Anthem Press

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.  

According to Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, Śambūka was practicing severe acts of austerity to enter heaven. In engaging in these acts as a Śūdra, Śambūka was in violation of class- and caste-based societal norms prescribed exclusively by the ruling and religious elite. Rāma, the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa epic, is dispatched to kill Śambūka, whose transgression is said to be the cause of a young Brahmin’s death. The gods rejoice upon the Śūdra’s execution and they restore the life of the Brahmin. The developmental history of the Śambūka narrative begins with the appearance of this story as a late addition to the core of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa in the first few centuries of the common era, a period of immense revision to and consolidation of an idealistic political Brahminism. The Śambūka story, with its hardline depiction of varṇa-dharma, fit quite well within this project of widely asserting Brahmanical dominance. Subsequent Rāmāyaṇa poets almost instantly recognized the incident of Śambūka’s execution as a blemish on Rāma’s character and they began problematizing this earliest version of the story by adjusting the story to suit the expectations of their audiences. Such adjustments included a more sympathetic view of Śambūka that exhibited a concern for his afterlife in the form of Rāma granting Śambūka salvation, albeit through their deadly contact. This particular narrative took hold especially in medieval India when Rāma became the object of fervent religious devotion. More pointed departures from Vālmīki’s Śambūka narrative developed within Jain Rāma texts and involved a complete overhaul in its exposition whereby Śambūka’s death occurs accidentally and at the hands of Rāma’s brother, Lakṣmaṇa. As a figure who embodies Jain ideals, Rāma could not participate in any act of violence, so Jain poets removed him from any involvement in Śambūka’s execution. In a display of intercommunal exchange, this motif of Śambūka’s accidental death is also found in some Hindu Rāmāyaṇas of the medieval period. 

In the modern era, author-activists find that the story of Śambūka as known in Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa leaves out some critical details—that Śambūka was a revolutionary leader who peacefully advocated for equal access to education for India’s oppressed populations and the abolishment of the caste system. Creators of new works on Śambūka seek to enter these details into the record of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition, thus correcting what they see as centuries of misrepresentation.

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

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

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

This major work in Ruskin studies offers a timely re-evaluation of the origins, formation and workings of John Ruskin’s Guild of St George. Drawing on both significant and recently discovered archive material and existing research, this work looks afresh at the genesis of Ruskin’s ideas and their translation into practice.

Since Ruskin criticism began, attention has been drawn to the Guild of St George, Ruskin’s attempt in the 1870s and 1880s to foster a series of self-sufficient, co-operative agrarian communities founded on principles of artisanal (non-mechanised) labour, and creativity and environmental sustainability. While endorsing previous accounts which point to the positive impact of Ruskin’s Guild, this book tempers such readings by considering the often destructive effect of Guild life on the Companions who worked in the communities. An astonishing wealth of previously unpublished correspondence reveals the extent to which Ruskin’s ideological position caused a failure to translate well-meaning idealism into effective social action, and often devastating consequences for those who worked St George’s land. By drawing on entirely new material, it is possible to reveal in detail for the first time the realities of Guild life over an extended period of time. This monograph provides an authoritative work on Ruskin’s utopian experiment, enriching ongoing discussions on sustainable community and bringing Ruskin’s work to a wider audience.

Ever since Godwin announced to the world in Memoirs that Wollstonecraft had had little use for religion, most biographers, scholars, historians and readers have regarded her as an apostate. Further, the existing scholarly texts fail to demonstrate the pervasiveness of biblical references in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The Pickering & Chatto version cites 42 scriptures; the Norton Critical Edition, 41; the Longman Cultural Edition, 50; and Broadview, 92. The true tally of scriptural references approaches over 1,100 as identified in this study. Furthermore, scriptural references are rife throughout all her publications and in many of her letters, and not just those written in her youth, contradicting Godwin’s implication that she abandoned her faith by 1787.

Wollstonecraft’s biblical allusions, besides sheer volume, are noteworthy because they gave women a biblical basis upon which to contend for better education and occupational opportunities as well as for legal and political independence. That the arguments were couched in biblical rhetoric most likely contributed to their initial reception and tolerance of what were actually incendiary ideas and searing social criticism. Nevertheless, they failed to effect any apparent political change either in France or in England as Wollstonecraft had hoped. However, they would be wielded by suffragists in the next century to argue for equal opportunities for women. By the second-wave feminist movement in the 1900s and definitely by the third in the 1990s, Wollstonecraft was hailed the Mother of Feminism but also deemed not radical enough because of her biblical renderings of womanhood. It seems that in the twenty-first century, more recent publications, including several biofictions, have reinvented Wollstonecraft as a nonbeliever, lesbian and moral rebel, none of which accurately represent her life or works.

The recognition and analysis of biblical underpinnings in Wollstonecraft and Religion not only of Rights of Woman but also of her other publications and letters propose a new consideration. Ayres’s chapters that accompany the scripturally annotated text of Rights of Woman furnish biographical and historical context that offer fresh perspectives about Wollstonecraft’s religious convictions and faith.

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.

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

Have you ever wondered why many of the over 28 million small businesses in operation in the United States do not survive past the first five years? As a fellow small business owner (and professor of business administration) trying to compete in the global economy, I became interested in understanding the actual reasons that cause many small businesses to fail. This question consumed me to the point that I decided to go back to school and earn a doctorate degree in business to hopefully understand the answer.

