From the earliest scratches on stone and bone to the languages of computers and the internet, A History of Writing offers an investigation into the origin and development of writing throughout the world. Illustrated with numerous examples, this book offers a global overview in a form that everyone can follow. The author also reveals his own discoveries made since the early 1980s, making it a useful reference for both students and specialists as well as the general reader.

This seminal text disputes the view that we are experiencing a “clash of civilizations” as well as the idea that globalization leads to cultural homogenization. Instead, Jan Nederveen Pieterse argues that we are witnessing the formation of a global mélange culture through processes of cultural mixing or hybridization. From this perspective on globalization, conflict may be mitigated and identity preserved, albeit transformed. Through numerous updates in the Fifth edition, the author focuse...

Now in a fully updated edition, this concise book explores the ways American movies, TV, music, fast food, sports, gaming, and fashion influence globalization. Projecting the future impact of popular culture, from both the United States and elsewhere, Crothers makes a powerful argument for its central role in shaping global politics and economies.

This concise text presents a focused, well-rounded, and clear-eyed introduction to the concept of human security. Questioning the utility of traditional national-security frameworks in the post–Cold War era, Paul Battersby and Joseph M. Siracusa argue that we must urgently reconsider the principle of state sovereignty in a global world where threats to humanity are beyond the capacity of any one nation to address through unilateral action.The authors highlight circumstances, actors...

This book offers a lively, accessible, and informative introduction to surveillance through the lens of globalization, and globalization through the lens of surveillance. The story that unfolds is wide-ranging, taking a thoroughly multidimensional and transdisciplinary approach that brings clarity to a complex subject. Drawing a long historical arc, and freely crisscrossing the Global North/South and subjective/material divides, Timothy Erik Ström convincingly shows how surveillance and ca...

This thoroughly updated editionprovides a comprehensive overview of two centuries of transnational feminist efforts to produce a more just global order. Mary Hawkesworth explores how social, economic, and political inequalities between men and women of different races, classes, ethnicities, and nationalities have been transformed over two centuries of globalization. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, she demonstrates how women have forged international networks and alliances ...

What is the connection between globalization and social movements? How have people collectively responded to globalization’s economic, political, and cultural manifestations and challenges? And how are contemporary social movements and networks affecting the progression of globalization? This clear and concise book answers these questions by examining social movements and transnational networks in the context of globalization in all its forms—economic, political, cultural, and technologica...

This provocative and important text offers a new way of thinking about sovereignty, both past and present. Distinguished geographer John Agnew boldly challenges the widely popular story that state sovereignty is in worldwide eclipse in the face of the overwhelming processes of globalization. He argues that this perception relies on ideas about sovereignty and globalization that are both overstated and misleading. Agnew contends that sovereignty-state control and authority over space is not...

Mining in World History deals with the history of mining and smelting from the Renaissance to the present day, drawing out, in an engaging and fast-paced fashion, the interplay of personalities, politics and technology which have together shaped the metallurgical industries over the last 500 years.Martin Lynch opens with the invention, sometime before the year 1453, of a revolutionary technique for separating silver from copper, an event that revived the rich copper-silver...

Navies in Modern World History traces the role of navies in history from the early nineteenth century, through both World Wars, to the dawn of the twenty-first century and beyond.In a series of case studies Lawrence Sondhaus examines the national fleets of Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Japan, Brazil, Chile and the Soviet Union, and demonstrates the variety of ways in which each country has made decisive use of naval power. In each case the author argues that...

China to Chinatown tells the story of one of the most notable examples of the globalization of food: the spread of Chinese recipes, ingredients and cooking styles to the Western world. Beginning with the accounts of Marco Polo and Franciscan missionaries, J.A.G. Roberts describes how Westerners' first impressions of Chinese food were decidely mixed, with many regarding Chinese eating habits as repugnant. Chinese food was brought back to the West merely as a curiosity.The Western en...

Landscape and History explores a complex relationship over the past five centuries. The book is international and interdisciplinary in scope, drawing on material from social, economic and cultural history as well as from geography, archaeology, cultural geography, planning and landscape history.In recent years, as the author points out, there has been increasing interest in, and concern for, many aspects of landscape within British, European and wider contexts. This has in...