|
Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
With the aim to write the history of Christianity in Scandinavia
with Jerusalem as a lens, this book investigates the image - or
rather the imagination - of Jerusalem in the religious, political,
and artistic cultures of Scandinavia through most of the second
millennium. Jerusalem is conceived as a code to Christian cultures
in Scandinavia. The first volume is dealing with the different
notions of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages. Tracing the Jerusalem Code
in three volumes Volume 1: The Holy City Christian Cultures in
Medieval Scandinavia (ca. 1100-1536) Volume 2: The Chosen People
Christian Cultures in Early Modern Scandinavia (1536-ca. 1750)
Volume 3: The Promised Land Christian Cultures in Modern
Scandinavia (ca. 1750-ca. 1920)
In 1958, Suzanne and Ezra Vogel embedded themselves in a Tokyo
suburban community, interviewing six middle-class families
regularly for a year. Their research led to Japan's New Middle
Class, a classic work on the sociology of Japan. Now, Suzanne Hall
Vogel's compelling sequel traces the evolution of Japanese society
over the ensuing decades through the lives of three of these
ordinary yet remarkable women and their daughters and
granddaughters. Vogel contends that the role of the professional
housewife constrained Japanese middle-class women in the postwar
era-and yet it empowered them as well. Precisely because of fixed
gender roles, with women focusing on the home and children while
men focused on work, Japanese housewives had remarkable authority
and autonomy within their designated realm. Wives and mothers now
have more options than their mothers and grandmothers did, but they
find themselves unprepared to cope with this new era of choice.
These gripping biographies poignantly illustrate the strengths and
the vulnerabilities of professional housewives and of families
facing social change and economic uncertainty in contemporary
Japan.
An authoritative study of food politics in the socialist regimes of
China and the Soviet Union During the twentieth century, 80 percent
of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union.
In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the
historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in
which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao
Zedong created greater disasters than those suffered under
prerevolutionary regimes. Focusing on famine as a political tool,
Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts about food among
peasants, urban populations, and the socialist state resulted in
the starvation death of millions. A major contribution to Chinese
and Soviet history, this provocative analysis examines the
long-term effects of the great famines on the relationship between
the state and its citizens and argues that the lessons governments
learned from the catastrophes enabled them to overcome famine in
their later decades of rule.
This book, edited by April Myung of Bergen County Academies in New
Jersey, contains autobiographies of ten Korean teenagers, currently
studying in American high schools. This historically significant
volume contains writings by break-dancing Julius Im, who
understands his Korean-American identity through this medium of
African-American dance, to Rei Fujino Park of Flushing, New York,
who explores her own dual identiy with a Korean father (who served
in the elite Korean military special forces) and a Japanese mother.
Rei Fujino describes her parents' marriage as a loving union of
"enemies" given the history of Japanese colonization of Korea
(1910-1945). Julie Oh describes the difficult situation of the
children of Korean company workers for Samsung, LG, SK, Woori Bank,
and other Korean companies, who come with a short-term working visa
to the United States. The children of these "Joo-Jae-Won" have to
go to Saturday school (in her case, "Woori School") in order to
maintain the skill level of Korean high schools, in the case that
their parents get recalled to South Korea - their children would
have to apply for Korean universities and meet the requirements of
Korean university entrance tests, which are vastly different from
America's SAT, ACT, and AP tests. Andrew Hyeon shars his experience
as a Korean Catholic, attending Hopkins School, an elite private
school in Connecticut, where former Yale Law School Dean Harold
Koh, a famous Korean, attended. Ruby Hong's autobiography is
written as a fairytale account of her own life. The autobiographies
in this book are not only creatively written as to capture the
readers' interest, but they also provide valuable resources for
Korean American Studies. (This book is the second in the Hermit
Kingdom Sources in Korean-American Studies, whose series editor is
Dr. Onyoo Elizabeth Kim, Esq.)