Through my studies, I began to suspect that the main cause of failure for small businesses was the lack of understanding between the roles of management and leadership. I soon became very frustrated when I could not find research studies that showed the direct link between the necessary skills needed for small business survival.

With little information or resources to rely on, I knew that if I wanted the answers I would have to conduct my own research study to gain the necessary insight into this ongoing problem that has plagued over 50% of today’s workforce.

For two years, I studied small businesses in the global economy. After completing a comprehensive study, I was able to finally document actual information that proved the management and leadership skills that affect small business survival. Once I understood the effects of management and leadership skills had on small businesses, I wanted to apply my research to helping small business owners improve their business.

I thought about the struggles and how I could not find any books or resources that provided a ‘one stop shop’ with detailed information on how to succeed in small business management and leadership. All I had available was a lot of business books and models that were created for large corporations and had to modify bits and pieces from several resources to hopefully fit my needs. This process was very time consuming and did not give me a good sense of a how everything fit together to help me succeed.

In fact, everything I found I went through starting my own small business and wanted to create a resource guide that provided a quick resource for all small businesses.

Since there are many different types of small businesses in many different markets, it is easy to understand why there were no specific resources. A resource that looked at the primary basic functions and demonstrated the causal links between management and leadership skills had to be created that could apply to small businesses in the trade sector of the market needed to be created. ‘Management and Leadership Skills That Affect Small Business Survival’ was the outcome.

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

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

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

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.

 “Media Sociology and Journalism: Studies in Truth and Democracy proposes an accurate reading on ‘fake populism’ regimes. Greg Nielson navigates on the fruitful and relevant tradition on media and power relationships to highlight the contributions of professional journalism to the fragility of democracy” — Fábio Pereira, Chair of Scientific Journalism, Université Laval.

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 book begins with rich descriptions of the experience of despair, drawn from real life case studies from the author’s clinical practice, and a review of current evidence of suicide prevalence, risk and protective factors. A review of theories about suicide highlights two contemporary explanatory models: Integrated Motivational-Volitional (IMV) model, with focus on perceptions of defeat and entrapment; and Interpersonal Theory (IPT), with focus on thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness. The book provides an overview of recent analyses of how literary and poetic texts confront the dilemma of existence in the face of grief and loss, and how literary readings can act as points of transformation.

‘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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Schumpeter’s Evolutionary Economics’ fills the void of analysis and serves as a standard reference work on this pioneering thinker by introducing novel interpretations of his five major books and tracing the development of his intellectual framework. Schumpeter’s first German book on the nature of theoretical economics (1908) is still untranslated, but it demonstrates how he developed his evolutionary research programme by studying the inherent limitations of equilibrium economics. He presented core results on economic evolution and extended evolutionary analysis to all social sciences in the first German edition of ‘The Theory of Economic Development’ (1912). He made a partial reworking of the theory of economic evolution in later editions, and this reworking was continued in ‘Business Cycles’ (1939). Here Schumpeter also tried to handle the statistical and historical evidence on the waveform evolution of the capitalist economy. ‘Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy’ (1942) modified the model of economic evolution and added evolutionary contributions to other social sciences. Finally, ‘History of Economic Analysis’, published posthumously, was based on his evolutionary theory of the history of economics. Andersen's analysis of Schumpeter's five books expounds the progress he made within his research programme, and examines his lack of satisfactory tools for evolutionary analysis. In so doing it places our understanding of Schumpeter on a new and firmer footing; it also suggests how modern evolutionary economics can relate to his work.

Esben Sloth Andersen was awarded the Gunnar Myrdal Prize for 2010 for ‘Schumpeter’s Evolutionary Economics’. The Myrdal Prize is awarded annually for the best monograph on a theme broadly in accord with the research perspectives of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy.

'Voyage to the Moon' And Other Imaginary Lunar Flights of Fancy in Antebellum America gathers together four moon voyage stories published by Americans prior to the Civil War. Included in this scholarly critical edition are the works of University of Virginia professor George Tucker, literary magazine author and editor Edgar Allan Poe, newspaper editor Richard Adams Locke, and scientist and medical educator John Leonard Riddell. Along with a general introduction to the collection as a whole, each story has its own introductory material along with explanatory footnotes and appendixes to identify the key points of its textual and cultural history.

The four moon tales found in 'Voyage to the Moon' And Other Imaginary Lunar Flights of Fancy in Antebellum America are remarkable for the ways in which they capture a wide diversity of both literary agendas and printed material. These stories originally appeared in genres ranging from the traditional novel and the literary periodical short story to a series of newspaper articles and a scientific pamphlet. The social critiques of Tucker and Poe, the manipulative power of startling scientific revelations demonstrated in Locke’s work and the more measured scientific discussions found in Riddell all bear witness to the power of print and science in the antebellum period.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This volume brings together a variety of Patrick Olivelle’s papers on Indian ascetical institutions and ideologies that have been published over the past thirty or so years. Asceticism represents a major strand in the religious and cultural history of India, providing some of the most creative elements within Indian religions and philosophies. Most of the major religions, such as Buddhism, Jainism, and the religious philosophies both within these new religions and in the Brahmanical tradition, were created by world-renouncing ascetics. Ascetical institutions and ideologies developed in a creative tension with other religious institutions that stressed the centrality of family, procreation and society, and it is this tension that has articulated many of the central features of Indian religion and culture. The papers collected in this volume seek to locate Indian ascetical traditions within their historical, political and ideological contexts.

