Anthem Press

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, poet, novelist and critic, was a professor of Ottoman and Turkish literature at Istanbul University. His ‘Five Cities’ was first published in Turkish as ‘Beş Şehir’ in 1946 and revised in 1960. It consists of five lyrical essays, each focused on a city significant in Anatolian history and in Tanpinar's emotional life.

Part history, part autobiography, part poetic meditation on time and memory, ‘Five Cities’ is Proustian in style, with a tension between a backward-looking melancholy and a concern for the unpredictable future of his country. Comparable to Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s ‘Istanbul: Memories of a City’, ‘Five Cities’ emphasizes personal attitudes and reactions but has a wider scope of geography, history and culture.

Ruth Christie’s translation of ‘Beş Şehir’ makes the essays, which are as aesthetically appealing as a novel, available to readers of English for the first time.

The individual has never been more important in society – in almost every sphere of public and private life, the individual is sovereign. Yet the importance and apparent power assigned to the individual is not all that it seems. As ‘Responsible Citizens’ investigates via its UK-based case studies, this emphasis on the individual has gone hand in hand with a rise in subtle authoritarianism, which has insinuated itself into the government of the population. Whilst present throughout the public services, this authoritarianism is most conspicuous in the health and social welfare sectors, such that a kind of ‘governance through responsibility’ is today enforced upon the population.

In the twenty-first century, individualism has come to pervade the body politic, especially where health and social care are concerned. Clients who may be at their most abject and vulnerable are urged to take responsibility for themselves rather than further burden the health and social care services. In some British healthcare trusts, prosecutions are mounted against clients who have lost their temper or who act inappropriately as a result of their disorientation, under the guise of ‘making them take responsibility for their actions’. Citizens on the street in Britain are likely to have responsibility thrust upon them through mechanisms such as electronic surveillance and the burgeoning new cohorts of community enforcement officers, as well as the police themselves. Thus taking responsibility is never quite as simple as it seems – being responsible demarcates the borderland between autonomy and authority, and often equates to simply ‘doing what you’re told’.

Prometheus and Gaia examines the ideological currents known as Futurism and Eco-Pessimism. While these tendencies are rarely spoken about explicitly, especially in mainstream discourse, they do have strong (if subterranean) influences on today’s popular politics. In light of the existential threats posed by climate change, nuclear proliferation, disruptive technologies (especially bioengineering and AI) and looming economic crises, many have grown weary of the “small fixes” offered by conventional politicians. Worsening climate change, to take one example, appears to be a problem that “reducing, reusing, and recycling,” or non-binding treaties, are inadequate to remedy. Likewise, perennial economic crises seem too large and too systemic a threat compared to the moderate “fixes” of quantitative easing and government bailouts. If the system, itself, is the problem, then some radical change appears necessary. 

Here, two styles of thought emerge to challenge the status quo: The Futurist sees in existential threats just so many symptoms of a disconnect. This is the widening chasm between a dynamic and ever-accelerating technology, on the one hand, and an all-too static conception of human nature and human society, on the other. Their solution is to fully embrace the disruptive and anarchic powers of technology, and to leave the human as we know it behind, as nothing more than a parochial relic. The Eco-Pessimist instead sees technological development as the problem. The need to dominate nature, and our spoiling the planet, is the proximate cause of our contemporary crises. Their solution is to chastise human consumption, egoism and instrumental reason as destructive of a holistic, planetary balance.

What these two ideologies have in common is a strident anti-humanism. Each, in their own way, subordinates human welfare and reason to some alien “other.” This common anti-humanism is, in some respects, more important than the specific “other” that they designate—whether this be an anarchic nature or a dynamic technology. In both cases, what stands above humanity is valorized as an object of adoration rather than true understanding or comprehension. This need for radical transcendence beyond the human masquerades as a new form of politics; in fact it is a pre-modern and counter-Enlightenment tendency. Prometheus and Gaia seeks to uncover and demystify this strange coincidence of opposites, and goes on to make the positive case for a humanistic rationalism.

The BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – are currently at the crossroads of major structural economic and political changes. This book provides a comparative analysis of the national innovation systems of the five BRICS countries and the trends in each of their science, technology and innovation policies. The BRICS Project was a workshop launched as part of the Globelics Scientific Committee, a global research network on the economics of learning, innovation and competence. The BRICS Project identifies and analyses development opportunities; highlights common characteristics and challenges of the BRICS countries; and helps to uncover possible paths to fulfil the BRICS countries’ socio-political and economic development potential. The BRICS Project also reveals development alternatives that contain the potential to help both developed and underdeveloped countries to overcome the problems brought by ‘an exhausted production and consumption system and a malignant regulatory and financial regime’. The collected research and workshop papers are now available in BRICS and Development Alternatives, an invaluable contribution to the understanding of the rise of these new emerging science and technology (S&T) powers and to improving evidence-based S&T policymaking with regard to these countries.

The book presents 18 games and develops the concepts of game analysis and winning strategies. Students are encouraged to play these mathematical games together, collect data developed through their play, and analyze the data to develop a winning strategy. The book provides the basis for a six- to eight-week unit on mathematical games. Each chapter also functions as a self-contained and independent exploration so that selected chapters may be used as supplementary classroom investigations or as independent projects. The book includes both familiar games (such as Quadrangles and Nim) and many others that will be new and exciting to most readers. Through the exploration of mathematical games, ‘The Play’s the Thing’ introduces teachers and students to the fun of play and to the mathematics behind the fun.

In this critical account of New Labour's economic and welfare policies in their first two terms in office, John Grieve Smith suggests that, far from pursuing any radical new agenda, they have been actively consolidating the Thatcherite Revolution. If Labour is to offer a genuine alternative to the Tories, and achieve its long standing objective of a fairer society, radical developments in policy are needed. John Grieve Smith discusses the policies needed to ensure expansion and full employment here and in the rest of the European Union. He examines the whittling away of pensions and other social security benefits, and the growing reliance on means testing, together with the need for higher and more progressive taxation if the quality of health and education services is to be improved. The greatest challenge of coming decades is to develop more effective global and regional international institutions in the economic and other fields. Here the author puts forward a programme of major reforms of the global financial system to make both developing and industrialized countries less vulnerable to the instability of financial markets. This new and updated edition of John Grieve Smith's lively and controversial book is a timely contribution to current political debate.

Western industrialism has achieved miracles, promoting unprecedented levels of prosperity and raising millions around the world out of poverty. Industrial capitalism is now diffusing throughout the East. Japan, the four Tigers (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong) and China are all incorporating themselves into the global industrial world. India, Brazil and many others are expected to follow the same course. But as China, India and other industrializing giants grow, they confront an inconvenient truth: they cannot rely on the Western industrial development model of fossil-fueled energy systems (resource throughput rather than circularity and generic finance) because these methods cause extreme spoliation of the environment and raise energy security, resource security and global warming concerns.

By necessity, a new approach to environmentally conscious development is already emerging in the East, with China leading the way in building a green industry at scale. As opposed to Western zero-growth advocates and free-market environmentalists, it can be argued that a more sustainable capitalism is being developed in China – to counter black developmental model based on coal. This new ‘green growth’ model of development, being perfected in China and now being emulated in India, Brazil, South Africa (and eventually by industrializing countries elsewhere), as well as by advanced industrial countries such as Germany, looks to become the new norm in the twenty-first century. Its core advantages are the energy security and resource security that are generated.

The British scientist James Lovelock has done the world an enormous service by formulating the theory of a ‘living earth’ named Gaia, where life self-regulates itself and the planet by keeping the atmospheric environment more or less constant, and likewise the environment of the oceans. In China’s Green Shift, Global Green Shift, Mathews proposes a way in which Gaia (a product of the processes of the earth) can be complemented by Ceres (our own creation of a renewable energy and circular economy system). Can these two concepts of how the earth works, represented by two powerful deities, be reconciled? While Lovelock is pessimistic, asserting that Gaia will look after herself and that if we survive at all it is likely to be as a greatly diminished industrial civilization, numbering no more than one billion people, Mathews argues in this book why he believes this prognosis to be mistaken. Mathews maintains that the changes that ‘we’ are driving, as a species, represent a viable way forward. They give us a chance of reconciling economy with ecology – or Ceres with Gaia.

The book provides a comprehensive descriptive history of the founding of the Saltire Society in 1936, a Scottish cultural organization dedicated to promoting ‘all that’s best in Scottish culture’, and its series of literary awards which now includes prizes for fiction, first books, history books, non-fiction, poetry and research books. The book accomplishes this by including a detailed descriptive history of the founding of the Saltire Society and its literary awards and original analyses of the impact the award has made within the UK’s literary economy and publishing culture, forming a unique perspective of research in practice enabled by access to archives, interviews and observations that are unique.

This cultural history of the Saltire Society Literary Awards demonstrates the significance the awards have had within Scottish literary and cultural life. It is one piece of the wider cultural award puzzle and illustrates how, far from being parochial or niche, lesser-known awards, whose histories may be yet untold, play their own role in the circulation of cultural value through the consecration of literary value. The study of the Society’s Book of the Year and First Book of the Year Awards not only highlights how important connections between literary awards and national culture and identity are within prize culture and how literary awards, and their founding institutions, can be products of the socio-political and cultural milieu in which they form,; but this study also illustrates how existing literary award scholarship has only begun to scratch the surface of the complexities of the phenomenon. This book promotes a new approach to considering literary prizes, proposing that the concept of the literary awards hierarchy can contribute to emerging and developing discourses pertaining to literary, and indeed cultural, prizes more broadly.

‘Human Resource Policy’ provides practitioners and students with a conceptual framework and practical guidelines to establish and maintain an effective HR policy function. It highlights the importance of, but often neglected, policy function as the vital link between strategy and practice.

Taking a uniquely holistic approach to HR policy, ‘Human Resource Policy’ demonstrates how HR policies can contribute to the achievement of organisational goals and the development of organisational culture. It focuses on practical aspects such as the processes of policy development and policy implementation so that they are understood and have maximum impact on policy function. Common policy management challenges are also discussed.

The book also examines in detail 16 common HR policy areas and discusses policy options in each area. This part of the book includes learning activities based on realistic business scenarios that require readers to deal with policy issues and solve policy-related problems.

The book is an addition to the scarce literature dealing specifically with HR policy.

Focusing on four poets who because of their distinctive profiles illustrate especially well the opportunities and pitfalls of writing science poetry during the long eighteenth century “Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin” offers numerous close readings that shed light not only on standard versions of the sublime but also on these idiosyncratic variants: the apologetic (Abraham Cowley), the illicit (James Thomson), the perverse (Henry Brooke) and the atheistic (Erasmus Darwin).

Recurrent concerns include the similarities and differences among the languages of poetry, science and religion. Of the poets analyzed all but Thomson wrote extensive notes to accompany their lines, permitting further comparison of languages, in this case between the same authors’ poetry and prose.

Topics covered include the Royal Society, the scientific revolution, astronomy, botany, chemistry, telescopy, microscopy, the anthropic principle, the clockwork universe, evolution, intelligent design, comets, meteors, light, the aurora borealis, the sun, the moon, the milky way, analogies, mimetic prosody, poetic diction and the value to poetry or science of fable and myth.

