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Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
The Sasanians were the last of the ancient Persian dynasties, and
the preeminent practitioners of the Zoroastrian religion. From its
foundation by Ardashir I in 224 CE the Sasanian Empire was the
dominant force in the region for several centuries until its last
king, Yasdegerd III, was defeated by the Muslim Arabs in the 7th
century. In this clear and comprehensive new book, Touraj Daryaee
provides an unrivalled account of Sasanian Persia. Using new
sources, he paints a vivid portrait of the empire's often neglected
social history and examines the development of its political and
administrative institutions. The author also explores, for the
first time in an integrated book on the Sasanians, their
descendants' attempts for more than a century after their defeat to
establish a second state. "Sasanian Persia" is a unique examination
of a period of history that still has great significance for a full
understanding of modern Iran.
This study examines how China has developed a diplomatic mechanism
to expand its international influence through the establishment of
strategic partnerships. These strategic partnerships have sparked a
debate among analysts. On the one hand, some optimistic studies
applaud the win-win objective of China's foreign policy and portray
China as a successful model for developing countries. On the other
hand, more skeptical studies depict China as a rising imperial
power that represents a competitive threat to Latin America. This
book focuses on China's strategic partnerships with Argentina,
Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela within the oil sector. It stresses
how Chinese strategic partnerships with each of these four
countries have diverged across cases over time (1991-2015). The
study finds that the strategic partnerships are asymmetrical in
which China benefits more than four Latin American countries in a
variety of aspects. I suggest Latin American countries to push for
greater diversification of export agenda toward China, to develop
new productive partnerships beyond traditional sectors and to
increase the competitiveness of firms. Meanwhile, China's
diplomatic actions toward Latin America are more than likely to
result in forms of change, particularly across my four country
cases, and where strategic partnerships are concerned.
While serving as a crew chief aboard a U.S. Air Force Rescue
helicopter, Airman First Class William A. Robinson was shot down
and captured in Ha Tinh Province, North Vietnam, on September 20,
1965. After a brief stint at the "Hanoi Hilton," Robinson endured
2,703 days in multiple North Vietnamese prison camps, including the
notorious Briarpatch and various compounds at Cu Loc, known by the
inmates as the Zoo. No enlisted man in American military history
has been held as a prisoner of war longer than Robinson. For seven
and a half years, he faced daily privations and endured the full
range of North Vietnam's torture program. In The Longest Rescue:
The Life and Legacy of Vietnam POW William A. Robinson, Glenn
Robins tells Robinson's story using an array of sources, including
declassified U.S. military documents, translated Vietnamese
documents, and interviews from the National Prisoner of War Museum.
Unlike many other POW accounts, this comprehensive biography
explores Robinson's life before and after his capture, particularly
his estranged relationship with his father, enabling a better
understanding of the difficult transition POWs face upon returning
home and the toll exacted on their families. Robins's powerful
narrative not only demonstrates how Robinson and his fellow
prisoners embodied the dedication and sacrifice of America's
enlisted men but also explores their place in history and memory.
How should failed states in Africa be understood? Catherine Scott
here critically engages with the concept of state failure and
provides an historical reinterpretation. She shows that, although
the concept emerged in the context of the post-Cold War new world
order, the phenomenon has been attendant throughout (and even
before) the development of the Westphalian state system.
Contemporary failed states, however, differ from their historical
counterparts in one fundamental respect: they fail within their
existing borders and continue to be recognised as something that
they are not. This peculiarity derives from international norms
instituted in the era of decolonisation, which resulted in the
inviolability of state borders and the supposed universality of
statehood. Scott argues that contemporary failed states are, in
fact, failed post-colonies. Thus understood, state failure is less
the failure of existing states and more the failed rooting and
institutionalisation of imported and reified models of Western
statehood. Drawing on insights from the histories of Uganda and
Burundi, from pre-colonial polity formation to the present day, she
explores why and how there have been failures to create effective
and legitimate national states within the bounds of inherited
colonial jurisdictions on much of the African continent.
