This extensively researched and elegantly written study offers a fine-grained analysis of the origins of the Chinese Communist Revolution in the countryside. Building on decades of research in newly available sources and multiple trips to Jiangxi, Stephen Averill provides a definitive local perspective on the rise of a revolution that reshaped China and the world. A rich work of social history, it goes beyond recently popular organizational approaches to explore the ways in which the party and social networks interpenetrated and interacted in the early stages of revolutionary base-building. The Jinggangshan highlands provided the base for Mao Zedong's first efforts at rural revolution. Chinese histories and most Western accounts have focused on the heroic exploits of Mao and his Communist Party comrades, battling the natural elements, hostile military forces, and skeptical authorities in the urban-based Communist Central Committee. This long-awaited work penetrates the hagiographic haze of Mao-centered analysis to provide a close narrative and rich social history of the Jinggangshan base. The author explores the historical patterns of local strongman rule, clientelist politics, lineage conflict, and ethnic struggle within which the party competed for power. Through this multifaceted lens, the revolutionary experience in Jinggangshan is equally dramatic but considerably more sobering than the conventional story. Among Western studies of the Chinese revolution, this work stands out as the definitive account of the critical moment in the 1920s when the physical and ideological center of the Communist movement shifted from the cities to the countryside. This was a process of elite-mediated political osmosis and adaptive compromises with local traditions. The party was not simply an outside force manipulating social tensions for its own political ends. There was, instead, an intricate interweaving of local networks and social cleavages in the highlands with the political structures and policy divisions of t

Political turbulence was common during the times of dynastic transition in imperial China. Multiple regional regimes frequently rose on the lands of the former unified empire, vying for political and military supremacy until a dominant power emerged and achieved reunification. The period of political fragmentation during the tenth century, known as the Five Dynasties and Ten States (907-979) was typical of such times. Lasting more than a half century, the period is thought to have been one of unique political intrigue, during which founding rulers of humble origins engaged in schemes and strategies that increasingly inspire popular interest today. This book is an exploration of the complicated national politics and intricate interstate relations of the early tenth century with a focus on the Former Shu (891-925), one of the "Ten States" that significantly contributed to the formation of the unique political configuration of the day.From the viewpoint of traditional historiography, the five northern dynasties constituted the "central" powers of the tenth century that dominated national politics and ultimately led China to the Northern Song reunification. In contrast, southern regimes were usually treated as subordinate or secondary powers, all considered neither legitimate nor capable of ever challenging the north, politically or militarily. This binary grouping and its discriminatory interpretation fundamentally shaped later historians' perception of the national politics of Five Dynasties China. Even today, compared to the studies on the political history of the five northern dynasties, the neglect of the southern regimes is obvious in modern scholarship, especially in Western language publications. By focusing on the political history of the Former Shu regime in the south, this book seeks to provide a new understanding of the geopolitics of Five Dynasties China.This book sheds much light on the complicated national politics and intricate interstate relations of the divided tenth-century China. It examines how Wang Jian, a military governor of Tang, rose to power from obscurity in the chaotic late ninth century and founded an empire in what is today's Sichuan province in the early tenth century. Depending on a powerful military, the strategic location, and astute diplomatic tactics in dealing with surrounding powers, the Former Shu under Wang Jian's rule successfully challenged the hegemonies of the most powerful regimes of the day from its base in the south. It was recognized as a political equal and treated as such by the contemporary northern powers, with whom the Former Shu shared the Mandate of Heaven both in rhetoric and in reality. This book is an important study for scholars and students of medieval China and regional studies. It will also appeal to the general reader interested in political and military history.

The long era of Muslim political ascendancy that began in a small region of western Arabia reached its pinnacle some nine hundred years later with the siege of Vienna by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1529. Suleiman then concluded that, given the increasingly volatile geopolitical environment, Muslim expansionism in Eurasia had run its course. The subsequent decline of Ottoman power also meant, in effect, the decline of political Islam, which had been intimately bound to it for centuries.

