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.

In 1998, the Belitung, a ninth-century western Indian Ocean–style vessel, was discovered in Indonesian waters. Onboard was a full cargo load, likely intended for the Middle Eastern market, of over 60,000 Chinese Tang-dynasty ceramics, gold, and other precious objects. It is one of the most significant shipwreck discoveries of recent times, revealing the global scale of ancient commercial endeavors and the centrality of the ocean within the Silk Road story. But this shipwreck also has a modern tale to tell, of how nation-states appropriate the remnants of the past for their own purposes, and of the international debates about who owns—and is responsible for—shared heritage. The commercial salvage of objects from the Belitung, and their subsequent sale to Singapore, contravened the principles of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage and prompted international condemnation. The resulting controversy continues to reverberate in academic and curatorial circles. Major museums refused to host international traveling exhibitions of the collection, and some archaeologists announced they would rather see the objects thrown back in the sea than ever go on display. Shipwrecks are anchored in the public imagination, their stories of treasure and tragedy told in museums, cinema, and song. At the same time, they are sites of scholarly inquiry, a means by which maritime archaeologists interrogate the past through its material remains. Every shipwreck is an accidental time capsule, replete with the sunken stories of those on board, of the personal and commercial objects that went down with the vessel, and of an unfinished journey. In this moving and thought-provoking reflection of underwater cultural heritage management, Natali Pearson reveals valuable new information about the Belitung salvage, obtained firsthand from the salvagers, and the intricacies in the many conflicts and relationships that developed. In tracing the Belitung’s lives and afterlives, this book shifts our thinking about shipwrecks beyond popular tropes of romance, pirates, and treasure, and toward an understanding of how the relationships between sites, objects, and people shape the stories we tell of the past in the present.

""Is there jazz in China?"" This is the question that sent author Eugene Marlow on his quest to uncover the history of jazz in China. Marlow traces China's introduction to jazz in the early 1920s, its interruption by Chinese leadership under Mao in 1949, and its rejuvenation in the early 1980s with the start of China's opening to the world under Premier Deng Xiaoping. Covering a span of almost one hundred years, Marlow focuses on a variety of subjects--the musicians who initiated jazz performances in China, the means by which jazz was incorporated into Chinese culture, and the musicians and venues that now present jazz performances. Featuring unique, face-to-face interviews with leading indigenous jazz musicians in Beijing and Shanghai, plus interviews with club owners, promoters, expatriates, and even diplomats, Marlow marks the evolution of jazz in China as it parallels China's social, economic, and political evolution through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Also featured is an interview with one of the extant members of the Jimmy King Big Band of the 1940s, one of the first major all-Chinese jazz big bands in Shanghai. Ultimately, Jazz in China: From Dance Hall Music to Individual Freedom of Expression is a cultural history that reveals the inexorable evolution of a democratic form of music in a Communist state.

How was Palestine destroyed? Did the great powers create Israel? Why has Lebanon suffered war after war? What role has religion played in the Middle East? When did the region become the hub of the world's ecological crisis? If you want answers to any of these questions, then you need this book. Since the Second World War, the Middle East has suffered a seemingly unending period of war, foreign domination, environmental devastation and mass resistance to the region's ruling classes. In this book, that resistance speaks in its own words. Roland Rance and Terry Conway have gathered together some of the most powerful articles written in the last sixty years by socialist, ecologist and anti-Zionist activists across the region. The topics in this book include: . The legacy of 1948, when Israel was created . The destruction of Palestine . Lebanon's experience of war after war . Iraq's devastation . The Zionist context . The contradictions of religion . What the 'New World Order' meant for globalisation, the environment and Zionism THE EDITORS - Roland Rance has been a socialist activist in Israeli, Palestinian and British politics since the 1970s. He is a former editor of News From Within and Return Magazine, and is the convenor of Jews Against Zionism. - Terry Conway is one of the editors of Socialist Resistance and also of International Viewpoint. She is a leading member of the Fourth International, the world socialist organization founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

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.

In The Arab Thieves, Peter Webb critically explores the classic tales of pre-Islamic Arabian outlaws in Arabic Literature. A group of Arabian camel-rustlers became celebrated figures in Muslim memories of pre-Islam, and much poetry ascribed to them and stories about their escapades grew into an outlaw tradition cited across Arabic literature. The ninth/fifteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi arranged biographies of ten outlaws into a chapter on 'Arab Thieves' in his wide-ranging history of the world before Muhammad. This volume presents the first critical edition of al-Maqrizi's text with a fully annotated English translation, alongside a detailed study that interrogates the outlaw lore to uncover the ways in which Arabic writers constructed outlaw identities and how al-Maqrizi used the tales to communicate his vision of pre-Islam. Via an exhaustive survey of early Arabic sources about the outlaws and comparative readings with outlaw traditions in other world literatures, The Arab Thieves reveals how Arabic literature crafted lurid narratives about criminality and employed them to tell ancient Arab history.

The book analyses all extant works by Ibn Jarir al-Tabari (d. 224/839-310/923), referring to their individual methodologies; their legacy as al- madhhab al-jariri; and their scholarly and socio- political context. Through the study of al- Tabari's works, the book addresses research debates over dating the legal and scholarly institutions and their disciplines; authorship and transmission of scholarly writings; political theory and administration; and 'origins' of the Qur'an and Islam. Al-Tabari defined the Qur'an in linguistic and legal terms. The linguistic terms refer to rhetoric and semiotics, and the legal to theories of social contract, 'natural law', and rule of law. Both sets of terms go into al-Tabari's theory of prophecy and administration, including of 'minorities'. By engaging current debates about the usefulness or not of the medieval Muslim scholars in research on the Qur'an and early Islam, this book argues that the - 2 - 20:59 contribution of each medieval scholar be assessed on an individual basis. Al-Tabari's philosophical, ethical, historical, linguistic, and legal education produced analysis of the Qur'an and 'origins' of Islam that stands up to some fronts in contemporary research. The book thus adds to research on al-Tabari; early Islamic disciplines and institutions; and the Qur'an and early Islam.

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.

The Quest for Forbidden Lands: Nikolai Przhevalskii and his Followers on Inner Asian Tracks is a collection of biographical essays of outstanding Russian explorers of Inner Asia of the late nineteenth - early twentieth century, Nikolai Przhevalskii, Vsevolod Roborovskii, Mikhail Pevtsov, Petr Kozlov, Grigorii Grumm-Grzhimailo and Bronislav Grombchevskii, almost all senior army officers. Their expeditions were organized by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society with some assistance from the military department with a view of exploring and mapping the vast uncharted territories of Inner Asia, being the Western periphery of the Manchu-Chinese Empire. The journeys of these pioneers were a great success and gained world renown for their many discoveries and the valuable collections they brought from the region.