‘Imagined Sound’ is a unique cartography of the artistic, historical and political forces that have informed the post-World War II representation of Australian landscapes. It is the first book to formulate the unique methodology of ‘imagined sound’, a new way to read and listen to literature and music that moves beyond the dominance of the visual, the colonial mode of knowing, controlling and imagining Australian space. Emphasising sound and listening, this approach draws out and re-examines the key narratives that shape and are shaped by Australian landscapes and histories, stories of first contact, frontier violence, the explorer journey, the convict experience, non-Indigenous belonging, Pacific identity and contemporary Indigenous Dreaming. ‘Imagined Sound’ offers a compelling analysis of how these narratives are reharmonised in key works of literature and music.

To listen to and read imagined sound is to examine how works of literature and music evoke and critique landscapes and histories using sound. It is imagined sound because it is created by descriptive language and imaginative thought, and is as such an extension of the range of heard sound. The concept is inspired by Benedict Anderson’s key study of nationalism, ‘Imagined Communities’ (1983). Discussing official (and unofficial) national anthems, Anderson argues the imagined sound of these songs connects us all. This conception of sound operates in two ways: it places the listener within ‘the nation’ and it bypasses the problem of both space and time, enabling listeners from across a vast space to, simultaneously, become one. Following Anderson, imagined sound emphasises the importance of the imagination in the formation of landscapes and communities, and in the telling and retelling of histories. 

’Imagined Sound’ encounters the different forms and tonalities of imagined sound – the soundscape, refrain, song, lyric, scream, voice and noise ¬– in novels, poems, art music, folk, rock, jazz and a film clip. To listen to these imagined sounds is to encounter the diverse ways that writers and musicians have reimagined and remapped Australian colonial/postcolonial histories, landscapes and mythologies. Imagined sound links the past to the present, enabling colonial landscapes and traumas to haunt the postcolonial; it carries and expresses highly personal and interior experiences and emotions; and it links people to the landscapes they inhabit and to the narratives and myths that give place meaning. As a reading and listening practice imagined sound pursues the unresolved conflicts that echo across the haunted soundscapes connecting the colonial past to the postcolonial present. The seeds of regeneration also bear fruit as writers and musicians imagine the future. ‘Imagined Sound’ fuses the spirit of close reading common to literary studies and the score analysis familiar to musicology with ideas from sound studies, philosophy, Island studies and postcolonial studies.

It is well known that resource-rich countries may suffer from a 'resource curse'. Their economic performance in the medium and long-run may be adversely affected by the resource riches. This problem is particularly important for Russia, since it is the world's second largest producer and exporter of oil, largest producer and exporter of natural gas, and also exports other natural resources such as diamonds, platinum, nickel, coal, iron ore, timber, and grain. This book is an edited collection, bringing together well-known specialists from Russia, Japan, Western Europe and the USA, providing data about the Russian hydrocarbons sector, its size, economic significance, and taxation. It also offers data about the growth of the Stabilization Fund. In addition, it analyses the role of the hydrocarbons sector in Russia's post-1998 economic boom, drawing attention to the contribution of remittances to Russia of the proceeds of raw material exports. With respect to international political economy, 'Russia’s Oil and Natural Gas' points out that Russia today, with its large energy exports, helps solve the problem of domestic energy shortages which plague many countries. In this way, Russia is currently a major contributor to world stability and the welfare of the energy importers.

From political sleaze and scandal to West End hits and the 'feel-good' factor, Michael Diamond explores the media stories that gripped Victorian society, in an age when newspapers became cheap, nationally distributed and easily accessible to all classes. Fully illustrated, and drawing on a wealth of original material, 'Victorian Sensation' sheds light on the Victorians' fascination with celebrity culture and their obsession with gruesome and explicit reportage of murders and sex scandals. With a vivid cast of characters, ranging from the serial poisoner William Palmer, to Charles Dickens, Jumbo the Elephant, distinguished politicians and even the Queen herself, this passionate analysis of the period reveals how the reporting methods of our own popular media have their origins in the Victorian press, and shows that sensation was as integral a part of society in the nineteenth century as it is today.

A Player’s Guide to the Post-Truth Condition: The Name of the Game presents sixteen short, readable chapters designed to leverage our post-truth condition’s deep historical and philosophical roots into opportunities for unprecedented innovation and change. Fuller offers a bracing, proactive and hopeful vision against the tendency to demonize post-truth as the realm of ‘fake news’ and ‘bullshit’. Where others see threats to the established order, Fuller sees opportunities to overturn it. This theme is pursued across many domains, including politics, religion, the economy, the law, public relations, journalism, the performing arts and academia, not least academic science. The red thread running through Fuller’s treatment is that these domains are games that cannot be easily won unless one can determine the terms of engagement, which is to say, the ‘name of the game’. This involves the exercise of ‘modal power’, which is the capacity to manipulate what people think is possible. Once the ‘necessarily’ true appears to be only ‘contingently’ so, then the future suddenly becomes a more open space for action. This was what frightened Plato about the alternative realities persuasively portrayed by playwrights in ancient Athens. Nevertheless, Fuller believes that it should be embraced by denizens of today’s post-truth condition. 

This book is designed to do what its title says, namely, to provide a guide to the post-truth condition for those who wish to feel at home and thrive in it – rather than simply avoid or attack it. It consists of a series of short chapters that are best read in the order presented but may also be read in a different order or simply in parts – as most books are normally read. The book ranges widely across philosophy, theology, science, politics, economics, psychology and the arts – but hopefully in a way that allows readers to find their bearings, given the opportunities presented by the Internet to follow up whatever might interest them in the text. Underlying this breadth of scope is a fundamental scepticism with ‘business as usual’ in the production and evaluation of knowledge claims. To be sure, the reader will see that post-truth extends many of the themes already found in what passes for ‘postmodernism’. However, at a deeper level, and in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the post-truth condition invites us to discover in a new key what it has always meant to be ‘modern’.

The book traces Luther’s career from his humble origins through his conflicts with pope and emperor, and his initiating the split between Protestants and Catholics. Based on the most recent scholarship, and drawing heavily upon Luther’s own writings, 'Martin Luther and the German Reformation' provides a picture of Luther that is historically faithful without being needlessly scholarly. Intended for use by students, it assumes no initial familiarity with Luther and is accessible to non-scholars. It would be ideal for any interested person who wants to get to know Martin Luther; one of the key figures in European history.

'South of the Crisis' examines why and how global capitalism has entered a phase of unsustainable crises of accumulation and legitimacy, and looks at various solutions to such crises, from mild reform to radical overhaul.

The book then examines the various scenarios from a Latin American perspective, arguing that the continent is a 'garden of forking paths' rather than a homogeneous area, and that different countries are likely to try diverse experiments in adapting to the crisis - with significantly different outcomes.

One common challenge faced by all Latin American countries, albeit with different modalities, is how to achieve economic growth with social inclusion. Corradi investigates the pros and cons of different policy solutions to the challenge of inclusion.

‘Foundations of Natural Gas Price Formation’ examines the fundamentals of natural gas price formation and the five principal features that make it unique in the world of commodities. It presents a model of hybrid gas pricing developed by Sergei Komlev from his detailed analysis of the interlinked impact of these features that is presented as a corrective to potential market failure.

Using mainstream economic theory, the book presents hybrid-pricing mechanisms not previously analyzed. Through a failure to understand the role of hybrid-pricing, boosters of spot pricing mechanisms through gas hubs are promoting an incorrect understanding of gas markets that will lead to market failure and to potential critical supply shortages in the near-term future. ‘Foundations of Natural Gas Price Formation’ defends the system of oil-indexed pricing as an accurate, market-based mechanism that has stood the test of time.

In the early nineteenth century, Henry Maudslay, an engineer from a humble background, opened a factory in Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth, a stone’s throw from the Thames. Maudslay invented precision engineering, which made the industrial revolution possible, helping Great Britain become the workshop of the world.

He developed mass production, interchangeable components, and built the world’s first all-metal machine tools, which quite literally shaped the modern world. Without his inventions, there would have been no railways, no steam-ship industry and no mechanised textiles industry.

His factory became the pre-Victorian equivalent of Google and Apple combined, attracting the best in engineering talent. The people who worked left to set up their own businesses. These included Joseph Clement, who constructed the Difference Engine, the world’s first computer, and Joseph Whitworth, who moved to Manchester and by the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851 was deemed the world’s foremost mechanical engineer.

The essays in this volume demonstrate how the Rossettis – from the celebrated Dante Gabriel and Christina to the comparatively neglected Maria and William – drew upon a shared cultural experience, and describe how each contributed to the intellectual debates of the age and played a substantial role in their various fields. Bringing together significant contributions from some of the most renowned experts on the Rossettis, 'Outsiders Looking In' provides important new perspectives on this talented family and their brilliant legacy.

The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by a group of atomic scientists to symbolise the perils facing humanity from nuclear weapons. In 2007 it was set at five minutes before the final bell, including for the first time the threat of climate change as well as new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology. This book aims at an analysis of the evolution of our present predicament throughout the Anthropocene Era beginning in 1763, making special reference to the history of the period, the study of the subject and major advances in the natural sciences.

Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson set out the basis for a scientific approach to the pre-industrial stages of historical development in the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, when the American and French Revolutions created a vocabulary of modernity. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the industrial revolution unfolded in several stages, nationalism, imperialism and totalitarianism were among the phenomena impeding the update of the Enlightenment programme as well as the fulfilment of the aspirations of 1776 and 1789. Our present predicament demands a rigorous examination of its origins and an assertion of a scientific pandisciplinary approach involving history and other academic specialisations.

How western countries handle issues of how to regulate immigration appears critical for their future development. Many agree on this, but at the same time think they know too little about these issues. In Eurobarometer surveys from the spring of 2018, migration was the issue most stated as the most important for the EU. At the same time, a majority did not think they were well-informed about migration and integration. This book has been written for those who want to find out more about why people migrate and what the consequences are of their doing so.

The book begins with a historical overview of migration. Focusing on the last fifty years, it looks, among other things, at what motives drive people to migrate and at migrants’ economic outcomes in their destination countries. It also describes the state of knowledge about the economic and social consequences of migration for the communities that receive the migrants. Finally, it discusses what scope there is in the west for increasing the level of control over migration.

A common theme throughout the book is that migration is a very different phenomenon from one situation to another. Groups of people who are over-represented among migrants include the world’s most successful technical developers as well as its most vulnerable war victims, and many things in-between. The conditions of different groups in their countries of destination can differ widely, and their immigration has different consequences for these countries. Some of these differences may also persist for several generations. Therefore, referring to migration as a single phenomenon often does not result in a very useful description. Instead, we should get used to portraying the diversity of migration and be careful with making comparisons between different groups of migrants.

China's economy has boomed, but a potentially disastrous side effect - along with pollution and a growing income gap between urban and rural regions - is the effects obesity will have on the country's fragile healthcare system. Today's overweight in China can look to a mixed future of bright economic hopes for their country, and poor and deteriorating health for themselves. From a situation 20 years ago when diets were limited by food availability, and famine was still a recent memory, China's urban centres have seen alarmingly rising rates of obesity. Throughout the country an estimated 200 million people out of a total population of around 1.3 billion were overweight (over 15%).

