Tsar and Sultan offers a unique insight into Russian Orientalism as the intellectual force behind Russian-Ottoman encounters. Through war diaries and memoirs, accounts of captivity and diplomatic correspondences, Victor Taki's analysis of military documents demonstrates a crucial aspect of Russia's discovery of the Orient based on its rivalry with the Ottoman Empire. Narratives depicting the brutal realities of Russian-Turkish military conflicts influenced the Orientalisation of the Ottoman Empire. In turn, Russian identity was built as the counter-image to the demonised Turk. This book explains the significance of Russian Orientalism on Russian identity and national policies of westernisation. Students of both European and Middle East studies will appreciate Taki's unique approach to Russian-Turkish relations and their influence on Eurasian history.

The Political Economy of News in China: Manufacturing Harmony is the first full-scale application of Herman and Chomsky's classic propaganda model to the news media content of a country with a system that is not outwardly similar to the United States. Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman examines the news media of the People's Republic of China using the five filters of the original model. He asks provocative questions concerning the nature of media ownership, the effect of government or private ownership on media content, the elite-centered nature news sourcing patterns, the benefits and costs of having active special interest groups to influence news coverage, the continued usefulness of the concepts of censorship and propaganda, the ability of advertisers to indirectly influence news production, and the potential increase of pro-capitalist, pro-consumerist ideology and nationalism in Chinese news media. This book will appeal to scholars of international media and journalism.

In this groundbreaking volume, based on extensive research in Chinese archives and libraries, Jan Kiely explores the pre-Communist origins of the process of systematic thought reform or reformation (ganhua) that evolved into a key component of Mao Zedong's revolutionary restructuring of Chinese society. Focusing on ganhua as it was employed in China's prison system, Kiely's thought-provoking work brings the history of this critical phenomenon to life through the stories of individuals who conceptualized, implemented, and experienced it, and he details how these techniques were subsequently adapted for broader social and political use.

Evolution and Power: China's Struggle, Survival, and Success, edited by Xiaobing Li and Xiansheng Tian, brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to provide a comprehensive look at China s rapid socio-economic transformation and the dramatic changes in its political institution and culture. Investigating subjects such as party history, leadership style, personality, political movements, civil-military relations, intersection of politics and law, and democratization, this volume situates current legitimacy and constitutional debates in the context of both the country s ideology, traditions, and the wider global community. The contributors to this volume clarify key Chinese conceptual frameworks to explain previous subjects that have been confusing or neglected, offering case studies and policy analyses connected with power struggles and political crises in China. A general pattern is introduced and developed to illuminate contemporary problems with government accountability, public opposition, and political transparency. Evolution and Power provides essential scholarship on China s political development and growth.

In Bali in the Early Nineteenth Century, Helen Creese examines the nature of the earliest sustained cross-cultural encounter between the Balinese and the Dutch through the eyewitness accounts of Pierre Dubois, the first colonial official to live in Bali. From 1828 to 1831, Dubois served as Civil Administrator to the Badung court in southern Bali. He later recorded his Balinese experiences for the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences in a series of personal letters to an anonymous correspondent. This first ethnography of Bali provides rich, perceptive descriptions of early nineteenth-century Balinese politics, society, religion and culture. The book includes a complete edition and translation of Dubois' Legere Idee de Balie en 1830/Sketch of Bali in 1830.

Nazar, literally 'vision', is a unique Arabic-Islamic term/concept that offers an analytical framework for exploring the ways in which Islamic visual culture and aesthetic sensibility have been shaped by common conceptual tools and moral parameters. It intertwines the act of 'seeing' with the act of 'reflecting', thereby bringing the visual and cognitive functions into a complex relationship. Within the folds of this multifaceted relationship lies an entangled web of religious ideas, moral values, aesthetic preferences, scientific precepts, and socio-cultural understandings that underlie the intricacy of one's personal belief. Peering through the lens of nazar, the studies presented in this volume unravel aspects of these entanglements to provide new understandings of how vision, belief, and perception shape the rich Islamic visual culture. Contributors: Samer Akkach, James Bennett, Sushma Griffin, Stephen Hirtenstein, Virginia Hooker, Sakina Nomanbhoy, Shaha Parpia, Ellen Philpott-Teo, Wendy M.K. Shaw.

Frontiers of the Ottoman Imagination is a compilation of articles celebrating the work of Rhoads Murphey, the eminent scholar of Ottoman studies who has worked at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham for more than two decades. This volume offers two things: the versatility and influence of Rhoads Murphey is seen here through the work of his colleagues, friends and students, in a collection of high quality and cutting edge scholarship. Secondly, it is a testament of the legacy of Rhoads and the CBOMGS in the world of Ottoman Studies. The collection includes articles covering topics as diverse as cartography, urban studies and material culture, spanning the Ottoman centuries from the late Byzantine/early Ottoman to the twentieth century. Contributors include: Ourania Bessi, Hasan Colak, Marios Hadjianastasis, Sophia Laiou, Heath W. Lowry, Konstantinos Moustakas, Claire Norton, Amanda Phillips, Katerina Stathi, Johann Strauss, Michael Ursinus, Naci Yorulmaz.

The present English translation reproduces the original German of Carl Brockelmann’s Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur (GAL) as accurately as possible. In the interest of user-friendliness the following emendations have been made in the translation: Personal names are written out in full, except b. for ibn; Brockelmann’s transliteration of Arabic has been adapted to comply with modern standards for English-language publications; modern English equivalents are given for place names, e.g. Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem, etc.; several erroneous dates have been corrected, and the page references to the two German editions have been retained in the margin, except in the Supplement volumes, where new references to the first two English volumes have been inserted. Supplement volume SIII-ii offers the thee Indices (authors; titles; and Western editors/publishers).

The surprise of the Yom Kippur War rivals that of the other two major strategic surprises in the 20th century Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 German surprise attack on the Soviet Union and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The major difference between these events is that Israeli intelligence had a lot more and better quality information leading up to the attack than did the Americans or the Soviet Union prior to those attacks. Why, then, was the beginning of the war such a surprise? The sudden eruption of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 took Israel and the world by surprise. While many scholars have tried to explain why Israel was caught unawares despite its sophisticated military intelligence services, Dalia Gavriely-Nuri looks beyond the military, intelligence, and political explanations to a cultural explanation. Israeli Culture on the Road to the Yom Kippur War reveals that the culture that evolved in Israel between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War played a large role in the surprise. Gavriely-Nuri lays out the cultural environment at the time to show that an attack of any kind would have been experienced as a strategic surprise despite the amount of intelligence available.