We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
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.
The fourth edition of Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations reconceptualizes this long-established classic to focus squarely on methods: not what we do, but how we do what we do. It presents revised, sharply focused essays on methods for researching national security, development, political economy, gender, religion, race, emotion, and nongovernmental organizations, alongside entirely new contributions on digital resources, spatial analysis, technology, materials, the natural world, the interaction of race and empire, US-Indigenous relations, ideology, and culture. The chapters are bracketed with an essay that assesses changes in the conception of US foreign relations history, and with an overview of how US foreign relations history is practiced in China. The essays, by scholars who have made a significant contribution in their areas of specialization, highlight conceptual approaches and methods that, taken together, offer an innovative and practical 'how-to' manual for both experienced scholars and newcomers to the field.
Realism has been disparaged for over a hundred years as an outmoded form, and, more recently, as a pernicious illusion, typical of nineteenth-century novels and Hollywood movies alike. After a long period of disrepute, realism has had in recent years something of a revival among critics and theorists. Yet this revival still represents a minority, and much of the old critique of realism remains taken for granted. This book treats realism as a persistent aspect of narrative in American culture, especially after World War II. It does not seek to elevate realism above other forms of fictional narrative – that is, to restore it to some real or imagined past supremacy. Rather, the goal is to reclaim realism as a narrative practice that has remained vital despite a long history of critical disapproval, by showing how it functions in significant recent works across media.
Clinical ethics consultants navigate some of the most challenging cases in patient care, public health, and healthcare policy. The second volume richly details haunting cases pertaining to perinatal, paediatric, and end-of life issues; neurodiversity; disability; and employment of high-tech devices. Authors explain distinctive features of consultations in rural and pandemic contexts and complicated transitions into and out of inpatient care. Cases are grouped together by theme and organized uniformly. Each chapter includes a case presentation, the authors' professional reflections, description of haunting aspects, case outcome, and questions for discussion. Organizational ethics factors into many of the cases. The authors honestly describe the affective aspects of their work, including lingering regrets, doubts, and moral distress. They pay special attention to justice, equity and inclusivity. It is a fascinating and important read for clinicians and bioethicists engaged in clinical ethics consultations as well as ethics committee members and students.
Political institutions have been depicted by academics as a marketplace where citizens transact with each other to accomplish collective ends difficult to accomplish otherwise. This depiction supports a romantic notion of democracy in which democratic governments are accountable to their citizens, and act in their best interests. In Politics as Exchange, Randall Holcombe explains why this view of democracy is too optimistic. He argues that while there is a political marketplace in which public policy is made, access to the political marketplace is limited to an elite few. A small group of well-connected individuals-legislators, lobbyists, agency heads, and others-negotiate to produce public policies with which the masses must comply. Examining the political transactions that determine policy, Holcombe discusses how political institutions, citizen mobility, and competition can limit the ability of elites to abuse their power.
The four fundamental forms of sociality structure our relationships. By comparing hundreds of cultures across more than 5000 years, this book builds on Relational Models Theory to reveal how each of the four basic types of relationship are conceived in its own distinctive cognitive medium. The text demonstrates how people use their food and bodies to foster affiliation, spatial dimensions to form hierarchy, concrete operations of one-to-one matching to create equality, and employ arbitrary, conventional symbols for proportion-based relationships. Originating from the author's ethnographic fieldwork in a West African village, this innovative social theory integrates findings from social, cognitive, and developmental psychology, linguistics and semiotics, anthropology, archeology, art history, religious studies, and ancient texts. The chapters offer compelling insights into readers' everyday social relations by showing what humans think their social relationships actually are.
The long-held view of the peasantry as a passive social group has gradually been replaced by a positive narrative that stresses peasant agency in economic, social, and even political terms. Contributing to this shift, Luis Almenar Fernández explores the objects that peasants used to store, cook, and serve their food in late medieval Valencia. Drawing on a range of archival, visual, material, and literary evidence from c. 1280 to c. 1460, the book examines the materiality of food to shed light on the consumer behaviour of agriculturalists during pivotal economic, social, and material transformation. It builds on discussions about changes in living standards, consumption patterns, and material culture in pre-industrial European societies. The materiality of food improved significantly among Valencian peasants during this period. This phenomenon had widespread implications for the economy and underpinned the development of new industries, contributing to the economic growth of this prominent Mediterranean polity.
This tutorial guide introduces online nonstochastic control, an emerging paradigm in control of dynamical systems and differentiable reinforcement learning that applies techniques from online convex optimization and convex relaxations to obtain new methods with provable guarantees for classical settings in optimal and robust control. In optimal control, robust control, and other control methodologies that assume stochastic noise, the goal is to perform comparably to an offline optimal strategy. In online control, both cost functions and perturbations from the assumed dynamical model are chosen by an adversary. Thus, the optimal policy is not defined a priori and the goal is to attain low regret against the best policy in hindsight from a benchmark class of policies. The resulting methods are based on iterative mathematical optimization algorithms and are accompanied by finite-time regret and computational complexity guarantees. This book is ideal for graduate students and researchers interested in bridging classical control theory and modern machine learning.
The narrative art of Herodotus' Histories has always been greatly admired, but it has never received an in-depth and systematic analysis. This commentary lays bare the role of the narrator and his effective handling of time, focalization, and speech in all the famous and much-loved episodes, from Croesus, via the Ionian Revolt, to the climax of Xerxes' expedition against Greece. In paying close attention to the various ways in which Herodotus structures his story, it offers crucial help to get a grip on the at first sight bewildering structure of this long text. The detailed analysis of Herodotus' narration shows how his masterful adoption and expansion of the epic toolbox endowed the new genre of historiography with the same authority as its illustrious predecessor. The commentary is suitable for all readers of Herodotus' Greek text: students, teachers, and scholars.