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

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

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

Startups are increasingly becoming the engine of innovation across all industries. We are living in an age where an entire generation of young entrepreneurs with different backgrounds and skill sets are coming together and collaborating with a desire to disrupt existing markets, challenge the status quo, replace the old with the new and, above all else, make the world a better place.

Startups, however, are constantly facing the challenge of how to make an impact given their initial small size and limited resources. Nine out of ten startups fail, and more than fifty percent do not reach past the five-year mark. The few that do manage to survive can quickly find themselves swamped in the oversaturated market, unable to make any decent progress. So how can they establish themselves among their immediate competitors, let alone defeat larger, more established companies? Is the story of David and Goliath still relevant in the modern business world? Hence the need to write an engaging book that offers unique, viable solutions to all the problems small startups face especially in their early stages.

This book provide practical teachings on how startups can strengthen their foundations, reach the pinnacle of the business world and, ultimately, become a virtuous leader of startups in the model of Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”

What does a 500-year-old figure from history have to do with the world of startups? I first encountered Machiavelli in high school in Italy. At the time, he did not represent much more to me than just another part of my studies, but he came rushing back when I moved to the US to finish high school in a small town of Ohio. I used to talk to people who knew little about Italy, but who could still quote Machiavelli’s most famous lines: “The end justifies the means” and “It is better to be feared than loved.”

Machiavelli seemed to be even more popular in America than in Italy. This triggered my curiosity and pushed me to do more research on him. I realized that throughout history, politicians, generals, philosophers and other leaders have all harnessed his philosophies in their own fields. He has also been criticized as being overly cynical, cruel or cutthroat. However, I think this is too dismissive and partial. Machiavelli was, more than anything, a pragmatic realist. He devoted himself to finding patterns in human nature and history, and was perfectly aware of what was ethical and unethical, encouraging aspiring leaders to reach their goals through “virtue”; to rely on hard work rather than luck; and to try to be loved rather than feared (while noting it is easier to be feared). He also understood that necessity and emergency compels leaders to make tough decisions.

During my studies at Harvard Business School, I began to apply Machiavelli’s principles to the business world, finding his teachings tremendously modern and useful for my own startup. I realized that as, a serial entrepreneur, I was already applying many of his tactics without even being aware of it. So I started decoding and adapting his writings to the world of startups, testing his teachings in the field.

From this experience, and from Machiavelli’s two most influential books “The Art of War” and “The Prince,” came the idea for “The Art of Startups.”

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

In the course of its unique exploration, Spirituality for the Independent Thinker combines themes from three related fields: quantum physics, theology, and philosophy. The result is a guide for independent thinkers who seek to do justice to the combination of ideas and feelings that generate spirituality.

Exploring themes of metaphysics and fundamental “ontology”—the philosophic study of being-as-such—the book singles out a constant structure of experience that we take completely for granted because it contains the reality we know: the experience of now. This is a structure that flows and it constitutes a phenomenon that scientists cannot understand or subject to experiments. They lack the standpoint from which to probe it because they are in it.

Spirituality for the Independent Thinker helps readers to navigate conceptions that are open to them as they think in an independent manner about religious issues. It confronts the darker side of reality with tough-minded candor, while offering a source of inspiration that withstands any realistic challenge: the ghostliness of the power that upholds us every single moment.

The book explores connections between poverty and migration in the context of the expansion of neoliberalism in Europe, examining these global concerns from a local perspective. The last decade has witnessed a massive, perhaps unprecedented, movement of people across Europe. Some of the dislocated are victims of war, but even greater numbers are casualties of the economic reforms which were implemented after the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe, and some 10-15 years earlier in western Europe. As this volume shows, people do not move in only one direction, from economically weaker to stronger regions; rather, movement takes place both into and out of recently created 'backwaters'. Such movements reflect the dynamic and shifting form of an ever-changing Europe, where people are responding to new opportunities for mobility, and to local inequalities resulting from political changes and economic reforms. As people seek new opportunities, movement itself becomes part of the process of generating new inequalities between regions and nations.  Symbolically and objectively the map of Europe is being redrawn. The chapters in this collection give vivid examples of not only the process of re-mapping, but also of people’s strong sense of local 'place' and their participation in global movements.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does ‘queer’ have to do with children and young people and, in particular, with literature for them? How are sexualities and gender identities depicted in writing and illustration for younger readers in a variety of languages and cultures? How are queer families and the construction of queer families portrayed? How is this depiction influenced by the way the culture in question views queer identities? What is the connection between LGBTQ+ rights and literature for children and young adults?

These are some of the questions addressed in this edited collection. While English-language LGBTQ+ literature for young readers has been and continues to be explored in some depth in academia, this is the first book to compare LGBTQ+ children’s literature from around the world and to connect the literature to greater societal, political, linguistic, historical and cultural concerns. The aim of this book, then, is to explore LGBTQ+ literature for young readers around the world, particularly beyond the English-speaking countries/cultures.