Pathways to Power introduces the domestic politics of South Asia in
their broadest possible context, studying ongoing transformative
social processes grounded in cultural forms. In doing so, it
reveals the interplay between politics, cultural values, human
security, and historical luck. While these are important
correlations everywhere, nowhere are they more compelling than in
South Asia where such dynamic interchanges loom large on a daily
basis. Identity politics-not just of religion but also of caste,
ethnicity, regionalism, and social class-infuses all aspects of
social and political life in the sub-continent. Recognizing this
complex interplay, this volume moves beyond conventional views of
South Asian politics as it explicitly weaves the connections
between history, culture, and social values into its examination of
political life. South Asia is one of the world's most important
geopolitical areas and home to nearly one and a half billion
people. Although many of the poorest people in the world live in
this region, it is home also to a rapidly growing middle class
wielding much economic power. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh,
together the successor states to the British Indian Empire-the
Raj-form the core of South Asia, along with two smaller states on
its periphery: landlocked Nepal and the island state of Sri Lanka.
Many factors bring together the disparate countries of the region
into important engagements with one another, forming an uneasy
regional entity. Contributions by: Arjun Guneratne, Christophe
Jaffrelot, Pratyoush Onta, Haroun er Rashid, Seira Tamang, Shabnum
Tejani, and Anita M. Weiss
Drawing on reinterpretations of melancholia and collective
remembrance, Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea:
Crossing the Divide explores the multi-layered implications of
divided Korea's liminality, or its perceived "in-betweenness" in
space and time. Offering a timely reconsideration of the pivotal
period following the inter-Korean Summit of June 2000, this book
focuses on a series of emotionally charged meetings among family
members who had lost all contact for over fifty years on opposite
sides of the Korean divide. With the scope of its analysis ranging
from regional geopolitics and watershed political rituals to
everyday social dynamics and intimate family narratives, this study
provides a lens for approaching the cultural process of moving from
a disposition of enmity to one of recognition and engagement amid
the complex legacies of civil war and the global Cold War on the
Korean Peninsula.
Peaceful War is an epic analysis of the unfolding drama between the
clashing forces of the Chinese dream and American destiny. Just as
the American experiment evolved, Deng Xiaoping's China has been
using "Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends" and borrowed the
idea of the American Dream as a model for China's rise. The Chinese
dream, as reinvented by President Xi Jinping, continues Deng's
experiment into the twenty-first century. With a possible "fiscal
cliff" in America and a "social cliff" in China, the author
revisits the history of Sino-American relations to explore the
prospects for a return to the long-forgotten Beijing-Washington
love affair launched in the trade-for-peace era. President Barack
Obama's Asia pivot strategy and the new Silk Road plan of President
Xi could eventually create a pacific New World Order of peace and
prosperity for all. The question is: will China ultimately evolve
into a democratic nation by rewriting the American Dream in Chinese
characters, and how might this transpire?
The rise of China is no doubt one of the most important events in
world economic history since the Industrial Revolution. Mainstream
economics, especially the institutional theory of economic
development based on a dichotomy of extractive vs. inclusive
political institutions, is highly inadequate in explaining China's
rise. This book argues that only a radical reinterpretation of the
history of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West (as
incorrectly portrayed by the institutional theory) can fully
explain China's growth miracle and why the determined rise of China
is unstoppable despite its current 'backward' financial system and
political institutions. Conversely, China's spectacular and rapid
transformation from an impoverished agrarian society to a
formidable industrial superpower sheds considerable light on the
fundamental shortcomings of the institutional theory and mainstream
'blackboard' economic models, and provides more-accurate
reevaluations of historical episodes such as Africa's enduring
poverty trap despite radical political and economic reforms, Latin
America's lost decades and frequent debt crises, 19th century
Europe's great escape from the Malthusian trap, and the Industrial
Revolution itself.
