This book analyzes the expansion of the Anatolian livestock trade, focusing on sheep and cattle, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— a period marked by significant changes in state policies, society and environment. It examines the impact of these changes on both human and non-human actors, maps trade routes and networks, and explores their transformations over time, thereby contributing to the literature on Ottoman environmental and socioeconomic history.

The book identif...

In the past decades, lay Buddhism has increasingly emerged in unexpected places—in the spaces in-between, beneath, above, and beyond conventional conceptions of religious or spiritual life in China. This book explores manifestations of the revival of Buddhism among non-monastic people and communities, building on mixed methods qualitative research. The book wishes to answer the central question: How do Chinese groups and individuals practice Buddhism under the socio-political and cultural c...

‘China Under Xi Jinping: A New Assessment’ is one of the first scholarly books on Xi’s China during the Pandemic, which contains several features that are unmatched by existing scholarship. First, all the authors have studied and taught Chinese and American history or politics in both China and the United States for decades. They accordingly are quite familiar with and possess deep understandings of the history, politics, ideology, and society in both countries and therefore their resea...

Spanning Malaysia’s post-independence period, and using the repression-mobilization nexus as a key theoretical framework, this study outlines how its Christian community delicately and simultaneously defends its religious rights without being construed as anti-Islam in the face of state-led “Islamization”. By primarily focusing on the 1980s to the contemporary period, while considering subnational differences between East and West Malaysia, this study charts the changes in the community...

Between 1848 and 1914, around 5,800 Swiss Mercenaries enlisted in the Dutch Colonial Army (KNIL) to fight in the Dutch East Indies, now modern-day Indonesia. This book traces the paths of these mercenaries beyond the boundaries of the Dutch Empire, shedding light on the intricacies of nineteenth-century military labour markets. It delves deep into their social backgrounds, motivations, intimate relationships, and their role in the violent expansion of the colonial empire. In doing so, it unve...

Awards shape careers, make research visible, and create role models. They provide evidence of prestige and credit and play a key role in evaluating individual scientists. Nevertheless, the understanding of prize cultures in science has remained surprisingly superficial. This book explores the prize cultures of the most famous scientific award worldwide: the Nobel Prize. It contributes to modern approaches in history and sociology of science that focus on the social context of scientific pract...

The book outlines a dramatic history of the failed liberalization of Japanese private law during the Meiji era. Once Japan overthrew the shogunate and fully opened up to contact with the world, modernization of the backward country and its fragmented customary legal system became a crucial objective of the new ruling elites. The initiated codification of law included the drafting of the first Civil Code, designed to revolutionize the traditional societal ties in Japan. The legal project, seem...

'Bodies beyond Binaries' advances the historiographical debate around the body in colonial and postcolonial Asia. Opening new research avenues that go beyond the binaries that have sometimes permeated previous scholarly contributions, this book explores not just the direct colonial encounter, but also wider global interconnections and flows involved in the making of knowledge, cultural constructions, and ‘techniques’ of the body.

Throughout the volume, critical concepts such as gender, s...