Anthem Press

It has been suggested that, if CARICOM nations wish to accelerate their development, they should embrace laissez-faire economic policies. However, laissez-faire economic policies have reinforced the very economic and social structures that have contributed to their low level of development; furthermore, laissez-faire economic policies ignore social attitudes that can greatly influence a nation’s development. Moreover, low-skilled labor-intensive production processes, which once propelled growth in CARICOM nations, will no longer perform a similar role because production processes are becoming more and more knowledge-skills intensive, and nations wishing to attract foreign manufacturing investment or high-tech services may not be able to do so without an adequate pool of the necessary knowledge skills. CARICOM nations must therefore try to accumulate a pool of knowledge skills that can help their economies become internationally competitive.

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 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.

‘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’.

‘Leadership’ is crucial to contemporary business, politics, and organizations of every type, including the corporate, non-profit, educational, and government sectors. While modern leadership theorists suggest various models, traits, and approaches to leadership behavior that purport novelty, Ecclesiastes just may have been right that ‘There is nothing new under the sun’. The biblical figure of Moses – a familiar name both to adherents of the Western religious traditions and to people who are not – provides an exemplary model of effective leadership that is broadly applicable. Moses is depicted in the Bible as exhibiting ‘heroic’ and ‘charismatic’ tendencies. He was certainly empathic. Yet Moses also shows ‘transactional’, ‘transformational’ and ‘visionary’ leadership qualities. A leader of good character, Moses exhibits features similar to the Yiddish term, ‘mensch’ – someone showing responsibility and integrity, knowing right from wrong.

Though few might think of Moses as a ‘leader’ or a ‘manager’ in the contemporary sense, Moses not only holds a firm place among the most significant leaders in Western civilization but is arguably the quintessential example of leadership from whom much can be learned by people entering and occupying leadership positions. While current leadership and management vocabulary might differ from the Hebrew Bible, many of the traits, behaviors and actions advocated by modern leadership theorists appear to emulate those of Moses. Wolak contrasts contemporary leadership ideas with biblical and rabbinic sources that show Moses’ leadership qualities, Moses serves as an ancient model with current relevance for what modern leadership theorists argue make for an effective leader.

‘Religion and Contemporary Management’ discusses and compares original and critical biblical and rabbinic sources with current business leadership and management literature, revealing what leadership theorists’ advocate today largely emulates what the Bible depicts as effective leadership through Moses’ example. Hence, Moses’ influence on current leadership trends in Western culture appears pervasive, even if contemporary leadership theorists do not typically cite Moses as an important source for leadership precedent.

So far, the history of football has been written by sport historians who have considered the history of this sport in isolation from the context in which it emerged. In the second half of the nineteenth century, football was created by educators and students as part of school reform. Football served as a new and enticing teaching tool that gave students freedom, encouraged self-determination, and fostered teamwork. After the game had been developed at English public schools, it was introduced by teachers and students at high schools and colleges in England, Germany, Argentina, and the United States during the 1870s. The game proved particularly popular among the children of parents who engaged in trade and industry since this new sport offered an introduction to essential modern values such as teamwork and collaboration that were needed in an industrialized society.

Football was, furthermore, part of the social reform movement that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century in response to the social ills of urban life. Adults and children spent more and more time inside badly ventilated buildings. Even physical education was conducted inside high school gymnasiums. Beginning in the 1870s, social reformers and teachers called for the introduction into school curricula of physical exercises that could be conducted on the meadows and sport fields outside cities. Those educators joined the calls for the introduction of football into high school curricula found themselves in the company of social reformers who championed the creation of public parks, tenement gardens, and clothing reform.

These two contexts have not mattered in books about the history of football written by sport historians. Sport historians have always separated football from the social and cultural contexts in which it emerged and have paid little attention to the reasons for which football was introduced into German, Argentinian, or American society in the first place. Historians of education have likewise ignored the role of football within school reform. The result is a narrative that provides vertical (national, regional, or local) accounts of this sport from its introduction into a specific geographic space (i.e., city, region, or country) from its first occurrence to the present time. Thisbook, by contrast, will offer a horizontal perspective that focusses on the spread of football in the 1870s from its English cradle to Germany, the United States, and Argentina. It will be the very first account of football that does not treat this sport in isolation but brings together the phenomenon of football with the conditions in nineteenth-century high schools and the crisis of urban living and, thereby, explains why this sport was so willingly and quickly accepted into various societies and cultures around the globe.

