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1
Behrman, Jere R. Aging and economic opportunities: Major world regions around the turn of the century. Washington, D.C: Inter-American Development Bank, Office of the Chief Economist, 1999.
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2
Nigro, Giampiero, ed. Gestione dell'acqua in Europa (XII-XVIII Secc.) / Water Management in Europe (12th-18th centuries). Florence: Firenze University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/978-88-6453-700-9.
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Water was a source of wealth which facilitated, fostered or brutally halted economic development in the Ancien Regime. Lack of hygiene meant that water was used less for drinking than other drinks, but as a raw material, source of energy, cooling, rinsing and cleansing agent, water was unequalled. It played a role in public and private relaxation and in health. Water also proved to be an ideal, safe and cheap means of transporting goods and ideas. Urban historians have long pointed to the enormous comparative advantage enjoyed by towns and regions whose favourable maritime or riverine location gave them access to cheap water-borne transport. But water just as often posed a threat to economic development and prosperity, whether due to its absence or its specific composition or level of pollution or to uncontrollable abundance. This duality is still present today in our modern, globalised society. While huge quantities of fresh, potable water are wasted in the West, free or cheap access to fresh and abundant water supplies remains a major challenge for millions of individuals on the planet. Major floods in different parts of the world regularly cause economic damage and endless human suffering. With a Settimana devoted to the management of the water supply, excluding related topics as water consumption, water transport and the use of water in agriculture and industry, the Istituto Datini is seeking to draw attention.
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W. C. J. Van Rensburg. Strategic Minerals: Major Minerals Regions of the World, Issues and Strategies (Prentice-Hall Intl Ser in World Resources, Energy, and Materials). Prentice Hall, 1985.
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W. C. J. Van Rensburg. Strategic Minerals: Major Minerals Regions of the World, Issues and Strategies (Prentice-Hall Intl Ser in World Resources, Energy, and Materials). Prentice Hall, 1985.
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5
Bentley, Jerry H., ed. The Oxford Handbook of World History. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199235810.001.0001.
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The Oxford Handbook of World History presents thirty-one articles by leading historians on the most important issues explored by contemporary world historians. These broadly fall into four categories: conceptions of the global past, themes in world history, processes of world history, and regions in world history. The articles on conceptions deal with issues of space and time as treated in the field of world history as well as questions of method, epistemology, the historiography of the area, and globalization as viewed from historical perspective. Themes present in the book include the natural environment, agriculture, pastoral nomadism, science, technology, state formation, gender, and religion. Articles dealing with large-scale processes review current thinking on some of the most influential developments of the global past, including mass migrations, cross-cultural trade, biological diffusions, imperial expansion, industrialization, and cultural and religious exchanges. And finally, a set of articles explores the distinctive historical development within the world's major regions, while also situating individual regions in the larger global context.
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Burnell, Peter, Vicky Randall, and Lise Rakner, eds. Politics in the Developing World. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/hepl/9780198737438.001.0001.
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Politics in the Developing World provides an introduction to politics in the developing world. This fifth edition has been updated to address topical issues and themes, including refugee movements; the rise of the so-called Islamic State; organized crime; gender; the role of new forms of communication in political mobilization; and the replacement of Millennium Development Goals by Sustainable Development Goals. The first four sections of the volume explore the theoretical approaches, the changing nature and role of the state, and the major policy issues that confront all developing countries. The final sections set out a diverse range of country case studies, representing all the main geographical regions.
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Shambaugh, David, ed. China and the World. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190062316.001.0001.
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China and the World is the most comprehensive, up-to-date scholarly assessment of China’s foreign relations and roles in international affairs. Students, scholars, practitioners, and publics worldwide will benefit from the information and insights contained herein. Written by sixteen leading international specialists, it covers China’s contemporary position in all regions of the world, with all major powers, and across multiple arenas of China’s international interactions. It also explores the sources of China’s grand strategy, how the past shapes the present, and the impact of domestic factors that shape China’s external behavior. As the world evolves in increasingly unpredictable directions, the impact of China will be one of the key determinants of the future global order. No country or society can escape China’s reach—indeed, many seek its embrace. China brings benefits to many but is also a problematic interlocutor for others. Overall, public opinion surveys indicate that China’s reputation around the world is mixed, with as many societies viewing China favorably as unfavorably. This volume explores the sources of this ambivalence. As China becomes a leading global power, and its footprint continually expands on different continents, understanding the parameters of its international presence, and what motivates China, is imperative for others. This volume digs deep inside China’s multidimensional “toolbox” to explore the instruments that Beijing uses around the world: economic, diplomatic, cultural, military, media, and other elements. China and the World provides many insights into China’s calculations and behavior and identifies a number of challenges China will face in the future.
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Hazzard-Donald, Katrina. Traditional Religion in West Africa and in the New World. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037290.003.0002.
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This chapter discusses the major manifestations of African traditional religion in the New World. It outlines significant general principles and practices carried to the Western Hemisphere by captive Africans from two regions, which inform West and Central West African religious practices as well as the major New World African religious manifestations establishing where Hoodoo fits in vis-à-vis the other New World syncretic religious forms. It considers the practice of spirit possession by a deity, spirit, or ancestor as part of West and Central West African religious tradition, and how it came to be observed in sacred contexts among African Americans in the United States in the twenty-first century. The chapter also examines the place of spiritual forces in herbal and naturopathic healing within the context of African traditional religion. Finally, it looks at the role of divination in the diagnosis of physical or mental illness in both traditional African society and in old plantation Hoodoo.
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Hagemann, Karen, Stefan Dudink, and Sonya O. Rose, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199948710.001.0001.
