This is an in-depth account of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, a uniquely cosmopolitan institution established in the wake of China's defeat in the Opium Wars (1842 to 43), and a central feature of the Treaty Port system.

The British-dominated service was headed by the famous Robert Hart who founded a far-reaching customs administration that also encompassed other responsibilities such as marine and harbour maintenance, quarantine, anti-piracy patrols and postal services. This institution sat at a crucial juncture between Chinese and foreign interests, and was intimately linked to British interests and fortunes in the Far East. Following the establishment of the Republic in 1911 there were grave misgivings as to whether the foreign element of the Service would survive. Yet the Service grew in influence and strength, ensuring the foreign inspectorate a continued role in China's affairs.

Delivering an overview of the Service, its bureaucracy, fiscal responsibilities and life for foreigners in its employ, focusing especially on the later years of the Service, Donna Brunero draws on the experiences of the foreign administration of the Service as it attempted to negotiate between Chinese and foreign expectations and interests.

As the Palestinian/Israeli conflict continues to be of major importance in the Middle East, this book employs a new agency approach to understanding the conflict, examining the unprecedented challenge mounted by Palestinian insurgents to Israeli military rule in the West Bank and Gaza between 1987 and 1992. In particular the book discusses how the Palestinians learned about their occupier and how knowledge of Israeli political divisions were used, as well as exploring the various ways in which oppression led to shared grievances and discontent, and the development of organizations to maintain the Intifada.

It has received an award by the Israeli Political Science Association for the best book on Israeli politics in English.

The work explores the complex and profound implications of digital technology for a stunning variety of spaces, ranging from science and cinema to citizenship and bazaars. It maps the multiple ways in which the 'new' media rewrites the 'old', and the dilemmas and issues that they pitch - questioning, in turn, recieved notions of knowledge, legality, ethics, privacy, identity and community. The book argues that the old and the new media are neither radically different nor the same: while the mutability of a narrative, whether on the printed page or on a digitally recorded disk remains, there are intrinsic differences between print and digital print.

Spanning the whole of the twentieth century, How China Works examines the labour issues surrounding the workplace in China in both the Republican and People's Republic epochs. The international team of contributors treat China's twentieth-century revolution as an industrial revolution, stressing that China's recent emergence as the new workshop of the world was a gradual change, and not a recent phenomena led by external forces.

Providing the reader with extensive ethnographic research on topics such as culture and community in the workplace, the rural-urban divide, industrialization, subcontracting and employment practices, How China Works really does ground the study of Chinese work in the daily interactions in the workplace, the labour process and the micropolitics of work.

This book traces the emergence of the modern Chinese press from its origins in the western Christian missionary press in the late nineteenth century.
It shows how the western missionaries and their evangelical/educational newspapers changed the long-standing traditional practices, styles, content, print culture and printing technology of Chinese newspapers and, in the process, introduced some of the key ideas of western modernity which were to have a profound effect on Chinese society. Xiantao Zhang demonstrates how missionary publications reshaped print journalism, rather indirectly, from a centuries-long monopoly by the state - the Imperial press - into a pluralized, modernizing and frequently radical public journalism. She focuses in particular on the relationship between the missionaries and the class of 'gentry scholars' - literati and civil servants, educated via the traditional state examination system in the Confucian classics, who were the prime target readers of the missionary publications. This key group and the independent press they established at the end of the nineteenth century played a crucial role in shaping the ongoing struggle for a modern democratic media culture in China.

Over the last twenty years the proportion of development cooperation resources earmarked for agricultural development has dwindled to between six and seven per cent of total bi- and multilateral Official Development Assistance. This is despite the fact that eighty per cent of the world's poor live in rural agricultural areas and that the poor are disproportionately affected when political, military and natural events lead to regional or global food shortages. Brandt and Otzen's key book fills a gap in current literature, undertaking a wide-ranging conceptual reorientation of development cooperation, criticizing the current orthodoxy and its bias towards urban areas, and arguing that in order to effectively alleviate poverty across the world, agricultural and rural development measures need to be implemented both by central and subnational governments, aid agencies and the private sector. The authors investigate the world food question, the current pressures it is under and its link to rural poverty, and set out the policies that need to be undertaken to reduce global poverty.

