In this book the focus uniquely lies on the colonial and slavery part of a city. Rotterdam, the second-largest Dutch city, is one of the leading European port cities. Its maritime expansion was intrinsically linked to Dutch colonialism, including slave trading and colonial slavery in the Americas, Africa and Asia. This painful history sits uneasy with the city’s contemporary profile, with its large number of ‘new Rotterdammers’ with colonial roots. The present volume provides a summary...

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...

There are many publications dealing with the political career of Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989), who transformed the political landscape of Iran and the Middle East after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Most of the research conducted in the West is on Khomeini’s political strategies, while the influential role of mysticism in all facets of his life is ignored. This book is the first study examining Khomeini’s poetry, mysticism and the reception of his poetry both in Iran and the West. It...

'Wars Overseas' focuses on Dutch military actions outside Europe in the early-modern period. Those actions were rooted in the Eighty Years’ War, the conflict between Spain and the northern Netherlands that led to the creation of the independent Dutch Republic. The Republic was determined to trade in tropical products from Asia, Africa and the Americas, commodities on which the Iberians had had a monopoly for a century or more. To do so, however, it would have to fight. The fledgling State d...

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 ...

This book, 'Climate Security and the Military: Concepts, Strategies and Partnerships', reviews the climate Security Nexus from the military angle and proposes the design of climate security strategies and how they can contribute to adaptation to and mitigation of the related challenges. Part 1 reviews the understanding of the Climate Security Nexus. Subsequently, Part 2 assesses the potential design of climate security strategies. In Part 3, adaptation to climate change by the military is rev...

At the heart of Singapore’s political economy is the PAP government, which controls the levers of control. The accumulation of power occurs through a recurring pattern of state collectivisation and economic liberalisation, while the nation’s wealth expands through state investment vehicles adapting to shifts in geopolitics and trends in international trade and finance. Overshadowing the bicameral capitalistic system is the corridor of power, where ideas are developed to drive growth and p...

‘The Necklace of the Pleiades’ is een boek over Perzische literatuur, cultuur en religie door onderzoekers uit de hele wereld. Dit boek weerspiegelt de stand zaken op het gebied van de Perzische literaire studies en is niet alleen van wezenlijk belang voor onderzoekers van de Iranese cultuur, geschiedenis en religies, maar zeker ook voor onderzoekers op het gebied van het Midden-Oosten en Zuid-Aziatische studies.

The topics of the 24 essays range from the Persian Alexander romance, to Ferdow...