This collection brings together contributions from across the academic and activist spectra, looking at picture books, middle-grade books and young adult novels. The foci of individual chapters include the representation of sexualities and gender identities, depictions of queer families, censorship, translation of LGBTQ+ literature for young readers, and self-publishing. Ultimately, the book considers what is at stake when we write (or do not write) about LGBTQ+ topics for young readers.

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

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

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. 

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

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

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

Current debates in the environmental humanities, animal studies, and related fields increasingly revolve around this question: What to do with “the human”? Is the human a category worth preserving? Should it be replaced with the post-human? Should marginalized and minoritarian groups advocate for a universal humanism? What is the relationship between humanism and anthropocentrism? Is a genuinely non-anthropocentric mode of thinking and living possible for human beings?
This book argues that the writings of twentieth-century poet Robinson Jeffers offer twenty-first-century readers a number of crucial insights concerning such questions and timely advice about how not to be human. For Jeffers, our tendency to turn inward on ourselves and to indulge in human narcissism is at the heart of the social, economic, and existential ills that plague modern societies. As a remedy, Jeffers recommends turning ourselves outward—beyond the self and beyond the human—and learning to affirm and even love the inhuman cosmos in all of its terrible beauty. In articulating this vision of “inhumanism,” Jeffers develops a full-orbed and radical non-anthropocentrism that stretches across ethical, political, ontological, and aesthetic registers. In the process, Jeffers helps us find our way back to ourselves, but this time no longer as “human” in the traditional sense but as plain members of the inhuman world. With his inhumanist philosophy and poetics, Jeffers not only anticipates the most pressing questions and cutting-edge debates of our present moment but also challenges us to reconsider some of the key dogmas that underpin familiar discourses surrounding the Anthropocene and posthumanist philosophies and ecopoetics.

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

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

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

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.

‘Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging’ explores mediated debates about belonging in contemporary Australia by combining research that proposes conceptual and historical frameworks for understanding the concept in the Australian context. A range of themes and case studies make the book a significant conceptual resource as well as a much-needed update on work in this area. ‘Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging’ also provides an intervention that engages with key contemporary issues, questions and problems around the politics of belonging that are relevant not only to academic debate, but also to contemporary policy development and media and popular discussion.

The chapters address a variety of key issues and questions regarding the ethics of media practice and actual media practices – consideration of ethical obligations, media treatment of different populations and the degree to which media serve not only as sites through which a range of voices contribute to definitions of Australian belonging but also, significantly, as a means through which such voices can be heard. An engagement with the problem of ethical practice also asks how a greater understanding of the impact of media representations can contribute to new ethical frameworks and new forms of media practice in areas of key sensitivity such as the reporting of Islam. [NP] In addressing such issues ‘Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging’ provides an important resource for understanding, and makes a vital contribution to, debates surrounding belonging in Australia.

The book focuses on the ideological instruments that enabled the United States and the Soviet Union to consolidate their power and to project their geopolitical reach. It provides a comprehensive picture of the geopolitical outcome generated by the actions of the superpowers in the 1950s and how they affected the international political order for the duration of the Cold War. The book explores how in order to project the geopolitical power of the United States, there was a need to ensure that the countries affected by the confrontation that emerged in the 1950s would be persuaded about the good intentions of the United States when it came to promoting the economic and social rehabilitation of vast areas of the world. The 1950s saw the beginning of the idea of a “global commonwealth” of nations, aligned with the geostrategic interests of the United States and willing to accept the political and economic principles projected from Washington. In the 1950s, American Exceptionalism was informed by three distinct particularist components: faith, dominion and managerialism. The particularist markers of American Exceptionalism dictated the course of US foreign policy in the 1950s. American policy makers dealt with the threat posed by the Soviet Union by putting together policies aimed at securing the supremacy of the United States in the global order.

The Superpowers and the Cold War in the 1950s  also argues that Eurasianism became an important instrument to entrench the geopolitical influence of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. The cultural rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the countries of the Intermarium was propelled by the need to secure that area of Europe from interference by the Western powers. Eurasianism became an important instrument to legitimize the harmonization of political and economic principles in the Soviet bloc. The concept of “redemptionism” propagated by the Soviet Union during the 1950s relied on a non-universalist notion of history that allowed Moscow to achieve geopolitical preeminence in its sphere of influence. During the 1950s, both superpowers were interested in achieving a situation in which the international political system could be controlled and managed efficiently. In spite of the ideological differences that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union, there was agreement on the need to reduce the possibility of revisionist powers seeking to break the domination of the superpowers and establish independent political guidelines.

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

This volume presents the work initiated and executed under the African Tobacco Situational Analyses (ATSA), a recent major public health initiative sponsored by the Canadian government’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Conceived to illuminate the factors that will facilitate the reform of Africa’s major public health policies, this program focused particularly (but not exclusively) on policies concerning tobacco. The results, presented in this book, are an important contribution to the literature on global public health and international development, and comprise the most comprehensive evidence-based analysis of tobacco policy in the African region.

The country-level analyses of this study examine topics such as smoking prevalence, the status of relevant smoking-related policies, and the politics of public health policy reform – as well as the role played by the tobacco industry in each of these key areas. Sitting above these case studies is an overarching conceptual framework, operating with the expressed goal of creating generalizable lessons for the continent as a whole. Thus, ultimately this book permits the reader not only to grasp the depth and complexity of the tobacco situation in each country, but also to draw meaningful conclusions regarding what sort of public health policy reforms have been broadly successful across Africa – and how these successes might be replicated in the future.

