Violence has always played a part in the religious imagination, from symbols and myths to legendary battles, from colossal wars to the theater of terrorism. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence surveys intersections between religion and violence throughout history and around the world.
The forty original essays in this volume include overviews of major religious traditions, showing how violence is justified within the literary and theological foundations of the tradition, how it is used symbolically and in ritual practice, and how social acts of violence and warfare have been justified by religious ideas. The essays also examine patterns and themes relating to religious violence, such as sacrifice and martyrdom, which are explored in cross-disciplinary or regional analyses; and offer major analytic approaches, from literary to social scientific studies.
The contributors to this volume--innovative thinkers who are forging new directions in theory and analysis related to religion and violence--provide novel insights into this important field of studies. By mapping out the whole field of religion and violence, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence will prove an authoritative source for students and scholars for years to come.

Although numerous books on Shakespeare are published every year, his language is a neglected topic. Yet an understanding of how his language works is fundamental to appreciating every aspect of his work. In this study of the grammar of Shakespeare's language, a detailed analysis is given. Steering clear of linguistic jargon it includes not only traditional features such as the make up of clauses and differing parts of speech, but also language in use in various forms of discourse.

The early Song dynasty (960–1278) was a time of immense intellectual fervor, as China rulers, after over a century of internecine warfare, embarked on a new course that promoted wen (literary or cultural arts) over wu (martial prowess). With the new literary based agenda came a discussion of how to constitute Song’s wen agenda, how to define wen values, what kinds of literature should be included and what excluded, and so on. Zanning (919–1001) was the leading Buddhist literatus at the Song court and his Topical Compendium of the Buddhist Clergy represents a major contribution to this debate, the understanding of which would be deficient without it. The new Song consensus which he helped forge became foundational for the future of China and formed the model for culture and civilization throughout East Asia.
The Topical Compendium of the Buddhist Clergy is a primary source of our knowledge of Chinese Buddhist institutional history. It details practices and policies regarding the administration of Buddhism that are otherwise difficult to access, and is the major work of its kind in the Chinese context. It establishes principles for the administration of Buddhism in China, many of which were customarily followed. Zanning’s work was compiled at the request of emperor Taizong (r. 976–997) for the purpose of educating the emperor and scholar-bureaucrats on matters pertaining to Buddhism, and thus serves the primary purpose of a guide book or primer on things Buddhist that Song administrators may need to know.
The relationship between religion and the state is a topic of major concern in the history of religions. While books, articles, and essays on this topic are common for other regions of the world, especially the West and increasingly for Islamic regions, there are few works discussing the dynamics of religion/state relations in China. Studies are beginning to appear that discuss the dynamics of religion/state relations in modern China, and while many studies of pre-modern Chinese religion touch on this topic, there is no study in English that addresses this topic head on. The relationship between religion and the state in China is a perennial problem that shows no sign of losing its significance in contemporary international affairs, and studies of the history of this relationship with a focus on Buddhism, the most articulate religious force in China during the past couple of millennia, cannot but have a real value to scholars and students.
Zanning’s Topical Compendium of the Buddhist Clergy engages the issue of the Buddhist presence in China directly, arguing for the clear and consistent contributions of Buddhism to Chinese culture and society in an unambiguous way. While ceding claims to independence, Zanning offers that Buddhism is an integral component of China’s culture, not an alien tradition anathema to Chinese values, but an important contributing factor to them. While other works argue in favor of Buddhism in the Chinese context in doctrinal and intellectual terms, only the Topical Compendium of the Buddhist Clergy asserts the necessity of Buddhist institutions and customs as assets in administrative affairs.
The Administration of Buddhism in China: A Study and Translation of Zanning and the Topical Compendium of the Buddhist Clergy is an important book for Asian studies, Buddhist studies, and history collections.