This book explores the history and agendas of the Young Men's
Christian Association (YMCA) through its activities in South Asia.
Focusing on interactions between American 'Y' workers and the local
population, representatives of the British colonial state, and a
host of international actors, it assesses their impact on the
making of modern India. In turn, it shows how the knowledge and
experience acquired by the Y in South Asia had a significant impact
on US foreign policy, diplomacy and development programs in the
region from the mid-1940s. Exploring the 'secular' projects
launched by the YMCA such as new forms of sport, philanthropic
efforts and educational endeavours, The YMCA in Late Colonial India
addresses broader issues about the persistent role of religion in
global modernization processes, the accumulation of American soft
power in Asia, and the entanglement of American imperialism with
other colonial empires. It provides an unusually rich case study to
explore how 'global civil society' emerged in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, how it related to the prevailing imperial
world order, and how cultural specificities affected the ways in
which it unfolded. Offering fresh perspectives on the historical
trajectories of America's 'moral empire', Christian
internationalism and the history of international organizations
more broadly, this book also gives an insight into the history of
South Asia during an age of colonial reformism and decolonization.
It shows how international actors contributed to the shaping of
South Asia's modernity at this crucial point, and left a lasting
legacy in the region.
China and Russia are rising economic and political powers that
share thousands of miles of border. Despite their proximity, their
interactions with each other - and with their third neighbour
Mongolia - are rarely discussed. Although the three countries share
a boundary, their traditions, languages and worldviews are
remarkably different. Frontier Encounters presents a wide range of
views on how the borders between these unique countries are
enacted, produced, and crossed. It sheds light on global
uncertainties: China's search for energy resources and the
employment of its huge population, Russia's fear of Chinese
migration, and the precarious independence of Mongolia as its
neighbours negotiate to extract its plentiful resources. Bringing
together anthropologists, sociologists and economists, this timely
collection of essays offers new perspectives on an area that is
currently of enormous economic, strategic and geo-political
relevance.
This book provides a general overview of the daily life in a vast
empire which contained numerous ethnic, linguistic, and religious
communities. The Ottoman Empire was an Islamic imperial monarchy
that existed for over 600 years. At the height of its power in the
16th and 17th centuries, it encompassed three continents and served
as the core of global interactions between the east and the west.
And while the Empire was defeated after World War I and dissolved
in 1920, the far-reaching effects and influences of the Ottoman
Empire are still clearly visible in today's world cultures. Daily
Life in the Ottoman Empire allows readers to gain critical insight
into the pluralistic social and cultural history of an empire that
ruled a vast region extending from Budapest in Hungary to Mecca in
Arabia. Each chapter presents an in-depth analysis of a particular
aspect of daily life in the Ottoman Empire. The extensive
bibliography provides rich and diverse sources of further reading
An index provides quick reference to the individuals and places
mentioned in the text
This study uses a comparative analysis of the Malayan Emergency,
the American experience in Vietnam, and Operation IRAQI FREEDOM to
examine the role and effectiveness of artillery units in complex
counterinsurgency environments. Through this analysis, four factors
emerge which impact the employment of artillery units: the
counterinsurgency effort's requirement for indirect fires;
constraints and limitations on indirect fires; the
counterinsurgency effort's force organization; and the conversion
cost of nonstandard roles for artillery units. In conclusion, the
study offers five broadly descriptive fundamentals for employing
artillery units in a counterinsurgency environment: invest in
tactical leadership, exploit lessons learned, support the
operational approach and strategic framework, maintain pragmatic
fire support capability, and minimize collateral damage. Finally,
the study examines the role of education for leaders in a
counterinsurgency, and its influence on these imperative
fundamentals.
