Americans at War in the Ottoman Empire examines the role of mercenary figures in negotiating relations between the United States and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Mercenaries are often treated as historical footnotes, yet their encounters with the Ottoman world contributed to US culture and the impressions they left behind continue to influence US approaches to Africa and the Middle East. The book's analysis of these mercenary encounters and their legacies begins with the Battle of Derna in 1805-in which the US flag was raised above a battlefield for the first time outside of North America with the help of a mercenary army-and concludes with the British occupation of Egypt in 1882-which was witnessed and criticized by many of the US Civil War veterans who worked for the Egyptian government in the 1870s and 1880s. By focusing these mercenary encounters through the lenses of memory, sovereignty, literature, geography, and diplomacy, Americans at War in the Ottoman Empire reveals the ways in which mercenary force, while marginal in terms of its frequency and scope, produced important knowledge about the Ottoman world and helped to establish the complicated relationship of intimacy and mastery that exists between Americans in the United States and people in Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Uganda, South Sudan, and Turkey.

Shinzo Abe returned to office as Prime Minister of Japan 2012, leading the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for a second time. This book examines how Abe has sought a restoration of Japanese primacy at three levels: political, through the restoration of the traditional postwar parliamentary dominance of the LDP; economic, through his signature policy known as "Abenomics," which aims to restore Japan's economic prosperity and end decades-long deflationary stagnation; and strategic, in which Abe wishes to restore Japan to a prominent role in regional and international security by reinterpreting and potentially altering or even abolishing Article 9 of the constitution, which would allow greater deployment of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. This study argues that Abe has achieved overall political dominance, being re-elected in 2014, and has passed controversial legislation allowing Japan to exercise collective self-defense, but it also contends that Abenomics has yet to lift the country out of its long-running deflationary stagnation.

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. Volume 3 analyses the impact of Jerusalem on Scandinavian Christianity from the middle of the 18. century in a broad context. 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)

Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies analyses the role of religion in past and present understandings of Asia. Religion, and the history of its study in the modern academy, has exercised massive influence over Asian Studies fields in the past century. Asian Studies has in turn affected, and is increasingly shaping, the study of religion. Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies looks into this symbiotic relationship - both in current practice, and in the modern histories of both Orientalism and Area Studies. Each chapter of the book deals with one regional sub-discipline in Asian Studies, covering Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, Korean Studies, South Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, and Central Eurasian Studies. The chapters are integrated by shared themes that run through the past and present practice of Asian Studies, covering the role of state actors in originating Area Studies, the role of local scholarship in defining and developing it, the interaction between humanities and social science approaches, debates over the dominance of Western and/or modern categories and frameworks, the interaction of past and present and the role of religious actors and religious sensibilities in shaping Asian Studies.

Over the last three decades Afghanistan has been plagued by crisis - from Soviet invasion in 1979 and Taliban rule to US invasion following the events of 9/11. Here the top specialists on Afghanistan, including Olivier Roy, Ahmad Rashid and Jonathan Goodhand, provide a unique overview of the evolution, causes and future of the Afghan crisis. Covering political and military events and examining the role of ethnic groups, religious and ideological factors and the role of the leaders and war chiefs of the period - from the anti-Soviet resistance to the presidency of Hamid Karzai - this book will prove essential reading to all interested in Afghanistan and the wider Middle East region. Examining recent events in the light of the country's economy, Afghan civil society, cultural heritage and state reconstruction attempts, this is a comprehensive and diverse look at a country whose recent history has been marked by internal conflicts and foreign intervention.

Combining a historical approach of Chineseness and a contemporary perspective on the social construction of Chineseness, this book provides comparative insights to understand the contingent complexities of ethnic and social formations in both China and among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. This book focuses on the experiences and practices of these people, who as mobile agents are free to embrace or reject being defined as Chinese by moving across borders and reinterpreting their own histories. By historicizing the notion of Chineseness at local, regional, and global levels, the book examines intersections of authenticity, authority, culture, identity, media, power, and international relations that support or undermine different instances of Chineseness and its representations. It seeks to rescue the present from the past by presenting case studies of contingent encounters that produce the ideas, practices, and identities that become the categories nations need to justify their existence. The dynamic, fluid representations of Chineseness illustrate that it has never been an undifferentiated whole in both space and time. Through physical movements and inherited knowledge, agents of Chineseness have deployed various interpretive strategies to define and represent themselves vis-a-vis the local, regional, and global in their respective temporal experiences. This book will be relevant to students and scholars in Chinese studies and Asian studies more broadly, with a focus on identity politics, migration, popular culture, and international relations. "The Chinese overseas often saw themselves as caught between a rock and a hard place. The collection of essays here highlights the variety of experiences in Southeast Asia and China that suggest that the rock can become a huge boulder with sharp edges and the hard places can have deadly spikes. A must read for those who wonder whether Chineseness has ever been what it seems." Wang Gungwu, University Professor, National University of Singapore. "By including reflections on constructions of Chineseness in both China itself and in various Southeast Asian sites, the book shows that being Chinese is by no means necessarily intertwined with China as a geopolitical concept, while at the same time highlighting the incongruities and tensions in the escapable relationship with China that diasporic Chinese subjects variously embody, expressed in a wide range of social phenomena such as language use, popular culture, architecture and family relations. The book is a very welcome addition to the necessary ongoing conversation on Chineseness in the 21st century." Ien Ang, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University.