The post-1990s commercial turn in the internationalisation of higher education has given rise to the global research university (GRU). Promoting educational exchanges and research partnerships as the engine of the knowledge economy, GRUs that play in a deterritorialised academic super league are hindered by their national origins, in which they remain ethically embedded, and their national orientation to which they are politically wedded. Like any organisation within an institutional environment undergoing change, GRUs that internationalise without also denationalising their organisational culture are saddled with contradictions. The Ethics of Internationalisation offers a critique of three of them: the ethical dilemmas of trans-national scholars, who face estrangement when their difference encounters the ethno-national prejudice of local faculty; the politics of the idea of the university, which under the logic of new public management valorises commercially viable, quantitative research and side-lines critically focused, qualitative studies; and given the event of the Anthropocene, the imperative to reclaim internationalisation from its commercial hijackers in favour of an ethical iteration, which takes up the challenge of thinking the idea of the university vis-à-vis the existential condition of the potential extinction of homo sapiens together with other forms of life on earth.
• The book begins by introducing its niche approach of a philosophy of internationalisation. Using the method of problematisation, the introduction highlights the challenges facing the university today and lays the groundwork for the rest of the discussion by explaining the personal and academic rationale behind the book as well as delving into an interpretation of the notion of the university. Chapter 1 takes up these themes and focuses on the crisis of internationalisation in the global north, where it has been subjected to a commercial hegemony that is blind to the switch in the conditions of possibility for thinking from globalisation to the Anthropocene. Chapter 2 takes its cue from the crisis and lays out an ethics of internationalisation by tracing the genealogical origins of the international to show how an ethical imperative has always informed it. The second chapter also considers geopolitanism as a way to think trans-species subjectivity, which is the mode of becoming-animal that underpins the ethics of internationalisation. Chapter 3 turns to the concrete case of internationalisation in Japan. Through an autoethnography, it discloses the ethical dilemmas faced by trans-scholars in an ethno-national culture and derivative organisational academic life that is designed for the exclusive use of insiders. Chapter 4 continues the pragmatic concern. It analyses how informational capitalism infiltrates the university through the discourse of new public management, which poses a threat to thinking tout court, particularly to critique within the university. As a remedy, the university as a heterotopia, or a space otherwise, is proposed. Finally, the conclusion uses the concept of the stranger as a regulatory metaphor for universities internationalising under the commercial logic and keen to switch to an ethical mode. Strangers, such as the trans-scholar, are unsettling figures who voice the ethical and political dilemmas that arise at the front-line of the process of internationalisation, hereby imploring an unconditional hospitality from the university in the name of its denationalisation, which in turn serves thinking our existential predicament in respect of the Anthropocene.

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.

Forced displacement, statelessness, and the omnipresence of asylum seekers and refugees—innocent people uprooted from their homes by war, climate change, natural catastrophes, economic collapse, terrorism—have been one the most challenging problems for the international community for several decades. Only in 2019, almost 1,900 environmental catastrophes caused almost 25 new internal displacements in 140 countries and territories, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. This number is three times larger than the displacements as a result of conflicts or violence. As a result, the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), the lead international United Nations agency coordinating refugee protection, continues to struggle to deal with so many simultaneous dire situations worldwide. But rather than organizations such as UNHCR, governments have the power to make a difference with their empathy and generosity. 

The COVID-19 pandemic, which has worsened the situation for refugees worldwide, has also brought crises (such as collapsed supply chains) to the West that are, unfortunately, common in other areas of the planet. In fact, there is a lot to learn about crisis management and resolution from these non-Western experiences of epidemics, natural catastrophes, war, and other extreme situations in refugee camps all over the world.

The essays in this volume will study the concept of refuge as well as historical forced displacement and statelessness, trying to provide potential lasting solutions to the many problems associated with this situation. This volume is not only timely but expansive, as it moves from the pressing crisis of refugees to the crisis of humanity that seeks to find refuge.

The book argues that the definition of a “fixer” emerges when local journalists are de-professionalized and their field expertise and connections are stripped away to produce a faceless, nameless, set of “eyes and ears” in service of the 24/7 media machine. The fact that we have the same news 24/7 across a range of news channels is an outcome of the simultaneous process of centralized decentralization—media conglomerates controlling news distribution and exhibition by hiring a scattering of fixers to do the groundwork of global news production. But working as a daily wager in journalism is not about risks taken or the self-exploitation endured. Rather, the role is an attack on the basics of the profession itself, the basic dignity of the journalist as an upholder of democracy. A fixer, who must be the eyes and ears of the people against forces of status quo, is reduced to a role and given as an instrument in regular journalists’ hands to be used as a resource. Challenging existing literature on the topic, the book reveals the tension between actual local reporters and the role (read fixer) they are hired to fill. The book argues that fixer as a role emerges in tandem with news practices that leads to decontextualizing local events, people and stories to fit the consumption patterns of market economy, a colonial practice resurging in contemporary capitalism. 

The book holds not just the hierarchies in journalism responsible for feeding the dark underbelly of global news production, but also identifies the field inequality that produces violence against those local reporters. The issue is a quite serious challenge. Offering on-the-ground view of the situation from local perspectives, the book examines the consequences of the political economy of corporate media, and the price journalists pay for diminishing the life expectations as well as intellectual labor of journalists working as “fixers.”

