A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY35 start with L start with L
In this first general history of organized labor in the south, F. Ray Marshall analyzes the main factors influencing union growth in the region from the earliest times to the present. Writing within the context of the south’s political, social, and economic history, the author provides valuable material on labor economics and labor relations.
An opening section lays the foundation for the analysis by reviewing the south’s unique economic and social characteristics, with a discussion of the beginnings of unions in the area and some of their activities and problems prior to 1928. The author then traces in detail the growth of key unions before 1932 and presents an evaluation of the 1930 southern organizing campaign of the AFL. An examination follows of the impact of the social ferment inspired by the New Deal. In Part IV, Marshall discusses union growth during and after the Second World War, with emphasis on the influence of the War Labor Board and other governmental agencies. Finally, in Part V he draws together all the main factors responsible for union expansion and union weakness in the south—economic forces, law and politics, union structure and philosophy, the characteristics of the workers, and social forces. In his concluding chapter the author assesses the possibilities for future union growth in the south through a projection of the trends brought to light in the previous chapters.
Land is a significant and controversial topic in South Africa. Addressing the land claims of those dispossessed in the past has proved to be a demanding, multidimensional process. In many respects the land restitution program that was launched as part of the county’s transition to democracy in 1994 has failed to meet expectations, with ordinary citizens, policymakers, and analysts questioning not only its progress but also its outcomes and parameters.
Land, Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice brings together a wealth of topical material and case studies by leading experts in the field who present a rich mix of perspectives from politics, sociology, geography, social anthropology, law, history, and agricultural economics. The collection addresses both the material and the symbolic dimensions of land claims, in rural and urban contexts, and explores the complex intersection of issues confronting the restitution program, from the promotion of livelihoods to questions of rights, identity, and transitional justice.
A valuable contribution to the field of land and agrarian studies, both in South Africa and internationally, it is undoubtedly the most comprehensive treatment to date of South Africa’s postapartheid land claims process and will be essential reading for scholars and students of land reform for years to come.
The year 2008 is the deadline set by President Mbeki for the finalization of all land claims by people who were dispossessed under the apartheid and previous white governments. Although most experts agree this is an impossible deadline, it does provide a significant political moment for reflection on the ANC government’s program of land restitution since the end of apartheid.
Land reform (and land restitution within that) remains a highly charged issue in South Africa, one that deserves more in–depth analysis. Drawing on her experience as Rural Land Claims Commissioner in KwaZulu–Natal from 1995 to 2000, Professor Cherryl Walker provides a multilayered account of land reform in South Africa, one that covers general critical commentary, detailed case material, and personal narrative. She explores the master narrative of loss and restoration, which has been fundamental in shaping the restitution program; offers a critical overview of the achievements of the program as a whole; and discusses what she calls the “non–programmatic limits to land reform,” including urbanization, environmental constraints and the impact of HIV/AIDS.
Muzaffar Alam shows that the adoption of Arabo-Persian Islam in India changed the manner in which Islamic rule and governance were conducted. Islamic regulation and statecraft in a predominately Hindu country required strategic shifts from the original Islamic injunctions. Islamic principles could not regulate beliefs in a vast country without accepting cultural limitations and limits on the exercise of power. As a result of cultural adaptation, Islam was in the end forced to reinvent its principles for religious rule. Acculturation also forced key Islamic terms to change so fundamentally that Indian Islam could be said to have acquired a character substantially different from the Islam practiced outside of India.
Contributors include Marina Alonso Bolaños, Gonzalo Camacho Díaz, José Jorge de Carvalho, Claudio F. Díaz, Rodrigo Cantos Savelli Gomes, Juan Pablo González, Rubén López-Cano, Angela Lühning, Jorge Martínez Ulloa, Maria Ignêz Cruz Mello, Julio Mendívil, Carlos Miñana Blasco, Raúl R. Romero, Iñigo Sánchez Fuarros, Carlos Sandroni, Carolina Santamaría-Delgado, Rodrigo Torres Alvarado, and Alejandro Vera.
