The Chinese government and international observers argue that China’s economy must overcome its excessive dependence on exports if substantial growth in domestic consumption is to be achieved and sustained in the future. But this shift can only occur if China also lessens its reliance on cheap migrant labor and encourages investment in its own labor force.

In The End of Cheap Labour?, Florian Butollo investigates the recent transformation of the garment and LED lighting industries in the Pearl River Delta, China’s largest industrial hub. He reveals that industrial upgrading rarely supports improvements in working conditions and the basic employment pattern; and this failure of “social upgrading” threatens to undermine the desired rebalancing of the Chinese economy. Butollo demonstrates that the implementation of collective labor rights remains an important obstacle in the future of the Chinese growth model.

Europeans Engaging the Atlantic offers innovative perspectives on historical European knowledge concerning the “New World” and on trade and commerce therewith. In so doing, it enhances our understanding of how, when, and why early modern Europeans made sense of the Atlantic world, and how they tried to connect with Atlantic trade and commerce. Featuring case studies that discuss these issues from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, this volume explores both the degree to which the Atlantic was (or was not) part of the European worldview—or just one part of a worldview with many centers of interest—and how European engagement with the Atlantic world evolved.

Everyday heroes and heroines—ordinary men, women, and children who are honored for actual or imagined feats—have received only scant attention in heroism scholarship. While scholars have devoted thousands of pages to war heroes, heroic leaders, and superheroes, as well as to the blurring distinctions between heroes and celebrities, they have said little about the meaning and impact of ordinary citizens’ heroism. This collection of essays seeks to fill that void. Comparing the United States, Germany, and Britain from a multidisciplinary perspective, Extraordinary Ordinariness asks both when this particular hero type first emerged and how it was discussed and depicted in political discourse, mass media, literature, film, and other forms of popular culture. Looking across fields of study, countries, and centuries, this book sheds new light on the many social, cultural, and political functions that our everyday heroes have served.