This book presents a clear, concise history of the extraordinary multicultural civilizations of the ancient Near East.
Bestselling narrative of the complex history of the ancient Near East Addresses political, social, and cultural developments Contains in-depth discussion of key texts and sources, including the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh Includes numerous maps, illustrations, and a selection of Near Eastern texts in translation Integrates new research, and greatly expands the guides to further reading for this second edition

Narrative history at its most compelling, After the Prophet allows readers to grasp the power and depth of the Shia-Sunni split as never before.
Even as Muhammad lay dying, the battle over who would succeed him as the ruler of the Muslim people had begun. And as Lesley Hazleton shows in her gripping history After the Prophet , the battle has never ended. This is the foundation story of the Shia-Sunni split in Islam, a magnificent tale of power, intrigue, assassination, and passionate faith. Starting in Arabia in the year 632 and reaching its terrible breaking point fifty years later in Iraq, it still shapes modern headlines from Iran’s Islamic Revolution to the Iraq civil war.
The succession crisis set Muhammad’s son-in-law, the philosopher-warrior Ali, in opposition to the controversial Aisha, Muhammad’s favorite wife. She would defy all expectations by leading an army against Ali, urging on her warriors in the thick of battle. The ultimate breaking point came when soldiers of the first Sunni dynasty massacred seventy-two warriors led by Ali’s son, Hussein, at Karbala in Iraq, forging the Shia-Sunni split in blood. Hussein’s ordeal would quickly become the Passion story at the core of Shia Islam, and history would be transformed into sacred history.
Balancing past and present, Lesley Hazleton shows how this story is alive in Middle Eastern hearts and minds today, as though it had just happened. Even as she tells what happened in the seventh century, she never lets the reader lose sight of where those events have left us, and why they matter so much now as the struggle for dominance in the Muslim world plays out in the cities and mountains of Iraq and Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Placed squarely at the volatile intersection of religion and politics, history and current events, the vividly narrated After the Prophet is compulsive reading—and an emotional and political revelation for Western readers.

Today's leading authority on the subject of this text is the author, MIT Standish Professor of Management and Director of the System Dynamics Group, John D. Sterman. Sterman's objective is to explain, in a true textbook format, what system dynamics is, and how it can be successfully applied to solve business and organizational problems. System dynamics is both a currently utilized approach to organizational problem solving at the professional level, and a field of study in business, engineering, and social and physical sciences.

This extensively researched book argues that the development of a libertarian culture was an indispensable component of the rise of the West. The roots of the West's superior intellectual and artistic creativity should be traced back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers. Among the many fascinating topics discussed are: the ascendancy of multicultural historians and the degradation of European history; China's ecological endowments and imperial windfalls; military revolutions in Europe 1300-1800; the science and chivalry of Henry the Navigator; Judaism and its contribution to Western rationalism; the cultural richness of Max Weber versus the intellectual poverty of Pomeranz, Wong, Goldstone, Goody, and A.G. Frank; change without progress in the East; Hegel's Phenomenology of the [Western] Spirit; Nietzsche and the education of the Homeric Greeks; Kojeve's master-slave dialectic and the Western state of nature; Christian virtues and German aristocratic expansionism.

Many historical processes are dynamic. Populations grow and decline. Empires expand and collapse. Religions spread and wither. Natural scientists have made great strides in understanding dynamical processes in the physical and biological worlds using a synthetic approach that combines mathematical modeling with statistical analyses. Taking up the problem of territorial dynamics - why some polities at certain times expand and at other times contract - this book shows that a similar research program can advance our understanding of dynamical processes in history. Peter Turchin develops hypotheses from a wide range of social, political, economic, and demographic factors: geopolitics, factors affecting collective solidarity, dynamics of ethnic assimilation/religious conversion, and the interaction between population dynamics and sociopolitical stability. He then translates these into a spectrum of mathematical models, investigates the dynamics predicted by the models, and contrasts model predictions with empirical patterns. Turchin's highly instructive empirical tests demonstrate that certain models predict empirical patterns with a very high degree of accuracy. For instance, one model accounts for the recurrent waves of state breakdown in medieval and early modern Europe. And historical data confirm that ethno-nationalist solidarity produces an aggressively expansive state under certain conditions (such as in locations where imperial frontiers coincide with religious divides). The strength of Turchin's results suggests that the synthetic approach he advocates can significantly improve our understanding of historical dynamics.