Economists have long lamented how the inefficiency of India's legal system undermines the country’s economic capacity. How has this come to be? The prevailing explanation is that the postcolonial legal system is understaffed and under-resourced, making adjudication and contract enforcement slow and costly.
Taking this as given, Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy examines the contents and historical antecedents of these laws, including how they have stifled economic development. Economists Roy and Swamy argue that legal evolution in independent India has been shaped by three factors: the desire to reduce inequality and poverty; the suspicion that market activity, both domestic and international, can be detrimental to these goals; and the strengthening of Indian democracy over time, giving voice to a growing fraction of society, including the poor.
Weaving the story of India's heralded economic transformation with its social and political history, Roy and Swamy show how inadequate legal infrastructure has been a key impediment to the country's economic growth during the last century. A stirring and authoritative history of a nation rife with contradictions, Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand India's current crossroads—and the factors that may keep its dreams unrealized.
Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy trace the beginnings of the current Indian legal system to the years of British colonial rule. They show how India inherited an elaborate legal system from the British colonial administration, which incorporated elements from both British Common Law and indigenous institutions. In the case of property law, especially as it applied to agricultural land, indigenous laws and local political expediency were more influential in law-making than concepts borrowed from European legal theory. Conversely, with commercial law, there was considerable borrowing from Europe. In all cases, the British struggled with limited capacity to enforce their laws and an insufficient knowledge of the enormous diversity and differentiation within Indian society. A disorderly body of laws, not conducive to production and trade, evolved over time. Roy and Swamy’s careful analysis not only sheds new light on the development of legal institutions in India, but also offers insights for India and other emerging countries through a look at what fosters the types of institutions that are key to economic growth.
“No nation can win a battle without faith,” Steve Biko wrote, and as Daniel R. Magaziner demonstrates in The Law and the Prophets, the combination of ideological and theological exploration proved a potent force.
The 1970s are a decade virtually lost to South African historiography. This span of years bridged the banning and exile of the country’s best-known antiapartheid leaders in the early 1960s and the furious protests that erupted after the Soweto uprisings of June 16, 1976. Scholars thus know that something happened—yet they have only recently begun to explore how and why.
The Law and the Prophets is an intellectual history of the resistance movement between 1968 and 1977; it follows the formation, early trials, and ultimate dissolution of the Black Consciousness movement. It differs from previous antiapartheid historiography, however, in that it focuses more on ideas than on people and organizations. Its singular contribution is an exploration of the theological turn that South African politics took during this time. Magaziner argues that only by understanding how ideas about race, faith, and selfhood developed and were transformed in this period might we begin to understand the dramatic changes that took place.
The Law Code of Viṣṇu (Vaiṣṇava-Dharmaśāstra) is one of the latest of the ancient Indian legal texts composed around the seventh century CE in Kashmir. Both because the Vaiṣṇava-Dharmaśāstra is the only Dharmaśāstra that can be geographically located and because it introduces some interesting and new elements into the discussion of Dharmaśāstric topics, this is a document of interest both to scholars of Indian legal literature and to cultural historians of India, especially of Kashmir. The new elements include the first Dharmaśāstric evidence for a wife burning herself at her husband’s cremation and the intrusion of devotional religion (bhakti) into Dharmaśāstras.
This volume contains a critical edition of the Sanskrit text based on fifteen manuscripts, an annotated English translation, and an introduction evaluating its textual history, its connections to previous Dharmaśāstras, its date and provenance, its structure and content, and the use made of it by later medieval writers.
Dutch and Sinhalese law coexisted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sri Lanka. A dual forum called the Landraad empowered colonial justices to defer to either imperial or indigenous law on issues ranging from standards of evidence to inheritance rights. So, while major judicial decisions were often skewed toward assimilation, everyday life in the colony was marked by a cultural multiplicity. In Navigating Pluralities, Nadeera Rupesinghe focuses on these day-to-day experiences of the law in colonial Sri Lanka, discovering how such plural practices affected both colonized and colonizers in surprising ways.