This book is unique in that it studies fixers not as a role but rather as a political position, objective condition and subjective experience. Theorizing on the emergence of the fixer as an outcome of colonial capitalism, the book brings Marx, himself a journalist, back into the twenty-first century discourse—taking discussions of intellectual labor back to the origins of capitalism—revealing how structural inequality takes a toll on journalism as a profession. As U.S. Senator Hiram Warren Johnson once declared that the first casualty of war was truth, the book suggests that the sacrifice of truth has become a routine, both in liberal democracies and in the war-torn Global South. The first casualty, in this reckoning, is not truth itself, but the bearers of truth, i.e., journalists, many of whom now find themselves reduced to the category of fixers. 

‘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.

Trade unions are central to Australian social, economic and political life. They are the largest voluntary organisations in the country, are a significant presence in political life, and, as workplace organisations, are often the only effective vehicle to give voice to working people. Their role is nevertheless under serious challenge, with low and declining union density and shrinking coverage of collective bargaining. Controversies surrounding several union officials have called into the question the legitimacy of trade unions. And for some governments, trade unions are not social partners but rather targets of restrictive legislation.

Despite these tensions, there has yet to be a broad and systematic scholarly engagement with the challenge to the centrality of trade unions in Australian social, economic and political life. Existing literature tends either to examine trade unionism from an historical perspective or to focus upon the regulation of the role of unions in the workplace.

This book aims to fill this gap by bringing together leading scholars in industrial relations, law, political science and political philosophy to critically assess the role of Australian trade unions. In doing so, it is organised according to two themes. First, the book examines the democratic role of trade unions as representatives of working people and addresses issues such as economic democracy and the rule of law in the workplace, political funding and trade agreements. Second, the book examines the social justice role of trade unions in providing a countervailing force to employer power including in relation to precarious work, the 'gig' economy, labour migration and the pressing global challenge of climate change. The concluding contribution weaves these two themes of democracy and social justice together in proposing a democratic socialist vision of trade unions and labour law.

‘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.

International education is nothing new. For centuries British universities have taught the progeny of despots, rajas and terrorists, all of whom came to the dreaming spires to study, mingle and be Anglicised.

‘Internationalisation of Post-1992 UK Universities’ studies the creation of a whole new group of universities in 1992 that changed the cosy world of international education in the UK dramatically. For them it was no longer about UK influence in the world, no longer about soft power; it was all about hard cash. They were encouraged by the UK government to recruit international students to make up for a lack of investment.

Now education as an export is seen as a good thing. The post-1992 university focus on international student fees has developed a market-led culture where staff are incentivised to lower standards – this was easily translated to the fee regime in England when it was introduced.

Due to commercial pressures and a lack of overall UK strategy post-1992 universities assisted foreign governments in their bids to have a better education system than the UK. At the same time international recruitment had an adverse effect on home students whilst making overseas students more attractive to employers.

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.

This book is the product of an endless individual and collective process of mourning. It departs from the author’s mourning for her parents, their histories and struggles in Germany as Gastarbeiter, while it also engages with the political mourning of intersectional feminist movements against feminicide in Central and South America; the struggles against state and police misogynoir violence of #SayHerName in the United States; the resistance of refugees and migrantized people against the coloniality of migration in Germany; and the intense political grief work of families, relatives, and friends who lost their loved ones in racist attacks from the 1980s until today in Germany. Bearing witness to their stories and accounts, this book explores how mourning is shaped both by its historical context and the political labor of caring commons, while it also follows the building of a conviviality infrastructrueof support against migration-coloniality necropolitics, dwelling toward transformative and reparative practices of common justice.

The book presents the first integrated study of the relationship between official Islamic leadership (muftiship), non-official Islamic authorities, grassroots Muslim communities and the state in post-Communist Eurasia, encompassing Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, the Volga-Urals, Crimea, the North Caucasus, Azerbaijan and ex-Soviet Central Asia. Its analysis is positioned within the current secularism/de-secularisation debate. The book is based on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including the author’s interviews with Islamic official and popular leaders and authorities, which she conducted over two decades in various parts of Eurasia. The book employs a history-based perspective and compares the nature and role of official Islamic leadership and the state-Muslim relations across Eurasia with those in both the Middle East and Western Europe. It argues that in most of the post-Soviet lands, the official Islamic leadership and its relations with the state have largely retained their particular national and broader Eurasian character, which distinguishes them from what prevails in the Middle East and Western Europe. At the same time, the increasing political ‘Europeanisation’ of Lithuania and Ukraine since 2014 and, to some extent, Belarus, has accounted for their divergence towards the Western model of state-Muslim relations. In conclusion, it analyses the impact of globalisation and the advance of global Salafism, in particular, on Islamic leadership and state-Muslim relations across post-Soviet Eurasia. 

Climate change is like no other challenge we have ever faced. We have seen technology change driven by computers and information systems. The rate of change is determined by market acceptance and economics. We have also witnessed social changes in areas like voting rights, civil rights, child labor and gender equality. However, these social transformations have been much slower and in many cases are only partially accepted even after a century or more of effort. 

Climate change is unique because global warming doesn’t care if we agree with the science, and it doesn’t slow down because we are unwilling to act. The science is not driven by our focus on quarterly earnings and is not determined by public opinion. 