Why is this issue so important? Taking into account that the recent period of stable world economic growth has in large part been driven by the availability of cheap labour in China, which produces much of the goods that keep the retail tills ringing elsewhere in the world, the issue of China's rising obesity is an issue of potentially global economic significance. Consider a scenario just a few years down the line, where there are so many overweight urban Chinese, suffering from obesity-related illness, that the government, in order to pay for increased healthcare treatments, has to raise the levels of income and other tax to pay for this huge and continual expense.

For more information please see the book website: http://fatchina.anthempressblog.com

The adoption of data-driven applications across economic sectors has made data and the flow of data so pervasive that it has become integral to everything we as members of society do – from conducting our finances to operating businesses to powering the apps we use every day. Flows of knowledge and technology are at the centre of new networks driving production and innovation. The increasing use of the Internet of Things (IoT), and the growing amount of data generated, are driving substantial opportunities. Data is now one of the world’s most valuable resources, and its flow across borders is the lifeblood of the global internet economy. Data has already significantly impacted various industrial sectors – e.g. trade, banking and finance, telecommunications, media/entertainment and healthcare – and the global economy overall.  

Governing cross-border data flows is inherently difficult given the ubiquity and value of data, and the impact government policies can have on national competitiveness, business attractiveness and personal rights. The challenge for governments is to address in a coherent manner the broad range of data-related issues in the context of a global data-driven economy. While larger economies such as the US, EU and China have clear policies and overarching objectives in place, many smaller jurisdictions have yet to adopt a strategy or framework. This is regrettable, as it is imperative that all jurisdictions have a clear strategy on cross-border data which is designed to meet the opportunities and challenges of the digital transformation. Instead, many jurisdictions currently operate on a “by default” combination of piecemeal legislation and obligations undertaken in free trade agreements.  

This book engages with the unexplored topic of why and how governments should develop a coherent and consistent framework regulating cross-border data flows. The objective is to fill a very significant gap in the legal and policy setting by considering multiple perspectives in order to assist in the development of a jurisdiction’s coherent policy framework.

In Wittgenstein and the Social Sciences, Robert Vinten takes a fresh look at the relationship between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the social sciences. The book locates Wittgenstein’s philosophy in relation to the social sciences. This involves getting clear about what Wittgenstein was doing in his philosophical work as well as about the nature of the social sciences. Vinten argues that the social sciences can be considered scientific despite the fact that social sciences have different methods and subject matter to the natural sciences. He then examines problems associated with relativism within the social sciences and considers whether Wittgenstein might be a relativist of some sort. 

The book goes on to consider whether Wittgenstein’s philosophy lends support to any particular political ideology and asks an important question: whether Wittgenstein himself was a conservative, liberal, or socialist. This question is explored involving a critical engagement with Wittgenstein scholars, cultural theorists, and political philosophers such as J. C. Nyiri, Richard Rorty, Alex Callinicos, Perry Anderson, and Terry Eagleton.

Finally, the book considers how Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks can help us in getting to grips with problems in the social sciences and political philosophy. A criticism of Patricia Churchland and Christopher Suhler’s neurobiological account of control suggests that Wittgenstein’s work can be useful in getting rid of problems concerning freedom of the will. A critical engagement with thinkers like John Rawls and Chantal Mouffe is used to examine the relevance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to discussions of justice. Wittgenstein’s work is clearly relevant to issues of injustice that are with us today.

There was never such a thing as true freedom of speech. In the past, in order to speak freely you had to have access to a printing press, a newspaper, a radio or a TV station. And everywhere you had to get past the editors. Only members of the elite ever did – the articulate and well-behaved 'representatives' of ordinary people. But those ordinary people hardly, if ever, had a chance to speak publicly and freely.

Until now. The age of blogging has begun. The internet revolution has given us all a chance to be irreverent, blasphemous and ungrammatical in public. We can reveal secrets, blow whistles, spill beans or just make stuff up.

The old elites don't like it. In fact, they really, really hate it. Blogs are commonly shut down, and bloggers are silenced, reprimanded and fired from their jobs. Suddenly modern liberal society reveals a repressive face that few of us knew existed.

Should we behave ourselves? Should we fall silent? Absolutely not! Let's call them on their hypocrisy. Let's demand that modern liberal society lives by the principles it claims to embrace. Bloggers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your gags.

Warren Elofson’s interest in the cattle business stems from years of first-hand experience ranching and farming in western Canada. His interest in Africa originated in the summer of 2018 when he hired a young man named Jonah Weyessa to help him shingle a roof on a “cabin” in Windermere, British Columbia, Canada. As they worked, Weyessa told him all about his life growing up in Kibera, Kenya, one of the world’s dirtiest and most dangerous city slums. Elofson was most intrigued by the fact that his young workmate remembered his experiences in Kibera with considerable fondness. “Yes,” he said when asked, “we were poor, but we lived in a community where people of different religions and cultures pulled together. I played in the streets with other kids and when one of our parents couldn’t be around or didn’t have food one day other parents stepped in and helped out.” “But weren’t you scared,” Elofson naively asked, “you know, wasn’t it dangerous there?” “No, it wasn’t” came the reply, “not at all, because in our little part of the community there were always two or three adults watching out for us. I felt safer there than I did later on in the first North American city we stayed in. 

Using a combination of personal experience and stories passed down to him, Jonah works with Warren to help textualize the realities of living in Nairobi’s poverty-stricken region, Kibera, one of the world’s dirtiest and most dangerous city slums in Slum City Africa: “A Very Bad Place With Good Teachings”.

This book focuses on two significant architectural elements in traditional Chinese buildings, that is, Dougong and Zaojing. Dougong is a bracket set often sitting above columns and beams as a key component in the great buildings and tombs of imperial China. Zaojing is a special structure sunken into the ceiling, often profusely decorated with carvings and colorful paintings in various motifs. As sumptuary laws from imperial China stipulated, Dougong (in its multiple forms) and Zaojing used to be constructed only in the great halls of royal palaces and major religious temples. 

There is ceaseless research on Dougong and Zaojing by modern architectural scholars. This is also facilitated by the heated architectural heritage conservation movement in contemporary China. As unique features that define the characteristics of traditional Chinese architecture, Dougong, and Zaojing not only widely appear in numerous counterfeit historic structures, but are also creatively revived in many cultural and commercial buildings. 

This book inquires about the origin of Dougong and Zaojing in the Chinese Bronze Age, and their heavenly interpretation in the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220). Compared to their later technically oriented development during the Tang to the Qing dynasties (c. 618–1912), and their modern preservation and innovative reinterpretation, the rich cultural meanings originally embodied in Dougong and Zaojing have almost disappeared. If the important architectural elements dougong and zaojing are taken for granted as a defining identity of Chinese traditional architecture, then they are feebly reflected in modern architecture practice as a mere visual element. Considering the transcendental quality that dougong and zaojing had in the Han dynasty in effectively expressing a mystical and magical worldview, there is a tangible loss of Chinese architectural heritage today. 

This volume reports on the research completed as part of the multi-year New England Climate Adaptation Project (NECAP), a partnership between the MIT Science Impact Collaborative, the US Government's National Estuarine Research Reserve System, four New England coastal towns, and the Consensus Building Institute. The first half of the book offers a series of chapters that explain how and why climate adaptation requires collective rather than individual risk management. It argues that most of the responsibility for responding to climate risks—including sea level rise, storm intensification, changing patterns of rainfall, and increasing temperature—must be taken by local and regional stakeholders.

While collective action is critical for climate adaptation, many communities are not ready to effectively tackle the adaptation challenge, and need enhanced collaborative capacity to support collective risk management. Using concrete examples, this book offers strategies to increase the readiness of communities to deal effectively with the impacts of climate change. It introduces methods for assessing local climate change risks and describes tools for evaluating the social and political contexts in which collective action can take place. It also shares NECAP research demonstrating that engaging communities in tailored role-play simulations has impacted public understanding of climate risks and local readiness to support collective risk management efforts.

The second half of the book presents the products of NECAP, including stakeholder assessments (showing how key stakeholders think about climate risks), risk assessments (including downscaled forecasts from global climate models presented in a way that is accessible to the public), tailored role play simulations (that other communities can use to engage residents in their locality), community case studies (that provide statistical and qualitative evidence of the before-and-after impact of public engagement in serious games), and the results of public opinion polls following interventions in each community after almost 18 months. 

The Creation of Markets for Ecosystem Services in the United States is a detailed, critical analysis of the most advanced efforts to create ecosystem services markets in the United States. With the help of in-depth case studies of three well-known attempts to create such markets––in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, the Ohio River basin and the Willamette River basin––the book explains why very few of these markets have actually succeeded even after close to two decades of much scholarly enthusiasm, significant federal funding and concerted efforts by NGOs, government agencies and private businesses.

Based on interviews, policy analysis and participatory observation, three features of markets for ecosystem services emerge as particularly problematic. First, the logic of displacement or the idea that particular elements of an ecosystem can be separated, quantified and traded across landscapes or watersheds runs counter to political interests, environmental beliefs and people’s connections to specific places. The second problem is that of measurement. By highlighting the long and often contentious histories of specific measurement systems used in ecosystem services markets, van Maasakkers shows that these quantification methods embed a range of assumptions and decisions about what counts when conserving or restoring (parts of) ecosystems. The third problem is related to participation in environmental decision-making. Since the requirements to buy offsets stem from federal and sometimes state regulations (based on the Clean Water Act or the Endangered Species Act), the opportunities and requirements for public participation are much more in line with typical policy implementation processes as opposed to voluntary decisions about buying and selling in an ideal typical market. How meaningful participation in this hybrid form of regulatory market is possible is not clear and not something that the proponents of markets have successfully dealt with, if at all.

This book provides a historical background to the formation of the Indian capitalist class from before British colonial rule in India. It analyses the nature of that class, the ways in which it changed under colonial rule, and the state of independent India; it also sets some of the peculiarities of capitalist organization in India and the ideology of big capital in their historical context.

The evolution of the working class in India is analysed in its dialectical interaction with global capital and Indian capitalism. The author challenges the view that the tensions within working class movements caused by caste, communal divisions or gender discrimination are to be attributed to primordial loyalties, emphasizing instead the influence of the deliberate strategies adopted by capitalists and of changes in the structure of global and Indian capitalism. Finally, the book investigates the impact of capital-friendly liberalization on the fortunes of the working class in the Third World.

‘Post-Truth’ was Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year. While the term was coined by its disparagers, especially in light of the Brexit and US Presidential campaigns, the roots of post-truth lie deep in the history of Western social and political theory. This book reaches back to Plato, ranges across theology and philosophy, and focuses on the Machiavellian tradition in classical sociology. The key figure here is Vilfredo Pareto, who offered the original modern account of post-truth in terms of the ‘circulation of elites’, whereby ‘lions’ and ‘foxes’ vie for power by accusing each other of illegitimacy, based on allegations of speaking falsely either about what they have done (lions) or what they will do (foxes). The defining feature of ‘post-truth’ is a strong distinction between appearance and reality which is never quite resolved, which means that the strongest appearance ends up passing for reality. The only question is whether more is gained by rapid changes in appearance (foxes) or by stabilizing one such appearance (lions). This book plays out what all this means for both politics and science.