How does education shape political rivalry and hostility? The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947—the violence that followed it, and its living legacy of rival nationalisms—has made a deep and pervasive impact on education in both India and Pakistan. In Learning to Live with the Past, educationist Krishna Kumar dwells on the complex terrain every history teacher has to navigate: how to make the past come alive without running the risk of creating a desire to lose this “pastness.”
Substantiating this question with a wealth of experiences gained from his extensive research on history textbooks, as well as his interactions with students and teachers in both countries, Kumar explores the integral function the discipline of history plays in the project of nation-building. To help children learn to live with the past, Kumar amplifies the need for spaces that create possibilities for inquiries into a “longer” common heritage shared by South Asia without necessarily denying a national narrative or encouraging an urge to undo the past.
Why did some offenses in the South end in mob lynchings while similar crimes led to legal executions? Why did still other cases have nonlethal outcomes? In this well-researched and timely book, Margaret Vandiver explores the complex relationship between these two forms of lethal punishment, challenging the assumption that executions consistently grew out of-and replaced-lynchings.
Vandiver begins by examining the incidence of these practices in three culturally and geographically distinct southern regions. In rural northwest Tennessee, lynchings outnumbered legal executions by eleven to one and many African Americans were lynched for racial caste offenses rather than for actual crimes. In contrast, in Shelby County, which included the growing city of Memphis, more men were legally executed than lynched. Marion County, Florida, demonstrated a firmly entrenched tradition of lynching for sexual assault that ended in the early 1930s with three legal death sentences in quick succession.
With a critical eye to issues of location, circumstance, history, and race, Vandiver considers the ways that legal and extralegal processes imitated, influenced, and differed from each other. A series of case studies demonstrates a parallel between mock trials that were held by lynch mobs and legal trials that were rushed through the courts and followed by quick executions.
Tying her research to contemporary debates over the death penalty, Vandiver argues that modern death sentences, like lynchings of the past, continue to be influenced by factors of race and place, and sentencing is comparably erratic.
Moving beyond elite figurations of globalizing Indian youth, Lukose draws on ethnographic research to examine how non-elite college students in the southern state of Kerala mediate region, nation, and globe. Kerala sits at the crossroads of development and globalization. Held up as a model of left-inspired development, it has also been transformed through an extensive and largely non-elite transnational circulation of labor, money, and commodities to the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Focusing on fashion, romance, student politics, and education, Lukose carefully tracks how gender, caste, and class, as well as colonial and postcolonial legacies of culture and power, affect how students navigate their roles as citizens and consumers. She explores how mass-mediation and an expanding commodity culture have differentially incorporated young people into the structures and aspirational logics of globalization.
The first English translation of the oldest extant work in Apabhramsha, a literary language from medieval India, recounting the story of the Ramayana.
The Life of Padma, or the Paümacariu, is a richly expressive Jain retelling in the Apabhramsha language of the famous Ramayana tale. It was written by the poet and scholar Svayambhudeva, who lived in south India around the beginning of the tenth century. Like the epic tradition on which it is based, The Life of Padma narrates Prince Rama’s exile, his search for his wife Sita after her abduction by King Ravana of Lanka, and the restoration of his kingship.
The second volume recounts Rama’s exile with Sita and his brother Lakshmana. The three visit various cities—rather than ashrams, as in most versions; celebrate Lakshmana’s marriages; and come upon a new city built in Rama’s honor. In Dandaka Forest, they encounter sages who are masters of Jain doctrine. Then, the discovery of Sita’s disappearance sets the stage for war with Ravana.
This is the first direct translation into English of the oldest extant Apabhramsha work, accompanied by a corrected text, in the Devanagari script, of Harivallabh C. Bhayani’s critical edition.
A new English translation of Raghuvaṃśa by the celebrated Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, who inspired such modern writers as Goethe and Tagore.