While there is much discussion on Africa-China relations, the focus
tends to lean more on the Chinese presence in Africa than on the
African presence in China. There are numerous studies on the former
but, with the exception of a few articles on the presence of
African traders and students in China, little is known of the
latter, even though an increasing number of Africans are visiting
and settling in China and forming migrant communities there. This
is a phenomenon that has never happened before the turn of the
century and has thus led to what is often termed Africa's newest
Diaspora. This book focuses on analyzing this new Diaspora,
addressing the crucial question: What is it like to be an African
in China? Africans in China is the first book-length study of the
process of Africans travelling to China and forming communities
there. Based on innovative intermingling of qualitative and
quantitative research methods involving prolonged interaction with
approximately 800 Africans across six main Chinese
cities--Guangzhou, Yiwu, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and
Macau--sociolinguistic and sociocultural profiles are constructed
to depict the everyday life of Africans in China. The study
provides insights into understanding issues such as why Africans go
to China, what they do there, how they communicate with their
Chinese hosts, what opportunities and problems they encounter in
their China sojourn, and how they are received by the Chinese
state. Beyond these methodological and empirical contributions, the
book also makes a theoretical contribution by proposing a
crosscultural bridge theory of migrant-indigene relations, arguing
that Africans in China act as sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and
sociocultural bridges linking Africa to China. This approach to the
analysis of Diaspora communities has consequences for crosscultural
and crosslinguistic studies in an era of globalization. Africans in
China is an important book for African Studies, Asian Studies,
Africa-China relations studies, linguistics, anthropology,
sociology, international studies, and migration and Diaspora
studies in an era of globalization.
Society, Law, and Culture in the Middle East:"Modernities" in the
Making is an edited volume that seeks to deepen and broaden our
understanding of various forms of change in Middle Eastern and
North African societies during the Ottoman period. It offers an
in-depth analysis of reforms and gradual change in the longue
duree, challenging the current discourse on the relationship
between society, culture, and law. The focus of the discussion
shifts from an external to an internal perspective, as agency
transitions from "the West" to local actors in the region.
Highlighting the ongoing interaction between internal processes and
external stimuli, and using primary sources in Arabic and Ottoman
Turkish, the authors and editors bring out the variety of
modernities that shaped south-eastern Mediterranean history. The
first part of the volume interrogates the urban elite household,
the main social, political, and economic unit of networking in
Ottoman societies. The second part addresses the complex
relationship between law and culture, looking at how the legal
system, conceptually and practically, undergirded the
socio-cultural aspects of life in the Middle East. Society, Law,
and Culture in the Middle East consists of eleven chapters, written
by well-established and younger scholars working in the field of
Middle East and Islamic Studies. The editors, Dror Ze'evi and Ehud
R. Toledano, are both leading historians, who have published
extensively on Middle Eastern societies in the Ottoman and
post-Ottoman periods.
Charles Corm: An Intellectual Biography of a Twentieth-Century
Lebanese "Young Phoenician" delves into the history of the modern
Middle East and an inquiry into Lebanese intellectual, cultural,
and political life as incarnated in the ideas, and as illustrated
by the times, works, and activities of Charles Corm (1894-1963).
Charles Corm was a guiding spirit behind modern Lebanese
nationalism, a leading figure in the "Young Phoenicians" movement,
and an advocate for identity narratives that are often dismissed in
the prevalent Arab nationalist paradigms that have come to define
the canon of Middle East history, political thought, and
scholarship of the past century. But Charles Corm was much more
than a man of letters upholding a specific patriotic mission. As a
poet and entrepreneur, socialite and orator, philanthropist and
patron of the arts, and as a leading businessman, Charles Corm
commanded immense influence on modern Lebanese political and social
life, popular culture, and intellectual production during the
interwar period and beyond. In many respects, Charles Corm has also
been "the conscience" of Lebanese society at a crucial juncture in
its modern history, as the autonomous sanjak/Mutasarrifiyya (or
Province) of Mount-Lebanon and the Vilayet (State) of Beirut of the
late nineteenth century were navigating their way out of Ottoman
domination and into a French Mandatory period (ca. 1918), before
culminating with the independence of the Republic of Lebanon in
1943.
How is Iran governed? Is the state accountable to its society? How
have Iran's political institutions evolved since the 1979
revolution? In short, Postrevolutionary Iran: the Leader, the
People, and the Three Powers argues that the answers to these
critical questions are neither as certain nor as fixed as much of
the existing literature on this topic would lead one to believe.
Part 1 of the book (chapters 1-3) analyzes what Iran's Constitution
refers to as "the Three Powers": the executive, legislative, and
judicial branches of government along with the unique mediating
institutions of the Guardian and Expediency Councils. In each
chapter, the author describes the unique structure and function of
the governing institution as outlined in Iran's Constitution, then
explains how the institution has evolved in practice over time.