Post-truth should be seen as largely a continuation of the last forty years of postmodernism, especially in its deconstructive guise. Both postmodernism and post-truth publicly display a strong anti-authoritarian, democratic streak. Yet it is also a legacy rooted in Plato, who acknowledged an eternal power struggle – done in the name of ‘truth’ – between those who uphold adherence to the past and those who uphold openness to the future. Later, Machiavelli, and still later Vilfredo Pareto, described these two positions as ‘lions’ and ‘foxes’, respectively. Moreover, there has always been concern that if the struggle between the lions and foxes is made public, the social fabric will disintegrate altogether, as happened to Athens in Plato’s day. The ancient and medieval support for a ‘double truth’ doctrine (i.e. one for the elites and one for the masses), as carried over in modern conceptions of censorship, articulate these misgivings. In early twentieth century, Pareto based a general theory of society on this struggle. Pareto’s legacy left the most lasting impression in the US through the Harvard biochemist Lawrence Henderson. Henderson convened a ‘Pareto Circle’ in the late 1930s, which influenced the young Thomas Kuhn, author of the most influential account of science in the second half of the twentieth century, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’. What distinguishes science from politics is that in science the lions normally rule because they suppress contested features of their history until their own internal disagreements about how to interpret puzzling findings force a ‘crisis’ and finally ‘revolution’, during which the scientific foxes are briefly in control.

The book is concerned with the implications of a systematically post-truth perspective on academic knowledge production, which is largely seen as a vulnerable target. It turns out that military and industrial attitudes towards knowledge production have always embodied a post-truth perspective. The book also suggests an academic course of study for a post-truth world. The course would put less emphasis on content and more on skills, especially those involving the propagation and deconstruction of content, much of which is normally associated with marketing, public relations as well as aesthetic and literary criticism. In addition, the course would focus on arguments relating to the avoidance (lions) or acceptance (foxes) of risk. It would also examine the contrasting Orwellian practices involved in constructing canonical (lions) and revisionist (foxes) histories. The twentieth century interwar debate between Walter Lippmann (lion) and Edward Bernays (fox) over the meaning of a public philosophy in an era of mass media would be a centrepiece.

There have been a great many books written on military intelligence and the secret services rooted in the twentieth century; however there is very little covering the activities of the men involved in the establishment of this fascinating institution. Its origins lie in the British Army: from the beginnings in the Topographical Department to the Boer War, when various factors made the foundation work of the eventual MI5 (founded in 1909) possible. Incredibly, there were two vast armies in the 1840s, both serving the state and Queen, yet no formally organized military intelligence bureau. Such ignorance of the enemy brought about many botched and bloody encounters, such as the notorious ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’. The thrilling story of the various intelligence sources for the armed forces throughout the Victorian period is one of individuals, adventurers and small, ad hoc bodies set up by commanders when the need arose.

Stephen Wade’s enthralling book reveals the unsteady foundations of one of the country’s most prominent and renowned organizations, tracing the various elements that gradually composed the intelligence and political branches of Britain’s Secret Service.

This book is a collection of articles focusing on comparative analysis of the development trajectories in the semi-periphery countries of South America and Central and Eastern Europe. The book tries to approach the dilemmas of development in the semi-periphery as diversely as possible, always emphasising the variety of trajectories as a crucial factor. Therefore there are evaluations of the role of cognitive regimes produced by professional fields as elements of collective action coordination and as beacons that fix State-society relations. As opposed to the transitology studies that were prevalent in the 1990s, and that treated the neoliberal context in these two regions separately, the articles in this volume instead offer a new comparative analysis about the consequences of the neoliberal reforms and the new actors that deal with these results.

The book is concentrated on the experiences with market reforms and institutional legacies during the last twenty years. Central and Eastern Europe and South American countries have gone through a rapid restructuring of productive regimes in the process of integration with the global capitalist system. This volume discusses the variety of forms of state that have unfolded in different peripheral countries and their role in the social engineering of economic models and social policies, as well as to the impact of state capacities and ideas on the institutional innovations. These essays also compare the transformations in political culture, collective identities and contentious politics in both areas. The growing distance between the state and society, social disintegration and the concrete effects of market reforms (unemployment, informality, loss of rights) were closely related to a growing social mobilization as well as to a politicization of social and ethnic identities in South America. In Eastern Europe the institutional model of liberal democracy has been challenged on the one hand by the claims of social equality that derives from the communist legacy, and on the other hand by the question of political rights that has emerged within the context of the new wave of nationalisms and politicisation of ethnic identities.  

‘Nationalizing the Body’ revisits the history of ‘western’ medicine in colonial South Asia through the lives, writings and practice of the numerous Bengali ‘daktars’ who adopted and practised it. Refusing to see ‘western’ medicine as an alienated appendage of the colonial state, this book explores how ‘western’ medicine was vernacularised. It argues that a burgeoning medical market and a medical publishing industry together gave ‘daktari’ medicine a social identity which did not solely derive from its association with the state. Accessing many of the best-known ideas and episodes of colonial South Asian medical history, it seeks to understand how ‘daktari’ medicine re-positioned the colonized bodies as nationalized bodies.

During World War II and the Greek Civil War, there was a systemic movement to drain Greece of its infants, babies and children for adoption outside the country. It was a phenomenon further instigated by poverty, and dependence upon other powerful forces, both external and internal. “The total number of Greek war orphans (who had lost one or both parents) was estimated to be 340,000 to 375,000 and by 1950, one out of eight children was orphaned,” according to the Greek Ministry of Social Welfare. Greece had become “a nation of orphans,” and between 1948 through 1962, “had the highest annual per capita adoption ratio in the world.” 

Some adoptions of that time were simple, legal adoptions and private. Others were expensive and complicated. Many were illegal and others had criminal overtones. A profit motive had been created to move babies and children from one place to another in the country and also far beyond Greek borders, internationally. But the issue was more importantly that of human rights. “Birth mothers and adoptive families were routinely deceived in this transnational scene of baby brokering, which left children without protection.” Documents were “concocted” in some cases and, in others, “forged. Some babies were stolen from their birth mothers. Some babies were “re-registered as foundlings and some parents were told their baby had died, but were not shown a body or a death certificate.” Further, “numerous mothers of children born out of wedlock were being denied any meaningful consent in the adoption proceedings.”

This book will reflect this time in Greek history through a collection of essays from these children, now adults, known as the “lost children of Greece.” Many of their stories were harrowing, some fantastic, and have affected and influenced the lives of these individuals for years. Their essays will reflect the times, but will also describe the feelings, experiences, and thoughts about being adopted in such turbulent times, and will chronicle the searches for their biological relatives, in most cases, after their adoptive parents have died. Much has been written about the history of these times, which briefly mentions or refers to the children, but little to none has come from the children themselves. That is this book.

This volume explores the interconnections between culture, ideology and hegemony in an effort to understand and explain how Indians came to terms with colonial subjection and envisioned a future for the society in which they lived. The process of exploring the indigenous epistemological tradition and assessing it in the context of advances made by the west was not unilinear and undifferentiated; it was driven with contradictions, contentions and ruptures. Locating intellectual history at the intersection of social and cultural history, the eight essays in this book cover a wide range of issues, moving from an overview of religious and social ideas in colonial India to empirical studies of themes such as indigenous medicine, the family and literary fiction.

Professor Panikkar contests both the imperialist and nationalist paradigms of intellectual history. Meticulously researched and lucidly argued, his analysis is illuminated by a rare sensitivity to the nature of class formation and class values, as well as to the material conditions of human existence.

Frank Hurley is best known today as a photographer and film maker. His major documentary films include ‘The Home of the Blizzard’, ‘In the Grip of the Polar Pack Ice’, ‘Sir Ross Smith’s Flight’ and ‘Pearls and Savages’, while his photographs of Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition, Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition and the two World Wars have been so widely exhibited and reproduced that in many cases they are the principal means by which we have come to see those world-historical events. Yet there is another source, so far little known to the public, which also gives us a startling sense of the presence of the past: it is Hurley’s voluminous manuscript diaries, only brief extracts from which have so far been published. Originally written in the field in Antarctica, South Georgia, England, France, the Middle East, Papua and Australia, and later raided and revised for his many publications and stage performances, they have survived years of world travel and are now carefully preserved in the archives of the National Library of Australia in Canberra and the Mitchell Library in Sydney. This illustrated edition of his diaries presents Frank Hurley in his own words, explores his testimony to these significant events, and reviews the part he played in imagining them for an international public.

As a specialist on India, the economist Daniel Thorner is remembered for his deep commitment to the cause of Indian nationalism, and his understanding of the country's social, economic and political complexity. As a tribute to Thorner's wide-ranging and far-reaching contributions to Indian economics, Thorner's wife, Alice Thorner, and his good friend, P. N. Haksar, have put together a series of lectures in association with the Indian Statistical Institute. This collection reflects the breadth of Thorner's own range of interests, encompassing themes in the social sciences and issues in the fields of public policy and human rights. This book comprises nine lectures, together with a hitherto-unpublished paper by Thorner himself, and an introduction by Utsa Patnaik, Professor of Economics at Jawarhlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine is an anthology of travel accounts, by a diverse range of writers and academics. Challenging conventional academic ‘authority’, each contributor writes, from memory during the Covid-19 lockdown, about a place they have previously visited, ‘accompanied’ by an historical traveller who published an account of the same place. As immobility is forced upon us, at least for the immediate future, we have the chance to reflect. Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine presents opportunities to approach a text as a scholar differently. We break with the traditional academic ‘rules’ by inserting ourselves into the narrative and foregrounding the personal, subjective elements of literary scholarship. Each contributor critiques an historical description of a place about which, simultaneously, they write a personal account. 

The travel writer, Philip Marsden, posits a fundamental difference between traditional ‘academic’ writing and travel writing in that travel narratives do not, or ought not anyway, begin by assuming a scholarly authoritative understanding of the places they describe. Instead, they attempt to say what they found and how they felt about it. The very good point we think Marsden makes, and the one this book tries to demonstrate, is that, as a matter of form, the first-person narrative has the ability to expose the research process: to allow the reader to see when and how a scholarly transformation takes place; to give the scholar the opportunity to openly foreground their own subjectivity and say ‘this is the personal journey that led me to my conclusions’; to problematize the unchallenged authority of the scholar. 

Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine challenges the idea of scholarly authority by embracing the subjective nature of research and the first-person element. We address a problematic distance between travel writing practice and travel writing scholarship, in which the latter talks about the former without ever really talking to it. Defining travel writing as a genre has often proved more difficult than it might seem, but Peter Hulme has suggested that it is ethically necessary for the writer to have visited the place described. Hulme asserts that ‘travel writing is certainly literature, but it is never fiction’. If this seems obvious, Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine asks the reader to consider the idea that if visiting the place described is necessary for the writer to claim they have produced a travel account, might it also be necessary, or at least advantageous and valuable, for the writer of a scholarly critique of that account to have done the same.

In this important study, Muhammad Moj explores the Deobandi sect within Islam and its relationship to Pakistani society in an innovative way. The Deoband Madrassah Movement (DMM) has largely been studied as a political and religious reform movement, but this book interprets it rather as a counterculture, drawing on the counterculture theory of Milton Yinger.

