from the rubble of the former Russian empire, first sought to define themselves in terms of population, territory and citizenship. 'Homelands' examines the interactions of forced migration, state construction and myriad emerging forms of social identity. It opens up a fresh perspective on twentieth-century history and throws new light on present-day political, humanitarian and scholarly issues of crucial concern to political scientists, sociologists, geographers, refugee welfare workers, policymakers and others.

Brazil, the world’s largest sugar producer, supplies 16 per cent of its energy consumption and approximately three quarters of its transport fuels with sugarcane-based ethanol. From ca. 2003 until 2014, the country under the Workers’ Party government aimed at creating a global market for ethanol. The time seemed right to steer foreign policy towards this goal due to a benevolent structural environment with global discussions about energy security, climate change, and South-South cooperation. 

Within a neoclassical realist framework, this study examines why Brazil did not fully succeed in its ethanol diplomacy to create a global market for ethanol. The analysis covers three analytical levels: the bilateral with Brazil in power deficit, the bilateral with Brazil in power surplus, and the multilateral, represented in three empirical chapters, Brazil-US, Brazil-Mozambique, and Brazil’s multilateral ethanol diplomacy, respectively. Each chapter finishes with a set of recommendations for political consideration.

This study also demonstrates how the theoretical approach of neoclassical realism can combine foreign policy output with international politics outcome research and is useful to analyse policy outside the hard security realm. It offers a basis for further research towards an understanding of Brazil’s overall foreign policy and the foreign policies of other emerging powers.

This book addresses an old and basic question: what is the moral order of the market? ‘Corporate Wrongdoing and the Art of the Accusation’ is an exploration of accusations of wrongdoing, and the revelations these accusations expose about the dark side of capitalism and modern corporations, and their relationships with suppliers, buyers, peers, investment banks and state regulators. The study explores data gathered from the past twenty years, including over a thousand accusations of economic wrongdoing in corporate America. The research traces exchange paths or structural routes; cultural recipes or ideas about wrongdoing; and interactions between the culture and structure of transgression in economic in markets.

Repertoires of accusation, and the three-way associations between accused, accuser and accusation, reveal the moral order of the market. The tools provided in this data collection and analysis provide a template for the study of the three-way relationship between the following: cultural items or types (i.e., accusation types), structural locations or paths (i.e., market interfaces) and time (i.e., temporal locations of types and paths, or recipes and routes). Repertoires unlock the moral order of the modern market and other institutions (family, politics, education, religion, science) as revealed in accusations of transgression.

Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in the site of Aztec Mexico? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Was Baja California really an island or a peninsula—and did romances of chivalry contain the answer? Were Amazon women hiding in Guiana and where was the location of the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of so-called books of the brave conquistadors, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature. 

The chapters in this book represent separate case studies regarding the use of romance strategies and tales of love and arms more generally in the imperialist myth-making of early modern England against the threat of imperial Spain, particularly those which were first used by Spanish authors to justify Spain’s own imperialist designs. With interwoven readings of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the English colonial mindset developed through a concerted conversation with the reality of Spain’s presence in the colonial world, particularly in the historically contentious sites of Mexico, Peru, Guiana, California and Australia, producing emergent discourses of English nationalism and proto-imperialism as contextually contingent responses to the Spanish problem. By uncovering long-neglected Spanish romantic influences on canonical English works, this book also tracks for the first time the unique social, political and cultural circumstances of English hysteria with Spanish romance that primed the success of Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.

The book highlights how the signs of fashion showcase stories, hybridations, forms of feeling, from the classics of fashion in cinema, to fashion as cultural tradition in the global world, to digital media. Based on a strong socio-semiotic method (Barthes, The Language of Fashion is the main reference), the book crosses some of the main aspects of the contemporary culture of the clothed body: from time and space, to gender, to fashion as cultural translation, to the narratives included in the media convergence of our age. According to Jurji Lotman, fashion introduces the dynamic principle into seemingly inert spheres of the everyday. Fashion’s unexpected function of overturning received meaning is conveyed through its collocation within the dynamic storehouse of what Lotman calls the “sphere of the unpredictable.”. In this horizon, the concept of fashion as a worldly system of sense (Benjamin), generates different “worlds” through its signs.

Founding on Walter Benjamin’s conception of time and history, the book first focuses on time as a main category of fashion. Space is the other main category this book considers in relation to fashion.The book next focuses on the body to show how fashion is a system of images that communicates through stereotyped signs, cultural models and archetypes of imagination that produce and define sexual identities in society. Finally, the book focuses on fashion as a means of communication in the age of social networks.

Zygmunt Bauman was born in 1925 – it is now almost 100 years since his birth. His career in sociology almost spanned six decades and culminated in more than sixty published book titles not to mention the many book chapters and academic articles. In many ways Bauman’s work straddled the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, providing us with a multitude of insights into the main changes and transformations characterizing these two centuries – what he metaphorically defined as ‘solid modernity’ and ‘liquid modernity’. This edited volume will illustrate the continuing interest in Bauman’s work through a number of chapters each dealing with the important aspects of his work and shedding light on some new angles and perspectives on his life and work.

Without aiming at any exhaustive account of Bauman’s life and work, the volume seeks to position Bauman’s within the field of sociology and to provide some examples of his lasting contribution to and relevance in this discipline.

As mentioned, Bauman’s ideas – his research topic, his extreme intellectual productivity and his imaginative approach to doing and writing sociology – – remain a source of inspiration for many scholars and researchers working within a variety of different fields and sub-fields, appealing equally to empirical work and theoretical elaboration. This book contains ten chapters, and all chapters are devoted to the presentation and discussion of themes and ideas that were characteristic of Bauman’s way of doing and writing sociology.

The purpose of this volume – as with the other volumes published in the Anthem Press Companion to Sociology series – is to provide a comprehensive overview of Zygmunt Bauman’s continued importance within the field of sociology and related social science disciplines. The book will engage with some of the major themes and continuing concerns of Bauman’s sociology. The chapters included in the book will explore different sides and dimensions of Goffman’s work, for instance, Bauman’s work, Bauman’s position and perspective within the social sciences (his combined Marxist and Weberian insights as well as inspiration from Sigmund Freud), his work on modernity and the Holocaust, the difference between the reception of his work respectively in Europe and the United States, Bauman’s writings on Western modernity, his work on death and immortality, his turn to the topic of nostalgia towards the end of his career, his many ‘conversational books’ written particularly throughout the final decade of his life and finally his engagement with ambivalence. Although it is impossible to ‘cover all angles’ of Bauman’s comprehensive work, it is nevertheless the overall aspiration behind the book that it will be found useful in teaching and research contexts alike, keeping the spirit of Zygmunt Bauman alive and kicking within sociology and related disciplines.

‘Rethinking Therapeutic Reading’ uses a combination of literary criticism and experimental psychology to examine the ways in which literature can create therapeutic spaces in which to do personal thinking. It reconsiders the role that serious literary reading might play in the real world, reclaiming literature as a vital tool for dealing with human troubles. 

The Aboriginal art movement flourished during a period in which the Australian public were awakened to the implications of the state’s decision to confront the legacies of colonisation and bring Aboriginal culture into the heart of national public life. Rather than seeing this radical political and social transformation as mere context for Aboriginal art’s emergence, this study argues that Aboriginal art has in fact mediated Australian society’s negotiation of the changing status of Aboriginal culture over the last century. This argument is illustrated through the analysis of Aboriginal art’s volatility as both a high art movement and a phenomenon of visual and commercial culture. This analysis reveals the agendas to which Aboriginal art has been anchored at the nexus of the redemptive project of the settler state, Indigenous movements for rights and recognition, and the aspirations of progressive civil society.

At its heart this study is concerned with the broader social and cultural insights that can be gleaned from conducting a sustained inquiry into Aboriginal art’s contested meanings. To achieve this it focuses upon the hopeful and disenchanted faces of the Aboriginal art phenomenon: the ideals of cultural revitalisation and empowerment that have converged upon the art, and the countervailing narratives of exploitation, degradation and futility. Both aspects are traced through a range of settings in which the tensions surrounding Aboriginal art’s aesthetic, political and significance have been negotiated. It is in this dialectic that the vexed ethical questions underlying Australia’s settler state condition can most clearly be identified, and we can begin to navigate the paradoxes and impasses underlying the redemptive national project of the post-assimilation era. 

Intrigue, betrayal, family secrets, forbidden passions – this tale of adventure and suspense links the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 and the Kobe earthquake of 1995 through the story of Akihiko Waki, who is living a quiet life as a think-tank director in Kobe, Japan, when he hears rumours that his father, presumed long dead, is in fact alive and in danger. Akihiko undertakes a dangerous journey to China, and in Shanghai learns that what he thought he knew about his father is in fact far from the truth. Here he meets the intriguingly secretive actress Li Xing, who as a pro-democracy activist is herself in danger, and as events gather pace Akihiko’s search for his father also becomes a desperate battle to save her from the brutal authorities…

This new translation of a Japanese novelist famed for his creation of suspense and his Hitchcock-style plotting is a rewarding and gripping read.  This new translation of a Japanese novelist famed for his creation of suspense and his Hitchcock-style plotting is a rewarding and gripping read. 

This book analyses the impact of the publications written by the economist, jurist, administrator and historian José da Silva Lisboa, the future Viscount of Cairu, from 1821 to 1822, on the events that led to the independence of Brazil in 1822. It reassesses the many interpretations of his role throughout the period, repositioning him among those who are part of the broad reformist Catholic Enlightenment.

In an original account of his career and a new interpretation of his role in helping create an appropriate environment for ideas to be discussed during the post constitutional period that followed the Liberal Revolution in 1820 in Portugal, the book brings to light the extent to which his ideas were influenced by the Enlightenment, and how these ideas influenced public opinion in the transition away from the Reino Unido with Portugal, between 1815 and 1822, towards an independent Brazilian empire under Dom Pedro. 

