Anthem Press

Albert Aftalion’s exploration into the theory of periodic, general economic crises in an industrial economy outlines a conceptual framework based upon the distinction between the structural conditions that make a crisis possible and the historical triggers that give any particular crisis its specific character. This distinction is key to Aftalion’s theory and policy of the medium term and makes his contribution a forerunner of the principle of contextual emergence in complex dynamics.

This approach allows Aftalion to distinguish between different, but hierarchically related, causal layers: (i) the fundamental relationship between production and needs: capital formation is a necessary condition in order to achieve an equilibrium between production and needs compatible with increasing (or non-diminishing) per capita welfare; (ii) the more historically specific causal layer at which the lengthening of production processes as a result of the increasing utilization of fixed capital items becomes a central feature and makes it necessary to allow for adjustment periods during which the economic system is out of equilibrium and lack of time co-ordination between production and needs may generate crises; (iii) the most specific level of causation at which different institutional arrangements (e.g., private- versus social-ownership economy) determine the response patterns of individuals and groups to the mismatches characterizing out-of-equilibrium situations.

Aftalion’s approach highlights causal pluralism in economic dynamics while emphasizing that the different causal triggers are systematically related to one another in a hierarchical way. This intertwining of causal layers is especially relevant in the medium term, which makes the context of medium-term policy decisions the most difficult to detect and, at the same time, of critical importance to the success of policy measures.

The sumptuous Topkapı Palace in eighteenth century Istanbul is a place of breathtaking splendour where human foibles, love, lust and above all greed reign supreme in the lives of a sultan, a painter, a grand vizier and some of the world’s most beautiful women. [NP] Imperial favour has raised a graceful blossom to the symbol of a time that history would later name the Tulip Era. Sultan Ahmed III reigns over a still vast empire as his close companion and Chief Imperial Painter Levnî creates exquisite works of art. But real power lies with his trusted Grand Vizier İbrahim Pasha. In the background, the radiant denizens of the imperial harem fight for supremacy in their cloistered universe. [NP] How will history record Sultan Ahmed III? Hedonist, aesthete or reformer? What will happen to his descendants? [NP] Levnî barely remembers his own Christian family before he was selected as a child tribute and raised into high office by the mighty Ottoman Empire. But who is he really? [NP] Will the Grand Vizier’s quest for ultimate power yield results? [NP] How does an imperial wife justify her own wickedness? [NP] And conversely, what makes another so loyal for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer? [NP] For whose shadow will the tulip gardens long when their world comes crashing down? [NP] 'Unto the Tulip Gardens: My Shadow' is a novel founded on historical fact woven by the silken yarn of imagination. 

The pace of growth in the Philippines is slower than that of many neighbouring countries, and despite increasing growth in the period before the current global financial crisis, domestic investment remained weak, and had a declining share in gross domestic product. Understanding limits to growth in the Philippines’ economy and how they may be counteracted is crucial for policy makers seeking to encourage economic development.

‘Diagnosing the Philippine Economy’ investigates the binding constraints on economic development, by following a growth diagnostics approach. Articles within this collection cover the areas of macroeconomic management; trade, investments, and production; infrastructure, human capital; equity and the social sector; poverty reduction efforts; and governance and political institutions. The studies’ findings provide insight for politicians, academicians, and economists into the issues and their potential solutions.

The Unspoken Morality of Childhood: Family, Friendship, Self-Esteem and the Wisdom of the Everyday reflects the thoughts of a senior ethicist. Each essay begins with a homey essay about the kind of everyday event that happens to everyone and then proceeds to discuss the ethical issues raised by such an event. The manuscript is interdisciplinary, located at the intersection of ethics, political psychology, moral psychology, philosophy, and political science/political theory. It uses stories to teach ethics and falls in the virtue ethics approach to ethics, making it perfect as a supplementary text for introductory courses to philosophy, moral psychology and political theory.

The manuscript discusses complex ethical concepts such as identity, agency, self-esteem, forgiveness, relations with our parents, dealing with loss, the moral imagination, and a wide range of other issues that people confront every day.

One of the essays, “Walnut”, tells a story about the author’s visiting her grandparents in a small, Midwestern town. This is turned into a discussion of the need for roots, how children formulate their sense of self, and how politicians like Donald Trump can turn the love of family and nostalgia for the past into a vicious tool in politics in which clever politicians exploit fears of foreigners and people who are “not like us.” Another essay describes a tired mother reading a piece of science fiction late at night, given to her by one of her children. A story by Olivia Butler asks why a black woman should be interested in science fiction and shows the value of the moral imagination, as science fiction reveals how those who can imagine alternate realities can then alert us to new possibilities, and better worlds. As Robert Kennedy was wont to ask: Some see the world as it is, and ask why. I imagine the world as it could be, and ask why not? The essay uses this prompt to discuss the importance of the moral imagination and the ability some have to conceptualize their way out of a dilemma that can plague others.

Australia has a fascinating history of visions. As the antipode to Europe, the continent has provided a radically different and uniquely fertile ground for envisioning places, spaces and societies. ‘The Antipodal Utopia’ evaluates this complex intellectual history by mapping out how Western visions of Australia evolved from antiquity to the modern period, with particular focus on the long nineteenth century. The book is underpinned by the provocative argument that due to its unique ‘antipodality’ (its antipodal relationship with Europe), Australia is imagined as a particular form of utopia – but since one person’s utopia is, more often than not, another’s dystopia, Australia’s utopian quality is both complex and highly ambiguous. Drawing on the rich field of utopian studies, ‘The Antipodal Utopia’ provides an original and insightful study of Australia’s place in the Western imagination and makes meaningful conceptual and analytical contributions to the fields of utopian theory, Australian studies and intellectual history.

If governments and policymakers agree on the principles of responsibility to protect (R2P), then why do they continue to ignore them and deal with violations of human rights ineffectively? ‘Responsibility to Protect and Prevent: Principles, Promises and Practicalities’ explores the evolution of R2P, a principle which – according to its supporters – has evolved into a new type of responsive norm for how the international community should react to serious and deliberate human rights violations. Arguing that the R2P ethos has been misunderstood and used ineffectively, this work defends the validity of R2P and urges for a more practical understanding that moves beyond theory.

The progression of R2P from an initial concept to formal ratification has been a very difficult one, with a great deal of disagreement over its validity as a substantive norm in international affairs. The disagreement is not that protection or prevention are unimportant, nor that the international community does not have at least some responsibility to try to stop extreme human rights violations. Rather, it is primarily about how the fine-sounding R2P principles are supposed to work in practice, and the utility of such principles when governments and policymakers continue to ignore the basic premise of protection.

This volume presents a number of important arguments that are directly related to the state vs. human security debate, with a critical analysis of the nexus between the protection verses prevention theses Through the case study of the Libyan Crisis, Janzekovic and Silander offer an example of the discrepancy and confusion regarding how R2P should be applied in practice, and support the claim that prevention should be more than an adjunct to protection.

The aim of this book is to broaden our understanding of technological change by adopting the concept of technological retrogression. With reference to concrete cases of technological retrogression a new conceptual framework is developed. Extensive fieldwork in Sri Lanka and Malaysia forms the empirical fundament. A new method of reconstructing technological change is furthermore developed. The book contains a detailed account of the work history method, which is designed to capture changes over time where there are no statistical data available. The book contains a thorough examination of central theories of socio-economic transitions in developing countries, searching for an explanation of instances where modernization reverses. 

The exposition aims at contrasting retrogressive economic dynamics of technological change to progressive dynamics as developed by Schumpeter. At one extreme in the dimension of technological change, capital-strong production units innovate their way out of the recession through technological progress, adopting more advanced production equipment that improves productivity. Following Schumpeterian progressive dynamics, virtuous spirals of growth result. At the other end we find the producers that resort to technological retrogression, which secures survival, but which result in low labour productivity, diminishing the possibility of capital accumulation and thus modernization that could form an escape from poverty. Vicious spirals of decline result, which is the book’s main object of analysis. The theory is, thus, a contribution to understanding the anatomy of recessions.

The contention is, thus, that a choice of technology of production may lead to reduced productivity and economic decline. The concept of technological change should, therefore, not be equated solely with productivity improvements and economic development. Producers who experience technological retrogression may find themselves in the paradoxical situation of earning more by producing less, a paradox which is addressed in this book. Furthermore, where technological retrogression involves a return to organization of production of the past, this may affect the political leverage of labour, curbing social progress. Reversal of modernization, technological and organizational, is linked closely to marginalization of producers and increased social inequality. Lock-in of producers, both technologically and geographically, into activities characterised by diminishing returns, is considered a major precondition of technological retrogression. Therefore, the phenomenon is thought most likely to occur during periods of economic decline, recessions or during prolonged crises.

Almost all industrial countries have undergone strategies to maintain, or improve, competitiveness in order to improve the standard of living of their population, particularly during the last quarter-century or so. But how have they treated developing countries? ‘Competitiveness and Development’ explains how developing countries can attain competitiveness at a high level of development, examines the possibilities and constraints in achieving it, and proposes remedial measures at the national and international levels.

The author Mehdi Shafaeddin illustrates how developed countries impose restrictive policies on developing countries through international financial institutions and the WTO, as well as regional and bilateral agreements, thereby limiting their policy space for promoting dynamic comparative advantage in order to achieve competitiveness at a high level of development. Such policies, the author argues, lock developing countries that are at the early stages of development in specialization in primary commodities, or at best simple processing and assembly operations in accordance with their static comparative advantage.

To support this argument, the author critically examines the neoclassical theory of economics, which is the philosophy behind the principle of static comparative advantage as well as the policy stances of international financial institutions and the WTO. The author also reviews the historical experience of developed countries through industrialization, development and achieving competitiveness based on the principle of dynamic comparative advantage. In this context, he explains the importance of trade and industrial policies and the role of government in human resource development, innovation and technological development. To illustrate his case, the author compares the contrasting experiences of China and Mexico since the 1980s, during which time globalization has been intensified.

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) was one of the preeminent sociologists of his time. He is widely recognized for his major contributions to a number of fields, including general sociology, sociology of organizations, industrial sociology, sociology of law, and moral sociology. He was a Professor of Sociology (and later a Professor of Law and Sociology) at the University of California, Berkeley from 1952 until his (notional) retirement in 1984. He founded the Center for the Study of Law and Society (in 1961) and the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (in 1978), both at UC Berkeley. The Law and Society Center and the JSP Program are still thriving. Over the years they have brought legions of students and scholars from all over the world to Berkeley, and then sent them in turn to many of the world’s great universities.

Selznick published his first book, TVA and the Grass Roots, in 1949; his last book, A Humanist Science, appeared in 2008. In between he wrote The Organizational Weapon (1952); Leadership in Administration (1957); Law, Society, and Industrial Justice (1969); Law and Society in Transition (1978, with Philippe Nonet); The Moral Commonwealth (1992), which he considered his magnum opus; and The Communitarian Persuasion (2002). These books, and the numerous contributions he published in edited volumes and academic journals, reflect the exceptionally broad scope of his interests. His intellectual strength also stands out in Sociology, the textbook he wrote together with Leonard Broom. This textbook came out in 1955 and went through seven editions, the last one published in 1981. For some thirty years, it was the best sold sociology textbook, not just in the United States but worldwide.

In the ten chapters of The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick, three recurrent themes stand out. First, in all chapters much attention is devoted to Selznick’s impressive professional and intellectual range and to his lasting influence in a number of major fields of sociology. Second, throughout these ten chapters, the question recurs whether Selznick markedly changed his sociological or political perspectives in the course of his career, or whether there is a basic continuity and coherence in his preoccupations and convictions throughout his life. Third, while in the first chapter Selznick’s intellectual predisposition is linked to the particular circumstances of his younger years and student days, and in the last chapter it is argued that Selznick’s distinctive intellectual perspective can best be ascribed to his “ecumenical sensibility,” all the chapters in between make substantive contributions to revealing the importance of the humanist impulse underlying Selznick’s sociology.

In order to capture the spirit of this towering sociologist, this man of all seasons, the book devotes one of the chapters to a historical symposium, in which Selznick himself responds to critics of his magnum opus, The Moral Commonwealth. The other nine chapters of this volume have a different background. They embody the legacy of Selznick’s humanist science. They come from different corners of the academic world: sociology, organization studies, law, political science, philosophy. But they all cross disciplinary boundaries, bridge disciplinary divides, and display an awareness of and respect for Selznick’s humanist sensibility. Selznick would have felt very comfortable in this company. In that sense, all the chapters of The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick are true companions to Selznick’s sociology.

This critical study examines the theme of interpersonal encounter in a range of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century travel writing written in French and Italian. Structured typologically, each chapter focuses on a typical activity that brings traveller-protagonists into contact with those they encounter: guiding and interpreting, hosting, staring and photography, challenging, and accompanying. Drawing on a wide variety of writing, the study offers a unique focus on this central but overlooked aspect of travel, demonstrating the key place that encounter occupies in the contemporary travel culture.

With reference to the literary critical study of travel writing, sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of tourism, as well as research in French and Italian area studies, the volume locates encounter firmly within the context of modern tourism. Elucidating the nature of encounter in unprecedented ways, the study demonstrates how the treatment of encounter determines the generic boundaries of travel writing and how narratives of encounter reveal the gap between ideals and practices in travel. The volume also analyses the dynamics between the traveller and ‘travellee’, as they are represented in narrative form, re-evaluating traditional notions of the traveller’s power and examining the potential for travellee agency, with particular reference to discourses of authenticity and ethics.

The core concern underlying the various problems in applied ethics is that of human rights. While most writings on human rights deal with its legal, political and socio-economic aspects, this collection instead addresses the philosophical aspect which has hitherto been neglected. Furthermore, the book explores the Indian counterpart of the idea of human rights which can be found in the notion of 'dharma'.

The text addresses issues of conceptual analysis as well as contextual applications of the idea of human rights and its fine nuances. It also contains papers which analyze the concept of 'dharma', raising questions on whether this concept can do 'double duty' for the notions of human rights as well as the notion of human duties. The collection offers papers on human rights issues of different categories of people, including ethnic minorities, homosexuals, women, mentally ill people and prisoners. The papers in this volume also afford grounds for comparative study.

This book provides a sociological examination of gender issues concerning the evolving place and role of women in the world of heavy metal. Grounded in feminist theories of gender difference and in close dialogue with relevant thematic studies from various perspectives, the study specifically analyzes how women are perceived to ‘do gender’ by members of the heavy metal community, which has traditionally been largely composed of men and is commonly known for its hypermasculine qualities.

Relying on semi-structured interviews with self-identified fans of heavy metal, this work reveals that the respondents describe their music subculture as traditionally dominated by men. Yet, they also note distinct signs of the progress women have made in entering into and participating within the heavy metal culture on terms aspiring to equality with the men of their music community. 

Despite the changes that are perceived as legitimately positive for women, both in the world of heavy metal and in terms of women’s broader standing in society, gendered conditions driven by masculinity continue to exist for women in heavy metal. Even as women are slowly yet steadily finding their way to develop what might one day become, but as of now not yet is, a realized and acknowledged identity and culture of heavy metal feminism, patterns of masculinity continue to hamper gender equity in this area of popular culture.

“Textuality, Culture and Scripture,” a study of the necessary and close relations between the three concepts, puts forward three main arguments. The first is that Western modernity retained the necessary role of texts and textuality in culture well into the twentieth century, although decreasingly so, until their role was increasingly displaced by materialist assumptions and theories. Taking as its starting point the so-called textual turn in cultural theory, the first argument is for the necessary role of textuality in understandings of culture.

