For a long time, silk, tea, sinocentrism, and eurocentrism made up a big patch of East Asian history. Simultaneously deviating from and complicating these tags, this edited volume reconstructs narratives from the periphery and considers marginal voices located beyond official archives as the centre of East Asian history. The lives of the Japanese Buddhist monks, Eastern Han local governors, Confucian scholars, Chinese coolies, Shanghainese tailors, Macau joss-stick makers, Hong Kong locals, a...

From time immemorial, thunder and lightning were seen as a wrathful Deity’s instruments of punishment. But then, in 1752, came Benjamin Franklin’s paradigm-shifting invention of the lightning rod, and the way we view God and nature was changed forever.

In Lightning in the Age of Benjamin Franklin. Facts and Fictions in Science, Religion, and Art Jan Wim Buisman shows how, in the second half of the eighteenth century, our scientific, religious, and artistic conceptions of one of nature’s...

Economic Diversity in Contemporary Timor-Leste analyses various economic dynamics in past and present Timor-Leste. Comprising 14 research chapters, the volume brings to the fore: 1) local, community-based economic values and arrangements; 2) community-based entanglements with a market-driven economy; 3) the colonial and postcolonial governance praxis through which a market-driven economy has permeated the country, and 4) the creative and place-based ways through which local people have respon...

Centuries of intense migrations have deeply impacted expressions of cultural heritage on the ABC islands: Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. This volume queries how cultural heritage on these Dutch Caribbean islands relates to the work of nation-building and nation-branding. How does the imagining of a shared political “we” relate to images deliberately produced to market these islands to a world of capital? The contributing authors in this volume address this leading question in their essays ...

Starting in the late nineteenth century, unusual pictographic books began to flow from a remote corner of southwest China into the libraries of the western world. What made these books so attractive? For one, they possessed the air of mystery that came with being “magical” books almost indecipherable to all but a select few ritual specialists, but perhaps more importantly, they were written in what looked like an ancient form of picture writing.

In these books, written in the Naxi dongba ...

Grondslagen van de fysica (Institutions de Physique) werd gepubliceerd door Mme du Châtelet in 1740, met een tweede, uitgebreid bewerkte editie in 1742. Het bevat een vrij volledige inleiding tot de hedendaagse natuurfilosofie, grotendeels in de geest van Leibniz, en de nieuwe natuurwetenschap zoals ontwikkeld door Descartes, Galileo, Huygens en Newton, en tijdgenoten. De tweede editie bevat ook brieven die zijn uitgewisseld in een geschil met M. de Mairan, permanent secretaris van de Konink...

Inlichtingenanalyse is een fundamentele schakel in het werk van elke professional die zich bezighoudt met openbare orde en veiligheid. Anticiperen op een onzekere toekomst is hierbij van groot belang. In dit boek worden de belangrijkste analysetechnieken, zoals die niet meer zijn weg te denken uit het inlichtingenveld, uitgelegd en toegespitst op de Nederlandse praktijk. ‘Gestructureerde inlichtingenanalyse voor opsporing en ordehandhaving’ kan daarmee dienen als naslagwerk tijdens de dag...

Whose international matters, and why? How are geographic regions constructed? What are the channels of engagement between a place, its people, its institutions, and the world? How do we understand the non-West’s influence in contemporary global interactions? From humanitarianism and activism to diplomacy and institutional networks, South Asia has been a crucial place for the elaboration of international politics, even before the twentieth century. South Asia Unbound gathers an interdiscipli...

'Discourses of Disruption in Asia: Creating and Contesting Meaning in the Time of COVID-19' makes a unique contribution to research on meaning making in times of crisis. Using diverse analytical approaches to the study of languages in societies from the Asia-Pacific region, this volume explores the struggles over national identity and manifestations of socio-political issues in the context of disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Each chapter interrogates how social actors in diverse c...