The book argues that while a supporter of Brazilian autonomy, a fierce critic of the Cortes of Lisbon, and an important figure in the events that unfolded after the departure of Dom João VI from Rio de Janeiro in 1821, he did not openly embrace the independence from the United Kingdom with Portugal and would instead work towards a solution that would encompass Brazil’s autonomy within a Portuguese empire, which did not take place.

Oral traditions and creative oratures have been celebrated in African studies over the years, specifically from the 1950s, as the most important and viable correspondence, aside from material artifacts, between social “archeologists” attempting to penetrate the African preliterate past and the social-political and economic productions of that same past.

In the memoirs chosen for this book, oral traditions are braided with personal experiences in the formation of the self, providing the basis of some African literary outputs and championed as having the ability to engineer the African knowledge system in global academe. In this regard, this work stressesthe concept that most memoir writing scholars feel that the production and presentation of the autobiographical self aredependent on the categories of individualism and relationality.

The memoirists depict their own identities in their tales as not simply a part of their society but also one strongly impacted by prominent persons in their many lived settings. The bookdiscusses an approach that enables West African memoirists to review their cultural backgrounds in the light of living in other spaces and acquiring different experiences.

The Inner World of Research is a book about the misery and joy of life as a researcher. It deals with essential but rarely spoken of topics in the everyday life of a researcher, focussing in particular on the role of emotions and social relations in research. It stretches from the individual researcher, to the ‘micro-cosmos’ of the research team and to the broader policy environment in which research takes place.

The book is to a large extent based on autobiographical material from the author’s long career as a leading social scientist. But it also derives from extended interviews with researchers from a variety of disciplines, and with authors, artists and musicians. It delves into the mysteries of creativity; the joys and frustrations of collaboration; and the role of fear, anger, and boredom in the life of a researcher. It is driven by a quiet fury about how research as a practice is so little understood and so poorly administrated and communicated.

Neither a standard research monograph nor a typical memoir or autobiography, The Inner World of Research belongs to the academic essay genre. It is a book based on the author’s frustrations, experiences and curiosity but all through written in dialogue with colleagues supported by adequate scholarship. It is personal and self-reflexive yet authoritative and offers significant insights into the heaven and hell of contemporary academic life in general. And in contrast to many other contemporary books on ‘the decline of the university’, this book is not only critical but also self-critical and constructive.

This is a book about dying, or, more accurately, about the representation of dying in the theatre. Its chief concern is how actors undertook to translate words and concepts into forms legible and significant to an audience. It deals with the ways in which playwrights wrote about death and attitudes towards death in their cultures. Nevertheless, the emphasis is on the practice of acting.

Before the nineteenth century, when death began to be confined behind closed doors, it was widely available as a spectacle. Death and the suffering that preceded it were in plain sight; no effort was made to hide the diseased and moribund. The absence of medical means of alleviating pain or of hygienic measures meant that the most distressing and abhorrent aspects of dying were out in the open. The contempt for human life shown by the law-courts and the death penalty for the slightest offence occasioned frequent and enthusiastically attended public executions. In addition, the Church and religion generally hoped, through elaborate rites and ceremonies, both before and after death, to invest it with an edifying value that could be extended for the greater good. The sacred and social ceremony makes a transition into an aesthetic and political performance, marking a more modern frame of mind.

Neoclassic decorum eschewed such displays; and, after a heyday of spectacular dying on the nineteenth-century stage, critics again began to insist on more moderate displays. This conformed to the growing emphasis on mental processes and psychological complexity. However, it runs counter to the theatre’s need for high color, extreme situations and fanciful invention. Denied house-room in literary drama, these desiderata found a welcome haven in the various manifestations of performance art.

The context of both the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the Prague Spring was the torturous process of communist regimes tentatively revising the history of the recent communist past that had been constructed and imposed during the Stalinist period. This process of remembering and forgetting had the power to shake the legitimacy and authority of communist party-states because their monopoly on the interpretation of the past was so central to their control of the present.

Once the elaborate histories of the show trials and subsequent propaganda were undermined, the whole credibility of the regimes that had propagated them was likewise weakened. In the Prague Spring, this long-delayed historiographical reckoning was joined by an equally problematic connection between meanings of the past and definitions of the present. Czechoslovakia’s communist allies insisted on understanding and seeking to influence the Czechoslovak reform process through varied and changeable references to and analogies from Hungary’s 1956 uprising. The purpose and nature of these loaded linkages between recent Hungarian past and Czechoslovak present changed according to circumstances and developments.

While the meanings of the 1956 uprising and the concomitant definitions of the 1968 Prague Spring also varied between Soviet and Hungarian analysts, they were alike resisted by Czechoslovak reformers seeking to chart a unique path to socialism. As they attempted to ground their policies in Czechoslovak history, they unsuccessfully rejected parallels with Hungary’s. Ultimately, however, the dependence on historical analogies to decisively explain the present was also a vulnerability for those who employed them, as the gap between a constructed past and an untidy reality irresistibly emerged.

The pursuit of collective happiness was considered a utopian ideal that structured many aspects of Soviet culture, a fact recognized by numerous scholars in various disciplines ranging from cultural and literary studies to sociology and political science. Several groundbreaking studies in the literary and cultural history of the former Soviet Union have changed our understanding of the Soviet past. However, none of these studies has paid attention to an important theme in the cultural history of Soviet society – the pursuit of happiness. Although specialists in Soviet culture repeatedly invoke various manifestations of happiness in works of literature and film in their research, it has yet to be investigated as the subject of a full-fledged independent study.

‘Petrified Utopia’ redresses this inexplicable omission. This collection of essays introduces the Western reader to the most representative ideas of happiness, and the common practices of its pursuit that shaped Soviet everyday life and cultural discourse from the early post-revolutionary years to the later period of Stalinist and post-Stalinist culture. The collection presents different manifestations of happiness in literature and visual culture – from children’s literature to the official and high literary cannon, from architecture to fine arts, from postcards to cookbooks, and from the culture of consumerism to product-paradise in Soviet posters. ‘Petrified Utopia’ features articles by the leading specialists in the study of Soviet culture from the UK, the US, Germany and Italy, and addresses the perplexing lack of scholarship on this important issue.

Stephen Condit begins ‘Anarchism in Local Governance’ arguing that anarchism and anarchists must engage with the ruling order in a more inclusive manner than radical opposition, at least in the environment of a stable and cautious welfare society like Finland. This encounter may enlarge the purposes and values of municipal governance towards some of the fundamental values of anarchism, primarily individual and communal self-governance, and as well develop anarchist thought and praxis, not to renounce radical and non-conventional action, but to enlarge its scope and opportunities by strengthening the legitimacy of anarchist values and praxis, and their practical relevance to the social order.

The discussion entails three intertwined discourses: anarchist thought in philosophical and theoretical terms with an emphasis on the possibilities of its praxis; a descriptive examination of municipal governance through its organisations, strategies and policies; and a rather anecdotal account of Condit’s 30-year career in attempting to combine these dimensions of anarchism, municipal governance and citizen participation in civil society. The counterfactual ideal of Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is a significant measure of evaluation.

Condit’s self-assessment is equivocal. He failed to instil much practical anarchism into the municipality and possibly diluted his own demonstration of anarchism beyond what most anarchists would accept. Nevertheless he considers his project justified because it has clarified potentialities for the municipality, citizen associations and anarchism, and because it may express in more coherent conceptual and ethical form significant emerging trends in Western society.

Australian photographer and film maker Frank Hurley became an international celebrity through his reporting of the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, the First and Second World Wars, the England-Australia air race of 1919, and his own expeditions to Papua in the 1920s. This book is an account of his stage and screen practice in the context of early twentieth-century mass media.

‘Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity’ is not a biography of Frank Hurley the man; it is instead an examination of the social life of the many marvellous and meaningful things he made as a professional photographer and film maker in the early twentieth century: the negatives, photographic prints, lantern slides, stereographs, films, diaries and newspaper articles. His stage and screen practices offer an insight into Australia’s engagement with the romance and wonder of international modernity in the early years of the twentieth century. The level of description at which this volume works is not that of personality or the originary events of Hurley’s life – the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, and the First and Second World Wars – but the media events he worked so hard and so professionally to create. He called them his ‘synchronized lecture entertainments’.

These media events were at once national and international; they involved Hurley in an entire culture industry comprising many kinds of personnel, practices and texts that were constantly in movement along global lines of travel and communication, and in a variety of institutional locations around the world. This raises complex questions both about the authorship of Hurley’s photographic and filmic texts – which were often produced and presented by other people – and about their ontology, since they were in a more or less constant state of re-assemblage in response to changing market opportunities. This unique study re-imagines, from inside the quiet and stillness of the archive, the prior social life of Hurley’s creations as they were once accelerated through the complicated topography of the early twentieth century’s rapidly internationalizing mass media landscape. As a way to conceive of that space and the social life of the people and things within it, this study uses the concept of ‘colonial modernity’.

The main sources for an understanding of classical Hindu law are the Sanskrit treatises on religious and legal duties, known as the Dharmaśāstras. In this collection of his major studies in the field, Ludo Rocher presents analytical and interpretive essays on a wide range of topics, from general themes such as the nature of Hindu law and Anglo-Hindu law to technical matters including word studies and text criticism. Rocher’s deep engagement with the language and worldview of the authors in the Dharmaśāstra tradition yields distinctive and corrective contributions to the field, which are informed by knowledge both of the Indian grammatical tradition and of Roman and civil law.

Davis’s introduction presents an interpretative account of Rocher’s many contributions to the field, organized around the themes that recur in his work, and examines his key advances, both methodological and substantive. Comparisons and contrasts between Rocher’s ideas and those of his Indological colleagues serve to place him in the context of a scholarly tradition, while Rocher’s fundamental view that the Dharmaśāstra is first and foremost a scholarly and scholastic tradition, rather than a practical legal one, is also explored.

This invaluable collection serves both as a summary review of the ideas of Rocher, a leading authority in the field, and as a critical evaluation of the impact of these ideas on the present study of law and Indology.