Review
"This concise and elegantly written book examines how chiefs develop and maintain political power in prestate complex societies, or what anthropologists commonly refer to as chiefdoms. . . . [It] is path-breaking in its sophisticated dissection of the relationship between ideology and other sources of power that narrows the gap between cultural evolutionary, Marxist, symbolic, and human agency theories of complex society development."—The Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Sciences
"In the present volume, Earle weaves together variation and pattern to bring us the very best of anthropology. . . . [Earle's] latest work is a powerful synthesis of theory and data that leaves us with both a better understanding of the political economy of chiefdoms and a solid foundation for future research into critical questions about the origins and maintenance of centralized polities and systems of social control."—American Anthropologist
Product Description
By studying chiefdoms—kin-based societies in which a person’s place in a kinship system determines his or her social status and political position—this book addresses several fundamental questions concerning the nature of political power and the evolution of sociopolitical complexity. In a chiefdom, the highest-status male (first son by the first wife) holds both authority and special access to economic, military, and ideological power, and others derive privilege from their positions in the chiefly hierarchy.
A chiefdom is also a regional polity with institutional governance and some social stratification organizing a population of a few thousand to tens of thousands of people. The author argues that the fundamental dynamics of chiefdoms are essentially the same as those of states, and that the origin of states is to be understood in the emergence and development of chiefdoms. The history of chiefdoms documents the evolutionary trajectories that resulted, in some situations, in the institutionalization of broad-scale, politically centralized societies and, in others, in highly fragmented and unstable regions of competitive polities. Understanding the dynamics of chiefly society, the author asserts, offers an essential view into the historical background of the modern world.
Three cases on which the author has conducted extensive field research are used to develop the book’s arguments—Denmark during the Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages (2300-1300 b.c.), the high Andes of Peru from the early chiefdoms through the Inka conquest (a.d. 500-1534), and Hawaii from early in its settlement to its incorporation in the world economy (a.d. 800-1824). Rather than deal with each case separately, the author presents an integrated discussion around the different power sources. After summarizing the cultural history of the three societies over a thousand years, he considers the sources of chiefly power and how these sources were linked together. The ultimate aim of the book is to determine how chiefs came to power and the implications that contrasting paths to power had for the evolutionary trajectories of societies. It attributes particular importance to the way different power bases were bound together and grounded in the political economy.

Lenin is a colossal figure whose influence on twentieth-century history cannot be underestimated. Robert Service has written a calmly authoritative biography on this seemingly unknowable figure. Making use of recently opened archives, he has been able to piece together the private as well as the public life, giving the first complete picture of Lenin. This biography simultaneously provides an account of one of the greatest turning points in modern history. Through the prism of Lenin's career, Service examines events such as the October Revolution and the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, the one-party state, economic modernisation, dictatorship, and the politics of inter-war Europe. In discovering the origins of the USSR, he casts light on the nature of the state and society which Lenin left behind and which have not entirely disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991. 'Immensely scholarly but also vivid and readable. This is a splendid book, much the best that I have ever read about Lenin ...I was overwhelmed by the power and vividness of this portrait' - Dominic Lieven, "Sunday Telegraph". 'He has managed skilfully to depict the surreal life of an obsessive, brilliant and stubborn individual' - "Guardian". 'Lenin's life was politics, but Service has succeeded in keeping Lenin the man in focus throughout ...This book deserves a place among the best studies of one of the most fascinating figures in modern history' - Harold Shukman, "The Times".