The second argument is that textuaity is necessary in and for cultural, group and personal identities and that the texts of primary importance for identity can be related to what is generally thought of as “scripture.” It moves on to posit “scripture,” so understood, as a necessary category in an adequate textual theory and relates textuality and “scripture” to identity, primarily in terms of the potentials of texts for relating constancy and change to one another. 

The third argument is that the Bible has been and continues to be for so many people their “scripture” because it provides what people, groups and, at times, also cultures need to have as identity or an adequate worldview, especially the relation created by biblical texts between stability or constancy and change or disruption. The book concludes with the proposal that textual locations or identities can be evaluated for whether or not they provide ways by which past and future, tradition and innovation, or constancy and change are related to one another.

The expansion of Mumbai over the last four centuries has been documented in great detail by both contemporary writers and historians, yet this narrative stands out as an alternative, unique and authentic voice. Quite simply, it is a book about the city like no other. Govind Narayan’s ‘Mumbaiche Varnan’ was the first full account of Mumbai in any language, written just before the explosive growth and renovation of the city.

Guiding the reader on a tour of the sights and sounds of an emerging city struggling to shake off colonialism and wrestling with the formation of its own budding identity, Narayan’s beguiling book offers descriptions of Mumbai’s daily life, its people and its institutions: the parts of the whole that come together to create this diverse and vivacious place. In addition to a detailed structural overview, the author provides a ground level account of the street life and market places rife with gambling and criminal activity. In every sense, this valuable text is a rare and enthralling glimpse into a fascinating period and place otherwise lost to time.

Translated into English for the first time, and fully illustrated and with a detailed glossary and biography of the author, this edition does full justice to this remarkable historical document.

In Kolkata’s traditional potter quarter of Kumartuli, a modern and a competitive market oriented approach to life is concealed behind tradition. Among the potters inhabiting the dirt-floored workshops of this caste-based neighbourhood, the history of a modern and economicly neoliberal-minded India unfolds. To these contemporary potters, caste is in their blood, caste is about being a creative and independent artist, and caste is about business as they engage in a competitive market to sell their artworks. This ethnographic study presents an analysis of these potters’ lives and the related commodification and instrumentalization of caste. An important insight is that Kumartuli consists of a group of artisans turned artists who do not display passive responses to colonial and capitalist encounters. On the contrary, this monograph unearths an ingenious and business-minded group that engages actively with the modern and economic developments of society at large, and, in the process, redefines the concept of caste identity. This study suggests a new academic direction for the study of modern India, and of caste in particular, through an empirically grounded portrayal of the synthesis of traditional categories and contemporary realities.

In Kolkata’s traditional potter quarter of Kumartuli, a modern and a competitive market oriented approach to life is concealed behind tradition. Among the potters inhabiting the dirt-floored workshops of this caste-based neighbourhood, the history of a modern and economicly neoliberal-minded India unfolds. To these contemporary potters, caste is in their blood, caste is about being a creative and independent artist, and caste is about business as they engage in a competitive market to sell their artworks. This ethnographic study presents an analysis of these potters’ lives and the related commodification and instrumentalization of caste. An important insight is that Kumartuli consists of a group of artisans turned artists who do not display passive responses to colonial and capitalist encounters. On the contrary, this monograph unearths an ingenious and business-minded group that engages actively with the modern and economic developments of society at large, and, in the process, redefines the concept of caste identity. This study suggests a new academic direction for the study of modern India, and of caste in particular, through an empirically grounded portrayal of the synthesis of traditional categories and contemporary realities.

The use of smartphones displays many facets of contemporary mobility. Smartphones and those applications downloaded to the device enhance connectivity in regard to socialisation, entertainment, transactions, networking, activism, and mobilisation. While the device and applications help community building and boost a sense of belonging, they also generate alienation, exclusion and marginalisation. Such online mobility of capital, commodity, idea and emotion visualised on smartphones cannot take place without the parallel existence of technological, sociopolitical and economic infrastructure that is established in the physical world offline. In this light, this book argues that the use of smartphones, and the constant switch between online and offline, has meshed virtual, social and physical mobilities together. However, such inseparability is yet to break down the boundary that marks their distinctive and discrete existence. Put simply, the absence, loss, outage, switch-off, unaffordability, or confiscation of the device can easily obstruct this meshed mobility. Interrogating what causes these obstructions will highlight the indispensable role played by the material and social infrastructure in this meshed mobility as well as the embedded structural constraints. It is equally important to look at migration and mobility beyond the points of departure and destination and trace the process in between, as scholarship in migration studies has advocated. Thus, this book offers an insight into the compression and tension between online and offline and the interlaced modes of mobility. On the whole, the articles included in this book aim to answer two critical questions: (1) How does the use of smartphones by migrants and the people connected with them generate new modes of mobility? (2) How do online activities and offline infrastructure interact and result in this compression? 

In answering these two questions, the authors seek to understand how the online–offline divide and the shift between physical and virtual worlds affect East Asian migrants’ activities. They investigate how these migrants’ mobility patterns are changing through such compression and tension between online and offline. The book will show how smartphones and the associated applications facilitate the expression of emotions and search for intimate relationships, expedite the movement of capital and commodity, enable public communication and social action and solicit political allegiance to the state or political parties. This spontaneous mobility in the virtual space visualised on smartphones obscures the physical separation between origin and destination. It also generates the space in between for network making and mobilisation. On the other hand, physical and virtual mobilities continue to be constrained by the tangible and intangible infrastructure created and administered by the state and the market. That is, not only is the ability of people, capital, commodities and ideas to cross borders regulated by the state, but the transmission of data related to these movements, in the forms of text, sound, image, graphics, or video, is also at the mercy of the operation of the infrastructure built by the state and the market. In sum, opportunities and resources emerge from this parallel between online and offline. However, their constant compression also limits personal agency and generates new restrictions or reifies existing constraints.

Lockdown, a measure enforced by governments around the world to suppress the spread of Covid-19, has made the compression between online and offline a daily reality. Whilse contemporary mobility continues to be overshadowed by this ‘new normal’, this edited volume seeks to re-examine the mobility and migration in the increasingly overlapping virtual, social and physical spaces. To achieve this goal, this volume offers an interdisciplinary lens through which to grasp the symbiosis between migration and ICT and underlines how countries in East Asia, Europe and North America are connected via migrants’ use of smartphones. Owing to this compression between the virtual and physical worlds, migrants, with their various skills, class, gender, sexuality and age, perform their intimacy, entrepreneurship and activism in relation to their fellow migrants, family members, partners, clients and the state at the crossroads between online and offline spaces. The use of smartphones enables them to exert their agency, empower others and conduct businesses not only for financial gains but also to satisfy their sense of care and morality, and interact with their governments’ political agendas. Presenting these cutting-edge findings drawn from East Asian migrants’ everyday experiences and practices, this book will make a lasting contribution to an emerging migration scholarship intersecting transnationalism, virtuality and mobility. 

This first of three volumes focuses on the evolution of Bengal's economy and society over the entire pre-colonial period beginning from pre-historic days. There is no documented, authentic history of Bengal. Indeed, more of the early history of India can be learned from the writings of other nationals. Yet even this material is very much related to chronologies of regimes and local to urban settlements and centres of trade. There remains little or no information on the villages where the vast majority lived and still live. Furthermore, until this work, little or no consideration has been given to the hugely influential period between Vasco de Gama's journey to India in 1498 and the battle of Palashi in 1757, a period in which the Mughal Empire held political power while the English, Dutch, French and Danes and other European nations grasped and held on to economic power. Much has been written on the Mughal Empire, but little of the role of the European trading companies in the two and a half centuries preceding Clive's victory. This book addresses that void and seeks also to explore the political, social and historical context in Bengal that facilitated the transfer of power into European hands. Given such a lack of source information, the author examines oral history, carried from generation to generation, recognizing their fallibility, but using those histories to corroborate what is known from other sources – from archaeological findings (coins, inscriptions, copper plates) through (invariably biased or localized) accounts from travellers, to economic, agricultural and ecological factors – relating them to known chronological events to provide a well-rounded history and, indeed, a study that uncovers the roots of the many issues in the colonial and post-colonial eras.

The collected essays from noteworthy dramatists and scholars in this book represent new ways of understanding theater in the Middle East not as geographical but transcultural spaces of performance. What distinguishes this book from previous works is that it offers new analysis on a range of theatrical practices across a region, by and large, ignored for its history of traditions and cultures, and it does so by emphasizing diverse performances in changing contexts. Topics include Arab, Iranian, Israeli, diasporic theatres from pedagogical perspectives to reinvention of traditions, from translation practices to political resistance through various performances from the nineteenth century to the present. 

The book is, therefore, concerned with not just the theatrical content of specific or range of plays in a variety of mediums, from stage to the radio, but also political implications, changing imaginaries of home and exile, and practices of identity through a range of performances in both local and translocal settings. The book argues that there are indigenous performers, ranging from actors to producers and audiences, who (re)make theatre through the reinvention of traditions, pedagogy, media, and translation. The book also shows that while all theatre is performance what precisely “performance” means is contingent to the lived context of audiences and performers who make theatre in its diverse forms and also in response to conflict, war, occupation, patriarchy, home, and exile.

‘Philosophical Meta-Reflections on Literary Studies: Why Do Things with Texts, and What to Do with Them?’ takes up key meta-questions in the humanities, with focus on contemporary literary studies, philosophically examines the nature of knowledge therein as well as the implications of certain popular critical approaches, and addresses the effervescent question of ‘relevance’. In contrast to usual works on literary theory, or on philosophy of literature for that matter, this book presents an integrated meta-reasoning on the foundational questions of literary studies from an interdisciplinary perspective – in a manner of intertextual informality. It endeavours to articulate a rationale for the humanities in general and literary studies in particular. It philosophically examines the implications of, and assumptions behind, three popular tendencies in contemporary literary criticism – textual deconstruction, ideological criticism and constructivism. It also introduces the reader to possibilities of non-reductive reasoning with regard to the relation between the aesthetic and the political. With his multidisciplinary background, doctoral degree on an encyclopedic author who extended the frontiers of fiction with his highly experimental writings (James Joyce) and past engagements with vital issues in the humanities/literature, Jibu George is in a position to deal with foundational questions therein. The book endeavours to fill the gap between theory and practice; its metacritical reflections redefine the way critics interpret texts, teachers teach them, students study them and researchers grapple with their research problems. It also proposes an array of new concepts for the understanding of literature which have a significance beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Today, in an age of globalization, religion represents a potent force in the lives of billions of people worldwide. Yet when social theorists examine the impact of globalization on contemporary religious movements, they tend to focus on issues such as Islamic fundamentalism and threats to US or global security. This collection of essays takes a different approach, analyzing – with special reference to Asia – religion through lived experience. The key issues covered in the volume include: how religious impulses contribute to globalization; how religious groups and organizations repackage traditional beliefs for transcultural appeal; how religious adherents cope with external threats to identity; how new technologies are reshaping the nature of religious beliefs and images; and how local and global religious influences blend and/or clash. Far from religion being a subject of peripheral concern to globalization, the contributors demonstrate that from the most basic level of our interactions with the natural environment to the socio-political behavior of the “great religions” – and even to the profusion of folk and pop culture phenomena – the influence of religion upon globalization, and vice versa, is apparent at all levels.

The Roxburghe Club, founded in 1812, has an unbroken publishing history from 1814 to the present day. Since the Club’s edition of ‘Havelok the Dane’ appeared in 1828, the Roxburghe has gained a reputation as a producer of beautifully printed editions of manuscripts and reprinted early books. The founding period of the Club, however, has been viewed with less approval, often seen as a frivolous, unscholarly period of wasted years when little of value was produced by a membership composed of dilettante aristocrats.

This work offers a new narrative of the formative years of the Roxburghe Club, for the bibliomania of the Romantic period and for early nineteenth-century antiquarian culture and its relationship to the emergent popularity and status of English vernacular literature. It addresses what is shown to be a long-repeated myth: what the Club was and whether its scholarship and editing of early English literature merited respect or mockery. The book covers the make-up and membership of the Club including social and political affinities, literary and scholarly achievements and the substantial contribution made by the Club to widening awareness and understanding of earlier English writers and the establishment of a canon of English literature. This revised history offers an alternative narrative for the move between antiquarian and scholarly areas of influence in the study of English literature, and offers a plausible mechanism for the growing acceptance of vernacular English literature, both in academia and in a more general cultural sense.

Dante and the Night Journey articulates a psychological approach to the Commedia, based on the Jungian concept of the descent into the darkest possibilities of the self and of human nature, which is necessary for spiritual progress.  Different chapters explore Dante’s growth in the problematic areas of love, anger, and ambition, and draw analogies between his journey through purgatory and contemporary experiences of recovery.  The last chapter, “Identity in Paradise,” examines telepathic communication there in the light of Object Relations work on inter subjectivity.

 The book emphasizes Dante’s universality, and takes issue with the tendency among professional dantisti to read him exclusively in terms of the theology of his time.  I think it will be of particular use to those who teach Dante to undergraduates, allowing students to connect their reading with their own lives.  My hope is that the personal side of the book will also speak to those who have undergone their own night journeys, or embarked on a spiritual path.

Spanning a decade of Michael Marder’s contributions as a public intellectual, Senses of Upheavals documents a period of exceptional global turmoil. Thrown into mayhem by right-wing populisms and a pandemic, combined with skyrocketing economic inequalities and worsening environmental crises, the world is on the verge of collapse. Could revolutionary practical-intellectual proposals to learn how to coexist from plants or to rethink the very meaning of energy chart the way to a better, more livable, and, perhaps, calmer world? Nonetheless, such proposals themselves constitute nothing short of an upheaval in philosophy, plant sciences, and environmental studies. We are doomed to upheavals, it seems; the point is not to deflect, but to choose judiciously among them.

In considering Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot', a novel less easily defined in terms of plot and ideas than his other major fictional works, Sarah Young addresses problems in the novel unresolved by previous interpretations, and in doing so fills a significant gap in Dostoevsky studies. 'Dostoevsky's The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative' provides an innovative theoretical framework for an analysis that integrates structural and narratological considerations with thematic (religious and ethical) aspects, by focusing on the characters' interactivity as the most fundamental level on which the ethical systems of the novel are enacted. It examines the questions of what ethical bases are put forward by the novel, what faith-issues and philosophical world-views they derive from, and how, in terms of structuring and narration rather than simply thematically, they are presented in the novel. For the first time, through the concept of scripting, the author shows how the ethical becomes the foundation for the narratological in The Idiot. No other book on Dostoevsky has addressed the question of ethics, which is so important to the study of Dostoevsky, particularly in the light of recent work on the religious dimension of his novels, within the context of narrative and Bakhtinian dialogue. This substantial new work will appeal to academics, postgraduates and undergraduates working on Dostoevsky and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian novel in general; as well as scholars in the fields of literary theory, including Bakhtin studies, narratology, literature and ethics.

Sociologists and social theorists use the term ‘social’ frequently. We talk of social relations, social media, social networks, social factors, and so on, as well as ‘the social’. But do we always know what we mean or what we are invoking when we deploy the term ‘social’?

The concept of the ‘social’ has often been treated as almost self-explanatory, inherited from the works of the instigators of sociology and social theory who, it is assumed, all meant the same thing by the term. ‘Rethinking the Social’ argues that this is not the case, and that there are major differences between their approaches. This the first book to systematically analyse the different concepts of the social developed by Durkheim, Marx and Weber. It examines how the concept of the social became unproblematic for twentieth-century writers and suggests that debates surrounding this concept remain very much alive. Building on A. N. Whitehead’s work, Halewood develops a novel ‘philosophy of the social’.