As Sicker shows, the problems faced by the Ottoman Empire were also faced by the Persian Empire and both underwent an extended period of political decline and territorial retrenchment in the face of imperialist pressures from Europe and Asia. The greatest challenge to the world of political Islam came from Western Europe, especially France and Great Britain. The Ottoman and Persian empires assumed a global importance in the 19th century, not because of anything in them of intrinsic economic value, but because of their geopolitical and geostrategic significance. They became, in effect, a buffer zone separating Europe from the wealth of the East, at a time when European imperialism was on the march in Asia. It thus came about that the rivalries of the Great Powers, most especially those of Great Britain, France, and Russia, were played out in the Middle East. This book will serve as a vital resource for students, scholars, and other researchers involved with Middle East History, Political Islam, and Modern European History.

The culmination of twenty years of research, this essential book completes distinguished historian Philip C. C. Huang's pathbreaking trilogy on Chinese law and society from late imperial times to the present. Huang shows how, at the level of ideology and theory, traditional Chinese law has been rejected time and again in the past century by China's own lawmakers, first in the late Qing and the republic, then in the revolutionary and Maoist periods of the People's Republic, and finally again in the current reform era. Considering legal theory alone, modern Chinese law can only be Western law, and past Chinese law traditional or Maoist can have no role under the leadership's current preoccupations with modernization and marketization. But what has actually happened historically at the level of judicial practice and the daily lives of common people? In exploring this central question, Huang draws on a rich array of court records and field interviews to illustrate the surprising strength of traditional Chinese civil justice. Albeit much altered, its legacy can be traced in informal and semiformal community justice (e.g., societal and cadres mediation), as well as in multiple spheres of court-administered formal civil justice, including property rights, inheritance and old-age maintenance, and debt obligations. He also identifies the influence of Maoist justice, especially its divorce and civil court mediation practices. Finally, despite the reform era's massive importation of Western laws, legal reasoning employed in judicial practice has shown remarkable continuity, with major implications for China's future legal system."

Aryeh Lightstone, former Senior Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Special Envoy for the Abraham Accords, is uniquely poised to unravel the past, present, and, most importantly, the future of U.S. foreign policy with the Middle East. "A powerful affirmation of humanity's capacity to achieve the extraordinary." -Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor to the President, 2017-2021 "Aryeh demonstrates that faithful adherence to one's core beliefs-in both his faith and his nation-are not only possible but necessary. Read and enjoy." -Mike Pompeo, U.S. Secretary of State, 2018-2021 The Trump Administration's "Peace to Prosperity" vision for the Middle East was unveiled on January 28, 2020. What followed over the next eleven months, concluding with the signing of the Israel-Morocco normalization agreement was one of the most fascinating and consequential periods of U.S. foreign policy in a generation, leading to five normalization agreements between Israel and Muslim states. The Abraham Accords achieved what had seemed impossible for decades and set the Middle East on a trajectory toward a broad regional peace. Aryeh Lightstone is uniquely positioned to tell the story. As the senior advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, he was in the room for nearly every major discussion and decision involving Middle East policy. He was tasked with the most complex and sensitive component of the Abraham Accords: turning them into practical action and doing it quickly-during a pandemic, no less. In addition, he led the Abraham Accords Business Summit and the Abraham Fund, and served as the key contact between Israel and the other Accords nations. Let My People Know provides a behind-the-scenes account of the strategies that allowed the Abraham Accords to be struck, and an unvarnished look at the region's idiosyncrasies that factored into the process. A rabbi and an enthralling storyteller, Lightstone paints a vivid picture of the varied cultures and personalities involved. He also offers a glimpse into the day-to-day activities of an embassy. Finally, he explains what the Biden administration must do better to advance America's interests abroad. We now have a paradigm for a forward-looking Middle East policy that ultimately benefits the United States. Lightstone makes the case for strategic action to maintain the momentum.

