Economic and political relations with Iran were a primary concern for the German Democratic Republic leadership and dominated the GDR's press. This is the first book to analyse the representation of Iran in the media, from the GDR's formation in 1949 until 1989, the last complete year before its demise. Covering key events, such as the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in 1953, the White Revolution, the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and the Iran-Iraq war, the author reveals that only in periods where the two countries enjoyed less amicable or poor relations, was the press free to critically report events in Iran and openly support the cause of the country's communist party, the Tudeh. The book explores the use of the press as a tool for ideological education and propaganda. It also examines how the state's official Marxist-Leninist ideology, the GDR's international competition with West Germany, and cultural prejudices and stereotypes impacted reporting so powerfully.

This book compares the ways in which new powers arose in the shadows of the Roman Empire and its Byzantine and Carolingian successors, of Iran, the Caliphate and China in the first millennium CE. These new powers were often established by external military elites who had served the empire. They remained in an uneasy balance with the remaining empire, could eventually replace it, or be drawn into the imperial sphere again. Some relied on dynastic legitimacy, others on ethnic identification, while most of them sought imperial legitimation. Across Eurasia, their dynamic was similar in many respects; why were the outcomes so different? Contributors are Alexander Beihammer, Maaike van Berkel, Francesco Borri, Andrew Chittick, Michael R. Drompp, Stefan Esders, Ildar Garipzanov, Jurgen Paul, Walter Pohl, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Helmut Reimitz, Jonathan Shepard, Q. Edward Wang, Veronika Wieser, and Ian N. Wood.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the establishment of the new Safavid regime in Iran. Along with reuniting the Persian lands under one rule, the Safavids initiated the radical transformation of the religious landscape by introducing Imami Shi'ism as the official state faith and in this as in other ways, laying the foundations of Iran's modern identity. In this book, leading scholars of Iranian history, culture and politics examine the meaning of the idea of Iran in the Safavid period by examining contemporary experiences of both insiders and outsiders, asking how modern scholarship defines the distinctive features of the age. While sometimes viewed as a period of decline from the high points of classical Persian literature and the visual arts of preceding centuries, the chapters of this book demonstrate that the Safavid era was nevertheless a period of great literary and artistic activity in the realms of both secular and theological endeavour. With the establishment of comparable polities across western, southern and central Asia at broadly the same time, the book explores some of the literary and political interactions with Iran's Ottoman, Mughal and Uzbek neighbours. As the volume and frequency of European merchants and diplomats visiting Safavid Persia increased, especially in the seventeenth century, and as more Iranians recorded their own travel experiences to surrounding Muslim lands, the Safavid period is the first in which we can document and explore the contours of Iran's place in an expanding world, and gain insights into how Iranians saw themselves and others saw them.

Education, the production of knowledge, identity formation, and ideological hegemony are inextricably linked in early modern and modern Korea. This study examines the production and consumption of knowledge by a multitude of actors and across languages, texts, and disciplines to analyze the formulation, contestation, and negotiation of knowledge. The production and dissemination of knowledge become sites for contestation and struggle-sometimes overlapping, at other times competing-resulting in a shift from a focus on state power and its control over knowledge and discourse to an analysis of local processes of knowledge production and the roles local actors play in them. Contributors are Daniel Pieper, W. Scott Wells, Yong-Jin Hahn, Furukawa Noriko, Lim Sang Seok, Kokubu Mari, Mark Caprio, Deborah Solomon, and Yoonmi Lee.

Read The Taiji Government and you will discover a bold and original revisionist interpretation of the formation of the Qing imperial constitution. Contrary to conventional wisdom, which portrays the Qing empire as a Chinese bureaucratic state that colonized Inner Asia, this book contends quite the reverse. It reveals the Qing as a Warrior State, a Manchu-Mongolian aristocratic union and a Buddhist caesaropapist monarchy. In painstaking detail, brushstroke by brushstroke, the author urges you to picture how the Mongolian aristocratic government, the Inner Asian military-oriented numerical divisional system, the technique of conquest rule, and the Mongolian doctrine of a universal Buddhist empire together created the last of the Inner Asian empires that conquered and ruled what is now China.

Using Inner Mongolian cases, this book explains the attenuation of inter-ethnic solidarity in the critical period of Chinese imperial transformation (1900-1930). It engages the key issues related to imperial organization, elite politics, and ethnic relationship. The book will attract a large audience in comparative sociology, empire and ethnic studies.