In its original edition, Bruce Trigger’s book was the first ever to examine the history of archaeological thought from medieval times to the present in world-wide perspective. Now, in this new edition, he both updates the original work and introduces new archaeological perspectives and concerns. At once stimulating and even-handed, it places the development of archaeological thought and theory throughout within a broad social and intellectual framework. The successive but interacting trends apparent in archaeological thought are defined and the author seeks to determine the extent to which these trends were a reflection of the personal and collective interests of archaeologists as these relate - in the West at least - to the fluctuating fortunes of the middle classes. While subjective influences have been powerful, Professor Trigger argues that the gradual accumulation of archaeological data has exercised a growing constraint on interpretation. In turn, this has increased the objectivity of archaeological research and enhanced its value for understanding the entire span of human history and the human condition in general.

Svat Soucek's book offers a short and accessible introduction to the history of Inner Asia. The narrative, which begins with the arrival of Islam, charts the rise and fall of the different dynasties right up to the Russian conquest. Dynastic tables and maps augment and elucidate the text. The contemporary focus rests on the seven countries which make up the core of present-day Eurasia, that is Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Sinkiang and Mongolia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, renewed interest in these countries has prompted considerable political, cultural, economic and religious debate. While a divergent literature has evolved in consequence, no comprehensive survey of the region has been attempted. Soucek's history promises to fill this gap and to become an indispensable source of information for anyone studying or visiting the region.

Statesmen and Gentlemen is an important study of the way in which, during the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries, China's ruling meritocracy was transformed into a locally rooted elite whose principal aim was the consolidation of their power, wealth and influence on a local as opposed to a national and dynastic basis. Professor Hymes offers a remarkable picture of the institutional and social changes this process entailed, but he also examines in detail the subtle ways in which the elite's perception of itself and its social role changed and it came to offer powerful support to local self-defence, social welfare, religious cults and temple-building.

Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, a distinguished French anthropologist, develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. With his central concept of the habitus, the principle which negotiates between objective structures and practices, Bourdieu is able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions. With detailed study of matrimonial strategies and the role of rite and myth, he analyses the dialectical process of the 'incorporation of structures' and the objectification of habitus, whereby social formations tend to reproduce themselves. A rigorous consistent materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic capital and, through analysis of the different modes of domination, a theory of symbolic power.

The empire of the Qara Khitai, which was one of the least known and most fascinating dynasties in the history of Central Asia, existed for nearly a century before it was conquered by the Mongols in 1218. Arriving in Central Asia from China, the Qara Khitai ruled over a mostly Muslim population. Their history affords a unique window onto the extensive cross-cultural contacts between China, Inner Asian nomads and the Muslim world in the period preceding the rise of Chinggis Khan. Using an extensive corpus of Muslim and Chinese sources, Michal Biran comprehensively examines the political, institutional and cultural histories of the Qara Khitai. Her book explores a range of topics including the organization of the army, the position of women, the image of China in Muslim Central Asia,the religions of the Qara Khitai and the legacy they left for the Mongols. Crucially she asks why they did not, unlike their predecessors and successors in Central Asia, embrace Islam. The book represents a groundbreaking contribution to the field of Eurasian history for students of the Islamic world, China and Central Asia.
• First book in Western language on a crucial period of Central Asia • Major contribution to the emerging field of Eurasian history, examining cross-cultural and long distance political interactions • Written by a highly regarded, established scholar in this field
Contents
Part I. Political History: 1. From Liao to Western Liao: Yelü Dashi and the establishment of the Qara Khitai Empire; 2. The quiet period: the reign of Yilie and the Empresses; 3. The fall: between the Khwarazm Shah and the Mongols. Epilogue: what became of the Qara Khitai?; Part II. Aspects of Cultural and Institutional History: 4. China; 5. Nomads; 6. Islam.