The Russian revolution of 1917 was a defining event of the twentieth century, and its achievements and failures remain controversial in the twenty-first. This book focuses on the retreat from the revolution s aims in 1920 24, after the civil war and at the start of the New Economic Policy and specifically, on the turbulent relationship between the working class and the Communist Party in those years. It is based on extensive original research of the actions and reactions of the party leadership and ranks, of dissidents and members of other parties, and of trade union activists and ordinary factory workers. It discusses working-class collective action before, during and after the crisis of 1921, when the Bolsheviks were confronted by the revolt at the Kronshtadt naval base and other protest movements.

This book argues that the working class was politically expropriated by the Bolshevik party, as democratic bodies such as soviets and factory committees were deprived of decision-making power; it examines how the new Soviet ruling class began to take shape. It shows how some worker activists concluded that the principles of 1917 had been betrayed, while others accepted a social contract, under which workers were assured of improvements in living standards in exchange for increased labour discipline and productivity, and a surrender of political power to the party.

Hitherto, the academic study of Indian cinema has focused primarily on Bollywood, despite the fact that the Tamil film industry, based in southern India, has overtaken Bollywood in terms of annual output. This book examines critically the cultural and cinematic representations in Tamil cinema. It outlines its history and distinctive characteristics, and proceeds to consider a number of important themes such as gender, religion, class, caste, fandom, cinematic genre, the politics of identity and diaspora. Throughout, the book cogently links the analysis to wider social, political and cultural phenomena in Tamil and Indian society. Overall, it is an exciting and original contribution to an under-studied field, also facilitating a fresh consideration of the existing body of scholarship on Indian cinema.

Events of the past twenty years, including the Cold War and the War on Terror, have meant that the environments of international development co-operation have changed extensively, with dramatic consequences for development policies and North-South relations in general.

Perspectives on European Development Cooperation takes stock of such changes, describing and analyzing the new European development agenda, including the role of the European Union. Essays by prominent authorities in the field examine the development policies of individual donor countries and focus on the principles and objectives governing aid strategies and the performances of these policies.

This book will be of interest to students of development studies and those involved in determining development policy.

The 1930s to 1950s witnessed the rise and dominance of a political culture across much of North India which combined unprecedented levels of mobilization and organization with an effective de-politicization of politics. On the one hand obsessed with world events, people also came to understand politics as a question of personal morality and achievement. In other words, politics was about expressing the self in new ways and about finding and securing an imaginary home in a fast-moving and often terrifying universe. The scope and arguments of this book make an innovative contribution to the historiography of modern South Asia, by focusing on the middle-class milieu which was the epicentre of this new political culture.

The late Stalinist period, long neglected by researchers more interested in the high-profile events of the 1930s, has recently become the focus of much new research by people keen to understand the enormous impact of the war on Soviet society and to understand Soviet life under 'mature socialism'. Written by top scholars from high profile universities, this impressive work brings together much new, cutting edge research on a wide range of aspects of late Stalinist society. Filling a gap in the literature, it focuses above all on the experience of the Soviet people and their interaction with ideology, state policy and national and international politics.

This book originally examines how prominent communist intellectuals in China during the revolutionary period (1921 to 1940) constructed and presented identities for themselves and how they narrated their place in the revolution.

There are many different kinds of sub-national conflicts across Asia, with a variety of causes, but since September 11, 2001 these have been increasingly portrayed as part of the global terrorist threat, to be dealt with by the War on Terror.
This major new study examines a wide range of such conflicts, showing how, despite their significant differences, they share the role of the media as interlocutor, and exploring how the media exercises this role. The book raises a number of issues concerning how the media report different forms of political violence and conflict, including issues of impartiality in the media's relations with governments and insurgents, and how the focus on the 'War on Terror' has led to some forms of violence - notably those employed by states for political purposes - to be overlooked.
As the issue of international terrorism remains one of the most pressing issues of the modern day, this is a significant and important book which will interest the general reader and scholars from all disciplines.

Interdisciplinary collaboration in the social sciences is obviously essential to scientific progress, but discontent and practical difficulties hinder collaboration in research and training. Many of the problems arise from the failure in the separate disciplines to understand the basis on which collaboration is necessary and possible. In an effort to shed light on the situation, these original essays by eminent scholars--economists, geographers, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and others--demonstrate effective means of achieving interdisciplinary coordination in studying human behavior and delineating promising areas--for cooperative research. The book provides a sophisticated guide to the nature of knowledge in social science as applied to its core disciplines.