This book is unique in its dedicated tackling of the subject of death in the work of Jean Baudrillard. Through new readings of his work, juxtaposed with philosophical (Schopenhauer, Kant) and artistic (Jeremy Millar, Ron Mueck) examples along with films (Norte, the End of History; Ida), the book makes so patently clear the importance of Baudrillard’s tendency to poeticize, his core indebtedness to Georges Bataille, Alfred Jarry, and others, and his reliance on paradox. Ultimately, Stratagem of the Corpse is less a making sense of death and more a transcript of what occurred when death made sense of us, a reverse thanatology in which death delineates the variant forms of our encroachment, not so much death as seen by Baudrillard but Baudrillard as seen by death.

Examples of Baudrillardian simulacra, depersonalization, detachment, violence, obscenity, Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘perfect crime’, and nihilism are incisively discussed. The book makes a compelling case for why Baudrillard is relevant and necessary.

Today as in times past, the figure of the dandy evokes the image of a fashionable male who achieves social influence by distinctive elegance in dress and sophisticated self-presentation. The book explores the history of Dandy as a cultural type across Europe and Russia from the eighteenth century through the present day, analysing different manifestations of dandyism from sparse minimalism to opulent richness. Olga Vainshtein offers a unique view on dandyism as a cultural tradition, based not merely on fashionable attire, but also as a particular lifestyle with specific standards of behaviour, bodily practices and conceptual approaches to dress. The dandy is described as the prototypical hero of the modern cult of celebrities. From clubbing manners, the techniques of virtual aristocratism, urban flâneurs and the correct way to examine people, Vainshtein walks us through the optical duels and the techniques of visual assessment at social gatherings. Readers will learn about strategies of subversive behaviour found in practical jokes, the fine art of noble scandal, dry wit, bare-faced impudence and mocking politeness. Vainshtein outlines the principles of dandyism through an examination of strategies of self-fashioning among famous dandies such as George Brummell, Count D’Orsay, Oscar Wilde and Robert de Montesquiou. Looking at dandyism as a nineteenth-century literary movement, Vainshtein examines representation of dandies in fiction. Along the way, the author offers the English-language reader something entirely new: a history of Russian and Soviet dandyism. Finally, a large section is devoted to the dandies of today, including the discussion of African sapeurs.

'Income Poverty and Beyond' emphasizes the need to go beyond the conventional definition of poverty and look at the various human aspects of the problem. Eminent social scientists such as Suresh Tendulkar, Abusaleh Shariff, R. Radhakrishna, M. S. S. Meenakshisundaram, Seeta K. Prabhu, Ravi Srivastava and the editors, Raja J. Chelliah and R. Sudarshan, take a comprehensive view of poverty to include the concept of human poverty, seen as the 'the denial of opportunities and choices most basic to human development'. Special care has been taken to make the information and analysis accessible to the general reader.

Using the latest available data for India as well as edited versions of papers commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for a South-Asia poverty monitor, the broad conclusion that has emerged is that more public action is needed to counter the high prevalence of human poverty. Therefore, current measures to reduce income-poverty, including high rates of economic growth, are not sufficient.

The first two chapters dwell on the concept of income-poverty, interstate and intergroup disparities and poverty trends in India over the decade 1983–94. This is followed by an examination of human development in rural India, availability of food to the poor, various programmes aimed at removing poverty, the indices of human poverty and public financing of social services, human priority expenditures, and human expenditure ratios for the Indian states. The perceptions of the poor in assessing their own poverty and in developing policies to improve their status are discussed, and an epilogue appeals to the national and international community to take serious note of human poverty in the midst of which we all live.

After years of relative indifference, space exploration has caught the public’s imagination once again. However, this enthusiasm may well hide a disturbing question: what if humankind is in fact bored with life on Earth? The end of the world has indeed arrived, but in an unexpected way. It can be described thus: man’s potential on Earth has been exhausted. We have discovered every piece of land, tried all sorts of political regimes, experienced all the forms of the arts and committed ourselves to all kinds of religious beliefs. Yet if we admit that the thirst for exploration and novelty is at the heart of human nature, we then have to confront the resulting question: can humanity survive the finitude of our world? Will we hold out long in this cloistered and domesticated Earth that has become so devoid of all mystery and adventure? Or will we die of boredom when the Earth will have become the biggest open-air zoo in the universe?

The consequences of our planet’s finiteness can already be perceived in our day-to-day experience: humans’ physical obsolescence, the decline of Eros, the epidemic of depression sweeping across the Western world and self-destructive tendencies that reveal an actual wish for the Deluge to happen, as if we wanted to recreate the clean slate we so yearn for. We must therefore find a way to break free from this looming trap. Part of the solution may lie above us, but the day when our technology can catapult us to a planet orbiting another star is considerably far off. One could consider that it matters little whether we are capable of colonizing space or not, as long as we have our humdrum lives to attend to here on Earth. But our human nature will not let this happen. We are wanderers, explorers, pioneers in all fields of life. 

The human race will therefore not be driven off our planet to escape meteorites or the depletion of natural resources, but to prevent our own mental and physical imprisonment. Knowing the world has nothing more to offer us is not merely a piece of information; it is a shattering reality to which our bodies and minds will react wildly and the biggest existential challenge humankind will have to face in the near future. By shedding light on this pervading worldwide mental condition, The End of the World and the Last God tries to raise awareness that the obstacles to interstellar expansion do not essentially lie in any technological limitation but in the demons and flaws we host in ourselves.

Located at the centre of the Balkan Peninsula, Bulgaria serves as a natural stepping stone to the Straits, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Its geo-strategic position has frequently attracted foreign powers – including Great Britain and the Soviet Union – with an array of regional and global interests. [NP] A succession of Great Power influences in the Balkans both shaped Bulgaria’s international place and marked its domestic policy. This book explores Britain’s involvement in Bulgaria between 1943 and 1949, providing a new understanding of the origins of the Cold War in the region.

Divided into three parts, the book examines the priorities of Britain during and after World War II, investigates the practical integration of strategic and ideological objectives in British foreign policy, and maps Britain’s diminishing interest in the country alongside the parallel consolidation of communist power and the increasing Soviet presence.

Using recently released sources from the Bulgarian and Soviet communist parties and foreign ministries, the author revisits the question of British attitudes towards Eastern Europe. This book offers a new approach to understanding the origins of the Cold War in Bulgaria and bridges significant gaps in the treatment of the country in English-language literature.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) or billionaire philanthropy is like a Rorschach test – the same act can look very different depending on how we understand its intentions and its consequences. In this book the author examines the politics of CSR in India to assess its ability to advance inclusive and sustainable development. The focus is on how CSR is remaking the practices and agendas of civic organizations that are being encouraged to collaborate with business to advance equality and prosperity.

Civil society organizations (CSOs) and corporations have a history of hostility to each other. According to CSO workers, businesses selfishly exploit workers, despoil natural resources, and distort democracy to serve their own profit-making ends. According to business executives, CSOs are hopelessly naïve, inefficient, and interfere in the market in ways that reduce economic growth. And yet, in the past decade more and more CSOs and businesses are collaborating in new ways. Individuals from both sectors are setting up social impact enterprises, and social investing funds are increasing. The more traditional forms of corporate-CSO collaboration have expanded as more funds are flowing from business to the social sector. The divide between the corporate sector and civil society seems to be narrowing. Why is this happening and what are its consequences? This book examines these trends in India, where since 2013 the state has mandated co-operation between the largest firms and NGOs in pursuit of inclusive and sustainable development.

This book offers evidence that CSR is unlikely to contribute to inclusive and sustainable development. By claiming to be “helpers” corporations are able to silence their critics and thus avoid making the deeper shifts in business models needed in order to create a more just and sustainable society.

In “The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality,” Melvin Kohn reexamines his 60-year inquiry––conducted across distinct cultures under radically different conditions––into the relationship between people’s location in the social order and their personality. The result of this reexamination is an important refinement of Kohn’s highly regarded theory on the relationship between social class, work and personality, adding key insights about the role of political intervention on personality to his scholarship.

Over the course of his career, Kohn and his collaborators––in the United States, Norway, East and West Germany, Japan, Poland, Ukraine and China––used groundbreaking empirical methodologies to understand the effect of social structure on personality. Beginning in mid-twentieth century America, Kohn established that for employed men and women, the most important aspect of social structure for personality was social status. Kohn confirmed and refined this insight over time and across distinct cultural, economic and changing political conditions. Whether in postwar America, East and West Germany, industrial Japan, Communist Poland or post-Soviet Ukraine, study after study demonstrated the primacy of social class and social stratification in determining people’s values and orientations.

This research also revealed interesting cross-national inconsistencies in people’s reactions to similar social conditions. These inconsistencies did not change the essential relationship of social class and stratification to personality, and repeatedly confirmed Kohn’s findings about the importance of occupational self-direction and substantive complexity on all aspects of personality. In “The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality,” Kohn focuses on these inconsistencies. Based on insights derived from research conducted during the transition to privatization of urban China, Kohn identifies political intervention as the force that modifies, for better or for worse, but does not eliminate the dominant effect of class stratification and the opportunities they provide for self-direction at work on personality.

The book is divided into four sections: The first section focuses on how certain environmental problems can only be solved through active government efforts to implement policies that effectively take science and politics into account. This section introduces readers to foundational concepts, including the steps in the US federal environmental policy-making process, and offers an action-oriented analysis of how environmental policy gets implemented and how practitioners can use comparative analysis of public policy in environmental problem-solving. It concludes with questions about the possibility of a unified theory of environmental policy making. The section empowers readers to develop, through carefully designed assignments, a framework to shape an action plan to solve specific environmental problems.

The next section focuses on formulating a sound philosophical basis for taking action in environmental problem-solving situations. This includes a discussion of several ethical frameworks that practitioners can use to underpin the actions they propose. This section begins with a general overview of environmental ethics, and then moves to a discussion of utilitarianism versus intrinsic value, deep green approaches to environmental problem-solving, the debate over sustainability versus economic growth, and how science and indigenous knowledge can be applied in a wide range of environmental problem-solving situations. The section empowers readers to take a stand on these debates, drawing on practical cases with worked examples.