In this book, David Bello offers a new and radical interpretation of how China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911), relied on the interrelationship between ecology and ethnicity to incorporate the country's far-flung borderlands into the dynasty's expanding empire. The dynasty tried to manage the sustainable survival and compatibility of discrete borderland ethnic regimes in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan within a corporatist 'Han Chinese' imperial political order. This unprecedented imperial unification resulted in the great human and ecological diversity that exists today. Using natural science literature in conjunction with under-utilized and new sources in the Manchu language, Bello demonstrates how Qing expansion and consolidation of empire was dependent on a precise and intense manipulation of regional environmental relationships.
Combines under-utilized and new sources in the Manchu language with natural science literature
Complements a general professional and publishing trend in environmental history relating both to China and to global history of the early modern period
Offers a new, radical interpretation of how China's last dynasty relied on the interrelationship between ecology and ethnicity to incorporate China's borderlands into its expanding empire

Information theory and inference, taught together in this exciting textbook, lie at the heart of many important areas of modern technology - communication, signal processing, data mining, machine learning, pattern recognition, computational neuroscience, bioinformatics and cryptography. The book introduces theory in tandem with applications. Information theory is taught alongside practical communication systems such as arithmetic coding for data compression and sparse-graph codes for error-correction. Inference techniques, including message-passing algorithms, Monte Carlo methods and variational approximations, are developed alongside applications to clustering, convolutional codes, independent component analysis, and neural networks. Uniquely, the book covers state-of-the-art error-correcting codes, including low-density-parity-check codes, turbo codes, and digital fountain codes - the twenty-first-century standards for satellite communications, disk drives, and data broadcast. Richly illustrated, filled with worked examples and over 400 exercises, some with detailed solutions, the book is ideal for self-learning, and for undergraduate or graduate courses. It also provides an unparalleled entry point for professionals in areas as diverse as computational biology, financial engineering and machine learning.

In this revisionist history of the eighteenth-century Qing Empire from a maritime perspective, Ronald C. Po argues that it is reductive to view China over this period exclusively as a continental power with little interest in the sea. With a coastline of almost 14,500 kilometers, the Qing was not a landlocked state. Although it came to be known as an inward-looking empire, Po suggests that the Qing was integrated into the maritime world through its naval development and customs institutionalization. In contrast to our orthodox perception, the Manchu court, in fact, deliberately engaged with the ocean politically, militarily, and even conceptually. The Blue Frontier offers a much broader picture of the Qing as an Asian giant responding flexibly to challenges and extensive interaction on all frontiers - both land and sea - in the long eighteenth century.

The Central Asian slave trade swept hundreds of thousands of Iranians, Russians, and others into slavery during the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, autobiographies, and newly-uncovered interviews with slaves, this book offers an unprecedented window into slaves' lives and a penetrating examination of human trafficking. Slavery strained Central Asia's relations with Russia, England, and Iran, and would serve as a major justification for the Russian conquest of this region in the 1860s–70s. Challenging the consensus that the Russian Empire abolished slavery with these conquests, Eden uses these documents to reveal that it was the slaves themselves who brought about their own emancipation by fomenting the largest slave uprising in the region's history.

In this major new study, Nicolas Tackett proposes that the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127) witnessed both the maturation of an East Asian inter-state system and the emergence of a new worldview and sense of Chinese identity among educated elites. These developments together had sweeping repercussions for the course of Chinese history, while also demonstrating that there has existed in world history a viable alternative to the modern system of nation-states. Utilising a wide array of historical, literary, and archaeological sources, chapters focus on diplomatic sociability, cosmopolitan travel, military strategy, border demarcation, ethnic consciousness, and the cultural geography of Northeast Asia. In this ground breaking new approach to the history of the East Asian inter-state system, Tackett argues for a concrete example of a pre-modern nationalism, explores the development of this nationalism, and treats modern nationalism as just one iteration of a phenomenon with a much longer history.