本书作者现任美国西北大学教授，多种国际权威杂志的主编、副主编。作者根据在教学、研究和咨询中的经验，写了这本适合学生和实际工作者的书。本书提供连续优化中大多数有效方法的全面的最新的论述。每一章从基本概念开始，逐步阐述当前可用的最佳技术。　　本书强调实用方法，包含大量图例和练习，适合广大读者阅读，可作为工程、运筹学、数学、计算机科学以及商务方面的研究生教材，也可作为该领域的科研人员和实际工作人员的手册。　　总之，作者力求本书阅读性强，内容丰富，论述严谨，能揭示数值最优化的美妙本质和实用价值。

Although the French Revolution is associated with efforts to dechristianize the French state and citizens, it actually had long-term religious-even Christian-origins, claims Dale Van Kley in this controversial new book. Looking back at the two and a half centuries that preceded the revolution, Van Kley explores the diverse, often warring religious strands that influenced political events up to the revolution. Van Kley draws on a wealth of primary sources to show that French royal absolutism was first a product and then a casualty of religious conflict. On the one hand, the religious civil wars of the sixteenth century between the Calvinist and Catholic internationals gave rise to Bourbon divine-right absolutism in the seventeenth century. On the other hand, Jansenist-related religious conflicts in the eighteenth century helped to "desacralize" the monarchy and along with it the French Catholic clergy, which was closely identified with Bourbon absolutism. The religious conflicts of the eighteenth century also made a more direct contribution to the revolution, for they left a legacy of protopolitical and ideological parties (such as the Patriot party, a successor to the Jansenist party), whose rhetoric affected the content of revolutionary as well as counterrevolutionary political culture. Even in its dechristianizing phase, says Van Kley, revolutionary political culture was considerably more indebted to varieties of French Catholicism than it realized.

This study of the first half of the reign of Louis XV considers the nature of politics in the ancient regime. Researched from primary sources, it offers a comprehensive analysis of the neglected ministries of the Duc de Bourbon and Cardinal de Fleury. Part one examines the court, policy and faction, while part two considers the crises provoked by Jansenism and the Paris Parliament. Campbell's discussion of the methods and practices of political management in this period of successful government should provoke debate and shed light on the crisis of the old regime in the 1780s.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to quantitative approaches to complex adaptive systems. Practically all areas of life on this planet are constantly confronted with complex systems, be it ecosystems, societies, traffic, financial markets, opinion formation and spreading, or the internet and social media. Complex systems are systems composed of many elements that interact strongly with each other, which makes them extremely rich dynamical systems showing a huge range of phenomena. Properties of complex systems that are of particular importance are their efficiency, robustness, resilience, and proneness to collapse.
The quantitative tools and concepts needed to understand the co-evolutionary nature of networked systems and their properties are challenging. The book gives a self-contained introduction to these concepts, so that the reader will be equipped with a toolset that allows them to engage in the science of complex systems. Topics covered include random processes of path-dependent processes, co-evolutionary dynamics, dynamics of networks, the theory of scaling, and approaches from statistical mechanics and information theory. The book extends beyond the early classical literature in the field of complex systems and summarizes the methodological progress made over the past 20 years in a clear, structured, and comprehensive way.

The most riveting political biography of our time, Robert A. Caro’s life of Lyndon B. Johnson, continues. Master of the Senate takes Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 through 1960, in the United States Senate. Once the most august and revered body in politics, by the time Johnson arrived the Senate had become a parody of itself and an obstacle that for decades had blocked desperately needed liberal legislation. Caro shows how Johnson’s brilliance, charm, and ruthlessness enabled him to become the youngest and most powerful Majority Leader in history and how he used his incomparable legislative genius--seducing both Northern liberals and Southern conservatives--to pass the first Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction. Brilliantly weaving rich detail into a gripping narrative, Caro gives us both a galvanizing portrait of Johnson himself and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings of legislative power.

Of the "Great Powers" that dominated Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, Prussia is the only one to have vanished ..."Iron Kingdom" is not just good: it is everything a history book ought to be ...The nemesis of Prussia has cast such a long shadow that German historians have tiptoed around the subject. Thus it was left to an Englishman to write what is surely the best history of Prussia in any language' - "Sunday Telegraph".