The Sufi thinker 'Abd al-Karim al-Jili (d. 1408) is best-known for his treatment of the idea of the Perfect Human, yet his masterpiece, al-Insan al-kamil (The Perfect Human), is in fact a wide-ranging compendium of Sufi metaphysical thought in the Ibn 'Arabian tradition. One of the major topics treated in that work is sacred history, the story of God's revelation of the truth to humanity through His prophets and scriptures. Fitzroy Morrissey provides here the first in-depth study of this important section of al-Jili's major work and the key ideas contained within it. Through a translation and analysis of the key passages on the Qur'an, Torah, Psalms and Gospel, it shows how al-Jili's view of sacred history is conditioned by his Ibn 'Arabian Sufi metaphysics, whereby the phenomenal world is viewed as a manifestation of God, and the prophets and scriptures as special places where the divine attributes appear more completely. It also looks at how this idea influences al-Jili's understanding of the hierarchy of prophets, scriptures and religions. The book argues that, contrary to common assumptions, al-Jili's Sufi metaphysical view of sacred history is in keeping with the common medieval Muslim view of sacred history, whereby the Qur'an is viewed as the best of scriptures, Muhammad as the best of prophets, and Islam as the best religion. The book therefore not only gives an insight into a key text within medieval Sufi thought, but also has ramifications for our understanding of medieval Sufi views on the relationship between Islam and other religions.

This book uses Pseudo-Dionysius and his mystic theology to explore attitudes and beliefs about images in the early medieval West and Byzantium. Composed in the early sixth century, the Corpus Dionysiacum, the collection of texts transmitted under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, developed a number of themes which have a predominantly visual and spatial dimension. Pseudo-Dionysius' contribution to the development of Christian visual culture, visual thinking and figural art-making are examined in this book to systematically investigate his long-lasting legacy and influence. The contributors embrace religious studies, philosophy, theology, art, and architectural history, to consider the depth of the interaction between the Corpus Dionysiacum and various aspects of contemporary Byzantine and western cultures, including ecclesiastical and lay power, politics, religion, and art.

Crime long has been a silent partner in China's march to modernization, leading the regime to make law and order as central a priority as economic growth and the promise of prosperity. This groundbreaking study offers the first comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of Chinese crime, policing, and punishment. A multidisciplinary group of leading scholars draw on a rich body of empirical data and rare archival research to illuminate seldom-explored theoretical dimensions of legal ideology and reform as well as the linkages between crime and control to broader themes of law, modernization, and development. The authors balance comparative perspectives with an understanding of China's unique historical and cultural experience. This context is critical, the authors argue, as crime and control are at the root of modernity and how it is defined. In many ways the PRC is reliving the experiences of other industrializing countries, yet at the same time the practices of China's police and prison system also are painted with thick layers of historical memory. Order has become increasingly important in legitimizing the Chinese regime, but its practices and ideas of policing are often missing from our picture of Chinese social and political development. This important book's discussion of the paradoxes of policing and the problems of order bridges that gap and demystifies developments in China. All those interested in modern and contemporary Chinese politics, law, and society, as well as in comparative criminology and law, will find this work an invaluable resource. Contributions by: Borge Bakken, Frank Dikoetter, Michael Dutton, James D. Seymour, Murray Scot Tanner, and Xu Zhangrun.

Originally published in London 1929. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Obscure Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork. Contents Include: The Missing Words. - The Origin of the Gypsies. - The Macedonian Gypsy. - The Gypsies in Roumania. - The Gypsies in Hungary. - The Gypsies in France. - The Gypsies in Spain. - The Gypsies in Germany. - The Russian Gypsy. - The English Gypsy. - The American Gypsy. - Nordic Gypsies and Other Strays. - The Tent in the Wind. A learned discussion of the mystery of the origin of the Gypsy race and their language, their achievement of happiness without civilisation, and the wild romanticism of their complete denial of nearly all accepted ethical and social values.

