This book offers the first detailed comparative study of the seven best-documented early civilizations: ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Shang China, the Aztecs and adjacent peoples in the Valley of Mexico, the Classic Maya, the Inka, and the Yoruba. Unlike previous studies, equal attention is paid to similarities and differences in their sociopolitical organization, economic systems, religion, and culture. Many of this study's findings are surprising and provocative. Agricultural systems, technologies, and economic behaviour turn out to have been far more diverse than was expected. These findings and many others challenge not only current understandings of early civilizations but also the theoretical foundations of modern archaeology and anthropology. The key to understanding early civilizations lies not in their historical connections but in what they can tell us about similarities and differences in human behaviour.

Three decades of dizzying change in China's economy and society have left a tangible record of successes and failures. Less readily accessible but of no less consequence is the story, as illuminated in this book, of what China's reform has done to its people as moral and spiritual beings. Jiwei Ci examines the moral crisis in post-Mao China as a mirror of deep contradictions in the new self as well as in society. He seeks to show that lack of freedom, understood as the moral and political conditions for subjectivity under modern conditions of life, lies at the root of these contradictions, just as enhanced freedom offers the only appropriate escape from them. Rather than a ready-made answer, however, freedom is treated throughout as a pressing question in China's search for a better moral and political culture.

Reading Latin is a Latin course designed to help mature beginners read Latin fluently and intelligently, primarily in the context of classical culture, but with some mediaeval Latin too. It does this in three ways; it encourages reading of continuous texts from the start; it offers generous help with translation at every stage; and it integrates the learning of Classical Latin with an appreciation of the influence of the Latin language upon English and European culture from Antiquity to the present. The text, richly illustrated, consists at the start of carefully graded adaptations from original Classical Latin texts. The adaptations are gradually phased out until unadultered prose and verse can be read. The Grammar, Vocabulary and Exercises volume supplies all the help needed to do this, together with a range of reinforcing exercises for each section, including English into Latin for those who want it. At the end of each section, a selection of Latin epigrams, mottoes, quotations, everyday Latin, word-derivations, examples of mediaeval Latin and discussions of the influence of Latin upon English illustrate the language's impact on Western culture. Reading Latin is principally designed for university and adult beginners, and also for sixth-formers (eleventh and twelth graders in the USA). It is also ideal for those people who may have learned Latin many years ago, and wish to renew their acquaintance with the language. Its companion course, Reading Greek is one of the most widely used mature beginners' courses in the world.

What is the basis for intolerance? This book addresses that question by developing a universal theory about what causes intolerance of difference in general, which includes racism, political intolerance (e.g. restriction of free speech), moral intolerance (e.g. homophobia, supporting censorship, opposing abortion) and punitiveness. It demonstrates that all these seemingly disparate attitudes are principally caused by just two factors: individuals' innate psychological predispositions to intolerance ('authoritarianism') interacting with changing conditions of societal threat. The threatening conditions, resonant particularly in the present political climate, that exacerbate authoritarian attitudes include national economic downturn, rapidly rising crime rates, civil dissent and unrest, loss of confidence in social institutions, presidential unpopularity, divisive presidential campaigns, and internal or external crises that undermine national pride or confidence. Using purpose-built experimental manipulations, cross-national survey data and in-depth personal interviews with extreme authoritarians, the book shows that this simple model provides the most complete account of intolerance.

Recasting labor studies in a long-term and global framework, this 2003 book draws on a major database on world labor unrest to show how local labor movements have been related to world-scale political, economic and social processes since the late-nineteenth century. Through an in-depth empirical analysis of select global industries it demonstrates how the main locations of labor unrest have shifted from country to country together with shifts in the geographical location of production. It shows how the main sites of labor unrest have shifted over time together with the rise/decline of new leading sectors of capitalist development, and demonstrates that labor movements have been deeply embedded (as both cause and effect) in world political dynamics. The book concludes by exploring the likely forms that emergent labor movements will take in the twenty-first century.