Since the social sciences separately are studying and theorizing about many of the same kinds of human behavior, the contributors propose that scholars can avoid possible duplication of effort and increase the validity of their formulations by consulting the related findings and methodology from other disciplines before embarking on a research problem. The contributors maintain that this interchange, by broadening the total knowledge of each discipline, represents the best approach toward fulfilling the goals of social scientific inquiry.

The individual chapters give valuable insight into the theoretical overlaps among the disciplines and outline specific research areas--such as group interaction, political attitudes, and intergroup relations--that require interdisciplinary cooperation to produce valid formulations. A major step toward creating a dialogue among disciplines, the book will enable every social scientist to understand more clearly the current state and future direction of interdisciplinary relationships and their indispensable future in social scientific thought.

This new book shows how the idea of a strategic triangle can illuminate the security relationships among the United States, the European Union and Russia in the greater transatlantic sphere.
This concept highlights how the relationships among these three actors may, on some issues, be closely related. A central question also follows directly from the use of the notion of the triangle: does the EU have actor capability in this policy sphere or will it get it in the future? The reason this is so important for our project is that only if the Union is regarded by the two other actors, and regards itself, as an actor in security policy does the strategic triangle really exists. Consequently, this book has a strong focus upon the development of the actor capability of the Union. In the case of the United States, it examines to what extent the concept of the strategic triangle has significance under each of five grand strategies that serve as alternative visions of the superpower's role in the world.

This book examines China's creative economy-and how television, animation, advertising, design, publishing and digital games are reshaping traditional understanding of culture. Since the 1950s China has endeavoured to catch-up with advanced Western economies. 'Made in China' is one approach to global competitiveness. But a focus on manufacturing and productivity is impeding innovation. China imports creativity and worries about its 'cultural exports deficit'. In the cultural sector Chinese audiences are attracted to Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese culture, as well as Hollywood cinema. This book provides a fresh look looks at China's move up the global value chain. It argues that while government and (most) citizens would prefer to associate with the nationalistic, but unrealized 'created in China' brand, widespread structural reforms are necessary to release creative potential. Innovation policy in China has recently acknowledged these problems. It considers how new ways of managing cultural assets can renovate largely non-competitive Chinese cultural industries. Together with a history of cultural commerce in China, the book details developments in new creative industries and provides the international context for creative cluster policy in Beijing and Shanghai.

Learn a little about each animal as you go through the book.

The enclosed wooden animals encourage motoric skills as well as early imaginative role play.

Though America experienced an increase in a native-born population and an emerging African-American identity throughout the nineteenth century, African culture did not necessarily dissipate with each passing decade. Archer examines the slave narratives of four key members of the abolitionist movement Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Tubman and Harriet Jacobs revealing how these highly visible proponents of the antislavery cause were able to creatively engage and at times overcome the cultural biases of their listening and reading audiences. When engaged in public sphere discourses, these individuals were not, as some scholars have suggested, inclined to accept unconditionally stereotypical constructions of their own identities. Rather they were quite skillful in negotiating between their affinity with antislavery Christianity and their own intimate involvement with slave circle dance and improvisational song, burial rites, conjuration, divination, folk medicinal practices, African dialects and African inspired festivals. The authors emerge as more complex figures than scholars have imagined. Their political views, though sometimes moderate, often reflected a strong desire to strike a fierce blow at the core of the slavocracy.

Maid in China is the first systematic, book-length investigation of internal rural migration in post-Mao China focused on the day-to-day production and consumption of popular media. Taking the rural maid in the urban home as its point of departure, the book weaves together three years of engaged ethnographic research in Beijing and Shanghai with critical analyses of a diverse array of popular media, and follows three lines of inquiry: media and cultural production, consumption practices, and everyday politics. It unravels some of the myriad ways in which the subaltern figure of the domestic worker comes to be inscribed with the cultural politics of boundaries that entrench a host of inequalities-between rich and poor, male and female, rural and urban. Wanning Sun explores a number of paradoxes that the domestic worker lives out on a daily basis: her ubiquitous invisibility, her enduring transience, and her status as an intimate stranger. Collectively, these paradoxes afford her a unique window onto the spaces and practices of the modern Chinese city. This intimate stranger's epistemological status makes her an unauthorized yet authoritative witness of urban residents' social lives, offering a revealing lens through which to examine both the formation of new social relations in post-reform urban China, and the new social uses of space-both domestic and public-engendered by these relations.