For a millennium and a half, Kalidasa’s works—from The Cloud Messenger to The Recognition of Shakuntala—have delighted audiences in India and beyond. Although the renowned poet and dramatist inspired many literary works over the centuries, little is known about his life. He likely lived in central India in the late fourth or early fifth century.
Kalidasa’s The Lineage of the Raghus, or Raghuvaṃśa, belongs to the Sanskrit literary tradition of mahākāvya, or court poem. It recounts the lives of ancient kings in the sūryavaṃśa, the Solar Dynasty who ruled from the capital city of Ayodhya. The poem describes, among other episodes, the quest for offspring by Dilipa, a descendant of the primordial king Manu; the world conquest of his son Raghu, which offers a panorama of the Indian subcontinent; the exploits of the famous Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu; and the debaucheries of Agnivarna, which jeopardize the future of the lineage.
This volume presents a new edition of the Sanskrit text in the Devanagari script alongside a fresh English translation of this enduring epic.
Many Americans still envision India as rigidly caste-bound, locked in traditions that inhibit social mobility. In reality, class mobility has long been an ideal, and today globalization is radically transforming how India’s citizens perceive class. Living Class in Urban India examines a nation in flux, bombarded with media images of middle-class consumers, while navigating the currents of late capitalism and the surges of inequality they can produce.
This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition, published with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Tracking everyday practices and interactions between poor residents and state agents in South Africa’s shack settlements, Chance investigates the rise of nationwide protests since the late 1990s. Based on ethnography in Durban, Cape Town, and Johannesburg, the book analyzes the criminalization of popular forms of politics that were foundational to South Africa’s celebrated democratic transition. Chance argues that we can best grasp the increasingly murky line between “the criminal” and “the political” with a “politics of living” that casts slum and state in opposition to one another. Living Politics shows us how legitimate domains of politics are redefined, how state sovereignty is forcibly enacted, and how the production of new citizen identities crystallize at the intersections of race, gender, and class.
Today, young Sora are rejecting the worldview of their ancestors and switching their allegiance to warring sects of fundamentalist Christianity or Hinduism. Communion with ancestors is banned as sacred sites are demolished, female shamans are replaced by male priests, and debate with the dead gives way to prayer to gods. For some, this shift means liberation from jungle spirits through literacy, employment, and democratic politics; others despair for fear of being forgotten after death.
How can a society abandon one understanding of reality so suddenly and see the world in a totally different way? Over forty years, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky has shared the lives of shamans, pastors, ancestors, gods, policemen, missionaries, and alphabet worshippers, seeking explanations from social theory, psychoanalysis, and theology. Living without the Dead lays bare today’s crisis of indigenous religions and shows how historical reform can bring new fulfillments—but also new torments and uncertainties.
Vitebsky explores the loss of the Sora tradition as one for greater humanity: just as we have been losing our wildernesses, so we have been losing a diverse range of cultural and spiritual possibilities, tribe by tribe. From the award-winning author of The Reindeer People, this is a heartbreaking story of cultural change and the extinction of an irreplaceable world, even while new religious forms come into being to take its place.
A critical look at the globally dominant development strategy of “empowerment”
Celebratory news features about India’s thriving middle class tell only part of the story of the country’s recent economic rise, frequently glossing over the 300 million Indians who live on the margins and struggle to survive under economic liberalization. How do those cast out of their country’s successes perceive and respond to their position and mobilize against disempowerment?
In Logics of Empowerment, Aradhana Sharma takes up these questions, focusing on the work of an innovative women’s program called Mahila Samakhya that is part governmental and part nongovernmental and strives to empower those rural Indian women who have been pushed aside. She details the awkward ideological articulations and paradoxical outcomes of this unique activist-cum-government organizational structure and usage of empowerment. Bringing much-needed specificity to the study of neoliberalism, Logics of Empowerment fosters a deeper understanding of development and politics in contemporary India.
The Lokaprakāśa by well-known Kashmirian author Kṣemendra (fl. 1050 CE) is a unique Sanskrit text that deals with details of public administration, from the king down to the village level. It includes private sale and mortgage documents as well as marriage contracts—documents that are little attested outside medieval Kashmir.