The purpose of Pathways to Action is to engage the reader in ideas about accelerating action. How can we prioritize certain approaches that allow for faster change at an industrial level? What are the biggest targets? Who can do more? What is the blueprint for action? The actions we take or don’t take will be this generation’s legacy for our children and grandchildren.

‘Rabindranath Tagore's Drama in the Perspective of Indian Theatre’ maps Tagore’s place in the Indian dramatic/performance traditions by examining unexplored critical perspectives on his drama such as his texts as performance texts; their exploration in multimedia; reflections of Indian culture in his plays; comparison with playwrights; theatrical links to his world of music and performance genres; his plays in the context of cross-cultural, intercultural theatre; the playwright as a poet-performer-composer and their interconnections; and his drama on the Indian stage.

The book explores both dramatic as well as theatrical traditions in Tagore’s plays by discussing vital issues on Tagore’s drama including gender politics; Tagore’s poetic tradition of dramatic action, time and space; his use of myth humour and satire in the Indian dramatic milieu and discussing Tagore and his contemporaries; modern Indian drama and also the nation and Tagore’s drama. The book also identifies Tagore’s drama of performance art; his stories that inspired many film creations; furthers the view of Tagore’s theatre as the creations of a poet-dramatist, poet-translator, dramatist-producer, actor-singer-choreographer and dramatist-scenographer, all the while not missing the vitality of the dramatist as seen in his intercultural performance/s; his use of environ, mise en scène and the theatrical milieu and last but not the least, the modern productions of Tagore plays.

This study examines why the Kruger Park struggled to become a leading venue for wildlife filmmaking and then, paradoxically, at a time when South Africa came under increasing political and military pressure, wildlife filmmaking took off very successfully. Another paradox is that the growth in wildlife filmmaking also paralleled the growth of wildlife hunting in Southern Africa. 

The study turns to Actor-Network theory to examine the complex interplay between local filmmakers, international commissioning agents like Mike Rosenberg, international broadcasters and the animals involved. It argues that Southern African filmmakers were often able to aim successfully both at European and North American markets and points to ways in which innovations from Southern Africa influenced broadcasting trends internationally, particularly in the move away from a British blue-chip BBC ethos and style. 

It concludes with an examination of Africam and WildEarth and the vision of founder Graham Wallington about the future of wildlife documentary. 

The demographic dividend is the name given by Harvard economists David Bloom and David Canning to the boost in economic growth that can result from changes in a country’s population age structure. As fertility rates decrease, a country’s working-age population grows larger relative to the young dependent population. With more people in the labor force and fewer children to support, a country has a window of opportunity for rapid economic growth if the right social and economic investments and policies are made in health, education, governance, and the economy. Conversely, research shows that resource requirements to support a large population of children and youth can depress the pace of economic growth and prevent needed investments in human capital. The discourse on responding to this population growth frequently excludes the youth. The result can be an apathetic community of young people who withdraw from participation in political and democratic processes.

We have compiled a series of articles that address the issue and highlight solutions from different parts of the world, from members of the Global Diplomacy Lab to external contributors: how they see their work promoting, enhancing and contributing to harvesting the demographic dividend.

What stories can they tell that can educate and inspire readers? In defining “harvesting the demographic dividend”, we want to identify ways to increase inclusion, ownership, sustainability and the impact of democracy and together, foster a shared global understanding of the challenge. The essays in the book are couched in language that is accessible, engaging, informative, entertaining, illuminating and inspiring. The book highlights, in particular, exceptional and inspiring stories that share unique perspectives on how work in one’s field seeks to, can or has promoted, provided and preserved human dignity.

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

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

Despite the great interest in and the availability of enormous literature about education in Japan, this book is a translation of the first work written in Japanese on the history of literacy in Japan. The authors are each accomplished scholars of Japanese educational history, and each provides solid empirical evidence and original analyses of literacy in their own particular specialty, from Heian aristocrats, to religious sects in the medieval period, to Christian believers in the sixteenth century, to a variety of farmers and merchants in early modern times. 

The book is unique in the sense that literacy in Japan is analysed with a high degree of methodological sophistication backed by empirical evidence in the form of “signatures” or personal marks on documents, on so many topics. The result is to show the often fallacious and easy generalizations made about literacy in Japan and to show that evidence exists to enable more robust empirical investigations to be undertaken. This book will make it possible for the Japanese case to be used more meaningfully worldwide and in comparative studies of literacy. 

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.

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.

The Last Window-Giraffe’ is a playful and personal journey through the political unrest of the seventies and eighties. It was inspired by a Hungarian children’s dictionary, entitled ‘Window-Giraffe’, which explained the whole world in simple terms; a world where everything was in order and all problems were easily solved. Popular across Europe for the best part of a decade, ‘The Last Window-Giraffe’ is a politically infused rendition of the original: quirky, astute and powerful. Péter Zilahy draws on his travels around the soft dictatorships of Eastern Europe, offering his acerbic observations on the often bizarre spectacle. In one instance he describes the carnival-like protests against the Milosevic regime in Belgrade simply and humorously. This reflects, like the format of the book, the manner in which the regime treat their people like children. [NP] Filled with his own striking photographs, Zilahy gives fascinating insight into a whole other universe behind the Iron Curtain. ‘The Last Window-Giraffe’ is one of the most unusual, beguiling books you will ever read.

