With the closure of the overland Silk Road in the fourteenth century following the collapse of the Mongol empire, the Indian Ocean provided the remaining vital link for wider cultural, political, and societal integrations prior to the Western colonial presence. Collectively, these studies explore the history of non-metropolitan urban settings c. 1400-1800 in the Indian Ocean realm, from the Ottoman Empire and the African coastline at the mouth of the Red Sea in the west to China in the eas...

The macro-region of South Asia – including Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – today supports one of the world’s greatest concentrations of cities, but as James Heitzman argues in the first comprehensive treatment of urban South Asia, this has been the case for at least 5,000 years.With a strong emphasis on the production of space and periodic excursions into literature, art and architecture, religion and public culture, this interdisciplinary study is a valuable te...

This volume is a collection of papers originally delivered by an international group of researchers at a conference organized in April 2000 by Dr. F. J. Brüggemeier and Dr. Wolfgang Schenkluhn. The World in the Year 1000 is organized in four thematic sections covering five world regions: Europe, the Islamic world, India, China, and Mesoamerica. All contributions in this volume are original works by many of today's leading scholars. Unlike most works on pre-modern world history, wh...

"Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company" is a culturally and socially significant 1860 novel by Multatuli (the pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker) which was to play a key role in shaping and modifying Dutch colonial policy in the Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the novel, the protagonist, Max Havelaar, tries to battle against a corrupt government system in Java, which was a Dutch colony at the time. Eduard Douwes Dekker...

David Hilfiker has committed his life, both as a writer and a doctor, to people in need, writing about the urban poor with whom he’s spent all his days for the last two decades. In Urban Injustice, he explains in beautiful and simple language how the myth that the urban poor siphon off precious government resources is contradicted by the facts, and how most programs help some of the people some of the time but are almost never sufficiently orchestrated to enable people to escape the cycle ...

In the past fifteen years, Henri Lefebvre’s reputation has catapulted into the stratosphere, and he is now considered an equal to some of the greats of European social theory (Bourdieu, Deleuze, Harvey). In particular, his work has revitalized urban studies, geography and planning via concepts like; the social production of space, the right to the city, everyday life, and global urbanization. Lefebvre’s massive body of work has generated two main schools of thought: one that is political e...

Who among us cannot testify to the possibilities of the night? To the mysterious, shadowed intersections of music, smoke, money, alcohol, desire, and dream? The hours between dusk and dawn are when we are most urgently free, when high meets low, when tongues wag, when wallets loosen, when uptown, downtown, rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight, male, and female so often chance upon one another. Night is when we are more likely to carouse, fornicate, fall in love, murder,...

The surprise Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979 shocked the international community. The two communist nations had seemed firm political and cultural allies, but the twenty-nine-day border war imposed heavy casualties, ruined urban and agricultural infrastructure, leveled three Vietnamese cities, and catalyzed a decadelong conflict. In this groundbreaking book, Xiaoming Zhang traces the roots of the conflict to the historic relationship between the peoples of China and Vietnam, the ongoin...

In the best tradition of Paul Theroux and J. Maarten Troost, comes Derek Pugh's torrid tale of Sumbawa, and his ascent of the iconic volcano Mt. Tambora, whose 1815 eruption did indeed change the world.Pugh's account of the eruption and its aftermath is masterfully done - clearly the product of much dogged research through archives, scientific journals, as well as conversations with Indonesians lasting long into the steamy night.Himself a long-time resident of the neighbori...

Drawing on interviews with 51 anti-authoritarian organizers to investigates what it means to struggle for “the commons” within a settler colonial context, Unsettling the Commons (ARP Books) interrogates a very important debate that took place within Occupy camps and is taking place in a multitude of movements in North America around what it means to claim “the commons” on stolen land. Travelling back in history to show the ways in which radical left movements have often either era...

Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old.The Cycling City is a shar...

Our actions in education, business, and government are no longer guided by conscious ideals, but by entrenched practices that are products of expediency, indolence, and even tyranny. Inveterate and ubiquitous problems abound. Students hate school. Employees dislike their jobs. Professors become disinclined toward teaching. Boredom and procrastination are everywhere. There are promotion requirements (such as scholarly publications by college professors) that promote nothing and benefit none...