Originally published in 1860, the formative Gothic novel ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835–1921), one of nineteenth-century America’s most significant woman writers, relates the tale of a tormented British aristocrat who struggles to retain his sanity while suffering horrifying visitations from the spectre of his dead lover amid the agonies of an already fragile mind. Setting her tale in the enigmatic Sir Rohan’s beautiful-yet-decaying estate, Spofford immerses readers in a ghost story that marries lush imagery with an atmosphere of impending, mysterious doom.

Upon its initial publication, a reviewer writing for ‘The Baltimore Sun’ deemed ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ as ‘a strange, weird production, fascinating and exciting […] A work of genius and not without moral significance’. Dating from a time when women writers like Spofford were increasingly making their voices heard by reshaping the character of popular American literature, ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ remains to this day an engaging and important work of Gothic fiction.

Spofford was, in her time, one of the most popular writers in America, and her work garnered praise from such notable literary figures as Henry James, T. W. Higginson and Emily Dickinson (who admitted she found some of Spofford’s writing frightening). ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ is, then, a rare mid-nineteenth-century Gothic novel by an influential American woman author. It is also – simply put – a good read.

Can ethics be hacked? Can new and unexpected meaning be found in or behind established traditions of moral discourse? Does not the digital transformation challenge us to develop a digital ethics that is just as disruptive and transformative as the technologies it proposes to regulate? Would ethical hacking be the same as hacking ethics? This book attempts to answer these questions. The occasion for this attempt is the digital transformation, the advent of a global network society, the big data revolution, datafication, and whatever other terms come to mind to describe our present historical moment. In the face of this changing reality, ethics has attempted to become digital ethics. No area of personal or social life is not conditioned by the digital and everything that it stands for and everything it brings with it. Marx would probably have been overjoyed to learn that very soon there will be no more workers since robots will do the work, that everyone will own the means of production, that is, their own creativity and skills, and that a sharing economy will largely replace capitalism. But would he be happy about the prospects of a posthuman or even transhuman world in which not only intelligence but also agency and identity are distributed among heterogeneous networks of humans and nonhumans? Would he be happy at the prospect of a data-driven society in which decisions are made based on evidence and not intuition, gut feelings, cognitive bias, prejudice, experience, and inherited assumptions? Indeed, not only Marx but practically no theory or world view that has arisen within the modern period, including ethics, finds itself able to cope with the new digital world order. Instead, we are experiencing in all areas the defensive reaction of Western industrial society to the disruptive influences of digital technologies. The world is changing. The digital transformation disrupts traditional forms of order, whether it be the order of knowledge, the order of cooperative action in social organizations, or the self-understanding of human existence.

The world of Western modernity is disappearing and a new world, let us call it a global network society, is emerging in its stead. For established institutions and habits of thought, this is a threatening and highly uncertain situation. Facing up to this situation does indeed have an ethical dimension; it does call for ethics. But an adequate moral response to this situation is not and cannot be merely applying traditional values and norms to digital technologies. Nonetheless, the current discourse of digital ethics consists almost entirely of attempts to apply traditional normative ethics to the development and deployment of new technologies. The thesis of this book is that no amounts of rights and duties, of moral norms and ethical imperatives, no list of ethical guidelines or principles of good AI or ethical big data are going to have the slightest effect if they do not leave the presuppositions, convictions, and traditions of Western industrial society behind and embark upon exploring a new world with new values and new forms of responsibility and accountability. This is the challenge of hacking digital ethics. The hack, from this point of view, consists of breaking into the codes of traditional moral discourse and redesigning things so that something like digital ethics can appear unconcealed from the outworn and concealing veil of modernity. 

Perhaps, despite all the publicity and attention, the hasty founding of institutes, centers, and departments for digital ethics, the activism of non-profit organizations, and the flood of guidelines, declarations, and programs supporting ethical design, development, and deployment of technology there currently is no such thing as digital ethics. There is only modern Western ethics, that is, ethics that arose within modern Western society, that is, within a no longer viable social order and a passing historical moment. It could be that a uniquely digital ethics is waiting for the hack to come into view for the first time. One could even go so far as to claim that ethics today is fundamentally dependent upon the hack and not the other way around. It is not hacking that needs ethics; it is ethics that needs hacking. Could such an endeavor be judged by the standards it leaves behind? Can the global network society be judged by the standards of Western industrial society? What new norms take the place of the old ones? And what does ethics become, when it no longer answers to the questions of the world in which it was formed, which defined what it was, and which, whether we like it or not, no longer exists? This book is an attempt to answer these questions and open up the possibility of a digital ethics capable of addressing the problems of the global network society.

‘Citizenship and Statelessness in Sri Lanka’ examines the loss of citizenship and statelessness of Indian Tamil estate workers in Sri Lanka. The loss of citizenship this community suffered over 60 years ago continues to dominate and disrupt their lives, contributing to poor working conditions, impoverishment and general marginalisation. By analysing the context of the formal agreement between the Indian and Sri Lankan government that led to the loss of citizenship Kanapathipillai reveals the economic, electoral and ideological issues that influenced the decision, and introduces gendered notions of citizenship and the agency of the workers into the discussion of the phenomenon.

‘Citizenship and Statelessness in Sri Lanka’ approaches the issue from a Sri Lankan perspective, thereby bringing a distinct new voice to scholarship on this subject, which has previously focussed on the inter-governmental and foreign policy implications of the agreement. By breaking the 'view from above' approach, and listening to the 'voices from below' of the Indian Tamil workers who have suffered as a result of the agreement, Kanapathipillai successfully reframes the parameters of scholarship on this subject.

Why do climate and financial crises pose such extreme risks? And what does it take to respond effectively to those risks? Extreme weather events – storms and sea-level rise, heat waves, droughts and floods – seem ever more common and extreme, while scientists warn of even greater climate risks ahead. Financial failures on the scale of 2008 make a mockery of the supposed efficiency of the market economy. None of this would be possible in the world as imagined by conventional economics – an imaginary land of gradualism, equilibrium, well-informed rationality and the win-win solutions dealt by the invisible hand.

The erratic rhythm of boom and bust in financial markets could be explained either by the patterns of crowd-following behaviour among investors, or by the unequal distribution of wealth (and the impact of the largest investors on the markets). Climate crises reflect the fact that natural systems can reach tipping points or critical transitions, where gradual change gives way to large-scale discontinuous changes. The economics of climate change has lagged behind the science, understating the severity of the problem and the likelihood of a crash.

While the causes of climate and financial extremes are distinct, the implications for public policy have much in common. The frequency of extreme events, of varying sizes, means that there is no way to predict the likely size of future crises. The traditional approach to risk aversion cannot account for longstanding patterns in financial markets. Better theories of risk call for more precautionary approaches to both financial and climate policy. In the frequent cases in which potential outcomes have unknown probabilities, the best policy is based on the worst-case credible scenario. When a single catastrophic risk commands everyone’s attention, a World War II-style, costs-be-damned mobilization is the right response. There is no formula for perfect responses to extreme risks, but there are important guideposts that point toward better answers.

‘British Depth Studies c500–1100 (Anglo-Saxon and Norman Britain)’ is a collaboration between academic specialists and experienced schoolteachers to provide a reliable and up-to-date summary of Anglo-Saxon and Norman England, complete with original sources, for use in schools. In particular, it is designed for students and teachers preparing for the new GCSE ‘Anglo-Saxon and Norman England’ British Depth Study components of the Edexcel and AQA examination boards. Eight chapters, each prefaced with a timeline and an overview, deal systematically and clearly with all the key issues defined in the exam specifications. Each chapter concludes with exam-style questions and guidance for further reading. The book provides students with a useful section detailing the character of the question types set by both examination boards and guidance on what is required to achieve a high grade at GCSE. At the end of the book is an essential glossary.

‘British Depth Studies c500–1100 (Anglo-Saxon and Norman Britain)’ includes many carefully chosen primary sources, a large number of which have never before been made available to students at this level. These serve to provide a richer, fuller flavour of the period than other textbooks. The sources are ‘folded’ organically into the narrative, so that history is presented in its most attractive format: as a story.

Over the next decade, states will be carrying out large-scale registrations in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aim to provide more than one billion people around the world with evidentiary proof of their legal and, increasingly, digital existence. 'Legal Identity, Race and Belonging: From Citizen to Foreigner' is an important book which identifies a connection between the role of international actors, such as the World Bank and the United Nations, in promulgating the universal provision of legal identity and links these with arbitrary measures to restrict access to citizenship paperwork from (largely) Haitian-descended people born and living in the Dominican Republic. The book provides the definitive analysis of the events leading up to the controversial 2013 Constitutional Tribunal ruling that rendered the Dominican plaintiff Juliana Deguis Pierre stateless. Hayes de Kalaf illustrates how measures that purposely blocked people of Haitian ancestry from accessing their legal identity not only affected undocumented and stateless populations – persons living at the fringes of citizenship – but also had a major impact on documented people; Dominicans already in possession of a state-issued birth certificate, national identity card and/or passport. The book illustrates the complex and contradictory ways in which digital identity systems are experienced, thus challenging the assumption within current development policy that the provision of ID to everyone, everywhere will lead to the inclusion of all citizens.

Professor Das provides a fascinating study of the issue of ethnic politics in multi-ethnic Third World countries and discusses the non-convergence of state and nation in the context of Kashmir and Sindh. The artificial de-colonization process in the South Asian sub-continent resulted in the construction of national frontiers for its two successor states that did not rest on a synchronization of ethnic and state boundaries. Consequently, cross-border loyalties amongst significant sections of the population survived the boundaries imposed between the two successor states. In the context of centralizing nation-building strategies, when ethnic political assertions occur in outlying or frontier areas of these nation-states, the distinction between domestic and external affairs or between home and foreign politics tends to lose its significance in the traditional sense. Political actors from across the borders of neighbouring states can then deny the marks of their different objective nationalities and treat themselves as members of a single 'loyalty group'.

Thus, ethnic politics transcends its domestic contours and helps foment regional tensions. In such circumstances, ethnic assertions tend to constitute vital local or domestic ingredients that define the national security priorities within a particular region. The current insurrection in Kashmir and turmoil in Sindh superbly demonstrate this pattern.

Over the next decade, states will be carrying out large-scale registrations in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aim to provide more than one billion people around the world with evidentiary proof of their legal and, increasingly, digital existence. 'Legal Identity, Race and Belonging: From Citizen to Foreigner' is an important book which identifies a connection between the role of international actors, such as the World Bank and the United Nations, in promulgating the universal provision of legal identity and links these with arbitrary measures to restrict access to citizenship paperwork from (largely) Haitian-descended people born and living in the Dominican Republic. The book provides the definitive analysis of the events leading up to the controversial 2013 Constitutional Tribunal ruling that rendered the Dominican plaintiff Juliana Deguis Pierre stateless. Hayes de Kalaf illustrates how measures that purposely blocked people of Haitian ancestry from accessing their legal identity not only affected undocumented and stateless populations – persons living at the fringes of citizenship – but also had a major impact on documented people; Dominicans already in possession of a state-issued birth certificate, national identity card and/or passport. The book illustrates the complex and contradictory ways in which digital identity systems are experienced, thus challenging the assumption within current development policy that the provision of ID to everyone, everywhere will lead to the inclusion of all citizens.

The book offers a step-by-step blueprint of radical proposals for the U.S.-Mexican border that go far beyond traditional initiatives to ease restrictions on immigration. The book argues that the border with Mexico should be completely open for Mexicans wishing to travel north. Up Against the Wall provides the background to understanding how the border has become a fraud, resulting in nothing more than the criminalization of Mexican and other migrants, the bloating of the mismanaged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the deterioration of living standards along the frontier, and the enrichment of American employers. Placing the border in a historical perspective, Laufer shows how circumstances have deteriorated to the present Trump-exacerbated crisis, and why the region and the migration through it cannot be ignored. Over the last several years he has interviewed dozens of authorities and men and women in the street while reporting from Mexico, along the border, and in the United States. He demonstrates that the security of America's southern border is a fallacy; offers vivid examples to illustrate how the chain of misery and lawbreaking for migrants heading north is initiated by U.S. employers, traces many of the border problems to the Guatemalan-Mexican border, and explores the abuses of the Border Patrol and the growing presence of vigilantes on the American side. Up Against the Wall is sure to provoke a lively debate over the future of Mexican immigration and global migration crises.

Almost all industrial countries have undergone strategies to maintain, or improve, competitiveness in order to improve the standard of living of their population, particularly during the last quarter-century or so. But how have they treated developing countries? ‘Competitiveness and Development’ explains how developing countries can attain competitiveness at a high level of development, examines the possibilities and constraints in achieving it, and proposes remedial measures at the national and international levels.

The author Mehdi Shafaeddin illustrates how developed countries impose restrictive policies on developing countries through international financial institutions and the WTO, as well as regional and bilateral agreements, thereby limiting their policy space for promoting dynamic comparative advantage in order to achieve competitiveness at a high level of development. Such policies, the author argues, lock developing countries that are at the early stages of development in specialization in primary commodities, or at best simple processing and assembly operations in accordance with their static comparative advantage.

To support this argument, the author critically examines the neoclassical theory of economics, which is the philosophy behind the principle of static comparative advantage as well as the policy stances of international financial institutions and the WTO. The author also reviews the historical experience of developed countries through industrialization, development and achieving competitiveness based on the principle of dynamic comparative advantage. In this context, he explains the importance of trade and industrial policies and the role of government in human resource development, innovation and technological development. To illustrate his case, the author compares the contrasting experiences of China and Mexico since the 1980s, during which time globalization has been intensified.

Late Victorian Orientalism is a work of scholarly research pushing forward disciplines into new areas of enquiry. This collection of essays tries to redefine the task of interpreting the East in the late nineteenth century taking as a starting point Said’s Orientalism in order to investigate the visual, fantasised, and imperialist representations of the East, as well as the most exemplary translations of Oriental poems. The Victorians envisioned the East in many different modes or Orientalisms since as Said suggested ‘[t]here were, perhaps, as many Orientalisms as Orientalists.’ 

By combining together Western and Oriental modes of art, this study is not only aimed at filling a gap in Victorian and Oriental studies but also at broadening the audiences it is intended for. Edward FitzGerald, William Bell Scott, the Brontë sisters, William Holman Hunt, D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, John La Farge, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, the anonymous author of the Hongkong and the Hongkonians, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Wilfred Thesiger, and Eric Newby play such a prominent role in the Oriental debate. By offering an extended discussion of their Oriental writings, this book will appeal to and benefit a wider range of audiences.

The subject range of this volume of essays on late Victorian Orientalism explores nineteenth-century modes of art which position themselves as instruments of knowledge of the Orient. The contributors deploy variegated tools derived from textual studies and visual culture research in order to explore the many ways in which the late Victorians envisioned the East. It is this combined approach which makes possible the reconsideration of Orientalist literature, art and cinema.

Reclaiming the Wicked Son: Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers takes the ideas of six well-known secular Jewish philosophers—Karl Marx, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ayn Rand, Peter Singer, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler—and views them through a wide range of Jewish lenses from the Talmudic tradition and prophetic Judaism to Kabbalist approaches, thereby understanding the 20th-century secular thinkers as on-going elements of a living Jewish intellectual tradition.

Jewish Studies as a field focuses on Judaism, but Jewishness is broader than Judaism, and as a result, a number of thinkers who come from Jewish backgrounds are excluded from the discourse in Jewish Studies. The goal of this volume is to act as a bridge between the religious and secular Jewish discourse communities, allowing a more inclusive and more comprehensive account of Jewish thought. 