In the first decade of the 20th century, famous explorer and Kashmiri specialist Sir M. Aurel Stein asked his friend, learned Kashmiri Pandit Sahaja Bhaṭṭa, to prepare an edition of this significant text with commentary explaining many otherwise obscure terms. The manuscript was originally projected to be published by Stein and Charles Lanman in the early 1930s, in a facsimile edition. Long lost, the manuscript has been recovered in the Société Asiatique in Paris and is now published here. The text fills a large gap in our knowledge of private life and public administration in medieval India and will greatly interest Sanskritists and historians alike.
The Lokaprakāśa by well-known Kashmirian author Kṣemendra (fl. 1050 CE) is a unique Sanskrit text that deals with details of public administration, from the king down to the village level. It includes private sale and mortgage documents as well as marriage contracts—documents that are little attested outside medieval Kashmir.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, famous explorer and Kashmiri specialist Sir M. Aurel Stein asked his friend, learned Kashmiri Pandit Sahaja Bhaṭṭa, to prepare an edition of this significant text with commentary explaining many otherwise obscure terms. The manuscript was originally projected to be published by Stein and Charles Lanman in the early 1930s, in a facsimile edition. Long lost, the manuscript has been recovered in the Société Asiatique in Paris and is now published here with all available additional manuscripts. The text fills a large gap in our knowledge of private life and public administration in medieval India and will greatly interest Sanskritists and historians alike.
Do democratic states bring about greater social and economic equality among their citizens? Modern India embraced universal suffrage from the moment it was free of British imperial rule in 1947—a historical rarity in the West—and yet Indian citizens are far from realizing equality today. The United States, the first British colony to gain independence, continues to struggle with intolerance and the consequences of growing inequality in the twenty-first century.
From Boston Brahmins to Mohandas Gandhi, from Hollywood to Bollywood, Nico Slate traces the continuous transmission of democratic ideas between two former colonies of the British Empire. Gandhian nonviolence lay at the heart of the American civil rights movement. Key Indian freedom fighters sharpened their political thought while studying and working in the United States. And the Indian American community fought its own battle for civil rights.
Spanning three centuries and two continents, Lord Cornwallis Is Dead offers a new look at the struggle for freedom that linked two nations. While the United States remains the world’s most powerful democracy, India—the world’s most populous democracy—is growing in wealth and influence. Together, the United States and India will play a predominant role in shaping the future of democracy.
Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize
“Remarkable and pathbreaking…A radical rethink of colonial historiography and a compelling argument for the reassessment of the historical traditions of Hindustan.”
—Mahmood Mamdani
“The brilliance of Asif’s book rests in the way he makes readers think about the name ‘Hindustan’…Asif’s focus is Indian history but it is, at the same time, a lens to look at questions far bigger.”
—Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books
“Remarkable…Asif’s analysis and conclusions are powerful and poignant.”
—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, The Wire
“A tremendous contribution…This is not only a book that you must read, but also one that you must chew over and debate.”
—Audrey Truschke, Current History
Did India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have a shared regional identity prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century? Manan Ahmed Asif tackles this contentious question by inviting us to reconsider the work and legacy of the influential historian Muhammad Qasim Firishta, a contemporary of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir. Inspired by his reading of Firishta and other historians, Asif seeks to rescue our understanding of the region from colonial narratives that emphasize difference and division.
Asif argues that a European understanding of India as Hindu has replaced an earlier, native understanding of India as Hindustan, a home for all faiths. Turning to the subcontinent’s medieval past, he uncovers a rich network of historians of Hindustan who imagined, studied, and shaped their kings, cities, and societies. The Loss of Hindustan reveals how multicultural Hindustan was deliberately eclipsed in favor of the religiously partitioned world of today. A magisterial work with far reaching implications, it offers a radical reinterpretation of how India came to its contemporary political identity.
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