Using analyses of Deobandi journals and interviews with madrassahs and college students, this book comprehends the DMM from a broader perspective to discover the reasons behind its clash with the mainstream society in which it operates.

The book is a collection of nine quantitative studies – each probing one aspect of Renaissance Florentine economy and society. These are organized into three parts by topic, source material and analysis methods. Part one, on risk and return, contains two chapters. Chapter 1 studies Florentine plague outbreaks. Recent work has highlighted the incompatibility of evidence from written records with medical evidence. The chapter reconciles these approaches by using financial market evidence to interpret the written records. The next chapter examines a commonly used interest rate time series for Renaissance Florence. Significant literature has evolved during the past quarter century that measures interest rates to assess state formation trends in late medieval and early modern Europe. This chapter links financial theory and medieval law to better measure the Florentine interest rate, showing that the interest rate evidence used to date must be reconsidered.

The second part examines Florentine society. This part shows how Florentine occupations can be separated into two categories by comparing wealth levels and distributions; demonstrates that the architectural and artistic explosion during the mid-fifteenth century was the result of a subsidy – a tax loophole that exempted the home and its furnishings from an significant new tax, leading to a transfer of assets into art and architecture; finds that Florentine neighbourhoods remained integrated between the mid-fourteenth and late fifteenth centuries; and provides evidence that the modern life-cycle curve of wealth accumulation might not have held true in Renaissance Florence.

The final part looks at work – focusing specifically on the wool industry. It examines the historical structure of Florentine firms and offers a wide range of evidence to demonstrate that the industry’s firms were small and perfectly competitive with little monopoly power. It also demonstrates the value of dynamic data in understanding women’s work during the late medieval and early modern periods. Finally, it shows that the foundation of the Florentine cloth industry reduced the risk facing the individual company by relying on a combination of a guild organization and the putting-out production system – both systems that are rejected by economic theory as hopelessly inefficient.

Sport in South Asia has a long and varied history that is often dramatic, sometimes violent, and which always promises to reveal much about the broader currents that have shaped culture and society. Some 100 years ago, an Indian became the star of England's cricket team, an 'Untouchable' was offered a contract in the English domestic cricket league, and an Indian win in a football match against an English Regiment was celebrated by a crowd of 60,000 as a nationalist victory. Almost a century on, the dead body of an Indian wrestler was paraded at the front of a Hindu crowd in order to incite the attacks on the Muslim neighbourhood that sparked the Aligarh riots in which almost a hundred people were killed, and in 1998, 141,000 fans attended the derby match between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal in Calcutta, one of the largest ever crowds at a football game anywhere in the world. These stories contain elements of colonialism and show the rise of nationalism and the emergence of communalism; other examples show how the establishment of nationhood in a post-colonial world, the challenge of the regions to the political centre and the impacts of globalization and economic liberalization have all left their mark on the development of sport in South Asia. Quite simply, South Asian history and society have transformed sports in the region while at the same time such games and activities have often shaped the development of South Asia. This unique volume is both an introduction to the sporting histories of the region and an exploration of the relationships between sport, history and society in South Asia.

'The Retreat of Democracy' presents an expanded and reworked selection of Basu's best journalistic and academic writings on political and economic themes since the late 1990s. In addition to Basu’s critical essays on globalization and democracy, the book also moves onto wider terrain – to ideas in economics, anthropological observations on social norms, the role of culture, and travel in India and abroad.

While the essays range from studies on major economists such as Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to humorous encounters with Indian bureaucracy, two recurring themes run thoughout: first, that the ultimate objective of policy-making must be the progress of the disadvantaged, and ignoring market laws and individual incentives courts failure; second, that for the successful crafting of economic policy it is important to recognize markets as embedded in specific cultures and social norms. This volume is a clear, intelligible and highly engaging showcase of Basu’s global and humanistic views on politics, economics and democracy.

For long, Latin America had the conceit of considering itself as “the middle class of nations”—not as rich as prosperous as the North Atlantic countries but certainly more so than those of Africa and Asia. This notion was always a bit of an artifice. Yet, it is one that has become especially apparent as the region descends from periphery to marginality, and “diplomatic eclipse”, in the words of Alain Rouquié. What to do to revert this trend? 

In this book, some of the region’s leading analysts and foreign policymakers argue that Active Non-Alignment is the path to follow if the region is to realize its full potential and occupy its rightful place in the concert of nations. Steeped in the best traditions of the Global South, but sharply attuned to the imperatives of the new century, Active Non Alignment constitutes a guide to foreign policy action in a world in turmoil, in which those not present at the high table charting a new path and shaping the new system will be left behind.

Charting the change from the old Third World’s cahiers des doleances diplomacy championing the New International Economic Order (NIEO) to the current new collective financial statecraft of the New South, reflected in entities like the Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank, the book opens new vistas for a Latin America. The latter has diversified its diplomatic, trade, investment and financial links and will not let itself be cajoled back to the days of the Monroe Doctrine. Yet, the forging of collective action will require a much more concerted effort at regional cooperation that has been extant until now. For those purposes, Active Non Alignment provides the right set of tools.

‘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.

The human body in modern South Asia is a continuous political enterprise. The body was central to the project of British colonialism, as well as to the Indian response to colonial rule. By constructing British bodies as normative and disciplined, and Indian bodies as deviant and undisciplined, the British could construct an ideology of their own fitness for political power and defence of colonialism itself. The politics of physicality then manifested in reverse in many ways, not least through Gandhi's use of his body as public experiment in discipline, as well as becoming a living rejection of British rule and norms of physicality. This unique collection makes for fascinating reading.

This book addresses the thorny issue regarding the authenticity of the Yulanpen Sūtra with a view to clearing up the centuries-long confusion and controversy surrounding its translation and transmission in China. The main objective of this study is thus to check and confirm the authenticity of the Yulanpen Sūtra, which features Mulian adventuring into the Preta realm to rescue his mother. 

Traditionally attributed to the Indo-Scythian Dharmarakṣa (Ch. Zhu Fahu, ca. 266–308) as the translator, the sūtra is now widely believed to have been created by Chinese Buddhists to foster sinicisation and transformation of Indian Buddhism on the grounds that there is no extant Yulanpen Sūtra in Indic sources and that the sūtra stresses Confucian filial piety and ancestor worship, amongst others. Through a critical review of the major arguments prevailing in modern scholarship against its authenticity and a close examination of textual and contextual evidence concerning the Yulanpen Sūtra, this book demonstrates that filial piety and ancestor worship are also deeply rooted in ancient Indian culture and that the Mulian myth reflects the recurring motif of ‘rescuing the hungry ghost of a sinful mother’ in Indian mythology and religious literature. 

In so doing, this book sheds new light on the Indic origins of the Yulanpen Sūtra and the Ghost Festival in general and of the Mulian myth and the Mulian drama – the oldest Chinese ritual drama that has been alive onstage for nearly one thousand years – in particular.

Psychiatry in India during the nineteenth century has hitherto been represented as an essentially ‘colonial’ psychiatry, permanently and intrinsically linked with the British civilising mission and British control over India. This book is the first comprehensive case study of an early twentieth-century Indian mental hospital that was headed by an Indian rather than a British superintendent.

The work explores the ways in which the institution was run, its patient profile, the circumstances of its staff and the treatments administered, all in relation to the regional sociocultural and political context, the wider medical and colonial setting in South Asia, and contemporary global developments in psychiatry.

Themes covered in the work include gender, culture, race and plural clinical practices within the context of medical standardisation. ‘Colonialism and Transnational Psychiatry’ offers an unprecedented look at both the local and global factors that had such a strong bearing on hospital management and psychiatric treatment at this institution. This study of Ranchi sets a standard against which future scholarship will be able to judge the impact of local affairs and transnational connections on a wider range of institutions in, and exchanges between, South Asia, the West and other parts of the world.

This is one of the earliest books to present a collection of writings on the effects of globalization on India and Indian society. The very concept of globalization needs critical examination, and one productive approach is to focus specifically on the local impacts of globalization in its various guises through comparative ethnographic investigations. Such research also permits examination of the relative significance of globalization, as opposed to national, regional or local factors of change that may actually be more salient. Assayag and Fuller have assembled a team of eminent academics, who present a series of critical discussions about important issues of economy and agriculture, education and language, and culture and religion, based on ethnographic case studies from different localities in India. This challenging collection also includes a major study of the history of globalization and India that sets current trends in perspective.

‘Intellectual Entertainments’ consists of eight philosophical dialogues, each with five participants, some living, some imaginary and some dead. The dialogues take place either in Elysium or in an imaginary Oxford Common Room. Each historical figure speaks in his own idiom with a distinctive turn of phrase. The imaginary figures speak in the accent and idiom of their respective countries (English, Scottish, American, Australian).

The themes of the dialogues are topics of perennial interest to any educated person with an intellectual bent. Two dialogues are concerned with the nature of the mind and the relation between mind and body – whether the mind is separable from the body, whether it is identical with the brain or whether such claims are confused. A second pair of dialogues examines the nature of consciousness and of conscious experience, and whether conscious experience is characterized by its distinctive ‘feel’ and by what it is like to undergo it. It investigates the puzzling question of what consciousness is for and whether there could be ‘zombies’ who behave just as we do, but who lack consciousness. A further pair of dialogues probes the nature of thought, the relationship between the ability to think and mastery of a language, and the question of what we think in – words, images or something else. One dialogue discusses the perennial question of the objectivity or subjectivity of perceptual qualities such as colour and sound, and whether a mindless world would also be colourless. A final dialogue consists of vehement argument on the ‘ownership’ of pain: whether two people can have the same pain or only similar pains. 

The dialogues are written in a colloquial style. They presuppose no antecedent philosophical knowledge, but only intellectual curiosity. Each subject is presented from different points of view, presented by a different protagonist, and the various points of view are subjected to criticism. The exchanges are sometimes amusing, sometimes passionate and vehement. The different views advanced are often the views of distinguished living philosophers or great philosophers now deceased, as is made clear by the endnote references to sources. The overall aim of the dialogues is both to amuse and to demystify academic mystery-mongering. Holy cows of current academic philosophy are sacrificed at the altar of reason and sound argument.

Love is often called a leap of faith. But can faith be described as a leap of love? In ‘Touching God: Hopkins and Love’, Duc Dau argues that the conversion of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Roman Catholicism was one of his most romantic acts.

‘Touching God’ is the first book devoted to love in the writings of Hopkins, illuminating our understanding of him as a romantic poet. Discussions of desire in Hopkins’ poetry have focused on his tortured and unrequited attraction to men. In contrast, Dau builds on existing queer and conventional readings of the poet’s work by turning to theories of mutual touch propounded by Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the process, she uncovers the desire Hopkins actively cultivated and celebrated: his love for Christ. By analysing Hopkins’ writings alongside his literary, philosophical and theological influences, she demonstrates that this love is what he called ‘eros’ or ‘amor’.

Dau argues that descriptions of the body and its acts of tenderness – notably touching – played a vital role in the poet’s depictions of spiritual eroticism. By forging a new way of reading desire and the body in Hopkins’ writings, this work offers fresh interpretations of his poetry, and contributes to contemporary interest surrounding the relationship between love, sexuality and spirituality.