While the philosophers who discussed may not have considered themselves to be Jewish philosophers. But, by reading them Judaically, they can be understood in terms of a more robust historical and intellectual context in which they partake of a tradition to which they are not often connected.

Hannah Arendt, Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, argued that some parts of history need not just to be understood but to be confronted as well. The 1998 Belfast or Good Friday Agreement between the two communities (nationalist and unionist) in Northern Ireland arranged power-sharing structures of governance between them. The Agreement was underwritten by the British and Irish governments. The signatories of the Agreement knew that its success required a cultural shift or conversion in each community.

To that end, the decisive and violent decade of recent Irish history, 1912–1923, needs to be confronted. In that decade, there were several conflicts: between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists, between nationalist insurrection and British forces, and between two nationalist groups. At the end of the decade, the country was partitioned: the south had become an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth, while the north continued as part of the United Kingdom.

The division was bitter and violent, with each community (nationalist and unionist) effectively rejecting the right of the other to exist. That remained unchanged until the violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. While the vast majority on both sides want peace and mutual recognition, the traditional construction of each community’s historical memories obstruct that. The goal of the book is to analyse the different elements required for each community in how to confront that history in the interests of affirming identity, giving recognition to the other community and building a shared political community.

This book is a wide-ranging collection of essays that makes the case for the humanities as central to our self-understanding, for theory as the latest incarnation of a perennial concern with the relation between words and things, and for the ancient as constitutive of the modern. Theory Does Not Exist: Comparative Ancient and Modern Explorations in Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, and Rhetoric makes a strong argument for a comparative approach to what we term “theory” today. It argues that our disciplinary boundaries create artificial divisions between philosophy, rhetoric, and literature, which historically would not have been recognized and have come to function as conceptual straitjackets.

These essays contend that a concerted engagement with the crucial texts in these debates over the last 2500 years not only offers a better understanding of the issues involved but also provides the necessary political, ethical, and existential tools for fashioning a better and more inclusive life. They offer extended readings of Plato, Cicero, and Sophocles, as well as Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Žižek, and Lacan. Theory Does Not Exist offers a full-throated defense of the humanities and crucial counterarguments against the reduction of education to the vocational and the operational.

This course is designed to present and develop jazz arranging and compositional principles. In preparation for successful improvisation, composing and transcription, a wide range of theoretical topics are presented.
The stylistic considerations of jazz improvisation and composition require an extensive and working knowledge of jazz theory, and mastery of diatonic, bitonal, poly-tonal and atonal theoretical maximums and processes – including the refining of the [imitation] transcription process towards theoretical justification and conventional usage.

During the Romantic period, Hannah Cowley (1743–1809) achieved fame both as a playwright and a poet, composing popular comedies and, as Anna Matilda, amorous Della Cruscan verse. But despite a recent surge of scholarly interest in her works, her controversial comedy The World as It Goes has never been published.This edition of The World as It Goes is based on the Larpent licensing holograph manuscript held by the Huntington Library (LA 548). The transcription of the play is supplemented with an introduction providing cultural, theatrical, historical and biographical contexts; contemporaneous reviews; and a note on the text.

The World as It Goes satirizes English tourists visiting a southern French resort and the scoundrels who prey on them. The play’s cast included some of the era’s most popular comic actors: John Edwin, John Quick, Charles Lee Lewes, William Thomas Lewis (aka “Gentleman Lewis”), Ralph Wewitzer (who specialized in stereotypical foreigners), Isabella Mattocks (who specialized in “vulgar” characters) and the famously rotund Lydia Webb. Elizabeth Younge, acclaimed for her portrayals of sentimental wives and daughters, played Lady Danvers, and the future novelist and playwright Elizabeth Inchbald appeared in the role of Sidney Grubb. 

Before the premiere of The World as It Goes at Covent Garden, Cowley’s comedies The Runaway (1776) and The Belle’s Stratagem (1780) and her farce Who’s the Dupe (1779) had been theatrical hits. But reviewers who admired her previous plays found The World as It Goes vulgar and morally offensive, and its sole performance on February 24, 1781, was disrupted by audience members who loudly objected to a ribald scene in a bedroom antechamber and repeatedly interrupted Younge as she attempted to deliver the epilogue, which contained a risqué reference to the transgender Chevalière D’Eon. Cowley heavily revised the play, but its second incarnation as Second Thoughts Are Best (performed March 24, 1781) was also a failure. The World as It Goes is Cowley’s most bawdy, multigeneric and socially subversive comedy and features a valet masquerading as his master and aspiring to take a seat at Westminster; French and German swindlers; a seductive countess; a lecherous, nouveau-riche London “Citizen”; an antiquarian bluestocking modeled after Lady Anna Miller; a fatuous aristocrat who neglects the wife he adores to be seen as fashionable; and a French monk who attempts to rape an Englishwoman. Among the contemporaneous issues and cultural products addressed in the play, its prologue and epilogue are English tourism on the continent; the pantomime Harlequin Free-Mason (1780); the January 1781 French raid on Jersey Island; the Chevalière d’Eon’s androgyny; the Gordon riots and Lord George Gordon’s acquittal in the ensuing treason trial; the recent performances by the French ballet dancer Gaëtano Appoline Balthazar Vestris at the King’s Theatre; anxieties about ambitious and oversexed male servants; bluestocking antiquarianism; the pretensions of the London merchant class; the pro-American revolution Bill of Rights Society and the London Association; James Graham’s Celestial Bed; and prison ships (“Hulks”). 

The comedy’s catastrophic failure influenced the manner in which Cowley handled controversial issues in her subsequent dramas and provides insights into late eighteenth-century anxieties and mores. Mortified by the damnation of The World as It Goes, she omitted it from her posthumous Works (1813), but she reworked some of its themes, situations and characters in her final play, The Town before You, which was staged in 1794. Although The Town before You, like The World as It Goes, portrays nefarious impostors, a philistine businessman, a spurious connoisseur and a wealthy female eccentric obsessed with classical art, it enjoyed a respectable run of nine nights.

This volume addresses a central problem of contemporary states, namely how to manage the eruption of public religions. While the liberal framework formerly regarded religion as simply a matter of private practice and conscience, in modern states religion has often come to challenge the so-called Westphalian model of church-state relations, and has brought into question many liberal notions of secularism and tolerance. There is much discussion about post-secular society in which religion has to be taken seriously in public affairs. This collection of case studies – looking at Turkey, Singapore, India, China, Britain, Europe and the United States – explores a number of examples in which the state exercises some degree of management of religion, thereby bringing into question the traditional separation of religion and state. This study also attempts to refine the notion of secularization by examining this process in terms of political arrangements (church-state relations) and the role of religion in everyday life. Ultimately, this study reveals that there is no uniform or standard pattern of secularization in modern societies.

This engaging two-volume study pursues a balance between theoretical and practical sociology. The authors are aware of the impasse often deliberately created by the self-conscious language of sociological theory. The primary concern of the applied sociologist is to adapt theoretical knowledge to actual human situations, using it to formulate social policy, investigate domestic and international social problems and create a pragmatic ‘sociology of possibility’.

Volume I, subtitled ‘Theoretical Perspectives’, focuses on the problems and prospects of applied sociology in an era of globalization. The essays emphasize the close association of applied sociology with altruism, identity formation, race and ethnicity. They evaluate the empirical ‘truths’ of sociological theories and examine their relevance for contemporary research, poverty, demographic issues and social policies. The authors agree that the ultimate test of theory is the extent to which it can produce knowledge that ‘works’.

Polar Shift addresses how to sustain the Arctic's richness, beauty, and local and global value. Its core describes programs specifically created to protect this region: the great inventory of law, policy, and civil society activity targeting sustainability of the region. It presents the Arctic’s environmental health very broadly understood and competing ideas of how it can be maintained or improved with specific recommendations. This is a book about the Arctic's past and how it was envisioned, about its environment, its people, and their cultures.

Polar Shift describes how the changing of the Arctic matters and to whom. It asks: Is it of serious concern if the Arctic becomes warmer? If its glaciers shrink away and its polar bears are found in zoos only? If cultures and traditions based on cold are changing? Is it acceptable if cultures adapt to a less cold world?

What if it's warming, thawing, melting, and other changes reflect significant global environmental shifts? What if the Arctic's instability affects society as a whole: if it bodes for bad changes: sunken cities throughout the world, cultural practices precluded, traditions and languages lost, species gone extinct, major metropolitan areas so hot as to be unlivable, and massive movements of people from inhospitable regions?

Why does it matter which countries are considered Arctic nations? Countries want to be seen as Arctic for several reasons. They may want access to a boom of extractable resources: oil, gas, and special metals. Some nations have a deep interest in protecting the Arctic, preserving what is pristine, and improving what is threatened. And some want to influence major international transit routes and rules for going through them to save time and money for international trade. Nations also view the region for significant security and military concerns. Who has and should have a decision-making say on these questions is a matter of high global stakes.

Immersed in a hyperconnected world, millennials are pressured by a lingering feeling that no matter their achievements, they can always do more. Conventional wisdom suggests that millennials must create and maintain personal brands while striving to achieve their potential. But this mentality, while initially appealing for many, breeds anxiety and insecurity. In "The Plight of Potential", Emerson Csorba shows how millennials can live deeper and more enriching lives by reflecting on the self, placing value on solitude and resisting the feeling that they must constantly connect and share. Drawing on case studies of millennials from networks such as the Global Shapers Community, Csorba offers suggestions on how millennials can thrive in a world that favours immediacy and superficiality.

Millennials live in a world of opportunity, characterized by the constant pursuit of personal growth and a belief that to hit the pause button would be catastrophic to a career. Within this context, Csorba explores ideas such as the ruthlessness of comparison amongst millennials and outlines guidelines for overcoming these pressures. Advocating for a long view of work and life, Csorba builds on hundreds of interviews with millennials across the world as well as research at the University of Cambridge.

The themes that Csorba explores in "The Plight of Potential" are not unique – they have existed for centuries, and do not pertain exclusively to millennials – but in a society that glamourizes the individual while paradoxically discouraging solitude and self-reflection, they are radical. Both practical and critical, this book is timely and refreshing for millennials looking to overcome the social pressures around them and advance their work and lives, while also cultivating the skills and qualities required to better know themselves in the process.

“Textuality, Culture and Scripture,” a study of the necessary and close relations between the three concepts, puts forward three main arguments. The first is that Western modernity retained the necessary role of texts and textuality in culture well into the twentieth century, although decreasingly so, until their role was increasingly displaced by materialist assumptions and theories. Taking as its starting point the so-called textual turn in cultural theory, the first argument is for the necessary role of textuality in understandings of culture.

The second argument is that textuaity is necessary in and for cultural, group and personal identities and that the texts of primary importance for identity can be related to what is generally thought of as “scripture.” It moves on to posit “scripture,” so understood, as a necessary category in an adequate textual theory and relates textuality and “scripture” to identity, primarily in terms of the potentials of texts for relating constancy and change to one another. 

The third argument is that the Bible has been and continues to be for so many people their “scripture” because it provides what people, groups and, at times, also cultures need to have as identity or an adequate worldview, especially the relation created by biblical texts between stability or constancy and change or disruption. The book concludes with the proposal that textual locations or identities can be evaluated for whether or not they provide ways by which past and future, tradition and innovation, or constancy and change are related to one another.

‘Another Canon: Indian Texts and Traditions’ in English traces the development of Indian English literary and textual practice over a period of seven decades, focussing on classic texts which have fallen beyond the scope of the established canon. Central to this volume is an inquiry into the nature of Indian modernity. Through careful and path-breaking readings of such important writers as Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, M. Ananthanarayanan, Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, U. R. Anantha Murthy, Kiran Nagarkar, Vikram Seth, and Upamanyu Chatterjee, the author constructs what may be called ‘another canon,’ shedding new light on literary and critical practice in post-colonial India.

Useful both to specialists and general readers, these engaging and insightful interpretations of key Indian texts enhance our understanding of the making of modern Indian consciousness and culture. In addition, the book also offers crucial theoretical insights into the distinguishing features of the novel in India, especially of the fiction of the 1980s and 1990s.

Today, in an age of globalization, religion represents a potent force in the lives of billions of people worldwide. Yet when social theorists examine the impact of globalization on contemporary religious movements, they tend to focus on issues such as Islamic fundamentalism and threats to US or global security. This collection of essays takes a different approach, analyzing – with special reference to Asia – religion through lived experience. The key issues covered in the volume include: how religious impulses contribute to globalization; how religious groups and organizations repackage traditional beliefs for transcultural appeal; how religious adherents cope with external threats to identity; how new technologies are reshaping the nature of religious beliefs and images; and how local and global religious influences blend and/or clash. Far from religion being a subject of peripheral concern to globalization, the contributors demonstrate that from the most basic level of our interactions with the natural environment to the socio-political behavior of the “great religions” – and even to the profusion of folk and pop culture phenomena – the influence of religion upon globalization, and vice versa, is apparent at all levels.

Written by a practising poet and novelist who has close experience of the subject matter and has published creative work in the areas being examined, Sexual Violence and Literary Art is a wide-ranging study, covering carefully selected works from Ovid through Shakespeare, to Pope, Richardson, Shelley, Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov and beyond. It addresses the necessary complicity of any representation in what is represented, by examining ways in which canonical male writers have attempted to evoke and address representations of sexual violence in poetry, prose fiction, and poetic drama. Representation has to involve itself with what is represented, and, in this sense, it is not possible to address in literature sexual violence without taking on the complicity of the representation with what is represented. The chosen works of literary art are understood not only as locations in which the showing of pain and cruelty inflicted through sexually acts occurs, but also as occasions to activate means at these writings’ disposal to work upon those representations of pain and cruelty towards possible readerly benefits. The book draws substantially upon recent criticism and theory written by philosophers, theorists, art historians, and literary critics including Martha Nussbaum, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Susan J. Brison, Mary D. Garrard, Nancy J. Vickers, and Coppélia Kahn. Writers may very well wish to determine the cultural meaning and ideological implications of their work, but for many reasons, including the necessary role of reader response and interpretation in the literary process, the meaning of a work cannot be entirely or finally fixed. Among the consequences of this is the fact that interpretations of literary works are always transactional negotiations with circumscribed perspectives. In light of these convictions, Sexual Violence and Literary Art subjects the literary artworks it addresses to close scrutiny derived from various generations of women’s writing on rape and upon the critical vicissitudes of the works studied. While recognising only too well the continuing presence of male violence in sexual relationships, this book’s aims include the identification of what roles literary art may play in its understanding, amelioration, and transformation. In these ways it offers a response to historical problems incurred through the inheritance of damage caused by the exercise of unequal power relations, and it offers an account of how literary art may work to overcome them.

A Marxist scholar and historian, Irfan Habib has been a towering presence in the Indian intellectual scene for over four decades. His formidable intellectual reputation, established in the sixties with the publication of 'The Agrarian System of Mughal India', broadened as he became an authority in the entire area of Indian history from ancient to modern. Professor Habib's undiminished commitment to the cause of socialism is reflected in these highly original and bold analyses of Marxist historiography and theories of socialist construction.

This volume comprises essays from scholars around the world representing the wide variety of Habib's interests and contributions. Ranging from history to politics and economics, the essays cover both the medieval period and modern India, as well as theories for the future of this emerging superpower. This special edition also features an essay by Irfan Habib, originally published as 'The Economic History of Medieval India: A Survey', covering the Delhi Sultanate, the Vijayanagara economy and the economy of Mughal India.

