A brilliant analysis of the transition in world economics, finance, and power as the era of globalization ends and gives way to new power centers and institutions.The world is at a turning point similar to the fall of communism. Then, many focused on the collapse itself, and failed to see that a bigger trend, globalization, was about to take hold. The benefits of globalization--through the freer flow of money, people, ideas, and trade--have been many. But rather th...

Narrative, Digitality, Well-Being Narrative, Digitality, Wellbeing adopts a transdisciplinary approach in exploring new forms of narrative that have emerged in a digital age, an age of new online practices that are both associated with increased riskand enhanced sense of identity. The book examines new literary narratives, new philosophies of digitality, and new approaches to cross-disciplinary work between narrative theory and psychology in the context of digital environ...

A sweeping account of three Gujarati Muslim trading communities, whose commercial success over nearly two centuries sheds new light on the history of capitalism, Islam, and empire in South Asia.During the nineteenth century, three Gujarati Muslim commercial castes—the Bohras, Khojas, and Memons—came to dominate Muslim business in South Asia. Although these communities constitute less than 1 percent of South Asia’s Muslim population, they are still disproportionatel...

The Economics of Empire: Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter is a multidisciplinary intervention into postcolonial theory that constructs and theorizes a political economy of empire.This comprehensive collection traces the financial genealogies associated with the colonial enterprise, the strategies of economic precarity, the pedigrees of capital, and the narratives of exploitation that underlay and determined the course of modern history. One of the first at...

This book presents an extensive analysis of the multifaceted benefits that higher education in the humanities offers individuals and society, as explored in the context of Hong Kong. Using both quantitative graduate employment survey data and qualitative data from interviews with past humanities graduates and with leading humanities scholars, the study provides an objective picture of the “value” of humanities degrees in relation to the economic needs and growth of Hong Kong, together with...

Recent posthuman philosophies, human-computer interface studies, and technology-inspired biopolitical discourses and practices are reinventing and reimagining loneliness in different communities.Cloneliness: The Reproduction of Loneliness takes a cross-cultural approach to loneliness by examining 20th-century artistic expressions and examinations of loneliness in the context of more recent global expressions grounded in social networks, virtual reality, the biopolitical co...

The image of the university is tarnished: this book examines how recent philosophies of education, new readings of its economics, new technologies affecting research and access, and contemporary novelists' representations of university life all describe a global university that has given up on its promise of greater educational equality.

This book examines how Irishness as national narrative is consistently understood ‘from a distance’. Irish Presidents, critics, and media initiatives focus on how Irishness is a global resource chiefly informed by the experiences of an Irish diaspora predominantly working in English, while also reminding Irish people ‘at home’ that Irish is the 'national tongue'. In returning to some of Ireland’s major expat writers and international diplomats, this book examines the economic reasons for t...

This is the first book-length study of the humanities and the Irish university. Ireland was a deeply religious country throughout the twentieth century but the colleges of its National University never established a religion or theology department. The official first language of Ireland is Irish but the vast majority of teaching in the arts and humanities is in English. These are two of the anomalies that long constrained humanities education in Ireland.This book charts a history o...

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy – not to mention one of the most challenging. Its topic is the nature of human knowledge, and the question of whether or not it is possible to have knowledge of the world at all.Over two centuries later, Kant’s treatise remains a subject of fierce debate among philosophers, who continue to offer new interpretations of his meaning. What is not in doubt is the work’s ori...

Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 The Concept of Mind is now famous above all as the origin of the phrase “the ghost in the machine” – a phrase Ryle used to attack the popular idea that our bodies and minds are separate. His own position was that mental acts are not at all distinct from bodily actions. Indeed, they are the same thing, merely described in different ways – and if one cuts through the confusing language of the old philosophical debates, he suggests, that becomes clear. While, in m...

David Hume’s 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a modern philosophical classic that helped reshape epistemology – the philosophy of knowledge. It is also a classic of the critical thinking skills of analysis and reasoning.Analysis is all about understanding how arguments work and fit together. Having strong analytical skills helps to break down arguments, pull out the evidence on which they rely, and understand the kinds of implicit assumptions and reasons on w...