The penultimate section helps environmental practitioners understand how to use various analytical tools. It includes a quick survey of traditional and non-traditional evaluation techniques, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each, focusing on environmental impact assessment, cost-benefit analysis, ecosystem services analysis, risk assessment, simulation and modeling, and scenario planning. This section prepares readers to practice multi-party environmental problem-solving, and to identify the power of each tool to enhance environmental problem-solving, developing the judgment to enumerate strengths and weaknesses as they see them playing out in practice.

The concluding section is a survey of the theory and practice behind mobilizing support for particular problem-solving efforts. It includes discussions of democratic decision-making and environmental problem solving, how the public can be brought in as a partner, methods of collaborative decision-making, the idea of consensus building, and how politics and power sway collective action efforts.

‘Re-balancing China’ addresses three key sets of issues in China’s political economy. Part One of the text provides an analysis of the profound impact of the global financial crisis on China’s economy – an economy deeply integrated in the global economic system through trade and foreign investment. It also examines the positive outcomes of the massive rescue package that constituted China’s policy response to the crisis. The rescue package stimulated Chinese growth and helped to stabilize the global economy as a whole.

Part Two focuses on the challenge of globalization for China’s industrial policy. Since the 1980s, China has pursued an industrial policy aimed at nurturing a substantial group of globally competitive firms, most of which have become superficially successful. However, China still has a negligible number of large firms that are competitive in global markets. China’s experience presents a fundamental challenge to traditional concepts of industrial policy and development.

Finally, Part Three examines China’s international relations, the focal point of which is its relationship with the United States. The US has made it clear that its principal challenge in international relations is the ‘rise of China’ and has announced a ‘tilt towards the Pacific’ in its military strategy. As a result, the core of this interaction spans the East and South China Seas and the countries that surround this area.

‘Sisters and the English Household’ revalues unmarried adult sisters in nineteenth-century English literature as positive figures of legal and economic autonomy representing productive labour in the domestic space. As a crucial site of contested values, the adult unmarried sister carries the discursive weight of sustained public debates about ideals of domesticity in nineteenth-century England. Engaging scholarly histories of the family, and providing a detailed account of the 70-year Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister controversy, Wallace traces an alternative domesticity anchored by adult sibling relations through Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals; William Wordsworth’s poetry; Mary Lamb’s essay ‘On Needle-Work‘; and novels by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Dinah Mulock Craik and George Eliot. Recognizing adult sibling relationships, and the figure of the adult unmarried sibling in the household, as primary and generative rather than contingent and dependent, and recognizing material economy and law as fundamental sources of sibling identity, ‘Sisters and the English Household’ resets the conditions for literary critical discussions of sibling relations in nineteenth-century England.

In the twenty-first century, literary scholars have increasingly explored the significant historical distance between the ways we name, plot and characterize sibling relations, and the quite different ways that pre-twentieth-century writers and readers might have done so. Yet, as Mary Jean Corbett and Naomi Tadmor have separately argued, efforts to historicize our understanding of English families over the crucial transitional period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been weakened by scholars’ reliance on terms and ideas that assume stable, universally human familial structures and relations. When we focus on the sibling relation, this reliance proves particularly limiting, driving continuing tendencies to define ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ in terms of sexual, specifically conjugal relations that reinscribe those stabilizing concepts, or to subsume the sibling relation into other categories, eliding its potential primacy in ‘family’.

‘Sisters and the English Household’ works to escape these lingering critical limitations through two innovations: a reframing of efforts to historicize ‘family’ as a further historicizing of ‘domesticity’ that renders it multiple and fluid rather than monolithic; and a turn towards the unmarried adult sister as a figure of legal and economic autonomy representing productive labour in the domestic space. The book traces two distinct nineteenth-century ideals of domesticity, one of which understood sibling fortunes as fruitfully intertwined through the full extent of the siblings' lives (corporate domesticity), while the other expected the domestic, material and, to some extent, emotional separation of adult siblings from their birth-homes and from each other (industrial domesticity). The second configuration, although counterbalanced by persistent idealizations of the first, sibling-anchored model, was gradually and unevenly ascendant through the period. As households came to be primarily defined by the relations between spouses, and between parents and children, the mutual householding and devotion of siblings, once expected features of family life, began to seem extraordinary. More specifically, as a domestic space defined by the apparent exclusion of productive labour was increasingly idealized, the adult unmarried sister in the house became an object of intense cultural scrutiny, her troubling autonomy rendering her the crucial figure in the English nineteenth-century’s protracted cultural negotiation of familial, household and domestic ideals. The sister's autonomy also drove a gradually increasing imperative to exclude adult unmarried siblings from the households of their married siblings, an imperative figured as expatriation from the homely and national ‘domestic’ space.

Alone on a midsummer night, Cat wakes to find a stranger dressed in yellow ‘rat-a-tap, tapping’ his feet. Captivated by the music of Kutze’s steps, Cat resolves to travel abroad and tread wheat alongside this stranger when he becomes an adult. But first, Cat must grow up in the small port town where he lives with his timpanist grandfather and a father irrevocably obsessed with an unsolved mathematical proof, and which, as part of the series of increasingly surreal events that characterize his life, Cat rescues from a plague of rats by his imitating the yowls of his namesake, the cat. The ‘rat-a-tap, tap’ of Kutze’s steps echoes through Cat’s life as he matures, moves away from the town to become a musician in the big city and, eventually, journeys abroad.

A truly unique coming-of-age tale, ‘Stepp’n on Wheat’ traces the unsettling events and characters encountered by Cat as he grows up, from the mysterious travelling salesman who cheats his town and ruins his father to a colourblind girl named Green.

'ICTs and Development in India' provides a critical account of the impact of the use of Information Technology in development projects in India, focusing particularly on E-governance and Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) development programs initiated by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). Sreekumar challenges the conventional wisdom concerning the potential of ICT to provide unprecedented social and economic opportunities for vulnerable groups such as women and marginalized communities by highlighting its failure to bridge social divides. He argues that in addition to reinforcing existing social divides, the patterns of ICT deployment and control have in certain cases created new divides. Given such tensions and contradictions, this book questions whether it is appropriate to consider civil society as an independent realm of social action separated from State and Market.

Sreekumar offers a fresh perspective and added depth to the discussions on the social impacts of new technologies in rural areas, especially in terms of methods, analytics and approach. The recognition of the shortcomings of CSO initiatives plays an important part in redefining the role of civil society and understanding its fractured relations with the State and Market. Sreekumar therefore creates a powerful critique on the interpretation of agency and the structure of rural transformation as mediated by new technologies in the particular context of India's social and economic transition.

‘William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856–1890’ offers a new reading of Morris’s work, foregrounding his commitment to the idea of transformative violence. Hanson argues, contrary to prevailing critical opinion, that Morris’s work demonstrates an enduring commitment to an ideal of violent battle and that combat, both imaginary and actual, is represented as a potentially renewing and generative force in his writings, from the earliest short stories to the late propaganda poems and political romances.

Hanson examines Morris’s imagination of violence as a way of understanding the world and the self. The interactions of combat, work and play, of self-sacrifice and hope, class war and prowess in his writings draw together conflicting cultural narratives about individual and political identity in a way that complicates or reframes their meanings.

Moving chronologically through his works, the book discusses the philosophy and phenomenology of violence by which Morris delineates his ethical and aesthetic positions, as well as examining the ways in which they intersect with those of his contemporaries. It combines close readings of his work with historical and contextual analysis to suggest that Morris’s paradoxical commitment to violence as a means to wholeness shapes the form and style of his works as well as their content and reception.

Has India’s shift to neoliberalism since the 1990s led to a heightened awareness of time and its passing, an intense preoccupation with youth, and anxieties over the relations between generations? ‘The Politics of Time and Youth in Brand India’ discusses the politics of time that have emerged in popular discourses across cinema, television, print and consumer culture, arguing that contests over conceptions of time are, in fact, sites of battle between labour and capital.

Kapur shows how the recent political-economic shift in India is accompanied by a new emphasis on youth and a preoccupation with change, novelty and the acceleration of time. This perception of time is examined through an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on critical theory and cinema and media studies, as well as two concepts from Marxist-feminist theory. The first focuses on the notion of capitalist development as a systemic form of underdevelopment, which perpetuates a radicalised individualism while simultaneously erasing selfhood, as each life-time is reduced to homogenous, commodified units of time, each with a varying price dependent upon one’s position in the market. The second is the critique of the time-orientation of capitalism and its promise of freedom through novelty where, in fact, its reliance upon a system of private accumulation based on exploitation favours calculations of profits in the present over investing in the future. Together, these approaches shed light on India’s contemporary cultural politics, explaining how the country’s shift to neoliberalism is deeply intertwined with profound conflicts over conceptions of time, youth and the relations between generations. 

"Report on the Agrarian Law" (1795) and Other Writings' is the first modern English translation of perhaps the greatest work of the Spanish Enlightenment, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’s 'Informe sobre la Ley Agraria' (1795). A major work of political economy and a beautifully crafted philosophical history of Spain’s political development until the eighteenth century, 'Informe sobre la Ley Agraria' is a classic work of the Spanish Enlightenment. Displaying the richness of Spanish Enlightenment writing on political economy emerging from a fecund conjugation of foreign writers (Smith, Ferguson, Condillac, Mirabeau, Genovesi) with Spanish writers (Ulloa, Olavide, Uztáriz, Campomanes), this masterpiece explores the lessons learned from the shortcomings of the Spanish Crown's economic policies in the eighteenth century.

This book proposes a radical new way of thinking about our democratic future, our ecological survival, and our ways to keep economies fair. It shows that adopting upper limits to wealth and income; replacing elections with local direct democracy and legal duty involving randomly selected citizens; and replacing welfare and redistribution policies with pre-distribution and reparations promises new solutions to political apathy, discontent, manipulation, economic inequality, unfairness, unequal opportunities, and looming ecological disaster.