Usually, discourses on the planetary evolution and the movements of slaves remain restricted within the narratives and scholarships of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and hardly engage with the evolution, movements, and shifts about the Indian Ocean World (IOW) slave trade. But multiple published, unpublished, authored, and non-authored historical documents like the historical records of Greco-Egyptian monk Cosmos Indicopleustes (sixthcentury BC), the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea (firstcentury CE), the travelogues of Ibn Battuta (fourteenthcentury), historical records of Tome Pires (sixteenthcentury), accounts of British historians William Hawkins and Sir Thomas Roe (seventeenthcentury), accounts of French historian Abbe Carre (seventeenthcentury), accounts of French Lieutenant de Grandpre (nineteenthcentury), and many more mention about the trade relations between India and different parts for Africa. The items of trade involved exotic stones, exotic spices, domestic objects, and local people.

Despite the existence of these diverse archival documents on the IOW trade activities, any discourses on the IOW continue to remain an understatement. The narratives on the IOW, to a vast extent, have been shaped by Western/colonial historians, who have imaginatively constructed the IOW within separate geographical, cultural, epistemological, and ontological enclaves. Based on these socio-historical arguments, this book unearths how Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa preserve their ancestral memories through spiritual, culinary, and musical practices on the one side, and generate creolized socio-cultural spaces of collective decolonial resistance and well-being on the other.

Exploring the imaginative construction of the post-colonial South by the communist East, this is a multi-faceted, collaborative study of the reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic. An account of fraught and complex cross-cultural literary exchange between two highly distinct, even uniquely opposed reading contexts, this study has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War.

Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic is an investigative exposé of Australian literature’s revealing career in East Germany. Working from the extraordinary records of the East German publishing and censorship regime, the authors materially track the production and reception of one country’s corpus as envisioned by another. The 90 Australian titles published in the GDR form an alternative canon, revealing a shadowy literary archive that rewrites Australia’s postwar cultural history from behind the iron curtain. Cast as a geo-political conundrum – beautiful and exotic, yet politically retrograde – Australia was presented to East German readers as an impossible, failed utopia, its literature framed through a critique of Antipodean capitalism that yet reveals multiple ironies for that heavily censored, walled-in community.

This book brings together leading German and Australian scholars in the fields of book history, German and Australian cultural history, Australian and postcolonial literatures, and postcolonial and cross-cultural theory, with emerging writers currently navigating between the two cultures.

Bringing together a series of essays on the political economy of trade and development policy, this book explores the following research questions: to what extent is the global trading regime reducing the ability of nation-states to pursue policies for financial stability and economic growth; and what political factors explain such changes in policy space over time, across different types of trade treaties, and across nations? Gallagher presents intriguing findings on the policy constraints on the Uruguay Round, as well as the restrictions that the USA places upon the ability of developing nations to deploy a range of development strategies for stability and growth. 

Analyzing the factors which have led to twenty-first-century trade politics being characterized by a “clash of globalizations,” including the standstill of the World Trade Organization over the issue of development strategies in emerging markets, the book sheds light upon the growing opinion among developing nations that it is in their interest to build upon their current advantage in primary commodities and light manufacturing, and to expand into new, value-added intensive areas where they might, someday, have a comparative advantage. 

As this collection of essays demonstrates, developing nations now have, for the first time, the economic and political power to refuse the proposals of industrialized countries and to put forward an alternative set of negotiating demands that industrialized nations have to take seriously. This volume exposes the reality that economic power isn’t the only factor in the difference between recent talks at the Doha Round and previous discussions; however, economic power is still key among a number of converging components, which, along with institutional structure, domestic politics, currency fluctuations and ideas about globalization, are effecting changes to global trade policies.

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.

“Development Without Aid” opens up perspectives and analyzes facts about foreign aid to the poorest developing countries. The discussion is advocacy as much as analysis, and makes extensive reference to recent research, including the author’s previous work on the World Bank.

Starting from a perception about development formed during the author’s formative years in what is now Malawi, the book develops a critique of foreign aid as an alien resource inherently unable to provide the necessary dynamism to propel the poorest countries out of poverty, and compromised by profound anomalies which subvert its own effectiveness. The book aims to help move the perception of development in poor countries squarely beyond foreign aid and beyond the discussion of its role, architecture and design, and to re-assert an indigenous development path out of poverty.

To move beyond foreign aid, the book examines a new international dynamic, i.e., the rapid growth of the world’s diasporas as a quasi-indigenous resource of increasing strength in terms of both financial and human capital. It considers the extent to which such resources might be able to replace the apparatus of foreign aid and help move towards a reassertion of sovereignty by poor states, especially in Africa, over their own development process. 

Inspired by Max Weber’s thesis on the Protestant ethic, ‘Overseas Chinese Christian Entrepreneurs in Modern China’ sets out to understand the role and influence of Christianity on Overseas Chinese businesspeople working in contemporary China. Through its in-depth interviews and participant observations (involving 60 Overseas Chinese entrepreneurs from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia and the United States), the text discusses how Christianity has come to fulfill an increasingly visible and dynamic function in the country, most notably as a new source of business morality.

Recognizing that China’s economic transition toward a market-oriented economy was not initiated by Christians (or indeed any other religious group), this volume demonstrates the importance of exploring the impact of religious ethics on economics at micro and organizational levels, via the subjective understandings of individuals and small businesses. Significant but often neglected facets of Weber’s thesis arise as a result. Of key importance is the issue of gender differences within the Christian ethos – a crucial aspect of the Protestant ethic that has yet to be systematically studied, but which offers great potential to enhance our understanding of Weber’s work. As a result, the text’s novel application of Weberian sociology to the context of contemporary China can be seen to offer a double return, elucidating both the theory and its subject.

This book is designed to be a short, critical introduction to the controversies in tax policy. The main thesis of the book is that there is a deeper substructure to debates about tax policy that underlie many of the controversies. By understanding the nature of this substructure one can place the debates about tax policy into a broader perspective. The chapters in the book elucidate this underlying architecture, drawing on ideas from economics, law, philosophy, psychology, and political science.

Economic principles shape some of the foundations for the debates, particularly with regard to the question of whether income taxes should be structured with a broad base and low rates, and whether the appropriate base of taxation should be consumption or income. Legal and administrative issues provide another foundation for tax policy, as certain structural features of the tax system—the separate existence of corporations and the realization principle for income—constrain the set of feasible tax policies. To understand tax fairness, one must delve into philosophy and psychology. A key debate is whether we view taxation just through a purely distributional lens (who gets what) or must we think about notions of process and deservingness to make sense of debates on tax fairness.

The book uses these tools to shed light on these issues as well as on the most current debates. These include the appropriate goals for tax reform, the most judicious way to tax multinational corporations, our ability to tax the very wealthy, and whether the tax system has a racial subtext. 

Time Out of Mind is one of the most ambitious, complex, and provocative albums of Bob Dylan’s artistic career. This album marks the culmination of several recurring themes that have preoccupied Dylan for decades, and it serves as a pivotal turning point toward his late renaissance in terms of both subject matter and intertextual approach. Despite winning a number of accolades, Time Out of Mind has been largely misunderstood and underestimated. This book seeks to remedy that by excavating three distinct levels of meaning at work in the songs recorded for the album. On one level, Time Out of Mind is Dylan’s intimate portrait of a killer, a series of murder ballads drawn from the memories, dreams, and fantasies of a condemned man awaiting execution for killing his lover. On another level, the album is a religious allegory, dramatizing the protagonist’s relentless struggles with his lover as a battle between spirit and flesh, earth and heaven, salvation and damnation. On still another level, Time Out of Mind is a meditation on American slavery and racism, Dylan’s most personal encounter with the subject, but one tangled up in the minstrelsy tradition and other white appropriations of black experiences. 

Time Out of Mind is an innovative and rigorously researched book, geared toward inspiring future scholarship. The three distinct but intertwined interpretations of the songs recorded for the album—as murder ballads, as religious allegory, and as “race record”—are highly original and provocative. The arguments put forth in the book will fundamentally alter our understanding of Time Out of Mind.

‘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.

Why does the position of the threshold exert such a compelling hold on our imaginative lives? Why is it a resonant space, and so urgently the place of writing – the place where one may remain, avoid speaking or naming, yet speak from? Through a combination of case studies and theoretical investigations, this book addresses these questions and speaks to the imaginative power of the threshold as a productive space in literature and art.

The first volume to draw together a significant range of the applications of the ‘threshold’, the book is located naturally on the threshold between disciplines, and alive to the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of education and scholarship. But its particular intervention is mainly literary, whether through an address of literary narratives, or through the use of literary critical analysis, or indeed through acts of criticism that become creative acts. Of this line of enquiry, ‘Thinking on Thresholds’ is a pioneering volume. Its broader remit is to examine the functions of transitive spaces in poetic language and mimesis. This includes ways in which narrative and mimetic art address the material and imaginative realities of such spaces; how they are drawn to threshold experience in life, society, and historical practice; and the affinity between the artistic process and the spatial idea of the threshold. Thus, it is cross-historical without being ahistorical, interdisciplinary but methodologically coherent. It also, unusually, muses on the methodologies that the threshold calls for in narrative as well as critical practice.

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.

The changing nature of African landscapes, from rural to urbanized spaces, has been a pre-occupation of African media producers since the beginnings of the African film industry in the 1960s. In the six chapters in the book, the authors bring together several examples of African documentary and fiction screen media that present, evaluate and criticize urban and rural landscapes, and the rural and urban dynamic of development, in relation to contemporary issues, from biodiversity, sustainability and deforestation, to inequity, women’s rights, political instability, to climate change-related themes of water and food supply, security and sovereignty. These works, comprising multi-platform cinema, streamed moving images and especially documentaries, depict the situations and open the door to rethinking and eventually to the possibilities of proposals responding to the situations portrayed. Screen media convey important visual information regarding the urban and rural built environments in Africa, relative to numerous geographic zones projected for major change and development over the next 30 years. Rapid spontaneous urban development will characterize the landscape of the African continent up until 2050, and urbanization has taken many forms, primarily unplanned. Yet, urban centres and cities have an important cultural weight since they often represent both a remnant of colonization (as colonial metropoles) and an opportunity for cultural place-making and belonging. Furthermore, African cities also serve as sites of negotiation because they are cultural melting pots offering the possibility to navigate and create identities that could not be created in rural areas.

A main goal of this book is to contribute to critical discourse and to knowledge resources to assess, critique and propose directions in contemporary urban and settlement development, in the face of rapid spontaneous urbanization of landscapes in a context of climate change and housing need. The book aims to study, track, set out and present options for landscapes and cities in Africa that are intrinsic to African culture via documentary and narrative cinema, incorporating diverse platforms of screen media. We use the term “African screen media'' to denote media presentation on various formats and platforms. This is also born out of our recognition of the fact that the term “African cinema” assumes a certain homogeneity throughout a continent of 53 countries, and that “the idea of an African cinema” has evolved with many critics to “African Cinemas” and even to the now widely used term that many scholars of African media prefer, “African screen media” (Dovey 2009, 2). This term also addresses the multiple platforms and formats representing the atomization and fracturing of distribution in contemporary streaming.