The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, being closely bound with the concept of the limit of inescapable necessity that has been embodied in and expressed through theatre since the time of the ancient Greeks. This book addresses the question of how the twentieth century – one of the most violent periods of human history – dealt with the fundamental structure that is the tragic. Examining the consciousness of the era through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding texts – including works by Ibsen, Claudel, O’Neill, Brecht, Camus, Beckett, Pasolini, Grotowski, Delcuvellerie and Josse De Pauw – ‘Modern European Tragedy’ draws a vivid picture of the development that tragedy experienced during this time. Along the way, the book engages with some of the prominent currents of twentieth-century thought and philosophy that can still be found in the varied map of contemporary thought today: the ideas of modern Christianity, psychoanalysis, the theory of the Absurd, nihilism, Marxism and the acceptance of the limit. Together, analyses of these currents serve to support the book’s key avenues of investigation: its explorations of what inspired these key authors to engage with the idea of the tragic; and its explanation of why the contemporary tragic no longer bears the form of classic tragedy.

Spanning a decade of Michael Marder’s contributions as a public intellectual, Senses of Upheavals documents a period of exceptional global turmoil. Thrown into mayhem by right-wing populisms and a pandemic, combined with skyrocketing economic inequalities and worsening environmental crises, the world is on the verge of collapse. Could revolutionary practical-intellectual proposals to learn how to coexist from plants or to rethink the very meaning of energy chart the way to a better, more livable, and, perhaps, calmer world? Nonetheless, such proposals themselves constitute nothing short of an upheaval in philosophy, plant sciences, and environmental studies. We are doomed to upheavals, it seems; the point is not to deflect, but to choose judiciously among them.

The book is a firsthand account of Dr. Hannah Jaicks’ journey through western Montana's ranching landscapes to showcase the stories of ranchers and affiliated groups who are pioneering strategies for reducing conflicts with wildlife, while also stewarding the landscape. Americans depend on these people who live by working on the land. Ranchers have the power to shape the future of our lands, waterways, and wildlife communities, but enduring perceptions frame ranching as a unilaterally destructive force to the environment. Perception is slippery ground to base an argument on, however, and reality is far more complicated. Often seen as antithetical to one another, American ranchers and wildlife have long been entangled with another. The book is about producers and partner organizations who are forging new paths in conservation and addressing these seemingly intractable entanglements to sustain working ranch operations alongside healthy wildlife populations. It elevates the voices of these people striving daily to achieve wild and working landscapes in the West and serves as a model for how others can begin to do the same.

The author takes readers on a journey up western Montana to a different valley in each chapter and showcases the place-based stories of everyday conservation heroes who practice regenerative ranching, provide consciously raised agricultural products, advance strategies for collaborative conservation and protect vital habitat for endemic wildlife that would otherwise be developed and subdivided beyond repair. Ethnographic storytelling is interwoven with psychological theories to inform readers about progressive ways to make the world we share – with people and animals – a better place to live. Illustrations by Katie Christiansen of wildlife and conflict-reduction tools accompany the text, helping to underscore the vivid realities of shared landscapes and how they are achieved. 

There is no doubt the history of ranching is laden with problematic examples, and public and private rangelands are not universally in good condition today. This book aims to capture the increasing recognition that strong ranching practices coincide with good land and wildlife stewardship measures, but ranchers need help. If we want to see more of this remarkable work happening, environmentalists and concerned citizens need to step up and ensure these practices are not only possible but also become the norm. Everyone must be willing to come to the table and navigate discussions about how to work together more effectively and collaboratively. This book is a roadmap for how people can begin to do so.

‘The Constitution of Shelley’s Poetry’ is a close philosophical reading of ‘Prometheus Unbound’ from the perspective of the argument or drama of language played out in its pages. At its heart a four-chapter reading of ‘Prometheus Unbound’, the book is punctuated with readings of other Shelley works and prefaced with two earlier chapters: one on 'Mont Blanc' and 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty', the companion poems inaugurating Shelley’s poetic maturity; the other on 'Ode to the West Wind' originally published with ‘Prometheus Unbound’ and here represented as 'signature' Shelley. The book’s one most distinguishing feature, from which several others derive, is its bringing the power and pertinence of Stanley Cavell’s thought to Shelley’s poetry and to his explicitly articulated philosophical interest in language.

The book urges and practises close reading, but it provides philosophical grounds for this ostensibly old-fashioned approach, and it implicitly proposes an understanding of language very different from those now most generally assumed in literary studies. The book’s bringing of Cavell’s thought to Shelley’s poetry would make two related but distinguishable contributions. There is, first of all, the reading of Shelley’s poetry, which is new and persuasive both in many of its local moments and in its overall thrust. Second, there is the practical demonstration of the relevance and yield of Cavell’s thought for literary studies.

The Oxford Movement, initiating what is commonly called the Catholic Revival of the Church of England and of global Anglicanism more generally, has been a perennial subject of study by historians since its beginning in the 1830s. But the leader of the movement whose name was most associated with it during the nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, has long been neglected by historical studies of the Anglican Catholic Revival. What attention has been paid to him by scholars has produced a largely negative picture of this complex man. This collection of essays seeks to redress the negative and marginalizing historiography of Pusey, in order to better understand both Pusey and his culture. The essays take Pusey’s contributions to the Oxford Movement and its theological thinking seriously; most significantly, they endeavour to understand Pusey on his own terms, rather than by comparison with Newman or Keble.

This collection of essays is derived from a conference on ‘Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Catholic Revival’ held at Ascot Priory, England in September 2009. It was attended by scholars from Britain, Europe, the United States and Australia. Broadly, the aim was to resuscitate Pusey as a figure of importance in Oxford Movement studies, in keeping with his contemporary importance during the Movement itself. The essays rescue both Pusey’s personality and theology from scholarly marginality, and place him in the same prominent place within the Oxford Movement that he had during his lifetime.

Together these essays represent an important step towards giving a more historically accurate view of Pusey. The essays do not subscribe to the hagiography of Liddon’s biography, nor do they exhibit the hostility typical of more recent works. Instead, the essays in the volume reveal Pusey as a serious theologian who had a significant impact on the Victorian period, both within the Oxford Movement and in wider areas of church politics and theology. This reassessment is important not merely to rehabilitate Pusey’s reputation, but also help contemporary understanding of the Oxford Movement, Anglicanism and British Christianity in the nineteenth century.

As an ancient Indian poet-dramatist, Kālidāsa cannot be absorbed into the homogenizing tendencies of Hindu hagiography, as has often been attempted, especially in the period after independence. From being projected as a Brahmin by birth in legends, a Vedāntist and Vaishnavite in darsana (theology), and more recently, owing to Western theoretical perspectives being applied to texts separated in time and contexts, Kalidasa is critiqued for a patriarchal and casteist outlook. These various readings have privileged personal theories and validated them by reading literary texts in certain ways. ‘Memory, Metaphor and Mysticism in Kalidasa’s ‘AbhijñānaŚākuntalam’’ brings together scholars from both sides of the globe who offer possibilities for reviewing this text, not as an Oriental discovery or a cultural property, but as an ancient literary text that can be read in multiple philosophical contexts. Further, the translations of ‘AbhijñānaŚākuntalam’ into South Asian languages like Urdu and Nepali and a classical language like Persian are also included for detailed study for understanding the impact of this text in the respective literary traditions of these languages, and to assess the actual cross-literary dialogue that this text made, without hyperboles and generalizations, given the fact that many of these translation happened just before and after independence when literary historiography and nation writing project went hand in hand in India.

‘Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment’ argues that both ageing as a unitary social process and agedness as a distinct social location have become fragmented. The book concentrates  on the emergence of a ‘new ageing’ mediated in part through the processes of ‘embodiment’.

The first section provides the main theoretical context for the book, with the first chapter outlining the new ‘sociology of the body’ and the second outlining the emergence of new ageing and its ‘re-orientation’ toward the body. The second section explores the relationship between new ageing and key aspects of embodied identity, namely gender, race, disability and sexuality. In each of these sections, the authors provide a brief historical perspective on the emergence of these embodied identities as social movements during the cultural ferment of the 1960s, and explore their subsequent confrontation, or avoidance of confrontation with, the issue of ageing.

The third section covers embodied practices, from sexual practice and its re-orientation toward age and ageing, to the embodied practices of ‘appearance management’, particularly those associated with cosmetics, clothing and fashion. Finally, the book considers ‘new enhancement technologies’ of the body, such as plastic surgery, with relation to ideas of ‘rejuvenation’. By focusing upon those embodied practices that are oriented toward age and ageing, and their place in expressing, maintaining or recreating other ‘pre-performed’ identities, the work allows a more embodied understanding of ageing and its diverse engagements within society to be realised.

Why do climate and financial crises pose such extreme risks? And what does it take to respond effectively to those risks? Extreme weather events – storms and sea-level rise, heat waves, droughts and floods – seem ever more common and extreme, while scientists warn of even greater climate risks ahead. Financial failures on the scale of 2008 make a mockery of the supposed efficiency of the market economy. None of this would be possible in the world as imagined by conventional economics – an imaginary land of gradualism, equilibrium, well-informed rationality and the win-win solutions dealt by the invisible hand.

The erratic rhythm of boom and bust in financial markets could be explained either by the patterns of crowd-following behaviour among investors, or by the unequal distribution of wealth (and the impact of the largest investors on the markets). Climate crises reflect the fact that natural systems can reach tipping points or critical transitions, where gradual change gives way to large-scale discontinuous changes. The economics of climate change has lagged behind the science, understating the severity of the problem and the likelihood of a crash.

While the causes of climate and financial extremes are distinct, the implications for public policy have much in common. The frequency of extreme events, of varying sizes, means that there is no way to predict the likely size of future crises. The traditional approach to risk aversion cannot account for longstanding patterns in financial markets. Better theories of risk call for more precautionary approaches to both financial and climate policy. In the frequent cases in which potential outcomes have unknown probabilities, the best policy is based on the worst-case credible scenario. When a single catastrophic risk commands everyone’s attention, a World War II-style, costs-be-damned mobilization is the right response. There is no formula for perfect responses to extreme risks, but there are important guideposts that point toward better answers.

The book is a firsthand account of Dr. Hannah Jaicks’ journey through western Montana's ranching landscapes to showcase the stories of ranchers and affiliated groups who are pioneering strategies for reducing conflicts with wildlife, while also stewarding the landscape. Americans depend on these people who live by working on the land. Ranchers have the power to shape the future of our lands, waterways, and wildlife communities, but enduring perceptions frame ranching as a unilaterally destructive force to the environment. Perception is slippery ground to base an argument on, however, and reality is far more complicated. Often seen as antithetical to one another, American ranchers and wildlife have long been entangled with another. The book is about producers and partner organizations who are forging new paths in conservation and addressing these seemingly intractable entanglements to sustain working ranch operations alongside healthy wildlife populations. It elevates the voices of these people striving daily to achieve wild and working landscapes in the West and serves as a model for how others can begin to do the same.

The author takes readers on a journey up western Montana to a different valley in each chapter and showcases the place-based stories of everyday conservation heroes who practice regenerative ranching, provide consciously raised agricultural products, advance strategies for collaborative conservation and protect vital habitat for endemic wildlife that would otherwise be developed and subdivided beyond repair. Ethnographic storytelling is interwoven with psychological theories to inform readers about progressive ways to make the world we share – with people and animals – a better place to live. Illustrations by Katie Christiansen of wildlife and conflict-reduction tools accompany the text, helping to underscore the vivid realities of shared landscapes and how they are achieved. 

There is no doubt the history of ranching is laden with problematic examples, and public and private rangelands are not universally in good condition today. This book aims to capture the increasing recognition that strong ranching practices coincide with good land and wildlife stewardship measures, but ranchers need help. If we want to see more of this remarkable work happening, environmentalists and concerned citizens need to step up and ensure these practices are not only possible but also become the norm. Everyone must be willing to come to the table and navigate discussions about how to work together more effectively and collaboratively. This book is a roadmap for how people can begin to do so.

‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ focuses on the dynamic interaction between suburbs and suburbia as this emerges in a century-long series of Australian novels – in works by Christina Stead, George Johnston, Elizabeth Harrower, Patrick White, Christos Tsiolkas and many other twentieth-century and contemporary writers. It puts the often trenchantly anti-suburban rhetoric found in these novels in dialogue with their evocative rendering of suburban place and time.

In the process, ‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ rethinks perennial literary and cultural debates about suburbia – in Australia and elsewhere. It does so by putting fictional ‘suburbs’ (their multitude of imagined interiors, homes, streets, forms and lives over time) into dialogue with cosmopolitan resistance towards the very idea of ‘suburbia’ as an amnesic and conformist cultural wasteland. ‘Suburban space, the novel and Australian modernity’ explores the generative collision produced in novels between the sensory remembered terrain of the primal suburb and wider cultural critiques of suburbia. It is through such contradictions that novels create resonant mental maps of suburban place and time. Australian novels, in other words, serve as a prism through which suburbs – real and imagined, remembered and utterly transformed – can be glimpsed sidelong.

‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ is a coinage that highlights both the persistence and the renovation of literary forms by means of the suburb. The suburbs prompt writers to experiment with the forms of the novel. The very scale of the suburb is productive, enabling narratives to slide readily from microcosm to macrocosm, from the domestic interior to the globe. Like suburbia, the novel is a form that is both generic and specific, circulating transnationally yet taking root locally. 'Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ enacts a retrospective of Australian literary suburbia that reorients understanding of the political, cultural and literary significance of the suburbs. Novels about suburbs often play with time, looking into the past in order to summon what is lost. ‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ enacts a retrospective of Australian literary suburbia that reorients understanding of the political, cultural and literary significance of the suburbs.

This book explores the multiple effects of globalization on urban and rural communities, providing anthropological case studies from postsocialist Bulgaria. As globalization has been studied largely in urban contexts, the aim of this volume is to shift attention to the under-examined countryside and analyse how transnational links are transforming relations between cities, towns and villages in Bulgaria.

Since the opening of borders after the end of socialism (1989) and Bulgaria’s EU accession (2007), rural communities have been drawn into new transnational connections and global ‘shortcuts’ that transcend the framework of the (formerly socialist) nation-state. The case studies of this volume demonstrate that apart from cities, villages and towns are also increasingly exposed to global flows and economic inequalities, resulting in the remaking of rural places. As a result of increased mobility and growing transnational and global connections, boundaries are fading between cities and the countryside and between Bulgaria and Europe. Some Bulgarian villages are winners while others are losers as a result of this development, leading to a situation of extreme rural diversity.

This book aims to challenge undifferentiated notions of ‘the countryside’, calling for a greater awareness of rural economic and social disparities which are often only associated with urban environments. It also focuses on how the ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ have been reconfigured in Bulgaria following the end of socialism and the advent of globalization, in socioeconomic as well as political, ideological and cultural terms. The volume is based on a collection of papers presented at a workshop that took place at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies on 29 and 30 May 2008. 

The book provides an assessment of the first 12 years of BRICS cooperation, from 2008 to 2020, focusing on international financial governance issues and especially on the new financing mechanisms created by the BRICS, the BRICS monetary fund and the development bank. It is shown that Brazil, Russia, India and China, joined later by South Africa, share common traits that led them to cooperate in the reform of the existing international financial architecture, especially the G20 and the IMF. After 2012, in light of the difficulty of having the USA, the European and other advanced countries agreed to move from “tinkering at the margins” to fundamental reform of the Bretton Woods institutions. The BRICS took the momentous decision to establish their own monetary fund, named the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), and their own development bank, named the New Development Bank (NDB). The book goes on to describe the difficult negotiations among the BRICS between 2012 and 2014. Some of these difficulties revealed the weaknesses that would lead the CRA and the NDB to make slow progress in the first five years of their existence, from 2015 to 2010. The book provides an overview of the strong points and weaknesses of the initial phase of these financing mechanisms. While they still hold promise, much remains to be done to make the BRICS financing mechanisms fulfill their founders’ plans and intentions. The book ends with a brief discussion of the future of the BRICS as a cooperation mechanism, highlighting that, despite inevitable and foreseeable obstacles, joint action by the five countries is likely to remain an important feature of the international landscape in the decades to come.