For more information please see the book website:www.lastwindowgiraffe.anthempressblog.com

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.

‘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.

A collection of essays rather than a single, continuously argued monograph, Hawthorne’s Histories, Hawthorne’s World collects together the essays Professor Colacurcio has written on Hawthorne since the publication of his ground-breaking Province of Piety, elaborating and refining his analyses of how Hawthorne’s most memorable early tales “do history,” but proceeding then to explore the later productions of that author’s distinguished career. The result, in Colacurcio’s patient analysis, is something like Hawthorne’s history of his own times. To be sure, The Scarlet Letter returns to the rich theme we know as “the matter of the Puritans,” but rides up from a moment, and clearly implies, the vibrant but troubled women’s movement; and, imagining the world Hester Prynne as good as predicted, The Blithedale Romance deepens the sensitive but cautious inquiry. Contemporaneous too is the subject of The House of the Seven Gables which, stopping just short of discovering that property is theft, dares to inquire into the murky sources of aristocratic wealth and privilege in his present New England. From the moment between the early tales and the three American romances, the tales and sketches written at the Old Manse in Concord reveal Hawthorne’s fascinated and troubled response to that swirl of contemporary reform movements which historians know as “Freedom’s Ferment”; several encounter Emerson explicitly, and even more question the life-implications of “idealism as it appears in 1842,” as Emerson had defined his Transcendentalism.  From the so-called “Last Phase” of Hawthorne’s career, Colacurcio presents, along with some remarks “Chiefly About War Matters” (1862) and, more briefly still, the unfinished romances, a major reading of the work Hawthorne called Our Old Home (1863); growing out of the Notebooks the author kept while serving as American Consul to Liverpool in the mid-1850s, this now nostalgic, now fierce mix of excursion and critique reveals a great deal about Hawthorne’s social intelligence, and about his biases. Finally, Colacurcio offers a patient but somewhat resistant reading of The Marble Faun, a major effort to identify the “puritanic” element in the developing American identity but revealing, at the same time, an unsteady Narrator’s increasing hesitance about the epistemology of the “Romance.”  Literary genius beginning to doubt its gift.

Gothic has often articulated fear as much through its depictions of weather, climate and landscape as it has through its typical monsters, and the relationship between geography, the environment and travel has been a persistent characteristic of the Gothic from its earliest moments. Gothic is an innately travelling mode of writing, and the literary fascination provoked by armchair travel is central to the navigation of cultural fears: ‘strangeness’ only becomes apparent once one exchanges the homely (Heimlich) for the uncanny in new or uncharted settings. This book will argue that what differentiates Gothic travel from all other kinds is the growing realisation that the terrain across which one journeys has become ‘haunted’ by what one finds there. At the same time, that encounter similarly transforms the traveller ‘for good’: whatever ghosts we encounter abroad follow us home and take root in our collective consciousness. This book therefore argues that Gothic literary travel plays a key role in giving expression to a range of very ‘real’ haunting anxieties. The strange and discomforting landscapes into which our reading propels us allow those anxieties to take form while, in turn, our experience of journeying through these landscapes enables us, in part, to confront the fears they provoke. 

This book argues that the process and experience of travel in Gothic literature provides a unique perspective on recurring cultural preoccupations from the late-eighteenth century onward, ranging from concerns about climate change or the presence of the unseen to the negotiation of cultural difference and the apprehensions produced by various modes of modern transport. The book follows travellers who take many fictional forms – tourists, commuters, walkers, explorers, as well as the ‘armchair’ tourist or reader – as they encounter fascinating, curious and often disquieting weathers, climates, landscapes and topographies. Gothic travel epitomises the wonder, excitement, suspicion or incomprehension that arises from journeys through familiar and unfamiliar terrain. While exposure to the wild, elemental or primitive could produce the elevation of the sublime in early Gothic, increasingly the experience of travel raised unsettling questions about people and environments that lay beyond established frames of knowledge. Gothic travellers are haunted, never alone, and the experience of journeying through these landscapes provokes fears that may shadow them even after they have returned to home ground.

One of the reasons why Gothic literature remains as popular in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as it has ever been, despite our lessening belief in the supernatural or the after-life, is because it continues to provide us with a mechanism for giving shape to otherwise formless but profound cultural concerns. The book questions, however, whether Gothic literature per se remains a source of fear (as it arguably was in its earliest phases), or whether it now provides a ‘homeopathic’ response to growing social, cultural and environmental anxieties which loom large in our consciousness. It tracks the ways in which Gothic literature, from the later eighteenth century to the present, has always propelled fictional travellers abroad into cultural landscapes which prove terrifying and unknowable, but also questions whether more recent literary portrayals ask different questions of their readers in relation to the environment, surveillance, (im)migration, the foreign and technological innovation, as viewed through the lens of travel. As this study will show, these expressions of fear speak loudly to our own time, and are manifested not only in contemporary Gothic literature but in the wider cultural discourse.