That Indonesia's ongoing occupation of West Papua continues to be
largely ignored by world governments is one of the great moral and
political failures of our time. West Papuans have struggled for
more than fifty years to find a way through the long night of
Indonesian colonization. However, united in their pursuit of
merdeka (freedom) in its many forms, what holds West Papuans
together is greater than what divides them. Today, the Morning Star
glimmers on the horizon, the supreme symbol of merdeka and a
cherished sign of hope for the imminent arrival of peace and
justice to West Papua. Morning Star Rising: The Politics of
Decolonization in West Papua is an ethnographically framed account
of the long, bitter fight for freedom that challenges the dominant
international narrative that West Papuans' quest for political
independence is fractured and futile. Camellia Webb-Gannon's
extensive interviews with the decolonization movements' original
architects and its more recent champions shed light on complex
diasporic and inter-generational politics as well as social and
cultural resurgence. In foregrounding West Papuans' perspectives,
the author shows that it is the body politic's unflagging
determination and hope, rather than military might or influential
allies, that form the movement's most unifying and powerful force
for independence. This book examines the many intertwining strands
of decolonization in Melanesia. Differences in cultural performance
and political diversity throughout the region are generating new,
fruitful trajectories. Simultaneously, Black and Indigenous
solidarity and a shared Melanesian identity have forged a
transnational grassroots power-base from which the movement is
gaining momentum. Relevant beyond its West Papua focus, this book
is essential reading for those interested in Pacific studies,
Native and Indigenous studies, development studies, activism, and
decolonization.
It has often been assumed that the subjects of the Ottoman sultans
were unable to travel beyond their localities - since peasants
needed the permission of their local administrators before they
could leave their villages. According to this view, only soldiers
and members of the governing elite would have been free to travel.
However, Suraiya Faroqhi's extensive archival research shows that
this was not the case; pious men from all walks of life went on
pilgrimage to Mecca, slaves fled from their masters and
craftspeople travelled in search of work. Most travellers in the
Ottoman era headed for Istanbul in search of better prospects and
even in peacetime the Ottoman administration recruited artisans to
repair fortresses and sent them far away from their home towns. In
this book, Suraiya Faroqhi provides a revisionist study of those
artisans who chose - or were obliged - to travel and those who
stayed predominantly in their home localities. She considers the
occasions and conditions which triggered travel among the artisans,
and the knowledge that they had of the capital as a spatial entity.
She shows that even those craftsmen who did not travel extensively
had some level of mobility and that the Ottoman sultans and
viziers, who spent so much effort in attempting to control the
movements of their subjects, could often only do so within very
narrow limits. Challenging existing historiography and providing an
important new revisionist perspective, this book will be essential
reading for students and scholars of Ottoman history.
Concepts such as influence, imitation, emulation, transmission or
plagiarism are transcendental to cultural history and the subject
of universal debate. They are not mere labels imposed by modern
historiography on ancient texts, nor are they the result of a later
interpretation of ways of transmitting and teaching, but are
concepts defined and discussed internally, within all cultures,
since time immemorial, which have yielded very diverse results. In
the case of culture, or better Arab-Islamic cultures, we could
analyze and discuss endlessly numerous terms that refer to concepts
related to the multiple ways of perceiving the Other, receiving his
knowledge and producing new knowledge. The purpose of this book
evolves around these concepts, and it aims to become part of a very
long tradition of studies on this subject that is essential to the
understanding of the processes of reception and creation. The
authors analyze them in depth through the use of examples that are
based on the well-known idea that societies in different regions
did not remain isolated and indifferent to the literary, religious
or scientific creations that were developed in other territories
and moreover that the flow of ideas did not always occur in only
one direction. Contacts, both voluntary and involuntary, are never
incidental or marginal, but are rather the true engine of the
evolution of knowledge and creation. It can also be stated that it
has been the awareness of the existence of multidimensional
cultural relations which has allowed modern historiography on Arab
cultures to evolve and be enriched in recent decades.
With its focus on internal North Korean affairs rather than
international relations, the book constitutes a broad and useful
addition to Northeast Asia area studies. The book provides detailed
coverage of such key issues as North Korea's nuclear weapons
program and its economic reforms Many of the contributors belong to
a younger cadre of North Korean specialist scholars and bring new
perspectives to this field
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