The book may be of interest to multiple audiences as it lies at the intersection of economics, international relations and geopolitics. Written in accessible language, avoiding jargon, the book is targeted not only at specialists but also at non-specialists interested in these areas of knowledge and changes in the international economic and financial landscape at the outset of the twenty-first century. 

This book brings together the leading contemporary currents of thought from a galaxy of established scholars and intellectuals of Pakistan. It is a monumental contribution to the national debate on a series of crises and lingering issues that need attention of the stakeholders all around.  

The book covers three major areas of investigation into public life in the country. One, it delves into the historical, sociological and cultural causes of various political conflicts, ranging from the negative role of the educational curricula for national harmony to cultural violence and persistent militarism to the curse of enforced disappearances. There are highly analytical contributions that define the conflict-resolution nexus. Two, the book is a source of inspiration on the liberal agenda of creating a scientific frame of mind, setting the feminist debate in a global context, challenging the shrinking space for media and focussing on the largely forgotten area of industrial relations. Readers will find ample issue orientation in the analysis and policy orientation in the deliberations. Three, the book enters a domain of hope, planning for a bright future and focussing on some longer-term issues couched in comprehensive new approaches to development, environment, energy, foreign policy and feminism.

The scope of the book is amazingly wide, the analysis is rich with conceptual references and empirical finding, and the scholarly idiom is comprehensible for both the articulate section of the population and the scholarly community. 

‘Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment’ argues that both ageing as a unitary social process and agedness as a distinct social location have become fragmented. The book concentrates  on the emergence of a ‘new ageing’ mediated in part through the processes of ‘embodiment’.

The first section provides the main theoretical context for the book, with the first chapter outlining the new ‘sociology of the body’ and the second outlining the emergence of new ageing and its ‘re-orientation’ toward the body. The second section explores the relationship between new ageing and key aspects of embodied identity, namely gender, race, disability and sexuality. In each of these sections, the authors provide a brief historical perspective on the emergence of these embodied identities as social movements during the cultural ferment of the 1960s, and explore their subsequent confrontation, or avoidance of confrontation with, the issue of ageing.

The third section covers embodied practices, from sexual practice and its re-orientation toward age and ageing, to the embodied practices of ‘appearance management’, particularly those associated with cosmetics, clothing and fashion. Finally, the book considers ‘new enhancement technologies’ of the body, such as plastic surgery, with relation to ideas of ‘rejuvenation’. By focusing upon those embodied practices that are oriented toward age and ageing, and their place in expressing, maintaining or recreating other ‘pre-performed’ identities, the work allows a more embodied understanding of ageing and its diverse engagements within society to be realised.

This book works at the intersection of two related yet different fields. One is the heterogeneous feminist effort to question universal forms of knowing. The expression 'embodiment of knowledge' deploys the notions of time (as history), space (as location) and politics (as partiality of perspective or standpoint) to interrogate the purported universality of knowing. Embodiment is one important concept through which feminist philosophies try to perceive the attempt of questioning the universal. The second field follows from mind/body dichotomy. Embodiment is traditionally understood to involve an act of simple inversion – valorizing the (material) body in place of the mind. However, if meanings are seen to produce the body as 'a system of signification', embodiment gets reduced to another form of the significatory mechanism. The book explored the dynamics of the production of the 'body' with a focus on the 'others' (death, sexual and colonial differences) that fracture and define the notion of the body. An ethical responsibility to the 'others' consonant with this ontologically differentiated body distinguishes this notion of embodiment from standard versions of 'third world feminism'. The development of this notion requires an elaboration of the ways in which power and scientific rationality work (epistemically) in a postcolonial setting. Finally, the book presents the notion of embodied knowledges as inseparable from a deconstructive politics of the (im)possible.

Examining today’s global politics by linking it to the meditations of a classical Greek philosopher may be counterintuitive to understanding a world in crisis. But for political analysts, policymakers, social media, bloggers, journalists, engaged students, the new influencers, and inquisitive citizens, Thucydides’ ancient wisdom may offer critical insights into detecting the endemic of political fear spreading across global borders. With his help and by applying his framework to six case studies, this book unearths the different facets of fear that define a world in crisis.

Fear is a pervasive term used to describe a group’s or individual’s sense of insecurity, threat, and angst. It identifies other subtle dimensions comprising suspicion, scepticism, wariness, dread, horror, stupefication, and moral panic. These events may arise in the very near future or affect society at some later point, as Thucydides discovered in his analysis. Disaggregating political fear makes us aware of its complexities as the classical Greek writer set out twenty-five centuries ago. Framing his study to today’s fears results in significant ramifications for democracy and rivalries between states. 

Thucydides’ meditations on fear is about six intriguing case studies structuring political fear: national fear which caused the Brexit outcome in the UK; a regional kind fomenting fear of foreigners in Germany’s Saxony state; an ethnic dimension emerging in a Russia fearful of too much in-migration; an individual case of a Japanese artist experiencing angst when caught between adversaries in World War II; fear of interstate relations shaping Australia’s troubled connections to China; and the precariousness of identity as the U.S. began to embrace tribal politics. In all this, can a rejuvenated liberal theory unpacking a heavy dose of tolerance overcome symbolic liberalism and slam the door on ever-mounting political fear?

Professor Das provides a fascinating study of the issue of ethnic politics in multi-ethnic Third World countries and discusses the non-convergence of state and nation in the context of Kashmir and Sindh. The artificial de-colonization process in the South Asian sub-continent resulted in the construction of national frontiers for its two successor states that did not rest on a synchronization of ethnic and state boundaries. Consequently, cross-border loyalties amongst significant sections of the population survived the boundaries imposed between the two successor states. In the context of centralizing nation-building strategies, when ethnic political assertions occur in outlying or frontier areas of these nation-states, the distinction between domestic and external affairs or between home and foreign politics tends to lose its significance in the traditional sense. Political actors from across the borders of neighbouring states can then deny the marks of their different objective nationalities and treat themselves as members of a single 'loyalty group'.

Thus, ethnic politics transcends its domestic contours and helps foment regional tensions. In such circumstances, ethnic assertions tend to constitute vital local or domestic ingredients that define the national security priorities within a particular region. The current insurrection in Kashmir and turmoil in Sindh superbly demonstrate this pattern.

Part I of this book gives particular attention to freedom as an “aesthetic idea” that informs certain philosophical discussions of freedom in Kant, Schelling, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus and Isaiah Berlin. The critical concept of “positive freedom” is discussed in the first chapter and continues to inform the entire book. In Part II, the more “practical” application of these ideas with respect to certain “zones” of freedom such as academia (“academic freedom”), religion (“religious freedom”), art (“artistic freedom”), “free speech,” and “political freedom” are discussed Finally, in the Epilogue, the surprising relationship of “friendship” to “freedom” that begins with their close etymological relationship is discussed.

This book gives the first no-nonsense, hands-on account of the financing principles and perspectives for Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs), the new kid on the block in the battle against climate change. NAMAs are finding their own identity, and most importantly, finding a new financial basis without relying on a carbon market and carbon credit. While the NAMA model may be the right instrument at the right time, it is spawned from the climate change negotiation sphere that continues to suffer from its lack of interaction with the other spheres involved in its actual deployment. Despite 20 years of negotiations, a barrier remains between concept and action. The disconnect is first and foremost between the political sphere and the private-sector sphere, and is particularly rooted in the understanding – or misunderstanding – of finance. This book bridges the gap by addressing policymaking and private sector financing in one volume. It disarms myths, hides nothing behind political correctness and applies a good measure of common sense to advance guidance for the financing of actions that will allow developing countries, having become the prime source of greenhouse gas emissions, to contribute to the global battle against climate change.

The twentieth century has witnessed a tremendous reinforcement of the concept of democracy. In a period of about one hundred years, the virtues of democracy have been greatly extolled and the world has witnessed a process of democratization. In the sixty years since its inception, Indian democracy too has developed indigenous roots and is emerging as a unique example of parliamentary democracy. The important question today is not the survival of Indian democracy, but the nature of India’s democratic politics.

The present volume is an attempt to understand the development of democratic polity in India. It covers a wide range of issues – theoretical concepts, political institutions, federalism, electoral process, individual and group rights and mass media – drawing attention to the significant broadening of Indian democracy. But the benefits of political democracy are yet to reach the masses – political institutions are dominated by the elite, civil society has been politicized and the interventionist state has become an arm of the elite. The solution to these problems lies in further democratization of the political process.

McCarron approaches the work of Alfred Hitchcock in a way that is unique in the world of film critique. Rather, than provide a biographical overview, or consider Hitchcock’s work in the context of conventional film criticism, McCarron uses Hitchcock’s films to illustrate ideas at play in the social sciences and philosophy even as he uses those same ideas to illustrate central aspects of Hitchcock’s films. In short, while McCarron focuses on many of Hitchcock’s most celebrated films, his broader concern is with a series of ideas crucial to Hitchcock’s work as an innovative artist of the cinema. For example, McCarron interrogates the idea of the MacGuffin, Hitchcock’s famous term for the motivating issue in a film’s narrative. However, there is far more to the idea of the MacGuffin than is found in Hitchcock’s description, as McCarron shows how political theorist Ernesto Laclau’s theory of equivalential substitution effectively explains how the MacGuffin functions as a device to bridge the divide between the film’s exegesis and the audience’s emotional engagement in the story. In a similar vein, McCarron undertakes a close reading of Hitchcock’s theory of ‘pure cinema,’ indicating that while the concept is widely embraced by Hitchcock scholars, rarely do those scholars agree on what Hitchcock ultimately intended by the phrase. Tracing the development of the concept across the years, McCarron shows how Hitchcock’s theory of pure cinema resonates with anthropological concepts of purity and even finds a place in current debates regarding so-called hybrid media. McCarron further explores Hitchcock’s alleged moralism, showing how the problem of moral agency was often treated in Hitchcock’s films as a highly complex and decidedly ambiguous condition. McCarron indicates the importance of re-viewing Hitchcock’s films from points of view that plainly show that Hitchcock is not properly understood when simply described as ‘the master of suspense,’ as his films are of enduring interest for a range of reasons that go well beyond their relevance for traditional film studies. Interpretations of his films gain in power and scope when we extend our analyses to the intricate interpretations of his work as it touches on subjects as diverse as politics, feminism, rhetoric, and philosophy. McCarron treats these larger intellectual constellations in considerable detail, bringing a fresh perspective to the study of the famed director’s work.

“The Domains of Identity” defines sixteen simple and comprehensive categories of transactions which cause personally identifiable information to be stored in databases. This research, which builds on the synthesis of over 900 academic articles, addresses the challenges of identity management that involve interactions of almost all people in almost all institutional/organizational contexts. Enumerating the sixteen domains and describing the characteristics of each domain clarifies which problems can arise and how they can be solved within each domain.

Discussions of identity management are often confusing because they mix issues from multiple domains, or because they try unsuccessfully to apply solutions from one domain to problems in another. This book is an attempt to eliminate the confusion and enable clearer conversations about identity management problems and solutions.

Who owns our digital identity? Is ownership even a relevant concept here? Who controls our digital identity (or pieces of it)? What is the correct relationship between the individual, the state, and private actors and organizations, with respect to one’s identity? What do emerging technical architectures do to potentially create alignment? What identity is required to get identity documents? Kaliya Young guides us through these and other questions we need to be asking to solve our society’s complex identity challenges.

This volume addresses a central problem of contemporary states, namely how to manage the eruption of public religions. While the liberal framework formerly regarded religion as simply a matter of private practice and conscience, in modern states religion has often come to challenge the so-called Westphalian model of church-state relations, and has brought into question many liberal notions of secularism and tolerance. There is much discussion about post-secular society in which religion has to be taken seriously in public affairs. This collection of case studies – looking at Turkey, Singapore, India, China, Britain, Europe and the United States – explores a number of examples in which the state exercises some degree of management of religion, thereby bringing into question the traditional separation of religion and state. This study also attempts to refine the notion of secularization by examining this process in terms of political arrangements (church-state relations) and the role of religion in everyday life. Ultimately, this study reveals that there is no uniform or standard pattern of secularization in modern societies.

Wittgenstein’s remarks on colour have been accorded little critical examination, the sole exception being the explanation in the Tractatus of the logical impossibility of a point in the visual field having two colours simultaneously, a gap the present work is primarily meant to fill. Remarks on Colour, a compilation of writings on the subject drafted in the last fifteen months of Wittgenstein’s life, is subjected to sustained critical scrutiny and is shown that it does not deserve to languish in the limbo to which it has been mostly consigned, but it indeed is deeper and more illuminating than other more studied writings, to say nothing of peripheral writings on ethics, aesthetics and religion.

The Remarks would warrant a careful look if only because it is, as it has been billed, ‘one of the few documents which shows [Wittgenstein] concentratedly at work on a single philosophical issue’. But it also deserves special consideration and is worth grappling with since it shows Wittgenstein thinking through a problem from scratch and, what is still less common, without knowing where he will end up. In particular no other extended stretch of writing so clearly shows him as engaged in an unconstrained investigation of a topic of huge general interest and setting the agenda for philosophers, indeed as pioneering a still insufficiently investigated subject. And following in his footsteps pays since it brings to light a great deal about how he approaches philosophy and proves to be a good way into the philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s once said: ‘Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo’, and the present work takes him at his word and accords him the courtesy of treating his own sentences as ‘all to be read slowly’. His remarks are examined one by one in the order he wrote them rather than the order they appear in the published text with close attention to his toing-and-froing and changes of tack. The result is a picture of a serious philosopher at work, one grappling with rare scrupulousness to a series of problems. Just as importantly one sees that the thrust of his deliberations is routinely misidentified, that there are significant similarities as well as significant differences between his late and early thinking about colour, and that much folklore, both laudatory and disparaging, that has sprung up regarding the thinness of his reasoning and the thickness of his conclusions is substantially off-base.

Population is a dangerous political category. It is not separable from the racist and class-based valorisation and devaluation of different lives. From contraceptive implant programmes for the Global South to right wing anti-immigration discourses, demographic interpretations of multiple global and local crises legitimise the states' grip on childbearing and mobility. The results are various dimensions of reproductive racism and restrictive border regimes. Meanwhile, global social inequalities and racial capitalist extractivism stay out of the game. 

The book explores how demographic knowledge production and states’ grip to the variable of population intertwine. It introduces the concept of a Malthusian matrix in order to understand how class-selective and racist hierarchies within population narratives are combined with gendered policies of reproductive bodies and behaviours. Another chapter unfolds the invisible assumptions underlying demographic projections, as these future narratives support powerful strategies of domination in the presence. 

Through the book various current dimensions of reproductive racism are demonstrated, distinguishing between the birth of desirable and undesirable people: an upward redistributive family policy in Germany is promoting births within the privileged middle classes. And international population programs revive targets in order to increase the use of long-acting contraceptives in the Global South, within a market-oriented setting of Big Pharma promotion. Reproductive racism is also effective in migration policy strategies: narratives about "migrant birth rates" circulate in ultra-right forces as well as among seemingly apolitical demographic policy consultancy. 