Most public debates today focus on the poor, on minorities, and on immigrants when discussing the problems of our democracies. The poor, minorities and immigrants, however, are not our problem. They had no say in designing the kinds of systems that threaten our planet, our wellbeing, and our social and communal lives. They consume very little and thus have a minimal ecological footprint. It is the super-rich who threaten justice, fairness, equal opportunity, and ecological sustainability.

We often hear that creative and intellectual innovation is the key to western economic renewal, that cognitive capitalism has succeeded in globalizing the mental-manual division of labour, and that old work – blue-collar, repetitive, de-skilled – is now consigned to the factories of the developing world. At the other end of the long production chains, the West relies increasingly on immaterial labour. From this perspective no rustbelt city can hope to regenerate, no developing nation can ascend to first-world status, without the ‘new oil’ of intellectual property. Workers in general are told to adapt to this transition, to remake themselves for the new economy. Rapid shifts in patterns of consumption, taste and technology can render jobs and skills obsolete in ways that defy the planning and foreclosures of Fordism.

Vocational fortunes depend not only on intellect and creativity but also on entrepreneurial acumen and vocational agility. New capitalism seeks to make a virtue of transience. It has taken up the counter-culture’s critique of the Fordist job-for-life, in order to persuade young people in particular that working life is (and should be) episodic and project-based. The precariat (Standing 2009) must embrace the idea of the improvised post-modern career - a wild vocational ride that unfolds like the levels of a video game. They must become labile labour: opportunistic, excitable, flexible, mobile and ready to flow without protest or friction into the spaces opened up by Post-Fordism. Those who resist or ignore this turbulence and cling to the goal of security are in effect sleepwalking towards redundancy.

‘The Creativity Hoax’ argues that creativity, the leitmotif of new capitalism, has become a key neo-liberal idiom for reorganizing work and working life in ways that erode communal bonds, loyalties and values and blur the boundaries between work and play, public and private. However, the creative economy remains a largely unrealized project, a fantasy of regeneration. Despite the inflated rhetoric of vocational fulfilment, much work performed in the West remains low-skilled and low-paid. Very few make a living exclusively from creative labour whether as employees, freelancers, or entrepreneurs. For the most part it is transnational cultural corporations that reap the patentable or copyrightable bounty, belying the egalitarian myths of the new economy. [NP] The challenge for capital has been to habituate the precariat to the condition of abeyance. In order to tolerate un/underemployment or jobs where skills and talents are underutilized (retail, hospitality or on the edges of creative industries), young workers need to be persuaded that vocational fulfilment and financial security are attainable. ‘The Creativity Hoax’ draws on extensive interview and observation research with creative aspirants – from technical, production and performance fields – who wrestle with the prospect and reality of poverty and unfulfilled ambition.

Nikolai Gretsch's Travel Letters is a fully translated English edition of a three-volume account published by Nikolai Gretsch (1787–1867) in Russian in 1839. In the original Russian, Gretsch describes his travels in post-Napoleonic England, France, and Germany in 1837 at the behest of the Russian Empire.

Gretsch had been asked to travel into Western Europe to examine the educational systems and report his findings to the Russian government. However, he was more than just a functionary. He was a journalist, novelist, and philologist. For nearly three decades, he published a journal called Son of the Fatherland, and he was able to convince many influential Russian thinkers of the time to contribute to the periodical. Later, he would publish The Reader’s Library and then The Northern Bee. The former was a short-lived magazine, but the latter was a newspaper that remained in circulation for almost three decades. As these accomplishments suggest, Gretsch was an intellectual—a person who looked beyond the surface-level of his existence to seek deeper meaning.

In consequence, as he travelled through England, France, and Germany, his sharp mind absorbed far more than just the details of the educational systems he had been sent to investigate. He noticed the cultural norms in his surroundings, the history of each country, and the personal experiences of the people he met. When he returned to Russia, Gretsch assembled his entertaining and often humorous personal observations into the three-volume edition that was published in St. Petersburg in 1839 — not long after Napoleon’s final defeat. His astute observations provide a rich contemporary resource for information about the countries he visited. The observations are all the more relevant since they come from the viewpoint of an outsider. Additionally, as a result of his government position, Gretsch was able to move in social circles that would have been closed to many other people. In England, he once found himself in the same room with the future Queen Victoria, for example, and in France, he had lunch with Victor Hugo. Given the new historicist slant of modern literary and cultural studies, Gretsch’s observations offer a treasure-trove of contextual information that will be valuable to history and literature scholars as well as to general readers interested in cultural interactions during the nineteenth century. This narrative has never before been translated into English in its entirety. 

Trailblazing women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945-1975 offers a compelling new perspective of Australian radio and television history. It chronicles how a group of female producers defied the odds and forged remarkable careers in the traditionally male domain of public-affairs production at the ABC in the post-war decades. Kay Kinane, Catherine King, Therése Denny and Joyce Belfrage were ambitious and resourceful producers, part of the vanguard of Australian broadcasters who used mass media as a vehicle for their social and political activism. Fiercely dedicated to their audiences, they wrote, directed and produced ground-breaking documentaries and current affairs programs that celebrated Australian life, while also challenging its cultural complacency, its racism and sexism. They immersed themselves in the ABC’s many networks of collaboration and initiated a range of strategies to expand their agency and authority. With vivid descriptions of life at the ABC, it traces their careers as they crossed borders and crossed mediums, following them as they worked on location shoots and in production offices, in television studios, control rooms and radio booths. In doing so it highlights the barriers, both official and unofficial, that confronted so many women working in broadcasting after World War II.

“Unhomely Cinema” explores how the unhomely nature of contemporary film narrative provides an insight into what it means to dwell in today’s global societies. Drawing from Freud’s concept of the uncanny – that frightful and inexplicable experience of the home as foreign and strange – the unhomely speaks to the spatial dislocation, transience, homelessness and disempowerment symptomatic of contemporary global societies.

While uncanny homes are traditionally associated with the science fiction and horror genres, “Unhomely Cinema” shows how an array of film genres – from Michel Gondry’s comedy “Be Kind Rewind” to Laurent Cantet’s eerie suspense thriller “Time Out” – use the figure of the precarious home to engage with some of the most pertinent social and cultural issues involved in the question of “making home.”

Encounters with the unhomely often result in the painful loss of home, but the unhomely can also offer an ethics of dwelling, whereby the impossibility of narrative closure represents new and more hopeful ways of dwelling in the world.

‘Lloyd George at War, 1916–1918’ provides a much needed re-evaluation of this charismatic prime minister’s wartime leadership. Calling on a wide range of primary sources and focussing on Lloyd George’s role in the war cabinet, Cassar compellingly argues that George’s reputation as the “man who won the war” was wholly unmerited. Instead Cassar shows that Lloyd George’s heavy handed leadership was often detrimental to the Allied cause. From his wholehearted support for the disastrous Nivelle offensive, to his pursuit of a peripheral strategy that diverted troops away from the critical theatre of war on the Western Front, Cassar shows that Lloyd George consistently bucked the advice of his generals in preference for ineffectual and dangerous military strategies. Cassar’s approach also differs from that of other studies of Lloyd George by adopting a thematic approach in preference to a chronological narrative, thereby allowing a closer evaluation of Lloyd George’s handling of complex issues.

The first book-length study of Sydney-based Horwitz Publications, the largest and most dynamic Australian pulp publisher to emerge after World War II. Although best known for its cheaply produced, sometimes luridly packaged, softcover books, Horwitz Publications played a far larger role in mainstream Australian publishing than has been so far recognised, particularly in the expansion of the paperback from the late 1950s onwards. 

Horwitz was adept at seeking out and exploiting the porous spaces that existed, sometimes only temporarily, between pulp and mainstream publishing: where mainstream literary forms were reconfigured to suit more sensational tastes, authorial reputation was fluid, and government regulation failed to keep pace with shifting reading tastes and social mores. Its dealings were aggressively transnational in scope, moving beyond London, to directly encompass the United States and other overseas fiction markets. And Horwitz continually mined international literary and publishing fashions and successes to create local analogues of popular pulp and mass-market publishing genres, giving them a makeover to align them with Australian cultural sensibilities, tastes and legislative environments. 

Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction and the Rise of the Australian Paperback examines the authorship, production, marketing and distribution of Horwitz pulp paperbacks. It includes ground-breaking material on the conditions of creative labour: the writers, artists and editors involved in the production of Horwitz pulp. The book also explores how Horwitz pulp paperbacks acted as a local conduit for the global modern: the ideas, sensations, fascinations, technologies, and people that came crashing into the Australia consciousness in the 1950s and 1960s. This is part of the larger story of Australian pulp fiction’s role as an unofficial archive of changing tastes, ideas, controversies and debates about gender, race, class, youth, and economic and social mobility that occurred in 1950s and 1960s Australia.

Winner of the Karachi Literary Festival Peace Prize 2015, ‘The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan’ traces the history of the political exclusion of the Ahmadiyya religious minority in Pakistan by drawing on revealing new sources. The Ahmadis believe Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadiyan (1835–1908) was a prophet (in a nuanced understanding of this term) and promised messiah. This led to the group’s condemnation as infidels during the colonial period, setting in course a painful history of religious exclusion.

Part I of this volume traces the development of the anti-Ahmadi movement from its origin in Punjab province, where an agitation movement was launched calling upon the central government to declare the Ahmadis officially non-Muslim. After the movement intensified, leading to proclamation of martial law in Lahore in 1953, the Punjab government held a court of inquiry, which released its report in 1954. The proceedings of the Munir-Kiyani inquiry commission has now become available to scholars, and is a key focus of analysis. Part II focuses on the developments in Pakistan’s politics that created a discursive space where legislative measures against the Ahmadis could be deliberated and adopted by the national assembly, and argues Pakistan’s first general elections in 1970 reflected the entrenchment of religious leaders in Pakistan’s power politics. The national assembly’s 1974 session saw Ahmadis unanimously declared as non-Muslims; the records of this session’s debates are extensively reviewed in this book.