Several trends emerge from this analysis, including, among others,
the growing influence of the military in politics, the expanding
power of the Guardian Council at the expense of the parliament, and
the widening asymmetry of executive power favoring the supreme
leader at the expense of the president. In Part 2 of the book
(chapters 4-6), the analytical focus shifts from Iran's formal
political institutions to consider instead the relationship between
state and society more broadly, with chapters on Iran's military
and economic structure, social movements, and public attitudes and
the media. Finally, in the concluding chapter, the author offers a
comprehensive view of what this analysis of Iran's political
institutions in theory and practice reveals about both the
resilience of Iran's political system and its capacity for
meaningful change.
A ferocious conflict between Mongol and Samurai
The Japanese word 'Ghenko' is the term employed for the Mongol
invasion of Japan. The event was an immensely significant one for
the Japanese and it remained so for centuries because, in part, the
defeat of the invaders was attributed to divine intervention. There
can be little doubt that Japan's salvation had much to do with the
fact that they are an island race and in that they have much in
common with other islanders, Great Britain among them, who on more
than one occasion might claim the sea as their principal and most
powerful ally. Indeed. the author of this book draws parallels with
Britain and the Spanish Armada. The Mongols had rapidly risen to
power during the 13th century and had created an unstoppable empire
that spread over huge areas of land from the Yellow Sea of Asia to
the Danube in Europe. Although massively stronger than the
Japanese, the Mongols attacked the Japanese islands, attempting
domination by invasion and yet were repulsed with finality. To
modern students of military history the contents of this book has a
compelling allure, since there can be no doubt that in the Mongol
warrior and the Japanese Samurai there resided a martial spirit and
expertise which, perhaps inevitably, could not both exist in the
same sphere, but which in collision could not fail to instigate
conflict of the most singular kind. This account of the clash
between the ultimate warriors of their day analyses this time of
warfare in superb detail. An essential addition to the library of
anyone interested in the warfare of the East.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each
title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our
hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their
spines and fabric head and tail bands.
Nepal is a living example of contrasts and contradictions.It is a
country that was born in medieval times, grew up in the 16th
century, and now finds itself engulfed in the high-tech gadgets and
material marvels of the 21st century. Nepal has its share of
problem which include inadequate economic development and social
infrastructure, poverty and corruption, plus worsening pollution,
but now it finally has relative peace and quiet after a hasty
Maoist uprising. Indeed, it has passed through several democratic
elections, and finally seems to be getting on the right track. This
second edition of Historical Dictionary of Nepal contains a
chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive
bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced
entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign
relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent
resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more
about Nepal.
"Britain in the Middle East" provides a comprehensive survey of
British involvement in the Middle East, exploring their mutual
construction and influence across the entire historical sweep of
their relationship. In the 17th century, Britain was establishing
trade links in the Middle East, using its position in India to
increasingly exclude other European powers. Over the coming
centuries this commercial influence developed into political power
and finally formal empire, as the British sought to control their
regional hegemony through military force. Robert Harrison charts
this relationship, exploring how the Middle East served as the
launchpad for British offensive action in the World Wars, and how
resentment against colonial rule in the region led ultimately to
political and Islamic revolutions and Britain's demise as a global,
imperial power.
This volume approaches the topic of mobility in Southeast Europe by
offering the first detailed historical study of the land route
connecting Istanbul with Belgrade. After this route that diagonally
crosses Southeast Europe had been established in Roman times, it
was as important for the Byzantines as the Ottomans to rule their
Balkan territories. In the nineteenth century, the road was
upgraded to a railroad and, most recently, to a motorway. The
contributions in this volume focus on the period from the Middle
Ages to the present day. They explore the various transformations
of the route as well as its transformative role for the cities and
regions along its course. This not only concerns the political
function of the route to project the power of the successive
empires. Also the historical actors such as merchants, travelling
diplomats, Turkish guest workers or Middle Eastern refugees
together with the various social, economic and cultural effects of
their mobility are in the focus of attention. The overall aim is to
gain a deeper understanding of Southeast Europe by foregrounding
historical continuities and disruptions from a long-term
perspective and by bringing into dialogue different national and
regional approaches.
|
You may like...
Israel Alone
Bernard-Henri Levy
Paperback
R452
R418
Discovery Miles 4 180
|