Finally, the book also reflects on the role of statehood in contested demographic politics and what theoretical instruments are needed in order to attack the demographic power-knowledge complex. The epilogue refers to the intersectional feminist concept of reproductive justice as an important tool and framework for anti-Malthusian resistance and alliances.

El cambio climático y la crisis de extinción entrelazados se prestan a la economía política. Joseph Henry Vogel ha construido un argumento a favor de llevar a los países ricos en carbono, pero pobres económicamente, a través del cuello de botella de la economía de vaquero y hacia el “comercio en el derecho de emisiones” de los países Anexo I del Protocolo de Kioto. Ecuador sirve como el modelo. “La economía de la Iniciativa Yasuní-ITT” es un contrapunto a muchos niveles a “El Informe Stern” por Sir Nicholas Stern. En el nivel más básico, Vogel sostiene que Stern se equivoca por su falta de reconocimiento de la naturaleza del cambio climático como termodinámica, con lo cual pierde de vista la apropiación del Norte del sumidero atmosférico. El cambio a la termodinámica pone de relieve la legitimidad de una “deuda de carbono”, que comienza a hacer tictac con el primer informe del Grupo Intergubernamental de Expertos sobre Cambio Climático ((IPCC) por sus siglas en inglés) en 1990. A través del lente de la teoría económica, la intransigencia comprensible de los países pobres para asumir el “tope” en el “comercio en el derecho de emisiones” es una distorsión del sistema económico. No obstante, acorde con esa misma economía, una distorsión puede justificar otra. Esa otra distorsión es el pago que Ecuador busca por no perforar en la Reserva de la Biosfera Yasuní. Haciendo caso de la llamada de Deirdre (antes Donald) McCloskey de que la economía necesita más humor, Vogel ha escrito una crítica penetrante sobre la economía convencional que a su vez entretiene.

‘Stephen Wall, “Trollope and Character” (1988) and Other Essays on Victorian Literature’, with an introduction by Nicholas Shrimpton, gathers together the principal publications of the distinguished scholar-critic Stephen Wall. Wall was widely regarded for his writings on the Victorian novel, and this book contains all his major writings about Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, including the full text of his book-length study ‘Trollope and Character’ (1988) and a history of Dickens's reception. Alongside these texts are included Wall's reflections on Jane Austen and George Eliot and on other aspects of nineteenth-century fiction, as well as his influential essay on the ways in which English novels should be edited. Together, the essays communicate the mixture of learning, human sympathy, critical intelligence and dry wit that made Wall's voice so distinctive and trusted.

Following the Nationalist defeat on the mainland in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his followers retreated to Taiwan, forming the Republic of China (ROC). To many it seemed almost certain that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) would attack and take Taiwan, perhaps as early as summer 1950. Control over a number of offshore islands, especially Quemoy (Jinmen) and Matsu (Mazu) became a deciding factor in whether the PRC could invade Taiwan or, conversely, the ROC could invade the mainland. Twice in the 1950s tensions peaked, during the first (1954–55) and second (1958) Taiwan Strait crises. During both these events the U.S. government intervened diplomatically and militarily. 

This work provides a short, but highly relevant, history of the Taiwan Strait, and its significance today. This small body of water—often compared to the English Channel—separates the PRC and Taiwan and has been the location for periodic military tensions, some threatening to end in war. During the 1950s, the two outbreaks appeared like they might result in a global war. During the evacuation of the Dachen Islands, for example, the U.S.Navy sent seven aircraft carriers and was authorized to nuke three Chinese coastal cities if the PLA tried to interfere. 

In the modern era, the Taiwan Strait separates democratic Taiwan from the authoritarian PRC. This study will discuss the origins of these conflicts, the military aspects of the confrontations, and, in particular, the complicated and largely secret diplomatic negotiations—including two previously unknown Eisenhower-Chiang secret agreements—going on behind the scenes between the U.S. government and the nationalist government in Taiwan. This book ends with a short discussion of the ongoing Covid crisis, and how the PRC might take advantage of this crisis to extend its political and, eventually, military control over Taiwan.

A young Tokyoite doctor accepts a post on a remote island south of Okinawa. When a highly contagious fatal disease breaks out, he has to choose between saving himself or saving others.

A hormone-ridden teenage youth left alone with his young stepmother following his father’s death is consumed with jealousy as her affections turn to another man.

A journalist in search of answers travels from the metropolis to a bleak shore on the Japan Sea and eventually the furthest extreme of ice-bound Hokkaido, as he investigates the suicide of a young man.

In a backstreet of the metropolis, a wily old detective follows his hunches to nail the murderer of a young prostitute.

A conflict arises between two detectives investigating the shocking suicide of a 6-year-old child, the son of a young actress famed for her immoral behavior. Can it really be suicide, or is it murder?

In this early collection of five short stories, Kyotaro Nishimura explores the criminal mind and what makes people do the unthinkable.

Schutz, then, being a philosopher with extensive experience with social scientists, economists, theorists of law—whom he encountered in his studies at the University of Vienna in the early twentieth century, worked in two areas: philosophical and social scientific theory. His investigations can be studied and more deeply appreciated in their own right, and also for the contributions they might make to an analysis of social problems (e.g. intercultural, interracial understanding) or of problems in the social sciences, including how social science itself can proceed in its different areas, such as sociology of knowledge, sociology in general, or the theory of society.

The contributors to this volume will examine topics in Schutz’s philosophical-phenomenological theory of the social world, such as the second person, the face-to-face relationship, the meaning of human action, signs, symbols, and relevance (or interests). Since Schutz sought to provide philosophical foundations for the social sciences, his work opens up a series of epistemological questions, such as those about traditional knowledge and the opacity of knowledge and theory, that is, the neglected or unseen questions that accompany any knowing or theorizing. Also, authors from within the Schutzian framework will address issues IN the social sciences, such as the Durkheimian aspects of Schutz’s thought, the sociology of knowledge, and the theory of sociology. The book will also explore how Schutzian theory, which is often viewed as a micro-sociology, can be extended to give an account of a macro-sociological reality like modern society.

The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, being closely bound with the concept of the limit of inescapable necessity that has been embodied in and expressed through theatre since the time of the ancient Greeks. This book addresses the question of how the twentieth century – one of the most violent periods of human history – dealt with the fundamental structure that is the tragic. Examining the consciousness of the era through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding texts – including works by Ibsen, Claudel, O’Neill, Brecht, Camus, Beckett, Pasolini, Grotowski, Delcuvellerie and Josse De Pauw – ‘Modern European Tragedy’ draws a vivid picture of the development that tragedy experienced during this time. Along the way, the book engages with some of the prominent currents of twentieth-century thought and philosophy that can still be found in the varied map of contemporary thought today: the ideas of modern Christianity, psychoanalysis, the theory of the Absurd, nihilism, Marxism and the acceptance of the limit. Together, analyses of these currents serve to support the book’s key avenues of investigation: its explorations of what inspired these key authors to engage with the idea of the tragic; and its explanation of why the contemporary tragic no longer bears the form of classic tragedy.

Growing levels of education, increasing availability of capital, diversification and specialization of economic activities, and the numerous support options available to start a business has led to the creation of more and more micro and small businesses across Europe. But while the process of setting up a business is increasingly straightforward, keeping it going is much tougher. In normal times, business entry and business exit are natural processes, inherent to economic life. Yet, the number of bankruptcies peaked during the recent financial crisis. The Lisbon Partnership had identified the key role of overcoming the stigma of business failure as a strategy for growth and jobs.

There is a clear economic and social rationale in providing a second chance to failed entrepreneurs and helping them derive positive experiences from negative situations. First, businesses set up by restarters grow faster than those of first timers in terms of turnover and jobs created. The case studies of Ford, Hershey and Disney are instructive for young entrepreneurs in this matter.

Second, most of the time, the cause of a business failure is not the incompetence but external circumstances such as a slump in demand, financial crisis or rise of a new competitor. However, this professional failure is often confused with personal failure, and low self-esteem causes individuals to withdraw and retreat to safer employment options.

Third, it is accepted that a society does not generate innovation and productivity by steadfastly avoiding mistakes but rather by learning from them. Yet the culture of and incentive system in Europe does not reflect this.

Value of Failure is a comprehensive attempt to understand the various aspects of the phenomenon of business failure. It enables readers to understand business failure from the perspective of institutional theory; economic failure in the process of small business growth in the context of the shadow economy; Schumpeter’s theory of ‘creative destruction’ and the fear of failure; sustainable economic growth and development and system approach to failures and their impact on the enterprise operation.

A wide-ranging collection of concise essays, ‘Past Forward’ introduces core features of Korean history that illuminate current issues and pressing concerns, including recent political upheavals, social developments and cultural shifts. Adapted from Kyung Moon Hwang’s regular columns in the ‘Korea Times’ of Seoul, the essays forward interpretative points concerning historical debates and controversies in order to generate thinking about the ongoing impact of the past on the present, and vice versa: how Korea’s present circumstances reflect and shape the evolving understanding of its past. In taking the reader on a compelling journey through history, ‘Past Forward’ paints a distinctive, fascinating portrait of Korea and Koreans both yesterday and today.

Containing both extensive chronological and subject tables of contents, the essays are grouped into themes demonstrating a particular facet of the recurring connections between the past and the present. In addition, the book contains a timeline of contents that situates the essays in chronological context and a subject index. While all the self-contained essays introduce particular facets of Korean history and society, they are free of jargon and written for the general reader.

The collection attempts to come to term with Robert Park’s legacy. As will become evident, the focus is largely though not entirely on the work rather than the man. Mary Jo Deegan makes use of aspects of Park’s biography to illustrate what she sees as his disavowal of developing sociology as a moral science in the interest of objectivity. The article by Martin Bulmer addresses how Park came to understand what it meant to “do sociology” and Raymond Lee sees Park’s inquisitiveness as the guiding thread linking his journalism and sociology. Lee contends that in terms of sociological research, inquisitiveness was channeled by a theoretical orientation that was open to mixed methods research.

Lonnie Athens and Donald Reitzes address theoretical concerns, particularly as they pertain to Park’s place in relation to the pragmatist tradition, the work of George Herbert Mead and the emergence of symbolic interactionism. Athens offers a systematic comparison of Mead and Park on social action, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of both positions. Reitzes contends that Park’s contribution to social psychology has heretofore been underappreciated, and sets out to rectify that relative neglect. Peter Kivisto, Chad Alan Goldberg and Vince Marotta address aspects of Park’s contribution to race and ethnic relations, reflecting the centrality of this theme to his body of work taken as a whole. Kivisto explores Park’s understanding of assimilation, which has come to be known as the “canonical theory of assimilation.” Goldberg’s chapter engages in a parallel undertaking by exploring Park’s concept of the marginal man and the subsequent career of this concept. Marotta begins by noting that Park’s links to journalism and his focus on empirical investigation led many subsequent commentators to overlook the theoretical sophistication of his work. In his contribution, Marotta compares Park to contemporary critical race theorists. Coline Ruwet analyzes the shifts in his thinking about the city over the course of a quarter century. Specifically, she identifies three stages in the evolution of Park’s thinking. Anthony Blasi rounds out the collection, addressing a topic usually not associated with Park: religion.

Taken as a whole, it will be evident that these articles embrace no singular response to Park, but rather a broad range of responses, generally appreciative but also critical. The goal of this book is not to make a case for or against Park, but rather to encourage readers to consider the virtue of rethinking—and rereading—this major figure in American sociology. If one is left with a sense that we actually still do not know enough about Park the person and Park the sociologist, but that getting to know him on both fronts is important, then this companion will have served its purpose. 

Despite upheavals in ownership over the past three decades, the name Angus & Robertson remains to date the most recognised book-retailing brand in Australia. However, it is little known that through the incredible efforts of everyone involved in the operations of its London agency, Angus & Robertson was, for a time, also the most recognised Australian bookselling and book publishing brand in the commonwealth.

This book documents a distinctive chapter in the history of Australian book publishing as it addresses how the company dealt with the tension between aspirational literary nationalism and the requirements of turning a profit while attempting to get inside the UK literary market. As well as detailing Angus & Robertson’s complete international relations, the book argues that the company’s international business was a much larger, more successful and complicated business than has been acknowledged by previous scholars. It questions the ways in which Angus & Robertson replicated, challenged or transformed the often highly criticised commercial practices of British publishers in order to develop an export trade for Australian books in the United Kingdom.

‘Angus & Robertson and the British Trade in Australian Books, 1930–1970’ is the first of its kind; no other book in the present literary market records a substantial history of Australia’s largest publisher and its role in the development of Australia’s export book trade. Although a unique piece, this volume also complements existing studies on Angus & Robertson, Australian literature and Australian publishing.

In considering Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot', a novel less easily defined in terms of plot and ideas than his other major fictional works, Sarah Young addresses problems in the novel unresolved by previous interpretations, and in doing so fills a significant gap in Dostoevsky studies. 'Dostoevsky's The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative' provides an innovative theoretical framework for an analysis that integrates structural and narratological considerations with thematic (religious and ethical) aspects, by focusing on the characters' interactivity as the most fundamental level on which the ethical systems of the novel are enacted. It examines the questions of what ethical bases are put forward by the novel, what faith-issues and philosophical world-views they derive from, and how, in terms of structuring and narration rather than simply thematically, they are presented in the novel. For the first time, through the concept of scripting, the author shows how the ethical becomes the foundation for the narratological in The Idiot. No other book on Dostoevsky has addressed the question of ethics, which is so important to the study of Dostoevsky, particularly in the light of recent work on the religious dimension of his novels, within the context of narrative and Bakhtinian dialogue. This substantial new work will appeal to academics, postgraduates and undergraduates working on Dostoevsky and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian novel in general; as well as scholars in the fields of literary theory, including Bakhtin studies, narratology, literature and ethics.

William Congreve wrote his plays and his novella, Incognita¸ during a time of immense social and political upheaval. The revolution of 1688 brought with it a rash of new ideas. William and Mary were monarchs chosen by a Convention of Englishmen, not rulers chosen by divine right. And new ideas in philosophy and politics, most notably expressed in the writings of John Locke, gave a new shape to the way the world was perceived. Congreve, an ardent supporter of the dual monarchy and later of William III, was depicted by Charles Lamb and many later critics as writing comedies that had no connection with the real world. To the contrary, his writings reflect a strong engagement with the changes occurring in the social milieu of the time. The new sense of political liberty brought with it greater social equality; the lapse in the Licensing Act brought greater freedom in publishing. And while the attack upon the stage by Jeremy Collier in 1698 was to rein in some of the explorative nature of comedy during the 1690s, Congreve took advantage of the new freedoms from the events of 1688 to write sophisticated comedies that both exploited this liberation and criticised it.

This book attempts to examine Congreve’s major writings in the light of these changes by beginning with what appears to have been the questions raised by what may be seen as skepticism about the family, the collapse of concepts of marriage and the debates over divorce that dominated the decade. The book demonstrates how Congreve’s plays were very much a part of this; however, in his comedies, he always managed to achieve a light surface affect. This is perhaps never truer than in his first publication, his novella Incognita. Yet what appears to be an amusing series of mistaken identities resembling what was called a “Spanish plot” turns out to contain some serious questions about identity and some doubts about the way we understand our world. After demonstrating the political ambiguities of The Old Batchelor, the book shows how the betrayal of the family to which the lovers, Mellefont and Cynthia, are attached, by the sinister Maskall, is a fairly blatant attack on the politics of Jacobitism. Congreve followed this with the lighter Love for Love, which, beneath its odd Egyptian imagery, contains an attack upon the patriarchal concept of government still accepted by the followers of the deposed king, James II. In his tragi-comedy, The Mourning Bride, Congreve allowed his plot to carry the weight of the Whig rebellion, giving his lovers the epistemology of perception that belonged to the new world of the 1690s, compared to the uncontrolled passions of the past. In his final play, The Way of the World, he demonstrates how his lovers of 1700 reveal a combination of sensibility and canniness that make them capable of facing the complexities of the new century.