A truly path-breaking study, this work goes beyond merely chronicling the details of anti-Ahmadi violence and the legal and administrative measures adopted against them, to address wider issues of the politics of Islam in postcolonial Muslim nation-states and their disputative engagements with the ideas of modernity and citizenship.

'Churchill, Eden and Indo-China, 1951-1955' provides a greater historical awareness of the broad international context of decolonized Indo-China, focussing on the administrations of Churchill and Eden. Nông Dân takes a systematic approach to pertinent international politics, providing a historiography and assessing the effects of events such as the Cold War and the Second World War, paying special attention to the impact of the Second World War on the British version of the domino theory. Nông Dân focuses particularly on South East Asia, and applies a thorough analysis of the pitched Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which took place during the last year of Churchill's office. Churchill's wartime helmsmanship is revisited in order to gain pertinent and further light on his post-war administration. Lastly, this study is a firm contribution to understanding the history of globalization in Eastern Asia and the Far East.

The reading figure has been a recurrent theme in Western art but especially from the nineteenth century. This book examines Irish portraits during the long nineteenth century in which people are shown reading or holding a book. It explores the different assumptions and values that were ascribed to reading and contemporary constructions of the reader. The selected pictures are by artists born, trained, or practising in Ireland. 'Irish art' is, therefore, used broadly to include work framed in some way by experience of Ireland and its history, culture, and politics. This was a time of large social and cultural shifts for Ireland, including the Great Famine and its aftermath, the growth of Irish nationalism, and the slow erosion of Anglo-Irish landlord power. It was a period of growing mass literacy, and also a time when books and other reading, including Irish novels, were often published in London. Many of the artists and sitters discussed were Anglo-Irish Protestants, a number of whom had Irish nationalist sympathies.

Reading, especially the reading of fiction, was not valued as a manly occupation. Both imperial and nationalist ideologues fostered dominant notions of manliness that depended on the assumption of an aggressive masculine nature checked by self-management. Portraits of male subjects with a book usually follow the tradition of accessories functioning as professional or status symbols. Nonetheless, some men are depicted reading and failing to embody a manly attitude. 

A prevalent patriarchal ideology framed women as inferior to men in both physical and intellectual power. Yet this book argues that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin was a space of special creativity for women, at least among those from the privileged classes. The introduction of ‘silent reading’, alongside the spread of the novel, allowed such women to engage privately with a new range of imaginative and intellectual reading materials, while silent reading also offered seclusion from patriarchal surveillance. Visual images of women as serious readers contradicted common constructions of women as consumers of lightweight romances, or as an object for the male gaze. It is contended that such images drew on and contributed to the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ in Ireland.

Edited by Professor Neera Chandhoke, 'Mapping Histories' is a fitting tribute to renowned historian Ravinder Kumar, well known for his pioneering work on the social consequences of colonial rule in India, and for founding the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Here, Fellows of the centre present a collection of historical and contemporary studies on India, which deal with diverse themes from religion to the environment, cultural studies to feminism. Together, these lively and challenging essays offer readings on how we understand India's history and, conversely, how we can use this comprehension of the past to interpret India's complex present.

After almost twenty-five years of experimenting with the neo-liberal economic reforms collectively known as ‘Washington Consensus’ policies, Latin Americans are starting to re-assess the merits of these policies – at the voting booth. Many newly elected governments are beginning to scrutinize the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in particular, and some nations have gone so far as to nationalize foreign firms. Without endorsing or condoning the actions taken by these governments, this volume demonstrates that it is quite rational for governments in the region to re-evaluate the role of FDI for their development paths.

The great promise of FDI by multinational corporations is that capital will flow into your country and be a source of dynamic growth. Beyond boosting income and employment, the hope was that manufacturing FDI would bring knowledge spillovers that would build the skill and technological capacities of local firms, catalyzing broad-based economic growth; and environmental spillovers that would mitigate the domestic ecological impacts of industrial transformation.

Consisting of country case studies and comparative analyses from Latin American and U.S.-based political economists, this volume finds that when FDI did materialize if often fell far short of generating the necessary linkages required to make FDI work for sustainable economic development.

‘Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905’ shows, for the first time, how science fiction writing developed in India years before the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The five stories presented in this collection, in their cultural and political contexts, help form a new picture of English language writing in India and a new understanding of the connections among science fiction, modernity and empire.

Speculative fiction developed early in India in part because the intrinsic dysfunction and violence of colonialism encouraged writers there to project alternative futures, whether utopian or dystopic. These stories, created by Indian and British writers, responded to the intellectual ferment and political instabilities of colonial India. They add an important dimension to our understanding of Victorian empire, science fiction and speculative fictional narratives. They provide new examples of the imperial and the anti-imperial imaginations at work.

In Victorian India technological change was necessarily understood through differences between the colonizer and the colonized. Since India was not a settler colony, new British-imposed forms of government could scarcely claim continuity with the past, and political and cultural dislocations gave rise to speculation about wholly new forms of social organization. Creation and destruction, cultural innovation and colonial resistance gave rise to the plots and tropes of science fiction. In the stories collected in ‘Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905’ nineteenth-century Indian writers project successful and failed revolutions into a twentieth-century future. British writers imagine, on the one hand, a catastrophic flood – thanks to the projected Panama Canal – and, on the other, a utopian future of peaceful multi-ethnic parliamentary government. And a Muslim writer designs a feminist utopia in which women practice science and men keep house.

Defining Hybrid Heroes: The Leadership Spectrum from Scoundrel to Saint defines the hero (and his or her journey) from a hybrid perspective, exploring the spectrum from scoundrel to saint. It utilizes a more dynamic and situational outlook, regarding heroism not only as a personal characteristic, but also as a series of heroic acts within a given situation.

The book examines the hybrid hero from several distinctive points of view, e.g. through lenses dominated by fiction, business, politics and psychology, and paints a new, more complex portrait that takes full advantage of the authors’ varied backgrounds. Inge Brokerhof has an academic background in psychology and has studied the impact of narrative fiction on workplace variables, such as career identity, employability and moral leadership. Stephan Sonnenburg has studied Joseph Campbell and the impact of the hero’s journey on creativity and innovation management. Greg Stone is a communications consultant who teaches executives and professors how to explain their work in clear and compelling language.

Yoko teaches piano during the day, works at a bar at night and dreams of her disappeared lover every single minute. “Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, I swear I will find you again”, he promised, and Yoko never stopped believing he would return. Her ten-year-old daughter Soko, born out of this brief passionate affair that marked her mother for ever, has had her life shaped by Yoko’s constant yearning, as the desperate search for the elusive man of her dreams means moving house more times than either of them can remember. The two travel through life on what Yoko calls “God’s boat”, moving from town to town, and for Soko from school to school, just as the narrative too shifts between the perspectives of the daughter and her mother, tracing them through the years as little by little the story of Yoko’s past emerges, and Soko tries to somehow build herself a future.

This haunting and sensitive novel combines the everyday patterns of the lives of mother and daughter, their rituals, their conversations, while always beyond these ordinary daily events lies what is hidden by Yoko’s seemingly unshakeable certainty: the spectre of madness and the indescribable pain of loss, so inextricably linked to the dazzling joy that only love can bring.

‘Navigating Social Exclusion and Inclusion in Contemporary India and Beyond’ examines the applicability of the concept of social exclusion in contemporary India, and addresses the following questions: How does an increasingly liberalised Indian economy contribute to processes of social inclusion and exclusion and to the reproduction of poverty and inequality? To what extent does the deepening of Indian democracy offer hitherto marginalised social groups new opportunities for pursuing strategies of inclusion? And how does ‘development’ alter the social terrain on which inequalities are negotiated? These and related discussions form the focal points of the volume. Importantly, the contributors deal explicitly with the simultaneity of processes of exclusion and inclusion, and with their entangled manifestation in social life. By applying the concept of social exclusion to concrete empirical case studies, the contributors expand conceptual horizons by keeping in mind that neither exclusion nor inclusion can be considered without its ‘alter ego’. The volume also challenges narrow conceptualisations of social inclusion and exclusion in terms of singular factors such as caste, policy or the economy. This collaborative endeavour and cross-disciplinary approach, which brings together younger and more established scholars, facilitates a deeper understanding of complex social and political processes in contemporary India.

This book chiefly approaches Irish nationalist references to “Iran” as a conceptual lens for probing a broad array of developments in Irish nationalist formulations of Irish history (from ancient times to post-Norman conquests), as well as formulations of Irish identities and modes of “collective” nationalist recollection. Key thematic examples in the book range from the late eighteenth-century antiquarian debates on Irish origins to the “Iran/Erin” interchange in Irish nationalist poetry of the likes of Thomas Moore and James Clarence Mangan in the first half of the nineteenth century, the coverage of the Anglo-Iranian War of 1856–1857 in the Irish nationalist press, studies on Irish folklore by the likes of Lady Jane Wilde in the second half of the century, the emergent Aryanist discourse in some Irish nationalist circles after the mid-nineteenth century, Irish nationalist responses to the Iranian “Great Famine” of 1870–1872, references to Iran in the context of Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century, Irish nationalist advocacy of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911, and cross-territorial expressions of solidarity during and after the First World War. The only exception to the general timeline covered in the book is the section on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), which serves as a means of interrogating the post-1922 shrinking world horizon of nationalist historiography and politics in the Irish Free State.

• In its specifically “Iran”-themed approach, this book highlights both the greater centrality of Iran in Irish nationalist antiquarianism after the late eighteenth century and in subsequent Irish nationalist folklore studies than hitherto acknowledged. At the same time, this book goes beyond explorations of Irish nationalist appropriations of “Iran” (past and contemporary) as reflected in a wide spectrum of debates ranging from antiquarian theories of Irish origins to studies on Irish folklore and mythology, as well as the manifold utilizations of Iran in Irish nationalist literature. Additionally, this book examines sporadic Irish nationalist interest in contemporary developments in Iran after the middle of the nineteenth century, most notably in the form of the protracted and multivalent Irish nationalist advocacy of Iranian sovereignty from 1907 to 1921. In the process, this book also highlights the persistently “worlded" framework of Irish-nationalist self- imaginations.