The articles in this collection indicate the still powerful role of queer theory in questioning the political, social, cultural, institutional hegemony of heterosexuality in culture and society at large as well as in academic research institutions. Written from the perspective of the northern European periphery, Queering Norway specifically reflects the challenges queer theory poses for ways of thinking about sexuality and identity in Norway. At the same time, the questions raised in the articles have wide relevance. From within their various fields (sociology, anthropology, ethnology, archeology, linguistics, psychology, media studies and religious studies) the writers attempt to develop a language enabling them to recognize the multiple social relations possible in contemporary societies, a language in which neither "queer" nor "homosexual" ousts the other, but in which the goal is to work, read, and write in the in-between spaces where no single difference is elevated above any other. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality.

Series Information:
Asia's Transformations/Asia's Great Cities

Providing a wealth of empirical research on the everyday practise of Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia, this book gives a detailed account of how Islam is understood and practised among ordinary Muslims in the region, focusing in particular on Uzbekistan. It shows how individuals negotiate understandings of Islam as an important marker for identity, grounding for morality and as a tool for everyday problem-solving in the economically harsh, socially insecure and politically tense atmosphere of present-day Uzbekistan. Presenting a detailed case-study of the city of Bukhara that focuses upon the local forms of Sufism and saint veneration, the book shows how Islam facilitates the pursuit of more modest goals of agency and belonging, as opposed to the utopian illusions of fundamentalist Muslim doctrines.

On The Borders of State Power explores the changing nature, meaning and significance of international borders over time in the area referred to today as the Greater Mekong Sub-region, incorporating Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and China's Yunnan province. An international line up of contributors examine the changing nature of borders over time, using examples from the 15th to 21st centuries and engage with contemporary literature on globalisation, particularly as it applies to borders and the nature of state power. What the book finds is that there is far greater diversity in terms of the importance of borders across time than is commonly thought. Thus, borders commonly thought to be closed are often more open, open borders are found to be more restricted, while pre-colonial frontiers, which are usually viewed as relatively unimportant compared with the colonial era, are in fact found to have been more closely governed. Looking at the contemporary period, the book shows how economic liberalisation - or so-called cooperation between the Mekong states in the post-Cold War period - has been accompanied not by the retreat of the state but rather by its expansion, including in ways which frequently impose greatest restrictions on the poor and marginalised. Incorporating work by both historians and social scientists this book is a valuable read for those interested in the politics, development and geography of Southeast Asia.

Driven by the need to identify, classify and assess western technology and culture together with a desire to advance a dialogue for reviewing the so-called 'unequal treaties' - the new Meiji government of 1868 despatched a top-level ministerial team to the west which, in 1872, arrived in the United States. In all, they spent 205 days in America, 122 days in Britain and two months in France, as well as visiting other countries including Belgium, Germany, Russia, Sweden and Italy.

Drawing on the papers given at the triennial conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies, held in Budapest in August 1997 (the year also marking the 125th anniversary of Iwakura's arrival), this volume presents a valuable new overview of the mission as a whole, with the significance and impact of the visit to each country being separately assessed. A supplement to the book looks at several 'post-Iwakura' topics, including a review of the mission's chief chronicler, Kume Kunitake.

This book examines the strategic interactions among China, the United States, Japan, and Southeast Asian States in the context of China s rise and globalization after the cold war. Engaging the mainstream theoretical debates in international relations, the author introduces a new theoretical framework institutional realism to explain the institutionalization of world politics in the Asia-Pacific after the cold war.

Institutional realism suggests that deepening economic interdependence creates a condition under which states are more likely to conduct a new balancing strategy institutional balancing, i.e., countering pressures or threats through initiating, utilizing, and dominating multilateral institutions to pursue security under anarchy. To test the validity of institutional realism, Kai He examines the foreign policies of the U.S., Japan, the ASEAN states, and China toward four major multilateral institutions, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum (ARF), ASEAN Plus Three (APT), and East Asian Summit (EAS). Challenging the popular pessimistic view regarding China s rise, the book concludes that economic interdependence and structural constraints may well soften the "dragon s teeth." China s rise does not mean a dark future for the region.

Institutional Balancing in the Asia Pacific will be of great interest to policy makers and scholars of Asian security, international relations, Chinese foreign policy, and U.S. foreign policy.