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The handbook is a reference work of thirty-two essays jointly written by specialists in the history of military and war and experts in gender and women’s history. The collection, covering four centuries from the Thirty Years’ War to the present Wars of Globalization, investigates how gender contributed to the shaping of warfare and the military and was at the same time transformed by them. The essays explore this question by focusing on themes such as the cultural representations of military and war; war mobilization of and war support by society; war experiences on the home fronts and battlefronts; gendered war violence; military service and citizenship; war demobilization, postwar societies, and memories; and attempts to regulate and tame warfare and prevent new wars. The volume covers chronologically the major periods in the development of warfare since the seventeenth century. Its content reflects the state of research on the history of gender and war. Therefore, the main geographical focus of the handbook in several chapters is on the best explored regions of eastern and western Europe, the Americas and Australia. But it also systematically covers the long-term processes of colonization and empire-building originating in early modern Europe and their aftermath in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia, which are more recent fields of research. Thus, the handbook allows for both temporal comparisons that explore continuities and changes in a long-term perspective and regional comparisons, as well as an assessment of transnational influences on the entangled relationships between and among gender, warfare, and military culture. All essays are thematic, comparative or transnational.
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Overhaus, Marco. The United States and Regional Security Orders in the Middle East, East Asia, and Europe. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198828945.003.0012.
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The USA is still the only power with the capability to have a major impact—for better or for worse—on the security orders in all major geographical regions of the world, most notably the Near/Middle East, East Asia, and Europe. A review of the major dynamics in regional orders shows that seven decades of American hegemony have always been short of the liberal ideal-type expectations—well before Donald Trump entered the scene. However, the Trump administration sees the international and regional security orders primarily as arenas for power competition in which economic and military might are the most relevant currencies. While the erosion of regional security orders is not primarily the result of the deeds and omissions in Washington, the missing liberal hegemon will make it much harder to reverse the trend and to rebuild these orders from within and from the outside.
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Hennie, Strydom. Part III Other Relevant International Regimes and Issues, 13 Transnational Organised Crime and the Illegal Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/law/9780198733737.003.0013.
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The involvement of international crime syndicates in the illegal trade in wild fauna and flora has taken on alarming proportions and presents a major law enforcement challenge for the international community. The message is that the states of the world are confronted with an increasing, complex, and difficult situation in successfully combating wildlife crime in many regions of the world, more so since transnational criminal operations pose a serious threat to the security, political stability, and economy of many countries, especially in the developing world. This chapter highlights the scope of the problem and investigates the enforcement potential and related issues associated with the implementation of the 1973 Convention on Illegal Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). In addition other relevant international and regional agreements for the combating of wildlife crime are dealt with.
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Kim, SP. Australian Lauxaniid Flies. CSIRO Publishing, 1994. http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/9780643105164.
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The Lauxaniidae are one of the largest families of acalyptrate Diptera (series Schizophora) and are distributed in all the major zoogeographical regions of the world. Early taxonomic work on the family began in Europe and some notable studies were done during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since then few significant revisions on regional faunas have been undertaken.
There are 142 recognized genera and about 1550 described species in the world fauna of Lauxaniidae as compiled from available references (Shewell 1965, 1977, 1986, 1987; Stuckenberg 1971a; Miller 1977a,c, 1980; Papp 1984a, 1984b; Yarom 1986; Evenhuis and Okadome 1989; Hirashima 1989; Broadhead 1989; Sasakawa and Pong 1990; Colless and McAlpine 1991; Sasakawa 1992; Silva, pers. comm.). The family has been divided into two subfamilies distinguished principally by the costal form: Homoneurinae Stuckenberg 1971 having a homoneuriform costa (its spinules stop abruptly at or just before the apex of R4 + 5) and Lauxaniinae Shewell 1977 with a sapromyziform costa (the spinules stop well before the apex of R4+ 5).
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Schimmelfennig, Frank, Thomas Winzen, Tobias Lenz, Jofre Rocabert, Loriana Crasnic, Cristina Gherasimov, Jana Lipps, and Densua Mumford. The Rise of International Parliaments. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864974.001.0001.
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International parliamentary institutions (IPIs) are on the rise. Around the world, international organizations have increasingly established or affiliated parliamentary assemblies. At the same time, IPIs have generally remained powerless institutions with at best a consultative role in the decision-making process of international organizations. This book pursues the question why the member states of international organizations create IPIs but do not vest them with relevant institutional powers. It argues that neither the functional benefits of delegation nor the internalization of democratic norms provide convincing answers to this question. Rather, IPIs are an instrument of strategic legitimation. By establishing IPIs that mimic a highly esteemed domestic democratic institution, governments seek to ensure that audiences at home and in the wider international environment recognize their IOs as democratically legitimate. At the same time, they seek to avoid being effectively constrained by IPIs in international governance. In a statistical analysis covering the world’s most relevant international organizations and a series of case studies from diverse world regions, we find two major varieties of international parliamentarization. IOs with general purpose and high authority create and empower IPIs to legitimate their region-building projects domestically. Alternatively, IOs are induced to create parliamentary bodies by international diffusion.
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Ahmad, Talmiz. The Gulf Region. Edited by David M. Malone, C. Raja Mohan, and Srinath Raghavan. Oxford University Press, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198743538.013.32.
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India’s traditional focus on economic and community-based ties with the Persian Gulf has been complemented in the twenty-first century with a dramatic upswing in political, defence, security, energy, and economic linkages with the countries of the region. Developments in the Gulf after the Arab Spring—centred around the Saudi–Iran divide on sectarian and strategic bases, competition for space and influence among various Islamist groups, and challenges to the traditional domestic structures within GCC countries—have created considerable turbulence in the regional security scenario. Given its high stakes in the region, Indian foreign policy faces a new imperative: defining and realizing a new security architecture in the Persian Gulf that would embrace all players, regional and extra-regional, in association with other major Asian powers which share India’s interests in Gulf stability.
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Brewster, David, ed. India and China at Sea. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199479337.001.0001.
