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The Classic Maya civilization (250–925 CE) in Mesoamerica innovated a hieroglyphic script that was written and read by people spread across hundreds of square kilometers and dozens of autonomous kingdoms over the course of more than a millennium. Yet, unlike other regions of the ancient world where writing was independently invented, the Maya area was never politically unified. In Religion, Writing, and the Shaping of the Classic Maya World, Mallory E. Matsumoto draws on hieroglyphic texts, imagery, and archaeological finds to reconstruct interactions through which the Classic Maya exchanged knowledge about their hieroglyphic script and how to use it. She argues that religion and ritual practice were central contexts for maintaining a coherent, mutually intelligible writing system in the absence of political centralization. The Classic Maya case challenges long-standing assumptions about the social forces underlying the origins of early writing. It also reveals religion's potential to shape human culture and technology. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
In 1616, Spanish officials in Acapulco watched nervously as a Japanese galleon arrived uninvited—the third such vessel in a decade. In an important challenge to accepted narratives of isolation and insularity, Joshua Batts reveals the surprising story of Tokugawa Japan's repeated attempts to establish direct trade with Spanish America. Though ultimately unsuccessful, these attempts flip the script about which societies sought to expand the geography of encounter in the early modern world. Early Tokugawa Japan emerges as an assertive polity whose ambitious outreach threatened Spanish prerogative in the Pacific and provoked a guarded response from a global empire. Based on archival sources from Japan, Spain, Italy, and the Vatican City, Batts reconstructs a tale of shipwrecks, political manoeuvring and cultural collision that stretches from Edo to Rome. The unique blend of adventure and foreign encounter redefines our understanding of the opportunities for, and obstacles to, early modern globalization.
Laura Nenzi draws readers into a fascinating world of samurai, shipwrecks, nocturnal monsters and partying crowds, in this richly detailed, illustrated and evocative history of the night. The world over, the installation of public lights transformed the night, reshaping expressions of authority; altering centuries-old forms of production and consumption; and enabling the expansion of legitimate daytime activities into the night hours. The cities of Tokugawa Japan, however, lacked any kind of public illumination until the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, Nenzi shows, many of the attributes associated with the modern night were firmly in place in cities and villages well before the age of streetlights. This exploration of the transformation of early modern Japan after dark challenges accepted definitions of modernity, encouraging readers to rethink the way we write history.
Singapore Mandarin represents a distinct and dynamic variety shaped by local multilingualism and global influences. This comprehensive study offers the most up-to-date linguistic description of contemporary Singapore Mandarin, drawing on a decade's worth of natural spoken and written data. Through rigorous quantitative and qualitative analyses, it systematically examines the variety's distinctive lexical, grammatical, and discourse features, revealing it as an inclusive and evolving system. Expanding beyond Putonghua comparisons, the analysis incorporates perspectives from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia Mandarin, offering a broader perspective on regional variations. A sociolinguistic survey of native speakers further enriches the study with insights into language attitudes, ideologies, and usage trends. By documenting how external sociocultural factors and internal innovations drive linguistic change, the book advances global understandings of Mandarin variation. As a significant contribution to Chinese linguistics, World Chineses, language contact, and multilingualism studies, this work is essential reading for linguists, educators, and policymakers.
Forgotten Hills is a book about lost geographies. It is about how the subordination of mountainous Tibet to lowland China meant the erasure of the hills between, and how the legal, environmental, and social transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hardened boundaries between Tibetan, Chinese, and Muslim peoples, obscuring the histories and practices that had bound hill folk together for generations. Wesley B. Chaney tells the story of this transformation by exploring small communities on the ferociously complex “mid-slope”—the hills along the northeastern edges of the Tibetan Plateau. Drawing from legal cases, genealogies, and Tibetan-language histories, Forgotten Hills illustrates how disputes over traditional landholding regimes erupted into violent conflict over resources and ethnic and religious identity. The ethno-politics that define modern China, this book reveals, arose from the legal disputes and everyday politics of the now forgotten hills.
This is the first comprehensive analysis of Southeast Asian globalization and development since 1870. Interpreting over 150 years of Southeast Asian economic history, Gregg Huff traces the impact of a first period of globalisation from the 1870s to 1929, the effects of Japanese occupation during World War II and its aftermath, and a second wave of globalisation since the late 1960s. He uses vent-for-surplus, dual economy and plural society concepts and argues that the response of those in Southeast Asia to periods of transport revolutions, innovation and opportunity in the world economy translated into rapid export-led growth. Recent swift growth enabled Southeast Asia to start to 'catch up' with the world's leading countries for the first time in its history. Achievements include industrialization, genuine social progress and numerous large urban regions. Nevertheless, the book contends that Southeast Asian development in its 'miracle economies' remains incomplete.