Eighteenth-century Britain is often understood as a time of commercial success, economic growth, and improving living standards. Yet during this period, tens of thousands of men and women were imprisoned for failing to pay their debts. The Poverty of Disaster tells their stories, focusing on the experiences of the middle classes who enjoyed opportunities for success on one hand, but who also faced the prospect of downward social mobility. Tawny Paul examines the role that debt insecurity played within society and the fragility of the credit relations that underpinned commercial activity, livelihood, and social status. She demonstrates how, for the middle classes, insecurity took economic, social, and embodied forms. It shaped the work that people did, their social status, their sense of self, their bodily autonomy, and their relationships with others. In an era of growing debt and the squeeze of the middle class, The Poverty of Disaster offers a new history of capitalism and takes a long view of the financial insecurities that plague our own uncertain times.

Beyond Good and Evil is one of the most scathing and powerful critiques of philosophy, religion, science, politics and ethics ever written. In it, Nietzsche presents a set of problems, criticisms and philosophical challenges that continue both to inspire and to trouble contemporary thought. In addition, he offers his most subtle, detailed and sophisticated account of the virtues, ideas, and practices which will characterize philosophy and philosophers of the future. With his relentlessly energetic style and tirelessly probing manner, Nietzsche embodies the type of thought he wants to foster, while defining its historical role and determining its agenda. This edition offers a new and readable translation, by Judith Norman, of one of the most influential texts in the history of philosophy, together with an introduction by Rolf-Peter Horstmann that sets it in its historical and philosophical context.
• One of Nietzsche’s major texts • New and very readable translation by Judith Norman • Introduction by Rolf-Peter Horstmann, a distinguished Nietzsche scholar
Contents
Preface; 1. On the prejudices of philosophers; 2. The free spirit; 3. The religious character; 4. Epigrams and entr’actes; 5. On the natural history of morals; 6. We scholars; 7. Our virtues; 8. Peoples and fatherlands; 9. What is noble? From high mountains: aftersong.

Most books on data structures assume an imperative language such as C or C++. However, data structures for these languages do not always translate well to functional languages such as Standard ML, Haskell, or Scheme. This book describes data structures from the point of view of functional languages, with examples, and presents design techniques that allow programmers to develop their own functional data structures. The author includes both classical data structures, such as red-black trees and binomial queues, and a host of new data structures developed exclusively for functional languages. All source code is given in Standard ML and Haskell, and most of the programs are easily adaptable to other functional languages. This handy reference for professional programmers working with functional languages can also be used as a tutorial or for self-study.

Do you want easy access to the latest methods in scientific computing? This greatly expanded third edition of Numerical Recipes has it, with wider coverage than ever before, many new, expanded and updated sections, and two completely new chapters. The executable C++ code, now printed in colour for easy reading, adopts an object-oriented style particularly suited to scientific applications. Co-authored by four leading scientists from academia and industry, Numerical Recipes starts with basic mathematics and computer science and proceeds to complete, working routines. The whole book is presented in the informal, easy-to-read style that made earlier editions so popular. Highlights of the new material include: a new chapter on classification and inference, Gaussian mixture models, HMMs, hierarchical clustering, and SVMs; a new chapter on computational geometry, covering KD trees, quad- and octrees, Delaunay triangulation, and algorithms for lines, polygons, triangles, and spheres; interior point methods for linear programming; MCMC; an expanded treatment of ODEs with completely new routines; and many new statistical distributions. For support, or to subscribe to an online version, please visit www.nr.com.
• Most comprehensive book available on scientific computing, now updated • New routines for classification and inference HMMs and SVMs, computational geometry, ODEs, interior point methods for linear programming, and MCMC • Over 600,000 Numerical Recipes products in print
Contents
1. Preliminaries; 2. Solution of linear algebraic equations; 3. Interpolation and extrapolation; 4. Integration of functions; 5. Evaluation of functions; 6. Special functions; 7. Random numbers; 8. Sorting and selection; 9. Root finding and nonlinear sets of equations; 10. Minimization or maximization of functions; 11. Eigensystems; 12. Fast Fourier transform; 13. Fourier and spectral applications; 14. Statistical description of data; 15. Modeling of data; 16. Classification and inference; 17. Integration of ordinary differential equations; 18. Two point boundary value problems; 19. Integral equations and inverse theory; 20. Partial differential equations; 21. Computational geometry; 22. Less-numerical algorithms; References.