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China and India are emerging as major maritime powers as part of long-term shifts in the regional balance of power. As their wealth, interests, and power grow, the two countries are increasingly bumping up against each other across the Indo-Pacific. China’s growing naval presence in the Indian Ocean is seen by many as challenging India’s aspirations towards regional leadership and major power status. How India and China get along in this shared maritime space—cooperation, coexistence, competition, or confrontation—will be one of the key strategic challenges for the entire region. India and China at Sea is an essential resource in understanding how the two countries will interact as major maritime powers in the coming decades. The essays in the volume, by noted strategic analysts from across the world, seek to better understand Indian and Chinese perspectives about their roles in the Indian Ocean and their evolving naval strategies towards each other.
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Mandelbaum, Michael. The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197533161.001.0001.
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In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. To be sure, wars took place in this era, but less frequently and on a far smaller scale than in previous periods. The peace ended because three major countries – Vladimir Putin’s Russia in Europe, Xi Jinping’s China in East Asia, and the Shia clerics’ Iran in the Middle East – put an end to it with aggressive nationalist policies aimed at overturning the prevailing political arrangements in their respective regions. The three leaders had a common motive: their need to survive in a democratic age with their countries’ prospects for economic growth uncertain. The key to the return of peace lies in the advent of genuine democracy, including free elections and the protection of religious, economic, and political liberty. Recent history has shown, however, that democracy cannot be imposed from the outside, leading to a paradox: the world has a formula for peace, but the world has no way to put it into practice.
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Howells, Coral Ann, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte, eds. The Oxford History of the Novel in English. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199679775.001.0001.
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This book explores the history of English-language prose fiction in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950, focusing not only on the ‘literary’ novel, but also on the processes of production, distribution and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as the work of major novelists, movements, and tendencies. After World War II, the rise of cultural nationalism in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and movements towards independence in the Pacific islands, together with the turn toward multiculturalism and transnationalism in the postcolonial world, called into question the standard national frames for literary history. This resulted in an increasing recognition of formerly marginalised peoples and a repositioning of these national literatures in a world literary context. The book explores the implications of such radical change through its focus on the English-language novel and the short story, which model the crises in evolving narratives of nationhood and the reinvention of postcolonial identities. Shifting socio-political and cultural contexts and their effects on novels and novelists, together with shifts in fictional modes (realism, modernism, the Gothic, postmodernism) are traced across these different regions. Attention is given not only to major authors but also to Indigenous and multicultural fiction, children's and young adult novels, and popular fiction. Chapters on book publishing, critical reception, and literary histories for all four areas are included in this innovative presentation of a Trans-Pacific postcolonial history of the novel.
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Doyle, Timothy, and Dennis Rumley. The Rise and Return of the Indo-Pacific. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198739524.001.0001.
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In the twenty-first century, the Indo-Pacific region has become the new centre of the world. The concept of the ‘Indo-Pacific’’, though still under construction, is a potentially pivotal site, where various institutions and intellectuals of statecraft are seeking common ground on which to anchor new regional coalitions, alliances, and allies to better serve their respective national agendas. This book explores the Indo-Pacific as an ambiguous and hotly contested regional security construction. It critically examines the major drivers behind the revival of classical geopolitical concepts and their deployment through different national lenses. The book also analyses the presence of India and the US in the Indo-Pacific, and the manner in which China has reacted to their positions in the Indo-Pacific to date. It suggests that national constructions of the Indo-Pacific region are more informed by domestic political realities, anti-Chinese bigotries, distinctive properties of twenty-first century US hegemony, and narrow nation-statist sentiments rather than genuine pan-regional aspirations. The book argues that the spouting of contested depictions of the Indo-Pacific region depend on the fixed geostrategic lenses of nation-states, but what is also important is the re-emergence of older ideas—a classical conceptual revival—based on early to mid-twentieth century geopolitical ideas in many of these countries. The book deliberately raises the issue of the sea and constructions of ‘nature’, as these symbols are indispensable parts of many of these Indo-Pacific regional narratives.
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Reimann, Mathias, and Reinhard Zimmermann, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law. Oxford University Press, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199296064.001.0001.
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The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law provides a wide-ranging and highly diverse survey as well as a critical assessment of comparative law at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It summarizes and evaluates a discipline that is time-honoured but not easily understood in all its dimensions. The book contains forty-three articles. The aim of each article is to provide an accessible, original, and critical account of comparative law in its respective area. Each article also includes a short bibliography referencing the definitive works in the field. The book is divided into three main sections. Section I surveys how comparative law has developed and where it stands today in various parts of the world. This includes not only traditional model jurisdictions, such as France, Germany, and the United States, but also other regions like Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. Section II discusses the major approaches to comparative law — its methods, goals, and its relationship with other fields, such as legal history, economics, and linguistics. Finally, Section III deals with the status of comparative studies in over a dozen subject matter areas, including the major categories of private, economic, public, and criminal law.
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Kumar, TM Vinod, and Dilip R. Ahuja, eds. Rural Energy Planning for The Indian Himalaya. International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), 1987. http://dx.doi.org/10.53055/icimod.7.
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This book is perhaps the first effort to focus on energy issues in the Indian Himalayas. Though a lot has been written on the ecological consequences (of energy-related activities), these energy issues by themselves have not received sufficient attention. The papers in this volume have been selected from those commissioned by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, and the Tata Energy Research Institute as a part of their collaborative programme on rural energy planning. As it was found that critical gaps exist in knowledge and experience in the area of effective diffusion of energy technologies for promoting Himalayan development, it was felt that a collection of papers on the existing states-of-the-art would be a useful first step before embarking on practical interventions. There are papers that have focussed on technologies, planning issues and economic welfare aspects relevant to development in all the different regions of the Himalayas. Some authors have focussed instead on the regions and have looked at the status of the three subject areas (technologies, planning and welfare) as they pertain to their regions. The major value of this book is that in addition to a clear articulation of problems, issues and possible solutions, it represents a comprehensive collection of information existing for this region. The authors have also brought out the gaps that exist currently and have established priorities for further research and direction for programmes to promote sustainable development of energy resources and their use in the Himalayan region.
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Aebi, Marcelo F., and Antonia Linde. Long-Term Trends in Crime. Edited by Paul Knepper and Anja Johansen. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199352333.013.3.