There is much recent talk of shifting power dynamics in international relations and of expanding Chinese influence abroad. How much of this talk is hype and how much of it reflects reality? This volume provides an up-to-date and comparative studies of Beijing's influence attempts abroad in a variety of countries. It shows significant variations across these countries, and often the limits of Chinese influence.
In colonial India and Mandatory Palestine, early-twentieth-century legal scholars made important contributions to the study of the nature of law, particularly by analyzing Hindu and Jewish law – their ancient religious systems. This book reconstructs the lives and ideas of these scholars, revealing a forgotten global wave of jurisprudential innovation that appeared across many territories in the non-Western world. The book challenges the view that non-Western legal scholars working in the colonies were passive recipients of Western ideas. It argues that Indian and Jewish thinkers used Western historical and sociological approaches to law to reimagine Hindu and Jewish law, and to assert their relevance to modern legal and constitutional debates. Though historical in scope, the story this book tells is also relevant to contemporary tensions between Western liberal law and non-Western religious legal traditions. This title is available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Chinese language acquisition has been discussed from pedagogical and discoursal perspectives, however this innovative book presents a linguistic perspective on Chinese as a second language. Bridging theory and practice, it provides an authoritative, research-based foundation to enhance Chinese language teaching and learning methodologies globally. Bringing together 18 leading scholars to explore the linguistic underpinnings of Chinese language teaching and acquisition, the chapters cover key areas of language acquisition such as tone, prosody, Chinese characters, syntax, aspect, and pragmatic competence, and offer new theoretical perspectives, such as cognitive approaches, alongside practical applications. Combining the best scholarship from both Chinese and non-Chinese perspectives, it presents a unique, cross-cultural approach, reflecting global collaboration in the Chinese as a Second Language Research Association (CASLAR) community. Aiming to strengthen the theoretical foundations of language teaching, and advancing Chinese language teaching methodologies, this book is an essential resource for educators and students, as well as researchers.
The material and visual culture of late precolonial Andean societies-especially the Inka Empire-looked radically different from their predecessors. For millennia, the iconography of the ancient Andes was dominated by warriors, sacrificial rites, apex predators and chimerical beings whose bodies were amalgamations of multiple human and animal species. Yet by AD 1000, these images had almost entirely vanished. This study offers the first ever analysis of these dramatic transformations. Far more than simply a change of aesthetic preferences, or even a shift in ideology, it posits a series of metaphysical revolutions in which Andean sociality was fundamentally altered. The basis of personhood, the creation of value and the nature of political power itself all came to be refigured in far-reaching ways. Specifically, a once-dominant metaphysics focused on the predatory extraction of vitality from enemies disappeared, to be replaced by one grounded in reciprocal exchanges between human and nonhuman beings.
The invention of paper currency marked a watershed in global financial history. In this deeply researched study, Richard von Glahn explains why paper money first arose in China rather than any other part of the world – and why it ultimately failed. Although paper money achieved notable success during the Song and Yuan dynasties, it collapsed under the very different principles of political economy adopted by the Ming. In the first English-language examination of the rise and demise of paper money, von Glahn argues that the answer lies in China's unique monetary system and political economy, introducing readers to the eleventh-century origins of paper money in China, the principles of Chinese monetary theory, China's bronze coin monetary standard and specific forms of fiscal governance. This is not only an essential introduction to Chinese monetary history, but a major contribution to global economic history.
This book complements abundant research about immigrants by contributing novel data, knowledge, and theories about potential immigrants-those who might have immigrated but did not despite the benefits of migration to immigrants and origin and destination societies. The text examines three mechanisms that reduce or restrict immigration-governments denying visas, policies and social forces deterring many from applying for visas, and potential immigrants becoming disenchanted with immigration. Jacob expands the Push-Pull Model to a Push-Retain-Pull-Repel Model that accounts for why many remain ambivalently immobile. Narratives of might-have-been-immigrants reveal an (im)mobility paradox: factors facilitating migration-socio-economic resources and social ties-also hinder it. The book analyses denial, deterrence, and disenchantment from the perspective of countless people who do not immigrate due to one of these processes, revealing how they are socio-economically stratified with respect to each other and immigrants. This provokes a deeper, more global understanding of inequalities in migratory opportunities.