This comparative study investigates court politics in four kingdoms that succeeded the south Indian Vijayanagara empire during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: Ikkeri, Tanjavur, Madurai, and Ramnad. Building on a unique combination of unexplored Indian texts and Dutch archival records, this research offers a captivating new analysis of political culture, power relations, and dynastic developments.

In great detail, this monograph provides both new facts and fresh insights that contest exi...

At the end of WWI, millions of military and civilians were displaced across Europe, the South Caucasus, and the Eastern Mediterranean. While many made their way home, genocide, revolution, and post-war instabilities complicated the repatriation of prisoners of war from Russia and the Central Powers and pushed Russian and Armenian refugees into exile. In response, an array of international organizations intervene: three of them, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the League of Natio...

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...

'Beyond Orientalism: Sir William Jones (1746-1794), A Journey of Understanding' reconfigures our understanding of Orientalism, the formation of British Romanticism, colonialism, and late eighteenth-century British India. This volume examines the enduring legacy of Sir William Jones, a seminal figure in the intellectual exchange between East and West during the Enlightenment. Through a rigorous analysis of Jones's translations, annotations, and original compositions, the book elucidates his pr...

It is the paradox at the heart of the Dutch Republic: how could a state emerge from resistance to political slavery and subjugation by a foreign power, only to become a colonial empire that promoted slavery all over the world? Slavery and the Dutch State shows how the modern Dutch state and its predecessors were complicit in colonial slavery. It describes the roles of various actors, such as enslaved people, administrators and merchants in the Netherlands and the colonized societies. More tha...

Verhelderend archeologisch onderzoek naar werktuigen van schelp uit de pre-Colombiaanse tijd, maakt het mogelijk keuze voor bepaalde materialen en werktuigen uit het verleden te begrijpen<br/><br/>'Tracing Traces from present to past' is een onderzoek naar werktuigen gemaakt van schelp. Gebruiksvoorwerpen gevonden bij de pre-Columbiaanse opgravingen op Guadeloupe, zijn bestudeerd en omschreven op basis van archeologische, etnografische en experimentele date. Aanvullend w...

In the area of Boysun, present-day Uzbekistan, there is a living and vivid oral tradition based on stories from the epic Shah-nama. Barzu, son of Suhrab, is tragically killed at the hands of his famous father, the legendary hero Rustam.

The storytellers Jura Kamol and Mullo Ravshan composed two different versions of the story of Barzu in the Tajik as spoken in this area. This is the first printed version including a translation of these stories to appear.

The stories have been transcribed and...

The Altai region has yielded a cluster of Middle and Upper Paleolithic stratified sites that have been recently excavated using a multidisciplinary approach. These sequences provide key evidence illustrating changes in material culture corresponding to the transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic. In Europe, this phenomenon is associated with the replacement of Neandertals by modern humans. Based on this archeological data set, local scholars have put forward a scenario of regional...

This ASLU volume examines the built environment and aspects of domestic material culture of the Late Byzantine/Frankish, Ottoman and Early Modern Cyclades in the Aegean (13th - 20th centuries).

On the basis of primary archaeological data gathered by the Cyclades Research Project, this monograph's aims are the reconstruction of everyday domestic life in towns and villages, the identification of socio-cultural identities that shaped or were reflected on pre-Modern material remains, and the hist...

This book gives an overall presentation and discussion of the interaction between Europe and Islam ever since Islam appeared on the European stage thirteen centuries ago. The events and stories presented are to serve the understanding of present debates on, and notions of, Islam and Muslims in Europe.

The leading questions in discussing the role of Islam in Europe are: how and in what ways did Europeans and Muslims interact and, for those Europeans who had never met a Muslim, what was their ...