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This chapter introduces the available research on long-term crime trends and shows the major role that cross-national comparisons have played since the nineteenth century, revealing that the first researchers were fully aware of such comparisons’ pitfalls. Since then, most research has focused on homicide trends—often used as a proxy for trends in all violent crime—in industrialized Western nations, because data are not widely available for other regions of the world and other types of offenses. Problems related to finding appropriate crime measures and valid denominators for the absolute numbers provided by such measures are also investigated, as are the risks of chronocentrism, parochialism, and causationism. Finally, it cautions that explaining the decrease in Western industrialized countries’ interpersonal violence since the late Middle Ages through the effect of a civilizing process requires overlooking the genocides, mass killings, and war crimes committed in these countries and their former colonies.
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Magnan, André. Food Regimes. Edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199729937.013.0021.
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A major challenge for food scholars is how they can explain the evolution of a global food system where distant social actors, ecologies, and places have complex, and often contradictory, relations. In particular, scholars face the difficult task of providing an account of food system change that is at once theoretically sophisticated, historically grounded, and holistic in its perspective. A leading example of this type of approach is food regimes analysis, which is anchored in historical political economy. The food regimes approach views agriculture and food in relation to the development of capitalism on a global scale, and argues that social change is brought about by struggles among social movements, capital, and states. The concept of food regimes was introduced by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael in an article in which they addressed the changing role of food and agriculture in the development of global capitalism since 1870. Food regimes analysis combines two strands of macro-sociological theory: regulationism and world-systems theory. This article examines the theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions of food regimes analysis, and looks at some of the latest developments in food regime theorizing and research.
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Arent, Douglas, Channing Arndt, Mackay Miller, Finn Tarp, and Owen Zinaman, eds. The Political Economy of Clean Energy Transitions. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198802242.001.0001.
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The 21st Conference of the Parties (CoP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) shifted the nature of the political economy challenge associated with achieving a global emissions trajectory that is consistent with a climate. The shifts generated by CoP21 place country decision-making and country policies at centre stage. Under moderately optimistic assumptions concerning the vigour with which CoP21 objectives are pursued, nearly every country in the world will set about to design and implement the most promising and locally relevant policies for achieving their agreed contribution to global mitigation. These policies are virtually certain to vary dramatically across countries. In short, the world stands at the cusp of an unprecedented era of policy experimentation in driving a clean energy transition. This book steps into this new world of broad-scale and locally relevant policy experimentation. The chapters focus on the political economy of clean energy transition with an emphasis on specific issues encountered in both developed and developing countries. Lead authors contribute a broad diversity of experience drawn from all major regions of the world, representing a compendium of what has been learned from recent initiatives, mostly (but not exclusively) at country level, to reduce GHG emissions. As this new era of experimentation dawns, their contributions are both relevant and timely.
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Guillery, Ray. Defining the functional components of the thalamic gate. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198806738.003.0008.
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This chapter starts by summarizing the electron microscopic appearance of the retinogeniculate axons and their immediate environment. These form the functional components of the visual input to the thalamic gate. I then look at evidence that all major thalamic relay nuclei have a shared structure produced by a shared developmental and evolutionary origin. Each nucleus receives a small proportion of its synaptic inputs (<10%) for relay to the cortex; these are the drivers. Drivers are topographically organized with the topography representing body parts, sensory space, or parts of the brain. Some drivers come from sensory pathways or from subcortical regions of the brain, and these innervate first-order thalamic relays; another, major part of the thalamus receives its drivers from the cerebral cortex itself, and these form the higher-order relays to the cortex. These higher-order corticothalamic inputs are crucial for understanding cortical processing. A large proportion of synaptic inputs (>90%) are not relayed to the cortex and are classifiable as modulators. They contribute to controlling the gate. Some modulators match the topography of the drivers, thus relating to the parts of the body and the world; others do not show this specificity and have more global actions.
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Reimann, Mathias, and Reinhard Zimmermann, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198810230.001.0001.
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This second edition of The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law provides a wide-ranging and highly diverse survey as well as a critical assessment of comparative law at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the current era of globalization, this discipline is more relevant than ever, both on an academic and practical level. The book contains forty-eight essays, each of which provides an accessible, original, and critical account of comparative law in its respective area. Each essay also includes a short bibliography referencing the definitive works in the field. The book is divided into three main sections. Section I shows how comparative law has developed and where it stands today in various parts of the world. This includes not only traditional model jurisdictions, such as France, Germany, and the United States, but also other regions like Eastern Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and the Islamic countries. Section II discusses the major approaches to comparative law—its methods, goals, and its relationship with other fields, such as legal history, economics, and linguistics. Finally, Section III deals with the status of comparative studies over a range of subject matter areas, including the major categories of private, economic, public, and criminal law.
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Shambaugh, David. Where Great Powers Meet. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190914974.001.0001.
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After the end of the Cold War, it seemed as if Southeast Asia would remain a geopolitically stable region within the American imperious for the foreseeable future. In the last two decades, however, the re-emergence of China as a major great power has called into question the geopolitical future of the region and raised the specter of renewed great power competition. As this book shows, the United States and China are engaged in a broad-gauged and global competition for power. While this competition ranges across the entire world, it is centered in Asia, and here this text focuses on the ten countries that comprise Southeast Asia. The United States and China constantly vie for position and influence in this enormously significant region, and the outcome of this contest will do much to determine whether Asia leaves the American orbit after seven decades and falls into a new Chinese sphere of influence. Just as important, to the extent that there is a global “power transition” occurring from the United States to China, the fate of Southeast Asia will be a good indicator. Presently, both powers bring important assets to bear. The United States continues to possess a depth and breadth of security ties, soft power, and direct investment across the region that empirically outweigh China’s. For its part, China has more diplomatic influence, much greater trade, and geographic proximity. In assessing the likelihood of a regional power transition, the book looks at how ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and the countries within it maneuver between the United States and China and the degree to which they align with one or the other power.