The Theory and Practice of Creative Coaching is a book that seeks to unearth new and exciting ways of coaching individuals in organisations and communities generally. Much of the practical writing about coaching is dominated by the use of coaching models and approaches and less work has been undertaken exploring the human basis for this work. Taking its source of inspiration from a wide range of sources such as philosophy and the practical joys of nature this book will seek to fill some gaps in the ways in which practice unfolds. 

Much of work undertaken has been against the practical backdrop of pitching theory against practice . In addition, more recently, this is set against trends involved in Higher Education whereby mature adults are undergoing over 12 months of training to achieve the nationally recognised ILM coaching qualifications at Levels 5 and 7. This represents contact with a diverse set of cohorts of learners of over 300 students in the past 5 years for more than 100 contact hours per cohort. Mixing theory with practice is one of the strong points of these vocational qualifications ‘producing’ highly motivated practitioners forging their understanding in the fulcrum of reflective practice and individual reflexivity.

Against this backdrop ideas, concepts and new ways of thinking have produced groups of coaches who are adept at utilising core and fundamental aspects of human nature to become successful coaches. Huge shifts in understanding have been made through engaging in creative activities; to engaging in art, metaphors, nature, walking and unusual methods of engagement with a fellow human in a coaching setting. As a result, this book sheds light upon the use of creative techniques and begins to extend the possibilities for coaches and their clients. Pitched as a way in which peers and equals can work together to learn and develop alternative coaching approaches this book forms the platform for strong learning and an increased diversity of practice and understanding.

The Petersburg Noverre accounts for Marius Petipa’s ballets produced on the Russian stage between 1847 and 1910. It is organized by year starting from the early 1860s, records details of his life and the action and reception of his ballets, obscure and famous.

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

Although single fathers as primary carers are on the rise, most single-parent households in the United States are headed by women. These women are a lucrative market for parenting books and most of such books are aimed at single mothers raising sons. This intersectional study analyses a broad range of material: books written by female and male authors, African-American and white, health professionals as well as lay people, outspokenly feminist or traditionally conservative, addressing a middle-class or a working-class readership. This allows for a comprehensive analysis of normative attitudes towards parenting, showing how class and ethnicity interact with traditional assumptions of gender and biology to produce a genre of literature that is quite restrictive, perpetuating ideas of ‘intensive mothering’.

Situating these advice books within the context of parenting experts, the US fatherhood movement, the so-called ‘boy crisis’, cultural prejudice towards single mothers and what has been termed ‘neurosexism’ and ‘neuroparenting’, this study analyses the way in which the books draw on mother-blame language, misconceptions of neuropsychological research and traditional conceptualisations of masculinity and femininity to convince the mother readers that they are unable to raise a son to be a man. Using prescriptive and often alarmist language, the authors privilege traditional assumptions of gender, hegemonic masculinity and heteronormative family structures over single parent families, same-sex parenting and single mothers by choice (via adoption or ART). In doing so, the books afford very narrow parenting roles, for fathers as well as mothers, as well as a very limited range of masculine identities for young boys. Presented as common sense advice, these books are widely read by women seeking support and it is thus vital that they be interrogated for the way they continue to construct, shape and influence expectations on parenting, as well as the identities of young boys.

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.

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 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.

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.

How could American social solidarity have so collapsed that we cannot even cooperate in fighting a pandemic? One problem lies in how our values mutate and intersect in an era of runaway high-end inequality and evaporating upward mobility. Under such conditions, tensions rise between our egalitarian and democratic traditions on the one hand, and what we often call the “American Dream” of self-advancement and due reward on the other.

In our current Second Gilded Age, as in the first one from the late nineteenth century, the results of economic competition appear to suggest, falsely, that some of us are “winners” who deserve everything they have, while others are contemptible “losers.” The rich ostensibly owe the poor nothing – not even compassion or respect, and certainly not material aid through government.

In Bonfires of the American Dream, Daniel Shaviro develops these themes through close studies, in social context, of such classic novels and films as Atlas Shrugged, The Great Gatsby, It’s a Wonderful Life, and The Wolf of Wall Street. He thereby helps to provide a better understanding of what, apart from racism, has in recent years caused things to go so wrong culturally in America.

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.

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.  

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. 

‘Bauman, Elias and Latour on Modernity and Its Alternatives’ provides a synopsis of and comparison between the conceptions of modernity and its alternatives, as found in the works of Bauman, Elias and Latour. Bauman and Elias share a few relevant features bearing on their conceptions of modernity and its possible alternatives; Latour, on the other hand, when compared to these sociologists, is a maverick thinker. The set of alternatives is as follows: modernity vs. post-modernity (Bauman); civilization vs. barbarity (Elias) and successful vs. unsuccessful hybrids (Latour). Bauman’s and Elias’s conceptions of modernity differ in some important respects. The constitutive elements of modernity are, according to Bauman, cognitive order, regulation, stability of relations and identities, and the role of intellectuals as legislators. In Elias’s view, pacification and civilization are the hallmarks of modernity. Both Bauman and Elias maintain, despite their differences, that a condition of barbarity indicates the absence of civilization, but not of modernity.