For every Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google, there are literally thousands of small start-ups trying to ‘scale up’ to become the next Slack, Zoom or Uber. Less than 1% of these start-ups will be able to scale up. For the would-be entrepreneurial leader, for employees working in a start-up, for a potential investor, how to tell if the business-in-the-back-bedroom will ever see its name in lights? Does the entrepreneurial team in question have the muscle-power to succeed? Of the huge array of start-ups founded each year, how do investors increase their chances of backing the one in a thousand that will become a scaled-up company? How can an investor talent-spot entrepreneurial muscle-power? How does the typical entrepreneurial leader, the employee joining the start-up and the investor in the start-up increase the chances of their start-up making it to the 1% club? And there is considerable interest in contemporary entrepreneurial leadership practice. Many would-be founders have a view to setting-up new business ventures, spurred on by opportunities presented by the changing world (and often with your newly minted MBA degree). How can new entrepreneurial leaders convince others (and maybe starting with themselves and their family members) that they can survive and thrive in a competitive world? With the muscle to make it happen?

It all depends on whether or not they have this very specific Entrepreneurial Leadership Muscle – or if they can see it in others. As entrepreneurs, how can they identify, develop, build and use this necessary muscle to make things happen in a sustainable way? As investors, what are the readable signs of muscle-power and the willingness to develop that muscle power amongst the entrepreneurial leaders passing the radar screens? How can they screen-in and screen-out?

In the high-technology sector alone, recently established high-growth organizations are bringing new and innovative products to market at an extremely rapid pace. A commonality among these companies is, firstly, their relatively short organizational life span to-date (they are often only now about 10-15 years old) and secondly, the speed in which they have grown into multi-billion-dollar organizations. Here we are talking about the few that have made it – and how, and why. What do they have that the others don’t? How can entrepreneurs looking to stand out in this crowded and fast-paced field work to ensure survival and sustainability and growth? And attract investors with many options but funds only for a few? Again, it all depends on whether that Entrepreneurial Leadership Muscle is there and the leaders and teams can show it.

There is growing interest in urbanization as currently a third of the world’s urban population live in slums, and by 2030 there may be two billion slum dwellers across the globe (Davies 2004, 17). During economic crises, slum dwellers are involved in increasing feats of self-exploitation. The literature on slums and informal settlements tends to focus on economic survival strategies, particularly those of men. But how do women, as the most marginalized and excluded slum-dwellers, survive in the face of poverty and gender oppression? What are the emotional rather than material costs of poverty? This book conveys the rich fabric of life in the slum.

‘Body Parts on Planet Slum’ discusses the importance of Christianity and telenovelas, and explores what it is about women’s lives in particular that makes these stories so central. Yet it is also increasingly clear that for the poorest women, church attendance has become a rare luxury – whereas telenovelas are piped into their homes on a daily basis. The unemployed women watch up to six hours of telenovelas a day in the midst of arduous physical labour in the home. The women suffer in relation to their bodies, but invest in a masochistic glorification of suffering. It is this glorification of suffering that links the women’s lives to the telenovelas in crucial ways. It reveals disturbing valuations of women’s bodies that traverse reality and fiction, and connect to a central feminist question, ‘What is a woman?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transduction is beyond translation: both retranslation and auto translation move beyond the transferal of one language to another to signify the speculative attempts to examine and execute the belief, concepts, and meaning of the level of different arts. The art of translating means the analytical exercise of transferring, rotating, and twisting one language into another art, but to retranslate (or auto translate) literary translation, the objective of retranslation or self-translation is to create from translation the poetic and lyrical terms of transduction. In the translation of literary language, the translator can monopolize his situation to break up language to give a different art with or without music or another tool of the critic. The new transduction gives the audience a piece of another linguistic and/or non-linguistic art in a drawing, novel, or opera.

The semiotic scholar of literature Roman Jakobson gave a literary translation of the double words and concepts of poetical hyper translation. Language can transmit verbal translation to explore new ways of inventing and thinking about writing novels, musical theater, and the other arts. Thomas A. Sebeok deconstructed the energy of translation into the duplicated genres of artistic transduction. In semiotics, transduction is a technical expression of language and non-language, involving music, theater, and other arts. Jakobson used Saussure’s theory to give a single meaning connecting the thought and sound of words, but later he followed Charles S. Peirce’s symbolic logic with a floating sensation of the double meaning of words and concepts to give different symbols to the signs. For Peirce, literary translation becomes the graphical visions of ellipsis, parabole, and hyperbole.

Language and non-language play a role in transforming translation into transduction. Ellipsis is illustrated by Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves to give a political transformation to change Wagner’s opera, Das Rheingold. Parabole is illustrated by the two lines of thought of Hector Berlioz. He neglected his own translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, when he retranslated the vocal text to accompany the musical lyrics of his opera The Trojans. Hyperbole is demonstrated by Bertold Brecht’s auto-translation of Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. In the cabaret theater of The Threepenny Opera, Brecht recreated his epic hyper-translation by retranslating the language of the folk speech of the German working classes with the jargon of criminal slang. 