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Brooks, William, Christina Bashford, and Gayle Magee, eds. Over Here, Over There. University of Illinois Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042706.001.0001.
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Music in World War I played an important role in cementing the transatlantic alliance among Anglophone and Francophone allies. Chapters 1–5 consider responses to the war by five individuals from three countries: Frank Bridge, Charles Ives, Claude Debussy, John Philip Sousa, and Irving Berlin. Chapters 6–10 gradually expand the focus to ever larger groups of people: women theatre organists in the United States, the Longleat community in England, the greater citizenry of Canada, the service flag and Gold Star mother movements throughout the United States, and the global population devastated by the influenza epidemic. A “prelude,” “interlude,” and “postlude,” which provide context and supplemental material, are co-authored by the three editors, who speak as representatives of England, Canada, and the United States. The whole demonstrates not only the importance of musical exchanges and influences in shaping transatlantic support for the war effort but also the range of contributions made—from unknown amateurs to major composers, from local communities to international populations, and from regions that span a third of the globe.
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Bianchi, Thomas S. Deltas and Humans. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199764174.001.0001.
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Humans have had a long relationship with the ebb and flow of tides on river deltas around the world. The fertile soils of river deltas provided early human civilizations with a means of farming crops and obtaining seafood from the highly productive marshes and shallow coastal waters associated with deltas. However, this relationship has at times been both nurturing and tumultuous for the development of early civilizations. The vicissitudes of seasonal changes in river flooding events as well as frequently shifting deltaic soils made life for these early human settlements challenging. These natural transient processes that affect the supply of sediments to deltas today are in many ways very similar to what they have been over the millennia of human settlements. But something else has been altered in the natural rhythm of these cycles. The massive expansion of human populations around the world in both the lower and upper drainage basins of these large rivers have changed the manner in which sediments and water are delivered to deltas. Because of the high density of human populations found in these regions, humans have developed elaborate hydrological engineering schemes in an attempt to "tame" these deltas. The goal of this book is to provide information on the historical relationship between humans and deltas that will hopefully encourage immediate preparation for coastal management plans in response to the impending inundation of major cities, as a result of global change around the world.
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Williams, Geoff. Invertebrate World of Australia's Subtropical Rainforests. CSIRO Publishing, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/9781486312924.
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The Invertebrate World of Australia’s Subtropical Rainforests is a comprehensive review of Australia’s Gondwanan rainforest invertebrate fauna, covering its taxonomy, distribution, biogeography, fossil history, plant community and insect–plant relationships. This is the first work to document the invertebrate diversity of this biologically important region, as well as explain the uniqueness and importance of the organisms.
This book examines invertebrates within the context of the plant world that they are dependent on and offers an understanding of Australia’s outstanding (but still largely unknown) subtropical rainforests. All major, and many minor, invertebrate taxa are described and the book includes a section of colour photos of distinctive species. There is also a strong emphasis on plant and habitat associations and fragmentation impacts, as well as a focus on the regionally inclusive Gondwana Rainforests (Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves of Australia) World Heritage Area.
The Invertebrate World of Australia’s Subtropical Rainforests will be of value to professional biologists and ecologists, as well as amateur entomologists and naturalists in Australia and abroad.
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Choueiri, Youssef M. Arab Historical Writing. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199225996.003.0025.
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This chapter traces the principal historiographical developments in the Arab world since 1945. It is divided into two major parts. The first part deals with the period extending from 1945 to 1970. During this period the discourse of either socialism or nationalism permeated most historical writings. The second part presents the various attempts made to decolonize, rewrite, or theorize history throughout the Arab world. The chapter then shows how in the various states of the Arabic world—some but not all of which have become fundamentalist Islamic regimes—Western models continued to be followed, though often with a more explicitly socialist approach than would be the case in America or Western Europe. By the 1970s, well before the shake-up of radical Islamicization that has dominated the past quarter-century, the entire Arabic world began to push hard against the dominance of residual Western colonial history.
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Rocha, Cristina. Buddhism in Latin America. Edited by Michael Jerryson. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199362387.013.18.
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This chapter presents an overview of developments of Buddhism in Latin America. Although not a major religion in the region, Buddhism has thrived among the tertiary-educated, white middle classes. Nevertheless, there has been a paucity of research on the topic, and the region seldom features in the scholarship on global Buddhism. Drawing on the extant scholarly work, government statistics, and Internet sites of Buddhist institutions, this chapter shows that the ways in which Buddhism arrived and is taking root in the region is similar to other parts of the Western world: with the arrival of Asian migrants, the flourishing of the counterculture and New Age spirituality, and globalization. This chapter argues that although Latin America may take a peripheral place in a network of global flows of Buddhism, it has never been isolated from flows of Buddhist ideas, beliefs, practices, material culture, and people circulating around the world.
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Zalasiewicz, Jan, and Mark Williams. The Goldilocks Planet. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199593576.001.0001.
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Climate change is a major topic of concern today and will be so for the foreseeable future, as predicted changes in global temperatures, rainfall, and sea level continue to take place. But as Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams reveal in The Goldilocks Planet, the climatic changes we are experiencing today hardly compare to the changes the Earth has seen over the last 4.5 billion years. Indeed, the vast history that the authors relate here is dramatic and often abrupt--with massive changes in global and regional climate, from bitterly cold to sweltering hot, from arid to humid. They introduce us to the Cryogenian period, the days of Snowball Earth seven hundred million years ago, when ice spread to cover the world, then melted abruptly amid such dramatic climatic turbulence that hurricanes raged across the Earth. We read about the Carboniferous, with tropical jungles at the equator (where Pennsylvania is now) and the Cretaceous Period, when the polar regions saw not ice but dense conifer forests of cypress and redwood, with gingkos and ferns. The authors also show how this history can be read from clues preserved in the Earth's strata. The evidence is abundant, though always incomplete--and often baffling, puzzling, infuriating, tantalizing, seemingly contradictory. Geologists, though, are becoming ever more ingenious at deciphering this evidence, and the story of the Earth's climate is now being reconstructed in ever-greater detail--maybe even providing us with clues to the future of contemporary climate change. And through all of this, the authors conclude, the Earth has remained perfectly habitable--in stark contrast to its planetary neighbors. Not too hot, not too cold; not too dry, not too wet--"the Goldilocks planet."
