First Published in 2004. Islands have always fascinated people. They often seem remote and mysterious, set between the continents on which most people live. Indeed, many people choose islands for their perfect holiday idyll. In practice, however, the everyday social and economic reality is often very different. A Geography of Islands firstly examines the differing ways islands are formed. Despite the uniqueness of such islands in terms of shape, size, flora and fauna, and also their econom...

Islands are contradictory places: they can be remote, mysterious spots, or lively centres of holiday revelry. They are associated alternately with escape, imprisonment, holiday and exile, and their alluring natural beauty and remoteness has inspired artists and writers across the centuries. Islands have been places of immense scientific, political and creative importance, from Darwin’s enlightening voyage to the Galápagos Islands, which resulted in his groundbreaking theory of evolution, t...

Clanging: Belfast in its industrial pomp must have been noisy: shipyards manipulating sheets of metal, the constant riveting being only one source of racket; the endless clatter from linen mills, the screeching of trams on unyielding rails, sirens and hooters marking time at the factories. There were steam trains and steam engines in addition to horses' hooves beating on the streets. The rumbustious, often riotous, eternally spirited Belfast people packed into the terraced houses as well a...

In April 1885 the British navy seized the small archipelago of Port Hamilton (now Geomundo) off Korea, an incident dubbed the Port Hamilton Affair. This was part of a larger story of Empire and East Asian geopolitics involving China, Japan, Korea and Russia. At the time Britain and Russia seemed close to war over Afghanistan, and taking the islands, with their sheltered anchorage, would deny them to Russia while they might be useful in any blockade of the Russian fleet in Vladivostok. Howe...

This book assesses the capabilities of an Islamic approach in aiding self-organisation by examining the case of the occupied Palestinian territories in conjunction with a comparative analysis of four other nations. Three main mechanisms of Islamic development are explored; finance, microfinance and charity. Identifying the need to recognise the non-linear nature of societal interaction at the individual, community and state levels, the book uses complexity theory to better understand devel...

This book presents a collection of papers from experts in a broad range of disciplines, including history, archaeology, genetics, and linguistics, to provide a detailed understanding of the Vikings in peace and in war. It focuses on one particularly exciting area of the Viking world, namely the north-west section of England, where they are known to have settled in large numbers. The 12 integrated studies in this book are designed to reinvigorate the search for Vikings in this crucial regio...

The rapid expansion of ISIS and its swathe of territorial gains across the Middle East have been headline news since 2013. Yet much media attention and analysis has been focussed upon the military exploits, brutal tactics and radicalisation methods employed by the group. While ISIS remains a relatively new phenomenon, it is important to consider the historical and local dynamics that have shaped the emergence of the group in the past decade. In this book Simon Mabon and Stephen Royle provi...

The links between islands and tourism, as sights of pleasure is embodied in the touristification of sun, sand and sea. Islandscapes are central to the tourist imaginaries that shape islands as touristified places - curated, designed and commodified for both mass tourism and more niche inclined versions. Yet while islands are parlayed for touristic pleasure seekers, islands are also home to longstanding communities that have variously battled with the tyranny of distance from metropolitan c...

This volume provides an important entrée into the current thinking and rethinking on Caribbean heritage, inclusive of the several topics that represent the rich plurality of the Caribbean experience.

**A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER‘Tender, fascinating … Lucid and illuminating’ Robert Macfarlane**Funerary rituals show us what people thought about mortality; how they felt about loss; what they believed came next. From Roman cremations and graveside feasts, to deviant burials with heads rearranged, from richly furnished Anglo Saxon graves to the first Christian burial grounds in Wales, Buried provides an alternative history of the first millennium in Britain....

Following the Arab Spring, Syria descended into civil and sectarian conflict. It has since become a fractured warzone which operates as a breeding ground for new terrorist movements including ISIS as well as the root cause of the greatest refugee crisis in modern history. In this important book, former Special Envoy of the Netherlands to Syria, Nikolaos van Dam, explains the recent history of Syria, covering the growing disenchantment with the Asad regime, the chaos of civil war and the fr...

By January 2015 the world’s richest 80 people had as much wealth as the poorest 50 per cent of the world’s population. It is a global unevenness through which the barriers to in-migration of Third World migrants to wealthy First World nations go ever higher, while the barriers to travel in the reverse direction are all but extinct.So how exactly does tourism contribute to narrowing this glaring inequality between the rich and poor? Are ever-expanding tourism markets a smoke-free, s...