Famine Relief in Warlord China is a reexamination of disaster responses during the greatest ecological crisis of the pre-Nationalist Chinese republic. In 1920–1921, drought and ensuing famine devastated more than 300 counties in five northern provinces, leading to some 500,000 deaths. Long credited to international intervention, the relief effort, Pierre Fuller shows, actually began from within Chinese social circles. Indigenous action from the household to the national level, modeled after Qing-era relief protocol, sustained the lives of millions of the destitute in Beijing, in the surrounding districts of Zhili (Hebei) Province, and along the migrant and refugee trail in Manchuria, all before joint foreign-Chinese international relief groups became a force of any significance.

Using district gazetteers, stele inscriptions, and the era’s vibrant Chinese press, Fuller reveals how a hybrid civic sphere of military authorities working with the public mobilized aid and coordinated migrant movement within stricken communities and across military domains. Ultimately, the book’s spotlight on disaster governance in northern China in 1920 offers new insights into the social landscape just before the region’s descent, over the next decade, into incessant warfare, political struggle, and finally the normalization of disaster itself.

From the Mines to the Streets draws on the life of Félix Muruchi to depict the greater forces at play in Bolivia and elsewhere in South America during the last half of the twentieth century. It traces Félix from his birth in an indigenous family in 1946, just after the abolition of bonded labor, through the next sixty years of Bolivia's turbulent history. As a teenager, Félix followed his father into the tin mines before serving a compulsory year in the military, during which he witnessed the 1964 coup d'état that plunged the country into eighteen years of military rule. He returned to work in the mines, where he quickly rose to become a union leader. The reward for his activism was imprisonment, torture, and exile. After he came home, he participated actively in the struggles against neoliberal governments, which led in 2006—the year of his sixtieth birthday—to the inauguration of Evo Morales as Bolivia's first indigenous president.

The authors weave Muruchi's compelling recollections with contextual commentary that elucidates Bolivian history. The combination of an unforgettable life story and in-depth text boxes makes this a gripping, effective account, destined to become a classic sourcebook.

Around the globe, people who have lived in a place "from time immemorial" have found themselves confronted by and ultimately incorporated within larger state systems. During more than three decades of anthropological study of groups ranging from the Apache to the indigenous peoples of Kenya, Richard J. Perry has sought to understand this incorporation process and, more importantly, to identify the factors that drive it. This broadly synthetic and highly readable book chronicles his findings.

Perry delves into the relations between state systems and indigenous peoples in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Australia. His explorations show how, despite differing historical circumstances, encounters between these state systems and native peoples generally followed a similar pattern: invasion, genocide, displacement, assimilation, and finally some measure of apparent self-determination for the indigenous people—which may, however, have its own pitfalls.

After establishing this common pattern, Perry tackles the harder question—why does it happen this way? Defining the state as a nexus of competing interest groups, Perry offers persuasive evidence that competition for resources is the crucial factor in conflicts between indigenous peoples and the powerful constituencies that drive state policies.

These findings shed new light on a historical phenomenon that is too often studied in isolated instances. This book will thus be important reading for everyone seeking to understand the new contours of our postcolonial world.