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Cobb, Charles R. The Archaeology of Southeastern Native American Landscapes of the Colonial Era. University Press of Florida, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5744/florida/9780813066196.001.0001.
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This book synthesizes the landscape histories of Native Americans in southeastern North America from the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century to the first decades of the American Republic. Relying on archaeological data and historical sources, the work outlines the ways in which Native populations accommodated and contested the growing encroachments of colonialism and colonial powers. Traditional landscape practices were greatly transformed by epidemic diseases, chronic warfare, and a widespread slave trade in Indian populations. Research demonstrates that populations adapted to these challenges in two major ways. First, they built on traditional histories of mobility to develop new modes of migration and travel to escape regions of conflict and to gain access to important colonial towns and resources. Second, seeking safety in numbers, Native Americans increasingly formed coalescent communities composed of two or more cultural groups. These coalescent communities evolved into the groups known today as Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Catawbas, and Seminoles. The study further explores how the evolution of these groups was connected to events and processes of the broader political economy in the Atlantic World, including the rise of plantation slavery, the growth of the deerskin trade, the birth of the consumer revolution, and the emergence of capitalism.
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Axworthy, Michael. Iran. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/wentk/9780190232955.001.0001.
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Since the beginning of recorded history, Iran/Persia has been one of the most important world civilizations. Iran remains a distinct civilization today despite its status as a major Islamic state with broad regional influence and its deep integration into the global economy through its vast energy reserves. Yet the close attention paid to Iran in recent decades stems from the impact of the 1979 revolution, which unleashed ideological shock waves throughout the Middle East that reverberate to this day. Many observers look at Iran through the prism of the Islamic Republic's adversarial relationship with the US, Israel, and Sunni nations in its region, yet as Michael Axworthy shows in Iran: What Everyone Needs to Know, there is much more to contemporary Iran than its fraught and complicated foreign relations. He begins with a concise account of Iranian history from ancient times to the late twentieth century, following that with sharp summaries of the key events since the1979 revolution. The final section of the book focuses on Iran today--its culture, economy, politics, and people--and assesses the challenges that the nation will face in coming years. Iran will be an essential overview of a complex and important nation that has occupied world headlines for nearly four decades.
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Clifton, Judith, Daniel Díaz Fuentes, and David Howarth, eds. Regional Development Banks in the World Economy. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198861089.001.0001.
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Regional development banks (RDB) have become increasingly important in the world economy, but have also been relatively under-researched to date. This timely volume addresses this lack of attention by providing a comprehensive, comparative, and empirically informed analysis of their origins, evolution, and contemporary role in the world economy through to the second decade of the twenty-first century. The editors provide an analytical framework that includes a revised categorization of RDB by geographic operation and function. In part one, the chapter authors offer detailed analyses of the origins, evolution, and contemporary role of the major RDB, including the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, the Central American Bank, the Andean Development Corporation, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. In part two, the authors engage in comparative analyses of key topics on RDB, examining their initial design and their changing business models, their shifting role in promoting policies supported by the United States as hegemon and the private sector. The volume ends with a critical reflection on the role played by RDB to date and a strong defence of the need for these banks in an increasingly complex world economy.
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Salway, Benet. Late Antiquity. Edited by Christer Bruun and Jonathan Edmondson. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195336467.013.018.
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Late antique epigraphy differs in several respects from that of the High Empire, reflecting the changed political, economic, and cultural circumstances. This chapter focuses on the epigraphic habit of that fluctuating portion of the late antique world that remained Roman. Despite the emergence of inscriptions in additional languages, such as Syriac and Coptic, Latin and Greek retained their hegemony as the two main epigraphic languages of the Roman world. The establishment of an imperial court, with its attendant bureaucratic and military retinue, in major centres of the Greek East from the last decades of the third century coincided with a new flowering of Latin inscriptions in the region.
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Maull, Hanns W. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198828945.003.0001.
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This chapter sets out the guiding questions for this volume and develops a comprehensive, integrated framework for analyzing political order across its three major levels. It proposes a concept of order that allows a comparison and evaluation of the characteristics and evolution of political order at their three major spatial levels: the nation-state, partial regional and functional orders at intermediate levels between the state and the world as a whole, and the global level. Key aspects of political order are effectiveness, legitimacy, and authority; principles, norms, and rules; compliance and collective sanctions and the incidence of violence; actors with the capabilities and the intentions to shape respective orders; their major structural characteristics; and their evolution over time and their resilience.
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Hall, Ian. Modi and the Reinvention of Indian Foreign Policy. Policy Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781529204605.001.0001.
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Narendra Modi’s energetic personal diplomacy and promise to make India a ‘leading power’, made soon after his landslide election victory in May 2014, surprised many analysts. Most had predicted that his government would concentrate on domestic issues, on the growth and development demanded by Indian voters, and that he lacked necessary experience in international relations. Instead, Modi’s time in office saw a concerted attempt to reinvent Indian foreign policy by replacing inherited understandings of its place in the world with one drawn largely from Hindu nationalist ideology. This book explores the drivers of this reinvention, arguing it arose from a combination of elite conviction and electoral calculation, and the impact it had on India’s international relations under Modi. It examines how Hindu nationalists understand the world and India’s place and role within it, as well as what we know about Modi’s thought and political style. It addresses, in turn, his government’s attempt to present India as a ‘world guru’ with teachings draw from its rich civilizational inheritance, its attempt to further regional prosperity and connectivity in South Asia, and its efforts to address national security vulnerabilities and manage relations with the major powers.
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Morgan, Kevin, Terry Marsden, and Jonathan Murdoch. Worlds of Food. Oxford University Press, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199271580.001.0001.