This work brings together theories and practices from the disciplines of urbanism, architecture and African cinema studies to examine some examples of how African artists are bringing attention to issues of urban precarity, climate change, survival and growth, and creativity on the continent. Theoretical references include Felwine Sarr's theory of ‘Afrotopias’ or ‘Afrotopos’ whereby the continent is a site of creative potential. Another theoretical influence with significant impact is the term "Black urbanism" as used by AbdouMaliq Simone for contemporary African cities. An alternative to modernist Western urbanism, this concept is structured around informality, creativity and improvisation.

What place does Turkey occupy in the world today? Is it a bridge between Asia and Europe, or a bridgehead? Is Turkey part of Europe? In spite of the fine sentiments of Brussels and the desire displayed by all Turkish administrations for the past 15 years to become part of the EU, a game of bluff seems to be unfolding, marked by postponements, hesitations and unspoken agenda. But this bureaucratic approach masks other pressing issues such as the question of military power, Islam, the Kurdish questions, Cyprus and immigration. In the context of these issues, the Turkish question serves to cast the spotlight on new challenges for Europe: where should the frontiers of Europe be drawn? What is the place of Islam in it? What is the best way to deal with minorities? The spectrum of authoritative analyses in this vital new book demonstrates that Turkey presents, to an enlarged Europe, the image of its own contradictions, but also its ambitions.

The idea of occupational devotion, or devotee work, was conceptualized and incorporated in the serious leisure perspective as one of the two serious pursuits. The other pursuit is serious leisure itself, with both forms being anchored in activities that are immensely appealing and fulfilling. Despite such desirable qualities the serious pursuits constitute a minority of all work and leisure, these two domains being dominated by disagreeable work and hedonic casual leisure activities. 

The devotee occupations serve as full-time or part-time livelihoods for people fortunate enough to have found them. Such work has so far been observed to exist in four sectors of the economy: the liberal professions, consulting occupations, craft-like trades, and creativity-based small businesses. In ways to be set out in the coming chapters, devotee work roots in serious leisure, and many participants in the latter have no desire to pursue the former. Moreover, some of those who do “quite their day job” to try to make a living at their leisure passion fail to achieve this dream and are forced to return to pure amateur, hobbyist, or career volunteer status. That is, these aspirants fail to make enough money to live as they need to, whether at a level of poverty or near-poverty (eg, the starving artist), passable living, or comfortable living. 

Neither type of serious pursuit offers an unalloyed life of positiveness. Nevertheless, both are hugely attractive, even while the enthusiasts invariably face some costs and unpleasant requirements that weigh against the powerful rewards. So it is that, unlike casual leisure, perseverance and effort number among the defining qualities of the serious pursuits.

This book is a new and exciting resource for teachers, students, and activists who aim to critically examine contemporary sexuality through the lens of sexual literacy and situated social analysis. This original anthology provides shorter cutting-edge essays on theory, method, and activism, including the nature of globalization and local sexuality discovered in ‘glocal’ topics, processes, and contexts. Within the anthology, students, educators, practitioners, and policy makers will find critical conversations regarding a wide array of sexual topics that impact our world currently. These cutting-edge essays inform readers of key moments in sexual history, including areas relating to research, practice, and social policy, and provide a platform from which to engage in rich discussion and forecast the development of sexual literacy in our world within multiple contexts.

Remarkable transformations in critical sexuality studies, sexual science, empirical and humanities-based studies, and human rights in the late-twentieth century reveal many of the complex conundrums of power that drive sexual study in the twenty-first century. Using the multi-faceted characteristics of sexuality literacy to engage critically and situationally across glocal factors, augmenting our ability to forecast sexuality issues, the book attempts answers for the following questions: What are the kinds of problems and solutions does applied critical sexual literacy work engage? How do we value one another and what political stakes are revealed when we do put one person over another? How do sexual identities and behaviors become authentic, meaningful, and important to comprehend in specific times and contexts? How does such work push forward pedagogy and allow forecasting the circumstances of tomorrow inasmuch as we can foresee?

‘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. 

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.

Simon J. James examines how Gissing's work reveals an unhappy accommodation with money's underwriting of human existence and culture, and how daily life in all its forms – moral, intellectual, familial and erotic – is transcended or made irrelevant by its commodification. Novels such as 'New Grub Street' expose high culture's dependence on the ruthless Darwinism of late Victorian capitalism: literary and personal success can only be achieved by understanding and adapting to the immanent and irresistible nature of a market hostile to the development of human self-betterment. Situated against nineteenth-century analyses of monetary relations by thinkers such as Ruskin, Mill, Marx and Carlyle, and novels by Dickens, Eliot and Hardy, 'Unsettled Accounts' demonstrates how Gissing's work is engagedly modern, dealing as it does with changes in the nature of the literary market, advertising, imperialism, the New Woman and the condition of the working classes. This groundbreaking new study, published 100 years after Gissing's death, will be of considerable interest to students, researchers and scholars. A valuable introduction to Gissing's work, it claims a prominent place for him in fin-de-siècle Victorian literature.

This book arises from a European Commission 6th Framework Programme for Research project: 'Global Climate Change Impacts on the Built Heritage and Cultural Landscape - The Noah's Ark Project'. The work recognised that although climate change attracts wide interest at research and policy levels, little attention is paid to its impact on cultural heritage. In a period when enhanced regulation has improved European air quality, it seems important to explore how the threat of climate change to cultural heritage can become better recognised and perceived as relevant. As a non-renewable resource to be transmitted to future generations, cultural heritage includes the built heritage, artefacts inside buildings, archaeological sites and cultural landscapes.

Rather than examining the fate of individual monuments, the 'Noah's Ark Project' took a strategic overview of the changing pressures on heritage.  The results can now be viewed on a wide geographical scale, presented here as a vulnerability atlas and accompanying guidelines. This atlas aims to fill the present gap in studies on the effects of future climate variations on cultural heritage, producing maps that link climate science to the potential damage to our material heritage. [NP] The atlas gathers different types of maps and research outputs of future scenarios. Sections within the atlas include climate maps, displaying traditional climate parameters relevant to cultural heritage, and specific heritage climatologies; damage maps that quantitatively express the damage induced by climate parameters on building materials in future scenarios; risk and multiple-risk maps showing areas of increasing or decreasing risk across European regions; and thematic sections focusing on specific processes of damage that may arise from climate change. The atlas is also supported by key recommendations for policy-makers managing the impact of climate change on European heritage sites.

An escalating ecological catastrophe is befalling the biosphere in the twenty-first century.The philosophical roots of this catastrophe lie in the deep structural dualism that has characterized the Western tradition. Dualism conceptually divides mind from matter, culture from nature and the human from the animal, thereby giving rise to an exclusively instrumentalist attitude to the natural environment. Science as the engine of modernity is now the chief global vector of dualism and by its means the instrumentalist attitude has spread around the world.

According to the author, this foundational flaw in Western thinking may be traced ultimately to the Greek discovery of philosophia; that is to say, it may be traced to philosophy itself and to the theoretic orientation to which philosophy led. Any escape from dualism thus requires training in an altogether alternative mode of cognition, a strategic and synergistic mode cultivated not via abstract theorizing but by visceral, sensory, agentically engaged practices of responsive attunement to one’s immediate environment. Such practices were the province of pre-agrarian societies that relied on foraging, and hence on intimate attunement to local ecologies, for their livelihood. Vestiges of this earlier pattern of practice were also preserved in the indigenous Chinese tradition of Daoism via a repertory of psychophysical exercises designed to induce attuned responsiveness to environmental cues.

First-hand opportunities for responsive engagement with local ecologies must rather be routinely available to people today just as they were to earlier peoples. Societies must reconfigure economic praxis so that human agency, in its most routine daily forms of expression, interacts synergistically with the biosphere rather than imposing its own abstractly preconceived designs upon it. This is required not only because such reconfigured praxis will serve and sustain life on earth at a biological level but also because it is what is needed to induct people themselves into ecological awareness. The book includes instances of such alternative, synergistic modes of praxis – in agriculture, manufacture and architecture.

As an emerging super-power whose thought-roots are in strategic as opposed to theoretic modes of cognition, China is in a position to assume world leadership in this connection. The author appeals directly to China to reclaim its Daoist heritage, apply this heritage to the problem of praxis today, and thereby light the way towards forms of civilization more appropriate to our times.

This challenging and unique new volume examines some of the most burning issues on the economic agenda in the world today. Bringing together some of the foremost authorities in their fields, this book is the result of work carried out on behalf of the G24, the world's only research effort devoting to furthering the interests of developing countries and bringing their needs to global attention. The book gives a voice to the developing nations of the world through its powerful essays and its fresh perspective. Challenging the existing mechanisms for the governance of the world economy, the chapters in this book consider the current approaches of the World Bank and IMF, and the operations of financial markets, and offer alternative proposals for the effective participation of developing countries. In doing so, the volume ranges from discussions on reforming the IMF and its conditionality, debt workouts and restructuring, through management of capital flows, debt sustainability and insurance against crisis, to Millennium Development Goals and the 'global partnership development'.

How would a Jacobean audience have assessed ‘The Tempest’? What would King James I have thought of it? This book provides detailed in-depth discussion of the various influences that an audience in 1611 would have brought to interpreting the play. How did people think about the world, about God, about sin, about kings, about civilized conduct? Historical, literary, political and sociological backgrounds are explained within the biblical-moral matrices by which the play would have been judged. This book links real life in the 1600s to the world of Prospero on the stage. Learn about the social hierarchy, gender relationships, parenting and family dynamics, court corruption, class tensions, the concept of tragi-comedy – and all the subversions, transgressions, and oppositions that made the play an unsettling picture of a world attempting to come to terms with capitalism and colonialism while re-addressing the nature of rule.

How did the US financial crisis snowball into USD 15 trillion global losses? This book offers a clear synthesis and original analysis of the various factors that led to the financial crisis of 2007-2010 - namely, an asset price bubble and excessive leverage. The focus is on the ingredients of and dynamics within the international financial system, and as such is the most comprehensive publication in scope to date in terms of market, country and instrument coverage. In addition to its thorough dissection of the causes and consequences of the most calamitous financial crisis in the past seventy years, the author also debates 'the way forward', including regulatory challenges, proposed changes and critique, and early warning systems.

The objective of this reader is to provide a holistic summary of the financial crisis, and bring to light a new perspective on each of the issues, while simultaneously providing a thorough platform for those wishing to research any of the sub-topics independently. It ultimately discusses the lessons to be learned from the recent crisis, and questions whether the global financial system is capable of learning them. Written in a clear explanatory prose and featuring a wealth of quantitative data and qualitative analysis, this reader is accessible to the beginner, intermediate and advanced student.

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.

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.