A repository of subversive, melancholic and existentialist themes and ideas, the rubaiyat (quatrains) that make up the collected poems attributed to the 12th century Persian astronomer Omar Khayyam have enchanted readers for centuries. In this modern translation, complete with critical introduction and epilogue, Juan Cole elegantly renders the verse for contemporary readers. Exploring such universal questions as the meaning of life, fate and how to live a good life in the face of human mortality, this translation reveals anew why this singular collection of poems has struck a chord with such a temporally and culturally diverse audience, from the wine houses of medieval Iran to the poets of Western twentieth century modernism.

The leaders of the oil-rich rentier states of the Middle East, and in particular in the Gulf, have hitherto often predicated their legitimacy on a tacit social contract with their (much poorer) populations. This social contract consists of little or no direct taxation, with some sort of subsidized living. But the casualty of this tacit agreement is often political participation, an issue which has come to the forefront in the Middle East following the 'Arab Spring' of 2011. Here, Sulaiman Al-Farsi looks at the impact the rentier nature of the Gulf States has on political participation, focusing on the nexus between tribe, religion and a new generation of young, highly educated citizens that is present in Oman. Specifically exploring the concept of shura (consultation), and how nascent concepts of democracy in the practice of shura have impacted and shaped the process of democratization, Al-Farsi's book is vital in the examination of the political discourse surrounding democratization across one of the most strategically important, but little understood states in the Middle East.

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) is one of the most enigmatic and active political forces in the Middle East. For observers in the West, the SSNP is regarded as a far-right organization, subservient to the Baathist government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which dictates its activities from Damascus. However, the SSNP's complicated history and its ideology of Pan-Syrianism has meant the party has been overlooked and forgotten by the daily output of news, analysis, studies and policy recommendations. Very little academic scholarship has been dedicated to understanding its origins, identity, and influence. Addressing the need for scholarship on the SSNP, this book is a political history from the party's foundation in 1932 to today. A comprehensive and objective study on the little known nationalist group, the author uses interviews from current members to gain insights into its everyday activities, goals, social interstices and nuances. Given the SSNP's history of violence, their own persecution, influence on other secular parties in the region, and their impact in Syria and Lebanon's politics, the book's analysis sheds light on the party's status in Lebanon and its potential role in a future post-war Syria. The SSNP is gaining popularity among regime supporters in Syria and will be one part of understanding the political developments on the ground. This book is essential reading for those wanting to understand the SSNP, its motives, and prospects.

Adapted from a series of lectures delivered at the University of London in 1913, this is a strikingly clearheaded and articulate discussion of one of the great faiths of the world from a historical and sociological perspective. Discover... the Koran as the basis of Islam the Koran as legal code the status cults in the Islamic faith the development of Islamic ethics asceticism and pantheism in Islam Islamic philosophy and more...Author David S. Margoliouth (1858-1940), a professor of Arabic at Oxford University, worked from primary Arabic texts and omitted "all anecdotes that are obviously or most probably fabulous," resulting in a clear-headed history of a highly contentious moment in time.

This book looks at the case study of Hachioji as a major transit hub with a world-class public transportation system in Japan. It tracks how Tokyo slowly expands into its suburban, rural or sub-rural districts. It also wants to profile the multiple identities of a city that is simultaneously an ecological asset, a heritage locale in addition to a logistics hub. The volume is probably the first of its kind to analyze the western sector of the largest city in the world.

Aristotle's theory of eternal continuous motion and his argument from everlasting change and motion to the existence of an unmoved primary cause of motion, provided in book VIII of his Physics, is one of the most influential and persistent doctrines of ancient Greek philosophy. Nevertheless, the exact wording of Aristotle's discourse is doubtful and contentious at many places. The present critical edition of Ishaq ibn Hunayn's Arabic translation (9th c.) is supposed to replace the faulty edition by A. Badawi and aims at contributing to the clarification of these textual difficulties by means of a detailed collation of the Arabic text with the most important Greek manuscripts, supported by comprehensive Greek and Arabic glossaries.

This book explores and comparatively assesses how Armenians as minorities have been represented in modern Turkey from the twentieth century through to the present day, with a particular focus on the period since the first electoral victory of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) in 2002. It examines how social movements led by intellectuals and activists have challenged the Turkish state and called for democratization, and explores key issues related to Armenian identity. Drawing on new social movements theory, this book sheds light on the dynamics of minority identity politics in contemporary Turkey and highlights the importance of political protest.

Reforms in Myanmar (formerly Burma) have eased restrictions on citizens' political activities. Yet for most Burmese, Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung shows, eking out a living from day to day leaves little time for civic engagement. Citizens have coped with extreme hardship through great resourcefulness. But by making bad situations more tolerable in the short term, these coping strategies may hinder the emergence of the democratic values needed to sustain the country's transition to a more open political environment. Thawnghmung conducted in-depth interviews and surveys of 372 individuals from all walks of life and across geographical locations in Myanmar between 2008 and 2015. To frame her analysis, she provides context from countries with comparable political and economic situations. Her findings will be welcomed by political scientists and policy analysts, as well by journalists and humanitarian activists looking for substantive, reliable information about everyday life in a country that remains largely in the shadows.

Reprint of 1970 publication from the US Army Center of Military History. A description of selected small unit actions, written primarily to acquaint junior officers, noncommissioned officers, and enlisted soldiers with combat experiences in Korea.