Writing Local History Today guides local historians through the process of researching, writing, and publishing their work. Thomas A. Mason and J. Kent Calder present step-by-step advice to guide aspiring authors to a successful publication and focus not only on how to write well but also how to market and sell their work. Highlights include:Discussion of how to identify an audience for your writing projectTips for effective research and planningSample documents, such as co...

Northeast Asia, where the interests of three major nuclear powers and the world's two largest economies converge around the unstable pivot of the Korean peninsula, is a region rife with political-economic paradox. It ranks today among the most dangerous areas on earth, plagued by security problems of global importance, including nuclear and missile proliferation. Yet, despite its insecurity, the region has continued to be the most rapidly growing on earth for over five decades—and it is em...

Was Japan's economic miracle generated primarily by the Japanese state or by the nation's dynamic private sector? In addressing this question, Kent Calder's richly detailed study offers a distinctive reinterpretation of Japanese government-business relations. Calder challenges popular opinion to demonstrate how Japanese private enterprise has complemented the state in achieving the national purpose of industrial transformation.

Why does Japan, with its efficiency-oriented technocracy, periodically adopt welfare-oriented, economically inefficient domestic policies? In answering this question Kent Calder shows that Japanese policymakers respond to threats to the ruling party's preeminence by extending income compensation, entitlements, and subsidies, with market-oriented retrenchment coming as crisis subsides. "Quite simply the most ambitious and strongly argued interpretation of a key dimension of Japanese politic...

Why cities often cope better than nations with today's lightning-fast changesThe British Empire declined decades ago, but London remains one of the world's preeminent centers of finance, commerce, and political discourse. London is just one of the global cities assuming greater importance in the post-cold war world-even as many national governments struggle to meet the needs of their citizens. Global Political Cities shows how and why cities are re-assertin...

Eurasian Maritime Geopolitics by Kent E. Calder examines the strategic geography of the sea lanes from Northeast Asia through the Indian Ocean to Europe, through which much of the world's energy and information flow. Calder shows how changing technology and economic patterns have profoundly transformed the global significance of those passageways since the end of the Cold War, with fateful consequences for the strategic calculations of both the United States and a rising China. Th...

How Singapore’s solutions to common problems can provide examples for other societies.Nearly everyone knows that Singapore has one of the most efficient governments and competitive, advanced economies in the world. But can this unique citystate of some 5.5 million residents also serve as a model for other advanced economies as well as for the emerging world? Respected East Asia expert Kent Calder provides clear answers to this intriguing question in his new, groundbreakin...

A Eurasian transformation is underway, and it flows from China. With a geopolitically central location, the country's domestic and international policies are poised to change the face of global affairs. The Belt and Road Initiative has called attention to a deepening Eurasian continentalism that has, argues Kent Calder, much more significant implications than have yet been recognized. In Super Continent, Calder presents a theoretically guided and empirically grounded explanation f...

Is Northeast Asia primed for peace or ripe for great-power rivalry? In this turbulent region, all the world-order challenges of arms control and disarmament, global North-South tensions, human rights and humanitarian intervention, environmental protection and eco-development, and democratization and humane governance are concentrated. More than any other part of the world, the divided Korean peninsula is the strategic crossroad where the four major regional/global powers-the United States,...

The overseas basing of troops has been a central pillar of American military strategy since World War II--and a controversial one. Are these bases truly essential to protecting the United States at home and securing its interests abroad--for example in the Middle East-or do they needlessly provoke anti-Americanism and entangle us in the domestic woes of host countries? Embattled Garrisons takes up this question and examines the strategic, political, and social forces that will det...

Japan grew explosively and consistently for more than a century, from the Meiji Restoration until the collapse of the economic bubble in the early 1990s. Since then, it has been unable to restart its economic engine and respond to globalization. How could the same political–economic system produce such strongly contrasting outcomes?This book identifies the crucial variables as classic Japanese forms of socio-political organization: the "circles of compensation." These cooperative g...

In this groundbreaking book Kent E. Calder argues that a new transnational configuration is emerging in Asia, driven by economic growth, rising energy demand, and the erosion of longstanding geopolitical divisions. What Calder calls the New Silk Road—with a strengthening multi-faceted relationship between East Asia and the Middle East at its core—could eventually emerge as one of the world's most important multilateral configurations. Straddling the border between comparative politics and ...