To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Ryan Jablonski's Dependency Politics examines how democracy works in aid-dependent countries. He draws on over six years of fieldwork to investigate relationships between donors and politicians, showing how politicians make policy and how aid dependency changes voters' assessments of politician performance. He reveals that voters don't simply reward politicians for aid, rather they condition their votes on beliefs about how politicians influence aid delivery. This leads to a 'visibility-uncertainty' paradox where aid can either enhance or erode democratic accountability. Revisiting assumptions about the effects of foreign aid on political behavior, he also explains how aid can cause citizens to vote against their interests and sometimes benefit opposition candidates over incumbents. Drawing on surveys, interviews, focus groups, and field experiments, Jablonski challenges conventional wisdom about foreign aid and offers lessons for balancing trade-offs over aid effectiveness, political capture and capacity-building. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Calvin and Perception in Early Modern Visual Culture is the first monograph to return John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559) to its original visual culture. AnnMarie Bridges draws on early modern optics, art theory, rhetoric, psychology, and religion to reconstruct the perceptual assumptions of Calvin's earliest readers. Her study reveals the Institutes' unrecognized concern with 'perception'-pre-conscious processing believed to occur in the imagination, capable of distorting sense experience before conscious thought could even occur. Illuminating Calvin's most striking visual metaphors-from the spectacles of scripture to the factory of idols-and through close readings of topics like accommodation, idolatry, faith, and Calvin's Latin prose, Bridges advocates a paradigm shift in how we read Calvin's most cited work, displacing 'knowledge' in favor of 'perception versus delusion.' In so doing, her study invites reflection on perceptual instability in our own cultural moment, where the challenge is not only to know what is true, but even to perceive what is real.
William Burroughs in Context offers the most comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of the iconic author to date and it captures the immense scope of Burroughs' radical vision and cultural influence. Moving far beyond the Beat Generation, this volume brings together 35 original essays that reframe Burroughs through his many identities: novelist, multimedia artist, queer visionary, drug theorist, and cultural provocateur. By organizing contributions around themes like space-time travel, technology, environmentalism, and creative collaboration, the book presents Burroughs as a uniquely situated figure at the crossroads of literature, science, philosophy, and pop culture. The contributors-drawn from leading voices in literary studies, media theory, cultural history, and the arts-offer readers fresh insights into both familiar and underexplored dimensions of Burroughs' oeuvre. An essential resource for scholars and fans alike, this landmark volume positions Burroughs as a central figure in understanding 20th-century counterculture and its ongoing 21st-century legacy
The 'American idea' is often claimed not to be based on any ethnicity, race, culture, or religion, but rather on the secular values associated with the Founders' Constitution, and liberal democratic values associated with the European Enlightenment. However, a careful reading of American history tells a different story. This book provides evidence that contradicts the view that America is a universal idea untethered to a particular and narrow view of Americanism. Using the techniques of critical discourse analysis, Ricento explores the written texts and speeches of American intellectuals and political figures of the Americanization era (1901–1927), showing that American identity is a construction that privileges a particular culture (Anglo-Saxonism), race (white), and religion (Protestant Christianity) as the fundaments of national identity. Examples are set against today's context as the rise in right-wing political thinking has raised similar issues that continue to threaten America's status as an inclusive and democratic republic.
How can words capture what it feels like to be a body moving through space? In charting how the aesthetics of motion mattered to eighteenth-century literature, print culture, theatre, and legal debates, Sara Landreth refocuses the period's fascination with the abstraction of 'selfhood' toward embodied kinetic processes that reveal the fictionality of selfhood altogether. This important study makes the case for wantonness as an aesthetic category in its own right, one that captures quasi-intentional actions and vital but indeterminate forms of agency in a wide range of genres, from it-narratives and harlequinade flipbooks to travel novels and fiction about slaveocracy. Fresh readings of works by Cavendish, Hogarth, Dennis, Johnson, Diderot, Sterne, Smollett, and Wilberforce illuminate how authors from 1650 to 1810 radically redefined how characters and plots could and should move.