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

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

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

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

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

Simply the best atlas for students, Anthem’s ‘Modern World University Atlas’ is the essential reference resource for the contemporary world. This is the only student atlas with fully integrated study maps and other illustrations on: climate and the environment; geological processes; natural disasters; economic and social concerns; health and education; wealth and poverty; travel and tourism; population trends, and maps of the world’s 18 greatest cities.

The ‘Modern World University Atlas’ also benefits from clear, detailed and fresh political and physical digital colour maps of our world and stunning colour imagery of the Earth from space, study maps providing in-depth colour analysis of key regions and themes, a section on map-making, satellites and remote sensing, up-to-date social and economic statistics for every country of the world, a comprehensive, 16-page index of world place names and features, and a flags of the world display.

In this selection of essays written for a variety of publications and platforms throughout the 1990s (essays, program notes, conferences), Nicole Brenez sets out and applies the tenets of what she dubs the “figurative analysis” of cinema. As the title suggests, her two main interests could broadly be summarized as the “figure” (in general) and the “body” (in particular). An actor performing on screen is, of course, a body, but Brenez goes beyond psychological or purely dramatic considerations, studying how formal elements such as framing, lighting, and editing determine what a body is and an audience’s perception of it as well as how cinematic devices can be used to create new bodies – as in the science fiction films of the 1990s that posit hybrid, post-human forms. At the same time, a body can also be a collective of individuals or even themes and motifs brought together via cinematic means.
The term “figure” also has a broad and rich meaning in Brenez’s work, informing concepts such as “figural analysis,” “figural economy,” “figurative invention,” or pure “figuration.” While glimpses of these concepts have appeared in scattered translations over the years, this collection represents the first comprehensive and expansive selection of her writings on cinema in English.
Brenez is interested in the myriad of shapes that figures take in film: shadows, silhouettes, and contours, but also themes and motifs, and how these are visually and aurally manifested. She is especially interested in the ways in which an individual film produces these figures or figurative constellations. Laying out a methodology in the book’s introduction (a letter to John Ford biographer Tag Gallagher), Brenez goes on to analyze and interpret the myriad of figures found in movies by filmmakers ranging from John Woo to Paul Sharits as well as classics by Orson Welles and Sergei Eisenstein. At once rigorous and open, the originality of the films Brenez studies and her very stimulating intuitions and connections, has produced one of the major studies of cinema of the late 20th century.

In the present day, a young married couple, Asafumi and Shizuka are trying to start a new life, having had to move after losing their jobs. Asafumi decides to join the family business of selling medicines, and a notebook that used to belong to his grandfather Rentarō leads him to explore the mysterious Mandala Road in the hopes of finding his grandfather’s former customers. Shizuka, meanwhile, struggles to resign herself to her new role as a housewife and wonders if she made the right choice in marrying Asafumi.

Following the end of World War II, Saya, a woman from a Malayan native tribe, is on her way to Japan with her seven-year-old son to find Rentarō, who was her wartime lover and the father of her child. When she arrives, however, she discovers that Rentarō has another family and has no place for her. Haunted by memories of torture from the Japanese seeking information about Rentarō and the abuses she suffered working in a brothel, Saya tries to rebuild her life and learn to live with her past.

Both setting out alone on Mandala Road in two different time periods, Asafumi and Rentarō wake up one day having both entered a post-apocalyptic world, where the people seem to have mostly been wiped out by a mysterious “calamity” and the ones that remain are scarcely human. Asafumi, Rentarō, Saya, and Shizuka are all, in their own way, on a private journey to discover and reconcile themselves to the memories of violence, both seen and experienced, as they learn to live with a past that seems always to be too close behind them.

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

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

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

Roland Barthes Writing the Political: History, Dialectics, Self is a re-reading and a re-purposing for the twenty-first century of the work and the critical theories of France’s most important writer of the twentieth century. Drawing on articles and chapters published since 2007, and including new material written for the volume, it argues that Barthes’s wide-ranging analyses and critical essays – from Voltaire to Nietzsche, Marx to myth, gay love to Japan – can be applied to debates and controversies in the contemporary world. By applying his 1958 essay on Voltaire to the aftermath in France of the 2015 terrorist attacks, by using Edouard Glissant’s work as an unspoken dialogue to look at post-colonial writing strategies, the volume sets out what a dialectical critical practice might look like in our complex world of political, ethical and aesthetic choices.

In order to address the complexity of his critical practice, the study takes up a seldom-discussed notion which Barthes had originally developed in relation to the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet: that of the ‘double grasp’. This ‘double grasp’ is used to think through photography and innovative forms of historiography (including a comparison with the work of Walter Benjamin), but also to account for the ‘stereographic’ approach with which Barthes read Balzac, visited Japan and then China, and even considered both the writing self and the imagined self.

The book considers the persistence – and the functions – of myth in the era of image-saturated social media, using both early Marx and early Nietzsche, whilst relating Barthes’s radical homosexuality and his questioning of binary structures to today’s debates on post-gender. The volume ends with discussion of Barthes’s essay-writing and its similarities with the theories on the essay of Hungarian Marxist George Lukaćs in his 1910 ‘Letter to Leo Popper’, and asks whether the essay, in its many Barthesian guises, is the future for radical forms of writing in the twenty-first century.