A collection of essays written from a Marxist-Feminist perspective, 'Inventing Subjects' is a significant contribution to the field of historical sociology. The essays speak of the different ways in which social subjects and their agencies have been constructed and represented in the context of the development of colonial hegemony and socio-cultural formations in India. Four of the essays focus on constructive proposals for social subjectivities and agencies of Bengali middle-class women by both the indigenous and the colonial elite. The othrt two essays consider the invention or construction of 'India' as an ideological category for ruling, which seeks to impose on it a colonially ascribed identity. The essays capture the fluidity and complexity of subject construction, and read moral regulations and culture in terms of a hegemonic process. They range from middle-class Bengali women's attempts at self-fashioning to the colonial ideological reflexes within which their projects are articulated. They disclose and query the tensions inherent in the processes of indigenous socio-cultural constructions and identity formations, as well as the reductionism involved in the creation of colonial 'others'.

'Feeding The World in the 21st Century: A Historical Analysis of Agriculture and Society' provides a historical understanding of agricultural development over the last two centuries. Characteristics of the period have included the opening of the prairies in the late 18th century, the invention of industrial fertilizer and the tractor's displacement of the horse. Such profound developments have led to an abundance of food and peace and prosperity within the world market. This situation began at the end of the American Civil War and continued until 2005, when prices rose in spite of increased production. Smedshaug gives a historical background of the current situation, while discussing the ultimate challenge of how to feed a world of 10 billion people. This challenge has to be met in the light of climate change, water shortage, and not least the declining availability of fossil fuel.

Smedshaug's analysis and recommendations underline the need for every country to have the freedom to establish an agricultural policy adapted to the given national natural conditions, as well as the need to put the producer at the heart of the policy in such a way that all countries can utilize their potential to produce food, and hence to feed the world.

Across the past two centuries, the Western novel has propagated the narrow view of the addict as a toxic force bent on undermining the rationality, morality, and progressive spirit that have, since the Enlightenment, defined civilization in the West. Addiction, Representation undertakes an investigation into an alternative literary tradition within which the addict is neither doomed to a horrific death nor sacrificed to the Twelve Steps so that the “recovering addict” might survive. At the center of this investigation is a modest collection of contemporary novels, originally published in the thirty-year span between 1985 and 2015, that exhibits experimental narrative techniques and, in doing so, unsettles the limited portrayal of the addict that has dominated the Western realistic novel since the nineteenth century.

Examining the works of John O’Brien, Sara Gran, Paula Hawkins, Bret Easton Ellis, and Grace Krilanovich, the book argues that the ways in which readers occupy the narratives of contemporary experimental fiction can be instructive for how to live in an extra-diegetic world, where attitudes toward addicts often are as narrow, restrictive, and damaging as they historically have been expressed in the Western novel. The book concerns itself with the practices and politics of reading the experimental addiction novel, and outlines both a practice and an ethics of reading that advocates for a more compassionate response not only to fictional addicts, but also to the actual addicts whose lived experiences gave birth to the existing fiction.

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. 

This must-read college composition textbook leverages creativity theory to demystify practices associated with writing in various academic and public genres.

Few composition textbooks that explicitly invoke creativity theory exist, and those that do exist treat it in cursory fashion. What these textbooks recognise but do not pursue extensively enough is the fact that creativity theory is a natural, stimulating and elucidating complement to the knowledge base in composition studies. The connection is natural in that all writing is a creative act to the extent that it brings something into being or produces something. The connection is stimulating in that the drive to create, in whatever form, enlivens human experience. The connection is elucidating for ways that it extends understanding of composing processes and helps pinpoint features of written products that qualify them as ‘creative’. Indeed, creativity (i.e., the transformation of knowledge and its effective, often unique, expression) is the pinnacle of achievement in all fields. Invention and Craft: Exercising Creativity in College Composition and Research, Second Edition, capitalises on this complementary relationship between creativity theory and composition theory, melding knowledge about creative processes and products with best practices in college composition instruction.

To that point, while invoking the discourse of process throughout, the textbook consistently emphasises post-process considerations: the idea that writing is an inherently social act, the idea that no single process is applicable to every individual or every writing scenario and the idea that writing is recursive. Furthermore, all discussions of composing activities take place against a backdrop of established rhetorical principles (e.g., elements of the rhetorical situation, classical rhetorical appeals). In keeping with the focus on creativity, such discussions foreground the need for writers to assume an active role in managing rhetorical principles (through metacognition and reflection) so they can locate meaning and exigency for the text at hand. 

The general objectives referenced above enable pedagogical benefits such as making unfamiliar composing tasks familiar by connecting writing to other intellectual, artistic and recreational pursuits; facilitating backward- and forward-reaching knowledge transfer; validating experimentation with writing practices through explicit reference to creativity and composition scholarship; energising students to become active problem-solvers; stressing insight as the hallmark of effective writing as facilitated by extended invention activity; and interrogating misconceptions about writing through ‘straight-talk’ backed by research on writers.  

Structurally speaking, Invention and Craft is characterised by several features intended to support instruction. More specifically, it 

• employs visuals to reinforce understanding of key concepts;
• includes in-chapter excerpts from example essays, annotated to pinpoint defining features of the focal genres, as well as model essays at the ends of all genre chapters; 
• closes each genre chapter with a preliminary activity geared toward composing in the focal genre and underscoring the need for substantial invention effort; 
• ends each genre chapter with a genre-specific formal writing assignment that allows plenty of freedom in topic generation so as to cultivate individual interest and allow students to capitalise on already developed expertise; 
• executes similar internal scaffolding across chapters as an aid to reinforcing key concepts and transferring knowledge across genres.

This volume brings together, for the first time, several of Professor Habib's essays, representing three decades of scholarship and providing an insightful interpretation of the main currents in Indian history from the standpoint of Marxist historiography. The collection examines the role played by the peasantry and caste in Indian history; explores the forms of class struggle and the stage of Indian economic development in Mughal India; analyses the impact of colonialism on the Indian economy; and chronicles the changes in Marx's perception of India. These painstakingly researched and erudite essays form a volume that is indispensable for scholars and students of Indian history.

Sixty years after their creation, the Bretton Woods institutions face a crisis of legitimacy that impairs their credibility and effectiveness. At the roots of this crisis lies the unrepresentative nature of their structure of governance, which places control of the institutions in the hands of a small group of industrial countries that do not use its resources. Developing countries and economies in transition are considered to be minor partners, despite accounting for half of the world’s output in real terms, most of the world’s population and encompassing the most dynamic economies and the largest holders of international reserves. The quota formulas should reflect the size of the economies of members, i.e. their GDP, their exposure to trade and capital movements as well as their ability to contribute to the Fund. If IMF quotas were based on objective measures, i.e. size of GDP, the volatility of receipts, the adjustment of European quotas for intra-trade and trade in a single currency in the euro area, the quota share of developing countries and economies in transition as a group should be no less than that of industrial countries. Reality has outpaced the evolution of thinking on the subject of governance. The growing breach between world economic and financial realities and the governance structure of the Bretton Woods institutions argues for reforms to increase the effectiveness and restore the legitimacy of these institutions. As debtors, the European countries had resisted conditionality during the first decades of the IMF and favoured increasing Fund resources, but as their situation changed, they no longer resorted to IMF support and they changed their position. Similar problems appear in the World Bank, giving rise to large negative flows of resources from the developing countries. The papers included in this book cover different aspects of the governance of the Bretton Woods institutions. They explore different options for reform and show that enhancing the participation of developing and emerging market countries in resolving the major monetary and financial problems confronting the world economy, would improve global economic performance and contribute to the elimination of world poverty.

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.

‘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.

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.

A beguiling account of twentieth-century America through the eyes of an outsider, a remarkable inversion of the standard 'Westerner observing the exotic' travel writing formula. Wu Tingfang wrote this book at an intriguing juncture in history - aeroplanes and motion pictures had recently been invented (and his musings on both of these have proven correct) and while he did not know it, a tremendous cultural shift was about to take place in the West due to the First World War. The unassuming and inquisitive diplomat delves into topics such as: immigration; the Arms Race and changes in technology; religion and ethics in the classroom; women's equality; fashion; violence in the theatre; vegetarianism; and cruelty to animals. His observations are enlightening and remain as relevant today as the era in which they were written. In particular, the exploration of the 'American character' and the nation's attitude toward commerce and international relations have a powerful resonance.

"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.

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.

‘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.

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.

This book presents the most comprehensive study of the Waffen-SS until this date. It draws on archival studies done in more than 20 archives in 13 different countries over a period of 5 years. The gathered material comprises a wide-ranging selection of data such as records from the SS, contemporary Allied documents, letters from soldiers, as well as diaries and memoirs. Other major groups of material derive from the investigations into war crimes, from intelligence services and other organisations with a stake in the SS soldiers’ post-war networks and veteran societies. All this diverse data has made it possible to study the Waffen-SS not merely as a hierarchical organisation but as a living organisation made up by human beings. Based on this extensive material the book covers the entire history of the Waffen-SS and follows the post-war fate of the SS-veterans as well. The evolution of the Waffen-SS is analysed with special emphasis on the role of Nazi ideology, war crimes and atrocities, as well as the unique multi-ethnic and transnational character of the organization. The book describes the haphazard, opportunistic and sometimes chaotic growth of the Waffen-SS but also analyses how a constant focus on ideology and a continuous brutalization through commitment of war crimes had a considerable integrative power. The SS managed to form a strong ethos with lasting power both among many of the former SS-soldiers and a greater public audience, documented in the book’s study of the post-war veterans’ culture and the popular cultural memory of the Waffen-SS.

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.

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.

This work of narrative non-fiction deals with common questions and doubts people have about vaccines, using very accessible, conversational, non-technical language. 

If you have ever thought any of the following, “Vaccines are not for me, I'm young and healthy and don't need them”; “I rather develop natural immunity to infections, without vaccination”; “Immunisation is a personal choice, it only affects me, so I'll take the risk” then this book is for you.  You would also enjoy this book if you have ever heard people articulate these beliefs and you couldn't quite put your finger on why these are common misunderstandings.  Throughout the book the author uses simple analogies, real-life examples and relatable stories, to explain common questions and objections people have about vaccines and vaccination. The text is wonderfully complemented by original and funny cartoons which bring home the main points, in a memorable and humorous way. 

This book is a collection of honest conversations and discussions he's had over the years with people who have doubts and hesitations about the contents, purpose, and safety of vaccines.

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.

This book begins by defining the term ‘fake news’, a term which has come to great public prominence since the start of our current millennium. Fake news, broadly defined, is used to describe ‘false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting’. By giving some high-profile examples, this volume shows how the concept differs from lying and propaganda on one side and then from postmodern arguments about the relativism of all knowledge on the other. The book outlines the way that various national governments have become concerned with the concept in recent years, and points to contemporary worries about the behaviours of social media, about manipulation by both state and non-state actors, and about the developing technological capacity that allows almost any individual to produce ‘deep fakes’ that are virtually indistinguishable from genuine photographs or film footage.

The volume explains why fake news can be productively examined through the lens of theatre and performance. We see how various forms of theatre have shared the epistemic function of the news: that is, to furnish the public with reliable factual information, and the book includes discussion of theatre-makers who have attempted to use theatre in this way.

This book also traces the way that the concerns of our own historical moment about fake news echo the repeated worries expressed throughout theatrical history. The examples selected in this section of the book are therefore taken from the canonical high-road of Western theatrical texts, by figures such as Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Henrik Ibsen, Lorraine Hansberry, Joan Littlewood, and Sarah Kane.

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. 

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.

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.