This book aims to increase our knowledge and deepen the understanding of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust by examining personal circumstances and characteristics of Jewish resistance members and the formation of small Jewish resistance groups during the Second World War. It is a carefully researched, fully annotated and referenced case study that examines primary and secondary sources, including evidence from oral history interviews with resistance members and documentary evidence, which have been conducted and was collected by the author during almost 40 years of research on the subject but were previously unavailable in English. It uses a qualitative analysis to investigate individual and small group manifestations of Jewish resistance during the German occupation of the Netherlands between 1940 and 1945. This study contributes to historiography, but its focus enables a different interpretation and displays a new view of history. It is a scholarly work, but it is also easily accessible for students and general readers interested in this subject.

Leaders are persons generally expected to excel at inspiration, persuasion and management. Few leaders, however, excel at all three equally. ‘Eisenhower and the Art of Collaborative Leadership’ examines one leader – Dwight Eisenhower – who was particularly adept at management. Rising through the ranks of the interwar US Army, Eisenhower became a valued staff officer who went on to lead the Allies to victory in Europe in the Second World War. From there, after becoming NATO’s first supreme allied commander, Europe, he served two terms as president of the United States.

Eisenhower’s leadership skills were sophisticated in their outward simplicity. He led not by force of personality alone but also by careful and deliberate mastery of team-building; by empathy for friends as well as foes; and by an uncommon respect for, and sometimes even deference to, the positions and interests of the members of his team. It was also remarkable that Eisenhower did all that less by the informal manipulation of relationships than through the formal structures of command and of government, which he crafted to produce the decisions and actions that he sought in the national interest.

‘Eisenhower and the Art of Collaborative Leadership’ examines Eisenhower’s unique art of collaborative leadership by tracing its roots in his family and education, and then by measuring it against the standards of some classic texts by scholars of leadership and the presidency. It is a concise portrait of one of America’s most important and talented leaders, and a case study in sound leadership.

The book defines and discusses Fen Gothic, an example of regional Gothic inflected by geography, relationships of centre and margins, history, ecology and gender and the perspectives offered by related Gothic critical approaches. Fen Gothic is also understood through local myths, locations, and the historical, supernatural and human issues which are a major concern of work from this region. 

After introducing significant historical earlier work (1852–1931), for the most part, the focus is on contemporary works: Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852–3); M.R. James, Ghost Stories (1931); Graham Swift, Waterland (1983); Susan Hill, The Woman in Black (1984); Fay Weldon, Growing Rich (1992); Rebecca Stott, Ghostwalk (2009); Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent (2016); Daisy Johnson, Fen (2016); Julie Myerson, The Stopped Heart (2016)

Although modern tourism did not begin in Ireland, it developed there rapidly after 1750, making the island one of the first counties in which tourism became a driving economic and cultural factor. Based on the accounts of British and Anglo-Irish travelers, this book charts the development of tourism in Ireland from its origins in the mid-eighteenth century to the country's emergence as a major European tourist destination a century later. Ireland presents an example of how modern tourism developed as a self-organizing system. There were no tourist boards, no planning commissions, no government grants and no consultants.  Apart from some basic infrastructure, such as roads and hostelry, most of the elements needed to support tourism in Ireland emerged without over-arching planning, and coordination largely through the generally uncoordinated actions of landlords, entrepreneurs, and the peasantry.

Given its scenic attractions and proximity to Great Britain, Ireland’s position as a tourism Mecca might seem inevitable. Yet tourism in Ireland, as anywhere else in the eighteenth century, had to be invented. Mountains and lakes had to be reconfigured in the public imagination as tourist sites. Through the descriptive accounts of travel writers the sites had to be identified and defined in ways that made them attractive and meaningful to potential visitors. Landlords often opened and organized the sites for visitors. However, the actual activities on the ground - what the tourists viewed and experienced - evolved out of the interaction between the visitors and the veritable army of peasant guides, jarvies, vendors, porters, and beggars who greeted and served them. These contacts combined with British stereotypes regarding the Irish to create distinctly 'Irish' tourist experiences.

In addition to period travel writing, this work draws upon recent scholarship in the fields of tourism and travel studies to produce the first investigation of the history of the initial century of Irish tourism.

Drawing on the work of Hegel, this book proposes a framework for understanding modernity in the Muslim world and analyzes the discourse of prominent Muslim thinkers and political leaders with reference to some of the most significant markers of modernity.

This study closely examines the works of nine major Islamic thinkers in twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Mohammad Iqbal, Abul Ala Maududi , Sayyid Qutb , Fatima Mernissi, Mehdi Haeri Yazdi, Mohammad Mojtaehd Shabestari, Mohammad Khatami, Seyyed Hussein Nasr and Mohamad Arkoun.

By discussing these thinkers, the book traces the genealogy of major strands of consciousness in some crucial parts of the contemporary Islamic world and their relations to significant features of the modernity, such as human and individual subjectivity and agency, freedom, domination, culture of mass democracy, human rights, women’s rights, political activism and participation, economic ethos and views on forms of property ownership, as well as social and cultural pluralism.

This book is about changing social relationships. The authors focus on the question of what social relations make for successful science and technology policies. In particular, the various chapters illustrate what happens at different social interfaces, such as between policy makers and researchers, and between the users and producers of knowledge. In other words, they are interested in the knowledge networks that are emerging between the many different actors involved in the development of science and technology.' Science and Technology Policy for Development' is the outcome of a workshop that brought together scholars and policy makers from the global South and the North, from private and public organizations, to review their experiences. What unites the authors is a common concern for research–policy linkages. In this context, research was taken to mean any systematic effort to increase the stock of knowledge, and 'policy' as any purposive course of action followed by an actor or set of actors. Linkages are seen as the communication and patterns of interaction among the actors involved. Such patterns may consolidate into knowledge networks in which information is evaluated or prioritized. A number of authors stress the communication aspect of such patterns, especially in the form of dialogue between actors or, through them, between institutions like ministries, universities or companies. The subtitle of this book reflects this orientation: 'Dialogues at the Interface' refers to communication between these different institutions. A must read for students of development economics, professionals in the sector and policy-makers alike.

Vyāsa is the primary creative poet of the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata and 'Vyāsa Redux' examines the many paradoxical dimensions of his narrative virtuosity in the poem where the poet is both the creator of the work and a character within it. The book also studies elements in the poem which have been received by the late Bronze Age poets who composed the figure of Vyāsa, elements that reflect kinship, polity and modes of mnemonic inspiration. Three paired concepts function within the poem’s narrative process: first, the central approach of the book is founded upon the distinction between plot and story, that is, the causal relation of events as opposed to the temporal relation of events. Second, much of the argument then engages with how this distinction relates to the difference between the preliterate and literate phases of our present text. Third, the nature of how inspiration functions and how edition operates becomes another vital component in our analytic process explaining how Vyāsa becomes a dramatic, causal and at times prophetic character in the poem’s narration as well as its originator.

This book looks at how Renaissance poets ended their poetic lines. It considers a range of strategies and argues that line endings are crucial to our understanding of the poems. It begins with an introduction summarizing the work that has already been done in this area and demonstrating the author’s own method. While many of the devices the book highlights have been discussed before and while there has been some scholarship on the poetic line as a unit, how lines end has not received much critical attention, and particularly not in the critical work on Renaissance poetry.

The main part of the book is divided into three chapters: one on rhyme; one on enjambment; and one on the sestina. Rhyme is perhaps the most obvious kind of line ending; it was a contentious subject in the English Renaissance. Scholars then debated whether rhyme was necessary or even advisable. Enjambment, in which the end of a line occurs part of the way through a phrase, was especially common in dramatic poetry. In lyric poetry as well, however, it was an important tool for poets. The sestina is a complex form in which matters are the (usually unrhymed) end words, which vary according to a set scheme. There are other technically demanding forms in the Renaissance that focus on end words, but the sestina is the most extreme.

These are the most significant kinds of line endings used by English Renaissance poets. Each chapter provides one or two main poetic examples, but the book considers a range of poems from the period. The book ends with a brief afterword, wherein the author’s findings are summarized.

This book has a double agenda. First, it is a series of free-standing essays dealing with the fraught question of regulation in its multiples guises: economic, social, political, cultural and psychological. At the same time, it serves as a companion volume to the re-edition of Kaplan’s landmark ‘Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV’, which first appeared in 1976. The chapters that unfold reveal how Kaplan’s thinking has evolved in reaction both to the changing intellectual, epistemological, historiographical and sociopolitical environment, and to some of the significant scholarship that has been accomplished during the past forty years. This study is conceived as a commentary on and a dialogue with ‘Bread, Politics’ and with researchers who have written in and around the concerns of that book.

Kaplan treats themes with which readers of his first book are conversant: the matrix motif of regulation; agriculture; markets; collective action and the moral economy; the people; order and disorder; the parlements in the age of the Economic Enlightenment; the king and kingship; the monarch and his ministers in the elaboration and execution of public policy; the new historiography of political economy; and the old, persistent tragedy of famine, understood as the problem of food insecurity in its less virulent incarnations.

Kaplan engages them all with keen interest, and his discussion is “problem”-oriented. The author focuses largely on the questions that he considered, or failed to raise or resolve, in his inaugural work. The unity of outlook derives from the triangulation between the ‘Bread, Politics’ of 1976, a dense selection of the scholarship of the past four decades, and the critical gaze that Kaplan directs toward both. Kaplan remains faithful to the premise of ‘Bread, Politics’: that the subsistence question, broadly construed, is at the core of eighteenth-century history, and that the issues joined by the struggle over liberalization have marked French (and European/Atlantic) history ever since. These issues continue to shape our destiny today through the bristling tension between liberty and equality, and the debate over the necessity, legitimacy and character of regulation.