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From farm to fork, the conventional food chain is under enormous pressure to respond to a whole series of new challenges - food scares in rich countries, food security concerns in poor countries, and a burgeoning problem of obesity in all countries. As more and more people demand to know where their food comes from, and how it is produced, issues of place, power, and provenance assume increasing significance for producers, consumers, and regulators, challenging the corporate forces that shape the 'placeless foodscape'. Far from being confined to niche products, questions about the origins of food are also surfacing in the conventional sector, where labelling has become a major political issue. Drawing on theories of multi-level governance, three leading scholars in the field explore the geo-politics of the food chain in different spatial arenas: the World Trade Organization, where free trade principles clash with fair trade concerns in the debate about agricultural reform; the European Union, where producers are under pressure from environmentalists for a more traceable and sustainable food system; and the US, where there is a striking contradiction between the rhetoric of free markets and the reality of a heavily subsidised farming sector. To understand the local impact of these global trends, the authors explore three different regional worlds of food: the traditional world of localised quality in Tuscany, the peripheral world of commodity production in Wales, and the frontier world of agri-business in California.
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Ocampo, José Antonio. The Provision of Global Liquidity. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198718116.003.0002.
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This chapter starts by analysing three major problems of the current international monetary system: the asymmetric-adjustment problem, dependence on the monetary policy of the main reserve-issuing country, and the large demand for self-insurance by developing countries. It then explores two basic alternatives to reform the system: one route would involve a fully-fledged multi-currency reserve system; the alternative route would be to design an architecture based on the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), the world’s only truly global reserve asset. These two alternative routes could be mixed in a number of ways, and in fact their complementary use may be the only possible way forward. Under such a mixed system, SDRs would become a major global reserve asset and the source of financing for IMF lending, but national/regional currencies would continue to be used as international means of payment and stores of value.
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Jha, Vivekanand. Acute kidney injury in the tropics. Edited by Norbert Lameire. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med/9780199592548.003.0241.
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The spectrum of acute kidney injury (AKI) encountered in the hospitals of the tropical zone countries is different from that seen in the non-tropical climate countries, most of which are high-income countries. The difference is explained in large part by the influence of environment on the epidemiology of human disease. The key features of geographic regions falling in the tropical zones are climatic, that is, high temperatures and absence of winter frost, and economic, that is, lower levels of income. The causes and presentation of tropical AKI reflect these prevailing cultural, socioeconomic, climatic, and eco-biological characteristics.Peculiarities of tropical climate support the propagation of several infectious organisms that can cause AKI and the disease-transmitting vectors. In contrast to the developed world, where AKI usually develops in already hospitalized patients with multiorgan problems and iatrogenic factors play a major role, tropical AKI is acquired in the community due to issues of public health importance such as safe water, sanitation, infection control, and good obstetric practices. Infections such as malaria, leptospirosis, typhus, HIV, and diarrhoeal diseases; envenomation by animals or insects; ingestion of toxic herbs or chemicals; intravascular haemolysis; poisoning; and obstetric complications form the bulk of AKI in the tropics. Poor access to modern medical facilities and practices such as seeking treatment from traditional faith-healers contribute to poor outcomes.AKI extracts macro- and microeconomic costs from the affected population and reduces productivity. Improvement in the outcomes of tropical AKI requires improvement in basic public health through effective interventions, and accessibility to effective medical care.
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Fant, Clyde E., and Mitchell G. Reddish. A Guide to Biblical Sites in Greece and Turkey. Oxford University Press, 2003. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195139174.001.0001.
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Nearly two-thirds of the New Testament--including all of the letters of Paul, most of the book of Acts, and the book of Revelation--is set outside of Israel, in either Turkey or Greece. Although biblically-oriented tours of the areas that were once ancient Greece and Asia Minor have become increasingly popular, up until now there has been no definitive guidebook through these important sites. In A Guide to Biblical Sites in Greece and Turkey, two well-known, well-traveled biblical scholars offer a fascinating historical and archaeological guide to these sites. The authors reveal countless new insights into the biblical text while reliably guiding the traveler through every significant location mentioned in the Bible. The book completely traces the journeys of the Apostle Paul across Turkey (ancient Asia Minor), Greece, Cyprus, and the islands of the Mediterranean. A description of the location and history of each site is given, followed by an intriguing discussion of its biblical significance. Clearly written and in non-technical language, the work links the latest in biblical research with recent archaeological findings. A visit to the site is described, complete with easy-to-follow walking directions, indicating the major items of archaeological interest. Detailed site maps, historical charts, and maps of the regions are integrated into the text, and a glossary of terms is provided. Easy to use and abundantly illustrated, this unique guide will help visitors to Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus appreciate the rich history, significance, and great wonder of the ancient world of the Bible.
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Rodgers, Yana van der Meulen. The Global Gag Rule and Women's Reproductive Health. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190876128.001.0001.
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In recent decades, the long arm of US politics has reached the intimate lives of women all over the world. Since 1984, healthcare organizations in developing countries have faced major cuts in US foreign aid if they perform or promote abortions as a method of family planning. The policy—commonly known as the global gag rule—is a hallmark of Republican administrations. The reinstatement and expansion of the global gag rule by Donald Trump in January 2017 caused a firestorm of debate. Proponents emphasize the importance of reducing abortions globally, while critics predict large increases in unsafe abortions and maternal mortality resulting from disruptions to family-planning services. How plausible are the various claims and projections? This question is surprisingly difficult to answer because there is little statistical evidence on the global gag rule. This book helps to fill the gap by conducting a systematic analysis of how the global gag rule affects women’s reproductive health across developing regions. The analysis yields three important messages: (1) in the majority of countries that receive US family-planning assistance, the global gag rule has failed to achieve its objective of reducing abortions; (2) there is no definitive relationship between restrictive national abortion laws and abortion rates; and (3) the 2017 expansion of the global gag rule will have adverse effects on a dashboard of health indicators for women, men, and children. These powerful messages should be heard by policymakers over the voices calling for an ideologically based policy that has counterproductive results.