Complete ready reference covering Chinese history, economics, politics, culture, and prevalent social problems ... a "must-have" addition to any global studies collection. Throughout its imperial golden ages, China was the world's most developed nation, home to advanced technologies, a robust economy, and thriving cities. Its thousands of years of cultural and artistic achievements combined with its vastness and ethnic complexity have made China both fascinating and forbidding for those encountering it for the first time. This new volume offers readers a concise, single-stop introduction to Chinese history, culture, economics, politics, and social issues. As they trace China's history from the creation stories of ancient Chinese myths to the Communist upheaval of the 20th century, readers will learn how the country has changed-and not changed-from early to modern times, and what life throughout China is like today. Chronology of key historical developments, which details the most important people, places, and events A directory of business, cultural, government, and tourist organizations to help facilitate further research and study

This comprehensive exploration of language and literacy in the multi-lingual environment of Roman Palestine (c. 63 B.C.E. to 136 C.E.) is based on Michael Wise's extensive study of 145 Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean contracts and letters preserved among the Bar Kokhba texts, a valuable cache of ancient Middle Eastern artifacts. His investigation of Judean documentary and epistolary culture derives for the first time numerical data concerning literacy rates, language choices, and writing fluency during the two-century span between Pompey's conquest and Hadrian's rule. He explores questions of who could read in these ancient times of Jesus and Hillel, what they read, and how language worked in this complex multi-tongued milieu. Included also is an analysis of the ways these documents were written and the interplay among authors, secretaries, and scribes. Additional analysis provides readers with a detailed picture of the people, families, and lives behind the texts.

The Nature of Revolution provides the first account of art and politics under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. James A. Tyner repositions Khmer Rouge artworks within their proper political and economic context: the materialization of a political organization in an era of anticolonial and decolonization movements. Consequently, both the organization's policies and practices?including the production of poetry, music, and photography?were incontrovertibly shaped by and created to further the Khmer Rouge's agenda.Theoretically informed and empirically grounded, Tyner's work examines the social dimensions of the Khmer Rouge, while contributing broadly to a growing literature on the intersection of art and politics. Building on the foundational works of theorists such as Jacques Ranciere, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, Tyner explores the insights of Leon Trotsky and his descriptions of the politics of aesthetics specific to socialist revolutions. Ultimately, Tyner reveals a fundamental tension between individuality and bureaucratic control and its impact on artistic creativity and freedom.

Sicker explores the political history of the Middle East from antiquity to the Arab conquest from a geopolitical perspective. He argues that there are a number of relatively constant environmental factors that have helped "condition"-not determine-the course of Middle Eastern political history from ancient times to the present. These factors, primarily, but not exclusively geography and topography, contributed heavily to establishing the patterns of state development and interstate relations in the Middle East that have remained remarkably consistent throughout the troubled history of the region.

In addition to geography and topography, the implications of which are explored in depth, religion has also played a major political role in conditioning the pattern of Middle Eastern history. The Greeks first introduced the politicization of religious belief into the region in the form of pan-Hellenism, which essentially sought to impose Greek forms of popular religion and culture on the indigenous peoples of the region as a means of solidifying Greek political control. This ultimately led to religious persecution as a state policy. Subsequently, the Persian Sassanid Empire adopted Zoroastrianism as the state religion for the same purpose and with the same result. Later, when Armenia adopted Christianity as the state religion, followed soon after by the Roman Empire, religion and the intolerance it tended to breed became fundamental ingredients, in regional politics and have remained such ever since. Sicker shows that the political history of the pre-Islamic Middle East provides ample evidence that the geopolitical and religious factors conditioning political decision-making tended to promote military solutions to political problems, making conflict resolution through war the norm, with the peaceful settlement of disputes quite rare. A sweeping synthesis that will be of considerable interest to scholars, students, and others concerned with Middle East history and politics as well as international relations and ancient history.

In contemporary history, a much-debated issue has been whether European nations have a common identity and what relevance the European Union has for a shared definition of Europeanness. The present book examines the link between historical conceptions of Europe and the contestations over Turkey's compatibility with the European Union during the 2000s.