According to Latour, the scientific usefulness of the concepts of modernity and, by implication, of non-modernity is questionable. If hybrids are defined as heterogeneous associations between humans and non-humans such as instruments and machines, by virtue of their great number they produce a variety of ways in which distinct and incompatible modes of knowledge may be interpreted, defined, and linked. This occurs by means of mediators.

A hybrid condition characterizes the modern world; hence, non-humans are relevant for investigating the modern world as they mediate between nature and society. The latter is a contraposition which Latour rejects, along with those between actor vs. system, science vs. society, nature vs. culture, and humans vs. non-humans. As for this last contraposition, Latour argues that this very distinction results from a process of purification, since humans and non-humans may be actors that form an integrated whole. Modernity therefore results from the two related but opposed processes of hybridization and purification. Much as the very concept of modernity is of questionable usefulness, the concept of non-modernity should also be relinquished. The existence of hybrids makes modernity and non-modernity impossible. In this sense, Latour has contended that we have never been modern. The joint product of human and non-human activities, as resulting in hybrids, may be a failure due, according to Latour, to the mismatch between the human and non-human actors.

‘British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793-1861’ focuses on the contributions made by Dorothy Carey, Hannah Marshman, Mrs Yates, Mrs Pearce, Mary Ann Cooke, Mrs Mundy, Miss Bird, Mrs Weitbrecht and Hannah Mullens, even if some were to only suffer silently while others were more active in their mission to educate and uplift native girls and women. These women rendered invaluable service in running schools and boarding houses for girls, and providing shelter and security to widows and orphans in the missions. Their work was a pioneering contribution which helped build a defining space and agency for women’s activities within a patriarchal colonial society. Their role and the challenges they faced have greatly shaped our understanding of the ‘woman’s question’ and future mission activities by women, for women in the Indian society.

The period under study sees the advent of the British in India and the beginning of colonialism and argues that the arrival of the Western missionary women led to extensive contestations and transformations in the role of women, in both India and Britain. It is important to understand exactly what was at stake when white women were brought in with a special imperial ‘burden of civilizing’ their counterparts in the colonies. ‘British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793-1861’ focuses on the contradictory nature of such positions in terms of dominance and subordination. These ‘sisters of mission’ were, albeit to a limited extent, seen as empowered agents responsible for civilizing and liberating their ‘other’ sisters. As the book works to illustrate, these first generation of emancipationists were not doing it for a universal, suffering, downtrodden sisterhood; neither were they articulate in their arguments for female emancipation. On the contrary, there was the struggle to adapt themselves to the challenges of complex factors like physical displacement from home, emotional bareness, economic dependence, family responsibilities, diseases and death, and psychological pressure to fit into a stereotype of a good missionary/wife – a role predetermined for them and many a times without their consent, which suited the largely male-dominated colonizing and proselytizing missions in British India. The issue of ‘woman’s question’ was more about the demonstration of white women’s moral authority, as distinguished from political authority exercised by men, and clearly differentiated in the private and public domains. Their moral superiority, though limited to domestic spheres, helped ratify the public imperial space as beneficial. This then was their responsibility towards their race, nation and for the empire itself.

‘British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793-1861’ chronicles and historicizes women missionaries’ contributions in Bengal, from the participation of the wives of missionaries, particularly the Baptist missionaries of Serampore and Calcutta, and their role typically as ‘helpmeets’, to single women missionaries who began arriving in the latter part of the period under study. The transition from ‘wives of missionaries’ to ‘missionary women’ was one of negotiation – a negotiation of women’s position within a very constricted patriarchal colonial framework. As ‘agents’ of emancipating the ‘other’ women, these women missionaries inadvertently opened a similar space for themselves which largely redefined their roles and identity. The book also demonstrates that the initial stages of missionary activities, secular or for conversion, were often without reflecting or internalizing native women’s position, place or their identity in the present society. Part of what has created a veritable tension between women’s role and imperialism has been the way Western feminism has ignored the realities and complexities of feminism and has universalized Western women’s experiences as representative of ‘problems of women’. Their entire exercise of educating and ‘uplifting’ native women for the purpose of ‘empowering’ the other woman undermines and overlooks the agency with which such women are already empowered. The early missionaries ostensibly did not want to ‘interfere’ in the status quo and the internal affairs of the country but brought in their baggage of ideas regarding social transformation. Ideologies of ‘ideal’ womanhood from a Western-centric authoritative position leading to much bewilderment and questioning of existing native institutions of marriage, family and role of women. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the activities of the women missionaries helped to shape the conditions under which women in future, both whites and natives, articulated and engaged in their struggle for power.

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.