Dignity has a remarkable resonance in contemporary life. It is used as a touchstone to mark out what is deemed good, right or proper. In all walks of public life dignity is invoked as having a talismanic power to distil the final essence of human existence. Yet, in such public discourse, largely uninformed by the signal role dignity has played in ethical thought, we rarely become acquainted with the source of dignity's imputed magical powers. ‘Social Thought and Rival Claims to the Moral Ideal of Dignity’ is a sustained attempt to rectify this oversight by following the fortunes of the idea of dignity from its humble origins until it comes to represent in our time a universal ethical ideal.

Beginning by tracing the source of dignity’s occult status from its earliest appearance in the life and thought of ancient Greece, ‘Social Thought and Rival Claims to the Moral Ideal of Dignity’ proceeds to identify dignity in the theological ethics of early Christianity through to the late Middle Ages, Renaissance and early modern period, where dignity appears for the first time in secular thought. The second part of the book picks up the growing debate in the Enlightenment and romantic period and from that point onwards concentrates on following closely the unfolding significance of the idea and ideal of dignity in the classical thought of philosophy and sociology and in more recent perspectives.

In exploring the legacy from such sources, ‘Social Thought and Rival Claims to the Moral Ideal of Dignity’ distinguishes dignity from other related ethical notions such as respect for persons, duty and compassion as they appear on the respective agendas of distributive justice, human (and animal) rights and natural law and citizenship. The course of the discussion illustrates just how wide ranging recourse to dignity has become as an ethical ideal and explores the reasons behind its resurgent modern deployment. Ironically, while the concept of dignity has, indeed, begun to feature in a range of recent public policy debates, insights from evolutionary psychology and biology tell a very different tale: that dignity is quite misconceived. ‘Social Thought and Rival Claims to the Moral Ideal of Dignity’ culminates in an analysis of the reasons behind dignity’s recently acquired negative connotation.

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

Rather than examining the fate of individual monuments, the 'Noah's Ark Project' took a strategic overview of the changing pressures on heritage.  The results can now be viewed on a wide geographical scale, presented here as a vulnerability atlas and accompanying guidelines. This atlas aims to fill the present gap in studies on the effects of future climate variations on cultural heritage, producing maps that link climate science to the potential damage to our material heritage.

The atlas gathers different types of maps and research outputs of future scenarios. Sections within the atlas include climate maps, displaying traditional climate parameters relevant to cultural heritage, and specific heritage climatologies; damage maps that quantitatively express the damage induced by climate parameters on building materials in future scenarios; risk and multiple-risk maps showing areas of increasing or decreasing risk across European regions; and thematic sections focusing on specific processes of damage that may arise from climate change. The atlas is also supported by key recommendations for policy-makers managing the impact of climate change on European heritage sites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christian Lehmann brings his experience as a musicologist, singer and academic to this fascinating journey through the origins of music and its role in human development, culture and society. The opening section examines the first stirrings of music in animals, birds and fish before moving on to humans in prehistoric times, and how musical sounds are an integral part of family bonding and social gatherings.

The second section follows the evolution of musical culture from ancient Greece and the educational theories of Pythagoras and Plato, as well as first great musical landmark in 1000 AD, when Guido di Arezzo devised the stave and music could now be written down instead of just being passed on verbally. The author examines the relationship between ‘art’ and folk music, and goes on to explore the flowering of secular music, the development of conservatoires and the democratisation of music with the rise of the middle classes and salon music. In 1877 came the second great landmark: Edison’s invention of the phonograph. Now for the first time music could be repeated and preserved, listened to anywhere, alone or in company.

The third section provides a critique of the decline of singing in our society and explores how we have become a race of listeners rather than music-makers. It considers our personal reactions to music – emotional, intellectual, subconscious and therapeutic – and the effects of the present-day ubiquitous ‘muzak’, which has made music a part of everyday life and has made it independent not just of the performer but of the listener as well.

Few books on music are as rewarding as this one. Technical terms are clearly described in a way that appeals to both the musically well-informed and the musically inexperienced. Well-chosen examples and amusing asides help to make this a highly informative and extremely readable book – a must for anyone interested in the development of music and how integral it is to the human condition.

The book scrutinizes the poetries of Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993), Lionel Fogarty (1958– ), and Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez (1943– ), focusing on their relatively comparable sociopolitical, and literary  concerns and aspirations, though they are ethnically diverse and geographically dispersed. What I have attempted to do here is an integration of their idiosyncratic differences. This objective is grounded upon the fact that the role of poetry in this struggle and the international connections between the political movements in which these poets were involved have been overlooked in historical narratives of Australia and the United States, although Aboriginal and African American representation in the political narratives did improve during the 1960s. In fact, these poets not only merged writing poetry with a commitment to their peoples’ political activism, but also actively participated in their peoples’ political activism. They collaborated with other civil rights activists and participated in rallies and demonstrations. Sanchez and Fogarty are still involved. In their poetries, they recorded their peoples’ pathos, injustices, social needs and political aspirations. Therefore, the book’s confluence of poetics and politics is original because it aims to demonstrate how these poets voice the demands of their peoples, and how they use their poetries to reflect the realities they experienced during this period. Additionally, the book demonstrates how these poets resist cultural and linguistic hegemony and how they adapt their peoples’ cultures and languages in their poetries to oppose literary universalism.