‘Altered Destinations’ addresses the complex interrelations of state, nation and identity in India through the medium of culture, and compellingly reframes the debate in the context of the Gandhian concept of swaraj. Engaging with Gandhi’s classic text ‘Hind Swaraj’, which envisioned an entirely new form of identity and governance in India in opposition with its colonial past, Paranjape extends the discussion by exlporing  how ideas of autonomy, selfhood, and cultural independence have been expressed, depicted and studied.

‘Philosophical Meta-Reflections on Literary Studies: Why Do Things with Texts, and What to Do with Them?’ takes up key meta-questions in the humanities, with focus on contemporary literary studies, philosophically examines the nature of knowledge therein as well as the implications of certain popular critical approaches, and addresses the effervescent question of ‘relevance’. In contrast to usual works on literary theory, or on philosophy of literature for that matter, this book presents an integrated meta-reasoning on the foundational questions of literary studies from an interdisciplinary perspective – in a manner of intertextual informality. It endeavours to articulate a rationale for the humanities in general and literary studies in particular. It philosophically examines the implications of, and assumptions behind, three popular tendencies in contemporary literary criticism – textual deconstruction, ideological criticism and constructivism. It also introduces the reader to possibilities of non-reductive reasoning with regard to the relation between the aesthetic and the political. With his multidisciplinary background, doctoral degree on an encyclopedic author who extended the frontiers of fiction with his highly experimental writings (James Joyce) and past engagements with vital issues in the humanities/literature, Jibu George is in a position to deal with foundational questions therein. The book endeavours to fill the gap between theory and practice; its metacritical reflections redefine the way critics interpret texts, teachers teach them, students study them and researchers grapple with their research problems. It also proposes an array of new concepts for the understanding of literature which have a significance beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.

This book explores the multiple effects of globalization on urban and rural communities, providing anthropological case studies from postsocialist Bulgaria. As globalization has been studied largely in urban contexts, the aim of this volume is to shift attention to the under-examined countryside and analyse how transnational links are transforming relations between cities, towns and villages in Bulgaria.

Since the opening of borders after the end of socialism (1989) and Bulgaria’s EU accession (2007), rural communities have been drawn into new transnational connections and global ‘shortcuts’ that transcend the framework of the (formerly socialist) nation-state. The case studies of this volume demonstrate that apart from cities, villages and towns are also increasingly exposed to global flows and economic inequalities, resulting in the remaking of rural places. As a result of increased mobility and growing transnational and global connections, boundaries are fading between cities and the countryside and between Bulgaria and Europe. Some Bulgarian villages are winners while others are losers as a result of this development, leading to a situation of extreme rural diversity.

This book aims to challenge undifferentiated notions of ‘the countryside’, calling for a greater awareness of rural economic and social disparities which are often only associated with urban environments. It also focuses on how the ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ have been reconfigured in Bulgaria following the end of socialism and the advent of globalization, in socioeconomic as well as political, ideological and cultural terms. The volume is based on a collection of papers presented at a workshop that took place at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies on 29 and 30 May 2008. 

The world has gone through a major transformation in the last two decades. The end of the Cold War in Europe has led to a massive increase in private capital flow and has also brought an information and telecommunication revolution. In this new interdependent and interconnected world, international trade and investment has overtaken the importance of national economies. Globalization has created new opportunities as well as many risks and challenges. While globalization creates new wealth and encourages technological innovations, it has also failed to support and promote sustainable human development and thus can be accused of generating anguish and deprivation. This has already resulted in growing civil unrest and, in some cases, contributed to armed conflicts in the developing world. However, peace and conflict research has hitherto somehow overlooked the influence of increasing globalization on the formation and management of such emerging conflicts. The study of globalization also tends to overlook a proven fact that the management of conflicts in the South has been invariably influenced by the global powers and their strategic politics. This impressive edited volume makes an attempt to assess the concrete that measures exist which can be effective in addressing the causes of conflict and building peace in an increasingly interdependent world.

Animated by theoretical eclecticism and methodological diversity, ‘Power Shifts and Global Governance: Challenges from South and North’ presents a 'post-national' political project for analyzing emerging architectures of global governance and examining country and regional case studies from the perspective of  'great power shifts' in the twenty-first century. Using theoretical insights from neo-Kantians and neo-institutionalists, the book explores the contested meanings and practices of globalization and polycentric governance in the context of emerging powers such as China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, and examines the implications of shifts in the foreign and domestic policies of the new powers in the world. The book not only reflects on the fundamental erosion of an international order in which Western societies enjoyed a relatively uncomplicated consensus on their political, economic and ideological eminence, but also debates the nature of emerging 'radically incomplete' global interdependencies among nations.

Challenging the hegemony of dominant paradigms in conventional International Relations theories and blurring the traditional distinctions between South and North, the book seeks a new 'New Deal' to address issues of poverty, climate change and human security at the global level. Written in clear, lucid language, the book is a serious attempt to deepen newer ways of international cooperation as it re-imagines the future of cosmopolitan democracy and global civil society.

Despite upheavals in ownership over the past three decades, the name Angus & Robertson remains to date the most recognised book-retailing brand in Australia. However, it is little known that through the incredible efforts of everyone involved in the operations of its London agency, Angus & Robertson was, for a time, also the most recognised Australian bookselling and book publishing brand in the commonwealth.

This book documents a distinctive chapter in the history of Australian book publishing as it addresses how the company dealt with the tension between aspirational literary nationalism and the requirements of turning a profit while attempting to get inside the UK literary market. As well as detailing Angus & Robertson’s complete international relations, the book argues that the company’s international business was a much larger, more successful and complicated business than has been acknowledged by previous scholars. It questions the ways in which Angus & Robertson replicated, challenged or transformed the often highly criticised commercial practices of British publishers in order to develop an export trade for Australian books in the United Kingdom.

‘Angus & Robertson and the British Trade in Australian Books, 1930–1970’ is the first of its kind; no other book in the present literary market records a substantial history of Australia’s largest publisher and its role in the development of Australia’s export book trade. Although a unique piece, this volume also complements existing studies on Angus & Robertson, Australian literature and Australian publishing.

The book offers a step-by-step blueprint of radical proposals for the U.S.-Mexican border that go far beyond traditional initiatives to ease restrictions on immigration. The book argues that the border with Mexico should be completely open for Mexicans wishing to travel north. Up Against the Wall provides the background to understanding how the border has become a fraud, resulting in nothing more than the criminalization of Mexican and other migrants, the bloating of the mismanaged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the deterioration of living standards along the frontier, and the enrichment of American employers. Placing the border in a historical perspective, Laufer shows how circumstances have deteriorated to the present Trump-exacerbated crisis, and why the region and the migration through it cannot be ignored. Over the last several years he has interviewed dozens of authorities and men and women in the street while reporting from Mexico, along the border, and in the United States. He demonstrates that the security of America's southern border is a fallacy; offers vivid examples to illustrate how the chain of misery and lawbreaking for migrants heading north is initiated by U.S. employers, traces many of the border problems to the Guatemalan-Mexican border, and explores the abuses of the Border Patrol and the growing presence of vigilantes on the American side. Up Against the Wall is sure to provoke a lively debate over the future of Mexican immigration and global migration crises.

Why do people queue up and break the bank to watch fantasy movies? Why do some fictional characters and mythical creatures arrest our mind and senses? Why do some images and tales affect us so deeply, so much so that we see them all around and inside us? From heroic journeys to uncanny feelings to invincible goddesses, ‘Symbols and Myth- Making in Modernity’ investigates the metaphoric power of symbols in human imagination today and in the past. The book traces how ever-present cross-cultural symbols, residing in ancient rites, masterpieces of Renaissance, Sufi poetry, religion and myths, erupt in popular culture today, including in cinema, books, visual art, music and politics.
The book unpacks a post-Jungian, phenomenological theory of deep culture that nourishes human perception of reality through symbols and myths. It describes how complex symbols such as those in ancient myths, religions or modern popular culture should be seen as multivalent, irreplaceable, shared to the extent that they carry significance across cultures and times and pointing to interiority or inner transformation, including as compensation or as affirmation. Moreover, the most popular and common symbols are not fantasized by individuals but are rather grasped or intuited from the culture they live in. Symbols are manifest in popular culture yet simultaneously hidden so that their significance becomes apparent only with appropriate conceptual lenses which carries signification beyond the literal object itself. Art and rituals are the societal vessels that disclose the depth of the symbol and its relevance to daily life.
Symbols have always been situated within a system of meaning — a mytho-logia. But moderns have largely lost conscious access to a mythology. This offers mythology for our time, illustrating its relevance in modern rituals of popular movies, religion and politics. Dismantling literalism and disturbing our view of the world, at each step the book unpacks how people relate to the world through symbols, how symbols play out in the modern world, and the work they do in transforming the self. At the same time, deep culture is helpful in pointing to ruptures — where modern myths stumble — thereby leading to new analyses of emerging societal crises and identifying new potential solutions.

Wittgenstein’s May–June 1913 critique of Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgement (or MRTJ) marked a crucial turning point in the lives of two great twentieth-century thinkers. But it was also a watershed moment within the history of analytic philosophy itself. The critique led Russell to abandon his 1913 Theory of Knowledge manuscript and left a significant breach within his epistemology. It represented an important milestone within Wittgenstein’s philosophical development and marked the point at which he emerged on the scene as an independent philosophical force. It inaugurated the linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy which would dominate the course of analytic philosophy throughout the early and middle part of that century. For these and other reasons, it is worthy of careful study and deep understanding.

Yet scholarly consensus around a satisfactory interpretation of the nature of the critique, the extent of and reasons for its impact on Russell, along with the role it played within Wittgenstein’s developmental trajectory have remained elusive. This partly reflects the fact that a correct interpretation of Wittgenstein’s critique depends upon a satisfactory resolution of several other, related exegetical controversies within the interpretation of Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s respective philosophies.

With these facts in mind, this book aims to accomplish four interrelated goals. The first is to develop a compelling reading of Wittgenstein’s May–June 1913 critique of Russell’s MRTJ. For reasons which will become clear over the course of the book, this reading is called the ‘logical interpretation’ (or LI). The second main objective of the book is to defend LI against its most prominent competitors in the scholarly literature. These include interpretations of Wittgenstein’s objection offered by Nicholas Griffin and Steven Sommerville, Gregory Landini, Graham Stevens, Peter Hanks, Christopher Pincock, Rosalind Carey, Fraser MacBride and Samuel Lebens. Third, the book aims to situate Wittgenstein’s critique of the MRTJ and Russell’s reaction to it, within the broader context of each of Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s respective philosophical developments. While much scholarship has focused on probing the role played by the objection within the evolution of Russell’s thought, much less has been done to explore the impact on Wittgenstein’s development. Still less, if any scholarship has been devoted to highlighting the significant traces of Wittgenstein’s critique which can be found latent within his later philosophical viewpoint. This book seeks to fill these lacunae in the scholarship on Wittgenstein while also adding to the high-quality work on Russell which has already been done in this area. Fourth and finally, the book aims to introduce students and scholars of early analytic philosophy to and familiarize them with the historical events, textual evidence, scholarly controversies, letters, notes and diagrams, consideration of which is integral to constructing a plausible reading of Wittgenstein’s objection. To that end, it brings together a broad selection of relevant materials and information in a clear, accessible and organized way into one, relatively concise source.

Examining today’s global politics by linking it to the meditations of a classical Greek philosopher may be counterintuitive to understanding a world in crisis. But for political analysts, policymakers, social media, bloggers, journalists, engaged students, the new influencers, and inquisitive citizens, Thucydides’ ancient wisdom may offer critical insights into detecting the endemic of political fear spreading across global borders. With his help and by applying his framework to six case studies, this book unearths the different facets of fear that define a world in crisis.

Fear is a pervasive term used to describe a group’s or individual’s sense of insecurity, threat, and angst. It identifies other subtle dimensions comprising suspicion, scepticism, wariness, dread, horror, stupefication, and moral panic. These events may arise in the very near future or affect society at some later point, as Thucydides discovered in his analysis. Disaggregating political fear makes us aware of its complexities as the classical Greek writer set out twenty-five centuries ago. Framing his study to today’s fears results in significant ramifications for democracy and rivalries between states. 

Thucydides’ meditations on fear is about six intriguing case studies structuring political fear: national fear which caused the Brexit outcome in the UK; a regional kind fomenting fear of foreigners in Germany’s Saxony state; an ethnic dimension emerging in a Russia fearful of too much in-migration; an individual case of a Japanese artist experiencing angst when caught between adversaries in World War II; fear of interstate relations shaping Australia’s troubled connections to China; and the precariousness of identity as the U.S. began to embrace tribal politics. In all this, can a rejuvenated liberal theory unpacking a heavy dose of tolerance overcome symbolic liberalism and slam the door on ever-mounting political fear?

From slums to suburbs, freak-shows to fast food, prisons to pornography, 'A Dictionary of Victorian London' is a fascinating exposé of everyday life in the Great Metropolis of Victorian London. Compiling authentic nineteenth-century voices from a multitude of sources, including advertisements, diaries, court cases, journalism and guidebooks, Lee Jackson paints a unique picture of life in a vibrant and diverse city in an alphabetical guide that ranges from A for Advertising Vans ("devoted to the promulgation of the merits of Holloway's ointment in curing diseased legs") to Z for Zazel (the world's first human cannonball). With striking contemporary illustrations throughout, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the remarkable history of London and the enthralling lives of the Victorians.

Al-Ghazālī made seminal contributions to the field of ethical economic thought. Though he dedicated many chapters in his encyclopaedic Iḥyā’ Ulūm al-Dīn (The Revival of Religious Sciences) to what he considered just and Sharī‘a-based economic conduct in (Muslim) society, this specific aspect of his corpus has been largely overlooked in Western scholarship. This book aims to analyse and revive al-Ghazālī’s little studied economic teachings by emphasizing his economic philosophy and its correlation between Sharī‘a’s moral law and the tradition of taṣawwuf, situating his thought within the context of modern economic theories. 

The scholarly ignorance of his economic contributions goes hand in hand with a claim made by several Western scholars (e.g., J. Schumpeter) that classical Islamic scholarship did not offer any significant development in the domain of economic thought in what was known in Europe as the Middle Ages—a claim that scholars like Ghazanfar and Islahi, attempted to refute. This book delves into an analysis of al-Ghazālī’s theoretical accounts and his economic philosophy as part of his overall ethics of happiness, looking closely at select passages from his work in order to position them at the intersection of two domains within the framework of classical Islamic economic thought, namely taṣawwuf or Sufi-mystical thought and Sharī‘a law. 

This work does not assume that al-Ghazālī anticipated modern trends of Western economics; however, by merging the necessity of kasb (acquisitions of wealth) and the importance of zuhd (renunciation of the worldly endeavours) as equal components in the context of the science of the hereafer (‘ilm ṭarīq al-ākhira), he presented the culmination of ethical economic thought in classical Islamic tradition, influencing later Muslim scholars. Hence, in this rather specific reading of al-Ghazālī’s economic philosophy, he conceived of an economic analysis that was founded upon ethical teachings, an endeavor that should be ultimately regarded as a technology of self-examination.