Morena Skalamera's The Transformation of the Eurasian Gas Trade explores the logic, character, and scope of natural gas interdependence in Eurasia and its dramatic transformations since 1990. She explains how ideas, identities, and culture affect the Eurasian gas trade as gas interdependence has in some cases ameliorated conflict through its pacifying effects and at other times led to reactionary backlash, nationalist resentment, and more aggressive foreign policy. She argues that China's role in influencing domestic and international policy choices as a key trading and investment partner of the countries concerned makes it crucial for analyzing gas interdependence in the Eurasian region. Offering a deep, contextual analysis of how profit–power incentives intersect with historically-specific social, ideational and cultural factors, Skalamera reveals how reversals in the scale and scope of natural gas interdependence in the post-Soviet era can be better understood through domestically-driven shifts in dominant narratives.
We are living through an era of unprecedented data-driven regulatory transformation. AI and algorithmic governance are rapidly altering how global problems are known and governed, and reconfiguring how people, places, and things are drawn into legal relation across diverse areas - from labour, media and communications, and global mobilities to environmental governance, security, and war. These changes are fostering new forms of power, inequality, and violence, and posing urgent conceptual and methodological challenges for law and technology research. Global Governance by Data: Infrastructures of Algorithmic Rule brings together leading interdisciplinary scholars working at the forefront of creative thinking and research practice in this area. The book offers fresh takes on the prospects for working collectively to critique and renew those legal and technological infrastructures that order, divide, empower and immiserate across our data-driven world. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
This volume provides the most expansive survey to date of the field of war and society, offering a magisterial overview of the American experience of war from the colonial era to the War on Terror. It brings together leading scholars to examine how societies go to war, experience it, and invest it with meaning. Those ideas unfold across three thematic sections entitled war times, war societies, and war meanings. The essays interrogate the symbiotic relationship between warfare and the armed forces on one side, and broader trends in political, social, cultural, and economic life on the other. They consider the radiating impact of war on individuals, communities, culture, and politics-and conversely, the projection of social patterns onto the military and wartime life. Across three sections, thirty essays, and a roundtable discussion, the volume illuminates the questions, methodologies, and sources that exemplify war and society scholarship at its very best.
This book brings together an international team of scholars to explore participation, change and transformative possibilities in everyday life. Drawing on critical ethnographic and participatory research from Brazil, Denmark, and Italy, it examines how people in marginalized positions – socially excluded children and young people, former gang members, rock musicians, bank employees and sex workers – engage in learning practices across diverse contexts. The chapters challenge conventional notions that oppose equality and difference, offering a critical perspective grounded in social practice theory, critical psychology, and urban anthropology. With a strong focus on co-produced knowledge and learners' perspectives, the book offers new conceptual tools for understanding learning as a dynamic, relational and political process rooted in everyday struggles. Essential reading for researchers, students, and professionals across education, anthropology, psychology, social work, pedagogy, and human geography.
Japan and ancient Greece. Placed side by side, these two concepts give the impression of something very strange, a sort of chimera - half Apollo, half samurai; half Venus, half geisha - set on a ground that is at once white and blue like the Cyclades, dark green and vermillion like Shintō shrines. How could two countries so distant from each other be joined together to form a coherent image, to give birth to a meaningful concept? In this groundbreaking study - translated into English for the first time - Michael Lucken analyses the manifold ways in which Japan has adopted and engaged with ancient Greece in the period from the Meiji restoration to the present. This invaluable and timely volume not only demonstrates that the influence of ancient Greece has permeated all aspects of Japanese public and cultural life, but ultimately illustrates that the reception of Classics is a global phenomenon.