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Lee, Jeong-Dong, Keun Lee, Dirk Meissner, Slavo Radosevic, and Nicholas Vonortas, eds. The Challenges of Technology and Economic Catch-up in Emerging Economies. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192896049.001.0001.
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This book synthesizes and interprets existing knowledge on technology upgrading failures as well as lessons from successes and failures in order to better understand the challenges of technology upgrading in emerging economies. The objective is to bring together in one volume diverse evidence regarding three major dimensions of technology upgrading: paths of technology upgrading, structural changes in the nature of technology upgrading, and the issues of technology transfer and technology upgrading. The knowledge of these three dimensions is being synthesized at the firm, sector, and macro levels across different countries and world macro-regions. Compared to the old and new challenges and uncertainties facing emerging economies, our understanding of the technology upgrading is sparse, unsystematic, and scattered. While our understanding of these issues from the 1980s and 1990s is relatively more systematized, the changes that took place during the globalization and proliferation of GVCs, the effects of the post-2008 events, and the effects of the current COVID-19 and geopolitical struggles on technology upgrading have not been explored and compared synthetically. Moreover, the recent growth slowdown in many emerging economies, often known as a middle-income trap, has reinforced the importance of understanding the technology upgrading challenges of catching-up economies. We believe that the time is ripe for “taking stock of the area” in order to systematize and evaluate the existing knowledge on processes of technology upgrading of emerging economies at the firm, sector, and international levels and to make further inroads in research on this issue. This volume aims to significantly contribute towards this end.
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Lee, P. J. Statistical Methods for Estimating Petroleum Resources. Edited by Jo Anne DeGraffenreid. Oxford University Press, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195331905.001.0001.
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This book describes procedures for determining the total hydrocarbon (petroleum) resource or resource potential in a region. Statistical concepts and methods employed in petroleum resource assessment are the subject of the manuscript, extensively illustrated by numerous real case studies. Prof. Lee's computer-aided Petroleum Information Management and Resource Evaluation System (PETRIMES) methodology has been adopted by governments around the world and by major multinational oil companies to perform resource assessment and to predict future oil and gas production. Though this methodology is so widely used, there is no "user's guide" to it, and this book will be the definitive resource for PETRIMES users.
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Locke, Joseph. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190216283.003.0001.
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The introduction presents the book’s major argument that, through the politics of prohibition, ambitious evangelical leaders were able to inject themselves into southern life and create the political conditions that would later identify the American South as the Bible Belt. H. L. Mencken coined that term later, in the 1920s, to capture what he saw as the South’s peculiar alliance of region and religion, but the reality that Mencken described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process. To explore that process, the introduction establishes key concepts such as clericalism and anticlericalism, argues for Texas as the proper focus for a targeted study, and previews major characters and milestones in the development of a politicized brand of southern religion.
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Jerryson, Michael, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199759996.001.0001.
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Violence has always played a part in the religious imagination, from symbols and myths to legendary battles, from colossal wars to the theater of terrorism. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence offers intersections between religion and violence throughout history and around the world. Its forty chapters include overviews of major religious traditions, showing how violence is justified within the literary and theological foundations of the tradition, how it is used symbolically and in ritual practice, and how social acts of violence and warfare have been justified by religious ideas. They also examine patterns and themes relating to religious violence, such as sacrifice and martyrdom, which are explored in cross-disciplinary or regional analyses; and offer major analytic approaches, from literary to social scientific studies.
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Weiss, Harvey, ed. Megadrought and Collapse. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199329199.001.0001.
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This is the first book to treat the major examples of megadrought and societal collapse, from the late Pleistocene end of hunter–gatherer culture and origins of cultivation to the 15th century AD fall of the Khmer Empire capital at Angkor, and ranging from the Near East to South America. Previous enquiries have stressed the possible multiple and internal causes of collapse, such overpopulation, overexploitation of resources, warfare, and poor leadership and decision-making. In contrast, Megadrought and Collapse presents case studies of nine major episodes of societal collapse in which megadrought was the major and independent cause of societal collapse. In each case the most recent paleoclimatic evidence for megadroughts, multiple decades to multiple centuries in duration, is presented alongside the archaeological records for synchronous societal collapse. The megadrought data are derived from paleoclimate proxy sources (lake, marine, and glacial cores; speleothems, or cave stalagmites; and tree-rings) and are explained by researchers directly engaged in their analysis. Researchers directly responsible for them discuss the relevant current archaeological records. Two arguments are developed through these case studies. The first is that societal collapse in different time periods and regions and at levels of social complexity ranging from simple foragers to complex empires would not have occurred without megadrought. The second is that similar responses to megadrought extend across these historical episodes: societal collapse in the face of insurmountable climate change, abandonment of settlements and regions, and habitat tracking to sustainable agricultural landscapes. As we confront megadrought today, and in the likely future, Megadrought and Collapse brings together the latest contributions to our understanding of past societal responses to the crisis on an equally global and diverse scale.
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Song, Weijie. Beijing and Beyond. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190200671.003.0007.
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This chapter situates Beijing in a larger context of modern Chinese urban literature, and charts the trajectories of affective mapping of major cities in the Chinese-speaking world against the great backdrop of the downfall of the (Manchu) Empire, the rise of modern nation-state, the 1949 great divide, and the formation of Cold war and globalizing world. The main issues are modern urban awareness, historical consciousness, individual/collective memories, and nationalist perceptions regarding the old and new capital, Beijing; the semicolonial metropolis and socialist Shanghai and its remnants; the traumatized and aloof Nanjing; the abandoned capital, Xi’an; Taipei under Japanese colonial rule and the subsequent Nationalist Party’s dominance; and Hong Kong from a British Crown Colony to a Special Administrative Region of China. Urban experiences, emotional vicissitudes, and literary topography continue to provide illustrating and illuminating methods of mapping Sinophone cities.