Why has the literature on Asian development not addressed the issue of money politics in Korea? How can we reconcile the view of an efficient developmental state in Korea before 1997 with reports of massive corruption and inefficiency in that same country in 1998 and 1999? Politics is central to the answer. In this book the author makes two arguments. First, both Korea and the Philippines experienced significant corruption throughout the post-independence era. Second, political - not economic - considerations dominated policy making in both countries. Focusing on the exchange of favors for bribes between state and business, the author argues that politics drove policy choices, that bureaucrats were not autonomous from political interference in setting policy, and that business and political elites wrestled with each other over who would reap the rents to be had. Even in Korea, corruption was far greater than the conventional wisdom allows.

Volume 15 of The Cambridge History of China is the second of two volumes dealing with the People's Republic of China since its birth in 1949. The harbingers of the Cultural Revolution were analyzed in Volume 14. Volume 15 traces a course of events still only partially understood by most Chinese. It begins by analyzing the development of Mao's thought since the Communist seizure of power, in an effort to understand why he launched the movement. The contributors grapple with the conflict of evidence between what was said favorably about the Cultural Revolution at the time and the often diametrically opposed retrospective accounts. Volume 15, together with Volume 14, provide the most comprehensive and clearest account of how revolutionary China has developed in response to the upheavals initiated by Mao and Teng Hsiao-p'ing.

This book, now recognised as a classic, has done perhaps more than any other single work to change the face of art criticism in the twentieth century. Whereas previous books on French painting looked only at the history of painting as an evolution of artistic styles (baroque, rococo, neo-classical, and so on), Norman Bryson examines the evolution of narrative styles: the kinds of stories paintings tell, the ways they communicate their information, the different techniques of presenting the body as an instrument for incorporating textual messages. The procedure is applied to a number of painters: LeBrun, Watteau, Greuze, David and others, and the author demonstrates that the relation of formal and ‘literary’ elements was regarded by painters and critics in the eighteenth century as the primary issue to be confronted in the production of a painting.

The spatial and temporal dimensions of ecological phenomena have always been inherent in the conceptual framework of ecology, but only recently have they been incorporated explicitly into ecological theory, sampling design, experimental design and models. Statistical techniques for spatial analysis of ecological data are burgeoning and many ecologists are unfamiliar with what is available and how the techniques should be used correctly. This book gives an overview of the wide range of spatial statistics available to analyse ecological data, and provides advice and guidance for graduate students and practising researchers who are either about to embark on spatial analysis in ecological studies or who have started but are unsure how to proceed. Only a basic understanding of statistics is assumed and many schematic illustrations are given to complement or replace mathematical technicalities, making the book accessible to ecologists wishing to enter this important and fast-growing field for the first time.

The theory of dynamical systems is a major mathematical discipline closely intertwined with all main areas of mathematics. It has greatly stimulated research in many sciences and given rise to the vast new area variously called applied dynamics, nonlinear science, or chaos theory. This introduction for senior undergraduate and beginning graduate students of mathematics, physics, and engineering combines mathematical rigor with copious examples of important applications. It covers the central topological and probabilistic notions in dynamics ranging from Newtonian mechanics to coding theory. Readers need not be familiar with manifolds or measure theory; the only prerequisite is a basic undergraduate analysis course. The authors begin by describing the wide array of scientific and mathematical questions that dynamics can address. They then use a progression of examples to present the concepts and tools for describing asymptotic behavior in dynamical systems, gradually increasing the level of complexity. The final chapters introduce modern developments and applications of dynamics. Subjects include contractions, logistic maps, equidistribution, symbolic dynamics, mechanics, hyperbolic dynamics, strange attractors, twist maps, and KAM-theory.

