At midnight on 30 June 1997, Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty after 150 years of British rule. The moment when the British flag came down was dramatic enough but the ten years leading up to it were full of surprising incident and change. These 'Letters from Hong Kong', written by an Englishwoman who was involved in those events from 1987, are both an unusual historical record and a heartwarming account of women's domestic, intellectual and political activity. This epilogue brings Hong Kong up to date ten years after the Handover.

"Uruk: The First City" is the first fully historical analysis of the origins of the city and of the state in southern Mesopotamia, the region providing the earliest evidence in world history related to these seminal developments. Contrasting his approach - which has been influenced by V. Gordan Childe and by Marxist theory - with the neo-evolutionist ideas of (especially) American anthropological theory, the author argues that the innovations that took place during the 'Uruk' period (most of the fourth millennium B.C.) were a 'true' revolution that fundamentally changed all aspects of society and culture. This book is unique in its historical approach, and its combination of archaeological and textual sources. It develops an argument that weaves together a vast amount of information and places it within a context of contemporary scholarly debates on such questions as the ancient economy and world systems. It explains the roots of these debates briefly without talking down to the reader. The book is accessible to a wider audience, while it also provides a cogent argument about the processes involved to the specialist in the field.

"State, Economy and the Great Divergence" provides a new analysis of what has become the central debate in global economic history: the 'great divergence' between European and Asian growth. Focusing on early modern China and Western Europe, this book offers a new level of detail on comparative state formation that has wide-reaching implications for European, Eurasian and global history.Beginning with a comprehensive overview of the historiography, Peer Vries goes on to extend and develop the debate, critically engaging with the huge volume of literature published on the topic to date. Incorporating new insights into the case of Europe, he offers a compelling alternative to the exaggerated claims to East-West equivalence, or Asian superiority, which have come to dominate discourse surrounding this issue.This is a vital update to a key issue in global economic history and, as such, is essential reading for students and scholars interested in keeping up to speed with the on-going debates.

Sex in the Middle East and North Africa examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices. The book is organized into three sections: Single and Dating, Engaged and Married, and It's Complicated. The allusion to categories of relationship status on social media is at once a nod to the compulsion to categorize, recognition of the many ways that categorization is rarely straightforward, and acknowledgment that much of the intimate lives described by the contributors is mediated by online technologies.

In the medieval world, geographical knowledge was influenced by religious ideas and beliefs. Whereas this point is well analysed for the Latin-Christian world, the religious character of the Arabic-Islamic geographic tradition has not yet been scrutinised in detail. This volume addresses this desideratum and combines case studies from both traditions of geographic thinking. The contributions comprise in-depth analyses of individual geographical works as for example those of al-Idrisi or Lambert of Saint-Omer, different forms of presenting geographical knowledge such as TO-diagrams or globes as well as performative aspects of studying and meditating geographical knowledge. Focussing on texts as well as on maps, the contributions open up a comparative perspective on how religious knowledge influenced the way the world and its geography were perceived and described int the medieval world.

This Key Concepts pivot explores the aesthetic concept of 'imaginative contemplation.' Drawing on key literature to provide a comprehensive and systematic study of the term, the book offers a unique analysis and definition of the connotations of the term, describing its aesthetic mentality and examining the issue of imaginative contemplation versus imagination in artistic creative thinking, especially as regards the characteristics of contingent thinking in aesthetics. It focuses on drawing parallels between imaginative contemplation and aesthetic emotions, aesthetic rationality, and artistic expression as well as aesthetic form. Examining the relationship between imaginative contemplation and the aesthetic configuration, the book provides a valuable introduction to aesthetic theory in Chinese philosophy and art.