The word “occupation” is not heard in classrooms on the Hebrew University campus, at the heart of Palestinian East Jerusalem. The “war outside” is not spoken of. Israeli and Palestinian students unsettle this denial for the first time in a practice-led course on human rights in the reality around them. 

Readers join the students for a walking tour of the Palestinian neighborhoods surrounding the Mt. Scopus campus to explore the complex relations between education, civil engagement, and the occupation. A short walk from the campus of the best university in Israel and one that is outstanding by global standards takes us to the neighboring village of Issawiyye. Here readers learn with the students about the poor education in East Jerusalem, where most youth have no access to higher education. The tour continues to Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood bordering the campus, where, after four decades of legal procedures, the Israeli courts authorized the police to evict Palestinian families from their homes so that Jewish settlers could occupy them. The tour then takes the students and readers to the abandoned village of Lifta. Here, in the magnificent historical village, Israeli and Palestinian students debate the 1948 Nakba and their own denial.

Back into the classroom on campus, when the past and present are discussed and the pain of others is acknowledged, Palestinian and Israeli students who engage with one another for the first time can share hope.

This important study investigates how Austen worked with, and played upon, the cracks and faultlines which time had uncovered in the ideals of polite conversation. In a wide-ranging argument combining intellectual history and literary stylistics, Bharat Tandon explores such activities as flirtation and ventriloquism, in order to show how a form of conversational morality is what Austen's novels both describe and set out to achieve. At the same time, he surveys readers' reactions to Austen, from the nineteenth century to the present day, in order to investigate the possibilities and limitations of 'ethical' criticism. Written in a lively and accessible style, 'Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation' offers a re-evaluation of Austen's career that will be of interest to scholars and general readers alike.

We are concerned about the role of the courts, particularly judges, in guaranteeing justice. We are impressed with the success of the courts in Canada that are using what is called judicial dispute resolution (JDR). We also describe similar efforts in other parts of the world wherethe court helps parties resolve their differences in a timely way, not by deciding who is right and wrong, but by assisting the parties in resolving their differences and mendingtheir relationships.The judges who do this mediate, rather than adjudicate. 

All judges, worldwide, have responsibility for and authority over the procedures that are used in their courtrooms. This book describes the ways in which a judge can facilitate problem-solving between litigants. JDR is similar to mediation, alternative dispute resolution (ADR),as it is sometimes called, but it is provided by a judge, not a private mediator (as in the United States). This increases the chances of success. A judge, unlike a private mediator, can give the parties a definitive forecast of the likely legal outcome they can expect if their case proceeds to trial. JDR also affords the parties substantial assistance in working out the terms of a mutually agreeable outcome, in the setting of the courthouse (not a lawyer’s office),and in the form of a court order signed by the judge. From what we have seen, such outcomes are very likely to be viewed as fair by all parties. There is no downside, because if JDR fails, the matter proceeds to trial with a different judge who knows nothing of the parties’ earlier efforts to settle. Additionally, what has happened in Canada is that the mediating parties, who like the help the judge is providing, can ask to turn their voluntary JDR process into a binding procedure, where if they cannot reach a complete agreement, they can ask their JDR judge to impose a final decision– which they can help to craft.

This book describes how JDR has worked for several decades in multiple provinces in Canada. We review the role of the Chief Justice in setting up JDRs for complicated (multi-party or other complex) cases. Very little has been written about JDR because all the records have remained confidential. We can tell this story now because we have been given exclusive access to the parties (including the JDR judges) and the records in nine carefully selected cases. 

Our book looks at the role judges play in ensuring justice – how that role has changed and could continue to evolve in North America and worldwide. The JDR process described in this book has resulted in agreement in 80% or more of all JDR cases in Canadian courts.

Clearly, judges need to be trained as mediators to make JDR work. In some cases (such as those in which harm to children and jurisdictional challenges are at stake), there needs to be a trial. But in most other cases, including criminal matters and those where restorative justice is the goal, litigants are best served by JDR rather than formal court proceedings. JDR has the official imprimatur of the court, as well as the judges’ direct involvement, turning informally negotiated agreements into enforceable court orders. This book explains exactly how this happens. With the help of our Harvard Law School students, we provide a Teaching Appendix that summarizes our nine case studies in detail. While we present the general lessons of the cases in the main text, the Appendix analyzes each case from the standpoint of a variety of legal specialties and highlights the differences between JDR and ADR.

We believe that the courts will be better able to deliver justice if they equip judges to use JDR. 

The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the principles of multicriteria analysis (MCA), and a series of case studies that illustrate its application to a variety of environmental decision-making problems, ranging from the siting of facilities with critical environmental effects to Natural Park planning, and from the prioritisation of environmental restoration interventions to the assessment of the impact of tourism infrastructures.

Chapter 1 introduces the principles of MCA and describes the main stages of a generalized MCA process, by providing details and references to support the implementation of each stage. Chapter 2 reviews the application of MCA for a specific field of environmental decision-making: nature conservation. The objective is twofold: to take stock of past experiences by investigating how key stages of the MCA process have been performed, and to compare findings with best practices in order to provide recommendations for successful applications.

In Chapter 3, a case study about landfill site selection is presented. The method is based on the combination of stakeholder analysis and spatial MCA to first design possible sites for a landfill, and then rank them according to their suitability. Chapter 4 presents an application of MCA to support protected area planning. The case study illustrates the process of proposing a zoning scheme for a natural park, by combining MCA and multiobjective evaluation. Chapter 5 addresses the problem of forest landscapes restoration. In this case study, spatial and non-spatial MCA are applied to first identify forest reforestation priority areas, and then design landscape-scale reforestation options aimed at improving both ecosystem quality and human living conditions. [NP] The last case study, described in Chapter 6, shows how MCA can be combined with GIS-based indicators to assess and compare the environmental impacts of proposed ski areas in a mountain watershed. Finally, Chapter 7 provides some conclusions about the potential of MCA to support environmental decision-making, and about the set of skills required for successful MCA applications.

This work is guided by the idea that Wittgenstein’s thought opens the door to a more profound break with the philosophical tradition than has been generally recognized. It brings this insight to bear on some basic problems of philosophy. 

Wittgenstein’s work has been assimilated to the analytic tradition in such a way that its radical character has been made nearly invisible. In fact, Wittgenstein formulates a basic critique of a predominant conception in contemporary analytic philosophy, according to which language can be seen as a formal structure describable in general terms. This conception neglects the profound context-dependence of the way things said are to be understood, thus imposing a schematic view of the connections between words and life. By distancing us from the life we live with language, it makes the problems of philosophy come to appear intractable. In this work, the attempt is made to show how philosophical confusions are to be overcome through attending to the actual use of words in conversation. The questions discussed belong to what would commonly be called the philosophy of language and of logic, ethics, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. 

The formal view of language is connected with a tendency, deeply entrenched in the Western philosophical tradition, to view human life in terms of dichotomies such as that between thought and behaviour, between the intentional and the non-intentional, between the mental and the corporeal, dichotomies which have given rise to philosophical bewilderment. The road to liberation from that bewilderment goes through the dissolution of those dichotomies by taking note of the variety of ways in which human thought and speech are bound up with human action and reaction.

Several of the essays will contain attempts at interpreting key passages from Wittgenstein’s work, but they will also contain some criticisms of Wittgenstein as well as of certain common ways of reading him; however, their main purpose is not to interpret Wittgenstein but to address the problems raised in their own right. 

Like many of the world’s iconic coastal cities, Boston faces potentially severe impacts from climate change. Depending on global emissions, Boston could face several feet of sea level rise this century, which would leave many parts of the city subject to tidal and storm flooding. Precipitation events could become more frequent and extreme, and its already-humid summers could become dangerously hot, with most days over 90 degrees. Today, Boston is a booming city with a growing population, a glittering new waterfront neighborhood, world-class universities and a strong economy. Its future risks and opportunities related to climate change are shaped by the 400-year environmental, social and economic history of the city’s development.

As part of Anthem’s series, Climate Change and the Future of Boston describes how Boston’s history and current context shape future climate impacts and examines the mitigation and adaptation strategies the city has taken. Boston is a leader in acknowledging the problem of climate change; it has set a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050, among other climate-related goals. It has also developed science-based climate models and undertaken a robust planning process to identify strategies to protect its waterfront from flooding and increase its resilience to other climate-related impacts. Its mayor has embraced a progressive Green New Deal for Boston emphasizing the need for an inclusive and equitable approach to climate mitigation and adaptation. But the city also faces structural challenges, such as aging infrastructure, historic racial inequities, rising gentrification and income inequality and ongoing political and regulatory obstacles that hinder efforts to adapt in an efficient and just manner. The book concludes with a set of forward-looking scenarios about what the future may have in store for the city and the lessons it holds for other coastal cities struggling with these challenges.

Water Security in the Middle East explores the extent and nature of water security problems in transboundary water systems in the Middle East. This collection of essays discusses the political and scientific contexts and the limitations of cooperation in water security.

The contributors argue that while conflicts over transboundary water systems in the Middle East do occur, they tend not to be violent nor have they ever been the primary cause of a war in this region. The authors place water disputes in larger political, historical and scientific contexts and discuss how the humanities and social sciences could contribute more towards this understanding. They also contend that international sharing of scientific and technological advances can significantly increase access to water and improve water quality. While scientific advances can and should increase adaptability to changing environmental conditions, especially climate change, national institutional reform and the strengthening of joint commissions are vital. The contributors indicate ways in which transboundary cooperation may move from simple and intermittent coordination to sophisticated, adaptive and equitable modes of water management.

'Rural India Facing the 21st Century' is a unique study of rural development in South India, concluded over a twenty-year period. Set against the context of international, national and state policies, the book focuses on a wide number of themes, including the stagnation of the ‘green revolution’, growing differentiation and inequality, the ecological crisis, resistance to reform, corruption and the enduring need for state intervention in rural development. Written by an international team of young scholars under the direction of Dr Harris-White, 'Rural India Facing the 21st Century' draws together a profound analysis of a broad range of issues to provide a masterly overview of overall rural development. Its highly original methodology and findings will be of considerable interest for development policy.