Instead of tracing the general development of Aboriginal and African American poetries during this period, I narrow the scope of my research to the poetries of these four selected poets, placing their works in broader, international contexts by drawing trans-Pacific connections between their poetries. The contribution of this book lies in its study of poetic intertextuality and common themes, and in the evaluation of the impact (direct or indirect) of African American poets, particularly those of the Black Arts movement, upon Aboriginal poets. Thus, the book should be seen as a starting point, rather than the final word on transnational exchanges between these movements. It should be noted that the poets I have chosen are not a comprehensive selection of Aboriginal or African American poets. Moreover, by selecting 1960s and 1980s as historical makers in the title of this book, my aim is not to narrow the scope of my research to the poetry publications of these poets to these decades, as, for instance, Oodgeroo began writing in the 60s and continued till her passing in 1993, and Fogarty began writing in the 70s and continues to the present, nor to limit these poets’ political and literary activism within this period, as Fogarty and Sanchez still involved in their peoples’ political activism. My intention is to demonstrate how these decades are significant in the literary and political developments of Aboriginal Australian and African American peoples, showing the role of many international sociopolitical and cultural upheavals, which took place during the 1960s, in shaping the literary and political ideologies of these poets.

 I have treated the poetries of these poets as an example of distinct poetics, which is not bounded by the borders of a territory or by geography as abstracted on a map, situating them along the lines of what Chadwick Allen (2012) calls “together (yet) distinct”. This literary-political relation enables the poetries of these geo-ethnically distinct poets to be read within a single critical frame, and we can place their poetries as part of a larger, international revolutionary ‘Black’ literary movement. As such, this book helps to identify a significant trans-local connection to add to the already existing connections between Australian Aboriginal politics and poetics and those of First Nations peoples across the globe. This synthesis can also be seen as a way to remap Aboriginal and African American literary discourses as well as mainstream anticipation of them and their pre-established literary positions. This book also invites the dominant critical studies to consider the new literary approaches adopted by these minorities, which challenge the individualistic literary genres and narratives in both countries. It is hoped that the synthesis of these geo-poetically diverse poets may stimulate further literary investigations in the field of Aboriginal and African American poetries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

War and Peace in the Worlds of Rudolf H. Sauter is a unique project which complements current trends in scholarship and the insatiable public appetite for books about the experience and impact of war. It is the first book to examine the creative life and worlds of Rudolf H. Sauter (1895–1977), the German-born artist, poet, cultural observer and nephew of the famed novelist John Galsworthy. Revealing him to be a creative figure in his own right, it examines his early life as a German immigrant in Britain, his formative years during the run-up to the Great War, his wartime internment as an “enemy alien,” and the postwar development of his intriguing body of artistic and literary work. Placing Sauter and his creative life in the historical contexts they have long deserved, this cultural biography opens a window onto subjects of war, love, memory, travel and existential concerns of modern times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) was among the most prominent sociologists of the past half-century. He co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, considered to be a modern classic of social science. His work on social theory, the sociology of religion, third-world development, and the role of capitalism in modern life define his enduring importance as a leading figure in social science. Berger established an international reputation for his various studies of economic development in different parts of the world, including Central America and South Africa.

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

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

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

This book offers a ground-breaking exploration of the aesthetics of poetic freedom. The range is broad, from antiquity to the present and from Europe and the Middle East into the poetry of the English-speaking world. Silent reading is shown as developing for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire into a fashionable way of reading, starting with the invention of the sonnet in the High Middle Ages. The social use of the word “we,” as when a society generalizes about itself, first appears in poetry in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In Goethe’s “Roman Elegies” anachronism becomes a literary device—also, it seems, for the first time—introducing a novel timelessness essential to modern affirmations of infinity.

Revealing questions about the elusiveness of poetic freedom—what does the term actually mean?—are repeatedly tested against the accomplishments of major poets such as Whitman, Dickinson, Rilke, Dante and Virgil, and their public yet intensely private originality. The result is a fresh, and well-nigh revolutionary, way of seeing literary and modern history, or an initiation into the more striking gift of aesthetic freedom.

Since the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, central banking has changed dramatically. Over the past five years central banks have intervened in both public and private debt markets, taking on functions of dealers of last resort, while simultaneously designing regulatory and resolution frameworks with the explicit aim of changing bank business models, all in order to contain and better address systemic risk. This book explores these developments through collected essays from authors from both academia and policy circles, and sets them in the context of the European crisis.

‘Central Banking at a Crossroads’ reflects on the innovations central banks have made to improve their modes of intervention, regulation and resolution of financial markets and financial institutions in four related sections: ‘Bank Capital Regulation’ examines the Basel III agreement, identifying its key novelties and shortcomings vis-à-vis its predecessor, Basel II; ‘Bank Resolution’ focuses on effective regimes for regulating and resolving ailing banks; ‘Central Banking with Collateral-Based Finance’ develops thought on the challenges that market-based finance pose for the conduct of central banking in periods of economic stability and, through a critical theoretical angle, the important role that governments play for financial markets as manufacturers of high-quality collateral or safe assets; and, finally, ‘Where Next for Central Banking’ examines the trajectory of central banking, its issues, and its new, central role in sustaining capitalism.