The Partition of India in 1947 involved the division of two provinces, Bengal and the Punjab, based on district-wise Hindu or Muslim majorities. The Partition displaced between 10 and 12 million people along religious lines. This book provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the resettlement and rehabilitation of Partition refugees in Pakistani Punjab between 1947 and 1962. It weaves a chronological and thematic plot into a single narrative, and focuses on the Punjabi refugee middle and upper-middle class. Emphasising the everyday experience of the state, the author challenges standard interpretations of the resettlement of Partition refugees in the region and calls for a more nuanced understanding of their rehabilitation. The book argues the universality of the so-called 'exercise in human misery', and the heterogeneity of the rehabilitation policies. Refugees' stories and interactions with local institutions reveal the inability of the local bureaucracy to establish its own 'polity' and the viable workability of Pakistan as a state. The use of Pakistani documents, US and British records and a careful survey of both the judicial records and the Urdu and English-language dailies of the time, provides an invaluable window onto the everyday life of a state, its institutions and its citizens. A carefully researched study of both the state and the everyday lives of refugees as they negotiated resettlement, through both personal and official channels, the book offers an important reinterpretation of the first years of Pakistani history. It will be of interest to academics working in the field of refugee resettlement and South Asian History and Politics.

Survivors of the Holocaust accounted for fully one-half of the wave of immigration into Israel in the aftermath of World War II. These survivors were among the first to enter the gates of the new state following its founding in 1948.

In this important addition to our understanding of the social integration of Holocaust survivors into postwar society, Hanna Yablonka draws on a wealth of primary materials such as recently released archival material, letters, newspapers, internal army magazines, and personal interviews, to examine, from all sides, the charged encounters between survivors of the Holocaust and the veteran Jewish population in Israel.

Yablonka details the role the new immigrants played in the War of Independence, their settlement of towns and villages abandoned by Arabs during the war, and the ways in which Israeli society accepted-and often did not accept-them into the armed forces, the kibbutz movements, and the trade unions.

Survivors of the Holocaust illuminates the ways in which Israeli society grew and developed through its emotional and sometimes contentious relations with the arriving survivors and how, against all odds, the survivors of the Holocaust and their offspring became pillars of modern Israeli society.

This study follows the social, intellectual and political development of the Phoenician myth of origin in Lebanon from the middle of the 19th century to the end of the 20th. Asher Kaufman demonstrates the role played by the lay, liberal Syrian-Lebanese who resided in Beirut, Alexandria and America towards the end of the 19th century in the birth and dissemination of this myth. Kaufman investigates the crucial place Phoenicianism occupied in the formation of Greater Lebanon in 1920. He also explores the way the Jesuit Order and the French authorities propagated this myth during the mandate years. The book also analyses literary writings of different Lebanese who advocated this myth, and of others who opposed it. Finally, the text provides an overview of Phoenicianism from Independece in 1943 to the present, demonstrating that despite the general objection to this myth, some aspects of it entered mainstream Lebanese national narratives. Kaufman's works should be of use to anyone interested in the birth of modern Lebanon as we know it today.

This book conducts a panoramic study on the history of China's Science and Technology which focuses on the Medium and Long-Term Science and Technology Program (MLSTP). In general these Programs have a duration of 5-30 year. This book provides an epochal assessment of the project's conceptual context over the past 60 years.. The author shows that the historical evolution and conceptual development of China's MLSTP are the result of an amalgamation of political, economic and social factors within distinct contemporary contexts. As a national action plan, MLSTP has incorporated many of the factors that go beyond the intentional factors of science and technology. MLSTP is not only a macro vision and blueprint for scientific and technological development; it is also a political act of realizing the national will. While ensuring the MLSTP builds on its great achievements, the author also reflects upon its deficiencies and disadvantages in order to better promote the advancement of science and technology in China. This book comprehensively lays out the historical and theoretical dimensions. Based on a clear vision of historical constructivism the author has compiled the MLSTP philosophy of different eras into a conceptual framework for this era and used this framework to research and analyze the historical and conceptual evolution of MLSTP. Research on MLSTP is important for as enrichment of contemporary studies in the history of science and the science and technology policy. In 2010, more than 60 years after the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the country had enacted 10 MLSTP programs. This book separates the development of the MLSTP into three different historical eras: the era of economic planning, the era of economic transformation and the new century. Each historical epoch corresponds to a different MLSTP philosophy concept, which enables us to study the conceptual evolution of MLSTP using historical research as our foundation.