This lively and engaging book explains the things you have to know in order to read empirical papers in the social and health sciences, as well as the techniques you need to build statistical models of your own. The discussion in the book is organized around published studies, as are many of the exercises. Relevant journal articles are reprinted at the back of the book. Freedman makes a thorough appraisal of the statistical methods in these papers and in a variety of other examples. He illustrates the principles of modelling, and the pitfalls. The discussion shows you how to think about the critical issues - including the connection (or lack of it) between the statistical models and the real phenomena. The book is written for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students in statistics, as well as students and professionals in the social and health sciences.

Convex optimization problems arise frequently in many different fields. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the subject, and shows in detail how such problems can be solved numerically with great efficiency. The book begins with the basic elements of convex sets and functions, and then describes various classes of convex optimization problems. Duality and approximation techniques are then covered, as are statistical estimation techniques. Various geometrical problems are then presented, and there is detailed discussion of unconstrained and constrained minimization problems, and interior-point methods. The focus of the book is on recognizing convex optimization problems and then finding the most appropriate technique for solving them. It contains many worked examples and homework exercises and will appeal to students, researchers and practitioners in fields such as engineering, computer science, mathematics, statistics, finance and economics.

This 2006 book provides a theory of the logic of survival of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), one of the most resilient autocratic regimes in the twentieth century. An autocratic regime hid behind the facade of elections that were held with clockwise precision. Although their outcome was totally predictable, elections were not hollow rituals. The PRI made millions of ordinary citizens vest their interests in the survival of the autocratic regime. Voters could not simply 'throw the rascals out of office' because their choices were constrained by a series of strategic dilemmas that compelled them to support the autocrats. The book also explores the factors that led to the demise of the PRI. The theory sheds light on the logic of 'electoral autocracies', among the most common type of autocracy, and is the only systematic treatment in the literature today dealing with this form of autocracy.

Who watches over the party-state? In this engaging analysis, Maria Repnikova reveals the webs of an uneasy partnership between critical journalists and the state in China. More than merely a passive mouthpiece or a dissident voice, the media in China also plays a critical oversight role, one more frequently associated with liberal democracies than with authoritarian systems. Chinese central officials cautiously endorse media supervision as a feedback mechanism, as journalists carve out space for critical reporting by positioning themselves as aiding the agenda of the central state. Drawing on rare access in the field, Media Politics in China examines the process of guarded improvisation that has defined this volatile partnership over the past decade on a routine basis and in the aftermath of major crisis events. Combined with a comparative analysis of media politics in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, the book highlights the distinctiveness of Chinese journalist-state relations, as well as the renewed pressures facing them in the Xi era.

Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan is arguably the greatest piece of political philosophy written in the English language. Written in a time of great political turmoil (Hobbes' life spanned the reign of Charles I, the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, and the Restoration), Leviathan is an argument for obedience to authority grounded in an analysis of human nature. Since its first publication in 1991 Richard Tuck's edition of Leviathan has been recognised as the single most accurate and authoritative text, and for this revised edition Professor Tuck has provided a much amplified and expanded introduction, which will provide students unfamiliar with Hobbes with a cogent and accessible introduction to this most challenging of texts. Other vital aids to study include an extensive guide to further reading, a note on textual matters, a chronology of important events and brief biographies of important persons mentioned in Hobbes' text.

Umberto Eco, international bestselling novelist and leading literary theorist, here brings together these two roles in a provocative discussion of the vexed question of literary interpretation. The limits of interpretation - what a text can actually be said to mean - are of double interest to a semiotician whose own novels' intriguing complexity has provoked his readers into intense speculation as to their meaning. Eco's illuminating and frequently hilarious discussion ranges from Dante to The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum to Chomsky and Derrida, and bears all the hallmarks of his inimitable personal style. Three of the world's leading figures in philosophy, literary theory and criticism take up the challenge of entering into debate with Eco on the question of interpretation. Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose each offer a distinctive perspective on this contentious topic, contributing to a unique exchange of ideas between some of the foremost and most exciting theorists in the field.