Few buildings have been as important to Western culture as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. One of the Seven Wonders of antiquity, it was destroyed during the Middle Ages, leading countless architects, antiquarians, painters and printmakers in Early Modern Europe to speculate upon its appearance. This book – the first on its subject – examines their works, from erudite publications to simple pen sketches, from elegant watercolours to complete buildings inspired by the monument. Spanning the period between the Italian Renaissance and the discovery and archaeological excavation of the Mausoleum's foundations in the 1850s, it covers the most important cultural contexts of Western Europe, without neglecting artworks from Peru, China and Japan. The monument's connexion with themes of widowhood and female political power are analysed, as are the manifold interactions between architecture, text and image in the afterlife of the Mausoleum. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Islamist civil wars pose a major challenge to peace and security around the world. Written by two leading scholars of conflict resolution, Jihadist Peace: Ending Islamist Civil Wars offers a groundbreaking analysis of why these conflicts are among the most difficult to end, and what can be done about it. The book makes a theoretical contribution by explaining their intractability, arguing that the transnational ideological framing of Islamist civil wars increases uncertainty about the capabilities and resolve of the warring parties. Drawing on conflict resolution theory, rigorous statistical analysis, and detailed case studies of Afghanistan, Mauritania, Mali, and Syria, the authors explore the conditions under which these wars can both come to an end and be resolved. They argue that the local dimension is key: by disentangling both rebel and government actors from broader networks, Jihadist Peace charts a path toward resolving some of the world's most intractable civil wars.
The western tradition of coinage began in Asia Minor around 650 BCE and from there the idea spread quite rapidly to other parts of the Mediterranean. This book describes and evaluates developments in coinage down to the period of the Persian Wars, ending in 479. Early coinage was not monolithic. The new medium of exchange proved attractive to a variety of rulers and societies – kings, dynasts, tribes, city–states with varying forms of governance. The physical characteristics of the coins produced were another source of difference. Initially there was no fixed idea of what a coin should look like, and there were several experiments before a consensus emerged around a small, circular metal object with a design, or type, on both sides. This book provides students with an authoritative introduction, with all technical terms and methodologies explained, as well as illustrations of over 200 important coins with detailed captions.
This engaging Cambridge Companion introduces readers to the richness, complexity and diversity of one of the most important periods in Chinese history: the Song dynasty, 960–1279 CE. Bringing together leading scholars from Asia, Europe, and the United States, it provides an overview of key institutions, political, economic and military history, while also delving into the everyday lived experience of medieval China. Together, the authors create a vividly detailed and intimate portrayal of people, places, ideas, and material culture at both the 'centre' and 'margins' of Song society. They explore the lives of people and groups from diverse backgrounds, as well as places and things from the Yellow River to the publication of Buddhist prints and medical formularies. This volume highlights the brilliant accomplishments of Song scholarship in recent decades and provides an inspirational introduction for future researchers.
What happens when European politics goes digital? Behind the scenes in European Union institutions, a quiet transformation is reshaping the way power works. Based on long-term ethnographic research, this book follows diplomats, civil servants, spokespersons, and interpreters through the corridors, meeting rooms, cafés, and smartphone screens of Brussels' European Quarter. Against the backdrop of Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia's war on Ukraine, it reveals how digital technologies have become inseparable from the practice of international politics—reshaping trust, tact, and authority in unexpected ways. Far from a tale of technological revolution, The Brussels Bubble exposes digitalisation as a messy, human negotiation about what diplomacy and Europe itself mean today. Combining vivid narrative with sharp theoretical insight, it offers a rare, inside view of how global governance, technology, and human interaction intertwine at the heart of European power. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Early English writers describe their landscapes in the same way they describe themselves. Illuminating the forms medieval people used to write their world, Amy W. Clark provides a new epistemological model for understanding early medieval English relational selves and positions. Beginning with the relationally oriented streams, oaks, and gates of Old English charters, she shows that Old English riddles similarly describe paths between long noses, loud voices, and puzzling contradictions, guiding readers to hidden mysteries. Widsith revisits legendary landmarks to comment on knowledge, power, and what it means to 'give good,' while the Old English elegies cope with catastrophic loss by mapping the remembered past onto an inverted present. In particular, Clark demonstrates how repetition becomes a key formal strategy when landscapes and selves are threatened. From bounds to Beowulf, she shows that Old English and Anglo-Latin texts revisit relational landmarks to stabilize knowledge and selfhood in an ever-changing world.