State workers in China have until recently enjoyed the ‘iron rice bowl’ of comprehensive cradle-to-grave benefits and lifetime employment. This central institution in Chinese politics emerged over the course of various crises that swept through China’s industrial sector prior to and after revolution in 1949. Frazier explores critical phases in the expansion of the Chinese state during the middle third of the twentieth century to reveal how different labour institutions reflected state power. While the ‘iron rice bowl’ is usually seen as an outgrowth of Communist labour policy, Frazier’s account shows that is has longer historical roots. As a product of the Chinese state, the iron rice bowl’s dismantling in the 1990s has raised sensitive issues about the way in which the contemporary Chinese state exerts control over urban industrial society. This book sheds light on state and society relations in China under the Nationalist and Communist regimes.
It offers an interesting way of understanding the Chinese revolution of 1949 and the power of the Chinese Communist Party • Shows how state-owned factories in China adopted the ‘iron rice bowl’ of cradle-to-grave benefits and permanent employment • Draws from recently opened archival sources in China as well as internal documents from some of the oldest factories in China.
Content:
List of tables;
List of acronyms;
Preface;
1. Introduction;
2. Labor management and its opponents, 1927–1937;
3. Welfare and wages in wartime;
4. Takeover policies and labor politics, 1949–1952;
5. Adjusting to the command economy;
6. Enterprise perspectives on the command economy;
7. The rise of "party committee factories";
8. Conclusion;
Archives consulted;
Bibliography;
Index.

This 1997 book was the first English translation of all of Kant's writings on moral and political philosophy collected in a single volume. No other collection competes with the comprehensiveness of this one. As well as Kant's most famous moral and political writings, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, and Toward Perpetual Peace, the volume includes shorter essays and reviews, some of which have never been translated before. The volume has been furnished with a substantial editorial apparatus including translator's introductions and explanatory notes to each text by Mary Gregor, and a general introduction to Kant's moral and political philosophy by Allen Wood. There is also an English-German and German-English glossary of key terms.

This landmark 2008 study provides an integrated analysis of China's unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. The authors combine deep China expertise with broad disciplinary knowledge to explain China's remarkable combination of high-speed growth and deeply flawed institutions. Their work exposes the mechanisms underpinning the origin and expansion of China's great boom. Penetrating studies track the rise of Chinese capabilities in manufacturing and in research and development. The editors probe both achievements and weaknesses across many sectors, including China's fiscal, legal, and financial institutions. The book shows how an intricate minuet combining China's political system with sectorial development, globalization, resource transfers across geographic and economic space, and partial system reform delivered an astonishing and unprecedented growth spurt.

The mechanism of speech is a very complex one and in order to undertake any analysis of language it is important to understand the processes that go to make up the message that a speaker transmits and a listener receives. Professor Fry therefore first takes the reader through the various stages of the speech chain: from language units to nerve impulses to muscle movements to sound waves, and vice versa as the message is received and decoded. He then explains the basic physical principles involved in the generation and propagation of sound energy and in the phenomenon of resonance. These principles are then applied to the speech mechanism itself and to the particular kinds of sound which constitute speech. There is a fully illustrated account of the use of the sound spectrograph in acoustic analysis and chapters dealing with the acoustic features of English sounds and with the way we recognise speech sounds by the acoustic cues inherent in a particular language. Professor Fry gave courses on the physics of speech to students of applied as well as theoretical linguistics and to speech therapists, and his clear account will therefore provide a basic textbook for such courses as well as being of interest to people working in departments of speech and in communications generally.

This book addresses a puzzle in political economy: why is it that political instability does not necessarily translate into economic stagnation or collapse? In order to address this puzzle, it advances a theory about property rights systems in many less developed countries. In this theory, governments do not have to enforce property rights as a public good. Instead, they may enforce property rights selectively (as a private good), and share the resulting rents with the group of asset holders who are integrated into the government. Focusing on Mexico, this book explains how the property rights system was constructed during the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship (1876-1911) and then explores how this property rights system either survived, or was reconstructed. The result is an analytic economic history of Mexico under both stability and instability, and a generalizable framework about the interaction of political and economic institutions.

This is a concise and profound book from one of the world's leading political and legal philosophers about a major theme, equality, and the proposition that humans are all one another's equals. Jeremy Waldron explores the implications of this fundamental tenet for law, politics, society and economy in the company of John Locke, whose work Waldron regards 'as well-worked-out a theory of basic equality as we have in the canon of political philosophy'. Throughout the text, which is based on the Carlyle Lectures given in Oxford in 1999, Jeremy Waldron discusses contemporary approaches to equality and rival interpretations of Locke, and this dual agenda gives the whole an unusual degree of accessibility and intellectual excitement, of interest to philosophers, political theorists, lawyers and theologians around the world.