In this seminal study, Peter J. Katzenstein drags the analysis of world politics from the Newtonian humanism of the nineteenth century into a new post-Newtonianism of the twenty-first. The key concept is entanglement. By examining differences in context, process, and language, Katzenstein specifies how risk and uncertainty intertwine. Three deeply researched case studies – finance and political economy, nuclear crisis politics and war, and global warming and AI – support his original arguments. A chapter on power further illustrates the risk-uncertainty conundrum. Entanglements in World Politics calls for humility and eclectic pragmatism, emphasizing the unity of knowledge of the natural and humanistic sciences and the complementarities of science and religion. Katzenstein's engaging writing and innovative approach make this a must-read for anyone interested in the complexities of global politics. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
In 1948, joining the wave of post-World War II evangelical missionary activism, the small, non-denominational Church of Christ from Lubbock, Texas, decided to establish its own mission in Italy. The missionaries believed that by promoting religious freedom, they would help spread democracy and American values. But they were also motivated by fervent anti-Catholicism and a conviction that they could challenge the Vatican's near monopoly on religion in Italy. Their zeal and naivety were met with a harsh response from the Catholic Church and its allies within the Italian government. At the same time, the omnipresent Cold War soon forced all the actors involved to adapt their strategies and rhetoric to leverage the situation to their advantage. A long-overlooked story, Mario Del Pero offers a compelling lens through which to explore the early history of the Cold War and the complex dynamics between geopolitical alignments, ideological integration, and national sovereignty.
Why do some international crises between major states escalate to war while others do not? To shed light on this question, this book reviews fifteen such crises during the period 1815–present, including the Crimean War, The Franco-Prussian War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the 2022 Russia-Ukraine War. Each chapter places the crisis at hand in its historical context, provides a narrative of the case's events that focuses on the decision-makers involved, theoretically analyses the case's outcome in light of current research, and inductively draws some lessons from the case for both scholars and policymakers. The book concludes by exploring common patterns and drawing some broader lessons that apply to the practice of diplomacy and international relations theory. Integrating qualitative information with the rich body of quantitative research on interstate war and peace, this unique volume is a major contribution to crisis diplomacy and war studies.
When people wonder about the appropriate course of action in a given situation, they are already engaging in moral reasoning. This also applies to the field of business, where an understanding of ethics could help businesspeople and market participants make morally informed decisions. This book aims to enlarge the body of ethical theories available in Business Ethics by illustrating three moral principles relevant to economic agents based on the ideas of Immanuel Kant, Antonio Genovesi, and Adam Smith. All three authors were prominent figures in the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment movement and have much to teach us about the origins of modern economics. Additionally, the book provides specific examples relating to contemporary business situations, focusing on the ethical challenges posed by incomplete contracts. Overall, this book demonstrates that the historical evolution of economic and philosophical concepts remains pertinent to current dialogues in Business Ethics.
Secure property rights are widely considered to be an essential prerequisite for sustained economic development; in Britain it is debated whether they have been secure since the medieval period or only established in the mid-seventeenth century. Within this context, Sean Bottomley examines wardship - the Crown's prerogative right(s) to appropriate landed estates which had descended to a legal minor until they attained their majority, to take custody of the child and, where they were unmarried, to decide their marriage partner. Bottomley demonstrates that this constituted a significant yet grossly inefficient and corrupted source of crown revenue, one that inflicted tangible economic penalties. It was also indicative of the decaying capacity of the early Stuart state and Bottomley concludes that without the constitutional changes of the mid to late seventeenth-century, Britain would not have industrialised in the eighteenth-century.
The book offers a critical and comprehensive examination of the concept of NIAC, including its normative foundations, threshold of activation, and corresponding personal, geographical, and temporal scope of applicability under International Humanitarian Law. It identifies and critically examines some of the most controversial aspects of modern NIACs, including notions of a 'global battlefield' and 'forever war' and provides practical guidance on identifying NIACs in real time. It is essential reading for international law academics, students and practitioners. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Why were sixteenth-century Europeans willing to risk their lives to attack 'mere matter' - images, lamps, altars, vestments? The most influential medieval liturgical commentary, William Durand's Rationale divinorum officiorum, offers an answer. Reading Durand to excavate the meaning of churches, altars, vestments, this book reveals the stunning scope of Reformation reconceptualization of worship, time, and matter. For Durand, liturgy was an ongoing praxis in which Scripture and Creation were in constant dialogue, leading to an ever-richer understanding of divine revelation. In attacking the made world - what human beings had fashioned from prime matter - Protestants sundered Creation from the liturgy and fundamentally changed how liturgy was understood, and what both Protestants and Catholics held the relationship between divine revelation and matter to be. Altars and vestments became 'objects' to which human beings gave meaning. As the sixteenth century redefined liturgy as a verbal practice, time, matter, and worship were realigned.
When George H. W. Bush ascended to the American presidency in 1989, one of the more urgent relationships that he was faced with building was that with Israel's Yitzhak Shamir. Drawing on newly declassified materials, from American and Israeli state and non-state archives, this book reveals the complexities of a relationship defined by both deep cooperation and sharp tensions. From the peace process to loan guarantees, from military aid to emotional diplomacy, The Strained Alliance uncovers the debates, conflicts, and strategic decisions that shaped this critical period between 1989–1992. In doing so, David Tal challenges the traditional perception that US-Israel relations were dominated by policy disagreements, highlighting instead the broader foundation of collaboration that endured behind the scenes. Tal provides fresh insights into the intricate dynamics of diplomacy, ideology, and leadership, offering a balanced perspective on one of the most pivotal chapters in US-Israel history.