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) was a preeminent American social and cultural theorist. The original essays in The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff offer an important new assessment of the major works of Philip Rieff by leading writers in the fields of social and cultural theory. These essays are the first to assess Rieff’s influence and significance as a master theorist and teacher, drawing on the contributors’ long interest in the broad scope of his work, from Freud: The Mind of the Moralist to The Triumph The Mind of the Moralist to The Triumph of the Therapeutic to his posthumous work, Sacred Order/Social Order.

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

This book-length essay on the oeuvre of a distinguished and influential poet, Fiona Sampson, is comprised of a series of interconnecting and dovetailing essays reading across and through a brilliant body of work to date. Dealing in turn with an extremely influential editorial career on the UK and internationalist scenes, much work at the interface of creative writing, poetry and social and health care, much internationally compelling, prize-winning poetry, criticism, creative nonfiction, literary theory and biography, the book aims to tie together and illuminate in different ways the variegated writing career to date, showing how the poetic métier at hand carries across many different modes and genres. Eschewing in the main a biographical approach, this is a book-length commentary that aims to tell and show the unitive story of a compelling literary career (still in vital motion), but more pressingly, that of a truly poignant literary sensibility. Under the lens of this study, Sampson’s oeuvre evinces high intelligence along with empathy, a long-borne and studied engagement with form and an approach to literary work that is deeply personable and engaging, and a democratic spirit that at the same time refuses to abandon the highest standards of excellence. Sampson is read across this work as an exemplary literary presence, after the so-called death of expertise.

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.

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.

Now widely recognized as one of the most effective methods for training future surgeons, simulation has become an integral part of the multidimensional landscape that makes up a surgical education curriculum, and its role in surgical training only continues to grow. But no matter how advanced or complex the simulation tool, it is of little use without a knowledgeable educator and a well-prepared curriculum.

This book provides an overview of the current status of simulation-based training in various surgical disciplines and explains the science of surgical education, from developing a simulation programme to properly assess surgeons-in-training, to transferring the skills acquired through simulation into real-life settings. As such, the book can be used as a guide for understanding the basics of surgical education and the growing role played by simulation-based training.

This book circumscribes both news media and popular cultural discourse dealing with the U.S. military, including its attendant industries, personnel, and leadership, over the course of a century and a half of American war. This book encompasses an analysis of American introspection, or lack thereof, describing the tone, content, lexicon, and spirit of media coverage of the American military in its engagements from the Spanish American War through to U.S. wars of choice in Iraq and the War on Terror. This work establishes conclusions about the overall way in which American media producers see the U.S. military and, in turn, describes the powerful and dynamic parameters of a discourse on the U.S. military in the public consciousness of the United States as well as international observers during the course of the last 125 years.

This new monograph is, therefore, positioned to provide an innovative and carefully researched view into the linkages between discourse and politics and between culture and policies within the United States looking at various critical moments in the history of the development of the American Empire. Ultimately, this research provides insight into the complex interrelationships between policy, the military, discourse, and culture focusing upon the power centres of discourse creation while connecting previously disjointed lines of historical and media research considering the United States and its imperial and military reach throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Potential benefits of the proposed research project are manifest within its innovative approach to the study of discourse construction, its broad historical vision and its multifaceted methodological approach applying the precepts of history, critical discourse analysis, political science, and media and communication studies. Further benefit from the proposed project includes the pioneering analysis it offers about the U.S. military itself, an institution which is routinely spared time under the critical lense of academic researchers given its primacy of place within the popular, contemporary American imagination. Through this unflinching analysis, this work is both viable and timely given the current geopolitical position of the United States at the apex of global political developments, and possibly, according to some researchers, at the beginning of the end of its military imperium.

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.

Although no less an authority than Joseph A. Schumpeter proclaimed that Antonio Serra was the world’s first economist, he remains something of a dark horse of economic historiography. Nearly nothing is known about Serra except that he wrote and died in jail, and his ‘Short Treatise’ is so rare that only nine original copies are known to have survived the ravages of time. What, then, can a book written nearly four centuries ago tell us about the problems we now face? Serra’s key insight, studying the economies of Venice and Naples, was that wealth was not the result of climate or providence but of policies to develop economic activities subject to increasing returns to scale and a large division of labour. Through a very systematic taxonomy of economic life, Serra then went on from this insight to theorize the causes of the wealth of nations and the measures through which a weak, dependent economy could achieve worldly melioration.

At a time when leading economists return to biological explanations for the failure of their theories, the ‘Short Treatise’ can remind us that there are elements of history which numbers and graphs cannot convey or encompass, and that there are less despondent lessons to be learned from our past. Serra’s remarkable tract is introduced by a lengthy and illuminating study of his historical context and legacy for the theoretical and cultural history of economics.

‘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.

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.

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.

Learning, and hence education, are in turmoil. Traditional learning techniques are challenged by powerful new approaches and insights while students and employers alike put new demands on education. The new insights come from quite different areas of science.

This book aims to provide a future-oriented picture of the various developments culminating in an educated speculation on learning and education in the near future. It has been written for leaders in education, scholars as well as practitioners and policymakers.

Learning will be a central issue in the decades to come. In the words of the recently deceased cultural anthropologist Catherine Bateson: “We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.”

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.